The Daily - ‘We’re Going to Take Over the World’

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

On the internet, there are bizarre subcultures filled with conspiracy theorists — those who believe the coronavirus is a hoax or that the 2020 election was stolen, or even that Hillary Clinton is a shape-shifting lizard. It’s a way of thinking that can be traced back to the first real internet blockbuster, a 9/11 conspiracy documentary called “Loose Change.” Today, we explore the film’s impact.Guest: Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Twenty years after 9/11, “Loose Change,” a landmark film for conspiracy theorists, still casts a shadow over our information landscape.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Two decades later, there are many legacies of September 11th. Thousands of lives lost. Two forever wars. The birth of a surveillance state, but also a new era of conspiratorial thinking. Today, my colleague Kevin Roos on the film that ushered in that era. It's Friday, September 10th.

For years now, I've been spending a lot of time inside these bizarre internet subcultures. These places filled with extremists and conspiracy theorists who have all kinds of ideas about how COVID-19 is a hoax or how the 2020 election was stolen or why Hillary Clinton is a shape-shifting lizard person. And the more time I've spent in these places, the more I've realized that what unites these groups is their way of finding and processing information. This belief that the way to figure out what's true isn't to listen to the experts or to the mainstream media, but to go figure it out for yourself on the internet, to do your own research, as they say. And I've been thinking about where that attitude, which is so pervasive now, actually originated. And I think a lot of it can be

traced back to this one particular 9-11 documentary, the first real internet blockbuster. But before I tell you about this movie, let's actually go back to the morning of September 11, 2001. Where were you? What did you see? What did you think at the time? I want to tell you about one of its biggest fans. I was actually out in Oneonta, New York, where I'd gone to college. I'd recently dropped out, but I was living with a couple of my fraternity brothers who were still in college. A guy named Jason Burmiss. And I was working at a pizza place late night. I didn't get to home till like four in the morning

times. So all of a sudden, my buddy comes into my room. He goes, the Twin Towers are gone. I'm like, what are you talking about, man? After a while, Jason started to have doubts about what exactly happened on 9-11 and specifically who the U.S. government said was responsible. Osama bin Laden and AlQaeda. Doubts that really started to form when he went to a basketball game at his old high school and slipped off to use the bathroom. And in the urinal is Osama bin Laden's face and it says, Operation Enduring Freedom.

And I'm thinking to myself, I'm pissing on Osama bin Laden's face and so is every 12 to 18 year old. Like, there was just something in my brain that said, you know what? I need to make sure that this guy did this. I really have no idea who he is. I have no background in any of these geopolitics or the past. This is crazy that kids are peeing on this guy's face.

Just something in my brain was like, that's wrong. While Jason was thinking about all this on's face. Just something in my brain was like, that's wrong. While Jason was thinking about all this on his own, all the things that happened in the wake of 9-11 touched me to the core and I wanted to protest them. A whole community of activists were also thinking about this, including a woman in Palo Alto, California named Carol Bruye. And, you know, one reason I became an activist is I was happily married. I had the kids. I had the luxury of being able to do it. And I felt that moral obligation. Carol was really concerned about the government's response to 9-11, the war in Afghanistan, and the dramatic increase in domestic surveillance.

I didn't want us to lose our civil rights. I didn't want to see the United States go to war. And then because I'm an activist, I get all these emails from all sorts of people questioning, you know, the official story and looking at some of the anomalies and strange things about September 11th. She was hearing from people who worried that the government was using 9-11 as an excuse to take control from Americans, and that maybe some officials had been waiting for something like 9-11 to give them that excuse. And as these activist friends of hers dug into the details, they started asking questions like, why didn't the military intercept the hijacked planes?

