

9/11 "Truthers" a Pack of Liars

Michael Shermer




For my appearance in Seattle, my web meister, Emrys Miller, came prepared with a video camera just in case the "troofers" showed up. Sure enough, one did: http://www.michaelshermer.com/audio-video/Elliott_Bay_911/Elliott_Bay_911.mov

There was no need for a camera in Philadelphia, as the 9/11 conspiratorialists came prepared with their own recording equipment, and captured the moment here:

They subsequently appeared at my events at Books Inc. in Mountain View, California, Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, California, and at UCLA. What's going on here? As Bill Maher discovered one day during the taping of his HBO series "Real Time," their goal is just to be heard--in any venue at any time under any circumstances. In spring of 2005, for example, I gave a lecture at the Los Angeles Public Library, after which I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Mooreish ambitions of exposing the "truth" about the 9/11 conspiracy, and he wanted to know if he could interview me. I responded, "you mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and his nineteen Al-Qaeda operatives to fly planes into buildings?"
"That's what they want you to believe," he said.
"Who is 'they'," I queried.
"The government," he whispered in hushed tones, as if "they" might actually be listening in at that very moment.
"Yeah, well, 'the government' is a little vague for me," I suggested. "Who in the government wants me to believe that Al-Qaeda did it?"
"The Bush administration," was the by now predictable answer.
"But didn't Osama and some members of Al-Qaeda not only say they did it," I reminded him, "they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was over America and western capitalism, materialism, and secularism?"
"Oh, you're talking about that video of Osama," he exclaimed knowingly. "That was faked by the C.I.A. and leaked to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign going on ever since 9/11."
"How do you know?" I inquired.
"Because of all the unexplained anomalies surrounding 9/11," he answered.
"Such as?"
"Such as the fact that steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees Fahrenheit. No melted steel, no collapsed towers."

At this point I ended the conversation and declined to be interviewed, knowing precisely where the dialogue was going next--if I cannot explain every single minutia about the events of that fateful 11th day in September, 2001, that lack of knowledge, in his mind at least, equates to direct proof that 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the CIA in order to implement their plan for global domination and a New World Order, to be financed by G.O.D. (Gold, Oil, Drugs) and launched by a Pearl Harbor-like attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby providing the justification for war. The evidence is there in the details, he explained, handing me faux dollar bill ("9-11" replacing the "1" and Bush supplanting Washington) choc-a-block full of web sites. Where I have heard all this before?

In the early 1990s I launched a full-scale investigation of the Holocaust deniers, initially as the cover story for Skeptic magazine and subsequently expanded into a book length treatment, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say it? The deniers employ this tactic of anomalies-as-proof to great effect. David Irving, for example, claims that there are no holes in the roof of the gas chamber at Krema 2 at Auschwitz-Birkenau. So what? So plenty, he says. No holes in the roof of the gas chamber at Krema 2 means that the eyewitness account of SS guards climbing up on the roof and pouring Zyklon-B gas pellets through the holes and into the gas chamber below where the prisoners were herded into, means that the eyewitness account is wrong, which means that no one was gassed in Krema 2, which means that no one was gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which means that no one was gassed at any prison camp, which means that no Jews anywhere were systematically exterminated by the Nazis. In short, "no holes, no Holocaust," says David Irving, a slogan emblazoned on t-shirts of his supporters at his London trial in which he sued a historian for calling him a Holocaust denier.


Best Part.

"I never imagined that 9/11 denial would get media legs. But now it has legs... so we have been forced to provide a public response."

Sounds like our work is paying off.

Posted at Huffpost

pending moderation.

Gee, Mr. Shermer, that's quite a sample of "troofers" you have there.

I saw you were coming to Seattle, found out it was for your new book, looked through your new book and didn't find it interesting enough to want to see you talk about it, and decided not to go. I thought of going and asking a question about 9/11, because I think you are wrong for reasons not worth stating here, but decided that would be inappropriate and rude to the audience.

Your attempt to associate questions about 9/11 with Holocaust denial is despicable. You should be ashamed of yourself for using the horrible tragedy of the Holocaust to make a cheap argument.


One more comment, Mr. Shermer. Your story about people showing up at your book promotions, and about your conversation with one person in 2005, does not support the title of your blog: "9/11 'Truthers' a Pack of Liars."

About the bin Laden video, the rational question is to you: how do you know it is authentic? Remember what has been premised on the official story about 9/11: war, torture, violations of privacy, etc. How do you know it is real, Mr. Skeptic?

I wrote something similar, but

it's hard to get past HuffPo censors.

They posted the second one only

They post multiple comments by others but they wouldn't post my first one.

Update: I submitted the first one again and they posted it. As I thought, it didn't violate their rules.

He's such a schmuck..........

I'll bet Shermer still lives with his mother.

He obviously can't handle the truth.


Shermer is a goddamn snake-oil salesman, using sly tricks of shaming the questioner, discrediting ideas by association and otherwise twirling his crop of acolytes around in the palm of his hand.
This guy is either utterly brainwashed or a twisted little man (maybe both.)

Shermer Has A Financial Motive To Distort Information

No matter what evidence is provided to support 9/11 Truth, Shermer will try to discredit it because he has a vested interest in doing so.

Agreeing with 9/11 Truth research will spell the end of his career.

A true skeptic would require

A true skeptic would require greater proof that the official version -- the authoritarian version -- is verifiably correct. He self-identifies as a fraud and a shill by his ill-logic (if the alternative version of this event is correct, then we are expected to believe in the alternative theories of an unrelated event) and by his lack of both inductive and deductive reasoning.

I'm sorry, Shermer, but it takes more than batting at strawmen like "creationism" and "magic" to any claim to true intellectual skepticism. But I guess that's how legend-building pays off when a different flavor of authoritarian needs to be trotted out to put everyone back to sleep. Hocus pocus.


Perhaps a short film revealing Shermer's pathetic attempt to discredit all those who can't believe the OCT would be in order... Or does such a film already exist?