The Persistence and Mutation of 9/11 Conspiracy Theories: How Falsehoods Moved From the Fringes to the Heart of Political Power

A quarter of a century after the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, the search for alternative explanations has not only endured but has expanded, mutated, and become deeply entangled with contemporary political warfare. Type “9/11 conspiracy theories” into YouTube’s search bar today and a seemingly endless procession of commentators, influencers, and self-styled truth-seekers appears, each offering a version of what “really” happened on September 11, 2001. Videos featuring prominent podcasters and broadcasters such as Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson sit alongside thumbnails emblazoned with questions like “Inside Job?”—one such video has attracted more than 500,000 views by zooming in on footage of the World Trade Center towers burning. Twenty-five years after two hijacked planes struck the Twin Towers, killing nearly 3,000 people, the theories have not faded into obscurity; rather, they have gained pace, adapted to new political realities, and crossed a dangerous threshold. Once associated with odd figures in tin-foil hats swapping improbable claims from basement forums, conspiracy theories have become an uncomfortable and defining feature of mainstream political culture. In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” its international word of the year, marking a moment when objective facts began to matter less in public discourse than emotion and personal belief. Since then, declining trust in traditional media and government institutions has allowed conspiratorial narratives to collide with authentic political movements—from the sprawling QAnon phenomenon to the baseless claim that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen, a falsehood that helped fuel the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump. Most recently, an entirely unsubstantiated wave of claims accusing Israel of involvement in the September 11 attacks has surged across social media, recycling old theories while riding on contemporary anger over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and its perceived influence on American politics. Experts argue that what was once a fringe subculture has now become a strategic tool for far-right politicians seeking to exploit real anxieties and grievances for electoral and ideological ends.

The deep roots of suspicion toward the American state long predate the events of 2001, but 9/11 represented a unique rupture in how such theories were born and spread. American political culture has harbored deep-seated distrust of centralized power since the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963, an event that spawned a sprawling and enduring collection of alternative narratives about who was truly responsible. Yet 9/11 operated on an entirely different scale and register. The attacks unfolded live on television, turning an event of extraordinary fear and uncertainty into a global spectacle witnessed in real time. Hugo Drochon, an associate professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham, noted that the event was “captured instantaneously,” a shock that marked an entire generation. “People saw it on television. The United States was at the centre of the world, and this was the great shock. There was also a spectacle element to it – hijacking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center,” Drochon explained. The immediate aftermath of the attacks deepened this crisis of trust. Less than a month after September 11, the United States invaded Afghanistan, and in March 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq on the now-disproven claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever found. For critics, the lie over WMDs became powerful evidence that the government was willing to deceive its citizens on matters of war and peace. “Lying creates distrust, and there is a correlation between distrust and belief in conspiracy theories,” Drochon said. At the same time, the media environment was shifting dramatically. The September 11 attacks were perhaps the first event of such magnitude to unfold simultaneously across 24-hour rolling television coverage and within an emerging internet culture. David Robertson, a lecturer and expert on conspiracy theories, observed that early 9/11 theories emerged alongside cable news and rolling coverage, creating new opportunities for people to pick out apparent loopholes in the official account. YouTube, launched just four years after the attacks, provided an unprecedented platform for these theories to flourish. Films such as Loose Change—which alleged that elements within the US government orchestrated or deliberately allowed the attacks to happen—reached enormous online audiences, while false claims that the Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolition developed their own sprawling internet communities that persist to this day.

The transformation of conspiracy theories from fringe hobby to political weapon accelerated dramatically in 2016, a year that reshaped Western politics in profound ways. “Conspiracy theories have always been there,” Drochon noted. “What changed was the moment when politicians started to actively use conspiracy theories as a political weapon.” That moment arrived with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who had already built significant national political capital by promoting the false “birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama, the first Black US president, was not born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to hold office. After entering the White House, Trump repeatedly embraced and amplified conspiratorial narratives, promoting allegations of a sinister “deep state” working against him and amplifying accounts linked to QAnon, the far-right movement that emerged in 2017 and asserted that a cabal of satanic pedophiles was waging a secret war against the president. According to Drochon, Trump’s embrace of conspiracy theories galvanized a new voter base of people who were traditionally less politically engaged. “Trump activated those kinds of voters. You had certain people coming out to vote who had not voted previously. You saw something similar in the case of Brexit,” he said, referring to the 2016 UK referendum that resulted in a narrow majority voting to leave the European Union. The social media ecosystem that had emerged by that time transformed both the speed and the scale at which false claims could circulate. “Social media allows conspiracy theories to thrive and makes them more prominent,” Drochon said. “Linked to that, you have politicians who have seized upon them. That creates a vicious circle: the theories gain greater visibility because politicians repeat them, and people then take them more seriously because they appear to explain political developments such as Trump.” The consequences of this cycle were made terrifyingly concrete on January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol as Congress met to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. QAnon imagery and slogans were visible among the throng, demonstrating that online falsehoods amplified by political leaders could fuel real-world action. “People can use them for nefarious purposes. They are a threat when the most powerful political actors adopt them,” Drochon warned.

