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20 Years of 9/11 Scholarship
31 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M talk about 9/11 and the impact it had on academic scholarship.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Recalling Nick's Birthday and 9-11 Conspiracies
00:00:00
Speaker
Here at the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, September 11th is an important date. Yes, because 9-11 is of course the birthday of our dear friend Nick, who famously, back in 2001, said nothing interesting ever happens on his birthday. Now, New Zealand Standard Time makes Nick's statement about the date September 11th occurred roughly the day before what happened in New York. Because time zones are weird and need to be standardised, but that is a matter for another time.
00:00:28
Speaker
However, it is notable that virtually no conspiracy theory about 9-11 involves Nick as a salient cause of the event. But on this, the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, and 20 years since Nick made his outrageous claim, this ought to change.
00:00:44
Speaker
Now, we're not saying Nick isn't the real mastermind behind both Al-Qaeda and the W presidency. But we're also not dismissing the possibility that perhaps Nick, in a drunken fugue state post-revelling on his birthday, accidentally orchestrated the whole affair. Frankly, what we need is a fresh investigation. Get on to those boys in New York who are setting up that new grand jury. For too long, the New Zealand connection to 9-11 has been overlooked.
00:01:11
Speaker
Admittedly, if we look too hard, then maybe some other stuff will come out? Such as? Well, weren't you with Nick when he made that claim? Well... And is it not true that you too do not remember what happened to that incredibly drunken knight? Uh... And didn't you have some very unusual credit card debts to pay off at the end of September? You know, now I think about it, it's fairly clear that Nick is not responsible for 9-11 at all, because...
00:01:40
Speaker
Uh, because, Josh, help me out here. Because we have a new patron. And we think it's awfully suspicious that they would choose to become a patron on this, our well advertised in advance special episode of 20 years of 9-11 conspiracy theories. So, Michael,
00:01:58
Speaker
If, indeed, that is your real name. Oh, it is. We got the patron email and everything. So, Michael, expect to hear from the lawyers for 9-11 inquiry, who I'm sure are entirely fixated on proving 9-11 was an inside job and not... Oh. Oh? Yeah, they've pivoted to COVID-19 as part of the globalist plot.
00:02:20
Speaker
It must be disappointing to be an academic who goes around saying conspiracy theorists aren't all cliched tinfoil hat-wearing weirdos, and then have to deal with the fact that the prominent ones kind of are. Yeah, believe me, it's not fun at parties. It's not fun at parties at all. Unlike Michael, who I believe throws a great party. And might have been responsible for 9-11. Unlike Nick. No. Nick and I definitely did not make 9-11 happen.
00:02:53
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:03:04
Speaker
And welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
Pandemic Life and Language Weeks
00:03:08
Speaker
It is, I was going to say a nice day, but it's the evening now here in Auckland during Tongan language week. A good thing about having primary school aged children is that you always know when it's Tongan language week or Samoan language week. I think we had a new A in language week at one point.
00:03:25
Speaker
and obviously, Mario Language Week, which is a month, I'm pretty sure. But anyway, the point is, yay, Tonga. All that aside, my name is Josh Addison. Here in Auckland, still under lockdown. They are Dr. M. Denteth in Xuhai, China, not under lockdown. But now, the one thing we do both have in common is that we're both vaccinated. It's true. I've been double jabbed. Have you been double jabbed? Actually, no. Have you had two pricks, Josh?
00:03:55
Speaker
No, I've only had the one. I've had my first wee wee brush with the vaccinators needle. You've had your first wee prick and you're waiting for your second wee prick. Yeah, had my first wee prick. But the next prick is scheduled to come along in a few weeks. There's always a prick who comes along in a few weeks. I mean, that's just the way that Western society works. There's always another prick around the corner. Sometimes it's you. Well, actually, sorry. We have a button for this. Well, we have a...
00:04:26
Speaker
I mean, it's the same rhythm as a wah-wah-wah, but...
00:04:31
Speaker
Yes, I think we really need the full grab bag of cliched sound effects. I think we need a wah, wah, wah, and maybe some sort of a thunder, lightning bolt thundercrash thing, and a cat screeching also, just because that sounds... I'm ready to chuck this whole preamble in quite frankly, because I don't think it's going to plan. I think we should shoot straight ahead into the main part of this episode.
