TRUTHERS
“You think it was 19 guys that were living in a cave, armed with box cutters that knocked down them towers with airplanes… in nine seconds?” Matthew Naus asked me incredulously, his voice crackling. He smirked at me, indicating such a notion—known to 9/11 conspiracy theorists as “the official story”—is absurd. I glanced at the tables surrounding us in the café where we had agreed to meet. Everyone was ignoring us, or pretending to. Not that Naus seemed out of place; he looks like the most typical blue-collar Milwaukeean you can imagine. He was wearing both a Green Bay Packers baseball cap and a green and gold Packers sweatshirt—clear indicators that he was a proud Wisconsinite—and jeans. He had a neatly trimmed mustache and looked like he might work as a construction foreman or in a factory.
Naus had agreed to sit down and join me for coffee and tell me what he and a group of thousands of others—members of the “9/11 Truth Movement,” who call themselves “9/11 Truthers” or simply “Truthers”—believe really happened on September 11, 2001.
On that date Naus was driving to his job as a middle school teacher in West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee, when he heard news of the first plane strike over radio. At the school, he and the principal wheeled out a television and watched in shock as the news unfolded.
At the time, Naus believed what he was seeing in these news reports: that members of al-Qaeda, under the direction of Osama Bin Laden, had hijacked four commercial airline flights and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, with a fourth headed to the White House crashing instead into a field in Pennsylvania.
But in 2005, Naus began to see things differently after he heard a segment on a popular radio show called Coast to Coast AM, which explores conspiracy theories and paranormal subjects. That episode discussed the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story structure that wasn’t struck by a plane and suddenly collapsed at 5:21 p.m. on 9/11. Experts say that it was the pile-up of debris from the twin towers and eight hours of fires inside the building that led to the sudden implosion, but Truthers say it was clearly a controlled demolition. In the confusion and clouds of dust there are still unanswered questions about Building 7, which makes it a favorite talking point for Truthers.
After the show and his own research, Naus learned more about 9/11 conspiracy.
The most common conspiracies say that the twin towers, like Building 7, were brought down by controlled demolitions and not the airplanes that struck them. Conspiracy says that the Pentagon was hit with a missile and not an airplane, and that Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was shot down deliberately or that the passengers were relocated, murdered, and their plane was replaced with a fabricated wreck site. More fringe theories suggest that the planes didn’t exist at all and were holograms.
Opposing schools of Truther thought suggest that the government either stood down and let the terrorists hijack the planes (the “Let it Happen on Purpose” or LIHOP theory) or actively helped in planning the attack (the “Made it Happen on Purpose” or MIHOP theory). The reason 9/11 happened, Truthers say, was to have a catalyst to invade the Middle East for their oil, and so Bush could have revenge on Saddam Hussein. A secondary benefit would be destroying damning paperwork, a cover-up for evidence of $2.3 trillion in Pentagon money that was missing.
Naus was convinced by what he was reading and became a Truther and an active organizer within the movement. A Vietnam vet, Naus co-founded a group called Veterans for 9/11 Truth, following the lead of similar groups like Scholars for 9/11 Truth, and Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Later, he formed a Milwaukee-based group called Take a Stand for 9/11 Truth. The group held monthly protests in high-traffic areas of Milwaukee, organized meetings, and distributed Truther literature and burned copies of DVDs. Naus also hosted a Truther-themed cable access program in West Allis titled Meet the Truth, with guests from within the movement.
9/11 Truthers at a 2007 rally in Los Angeles. CREDIT: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/DAMON D’AMATO.
To help illustrate his deep involvement with the Truthers, Naus had brought along a scrapbook for me to look at, which he thumped down on the café table. It was filled with photos of him at various protest marches, Truther conferences, and poses of him with prominent Truthers.
“Here, here’s me with the guys who made Loose Change,” he said, pointing to a couple of pictures. Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup is the Truthers’ most popular piece of propaganda, viewed by millions of people online. Alex Jones was an executive producer.
Naus pointed to a picture of him and Jones together at a 9/11 protest in Manhattan near Ground Zero. Jones had quickly become a hero of the Truther movement when he predicted 9/11 happening months before it did.
As a Rolling Stone article reports, “On July 25, 2001 [Jones] looked into the camera and issued a warning that has become legendary among 9/11 Truthers. ‘Please!’ he implored. ‘Call Congress. Tell ’em we know the government is planning terrorism.’ Jones mentioned the World Trade Center by name and warned against the propaganda he expected to accompany the attacks. ‘Bin Laden is the boogeyman they need in this Orwellian, phony system,’ he said.”
