A lot of it was shock and confusion. How could this happen? Why did this happen? People wanted answers and people got answers.

I was a truther right away, after 9/11. It’s embarrassing to say now. I fell for narratives like “jet fuel doesnt melt steel” and “only a controlled demolition collapses like that.”

Jet fuels softens steal beams, and they were holding up so much weight. And that’s exactly how a really tall building, surrounded by other tall buildings, looks when it collapses.

People were hot with emotion and it’s hard to be rational in that state of mind.

At this point, I believe some in the US government knew the attack was imminent but did not know when, and by the time it was happening, it was too late.

I can’t dismiss as out of hand the idea that Bush, Cheny, and some of their friends in Saudi Arabia (people who are now Donald Trump’s friends), wanted the attack to happen, specifically in order to justify wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I do believe were just wars under a doctrine of irredentism.

Because the collapse of the towers looked like a controlled demolition. It wasn’t, but it looked like it.

1. It was unthinkable to millions of people that an attack on the USA could reach so far in as to hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in a single morning. We were the strongest military on earth and had fully operational radar, but failed to keep planes from absolutely demolishing the towers. A lot of people just can’t understand the complicated stuff like that.

2. The government has done a lot worse.

People are emotion driven. The idea of a conspiracy is somehow more soothing to them than a chaotic world where no one’s really in control. Also many people are, frankly, fragile cowards, and the idea of admitting they are wrong is too much for their ego to take.

People’s beliefs are social. Once they’re in a social group that believes something, they’re very unlikely to change. It’s not even wholly conscious. But if someone’s in conspiracy circles, abandoning the beliefs means losing all those friends. That feels like Danger to the brain, and most people will reject it.

To quote Pearl from ‘Keep Beach City Weird’:

Humans just lead short, boring, insignificant lives, so they make up stories to feel like they’re a part of something bigger. They want to blame all the world’s problems on some single enemy they can fight, instead of a complex network of interrelated forces beyond anyone’s control.

Because the government was aware of two of the attackers prior to the event, it’s not a stretch that they allowed it to happen to use it as an excuse to invade the middle east.

https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/0506/chapter5.htm

Because Bush and company did everything they could to protect the Saudis and the Bin Laden family, and then made massive fortunes attacking Iraq which had nothing to do with the attack.

At best, the Bush administration were opportunistic war-profiteers who abused the situation for their own gain.

That doesn’t validate any of the absurd theories about demolitions or RC planes.

I drove away from the WTC on the morning of 2001-09-11. I watched from a safe distance as the towers fell. It was a surreal day I shared with like 10 million people as we watched the smoke and fires and falling structures, willing with every ounce of our being that our loved ones due to be in the area at the time - and one in the building interviewing upstairs - ended up far away at the right time. The universe delivered, and we luckily lost no dear friends that day, but it was tense while some of them were in the proverbial wind.

I still - I’m ashamed to admit - think something was SUPER-fishy about the pentagon strike. I believe it when they say the parts don’t add up, and I believe them when they say the surveillance tapes from a local gas station were taken, and I debated the significance of the lamp-posts being taken down in the days before where they magically didn’t get hit by the incoming plane. And I’m pretty sure the plane following that pennsylvania crash was doing more than watching.

Do I think the planes hit the towers? Yep. Do I think the jet fuel weakened the structure until it popped? Yep. But I can’t resolve the rumour that the basement was empty on that day of all days. I heard the stories that the tail numbers were spotted elsewhere and I briefly gave it some thought until I just went “nah, fuck that” and tossed that idea.

I don’t think there’s gonna be an alternate explanation to cover the weird concerns I have, and I can live with that; but I’m not gonna forget it.

That’s the way it is.

I think you need to reassess these people you respect a lot. Belief in 9-11 conspiracy theories is not common.

Also the usual pattern (seen in many countries/empires, not just USA) - since civil war war-profiting (closely related to the two parties & why the switch happened) the industry was always hungry and in need of a good loosing-ish war (or - only short periods without a war).

It always follows the same pattern --> need for profits/power expenditure rises --> if public is (fuded) on board, great, if not, we need a terrorist-like attack, seemingly unpreventable yet utterly publicly show before it happened.