00:04:57
Speaker
Fair enough. I have only one question for you. Is Tongan Language Week back home? Is it Tongan Language Week everywhere? I always get confused about these things. I mean, Mother's Day and Father's Day all occur on different days around the globe.
00:05:14
Speaker
Tongan Language Week. Is that a Tongan Language Week only in Aotearoa, New Zealand? Or is it a Tongan Language Week everywhere? Well, yes, I don't know. Presumably in Tonga, every week is Tongan Language Week.
00:05:29
Speaker
I think possibly only in New Zealand? I don't know. I would say. Worthy of further investigation. You know what else is worth for further investigation? Your mum. Yes, and also the 9-11
20th Anniversary of 9-11 and Conspiracy Theories
00:05:42
Speaker
attacks. Go. Alright, well, let's play that sting.
00:05:52
Speaker
So yes, obviously we are recording this on the 9th of September, but that means in two days it will be the 11th of September 2021, making it the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. And we can't
00:06:07
Speaker
We can't not talk about an event like that, but it was a little bit... When we were discussing this earlier, we kind of thought, what more is there to say? We've devoted multiple episodes of this podcast to 9-11 conspiracy theories, your bog-standard truthy stuff. We've looked at building... We did a whole episode on building seven conspiracy theories. We did a whole episode on loose change.
00:06:33
Speaker
And when we've done news episodes and there have been developments in 9-11 news, we've kept you a rest of those. So we're quite sure what else we could say, but then we thought maybe, maybe we could get academical. Academical? My, on this podcast? In these pants? In this time of year, at this part of the country, localized entirely into your kitchen.
00:06:59
Speaker
introduced the boys to steamed hams memes on youtube we've been going through that quite a bit uh but yes no so because uh we've been looking we've spent the the last year i think or thereabouts um looking back at the conspiracy theory literature it's actually been more than a year yeah i think it has been more than a year yeah yeah we've we've been at it a while now um and over that time
00:07:26
Speaker
we've sort of seen 9-11 pop up. And so we thought maybe it would be good to have a look at how much of an effect the September 11 attacks had on conspiracy theory literature. Because it feels like it must have been significant. It feels like 9-11
00:07:44
Speaker
is now the king of conspiracy theories where in the past you might have said it was the JFK assassination or the moon landing conspiracy theories. Or Watergate. Or Watergate, yep. 9-11 seems to have knocked them all off their perch, but how much of an effect has it had on the actual literature? Has there been more of an interest? I think the question I asked on Twitter a little while ago when we were discussing this was, would you now be an associate professor if 9-11 had never happened? And
00:08:14
Speaker
theoretically brought about more interest to conspiracy theories. I mean, it's curious for the sheer fact that up until the Trump presidency, by and large, most philosophers didn't understand why I'd want to study conspiracy theories at all. Once Trump became the prominent Western example of a politician who traded largely in conspiracy theory rhetoric as a way of convincing or controlling his
00:08:43
Speaker
audience suddenly people go oh this is quite interesting. So I don't know that 9-11 actually had much of an effect on the careers of people who study conspiracy theories at all. I think the recent burgeoning of the literature has been more
00:09:03
Speaker
Trump taking the Orban playbook and making it kind of his rhetorical device. So in many respects, I don't know that 9-11 is as big as maybe people make it out to be, which is kind of a hint as to what we're going to see when we look at the literature in depth towards the end of this episode.
00:09:24
Speaker
And certainly it became a bit of a theme, a bit of a running joke almost as we went through these papers to begin with, because obviously the literature kind of started in the 1990s, pre-September 11. But then once we started looking at papers in sort of 2002, 2003, we were a little surprised initially that it didn't seem to be coming up much, I think.
00:09:50
Speaker
It was notable the first time a paper that we looked at mentioned 9-11, and that I believe was when we looked at David Cody's conspiracy theories and official stories from 2003. We did that back in episode 278.
