AVC: In The Great Derangement, you document your infiltration into John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church and your incognito participation in 9/11 Truth Movement meetings. Have you gotten a reaction from either camp since the book’s publication?
MT: Oh yeah. Among the people that I was in church with, one of them actually saw me on television earlier this spring and called me up right afterward. So my cover was blown before the book even came out, which was kind of embarrassing. But I haven’t heard too much from that whole crew. Weirdly enough, the letters I’ve been getting from a lot of Christians—not specifically from that church, but from other fundamentalist Christians—have been strangely positive in a way that I really didn’t expect. A lot of people are very critical of Hagee’s church, that it’s deviating from the real message of Christ. I get a lot of letters of the ‘If only you’d experienced Christ through our church’ variety. There’s a lot of that, but relatively little abuse of the sort that you would’ve expected. The Truthers, on the other hand… [Laughs.] I think they’re probably the most self-Googling sliver of humanity on the planet. The instant you write anything about them, your e-mail is flooded with letters. I haven’t gotten a single positive reaction from anybody who’s a self-described Truther.
AVC: You’d think a movement devoted to seeking truth would encourage debate as a way to arrive at the truth, rather than trying to suppress whatever doesn’t already align with their own views.
MT: Absolutely. I make this point with Truthers all the time, that the whole direction of everything they do is the opposite of what finding out the truth is. They approach the subject matter in much the same way a defense attorney does. A defense attorney takes a case and he sees six pieces of evidence that are going to convict his client, and he sets out to destroy those six pieces of evidence, irrelevant to the actual truth of the situation. That’s not to denigrate defense attorneys, but that’s what they do. It’s exactly the same thing that Truthers do. They just take the 9/11 Commission Report piece by piece, and they try to break down links in that evidentiary chain that compose the official story, but they never really try to find out what happened. They’re just trying to convince you that the official story couldn’t possibly be true. For instance, the stuff about Hani Hanjour—the hijacker who reportedly made that maneuver into the Pentagon. They’re really hopped up about the fact that he was a bad pilot and couldn’t have made that sophisticated maneuver. But they make absolutely no effort to tell you what actually did happen. They’re like, ‘Oh, it could have been a remote-controlled plane.’ Offhandedly, they’ll say that. [Laughs.] Like that’s a very simple thing. It’s really weird.
We don’t know what the whole truth ia about 9/11, but we can see parts of the truth. And we can also see that the official story is all lies. 9/11 was an inside job. Who exactly did it, we don’t know. But it must have been done with the assistance of people in and connected with the American government.
Sydney, Australia
I have a lifetime subscription to Rolling Stone (cost me a hundred bucks a few years ago!) and Matt Taibbi is one of my favorite writers, in spite of the fact that I disagree with almost everything he thinks. I haven’t heard of this book but there’s a decent chance I’ll buy it because those 9/11 nuts drive me up the wall.
Any idea how he pronounces his last name?
Its pronounced Tie-ee-bee. His dad is a network correspondent so I’ve heard it multiple times on-air.
Robert Hoogenboom, didn’t you just do what MT complained about in the OP? “Offhandedly, they’ll say that. [Laughs.] Like that’s a very simple thing. It’s really weird.”
It’s unfortunate that for all his soft-pedalling as he does it, Taibbi went after the cliched target of defense attorneys in his analogy. A defense attorney’s job is not to “tell you what actually did happen” but rather to ensure that the state has met its burden of proving its case. A better and more accurate analogy would have been prosecutors (you know, the ones whose job it actually is to “tell you what actually did happen”) who get fixated on a particular defendant or theory of a case and then railroad it through irrespective of conflicting or absent evidence. (See, Innocence Project, passim.)
Gotta call this little tidbit a fail on Taibbi’s part.
Taibbi’s allegation is ridiculous. I have screened several 9/11 movies to the public; each time, I dutifully contacted CIA, FBI, DoD, NIST, FEMA, and several mainstream media outlets beforehand to ask them for any information to refute the movie, promising that I would present it. The only response I ever got was harassment by DoD agents.
My case is not unique. In fact, most 9/11 organizations would welcome some debate with the U.S. government.
Love,
Isn’t science supposed to be a Truth Movement?
How do you build a 110 story 1360 foot skyscraper without figuring out the distribution of steel and concrete before even digging the hole for the foundation.
The NIST report says the the south tower oscillated for FOUR MINUTES after impact and the building deflected by 12 inches at the 70th floor even though the plane hit at the 81st floor. So how much kinetic energy went into deflecting the building? How do you compute how much energy did structural damage without knowing how much merely shook the building?
So how is it that the media and structural engineers can’t address something as simple as a table specifying the TONS of STEEL and TONS of CONCRETE on every level of buildings designed before the moon landing? The Empire State Building was designed without computers so why can’t we get such simple data with all of the computing power we have today?
psik
Matt is spot on regarding the “truthers”.
They are deranged – and incapable of looking at the body of facts and evidence as a whole. They seize on minor inconsistencies and try to run those all the way to their wild conspiracy theories – involving thousands of people that would have to have perfect security and execution of highly uncontrollable situations.
The truthers are truly nutjobs.