Jones opened his September 11, 2001 radio show with a tirade against the government saying that the buildings were brought down with controlled demolition.
“Look, here’s Jones with Charlie Sheen,” Naus says, turning a page with a crinkling sound, pointing at a photo of Jones and Sheen, arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling at the camera.
Ignoring his coffee completely, Naus showed more photos—a picture of himself with Jim Marrs, the classic conspiracy theorist, at a conference.
“This is David Ray Griffin—he’s written over ten books on 9/11. I did a 15-city tour for him in 2010, in fact, there’s a part of one of his books where he thanks me for organizing his tour,” Naus explained to me.
Truther groups have spread around the world, organizing meetings, protests, and conferences, and talking about the latest literature on the subject. 9/11 conspiracy books and DVDs are a cottage industry. There have even been candidates running for office on a “9/11 Truth Platform.” New Jersey conspiracy theorist/politician Jeff Boss threw his hat into the 2012 presidential election ring and won 907 votes.
ON JULY 22, 2004, the 9/11 Commission published its final report on their findings of the circumstances of the terrorist attack. The Commission interviewed over 1,200 people in ten countries and reviewed over two million pages of documents from various intelligence organizations around the world. Their findings confirmed that miscommunication between intelligence groups left the country vulnerable, and after careful planning by Al-Qaeda, the terrorists were able to carry out their plan. The report was published and became a bestselling book.
When I asked Naus what he thought of the 9/11 Commission Report, he made it clear he thought it was a poorly written fiction.
“Oh, I burn a copy every year,” Naus told me, grinning widely. Take a Stand for 9/11 Truth, he explained, used to burn a copy on the date of the Boston Tea Party, December 16. The group cremated the book in a Weber grill in a city park, then dumped the ashes in Lake Michigan. December is not the best time of year to plan outdoor activities in Wisconsin, though, so they later switched the date to July 22, the day the commission published the report.
This new event, dubbed the “9/11 Myth Destruction Picnic,” took place in a city park near the lake on a nice, sunny day. Perhaps energized by the good weather, Naus determined that simply burning a copy of the book was too lenient a sentence, so he bought several copies to destroy.
“We destroyed it six different ways,” he explained. “We put it in a big jug of Kool-Aid, you know, like, ‘you’re drinking the Kool-Aid if you believe this.’ Then we tarred and feathered it; we drilled holes in it because there are so many holes in the story. We shredded it and then I mixed the shredded pages into bullshit, cow manure,” Naus laughed. “And actual bullshit! I went to the State Fair to find real bullshit!” He stopped to reflect on the day.
“Oh yeah, we peed on it! But we didn’t really pee on it, because we didn’t want to get arrested in the park, so we filled some balloons up with Mello Yello. Then we held the balloon necks in our hands,” he told me, making a foreskin-pinching gesture, “to make it look like we were peeing on it. I have all this on film!” Naus told me, looking up his YouTube page on his iPhone.
AS TIME WENT ON, Naus suspected something bigger had happened and that the current popular 9/11 conspiracies were a “cover-up of a cover-up.” In this way I found conspiracy theorists to be somewhat like hipsters—when a theory becomes too popular and mainstream, they head deeper underground into the rabbit hole to find the next idea. Naus began to question if planes had ever really hit the twin towers, especially after he began reading the theories of Dr. Judy Wood, who came to the conclusion that the towers weren’t destroyed by plane impact or controlled demolition, but were secretly blasted by a controlled energy beam, technology that had been developed by Nikola Tesla.
Tesla is a conspiracy favorite, with various theories suggesting that his discovery of free energy from the atmosphere was suppressed by oil and energy companies; that he had established communication with extraterrestrials; and, relevant to Dr. Wood’s theory, toward the end of his life he claimed he developed a death ray. Tesla’s conspiracy lore deepened when the FBI seized all his papers after his death in 1943, hoping they might find something to give them the upper hand in World War II (they reported they didn’t find anything useful and later declassified the documents). Dr. Wood’s theory taps into the mythology of Tesla’s death ray.
“Here, she explains it all in here,” Naus told me, handing me a hefty, nearly five-hundred-page textbook titled Where Did the Towers Go? Evidence of Directed Free-Energy Technology on 9/11, self-published by Dr. Wood in 2010. “She lays out empirical evidence,” Naus told me adamantly, tapping the table at the café with his pointer finger.