00:10:07
Speaker
But even then, it was mentioned, but actual 9-11 truth conspiracies weren't mentioned at all. It was just 9-11 was brought up as an example of a thing that appears to be the result of a conspiracy, but a lot of people would hesitate to call it a conspiracy. It was basically one paragraph in that paper which read,
00:10:34
Speaker
Take the events of September 11, 2001. I assume that most people, or at least most people reading this article, accept an explanation of these events that appeals to the significant causal agency of a conspiracy involving Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to bring about these events. But this explanation is unlikely to attract the label conspiracy theory. Why does it seem wrong to call our explanation of September 11, despite its obviously conspiratorial nature, a conspiracy theory?
00:10:58
Speaker
So, I mean, not in the context of 9-11 truth or anything like that at all, just simply this was David Cody's take on matching a definition of conspiracy theory to the way the word is more commonly used. But we did say sort of multiple times that
00:11:19
Speaker
It wasn't really until Loose Change came out in 2005 and possibly not even until its second edition in 2006 that your actual what you would call truth conspiracy theories really started to take off. So it probably wasn't a surprise that we didn't start seeing talk about actual 9-11 conspiracy theories
00:11:40
Speaker
outside of the context of everyone's a conspiracy theorist, even the official theory is a conspiracy theory type arguments, until a bit later. But you, though, Dr. Denteth, have done a bit of a literature survey from the looks of things, a bit of a fairly comprehensive going down this list, look at when 9-11 started coming up in the literature. So why don't you take us on a stroll down
00:12:09
Speaker
memory lane? I don't know. Conspiracy lane. And tell us about the history of 9-11 conspiracies appearing in the literature.
9-11 in Academic Literature
00:12:21
Speaker
So you're right, 2005 is kind of where 9-11 trutherism as a community takes off. I'm sure there were multiple people involved investigating the 9-11 attacks from a conspiracy theory angle in the sense of going against the official view of the time.
00:12:40
Speaker
But the community as a kind of diesel entity where there's a large number of people engaging in these investigations really doesn't start to emerge until four or five years after the event. So there's kind of understandable rationale as to why in 2003, David Cody mentioned 9-11 conspiracy theories, but is actually having an interesting academic question about so why don't we call the official theory of 9-11 a conspiracy theory? What's up with that?
00:13:10
Speaker
my dated Seinfeld reference goes. I mean, as someone who's never really watched Seinfeld, I don't even know why I'm doing a dated Seinfeld reference. It's very confusing. So I have a database, and in that database, I have what I take to be most of the academic literature published on conspiracy theories since about the 1990s.
00:13:36
Speaker
This is probably not the most comprehensive database, I suspect there are papers that I do not have in it, but I also suspect it's probably comprehensive enough that the following analysis is fairly accurate to what's been going on with literature.
00:13:54
Speaker
So we start to see a few mentions of 9-11 around about 2003. It says virtually nothing in 2001, although that's understandable because due to publication lag, anything that was written in September of 2001 wouldn't have been published until 2002 at the earliest anyway.
00:14:18
Speaker
So I suspect the 2003 references are papers that were being written fairly close to the event and then went through peer review and eventual publication coming out two years after the event. Publication in academia is weird, the lag time between starting an article
00:14:35
Speaker
and it eventually getting to print can be anywhere between 18 months to two years for certain types of papers. And interestingly enough, the first mention of 9-11 in my database isn't actually even in an academic article. It's a paper put out by the Anti-Defamation League called Unravelling Anti-Semitic 9-11 Conspiracy Theories, which basically mentions
00:15:03
Speaker
In the paper, the claim, which then goes to debunk that Israeli companies moved out of the Twin Towers weeks before the September 11th attacks. So it's looking at a quite specific anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, one which did emerge very quickly in 2001 and explaining why it's bad.
00:15:25
Speaker
Yeah, actually, that's something I kind of forgotten about a little bit, really, but around more close to soon after the events of Citroël, there were all those sort of, I mean, basically racist conspiracy theories of one stripe or another where you'd hear all these, yeah, these are already companies all moved out or
00:15:44
Speaker
My Iranian taxi driver told me to stay away from the Twin Towers a week beforehand. There are all these suggestions that various ethnic groups had advanced knowledge of the attacks and all completely baseless and basically just unfortunately racist. So probably it's good that we've forgotten about them. I don't know.