Why did it take President Bush so long to authorize a response? All these questions had perfectly reasonable answers. But when Carol heard the questions, she started getting more and more suspicious. So I organized like the first march demanding an investigation of 9-11 in January 2002. So we met with the staff of Feinstein and Boxer and raised these questions. Eventually, Carol put together

a kind of 9-11 info booth. Every week, she'd set up a table in downtown Palo Alto and encourage people to come to her with questions. And I had a table. I gave away cookies just to get them thinking about the big questions that I felt needed to be raised. In small-town Oneonta, Jason didn't have someone like Carol,

but he did have the internet. All's I wanted was a timeline of the day. So really, the first thing I found, and you can still, I think, find it up there. It was like 40 pages long and it was www.911timeline.net. All right. It was 12 AM to 12 AM and all these different anomalies and weird things and stories that had links. And I read this thing and I'm just like, Jesus Christ. He soon found that there was this small but very active network of websites and blogs and message boards devoted to 9-11 skepticism. They had all these super detailed documents and

complicated explanations for things. And Jason got obsessed. Were you kind of alone in this in your personal life? Did you have friends who were also questioning the dominant narrative about 9-11? Or was it kind of just like your thing? I mean, you know, like some friends were very upset. But other people who lived with me and like whatever, they would look at the evidence. But I'll tell you what, you know, my stepfather was like one day trying to crack a joke at me that, you know, I, I just don't want to see you, uh, end up being in the basement with a bunch of jars of

ears. And I'm like, what, what are you talking about, man? At that time, you know, there was just no challenging this narrative. You know what I mean? You're there's just all that pressure. There's just all that pressure. So there was this small but very dedicated group of 9-11 skeptics. Truthers, they were called. But to figure out how this small movement really started to grow, it helps to remember what happened next. Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror.

In 2002, the Bush administration and the Pentagon began turning their sights on Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq. And he cannot be trusted. Claiming that he had connections to al-Qaeda and bin Laden and that he was developing weapons of mass destruction. There's a story in the New York Times this morning. The media was lending these claims credibility. He has been seeking to acquire the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a

centrifuge, and the centrifuge is required to build a bomb. And in March of 2003, America invaded Iraq. But as we know... The main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had... These claims were wrong. The government had misled the public, and most of the mainstream media went along with it. So if you were a conspiracy theorist,

you didn't really have to make up anything. The government did it for you. And more people outside of the conspiracy theory world began wondering, well, if the experts were so wrong about Iraq, what else can't they be trusted with? So every week I was out there on the streets, and in the early days, people would be surprised by my questions or questioning the official narrative of 9-11. And then I would later see them at the anti-war rallies, and then they would be completely on board, giving me the thumbs up and much more knowledgeable. And people would just, you know,

flock to our tables for materials. They were just so hungry for the information. Word was getting around about Carol's info booth, and documentary filmmakers, who were also skeptical about 9-11, started sending her their work. I would get so many unsolicited DVDs in the mail. I mean, some of them, I still remember, I have one right here. It's called Severe Visibility. And so in 2004, with her growing collection of 9-11 movies, Carol helped a fellow activist start the 9-11 Truth Film Festival in the Bay Area. Welcome to Muhammad Adda and the Venice Flying Circus. I'm standing in front of the Venice, Florida airport. There is a massive conspiracy going on to cover up what happened on these runways before September 11th.

The festival featured movies that were now asking questions like, was 9-11 an inside job? We're being lied to about the nature of the conspiracy that took down the World Trade Center. I know Aftermath, Unanswered Questions from 9-11 was one of the earliest films. Unanswered Question number one. To what extent should airlines have been prepared for September 11th? Some of them just had a lecture. I'd like to start off by asking a question, like a show of hands. Most of the documentaries Carol and her friends could choose from for the festival

were kind of a mess. Hello, I'm Alex Jones. In this film, we're first going to look at some historical examples of tyrants and governments, oligarchies alike, using crises, in many cases, terrorist events that they themselves... I would say it's a variable quality.

