“Psychological Aspects of 9/11 Truth”

It appears to be edited to be as unwatchable as possible, but 9/11 deniers have slapped together another appeal to authority in the form of a video called “Psychologists help 9/11 truth deniers.” Only two of the eight people in the video are actual psychologists, and each have oddly unrelated licenses. At least one is a New Age quack who runs a scam site (read on).



I worked in a behavioral sciences laboratory as an undergrad and have a few certifications of my own under my belt, so with that pointless appeal to authority, let me offer some of these people some actual data that the literature in their (nominal) field suggests about their statements.

Namely, that they’re all full of bullshit.

To the first interviewee, Marti Hopper: The evidence from the psychological literature demonstrates that trauma makes someone more, not less, susceptible to conspiracy theories. Oh, also that those effects sink in right around the time of the trauma, so a Commission Report that comes out years later is immune to the types of cognitive traps that a conspiracy theory peddled within months of the event isn’t.

To the second interviewee, Frances Shure: The evidence from the behavioral literature shows that flashbulb memory is crap, and that eyewitness testimony is wildly unreliable (in case you happen to base your beliefs on, say, “the sounds of explosions” or the words of, say, BBC journalists).

To Robert Hopper: For someone who points out that “fear and anxiety” are the most common reactions to cognitive dissonance (they probably aren’t, by the way), you sure are doing a lot of defending of a violent, aggressive movement of conspiracy theorists.

To Danielle Duperret: Your trauma therapies are crap. Stop telling people who to deal with tragedies; you’re hurting them. Oh also, don’t sell magic and tell people it’s science.

To Dorothy Lorig: David Ray Griffin lies for a living.

To David Ray Griffin: See above.

To John Freedom: Your own theories about how to change someone’s mind are wrong. “Open-ended questioning” doesn’t cut it, either.

To Robert Griffin: For someone who has accused people who know better than you of engaging in “a lack of humility,” you sure are fond of parroting the beliefs of those you agree with without providing a shred of reasoning.

Ugh, how sad. Please do check out Danielle Duperret’s website; nothing screams “fraud” louder (or with as gaudy a color scheme!). “Energy medicine,” homeopathy, and using magic vibrations to cure trauma? This sounds actively dangerous to people with legitimate problems. At the risk of shocking you: the 9/11 denier movement is employing scientific frauds to sell you something. Gasp.

Sweden’s JFK?

I never even knew this is how the life of one of Sweden’s most respected statesmen ended, but apparently the assassination of Olaf Palme is as plagued by conspiracy theories as the assassination of John F. Kennedy:

In the course of my year traveling around Sweden, I often asked those whom I met what was there view of the assassination, and what I discovered was that the responses told me more about them than it did about the public event. Some thought it was a dissident faction in the Swedish security forces long angered by Palme’s neutralist policies; some believed it was resentment caused by Palme’s alleged engineering of Swedish arms sales to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s; some believed it was the CIA in revenge for Palme’s neutralism during the Cold War; some believed it could have criminals in the pay of business tycoons tired of paying high taxes needed to maintain the Swedish maximalist version of a welfare state; and there were other theories as well. What was common to all of these explanations was the lack of evidence that might connect the dots. What people believed happened flowed from their worldview rather than the facts of the event—a distrust of the state, especially its secret operations, or a strong conviction that special interests hidden from view were behind prominent public events of this character.

This quote comes to us, unfortunately, from blithering doofoid Richard Falk, who seemingly breathlessly transitions straight from this, to a critique of such a mindset, right to 9/11 denial:

In a way, this process of reflection is natural, even inevitable, but it leads to faulty conclusions. We tend to process information against the background of our general worldview and understanding, and we do this all the time as an efficient way of coping with the complexity of the world combined with our lack of time or inclination to reach conclusions by independent investigation. The problem arises when we confuse this means of interpreting our experience with an effort to provide an explanation of a contested public event…

The arguments swirling around the 9/11 attacks are emblematic of these issues. What fuels suspicions of conspiracy is the reluctance to address the sort of awkward gaps and contradictions in the official explanations that David Ray Griffin (and other devoted scholars of high integrity) have been documenting in book after book ever since 2001. What may be more distressing than the apparent cover up is the eerie silence of the mainstream media, unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials. Is this silence a manifestation of fear or cooption, or part of an equally disturbing filter of self-censorship? Whatever it is, the result is the withering away of a participatory citizenry and the erosion of legitimate constitutional government…

Of course, the proposition that David Ray Griffin’s absurd claims have gone unaddressed is by now so obviously false that it seems fair to call it a lie. And it is no longer a source of debate to say that every single JFK conspiracy theory is transparently false.

As skeptics tend to understand, conspiracy theories arise at the drop of the hat and they don’t really leave the public conscience. It’s just another part of forming an identity to make enemies out of people who are dislike you, and even slightly paranoid people have no trouble doing just that. Falk, himself a rabid bigot, probably doesn’t even get the joke he just told.