Another one happened during the Occupy Wall Street thing here in LA. Jeremy Roth was about to ambush Van Jones about 9/11. So, I said, “Jeremy, listen, you’ve got to look and understand it, the building collapsed due to kinetic force, the building floors, that was the energy source.” I explained it to him as much as I could, and he didn’t ambush the guy. I told him, you’re a smart guy, you should be working towards your activism with real things. I never saw him again at any 9/11 demonstration. In fact, all four founders never went to another demonstration again. They just gave up.

A lot of it is just laziness. You fall into it and you think you found something new, and since there’s nobody arguing against it you get deeper and deeper into it. That’s what happened to me, there wasn’t any counterargument to 9/11, it was always just explained as government manipulating the media. It keeps self-confirming and you just keep getting more and more isolated.

Really the critical thing is just being able to have the courage. When the group leaders lose their credibility, it increases your courage to challenge what they are saying. 9/11 Trutherism is belief in authority. You think AE911 Truth is all the architects and engineers on the planet, when really it’s just a handful, only a few who have any structural background.

I think a lot of 9/11 Truth is that they have this information they think is novel and nobody else knows about. If you have someone like me, an ex-Truther, I always tell them I already know everything you are saying to me, I used to do it myself, I used to do demonstrations myself. See, with you, Mick, and other debunkers like you, they just think that you don’t know what they know. But with me I’ve already been down that rabbit hole and I know that information. I was there, I was a demonstrator, I was a soldier. I can tell them straight to their face that it’s incorrect, they are not doing critical analysis, they are not looking at both sides.

They often just don’t have the guts to look at the other side. They have invested so much, with family, with conversations at Thanksgivings, it’s just very hard to go back against all your friends. So, part of the problem with getting out is just embarrassment, and you need the guts to get past that and actually look at the information.

You can give people information about their conspiracy theories and they won’t take it. But you can give them info about other things that are obvious bullshit like Sandy Hook. Then the Chemtrail thing is excellent, as it’s such a visual, you can see them every day. People get sucked in quick, but you can give them a bit of information about how contrails form, and they see that, and it gives them a bit of courage to question other things.

There’s some people you definitely cannot get through to, there’s just too much ego, too many Thanksgiving dinners they have invested in. There was one guy I was just explaining how claims have counterclaims, and there was this great process of critical thinking. I had been showing him the NIST 9/11 slides and he realized he was wrong at that moment. This guy just started screaming. It stuck in his head that he would have to go back to his family and explain that he was incorrect. He almost had a nervous breakdown.

So give them time, let them find the courage to look into it themselves. Let them look quietly in their room, on the internet, and then come back to me. I’d always challenge them: I know you’re not going to believe me now, but just read the NIST report and then we can have an intellectual discussion of what you think is wrong with it. But until you do that we can’t really have an intellectual rapport. I challenge them, not to believe it, but to be better informed for the next conversation. But usually they just never came back.

The only group here in Los Angeles meets on Saturdays at a café, and they have combined the 9/11 Truthers with the Chemtrail thing. But they are strange, it’s a small group in a dark room. I’ve been there, but they hate my guts, the Chemtrail guys, so I’m a little nervous there. They only allow me one question, then they blow it off and go to someone else for an hour.

Once you are out, once you are no longer part of that group, of 9/11 or Chemtrails or whatever, you are kind of left empty. You’re going to lose all your friends that you’d suddenly developed relationships with. There’s some very shy introverted people, so the conspiracy group is all they have, and if they leave then the few friends they have in their life are going to be gone. It’s very traumatic.

I’m proud of myself that I was able to get out of a cult. I feel like I flushed out that whole thing from my brain. You don’t think you could belong to a cult when you are actually in a cult. You think you are too smart for that. But it slowly progresses around you until you are surrounded by it. It’s amazing, how the ego works. Anybody can fall into the trap.

I’m grateful to you, and to all the people who contribute to Metabunk. Even though I don’t write too much, I read it to get the latest information to make sure I’m up to date, in case I meet somebody who needs it.