The Conspiracy Files
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This message comes from Travel Nevada. Need a little space? They know a place, the big heart of Nevada. There's always something new to see, because Nevada has plenty of space to just be. Plan your trip at TravelNevada.com. September 11th, 2001.

I remember the day very clearly, as many people do.

I was waiting to start basic training. I had gotten my head shaved, I had gotten my equipment and we were just hanging out normal morning, you know, doing PT. It was a beautiful day. And then all of a sudden, we just got this call from the drill sergeant. Everybody form up. So everybody fell into formation and they walked us into, you know, the media trailer where there was a TV and it was your old 4-3 square TV with the long extension cord.

And then they turned on the TV. I thought it sounded kind of louder, but I looked up, and all of a sudden it smashed right dead into the center of the World Trade Center. And we saw the first tower burning. I remember literally less than two minutes that we were watching, and then the next tower was hit. Hold on just a moment. We've got an explosion inside.

And I remember going for a run because I didn't know what to do. I was, this was not what I signed up for. I did not mean to get into the situation. And I remember collapse in the woods and I started to cry.

Just staring up at the canopy in the woods and just being utterly terrified of what I had gotten myself into as a young 18-year-old boy. And now I was deployed into a war that I didn't understand. The reality that we existed in changed on September 11th for everyone on the planet. Ramteen, what do you remember about 9-11? Wow. I know, softball question. That's a big question. God, what do I remember? I remember...

The intensity of it, the feeling of fear, not just around the attack and the horror of seeing like the TV coverage of the attack, but also just like what's going to happen to us because it felt like the kind of country's attention was focused on.

on Muslims, you know, being Muslim American. There was this feeling of uncertainty. And I think for the very first time, I was very aware of my identity, that we're different. Yeah. Like almost from day one, I don't remember if it was on 9-11 or like soon after 9-11, but I remember there was this reporting coming out that

My community in particular, this North Jersey Arab American community that was like right across the water from New York where the Twin Towers were hit, that people were celebrating in the street. I remember those stories. I mean, I wasn't seeing any of that. I knew that, you know, in our home or in the mosque or wherever, like people were talking about how afraid they were. They were confused. They had no idea who had done this. They didn't know why.

You know, my dad and his friends would be on the couch like TV was on 24 hours a day. They were just watching the coverage on like CNN or whatever and arguing about this country is responsible. That country is responsible. Kind of all the uncle level conspiracy stuff. Yeah, I distinctly remember like my dad being like, you should be suspicious of people in power, whether we're talking about a cleric or a congress member, that's

They need to be held accountable. And I think a lot of that sort of, I don't know, I guess skepticism, I remember starting to see it make its way online. Yeah. You know, I went off to college and I was on the Internet all the time, early Internet. And I just remember just the amount of

of these different, very complex conspiracy theories. None of us knew what was coming on September 12th. What aren't they telling us? Or in October? Especially in the years after 9/11. Or in 2002. Like with the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib. What are they telling us that is completely false? I think there was a lot of feeling that we weren't getting the whole truth.

When you have a situation that is so complicated, you need to turn to fiction to help reason through it. You seek to make order out of chaos. Societies around the world have subscribed since time immemorial to conspiracy theories of one sort or another. There were conspiracy theories in the Revolutionary War. There were conspiracy theories in the Civil War.

Years ago, in the early days of ThruLine, we told the story of conspiracy theories before the internet. But 9-11 and the dot-com era helped launch something new, the conspiracy theory industrial complex, moving conspiracy theories from the fringes to the mainstream and making them profitable. That's what we want to focus on in this episode. And here's where things get tricky.

Sometimes the conspiracy theory turns out to be true. And some skepticism is key to holding people in power accountable in a democracy. But too much skepticism can lead to a world where, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, we begin to believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing is true. And if nothing is true, how does a democracy survive?

I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And I'm Ramteen Arablui. Coming up, we're going back to the earliest days of the internet to trace how we ended up in a world that can't be believed, beginning with UFOs. This is Grant Herron from St. George, Louisiana, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Part 1. The truth is out there.

One summer day in 1947, a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, came across something strange in the pasture where his sheep grazed. A field of debris he'd never seen before. Tinfoil, rubber strips, and sticks. But he had heard stories of unidentified flying objects, UFOs.

There had been a flurry of sightings across the country that summer. People claiming to see flying saucers flash across the sky. Could this be related? The rancher brought a sample to the local sheriff, who was also stumped. Before long, an intelligence officer arrived at the rancher's door. He swept the fields, gathered as much of the debris as he could find, and left, leaving the rancher to wonder, what are they hiding?

That question started spreading on the airwaves. What happened on that ranch near Roswell in 1947 would fuel conspiracy theories for decades to come.

At first, people speculated it was a secret Soviet spacecraft. It was the beginning of the Cold War. But eventually, many people began to see it as ground zero of the alien invasion that the government was covering up. And that last part, the cover-up, was there no matter what version you believed. The idea that some people in power were keeping something from you and me, the powerless.

I do not agree with the means by which the powerful few have chosen for us to reach the end. But unless we can wake the people from their sleep, nothing short of civil war will stop the planned outcome. This is the voice of Milton William Cooper. Most people knew him as Bill. He's reading from a book he wrote in 1991 called Behold a Pale Horse. We have been taught lies.

To this day, it is considered a kind of conspiracy theory manifesto. It's actually the number one bestseller in the American prison system and has been cited by everyone from far-right militia members to rappers like Wu-Tang Clan, Talib Kweli, Nas, and Tupac Shakur.