Some of the production values were... Sometimes it was higher quality, and sometimes it was lower quality. And all the way across the country, Jason had noticed the same thing. God bless Alex Jones or whatever, but it was still some guy at an AXS TV a blue curtain with like, you know, some graphics rolled over. You know, it wasn't After Effects. You know, it wasn't done with Premiere. It didn't, you know,

it didn't flow with a crazy backbeat. But then Jason stumbled onto a documentary called Loose Change. Set the scene for me. The first time you saw Loose Change, do you remember like where you were? Do you remember what site you saw it on or if someone emailed it to you or like? I know that. No, I downloaded the AVI. So I pirated it for sure.

It probably Morpheus at the time. It was either Morpheus or Kazaa, depending on- That must have taken a long time. It was like an hour long documentary. I don't think my computer at the time could have handled an hour-long video. Well, I... Dude, it's 700 megabytes.

Sorry for that momentary time warp back to the internet of 2005. But what's important is that when Jason finally pressed play on his bootleg copy of Loose Change, he saw a fresh take on a 9-11 documentary. I got an eyewitness who said there was an explosion on floor 78. The movie was made by two young guys,

an amateur filmmaker named Dylan Avery and his childhood best friend, Corey Rowe. Corey was a soldier fighting in Iraq, and he helped Dylan make loose change whenever he had a spare moment overseas. The issue of the World Trade Center's collapse is at the crux of the story of September 11th. By Hollywood standards, it wasn't super impressive. It didn't have like special effects or CGI or really much of a plot. The highest temperature was in the east corner of the South Tower, where a temperature of 1,377 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded.

The molten steel in the basement was more than double that temperature. Parts of it felt like a PowerPoint presentation, just all these screenshots of very detailed documents. He received word of the possibility of a secondary device. That is another bomb going off. But it also had newsreel footage and interviews with eyewitnesses and a soundtrack. The tripod shakes exactly nine seconds before the tower begins collapsing. And so compared to the other 9-11 documentaries, I was blown away. Blue's Change was actually pretty watchable. It wasn't so much that it was mind-blowing because of the facts it was because it had

production value so i come from a generation of film being the dominant language period you know that's that kind of like mtv cut boom boom boom and it had that and i just knew right then that this this was going to be a tool that the masses would reach. Loose change was very fringe, very underground. The filmmakers had only printed 1,000 DVDs at first, which was the minimum order you could place. But Jason loved it. He became a loose change evangelist. And, you know, a lot of people think this is corny.

I don't even know if I should tell you this, but hey, it's what actually happened. Not a religious guy, but I prayed to whatever God you could believe in. And I just closed my eyes and I put my hands together and I said, look, you know, I don't know how this is going to work, but if you get me involved with this, I will fight my ass off. And I promise you I'll do what I can. He started burning copies of the movie onto CDs and handing them out around town. Was anyone actually convinced by it that you hadn't been able to convince before? Yeah, absolutely. And that was another thing where friends, I would say fraternity brothers,

I would say friends back home, a lot more people. And then a little while later, I think it might've been two months later, I was still working nights at the pizzeria. And I told you how I was burning discs and handed them out, right? I hand it to my delivery guy and he goes, oh, I know these guys. I go, what do you mean you know these guys? He goes, well, Corey just came back into town and Dylan is going to be here next week. And I go, well, how do you know them? He's like, well, they're from here. I'm like, really? He's like, yeah, I can get Corey over here if you want. I'm like, please do.

Corey had just returned back to his hometown from his tour of duty. And Corey comes in and he starts talking to me. We have like a two-hour conversation. The next thing I know, he's going home to get me a copy of the script for the second edition that he wants me to go through and edit. All of a sudden, Jason is no longer just a fan of Loose Change. He's being brought in to work on a new, expanded second version of the movie, one that would be bigger and better and packed with even more questionable information than the first. One that would be bigger and better and packed with even more questionable information than the first.

