Remember when Matt Taibbi Called 9/11 Truthers “Hopelessly Stupid”?

VN Alexander

I came out as a truther in 2015 with my 9/11 novel, Locus Amoenus. It wasn’t an easy decision. I anticipated being called “clinically insane,” a “dickwad,” promoting “rank steaming bullshit” by the likes of Matt Taibbi.

Among other notable left-leaning 9/11 truth debunkers, such as Chris Hayes and Noam Chomsky, Taibbi stands out in my memory as being particular angry, nasty, and very sure of himself.

As Taibbi writes in Rollingstone in September 2006,

9/11 Truth followers will doubtless argue that I am ignoring the mountains of scientific evidence proving that the Towers could not have collapsed as a result of the plane crashes alone… To which I’ll have to answer: you’re right. I am ignoring it. You idiots. Even if it were not the rank steaming bullshit my few scientist friends assure me that it is, none of that stuff would prove anything.

Despite his fairly recent road-to-Damascus conversion, finally realizing that “left” journalism has lost its way — and now supports the US Empire, the surveillance state and the censorship industrial complex — Taibbi hasn’t, insofar as I know, reflected much upon the deeds of his earlier self, when he was a rabid attacker of those who would report a few facts about how gravity works.

I want to point out that, in Taibbi’s infamous above-mention 2006 article, “The Idiocy Behind the ‘9/11 Truth’ Movement,” his main “gripe” is that truthers aren’t conspiracy theorists: he complains that, for the most part, they just analyze the physical evidence pointing to the use of incendiaries, and they do not offer, a “concrete theory of what happened, who ordered what and when they ordered it, and why,” which, of course, the engineers examining the physical evidence could not do, no more than the coroner who does the autopsy in a murder case could do.

As late as July 2019, Taibbi was still bashing 9/11 “conspiracy theorists” by associating the movement’s investigators, who had Engineering or Physics PhDs, with “Flat Earthers” and “Moon Landing Deniers” (yawn).

But within a year’s time, after he got locked down during CoVid, he started noting how the media censored commonsense notions about how best to deal with infectious disease. This time, he started questioning the official narrative. Not long thereafter, this foul-mouthed enfant terrible of journalism, this wannabe Hunter S. Thompson, became the target of his own kind of snark from his former colleagues.

No longer with Rollingstone, by September 11, 2021, Taibbi was making the connections between the “War on Terror” and the “War on CoVid.” Two years later, he repeated such observations again on Racket News.

Now, it seems to be clear to Taibbi why 9/11 happened.

Although Taibbi is doing useful work these days exposing how government and Big Tech colluded to censor US citizens, he could say a thing or two about that other kind of censorship — the most powerful kind: name-calling, dismissiveness, bullying. No one wants to be ridiculed in public. No one wants to be put in that hated group, the Truther, the Anti-Vaxxer, the Anti-Semite, the TransPhobe.

Taibbi was very effective at getting people to stay silent about an important historical event. I can’t help but speculate that, had more people been made aware of the 9/11 cover up, more people would have been cynical about government authority and fewer people might have taken the shot.

When is Taibbi going to admit that the 9/11 truthers were right? It’s not too late for an apology.

VN Alexander PhD is a philosopher of science and novelist, who has just completed a new satirical novel, C0VlD-1984, The Musical. You can read and follow her SubStack here.