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The Yoda of 9/11

Continued from page 3

Published on August 09, 2007

"It was kind of a touchstone for me, these little connections," admits Curley. "So whenever anything came out about United 93, I wanted to read it. I wanted to watch it. I had seen the A&E movie which was called Flight 93. And last year in April, the theatrical movie United 93 was going to come out. So I was looking around for reviews, and there were a bunch of posters on the Huffington Post who had gotten into the Tribeca première. They were all very positive. But I noticed in the comments section, all these Loose Change guys were spamming the comments saying, 'Oh, that's all a bunch of government propaganda. If you wanna know what really happened to United 93, you've gotta watch Loose Change.' I was like, 'Huh, I've never heard of this thing Loose Change. Let's go ahead and see what this is all about.'

"The first hour or so, I wasn't getting angry. It was just this is nutty stuff, you know? Then they got into the Flight 93 stuff and denying that and saying that the passengers' voices were faked, and I got furious. I saw red. So I said, okay, this is something I'm going to write a blog post about. So I wrote a post on my political blog, Brainster."

Everything flowed from there, with Bennett soon joining forces with Curley to oppose the slick falsehoods of Loose Change, which was made on a laptop in Oneonta by Dylan Avery, Jason Bermas, and Rowe. By all accounts, Loose Change continues to be an Internet sensation, with more than 10 million downloads worldwide, spawning a cottage industry of copycat 9/11 deniers: self-appointed experts who all seem to have their own little Loose Change knockoffs, Web sites, and books.

But Curley and Bennett remain undaunted.

"I'm offended that these people slander our country," Bennett notes. "Whether you like Bush and the administration or not, you still don't like people saying false things about them. History is history. I don't like people trying to alter history for their own egotistical motives, their own fears and motivations. It's something that we all share in common; it's not something someone should just be able to hijack."

Through the blog, they keep pols, celebs, and so-called intellectuals on their toes. If a public brainiac like Harper's editor Lewis Lapham, or historian Howard Zinn, dallies with the tenets of trooferism, SLC chastises them for taking "a bite of the apple." If a politician fails to reject 9/11 conspiracy theories outright, they're lambasted. If a celeb like Rosie O'Donnell starts spouting baloney about 9/11 being "the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel," she can expect to be spanked, and spanked hard. And when they discover that physicist and troofer Steven Jones' science is weak, or that he once fell for a far-fetched archaeological hornswoggle, they let him have it.

They also help keep the madness from spreading. When Virgin Atlantic announced that it'd inked a deal with the Loose Change boys to show the sham documentary on flights, SLC, along with other commentators, raised hell, and the plan was nixed. Along the same lines, when Irish public TV was planning to air Loose Change, Curley enlisted the aide of like-minded Emerald Isle bloggers, and soon the airing was axed.

"Those were real victories for us," says Curley, first smiling, then dour. "Unfortunately, we weren't successful in keeping it off Australian TV."


In some ways, a blog is better suited to addressing the ever-mutating prevarications and hothouse insanities of something like the 9/11 truth movement than is the mainstream media. Curley and Bennett aren't professional journalists, they don't have to pretend to be neutral, and they can be as snarky and offensive as they want. Name-calling and ad hominem attacks are de rigueur. Humor, invective, and ridicule are mandatory.

Truthers (as the conspiracy believers like to call themselves) are, of course, troofers. Mutton-chopped 9/11 conspiracy advocate James Fetzer is referred to as "Uncle Fetzer." Gold-star mama Cindy Sheehan, who's lately flirted with the "truth" movement? "Becoming Full-On Woo," reads one headline. "Yet Moron Rosie O'Donnell," reads another. Radio blowhard Alex Jones is dubbed "Old Leather Lungs," and on and on. The result is a far more entertaining read than you'll get in Time, Newsweek, or the Wall Street Journal.

To paraphrase Karl Marx, Curley and Bennett own the means of production. They're beholden to no corporate entity, so no one's pressuring them to be boring. They're also able to do something many full-time journalists in the old media would like to do, but can't: specialize.

Most reporters haven't the time to watch video after video, listen to hour after hour of skull-splitting lectures, peruse countless Web sites and suss out each writer's agenda, much less wade through slush piles of self-published conspiracy material. Nor would many mainstreamers see the value in documenting lunacies like those of ex-Clemson University engineering professor Judy Wood, who holds that "Star Wars beam weapons" took out the Twin Towers, or in revealing the slavish praise heaped upon Wood's idea by philosophy professor and professional blowhard Fetzer.

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