Like in WWII, USA had stakes on both sides, but also not ‘as big’ of a military budget as they could have. The problem was that the public was super against entering the conflict (80~90% against, this is the time when the civil war was well within lining memory with soldiers and widows on proper military pensionsv still alive, regular parades, etc). So for the first time ever they decide to put all their ship-eggs in one Pearl-basket & advertise that move a lott, how they did that, where they did that (how much time they are gonna wait there, lul), and what defenses are there, how the seamen were sent home etc. All under the disguise of showing their military power to Japan (that’s like exposing your balls to an enemy that is already attacking you). Ofc the attack successfully happened, propaganda machine spun up (still today we get movies about that, ‘the horror’), the public option switched over night and politicians could hike the military budget substantially. (Movies that we don’t get is about what/how USA did to japan - like how they killed more civilians with regular carpet bombing per day compared to the killed in blasts of atomic bombs - the most destructive single air attack in human history … and USA dropped about 4× as much bombs total in Vietnam)

The same with 9-11, public is anti war, you have the two towers and movies detailing how easy it would be to crash a plane into specifically the towers. Or Vietnam proxy war, which lasted for so long that the public turned back against it (hippies) and government had to demonize them (the ridiculous anti weed laws/enforcement, “satanism”, etc).

Funding and assisting a foreign terrorist group for profit is shockingly common. Sometimes you even have to manufacture a new group because the existing don’t suit your needs.

Oh, and the atrocities compared are always like x killed in domestic attack, xxxxxx killed in the foreign bombarding campaign. When public opinion isn’t that big of an issue a smaller trigger point is needed - usually USA sends literal military personnel into sovereign foreign countries & when the invaded county returns fire in the invading force USA counts that as an act of war (huh, I guess technically that is correct).

I think it’s because people would rather believe the world is secretly controlled by some truly awful people than acknowledge no-one’s steering the bus.

It certainly wasn’t a plane that hit the Pentagon.

Because there was some legit sketchy shit:

1. Bush was warned at least a month in advance that an attack was coming. He deliberately did nothing. This was documented publicly in a Senate hearing afterwards. We don’t know whether he did nothing because of incompetence or malice, and we don’t know who else knew in advance as well, but either way, at least he and the people who briefed him knew.

2. The dirty secret of skyscrapers is that they’re mostly made of nothing. They’re almost entirely air. It takes precious little to weaken them and bring them down. The Bin Laden family was in the construction business and they knew this fact very well.

3. As others have noted in the thread, Bin Laden and the Muhjadeen had been funded, trained, and armed by the USA. They were our creation.

Usually when people are suspicious, they’re right to be suspicious. They’re not always right about what to be suspicious about.

Because two planes hit two buildings (and the other one) and like 3-4 buildings imploded. It didn’t look real.

Im guessing engineers didn’t plan for planes to strike the building which is why they crumbled.

That was literally it. It was so odd a situation to our daily lives that parts of it didn’t seem real.

I didn’t actually believe this, but it was fun to entertain the idea.

Here’s why. At the time, there were a bunch of very odd coincidences. I’ll do my best to remember the best of them.

• The CIA/NSA (one of the “secret” agencies) put out a budget report showing a large amount of money that was not trackable, in the billions.
• Coincidentally, the section of the pentagon hit by the “plane” was reportedly where financial records were stored.
• By “plane”, I mean object. If you watch the 1 video that got out (all other videos were confiscated) from the nearby gas station, the thing that hits the pentagon does not look like a plane but instead a missile.

Next!

• reportedly, the owner of the twin towers took out a massive insurance policy against the buildings the day or week before 9/11 (I forget exact timing)
• also, the building was covered in asbestos, the cost to remove was in the billions, and the cost to keep the building occupied always also increasing

Next!

• building 7 (I think that’s the right one) collapsed under what appeared to be demolishing conditions
• building 7 was never hit by a plane or anything else, it just dropped like it was purposefully demolished

Edit: forgot one!

• the towers were obviously hit by planes, we have plenty of video evidence of this. The controversy is around how the towers actually fell. This is where the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” meme comes from.

There are more, but it’s been 20 years and my memory is hazy.

Overall, there were some oddities around the whole event that, when allowing yourself to think completely outside of reality, make sense as to why it was an inside job.

Finally, personally I believe the Saudis did it in cooperation with Bin Laden and their goal was to bankrupt America. They did a pretty good job, from their perspective.