The Ben Mulroney Show - Why is an American Senator trying to re-investigate 9/11?

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Why is an American Senator trying to re-investigate 9/11? Guest: Nathan Radke, Co-Host of the Conspiracy Theory podcast The Uncoverup, and author of Simveillance in Hyperreal Las Vegas -Looking back at the closest election in Canadian History with Guest: Craig Baird, Host of Canadian History Ehx If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Ben Mulroney Show and thank you so much for sticking with us. I will admit that when Donald Trump declassified the remaining JFK files, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy files, it didn't ping on my radar. I just, I didn't care enough to say, oh, now we're going to know the truth. I was, however, surprised when after they were declassified, I didn't see a whole lot of news coming from it. And it's only later on that I read that it's because there wasn't much news to be made that by and large, what people believe what the story that had been put out there was the story of what happened.

And I guess a lot of people were hoping there would be a smoking gun, Lincoln, the mob and, of people were hoping there would be a smoking gun linking the mob and a second shooter and the Cubans and Russia, all of that stuff. It wasn't in there. Because sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one. And so now we're finding, I guess maybe because that one's been put to bed, there are some politicians in Washington that are looking for a new conspiracy to get behind because Senator Ron Johnson says that there are a lot of questions now about 9-11. Well, let's start with building seven. Again, I don't know if you can find structural engineers other than the ones that have the corrupt investigation inside NIST that would say that that thing didn't come down in any other way than a controlled demolition. I mean I just you just look at that you

talk about molten steel again you listen to the documentary Bravo 7 there's an awful lot of questions you know who who ordered the removal and the destruction of all that evidence totally contrary to any other firefighting investigation procedures. I mean, who ordered that? Who was in charge? I think there's some basic information. Where's all the documentation from this investigation?

There are a host of questions that I want, and I will be asking, quite honestly, now that my eyes have been opened up. All right, so Senator Ron Johnson suggests that more congressional hearings into 9 11 need to happen. He's spreading this theory that may be conspiratorial. Somebody who knows the difference between fact and fiction and conspiracy is our next guest, Nathan Radke, the co-host of the conspiracy theory podcast, the uncover up. Welcome back to the show, Nathan. Well, thanks

for having me on. Okay. I would like to take the, an approach on this story that is, you know, with a, with a smile on my face, because if I don't, if I take this really seriously, then I'm going to go down a path where I'm going to say something like, Senator Ron Johnson in peddling this stuff is, is, is besmirching the memories of the people who died that day. But I don't wanna go there. So let's have a little bit of fun with this. What is going on? Well, I mean, what's going on ultimately

is that politicians are often tempted to tap into this sort of conspiratorial energy. And it seems to motivate their base, it gets them a lot of press. And they often think that they can control it and use it for their own purposes. But that's never what ends up happening. That paranoid conspiratorial energy, it only consumes and destroys. And it's a very cynical move sometimes by politicians, unless of course, it's entirely

possible that he genuinely believes this. Well, let's assume that he does. Let's assume he's a good faith actor. But before we get there, like, I mean, I remember when the 9-11 Commission put forth their report, it was like, I don't know, thousands of pages in that big blue book. What's, is, I thought there was a, there is a consensus, right, that we believe, we believe that the story that is public is the story most people believe, right? Well, these days, that's true. I mean, back in 2005, the Iraq invasion was a few years old, the insurgency was getting stronger, it was becoming clear that the war wasn't going to be

the quick and easy operation that had been promised. And so back then, a lot of people were questioning the motivation and justification for that invasion. The documentary Loose Change had been released online at a time when many people had the ability to burn DVDs and pass them on to friends. And while that doc was riddled with factual inaccuracies and unfounded speculation, it was extremely widely distributed, influential, and it caused a lot of people to ask questions about the official story of September 11th. And it's understandable that people had questions about something that terrible and destructive. There were a lot of odd elements to that official story, like links between the Bush and Bin Laden families, or the way that building seven collapsed, even though it hadn't been hit

