Karl is a comedian and YouTube content creator who has made some excellent videos explaining how World Trade Center Building 7 fell. He posts under the name “Edward Current.” In the comments on his first debunking video1 (which I highly recommend you watch and try to show to your friend) he briefly mentions that he used to be a “deluded 9/11 Truther.” I got in touch and asked him how he got interested in the Truth movement.
It was about 2007, 2008. I don’t tell people how long it lasted because it’s kind of ridiculous, but maybe a week. I learned about Building 7 and I watched what they usually show, which is the very last global collapse without the penthouse, and I thought “oh my god!” Then I read this page that was like “Nine Things That Don’t Make Sense.” And then I was kind of all-in, I even drafted a letter to Frontline, the PBS show, which I love, it’s an amazing show. I never sent the letter.
Then about a week into it I asked my brother about it and he just kind of shrugged and was like “Occam’s Razor,” the least complicated explanation is probably right and that would be fire.
Then I was like, “Why did it go straight down?” and he just shrugged and said, “Gravity points straight down,” and I was like, “That kind of makes sense.”
This was initially surprising to me, as I had never heard of a 9/11 Truther who got in and out so fast. His route in was quite a common one—in that people see a video, they can’t explain the video, then they start watching other things and it starts to make sense. But what happened with Karl after that was different. He was lucky to have a brother that he trusted. His brother essentially caught him just before he fell deep down the rabbit hole. Karl was simply not in the hole long enough to get stuck.
It’s possible I’d get sucked in. I like to think I’m one of those people who is happy to be shown I’m wrong, and then change my mind. They all say that, but it’s kind of like a Dunning–Kruger thing. While I wouldn’t say I’m the most skeptical person I think a lot of Truthers would say, “I’m really skeptical and I don’t want to believe the government did this to us, this is an objective viewpoint.” But I like to think I’m a bit more introspective about my own flaws that might lead my thinking astray.
Dunning–Kruger is a common mental bias that we all share where we tend to overestimate our abilities.2 The lower our abilities, the more we overestimate. In nearly every field 90 percent of people in it rate their ability as “above average.” During his very brief stint as a Truther, Karl did what most over-confident Truthers do: he did his own research.
I was just looking at videos and reading documents and things like that. But of course I only did it on the one side, the side I was looking for at that moment. I didn’t look at the other side of the story. I wanted to believe this so I was drawn to all those materials. But then you get the “echo chamber” effect.
He’s seen this in the more long-term Truthers he’s been interacting with:
I think the more emotionally invested you are in it, the less likely you are to be able to pull yourself out, just because you’ve spent so much time and energy on it. Some people just do not like to be shown wrong. They react with anger, they resist it. But then other people are just like, “I’m a dumb shit.”
Another thing that Karl had in his favor was that almost nobody around him was really into conspiracy theories.
The only one is this very smart guy, who listens to KPFA, which is big on 9/11 conspiracy theories. He saw one of my debunking videos and I got an email from him just out of the blue saying, “How can you believe this stuff!” He was just laying into me about the guys living in caves a reference to Osama bin Laden with box cutters. You know, all of the language. And we had a couple of exchanges and then just agreed to disagree. But other than that, no, I don’t really know anybody who latches onto these things.
Now Karl spends some of his free time making debunking videos which he puts on YouTube, and then more time in the YouTube comments section responding to feedback regarding his videos. We discussed his motivation.
The thing that keeps me engaged is checking back and looking at comments. Seeing the kind of intellectual dishonesty that’s going on. I just want to try to show people that their thinking is flawed. Part of it is I’m a guy and guys tend to be warriors, and they want to show people that they’re right. It’s funny that there’s so few women that do this kind of thing. It’s always men kind of at war with each other.
It’s also kind of an intellectual exercise. I really enjoy finding logical fallacies and things like that, making analogies, finding parallels between things, etc. It’s psychologically fascinating, and the physics of the engineering is fascinating.
As Edward Current, Karl also put a little time into hoaxing 9/11 Truthers. He created a fake video that appeared to show a close-up of Building 7. Unlike the other videos that had been made public, this one showed windows being blown out and the sounds of explosions. The 9/11 community initially lapped it up, getting very excited over this new “100 percent proof” of controlled demolition. But people quickly noticed a few problems with the video. For one if you flipped it and slowed it down you found it was actually just the real-world footage, with some added explosions. An extra giveaway was the UFO, a small flying saucer that zoomed across the shot as the building collapsed. This had mixed reactions.
With my videos it seems like people are divided right down the line. Some people, when you tell then they’ve been fooled they’re like, “I’m a dumb shit, ha ha ha, you got me. Next time I’ll be more careful.” But the other half just get pissed off and lash out and go running.
That kind of divided the community, and to this day there’s some people who think I’m a liar, I didn’t hoax that video and that it’s a real video, and they challenge me to put up the source files. Even though I put in the flying saucer and hidden messages and things. I made it so ridiculous, I actually made it fall faster than free fall. It doesn’t match any other video that people had seen but they still thought it was real.
Prevention is good. My goal is not necessarily to convert Truthers back to non-Truthers. But there are people who are just starting to get into it. If they can see a reasonable explanation maybe it will prevent them from going down that path.
Ultimately Karl was only very briefly down the rabbit hole, about a week—his descent stopped by his brother. He came out of it as anti-conspiracy as some of the people who had been down in years before they found their way out. It’s almost as if a trip down the rabbit hole acts to inoculate you against getting sucked in again. Once you recognize your own cognitive failings and set out to change them, then there can be no going back. Exposure to conspiracy theories can suck you in, but once you’ve seen the (real) light, you see the rabbit hole for what it really is, and you are no longer tempted to remain.
His brother was able to stop Karl’s descent relatively easily because Karl had not spent much time reinforcing his belief, compared to a case like Stephanie’s. But the strategies and tactics that worked were basically the same. A friend gave him some information that he was missing. The same techniques for helping people seem to apply regardless of how long they have spent mired in the conspiracy swamp. Karl’s brother gave him some simple answers in a non-judgmental manner. Stephanie’s friend gave her some simple answers. Karl was quicker to accept the new perspective than Stephanie, but both of them escaped with the help of their friends.