How 9/11 conspiracy theories moved into mainstream American politics

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. “Inside Job?” reads the thumbnail of one video that has been viewed more than 500,000 times, before it zooms in on footage of the World Trade Center’s two towers on fire on September 11, 2001.

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 genocidal war on Gaza and public perception of its influence on United States politics.

As a result, conspiracy theories have moved from the political fringes towards the mainstream, offering false explanations for real-world anxieties, and increasingly becoming a tool of far-right politicians to exploit grievances for their own political ends.

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 event “was captured instantaneously”, noted Hugo Drochon, an associate professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham.

“People saw it on television,” said Drochon. “The United States was at the centre of the world, and this was the great shock. There was also a spectacle element to it – hijacking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center. It marked a certain generation.”