How 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Shifted Into Mainstream American Politics

Conservative US commentator Tucker Carlson speaks during the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) Feszt on August 7, 2021 in Esztergom, Hungary. Type the words “9/11 conspiracy theories” into the search bar of YouTube, and there is no shortage of people lining up to tell you what “really” happened. There are countless videos of commentators like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson giving their hot takes, alongside a seemingly limitless collection of video accounts blaming the CIA, the “deep state”, or the Illuminati.

Twenty-five years after two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York City, killing nearly 3,000 people, the conspiracy theories are still going strong. If anything, they have only continued to gain pace and mutate. While conspiracy theories were once associated with slightly odd people in tin-foil hats swapping improbable theories from their mothers’ basements, since 2016, when “post-truth” was named Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, they have become an uncomfortable part of our political culture, experts say.

In an era of “fake news”, the declining trust in traditional media and government has seen conspiracy theories increasingly collide with mainstream politics – from QAnon to false claims of a stolen 2020 US election that helped fuel the January 6 assault on the US Capitol by disgruntled supporters of presidential candidate Donald Trump. More recently, a new wave of entirely unsubstantiated claims accusing Israel of involvement in the September 11 attacks has gained traction online, recycling older theories and riding on a wave of contemporary anger over Israel’s war on Gaza and public perception of its influence on United States politics.

Suspicion of the state has deep roots in American political culture. Decades before the events of 9/11, unanswered questions about the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963 fuelled a sprawling collection of theories about who was really responsible. But 9/11 was different. The attacks unfolded live on television, turning an event that triggered extraordinary fear and uncertainty into a spectacle witnessed in real time around the world.

The attacks were then followed by two wars that would further shape mistrust of the US government. Less than a month after the September 11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan. In March 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq under claims that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was holding “weapons of mass destruction”. No such weapons were subsequently found, and lies told by the government fuelled a rise in conspiracy theories.

Moreover, the past quarter century has also seen a rapid change in the way that people consume information. The September 11 attacks were perhaps the first event of this scale to unfold simultaneously through 24-hour rolling television coverage and within an emerging internet culture. YouTube, launched just four years after the attacks, provided a new platform on which those theories could grow and flourish, with films such as Loose Change reaching enormous audiences online.

That pivotal moment when politicians started to actively use conspiracy theories as a political weapon came in 2016, the year Donald Trump was campaigning for his first term in the White House. Trump had already built part of his national political profile by promoting the false “birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama. After he became president, Trump repeatedly embraced or amplified other conspiracy theories, promoting allegations of a “deep state” working against him and amplifying accounts linked to QAnon.

According to Hugo Drochon, an associate professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham, Trump’s appeal to people who lapped up conspiracy theories galvanised a new voter base. At the same time, the relatively new social media ecosystem transformed the speed and scale at which such claims could circulate. As fake news somehow became gospel truth, Trump’s devoted “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) voter base repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread election fraud had cost him the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Donald Trump is once again at the centre of American politics and is telling his own version of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, claiming at a recent commemoration event that firefighters had carried him away from Ground Zero. Several people in Trump’s immediate orbit have also pushed 9/11 conspiracy theories, including former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, far-right activist Laura Loomer, Infowars founder Alex Jones, and broadcaster Tucker Carlson.

While Carlson previously defended Israel during his career at Fox News, his focus has recently shifted towards claims implicating Israel in 9/11, arguing that Israel may have been motivated to withhold information to draw the US into conflicts in the Middle East. Although these claims are unsupported, they illustrate how conspiracy theories continue to mutate with the politics around them, moving from the political fringes to the highest levels of power.