00:16:08
Speaker
Yes, although I think we do forget about anti-Semitism at our peril, given it keeps coming up again, and again, and again. So also in 2003, Peter Knight writes a contribution. He's a sociologist. Oh, actually, I suppose technically he's actually a cultural theorist and an American studies person rather than a sociologist. Sorry, Peter. He writes a contribution to conspiracy theories in American history.
00:16:37
Speaker
And in his chapter, Making Sense of Conspiracy Theories, he references a blog post about 9-11, so it's in the citations, doesn't actually mention 9-11 as an example of a conspiracy theory in recent American history.
00:16:55
Speaker
So in 2003, conspiracy theories about the 9-11 attacks have not become big enough or mainstream enough to be noted in a history of conspiracy theories in America. And then, basically, we have to move on to 2006. And Charles Picton's paper, Complots of Mischief, a paper we've reviewed on this very series, mentioned 9-11 as an example, but it's in the Cody sense
00:17:23
Speaker
of then going, look, it's any explanation of an event which cites a conspiracy will turn out to be a conspiracy theory. So any explanation of 9 or 11 will turn out to be a conspiracy theory as well. Yeah, that was, I don't know, the earliest stages definitions were quite, was in a lot of cases, well, a lot of cases were certainly very significant.
00:17:49
Speaker
before even people started talking about it so much, there was a lot of, what do we mean by a conspiracy theory in the arguments over, does it matter that we tend to think that the official version isn't a conspiracy theory? And yeah, 9-11 is a good example of
00:18:08
Speaker
of the phenomenon of official theory versus what we want to call conspiracy theory, or not, is the case maybe. But yeah, still not actually talking about the specifics of 9-11 conspiracy theories, and certainly not using them as an example. I mean, recall that the earliest ones we looked at, Brian Elkely's papers used the Oklahoma City bombings as an example, because of course 9-11 hadn't happened then.
00:18:33
Speaker
But it would be a little while before we start hearing. Well, actually, no, no. So because our next example is Cedric Vincent mapping the invisible notes on the reason of conspiracy theories. And this paper does mention 9-11 conspiracy theories, because he uses as a prominent example the French journalist slash political activist Thierry Messin and the book that he wrote
00:19:01
Speaker
just after the 9-11 attacks, which was basically the first we think that it was an inside job, or at least sorry, we think that it wasn't Al-Qaeda who committed the attacks, we think there's some kind of plot. I'm fairly sure this is once again a Jewish plot to destroy the Twin Towers style.
00:19:20
Speaker
book that was written. But this is an actual explicit discussion of a 9-11 conspiracy theory in a paper. But that's basically it for 2006. We've got Charles and we've got Cedric. 9-11 is mentioned as
00:19:40
Speaker
a footnote in one and a major example in another, but five years after the event, it's still not turning up in the majority of papers being produced that year. And yet 2007, it looks like that's when things really get going.
00:19:59
Speaker
Yes, so in 2007, we of course get conspiracy theories and the internet, Steve Clark's paper, which is on controlled demolition theories and the way that these theories have kind of had an arrested development due to the way the internet works. So this is a paper which uses 911 as its major example.
00:20:22
Speaker
And then we get a few kind of potted references to 9-11 and other papers. So Jeffrey M. Bayles' text, Political Paranoia versus Political Realism, it has a section on distinguishing between bogus conspiracy theories and genuine conspiratorial politics. And 9-11 is used as an example of a bogus conspiracy theory.
00:20:47
Speaker
Jack Z. Brettich, who we interviewed in the early days of this podcast, and his paper, a summer of double, I'll try it again, a summer of double super secrecy, public secret spheres, evidence, and cultural strategies.
00:21:04
Speaker
He also uses 9-11 as an example. Neil Levy's paper, Radically Socialized Knowledge and Conspiracy Theories, reviewed on this podcast, uses 9-11 as a conspiracy theory, as does Shit Happens by Pete Mantek, published the same year. Another example of a 9-11 conspiracy theory is used there.
