No, this was just your social circle. I know literally zero people who ever bought into any of that crap

I have vivid memories of people having the firm belief that there was something up with the attack on 9/11. Was this just my social circle?

"Conspiracy" covers a lot of area.

There's people that think explosives were planted because "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" and they've always been ridiculed.

There are people that look at facts that the different intelligence agencies had all the information to put it together, but due to Dick Cheney requiring each agency only report to him, he was the only one that saw every piece of the puzzle and would have known enough to stop it. GW didn't even know enough, because Cheney was the only one talking directly to GW.

So some people have always thought Cheney (whether on his own or not) allowed 9/11 to happen to justify the wars he started under Regean and HW to continue indefinitely.

There's people who claim Israel funded and caused it, when there isn't really any evidence.

There's people who claim Israeli spies were caught celebrating... But that was undocumented immigrants celebrating they got the day off work.

https://www.thejc.com/news/world/who-were-the-dancing-israelis-of-9-11-c7f9b960

That's how conspiracy theories spread.

They took a kernal.of truth and build on it till it becomes something completely out of control.

Immediately after 9/11 everyone had questions and that's 100% normal, I think that's what you're remembering.

It's not the same as insisiting an unfounded conspiracy theory was true based on spurious evidence.

9/11 in itself would not be as sketchy if they did not use it as pretext to force through a ton of privacy violation laws which just so happened to be ready and only needed an excuse. And invade the middle east with a convenient pretext. And the FBI having advance warnings about 9/11 which were ignored.

I don't care about whether it was jet fuel or pre planted explosives. 9/11 was used as an excuse to invade countries which we now know had nothing to do with it. And at the time the government knew they were lying about those countries complicity. So I still believe there is more to the story than what is made public.

There is some evidence to suggest that the Saudis were involved in setting it up. Beyond that, there were endless conspiracy theories, none of which were widely believed. I've talked about it with a lot of people over the years and have yet to meet a single conspiracy theorist. The vast majority have never believed in a 9/11 conspiracy.

Never known a real person to think it was an inside job, just internet whackos...so yea same as the Maga crowd - or any other whackjob conspiracy like flat earth, big foot, vaccines cause autism...

Central NJ - it's so close... so to me its no surprise ppl are speculating and then that transitions into conspiracy theories that are perceived as fact.

I was 31 when the attacks happened.

While I do think that there was an awareness that an attack was possible, or even in the works. I sincerely doubt that anyone truly thought that 3 airplanes were going to be flown into buildings on that day and one crash in a PA field. The US had the attitude that we were isolated and well defended enough that such attacks were unthinkable. The complete one sidedness of Gulf War 1 really gave the US an out of proportion notion of being invulnerable. Even though the WTC was bombed 9 years prior, two years after the end of GW1.

Conspiracy denotes malicious intelligent intent. The reality is closer to stupidly complacent. Sometimes the two are hardly indistinguishable.

There was a conspiracy involving 9/11, but it had nothing to do with secret thermite demolition or Israel or holograms or any of that nonsense. People were rightfully questioning how these hijackers were able to enter the US and stay under the radar while training for and executing the attack. We now know that Saudi officials helped them.

It's also worth noting that the Bush family has very, very deep ties to Saudi Arabia, which may have affected the investigation and how information concerning Saudi complicity was handled.

From my understanding it's pretty widely known that most intelligence agencies though something could happen but not the specifics, and chose not to act on that information or communicate with one another.

The exact reasons aren't known obviously. My gut tells me incompetence/apathy from government agencies. That's not a very cinematic or compelling answer, though, and I think a lot of people look for more interesting narratives.

Whenever a big tragedy like 9/11 happens, people tend to try and look for the Chekhov's gun that shows a deeper meaning or dramatic orchestration. That's just not real life though.

The only conspiracy that I or people I know may have given credence to is the idea that people high up in the House of Saud knew about, condoned and/or funded the attacks.

And there’s actual evidence that it’s not just a theory.

A lot of people made fun of those theories and sarcastically pretended to believe in them. Maybe that's what you remember. Our human memories are not very reliable.

For the first few weeks, everybody wanted answers, and when people don't get answers, we make them up.

I remember hearing and seriously considering nearly all of the theories you mentioned, but as we started to get more answers, most people just forgot about, or stopped listening to the conspiracies.

Unless, of course, you were DEDICATED to one of the conspiracies, and surrounded yourself with like minded people who dismissed any evidence that went against their beliefs. Much like MAGA when you mention all the evidence that Trump lost the last election, or committed over 34 felonies.

The only thing I remember people being remotely close to believing was that Bush was so incompetent that he allowed a terrorist attack to happen.

It's not really a theory that Bush was an incompetent fuckwit, but it's highly debatable if they knew enough to stop it.

I’ve always thought the conspiracy theories like “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams!” Were just memes, personally

There are many people who like to fill in the gaps of things they don't understand with conspiracy theories. It takes some degree of understanding of physics to understand why the buildings collapsed in the manner that they did, why hollow aluminium airliners accelerating to extreme speeds imposed so much damage to the buildings, and also why there is typically less aircraft wreckage to be found when especially high speed crashes are involved.

In your case, it's probably just your social circle as none of my friends believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories.

In my circle yeah we all said Bush did 9/11. Was def taken as fact by edgy skaters/stoners who watched a lot of early YouTube.

I still believe 9/11 was an inside job or at least high level officials, including Bush, were aware it was going to happen

Crazy talk. This was absolutely not a widely held opinion.

It wasn't most people, but there were a lot.

Everyone who is aware of the facts agrees that the big terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were the result of a conspiracy. That the American president was in on it seems unlikely. Some of your "reasonable" questions seem ridiculous, such as the idea that a person having "limited flight time" makes any difference at all. The invasion of Iraq was the result of another conspiracy, one which was ongoing at the time and ready to use any convenient excuse to get started.

not in my circles. Certainly taken advantage of big time though with bad laws.

It's not accurate to say Afghanistan had nothing to do with it. The Taliban government were directly helping to hide Bin Laden after the fact, and obviously it was not going to do anything to stop violent extremism, rather it was going to reward and encourage it.

I didn't support it when it started, and I certainly didn't support all twenty of the years we spent there, but I believe now that the decision to overthrow the Taliban at least initially was the right one. Maybe some people in Washington pushed and went along with it as a handout to the oil and defense industries, but I think most of the legislators went with it because they truly believed, as I do, that overthrowing the Taliban and helping the people build a new state, with real institutions, was a path towards securing lasting human rights to millions of people. No religious dictatorship can grant human rights, it's not theirs to give.

I still do, at least when it comes to the pentagon. There was also evidence of high frequency trading that occurred right before the attack.

"It's in the Bible", is what my boss at one time believed.

I started there a few years after the events and wondered why this guy kept a 9/12 newspaper front page on display. I thought it was in poor taste but so be it. Eventually the topic came up and he started spitting out bible quotes to explain it all clear as day. He also laughed at dinosaurs!

Sadly, enough of the others there were bible toters too and did not disagree. I moved on before the Trump and covid fun began but I'm sure it was nuts.

That office changed me to my core. Seeing people living so deep in their own fantasy world that they would apply those fantasies to real world events was truly depressing.

These were professional engineers. Not kooks. My time there made me lose any respect for religion. Fanatics and conspiracy theorists are all attention seeking story tellers in need of gullible listeners.