by a plane. And people had questions about why fighters hadn't been able to intercept the hijacked airliners. There were things in the videos that looked suspicious, like puffs of smoke emerging from tower windows that collapsed, or what appeared to be molten metal. And there had even been examples of the American government lying in the past about attacks, things like the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. Even a proposed plan from the Department of Defense in the early 60s titled Northwoods to launch false flag style attacks on American interests to justify an invasion of Cuba. So it's good to have questions. It helps keep the government more transparent

and prevents them from getting away from nonsense. But if you have questions, you have to be willing to listen to the answers. And there are answers to these questions that people have about 9-11 that don't require there to be an inside job or explosive placed in the towers or anything like that. And look, I have to assume that even on the conspiracy side, there isn't a consensus on what actually happened, what they believe happened. There must be myriad conspiracies, each one of them mutually exclusive from the other. Well, and the problem is, as time has passed, and I can't believe it's been almost 25 years,

this has allowed more and more ridiculous hypotheses to creep in. What's the most ridiculous one you've heard? Oh, that the airplanes were holograms and didn't exist at all. Are you kidding? No, I'm serious. And I've spoken to people who said, I mean, maybe this is even more ridiculous, that the World Trade Center towers never existed to begin with. This is the problem when something starts receding into the past. It makes it possible for people to come up with more and more ridiculous explanations. My goodness. And do you think that if, listen, if we have congressional hearings, what are they going to

focus on? Because you could focus on any number of things here. You could focus on, like Ron Johnson talked about, the collapse of building seven. Or you could go to the hijackers themselves, because I heard one guy a few days ago say that Israel was involved in 9-11. I mean, this is, there are so many strings, once you start pulling at the strings, you never stop. I mean, and that's why it's so important to have a historical context for so many people. When this awful thing happened, it appeared like it came out of nowhere. It just came out of the blue sky. But I mean, the more people learn, for example, about the history of what happened during the Cold War in Afghanistan, the less they tend to believe in these inside job

hypotheses. And of course nothing that we learn is going to justify the mass murder that happened in 9-11, but it can help us understand it, which is a very different thing than justifying it. Robert Leonard I don't understand these people who go down this rabbit hole and when they do so, like I said, they are denying the pain and suffering of people who died that day and whose families carry that pain with them to this day. Well, and again, it's that pain and and trauma that I think often leads people to conspiracy theories because otherwise things seem so out of control. Whereas a conspiracy theory, if you thought your own government was in charge of it in a really weird way, that's almost a little bit soothing.

It's almost a little bit calming because then rather than this sort of outside force that was able to pull off this terrible thing, it's your own government that was behind it. And we're almost more, we're almost happier when there's somebody who is near to us that is still in charge of things, even when it's as ridiculous as this. And Nathan, is there one thing that conspiracy theorists have in common?

The theories can be different, but is there one thing that links all conspiracy theorists? Well, I think the one thing that links all conspiracy theorists is that we could all be conspiracy theorists. We have the natural tendency to seek out explanations. We have the natural tendencies to find patterns. And so any one of us can be sort of tempted into a conspiracy theory. It's why it's so important that we always have proper historical context and that we teach media literacy and critical thinking. Because I've spoken to so many people at parties or at school or wherever, where they talk about a friend or a family member who got sucked into some

kind of deep dark rabbit hole. And it is a thing that can happen to any of us, particularly when we feel like we're not in control of the situation we're in. A very quickly in a couple of sentences, is there one conspiracy theory that you actually believe? Well, there's there's many. The CIA had a mind control project called MK Ultra. I mean, Oh, I thought that was real. It is true. Yeah, that's a true one. I believe it because it is accurate. And it is history. There have been some conspiracies that have occurred.