“The World Trade Center (WTC) towers did not ‘collapse’ on 9/11/01. They didn’t have sufficient time to collapse because they were destroyed faster than is physically possible for a gravity-driven collapse,” Dr. Wood writes.
The text is a strange collection of equations, charts, graphs, and photo analysis, strung together with random observations. One section shows a series of graphs that detail the rate a billiard ball should fall off the roof of World Trade Center Building 1, another chapter studies seismic impact. In another part, Dr. Wood examines the body language of people falling to their death from the twin towers, concluding that they were launched by an energy beam impact instead of jumping.
In her conclusion, Dr. Wood says that “the technology demonstrated on 9/11 can, indeed, split the world in half, or it can be used to let all people to live fruitful, constructive, and non-polluting lives through their use of free energy.”
AFTER WATCHING SOME VIDEO FOOTAGE of Naus destroying copies of the 9/11 Commission Report, I asked him if he thought we’ll ever get a public disclosure of what he thinks really happened on 9/11. “Maybe not in my lifetime. I think what is going to happen is that the government is going to get dissolved. I think the one chance we have is we have good people in the military,” Naus told me. “There’s going to be a day of reckoning, but we’re going to go through a lot more before then. There’s going to be chaos in the cities and food shortages. They’re going to block off areas—if people are killing each other in the cities, they won’t give a shit, they’ll just block off the roads to the suburbs.”
If that turns out to be the situation, Naus plans to go out shooting if he has to.
“I’m not the type of person that is fear-driven. The only thing I fear is that I’m caught somewhere where I can’t shoot it out with them when they come to take my guns and catch me. You know, ‘Fuck you, you’re taking my freedom away, go ahead and kill me, but I’m takin’ out one of youse!’ I’m afraid to get caught without protecting my freedom, but other than that I don’t fear nothing at all. Most truth seekers are like that.”
Somewhat dazed by his last statements, I parted ways with Naus at the café and start walking down the street.
“Hey Tea, wait up!” Naus shouted after me. I slowly turned around as he approached.
“Here, I forgot to give you this,” he said, handing me a DVD in a paper sleeve. “This here is a documentary about the Apollo moon landing. It was all fake,” he said, shaking his head.
I looked at the DVD, with a photocopied insert. It read The Apollo Moon Hoax.
“What they did is they got, uh, the guy who directed 2001: A Space Odyssey…”
“Stanley Kubrick?” I asked.
“Yeah, Stanley Kubrick. They shot the whole moon landing in a Hollywood studio and Stanley Kubrick directed the whole thing.”
ON SEPTEMBER 11, RICHARD says he was walking back home from the grocery store when he got the news.
“At a street corner near my apartment, a guy was selling rush editions of the Austin American Statesman with the story on the front. I got one, of course.” The headline for the special report edition screamed “Our Nation Saw Evil,” above a photo of panicked New Yorkers rushing down a street in a giant cloud of ash. The other two cover articles are headlined “Long, aggressive fight ahead for U.S., Bush” and “Airliners turned into weapons of terror.”
“I wasn’t all that surprised that something like this had happened, although I figured the ‘terrorist’ target in NYC would be the Statue of Liberty,” Richard says. “Obviously, a bunch of third-world extremists couldn’t have pulled this off. At least not by themselves.”
Richard’s conspiracy theory studies already had him amped up and made him an instant Truther.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but none of the passengers’ bodies on any of those planes were ever actually recovered or identified (probably killed elsewhere),” he wrote me. “The news just kept saying that everyone got burned up. Bullshit!Then to further insult the intelligence of their viewers, the teleprompter readers began reporting that copies of the Koran and the hijackers’ passports had miraculously been found at Ground Zero! What really amazes me is that the majority of Americans still believe the ‘official story’ after all the hard evidence to disprove it!”
Richard continued to make symbolic appearances as the Phantom Patriot, on Congress Avenue and again on Sixth Street, a popular entertainment district, on Halloween.
He had some of his poems he had written for his pamphlets read on a cable access show, Common Sense, a conspiracy show hosted by George Humphrey and Rusty Fields, which aired on the same channel as Alex Jones, AC-TV. Jones himself gave Phantom Patriot an endorsement on air, Richard says, on a November 1, 2001 show.
But none of this was satisfying for him. He decided it was time to take direct action, like his comic book heroes. The world was different now. The ground had shook. Richard remembered his recon mission at the Bohemian Grove.
It was go time.
Richard in his Phantom Patriot costume with weapons shortly before his Bohemian Grove raid.
