The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [73]
But almost instantly after the column went up online, my mailbox started filling up with hate mail. And what hate mail! If there is a consistent characteristic of the 9/11 Truth Movement, it’s a kind of burning, defensive hypersensitivity, a powerful inclination to be instantly offended, which expresses itself in a tendency for its adherents to seem literally to leap out of their seats in anger even in e-mail form.
“Fuck you, you prick!” said one letter. “Left-gatekeeper cocksucker!” said another. “You’re the one who’s clinically insane,” said a third. “I can’t believe you call yourself a journalist.” Numerous complainants promised to kick my ass. Even a column I’d written celebrating the death of the pope hadn’t come close to inspiring this much invective.
About six days into this I called Jan Frel, my editor at AlterNet, and he mentioned, casually, that my 9/11 column was setting some kind of site record for comments. When I looked on the site I noticed that some of the comments touched on the actual subject I was writing about, but the vast majority were focused on that one “clinically insane” line. A sample:
Matt Taibbi, in denial or not, is misleading readers into believing the government’s fairy-tales concerning 9–11 and everything that has followed. He doesn’t ask “Cui bono?” He tries to make us believe that it was simply those other terrible people with box cutters who perpetrated 9–11 on us—that despite increasing overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that we are since 9–11 the poor victims of people who hate us for our freedoms—yeah, right! What we collectively are—are suckers for the “big lie” Taibbi is pitching.
AlterNet consistently plays the role of left-wing gatekeeper by publishing articles such as this one. I wonder if AlterNet could do some real journalism by giving a fair shake to the 9/11 Truth Movement. I think AlterNet is becoming part of the problem, not the solution.
read “the new pearl harbor” by david ray griffin and rent the film “network.” there’s no united states no middle east no germany no japan no russia no china no iran no vietnam etc etc there’s just one big global governmet a shadow government the international finanical government which executed a coup d etat on november 21, 1963 and orchestrated the attack on 9/11. its not a matter of winning any war its a matter of perpetual war.
The most insane conspiracy theory of all is to blame 9/11 on 19 Arab Muslims with box cutters led by a guy in a cave, outsmarting the the entire US Military, all of the US Spy Agencies and the US Government. As to the explosives that were most likely planted in buildings 1, 2 and 3…
After scrolling through a couple hundred of these messages and looking through another hundred more or so in my mailbox, I lost my temper and tossed off a column thrashing the 9/11 “Truth” Movement. At the time I was, mistakenly, under the impression that the movement was an easy target. It seemed to me at the time that the only reason the 9/11 conspiracy theories were surviving on the Internet was that the movement’s leaders had carefully avoided articulating their theories in full. I really thought that all anyone had to do was put all of the movement claims together and the resulting summary would be so unbelievably ridiculous that people would actually be ashamed to defend them publicly. The 9/11 conspiracy theories seemed absurd on their face, the kind of thing that no person familiar with the mundane everyday corruption of Washington would ever take seriously, and I thought, mistakenly, that they would go away as soon as someone bothered to point out in public how retarded they are.
So I wrote something along those lines. But the response was twice, three times as vociferous as before. My in-box was deluged with hate mail of the white-hot-rage/die-cocksucker genus, and then, eventually, word of the protest hit me.
At the appointed time I walked across town and grabbed a hot dog across the street from our offices on Sixth Avenue, a block up from Rockefeller Center. It was a strange scene.