And that's, again, why it's so important that we're able to sort the difference between the two, because some of the ridiculous ones like the Americans planning on nuking the moon, so accurate. Nathan, thank you so much for joining us. Enjoy the rest of your week. You too. Thanks for having me on. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. And you know, this election feels very close. It just does. I know that the Tories, their vote is far less efficient than the Liberals, so they have to do far better in terms of raw numbers just to get the same number of seats as the Liberals. I know that the Bloc vote has seemingly collapsed in Quebec.

The NDP vote has seemingly collapsed across the country, which means everyone seems to be coalescing behind the Tories and the liberals. And depending on what day it is and what part of the country and what poll you're looking at, one's up or the other's up. So this is shaping up to be one of the closest head-to-head races in the history of Canadian politics. All the more reason to bring back to the show,

Craig Baird, the host of Canadian History X, to talk about the last closest election in Canadian history. Craig, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me. So let's get in the way back machine and take us all the way back to the election of 1972. Yeah, 1972 was a very unique election. We were coming about four years after 1968

where you had Trudeau mania and the liberals had a majority government. But by 1972, that had kind of started to wane and the economy wasn't doing great. So people were starting to look for some sort of change. And they were looking towards the progressive conservatives and Robert Stanfield, who would lead the party through his second election. And by 1972, you had things like the October crisis that happened in October, 1970 that hurt the liberals in places like Quebec. And then meanwhile, Robert Stanfield, you know, the progressive conservatives

had the campaign of a progressive conservative government will do better. And the liberals had a campaign where it was the land is strong and the campaign message. Let's, let's, let's stick with those slogans for just a second. A progressive conservative government will do better. That's really not shooting for the stars, is it? It really isn't, but it was better than the liberals, the land is strong, because they mostly just had pictures of Canada in their campaigns and on television.

And many consider it to be one of the worst campaigns in Canadian history just because of how inefficient it really was. Listen, I'm going to editorialize for a second. You don't have to, but that's perfectly in keeping with the Liberal Party. If their campaign was nothing but pictures of Canada, well, the Liberal Party sees itself as Canada.

So that's very in keeping with how they see themselves. Anyway, go on, my friend. And then the NDP, they were still led by, or they were led by Tommy Douglas until 1970, and then he was replaced by David Lewis. So going into the election, one big change was that the voting age had been lowered to 18. So you had a lot of new people, but you also didn't have a TV debate. You had the first TV debate in 1968. But it was a very boring affair. Nobody liked it. And it wouldn't return until I believe 1980. So it'd be a while. But this election was incredibly close. The liberals won with 109 seats. And the progressive

conservatives had 107 seats. So it was a very, very close election. The NDP actually did very well. They took a lot of the seats from the liberals when they had 31 seats and that would be their best to that point until the late 1980s under Ed Broadbent. But it was a very close election. Obviously the government only lasted a couple years before it went into another election in 1974. So yeah, well that's what happens. Typically in Canada, minorities don't last that long. I mean, We just came out of a very long, the longest minority in Canadian history. And so, yeah, I think people like minorities because they can pull the plug somewhere between nine and 18 months. was kind of helping the liberals stay in power until they fell in a budget vote in 1974.

And then the liberals actually got a majority in that government in that election. And I know you said that the liberal campaign was viewed as one of the worst of all time, but they had a slumping economy. They had the War Measures Act. They had a whole bunch of, they had baggage, right? So how is it that they still manage

to outperform the Tories? You would think that it feels like it might have been a change election, and yet it really wasn't. Well, the Tories did very well, again, in Western Canada, but they didn't do as well in Eastern Canada. The Liberals were able to win Ontario, a good chunk of Quebec, the Social Credit Party actually won a bit there as well. So it was just, it was very

split between the two parts of the country. And, you know, if a few votes had just gone a different way, Robert Stanfield would have easily won that election. And it was incredibly close. I don't think we've ever had an election that close before. All right, well, we're going to pivot from the performance in the theater of politics to the performance in theater of theater. And I understand that hindsight is 20-20, so we can look back at the performance of Godspell in Toronto in 1972, knowing what we know today. But back then, it was a cast made up of unknowns

who one day all became knowns. Talk to us about that. Yeah, when people would ask me, you know, when would you like to travel back in time to, I have various places I would like to go. But one is to see a Godspell performance in Toronto 1972 because it was just an unbelievable cast of unknowns. People like Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber. It was so stacked with talent that Catherine O'Hara actually auditioned for Godspell and didn't get a part. So it just shows you how much talent there was in this. And Paul Schaeffer was the show's musical director?

