- And 2 and 2, 1.
This is as close as we can get
to the base of the World Trade Center.
You can see the firemen assembled here,
the police officers, FBI agents,
and you can see the two towers --
a huge explosion now reigning debris on all of us.
We better get out of the way!
- Get my back, get my back, get my back, get my back.
Yeah.
- Shit! - Duncan, Duncan!
- Anthony? - You okay?
- Yeah. - Will you let me in, please?
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God!
- Watch out, watch out.
- Come on. - Oh, my God!
- We're not saying it's true.
- Every time I see it, I still get upset.
I still get upset. - Oh, my God!
There it goes!
- Get out of here! - Now, I could drive --
making up some story that makes me feel better.
But I'm not gonna make up a story that makes me feel better.
I'm gonna feel bad about it, 'cause it was bad.
I was a trial lawyer for 28 years.
You cannot give a theory of any kind
unless you can back it up with substantial evidence.
What motivated me to look into 9/11 is I had a student,
and he came up to me real excited, and he said,
"I saw this amazing film,
and it tells the truth of what happened on 9/11."
I said, "What was the name of it?"
He goes, "'Loose Change.
' You have to see it." - You sort of wonder
when something like that happens,
well, who stands to benefit.
You know, who has the opportunity and the motive?
- It is theory, theory, theory, theory, boom, boom, boom, boom!
You don't even have time to think.
- Galileo's law of falling bodies
calculates the time in which an object
will travel a certain distance in complete freefall.
- Wait a minute. What -- What was that?
It's almost like Muhammad Ali.
He would win by constant jabbing -- jab, jab, jab, jab --
until the person was down.
I then researched their claims and found out, of course,
almost everything they said could be debunked very easily.
But I wanted to find out why it was convincing
and why people still believe in these theories.
I eventually worked with my friend
and cohort Raju Parakkal.
- I was not even in the United States.
I actually was in my hometown in India,
and we were watching it happening
actually live on CNN International.
- You see the plane coming in
from what looks like the east side.
- There were many thoughts running through my mind.
One was, "This isn't true, because this is happening
in the world's strongest, most militarized country."
- The findings that we came up with is the effect of fear
and how fear creates a different narrative.
- Get down! - What's happening?
- 'Cause they're running from the next -- -Down, down!
My man, down!
- There are two conspiracy theories involving 9/11 attacks.
The first one is LIHOP,
meaning President Bush let it happen on purpose.
The other one is MIHOP, made it happen on purpose.
- But, you know, I think the only person
we have to blame for it is Bush,
'cause this is all what he wanted.
- Why blame Bush?
I mean, bin Laden versus Bush -- it doesn't make any sense.
'Cause in conspiracy theories,
it's the brown-skinned person who's responsible.
It's the Jewish person who's responsible.
Conspiracy theories always target the other.
And in 9/11, which shocked me,
the obvious evil outsider is Osama bin Laden.
There was a theory that was put on by Leon Festinger.
It deals with cognitive dissonance.
- Cognitive dissonance theory
leads to an exactly opposite prediction.
- What it believes is that there is a certain amount of stress
that human beings can actually handle comfortably.
And if you hold beliefs strongly
and if confronted with an opposite belief,
you suffer debilitating stress,
to the point that you cannot even function for some people.
- For him, there is dissonance.
Time after time, we have seen what follows.
- You can live with the stress, or you reform the narrative.
- This is seen across most conspiracy theories --
the inability to accept the fact that something random happened.
- I would have done a legitimate investigation to find out
what exactly happened on 9/11.
How did they know who did this so quickly,
like they did Lee Harvey Oswald?
- I don't think Oswald shot any of the bullets.
- All conspiracy theories are rewrites.
You're re-creating reality
to support something you believe in,
something that you want to relieve stress in,
or something you want to manipulate.
- Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake,
with actors, in my view, manufactured.
- And we found that people who feel a degree
of helplessness are more likely to believe in conspiracies.
You want to know that things are caused for reasons.
"God has a plan."
Whatever it may be, it became pretty clear
that the more stress you felt, the more difficult it was
for you to deal with the effects of 9/11,
the more likely you were to re-create the narrative.
- They just lost trust in pretty much everything,
including the presidency, the government, and the military.
- 9/11 provides a very interesting question,
because you're given the fact the system failed.
Didn't protect us.
So if you believe that the military itself
cannot handle protecting us,
that's a very, very stressful conclusion.
You don't have the trust, you fall apart.
You can't even get out of bed in the morning.
How could you?
How could you go in an elevator if you can't trust the system?
So that's why we turn to Bush --
a person outside of the system, a replaceable element.
Republicans and Democrats really lined up
on how you would think they would.
Democrats who didn't like Bush thought he was behind it.
Republicans who identified with him did not believe it.
- In so many ways, 9/11 conspiracy theories
were sort of like a signal
for what was going to come later on.
- What has happened now is instead of being divided
as to Democrat, Republican,
what we've gone into is being divided
as science believers and science deniers.
And it's become a matter of life and death.
Now we're having arguments on reality
and what is real and what is not.
- We are grappling with the big lie.
- Tens of millions of Americans suspect
this election was stolen from them.
- It really was rigged against Donald Trump.
- "We have not seen fraud on a scale that could have
effected a different outcome in the election."
- Not having a common set of facts
can seriously affect national security,
because it just shows the discord
that prevails in our country.
- We're seeing protesters overcome the police.
The police are now running back into the Capitol building.
- And I think that's far more dangerous than it was when 9/11
Truthers started, because we're denying reality now.
I tell my students -- I said, "We're in a virus right now,
but I want you to be a good virus.
I want to teach you about evidentiary evidence.
I want you to spread it exponentially."
If we teach our kids how to think,
if we teach them how to research, then there's hope.
That's the best I can tell you.
I am -- I fear a lot.