And this might seem strange to say, but I really think the world we live in now, this world where everyone is skeptical of everything and is constantly just coming up with their own theories, it all comes back to this moment. The thing that I had actually prayed for, probably the only thing I prayed for in my adult life, okay, actually happened, I told them as we were making this, we're going to take over the world. We'll be right back. Jason was now finding himself really busy. In addition to his shifts at the pizza place, he had also started a job at a graphic design company. Right?

So I had to be there at 8 in the morning every day, and there was two nights a week that I was also working till 3 in the morning at the pizza shop. While living with a bunch of loud frat guys. And so there was actually a drum set in my living room. It was a nightmare. And these guys used to get way, I mean, I wanted to kill these guys all the time.

And on top of that, he was helping Dylan and Corey make a new edition of Loose Change. You know, Dylan's usually at my house at like six o'clock and he's sitting in a beanbag chair and he's usually going through this. And, you know, I'm usually just doing my thing on, you know, looking stuff up and maybe we should add this and blah, blah, blah. Jason, who had spent an ungodly amount of time researching and memorizing all these arcane 9-11 theories, became the team's lead researcher. Really, my job

was to go through all these other archives and clip out the 15 seconds of a three-hour clip and say, this is probably what we should use. Where can we fit it, you know? Whatever Jason's research turned up, he would feed to Dylan, who was putting everything together on a compact Presario. Obviously, you know, sitting down and watching the movie 150 times, the three of us,

we would say, yo, you should cut that there. But usually, I mean, especially his editing is crisp, you know, sitting down watching the movie 150 times, the three of us, we would say, yo, you should cut that there. But usually, I mean, especially his editing is crisp. You know, he's a hell of an editor. He has good timing and beats, you know, obviously. And Jason didn't have final say on what made it into the film. There were certain things I didn't want in the film. And well, for instance, the Cleveland stuff. What Jason means by the Cleveland stuff is this claim that Flight 93, the one that crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that maybe it didn't actually crash, but that it landed safely in Cleveland. Which, to be clear, isn't true and is also pretty offensive.

Like, it's basically suggesting that the 44 people who died on Flight 93, maybe they actually didn't. I thought it was going to backfire. I wasn't quite sold on it. I'm still not. I never have been. And, you know, what can you do? Dylan felt strongly about it at the time. Dylan declined to talk to me. So I can't be totally sure he was the one pushing for the Cleveland stuff. For me, I know that I spend a lot of time worrying about making mistakes. And I guess I'm just wondering how it felt for you to work on something that you had doubts about, that there were certain facts that you knew weren't bulletproof. How did that feel to work on?

Like, how did that feel to work on? I would just say that we were filled with such a bombardment of lies from the mainstream and possibly a never-ending war. And that was my main concern. The second edition of Lose Change, like the first, is full of errors. Just stuff that was wrong or sloppy or offensive. But Jason and Corey and Dylan pressed the DVDs and they posted them for sale on their website. They were excited to tell the world that jet fuel can't mount steel beams

and that what hit the Pentagon could have been a missile. March 13th, 1962. Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff... All of it packaged together with even tighter pacing and cooler music and more information than the first edition. The real plane would be converted into a drone. The two planes would rendezvous south of Florida. The passenger-laden plane would land at Eglin Air Force Base to evacuate its passengers...

Out in California, Carol's friend set up a screening. And so some of us supported her, and we helped her, and there was a showing. And that film screening made USA Today and helped get more attention. Jason says they began selling DVDs in bulk. The first moment that I knew that we were on the right track and things were really moving was we got our first celebrity buy and it was Joe Rogan bought 10 copies. Okay. And I'm a big MMA fan. I was a big MMA fan back then. And I remember Rogan ordering and packing that up and being like, here we go. A few months after releasing the second edition on DVD,

they got an even luckier break. Fans started uploading it to a new streaming service called Google Video, which doesn't exist anymore, but was basically YouTube. The key difference, though, was that unlike YouTube at the time, you could post clips longer than 10 minutes. People were uploading our video, and then they were also translating into multiple languages, and it was taking off there. Loose Change was now readily available to anyone for free. I mean, I was in college at the time, and I was busy playing video games and generally making bad life choices.

