Posted on September 22, 2026
Bad Nuge
We need to start responding to 9/11
truthers
by
Daniel Clark
While playing
a concert in Farmington, Pennsylvania on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11
attacks, and just about an hour away from where one of the planes went down,
Ted Nugent blamed those events, at least in part, on Americans. This attendee did not at first catch on to
what he was driving at when the Nuge made an apparent
non sequitur about arresting Dick Cheney.
It seemed a bit odd since the former vice president had been deceased
for ten months, but it made a certain amount of sense as a simple application of
the transitive property of political loyalties.
Trump hated Cheney, and Nuge loves Trump;
therefore, vicariously, Nuge hates Cheney.
After playing a couple more songs,
Nugent went on an expletive-laden rant, most of which did not seem
noteworthy. Eff Flock cameras. Eff data centers. Eff the IRS.
The unexpected part was when he added Eff Uncle Sam, which he quickly
revised to "Uncle Sham." Surely, this
was something that just came out wrong.
He must have only meant to voice his displeasure with meddlesome, big
government bureaucratic wonks, and not really to curse a symbol of
America. He spelled it out about halfway
through the show, however, when he momentarily silenced the crowd by saying
about 9/11, "Uncle Sham was involved, and if you don't know that, you need to
find out."
We can
only guess how he "found out" this interesting fact, but he was not going to
take the time to explain it to us during his show, nor did we want him to, as
he surely knew. The point to the series
of strange remarks was never to present a coherent argument, but only to
advertise the assertion.
This is
basically the same approach that is being taken by formerly conservative
commentator Tucker Carlson, who is a recent convert to the 9/11 "truther"
movement. Back in 2008, libertarian GOP
presidential candidate Ron Paul held his own convention in protest of the one
across the road where John McCain was accepting the Republican nomination. Carlson had agreed to introduce Paul at his
keynote address, but earlier that same night, former Minnesota governor and
professional wrestler Jesse Ventura took the stage to declare that the World
Trade Center was brought down in a controlled demolition, leading the crowd of
crackpots to begin chanting, "Inside Job!"
Carlson had a sudden attack of integrity and walked out of the event.
Today,
Carlson apologizes for having dismissed those people, and complains that they
have been "blacklisted." On his podcast,
he posted a five-part series that did not come right out and say that 9/11 was
an inside job, but strongly suggested it under the guise of "just asking
questions," which has become his typical m.o.
Mind you, a question to which one does not want the answer is an
insinuation, and not a genuine expression of curiosity. In fact, a lengthy analysis in Popular
Mechanics answered some of his questions as long as twenty years ago, but
he continues to ask them anyway.
One of Carlson's interview subjects
is Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who won't state for a fact that
WTC Building 7 was blown up by the government, but only that it sure looked as
if it had been. Johnson says he wants to
hold Senate hearings on "what actually happened on 9/11," but if he did, they
could not possibly back up this speculation of his. They would only give him an opportunity to
amplify it.
When 9/11
was still fresh in American minds, the truthers were stigmatized. Now they're treated as mundane, to the point
that there is little outrage about one of them residing in the Senate. It's not hard to see how this happened. Most of us stopped talking about the events
of that day, but the truthers never did, the result being that their narrative
has gone largely unchallenged. Young
people who have no memory of 9/11, and have rarely even seen video of it, can't
help but be susceptible to the propaganda.
We need to
respond to the truthers, not by rebutting their point of view in a manner that
confers legitimacy upon it, but simply by asking them to explain what their
innuendos really mean. That way,
impartial observers will be able to see how wrong they are, even though they
will probably never admit it themselves.
To that end, here are some questions for Ted, Tucker, Sen. Johnson, and
the rest of the truthers, who seem to be so fond of "just asking questions."
* If
President Bush wanted to contrive a terrorist attack because he was a
warmonger, or because he wanted to create a surveillance state, or whatever you
suppose his motives to have been, would he not have picked some target other
than the World Trade Center? How
plausible is it that an American president would set out to destroy the hub of
the U.S. economy during his first year in office?
* Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed presented the 9/11 plot to Osama bin Laden in 1996, a full
presidential term before George W. Bush was elected. Are you saying that Bush began collaborating
with the terrorists while he was still governor of Texas? How did he know he would be president when
the time came to blow up the buildings?
Would al-Qaeda have invested so much time and effort in the plot if its success
had been dependent upon the outcome of the 2000 presidential election?
* Most of
you guys aren't denying that Islamic terrorists flew airplanes into the Twin
Towers, but you also claim that the buildings were brought down in a controlled
demolition. Why was it necessary to do
both? Why would the airplane attacks
themselves not have been enough to serve their purposes?
* If the
hijackers had failed, would our government have blown up the buildings and
blamed it on Islamic terrorists anyway?
Then why not just do that, instead of concocting such an intricate
scheme?
* If the
idea was to blow up the towers so that it looked like they had been destroyed
by the airplanes, then why did the detonations not immediately follow the
impact of the planes? Wasn't the delay
more consistent with the structure of the buildings being compromised than it
was with a coordinated demolition?
* How is
it even logistically possible to wire two of the world's tallest buildings in
one of its busiest cities for detonation without anyone noticing?
* If our
government's motivation for the 9/11 attacks was at least in part to create a
pretext for war, wouldn't slamming an airplane into the Pentagon have been
counterproductive?
* Since
these were coordinated attacks, why was the Pentagon not completely
destroyed? Was it not also wired for
implosion?
* What was
the intended target for Flight 93, and was it rigged for demolition, also? Does it remain so to this day, or did the
conspirators remove the explosives just as secretly as they had planted them?
* If there
were secret files or other materials in Building 7 that needed to be disposed
of, wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to discretely remove them than to
blow them to smithereens?
* Why
wasn't WTC Building 7 hit by an airplane, also, if the government had a
particular motivation to destroy it?
* If Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed was in cahoots with high-ranking officials in our federal
government, shouldn't we know it by now?
Why would he continue to protect them at this point?
* How many
people were needed to carry out this conspiracy, and why hasn't any of them
ever cracked?
* Wouldn't
the successful execution of a plot like the one you're suggesting require a
superhuman level of competence within our government, and does it not therefore
refute itself?
These are
the kinds of questions that those in the "just asking questions" crowd are
disinclined to ask. It's about time we
started doing it for them.
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