Trump’s personal relationship with 9/11 conspiracy theories—and his tendency to insert himself into the story of the attacks—has been a recurring feature of his public life. Speaking at a commemoration event this week, the Republican president claimed that firefighters had physically carried him away from Ground Zero, where he said he had arrived with workers to assist in rescue efforts, over fears that a nearby building could collapse. “Two firemen, big strong guys – and I’m not the smallest guy in the world – they grabbed me under the arm, said: ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up,” Trump recounted. It was hardly the first time such claims have been made without corroboration. In November 2015, ahead of his first presidential campaign, Trump claimed he had watched “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City cheering as the World Trade Center came down, an allegation for which no evidence has ever emerged. In September 2019, Trump shared a video falsely claiming that Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar was dancing on the anniversary of 9/11, writing, “The new face of the Democrat Party!”—the footage was actually from a Congressional Black Caucus event held on a completely different day. Beyond Trump himself, several people in his immediate political orbit have promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories. Former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene at one time questioned whether a third plane had ever struck the Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia, where nearly 200 people died alongside those killed in New York City; she later acknowledged she was wrong. Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who has become an influential Trump ally, has shared a video describing 9/11 as an “inside job.” Alex Jones, the founder of the right-wing Infowars platform, has long promoted claims that the World Trade Center was brought down through controlled demolition; Jones was ordered to pay millions of dollars in compensation to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, after falsely claiming the massacre was a hoax staged by gun control advocates. Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential broadcasters on the American right, has also repeatedly questioned the official explanation for the collapse of the Twin Towers, using his platform to lend credibility to long-debunked engineering claims. The result is a media and political environment in which pure fabrication is no longer an obstacle to influence, but rather a currency of loyalty.

The most recent evolution of 9/11 conspiracy theories involves a dangerous fusion with contemporary geopolitics, centered on entirely unsubstantiated claims implicating Israel in the attacks. In March, Tucker Carlson shifted his focus toward this strand, asserting that declassified 9/11 files would reveal Israeli foreknowledge. “We’ll declassify the 9/11 files. And then all those people on the internet were like, ‘Oh, the dancing Israelis. They did it. Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11.’ There were text messages sent to Israel, warning of 9/11. All true, by the way,” Carlson said. His argument suggests that Israel may have deliberately withheld information about the planned attacks in order to draw the United States into conflicts in the Middle East, thereby serving Israeli interests. These claims are entirely unsupported by evidence, yet they have been eagerly amplified by influential figures on the American right. The shift is deeply embedded in the changing politics of the region. As support for Israel has fallen sharply among Americans during the genocidal war on Gaza and the broader US-Israel confrontation with Iran, political analysts have pointed to Carlson as a prime example of how right-wing figures have repositioned themselves. After building much of his career at Fox News defending Israel, Carlson has dramatically changed direction as anger over American support for Israel has grown. With conspiracy theories already deeply embedded within large parts of the MAGA movement, Carlson has increasingly channeled genuine grievances over Gaza into unsupported claims implicating Israel in 9/11—claims that are likely to find a receptive audience among the conspiratorial elements of Trump’s base. This new wave recycles older anti-Semitic tropes that have haunted conspiracy culture for centuries, but it does so with a modern veneer of geopolitical critique. The convergence of traditional 9/11 trutherism, anti-war sentiment, and anger over the situation in Gaza has created a potent and potentially dangerous mixture. It demonstrates how conspiracy theories are not static or harmless curiosities, but living narratives that mutate according to the anxieties and political needs of the moment.

Twenty-five years after the attacks, the official account of September 11—that Al Qaeda operatives hijacked four planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania—remains the established historical record. Yet the persistence and evolution of conspiracy theories surrounding that day offer a troubling insight into the broader crisis of trust and truth in modern democratic societies. What began as marginal speculation about controlled demolitions and government complicity has become a mainstream political phenomenon, embraced by presidents, prime ministers, and presidential candidates. The rise of social media has democratized information in ways that are often beneficial, but it has also enabled falsehoods to spread faster and wider than ever before, unmoored from any accountability. The erosion of trust in traditional media, government institutions, and expertise has created a vacuum that conspiracy theories have rushed to fill. When politicians use these theories as tools to mobilize supporters, they are not merely engaging in political strategy; they are actively undermining the foundations of democratic accountability and shared reality. The events of January 6 demonstrated the potential for violence when conspiratorial falsehoods collide with political mobilization. The growing popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories that blame Israel, even as they recycle ancient hatreds, shows that no tragedy is too sacred to be weaponized in the service of contemporary political battles. Experts like Drochon warn that the threat is no longer confined to the margins of society. “Conspiracy theories have always represented a potential threat, but at the moment that threat is particularly visible because the people promoting them are no longer simply on the fringes. Some conspiracy theorists are among the most powerful people in the world,” he said. As the world marks a somber anniversary, the challenge is not merely to defend the historical record of what happened on September 11, 2001, but to confront the deeper political and cultural conditions that have allowed so many people to embrace alternative realities. Without a restoration of trust in institutions, media, and the possibility of objective truth, the conspiracy theories that emerged from the ashes of the Twin Towers will continue to spread, adapt, and shape the future of politics in ways that are both unpredictable and deeply unsettling.