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...
In a 2017 piece in The New York Times, voting expert Ari Berman wrote, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed tactics that prevented blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups from voting. But fo...