00:21:24
Speaker
And Marty Orr and Jenna Hosting's paper, Dangerous Machinery, they've also been interviewed on this podcast, they use 9-11 as an example. Although in most of these cases it's an example rather than the example. It's an example which is added to a list of conspiracy theories you might have heard about
00:21:49
Speaker
but it isn't the major motivating example for the analysis they're trying to engage in. Unlike Peter Knight's paper, Conspiracy Theory is about 9-11, which the title kind of gives away that 9-11 is a major example in this particular text.
00:22:08
Speaker
Some of these names you've been mentioning are not familiar to me. Are all of these things in philosophy specifically? No, this is the wider literature we're looking at here. So social psychology, sociology, American studies, cultural studies, history and the like. We're looking at all the lip that's been produced at this time.
00:22:31
Speaker
In the years after 2008, it seems like there's a bit of an explosion. We've got five papers in two books in 2008, six papers in two books in 2009, at least five papers in 2010.
00:22:47
Speaker
So it seems things, it is becoming much more entrenched as an example. But of course then we get 2011, so then that's the 10th anniversary, so how does that affect things? So that's when 9-11 examples become kind of common to the literature generally. So from 2011 onwards,
00:23:10
Speaker
almost every paper that that's on conspiracy theories is going to mention 9-11 as an example of a conspiracy theory. So in 2011 we get conspiracy theories and their truth trajectories by Mathis Peltman and Rhys McCold and they use 9-11 as a kind of major example and they want to use it as a major example to talk about if we were to use
00:23:38
Speaker
conspiracy theory in a kind of non pejorative gloss and talk about conspiracy theories and official theories in the same way, then that's going to change the way our conversations work around particular types of conspiratorial claims in our society.
00:23:55
Speaker
Dean Batlinger releases his PhD thesis in 2011, and 9-11 is a fairly prominent example. We interviewed Dean many, many, many years ago on podcast. Lee Basham's Conspiracy Theories and Rationality, which we recently reviewed, that uses 9-11 as a fairly major conspiracy theory within it.
00:24:22
Speaker
then we get a few kind of passing references. So categorization and communication in the face of prejudice when describing perceptions changes what is perceived by Kevin R. Binning and David K. Sherman does mention 9-11 as an example when they're polling people on conspiracy theories, although interestingly enough,
00:24:45
Speaker
There are three studies that are talked about in that paper, and 9-11 only occurs in one of those studies. So it's very much an example rather than a major example that's been pulled.
00:25:02
Speaker
Jovan Byford's book, Conspiracy Theory, is a critical introduction, mentions 9-11 a few times, but it's kind of more in passing. He's much more interested in historical predecessors to 9-11 than he is at looking at a contemporary conspiracy theory within his text.
00:25:22
Speaker
Conspiracies ideation in Britain and Austria, evidence for monological belief system, and associations between individual psychological differences in real world and fictitious conspiracy theories, which is titled by, and also authored by almost as many people as the length of the title alone demands, does mention 9-11 conspiracy theories, but one, the paper's actually much more on the 7-7 conspiracy theories.
00:25:51
Speaker
theories. Britain and Austria, that would make sense. And two, when I actually looked at the references to 9-11, it's to another paper by some of the authors published that year. So it actually turns out the 9-11 reference there is actually just a reference to earlier work by the same authors.
00:26:13
Speaker
Belief in conspiracy theories, the role of paranormal belief, paranoid ideation and schizotypy by Hannah Darwin, Nick Nave and Germany Holmes mentions 9-11 in a list of other conspiracy theories you might have heard of. In fact, the reference occurs here.
00:26:29
Speaker
Conspiracy theories have been put forward to explain major tragic events such as the death of Princess Diana, the assassination of JFK, the terrorist attacks of 9-11, and are strongly associated with debates surrounding the NASA moon landings and alleged government cover-ups of alien visitations.
00:26:48
Speaker
So one, 9-11 is an example, and two, they're very much associating 9-11 conspiracy theories with those other wacky conspiracy theories we already know are believed by crazy people. That's what, a psychology paper, is it? It is, yes.