But I remember people I knew emailing me this link saying, you've got to watch this video. Loose Change wasn't specifically made for the internet, but it ended up hitting this internet sweet spot. It kind of had this raw, unfiltered quality to it. And its granular level of detail made it seem way more authentic than the slick, overproduced mainstream media. Loose Change got a million views on Google Video. Then two million, then three, then four,

then five million, then 10. Millions more were watching it on BitTorrent and other sites. It went viral at a time when the concept of a video going viral didn't really exist yet. And if you look at that era, we were by far

the most watched Google Video of all time, period. There's not even one that's close. Dylan and Corey and Jason had found out just how big a market there was for anything that challenged the conventional story of 9-11. What had seemed like this far-fetched fringe thing, it turns out it was actually more popular than anyone thought. By 2006, an Angus Reid poll found that more Americans now believed the Bush administration was lying about 9-11 than thought it was telling the truth. Which doesn't mean all these people thought 9-11 was an inside job, but they didn't trust the official narrative.

And these conspiracy theories were filling that gap. 2006, that's when we had the big 9-11 Truth Conference in Chicago. And we had a huge conference. We had like 500 people there. We did a march through downtown Chicago with Alex Jones. It was a big deal. The 9-11 truther movement seemed to be at an all-time high. We would network with groups in Australia and Europe

and all sorts of people were doing actions just everywhere. The movement was just growing by leaps and bounds. And loose change was being talked about everywhere. Who do you think people are who accept your version of events or are fascinated with your version of events

rather than the mainstream version of events? NPR, Vanity Fair, CNN, the BBC. That is what is so unbelievable about our film is that it doesn't just cater to the conspiracy theory crowd. We have conservatives, we have Republicans. I mean, it has this viral effect on people. And I think that its popularity is a testament that there is a ring of truth to it. You know, it was the most effective thing ever. Virgin Airlines carried it on their flights. It aired on the History Channel in several different countries as loose change. You know, it was through the empowerment of the internet that was its ultimate success, my friend.

And I'll tell you what, people that had been nasty to me before and refused to look at it, a lot of them did look at it. A lot of them apologized to me. It's like even my stepfather, there was no joke cracking about ears and stuff like that. It was long gone. You know, he got it. What were your hopes? Like, what did you hope it would accomplish? Change the world, man.

I wanted a real investigation of 9-11. I wanted criminals accountable. Like, I'm not playing around. That's what I wanted. I wanted justice. But I was naive, to be honest with you. It turns out that this was the high watermark for the truth movement. This weird moment when loose change was the biggest viral video on the internet,

and when people could say that 9-11 was an inside job and still kind of be taken seriously. I think that probably the wind started getting out of the sails of the 9-11 truth movement when Bush and Cheney left office. And when Obama came to power, there was this ridiculous sigh of relief like, oh, the Democrats are in power. Now we're safe. Dylan and Corey and Jason continued to make more editions of Loose Change. There are now at least five, including Jason's favorite, The Final Cut. But the truther movement itself was losing steam. Conspiracy theorists were moving on to other things. President Obama's birth certificate, then Sandy Hook and QAnon and the rest of the theories

we now know so well. And many of these other theories spread through the success of their own grainy, raw online videos. What you're about to see are some new findings regarding Pizzagate, which are disturbing, to say the least. It look and sound a lot like descendants of loose change. Most of my presentation will deal with the first explosion site near the finish line. They controlled 100% of coronavirus. I don't think there's anybody out there who can argue with a straight face that this is a real human being. When Dylan declined to talk to me about Loose Change,

