{"id":3314,"date":"2015-04-19T18:51:09","date_gmt":"2015-04-19T23:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=3314"},"modified":"2015-04-20T21:17:19","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T02:17:19","slug":"truthers-419-was-an-inside-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2015\/04\/19\/truthers-419-was-an-inside-job\/","title":{"rendered":"Truthers: 4\/19 was an inside job"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is the 20th<\/sup> anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing<\/a>. Since my family\u00a0lives here in OKC, almost everyone we know over a certain age has a personal story to tell\u00a0about\u00a0that day. The people known as “Truthers” tell another story altogether, though.<\/p>\n

[Alex] Jones grew up in the Dallas suburbs, just two hours\u2019 drive from the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel. In 1993, when Jones was barely out of high school, a seven-week Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) siege ended in the incineration of 76 cult members. Jones remembers being transfixed by the congressional hearings into the fiasco, which were broadcast by C-SPAN. The episode turned Jones into a full-time crusader against the United States government.<\/p>\n

Koresh and his followers, Jones believed, were harmless innocents who\u2019d been murdered by Attorney General Janet Reno and cynical ATF agents looking to boost their agency\u2019s profile. \u201cI remember watching the TV screen and seeing that famous footage of the ATF loading their video cameras before going in,\u201d Jones told me. \u201cThey were going to lose their funding. This was [a] PR stunt. They were about to be abolished. That\u2019s why they did it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two years later, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, an act intended to incite a popular revolt against the U.S. government. But Jones concluded the bombing actually was a part of a conspiracy, hatched by the feds themselves, to quash the nascent states\u2019-rights movement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The above is quoted\u00a0from a\u00a0profile of Alex Jones<\/a> by Jonathan Kay, author of Among the Truthers<\/a>. On page 113 of\u00a0that book, Kay note\u00a0that “alleged\u00a0false-flag attacks that\u00a0have become Truther talking points” include “the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and Israel’s attack on an American intelligence-gathering ship called the USS Liberty<\/em> during the Six Day War of 1967.”<\/p>\n

We often tend to think of the “Truther” movement as\u00a0something that got started after the 9\/11 attacks of 2001, but the\u00a0willingness of modern conspiracy theorists to blame the U.S. government<\/a> for perpetrating false flag attacks (even when more plausible\u00a0perpetrators\u00a0are\u00a0openly boasting\u00a0about committing the selfsame\u00a0act of terror) goes back at least as far as 4\/19\/1995.<\/p>\n

In case you are feeling adventurous, you can see how deep the rabbit hole goes<\/a>\u00a0over at Infowars.<\/p>\n

As for me, I’ll be watching the memorial concert\u00a0on Youtube.<\/p>\n