00:27:10
Speaker
Not something we've looked at much in the past, but you have suggested that the other disciplines tend to take a different view to philosophy. The other disciplines tend to take it that belief in conspiracy theories is, if not prima facie irrational, largely irrational and thus not worth taking seriously. So philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists have been much more inclined to go look
00:27:37
Speaker
Let's just use what the term conspiracy theory refers to, a theory about a conspiracy, and analyze those on a case-by-case basis. A lot of work in social psychology has got, no, conspiracy theory is a mad, bad, and dangerous, and we need to work out why do people believe them nonetheless?
00:27:57
Speaker
And so I see after that we have another interesting title. Does it take one to know one? Endorsement of conspiracy theories is influenced by personal willingness to conspire. By Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton. Are they?
00:28:13
Speaker
Who are the ones who wrote that paper about building seven conspiracy theories? Is that them? So that's so that definitely is one of them. So and I think that was one of them or both of them with Mike Wood. So Karen and Robbie are husband and wife pair.
00:28:31
Speaker
So they often have many co-authored papers together. I sometimes forget which one wrote which particular piece. And yes, this is an interesting paper because 9-11 gets mentioned, but the major example they use is Watergate. So they're going back to a classic. 9-11 is not classic enough.
00:28:49
Speaker
What is their particular reason? Do they just like it more or is it a better illustration of the point they were wanting to make? It is a better illustration of the point they want to make because there's a certain defense of Watergate, which is, well, you know, Nixon was right to, you know, to try to bug the Democrats. I mean, he was a paranoid individual. He was scared of what his side was doing.
00:29:14
Speaker
If you're scared of what your side is doing, you're particularly scared of what the other side might be doing. So it's a great example of going, look, if you're Nixon and you don't trust your own group, you're definitely not going to trust the other group. And thus you're going to want to put them under as equal surveillance as you have your own side.
00:29:35
Speaker
And at this point, we've pretty much reached the point where we're at, I think, in Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, because I see your next reference is Feldman's Counterfact Conspiracy Theories, which is the one we looked at most recently. Indeed. In fact, very recently. Two weeks ago. Yes. So how do things go from there?
00:29:55
Speaker
So after that we've got Counter Knowledge, Racial Paranoia and the Cultic Maloo, Decoding Hip-Hop Conspiracy Theory by Travis Algosa. And that's a look at how some members of the African-American communities took both 9-11 conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories about the governmental response to Hurricane Katrina as examples of why the US government is up to no good.
00:30:20
Speaker
We also have a future paper by Curtis Hagen, Conspiracy Theories and Stylized Facts. We'll talk about that one soon enough so we won't cover that here. Then we've got Martha Lee's book, Conspiracy Rising, which has a chapter on anti-Semitism and that's where she brings in discussion about 9-11. So it goes back to those early 2001-2002 conspiracy theories about
00:30:47
Speaker
how the Jews clostered the 911 attacks, and the evidence of that was they're disappearing from the building weeks beforehand, and she goes through and fisks those views and puts them into a context of antisemitism over the course of the 20th century.
00:31:04
Speaker
We have The Emergence of Conspiriality by Charlotte Ward and David Vollas, which is a paper which places 9-11 into the recent history, that's recent history back in 2011, of conspiracy theories. Eva Horn's paper, Logics of Political Sequency, uses 9-11 as an example
00:31:29
Speaker
And I've managed to repeat the Karen Douglas and Robbie M Sutton paper at the end of my list, making it look like it's one larger than it actually is. So what do you take from looking at this history of 9-11 throughout academic literature?
00:31:48
Speaker
The first moral, and I think the most important, is that everybody spells Al-Qaeda in a different way. There's no standardized spelling. No, that's probably understandable when you're talking about words from a language that has a non-latinate alphabet. When you're mapping... mapping... what's the word even? Symbols, I guess, from a completely different alphabet onto ours. They're always...
00:32:17
Speaker
It's always tricky, I guess. Some people, I think the sound I usually see as Kaida is Q-A-E-D-A, but then I have seen Q-A-I-D-A.
00:32:28
Speaker
Some do it with a K instead of a Q. Sometimes there's no hyphen. Sometimes L is capitalized. Sometimes it's not. It's all very confusing. That's language for you. The other thing to note is that we get this explosion of references to 9-11 in 2011.