He was, yeah. He'd actually come just to play the piano for some of his friends who were auditioning, but they really liked him. So they actually come just to play the piano for some of his friends who were auditioning, but they really liked him. So they actually made him the show's musical director. And then Howard Shore was there and he was playing saxophone. And then he would go on to win three Academy Awards for scoring the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Like, it's just unbelievable the talent that's in this. So he won three Oscars for the Lord of the Rings. Paul Schaeffer, in my mind, the high water mark in his career

was not David Letterman. It's the fact that he wrote the song, It's Raining Men. Exactly. Yeah, this cast and crew, I mean, they went on to earn four orders of Canada, 10 Emmys, five Tonys, three Oscars, three Golden Globes, seven Grammys, and three stars on Canada's Walk of Fame. And at the time, nobody knew who they were.

They were just a bunch of unknowns on stage, and nobody knew what they were seeing in front of them. All right, well let's listen to a little bit above your episode on Godspell. News traveled fast across Toronto that the production was coming. Every actor in the city wanted a role and over 500 auditioned for the 10 roles. During the first week of March, various auditions were held and with each one, the number of potential performers slowly decreased. Until the final callback. Eugene Levy was one of those eagerly waiting news of a role. Originally from Hamilton, he never thought he would get far in the audition process. When he entered, he saw six people go in before

him and each one sang the song Aquarius from the musical Hare. He didn't know the lyrics but listened to the chorus of each singer to learn the words. He walked in, gave his performance in front of the directors and as he hit the high note, they stopped him and said, alright, that's fine, thank you very much. But it turns out the directors weren't looking for polish. What they wanted was raw talent. And Levy had a lot of it. Absolutely incredible. Who was the director of this play? It was actually directed by, it was created by Steven Schwartz. And so it was directed by, I believe, him and some other people who came in to kind of put on

because it was put on various performances in the United States and then Toronto and London. So it kind of went all over the place. Every place had its own cast and crew and all of that. Yeah, but it's still fun. I mean, I can't even understand how they identified the talent that they put on stage so early on and how those stars went on to become bonafide stars around the world. I mean, I would love to pick the brain of that director and say, what did you see in Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Andrew Martin, Dave Thomas, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber. I mean, that's a Ted talk right there.

Absolutely, like it was somebody who, if they were a scout for hockey, they essentially picked a team of hall of famers, you know, on the first try. Like there was so much talent in Toronto at the time. It was a hub for performances and such that there was just so much to choose from that you just chose the best of the best for this. Yeah, that's like getting, you know, seven first round draft picks and every single one that you pick in one year makes it to the Hall of Fame. Oh, absolutely. And that's one reason why when it premiered in 1972, it was only supposed to run for a few weeks. It actually ran till August 1973 for what was then a record 488

performances. Did all of them stick around for the entire thing? Most did. Victor Garber, who people would know from Alias and Titanic and all these other shows, he actually played Jesus and he was so good at it that they actually had him go and play Jesus in the movie that was made. So he left a little bit later and then Eugene Levy actually played Jesus and he had to be shirtless and asked him if he would shave his chest and he said, absolutely not, I'm not doing that. Hey, Craig Baird, how can people find the show? You can find it on all podcast platforms and you can listen on the Chorus Radio Network every

weekend. Just check your local times. Craig Baird, the host of Canadian History X. Always you can listen on the Chorus Radio Network every weekend. Just check your local times. Craig Baird, the host of Canadian History X, always love having you on the show, my friend. Thanks for having me. I'm ready to eat. Want to kick your cooking up a notch? This is the moment you've been waiting for.

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