he said he was sick of being blamed for, quote, everything wrong with the internet. But Jason has a different take. Do you think Loose Change's success made people feel more willing and able to kind of question authority and official narratives beyond just 9-11? That's exactly what it did. That sentence is correct. Our film absolutely had people questioning narratives, as they should, outside of 9-11, as 9-11 is one small part of many larger

lies. I would give you that a hundred times over, Kevin. I hope that's our legacy, quite frankly. I mean, to be quite honest, I don't trust the establishment. I don't think we've been given any reason to trust the establishment. I don't like to be gaslit. So if something I was involved with got people to question more things, I think that's healthy. I don't think Jason is necessarily wrong, but I think there's more to it. Loose change arrived at this very weird moment in American history. Trust in institutions like the government and the media was falling, in some cases for good reason. And people's attitude toward the internet and technology was changing too. The old conventional wisdom was that you shouldn't believe anything you saw online. But loose change asked, what if you could only believe what you

saw online? And the incredible viral success of loose change proved that there is a huge demand for this kind of alternative information. And if you can package that material in the right way, even if it's completely wrong, you can get really far. Hi, my name's Jason. And I used to be just a good old average American kid living in upstate New York. There's me. Jason now has a YouTube show, which I'm actually going to go on pretty soon. That was one of the conditions of him agreeing to be interviewed.

And he actually talked to me from the studio where he broadcasts his take on current events. So, yeah, man, I mean, that's what I'm here to cover, you know, and people that are resisting the system. And I think it's a system of oppression. And, you know, obviously on a daily basis, I tell people why. And, you know, I've said it from the very beginning, I've never been about left or right. It's always about right and wrong. I don't play team baseball. I don't think anybody should. And we never looked at it that way. You know, me and Dylan today don't agree on a lot politically, you know, and we still talk, you know, we, we saw each other on January 6th, you know, I, you know, I saw,

yeah. At the Capitol? Absolutely. Not at the actual Capitol, but we were over at the Ellipse, right? Well, everything was going on. What were you doing there? I went to cover it. I thought it was a big news story. I wanted to, you know, see how many people were going to come out. I obviously did not go inside.

I was not part of a protest. I didn't have a, you know, I didn't have a MAGA hat. Did you think that the election results weren't accurate? Or did you have questions about the official narrative about the election? I'll straight up tell you I do believe that they stole the election, for sure. Carol has also moved on to other topics. I'm okay. I think I'm just slightly sleep-deprived because it's been pretty intense here in California, to put it mildly, just because there's all these mandates being passed and all these protests and

a lot of organizing going on. Because honestly, to me, the COVID-19 event is more like 9-11 on steroids. It's 9-11 rashes up a few levels. And 9-11 really laid the foundation for this. You realize there's a very sinister continuity to the events of COVID-19 and the events of 9-11. Yesterday was the 17th anniversary of the 9-11 Truth Film Festival, and Carol was really excited to screen one of Dylan Avery's newest documentaries. We have to. We have to show Seven. We've been wanting to show that for so long.

So we have to show that. A film about what really happened to Building 7 of the World Trade Center. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to nerdy. My message to unvaccinated Americans is this. What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see? We've made vaccinations free, safe and convenient. On Thursday, President Biden announced a sweeping series of mandates requiring that tens of millions of Americans be vaccinated against COVID-19.

that tens of millions of Americans be vaccinated against COVID-19. The mandates represent a major escalation in the president's attempts to pressure those who refuse to take the vaccine. Biden ordered that all federal workers be vaccinated without the option of being regularly tested instead, and that all employees of companies with over 100 workers either be vaccinated or face regular testing. The orders are expected to face strong resistance, especially from Republican lawmakers. But in a speech, Biden expressed growing frustration with those officials and with those who won't get vaccinated.

We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. Today's episode was produced by Daniel Guimet, Rachel Quester, Eric Krupke, Claire Tennesketter, and Rob Zipko. It was edited by Michael Benoit, Thank you. by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.