00:32:49
Speaker
But it's very much an explosion of, this is a conspiracy theory you've heard of, but it's not a major conspiracy theory we're going to be focusing our arguments on. Most of the references to 9-11 in 2011.
00:33:05
Speaker
places it in a list of other conspiracy theories. It's not a major example. It's just one of many examples. It is kind of interesting that there's a whole bunch of examples of 9-11, sorry, of non 9-11 conspiracy theories, which are taken to be bigger, like the aforementioned discussion of the Watergate conspiracy theory. It ends up being a much bigger example than 9-11 in that paper, and arguably,
00:33:34
Speaker
Other examples end up being bigger than 9-11 in 2011. And this kind of fits my hypothesis.
00:33:43
Speaker
that even though we might think of 9-11 as being this major, major example of a conspiracy theory, it kind of isn't treated that way by academics. And I think it's because when you actually look at the polling on belief on 9-11 conspiracy theories, it's still a very marginal view. More people know about JFK conspiracy theories or Watergate conspiracy theories.
00:34:12
Speaker
And they often do about 9-11 conspiracy theories. It seems like it should be big because it arguably did change the world in which we live. We travel in a completely different way now because of what happened on 9-11.
00:34:28
Speaker
But that's a political consequence of the attacks. It's not a political consequence of the conspiracy, unless, of course, you believe that actually the official theory is in fact a tissue of lies. So it's kind of fascinating for the sheer fact that I thought this would be a bigger topic.
00:34:47
Speaker
then actually it turns out to be. And actually, that's something that just occurred to me as we were going through this that I probably should have asked ahead of time. Do you know when Joe Yosinski started polling people for belief in 9-11 conspiracy theories? I think in the mid 2000s.
00:35:06
Speaker
because yeah that would be interesting to look at both for when it became enough of a thing to be worth asking people about and then obviously the change in belief over time although if I recall anything from the interviews we've done or you've done with Jo that belief in these conspiracy theories doesn't really seem to be growing much over time does it?
00:35:30
Speaker
No, I mean, Watergate conspiracy theories seem to have a waxing waning effect, but 9-11 seems remarkably stable. Yeah. And you've had a good look through the literature there, but there are also a few of the papers that kind of are 9-11 truth conspiracy theories masquerading as academic literature. I mean, you looked at the Amy Baker Benjamin one,
00:35:58
Speaker
But there have been a few others. There's also the silence of the IR discipline paper that we looked at. There's your suspicion about the Curtis Hagen paper we looked at several weeks ago. There have been papers which do appear to be explicit defenses or implicit defenses of a certain 9-11 conspiracy theory. So those papers, of course,
00:36:23
Speaker
have 9-11 as a major example. But it's kind of fascinating that the ones where it's quite obviously a major example, at least in these cases, are the ones where people are trying to persuade you, you should take 9-11 conspiracy theories seriously. And I suppose perhaps we could look to the future. Now, you mentioned interest in Trump and his sort of conspiratorial style.
Shift to COVID-19 Conspiracies
00:36:50
Speaker
It's getting a lot of people interested in that sort of thing.
00:36:53
Speaker
I can't imagine it would be a great idea to write academic papers about a sitting president, especially when there's a chance that, as it turned out, there'd be a one-term president and you'd end up publishing papers
00:37:11
Speaker
towards the end of, or even after, the end of this person's presidency. So I don't know how much, how much Trumpy stuff is a figure that literally, well, of course, these days, every conspiracist's bread and butter is COVID-19. So do you think COVID-19, anti-vaxxie sort of conspiracy or either anti-vax conspiracy theories or conspiracy theories around the origins of COVID-19 will become
00:37:37
Speaker
the biggest example in the literature or has it already happened?
00:37:41
Speaker
It has already happened, not in philosophy. I'm not aware of any published papers this year or last year, which use COVID-19 conspiracy theories as a major example. But as someone who gets notifications about new papers on conspiracy theories on a almost day by day basis, I can tell you there are a lot of papers on COVID-19 conspiracy theories, largely
00:38:10
Speaker
from a kind of communication studies angle of people going, look, these messages are out there. We need to know how to counteract or downplay them. There's an awful lot of how do we stop these theories from spreading online. But there is a lot of COVID-19 stuff out there in the literature as it stands. And that's also fascinating for the sheer fact that it has become
00:38:36
Speaker
a big industry within the academic literature. Now, I think that's because we have a rather burgeoning academic literature on conspiracy theories as it stands. So because there's a lot of papers being published on conspiracy theories prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, people have simply pivoted to using that as an example.
00:39:00
Speaker
And so in a counterfactual history, it's possible we would have seen the same thing around 9-11 if we'd had the same kind of academic environment and pushed for publication in 2001 and 2002 that we do now. So we can't draw many morals about the COVID-19 pandemic papers.
00:39:25
Speaker
for the sheer fat that the environment is so radically different. I imagine if we had the same environment 20 years ago then we probably would see the same kind of literature being produced then as we are now with respect to the novel coronavirus. Yeah, although
00:39:42
Speaker
There is possibly a difference in terms of consequence. If a bunch of people believe that 9-11 was an inside job, apart from arguing with you and then going back to their job as front man of the killing joke,
00:39:59
Speaker
it doesn't have a massive effect, but COVID-19 conspiracy theories, especially the anti-vax kind, are actually having a tangible effect in the world right now, as we see that they may be partially to blame for vaccination rates being lower than they might otherwise be, which has a genuine real world impact on the spread and longevity of the pandemic. So possibly they're not 100% equivalent
00:40:26
Speaker
Well, except of course, if you are a mihop theorist or a lihop theorist, you will point towards what happened in the Middle East as a consequence of the 9-11 attacks and go, well actually, there were massive real world consequences to this story as well.
00:40:43
Speaker
I suppose that's true, yeah, there were not significant repercussions. And indeed, given what's happening in Afghanistan at this very moment in time, after 20 years of occupation, due to a reaction to what happened on September 11, 2001, yeah, the consequences were startling.
00:41:07
Speaker
Yes, I mean, there are still grounds to be cynical there and say, yes, that was happening to brown people in another country, whereas COVID infects Western people with lighter completions, so possibly the powers that care about that a little more. But yeah, no, that is an interesting point. So we've looked to the past, we've looked to the future. I think we're all done looking.
00:41:32
Speaker
We are. The thought I had before we started recording is that this will be released before September 11th US time, probably actually before September 11th NZ time.
00:41:45
Speaker
Now, of course, in the years after September 11th in 2001, people were concerned that September 11th would become a kind of focal point for anger in the Middle East towards the US, and there could be a copycat attack. So I am hoping
00:42:07
Speaker
for a multitude of reasons that September 11th's 20th anniversary is not going to be the motivation for such an event because otherwise the release of this episode is going to be very awkward for so many different reasons. Yes, well fingers crossed.
00:42:25
Speaker
But yeah, I think we've run out of things to say about 9-11's impact on the academic literature. But we haven't quite run out of things to say about 9-11, because we do have a patron episode to record now. And there has actually been a little bit of what you could call recent developments.
00:42:45
Speaker
which we can talk about to our patrons. And of course, in the theme of things that we can't not talk about, there were the events of last Friday, a week ago at any rate, where we had a smaller scale, the 9-11 attack in a supermarket here in Auckland, which, yeah, we probably want to discuss a bit of that as well.
00:43:15
Speaker
you'd like to hear us talking about those topics and you're a patron then you're in luck because you get that bonus episode just by being one. If you would like to hear about one of those episodes and you're not a patron then you can simply become one by going to portray on and searching for the podcasters guide to the consistency. I'm pretty sure if you just type podcasters into the search bar, our one is one of the first suggestions that pops up right like that. It's as simple as that.
00:43:42
Speaker
And if you don't want to become a patron, well, that's fine as well, because you listened all the way to the end of this one. So bless you all the same. And having done our usual little plugs at the end there, I think we are completely spent for the episode. So it simply remains for me to say goodbye. And for me to say also goodbye. The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Anderson and me, Dr. M.R.X. Denterth.
00:44:11
Speaker
You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December was a night.