The book is 500 pages long, and there's something in it for everyone. AIDS was created in a lab to wipe out Africa. JFK was assassinated because he was about to reveal that aliens were on the verge of invading Earth.

Cooper was a former naval intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, and he claimed without evidence that he... Saw firsthand documents talking about the government conspiracy around crashed alien spacecraft...

Majesty 12 is the secret group that is supposed to control extraterrestrial information and projects. He cast himself as a whistleblower, a word that had taken on new meaning in American life during the Vietnam War era. I've earned every cent, but I have never obstructed justice. But I welcome this kind of examination. I'm not a crook.

The 1970s were defined by a series of real-life conspiracies brought to light by whistleblowers and journalists. There was Watergate, when the American public learned that President Richard Nixon had repeatedly lied to them about his involvement in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

A report on the U.S. war in Vietnam revealing that four different administrations, Republican and Democratic, had misled the public about their intentions and actions in Vietnam.

The CIA had attempted to assassinate foreign leaders. The FBI had carried out a 15-year operation called COINTELPRO that spied on and tried to sabotage civil rights leaders and groups like the Black Panther Party. And the U.S. Public Health Service had conducted a four-decade study on 600 Black men in Alabama, intentionally withholding treatment for syphilis without informed consent.

Many Americans realize with horror for the first time that presidents would lie to the American people, that the government will lie to the American people. This is Garrett Graff. I'm a journalist and historian and author of books on subjects including Watergate and UFOs and 9-11. And I'm the host of a history podcast called Long Shadow.

This may be the most startling film you'll ever see. All the lies and deceptions of this era led to more people, like Bill Cooper, becoming more skeptical of the official government story about anything. And the rise of a paranoid fringe that's trying to understand all of this change. I felt something staring at me or...

For some, conspiracy theories became a kind of outlet to imagine things they couldn't see to help them deal with the things they could. Films dramatized these fantasies. Things like Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, and the big one. You know, who knows what our universe can hold.

By the 1980s, some of these fringe ideas were making their way onto the earliest versions of what we now call the internet. Maybe you remember these kinds of sounds. There were many competing networks. Some of them were defense-related. Some of them were commercial. Some of them were educational.

Most Americans weren't yet online. It was mainly military personnel, academics and businesses. But there was also a small group of computer hackers with their own amateur networks. What becomes the BBS scene or bulletin board system scene. Basically, early chat rooms where people could type out their thoughts about all sorts of things. Aliens, the supernatural.

The sky, or the universe really, was the limit. What the internet really is, is like creative software to project our imaginations to other people, to think beyond one's immediate circumstances. To expose things that had been hidden and to fuel our wildest fears and fantasies in real time with the click of a button.

And that, of course, is what conspiracy theories or really any fictional narrative lets us do. This is Walter Shirer. I'm the Dennis O'Dowdy Collegiate Professor of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. And I just wrote a book called A History of Fake Things on the Internet. Walter says fake things have been on the Internet almost from the start and that some of the most effective fake things are the ones you can't disprove.

I think really any good conspiracy has that avenue, right, where it's like, well, it could be true. Bill Cooper started to build a name for himself on one of those bulletin boards called Paranet. It was dedicated to all things UFOs. There, he pushed the idea that aliens were colluding with secret government forces.

Eventually, he gained enough of a following that he was able to take his message to the airwaves with a radio show called The Hour of the Time. In the coming months and hopefully years, this show is going to bring you information that is not available to the public, ladies and gentlemen, in any form.

In 1987, something called the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to feature multiple perspectives on a given topic, was abolished. And suddenly, the radio, this old-school thing that seemed more and more out of date, found a new life. For conservative talk radio hosts in particular, it became a kind of on-air version of online chat rooms and pushed the envelope of what those conversations could be.

It's a very angry voice. Bill Cooper becomes one of the most popular and influential nationwide talk radio show hosts in the 1990s.

Nazi means national socialism. It's on the left, not the right. He espouses this... We are in the process of falling into the abyss. Very dark, almost apocalyptic worldview of the looming showdown with the U.S. government. Who is our king of?

Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world. And then in 1993, a UFO enthusiast was elected president. According to his longtime friend, Webster Hubble, one of the first things President Bill Clinton said to him when he was appointed associate attorney general was, quote, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK?

And two, are there UFOs? An investigation was then opened into the 1947 Roswell incident, declassifying some of the military documents.

And it turned out the government had been hiding something. They were developing a secret series of Cold War balloons that would be able to detect, you know, for instance, a nuclear test in the Soviet Union. And one of those balloons had crashed in Roswell. The Pentagon just says it wasn't aliens.

The front page of the report has a diagonal stamp across half the page that says, in all caps, CASE CLOSED. But for many people, it was anything but that, because this just proved that the government had been lying, leading to even more conspiracy theories. Today, nearly two-thirds of Americans believe there's extraterrestrial life out there, the exciting possibility of a world beyond everything we can see.

But Bill Cooper and his listeners saw something much darker. What we would now call in the 2020s, the deep state. The idea of this...

shadowy cabal of military and intelligence professionals. To create an artificial extraterrestrial threat to this earth in order to create a one-world totalitarian socialist government. Then, one day, two men drove out to Bill Cooper's Arizona compound. One of those men is believed to have been... A young Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was an avid listener of Cooper's show.

The men asked Cooper if he'd read the Turner Diaries. Which is, in many ways, the blueprint for the modern white nationalist, white power movement. Cooper had, but he wasn't a fan. Before the men left, they turned to Cooper and said... Watch Oklahoma City. And then on April 19th, 1995...

A massive explosion ripped apart the main federal office building in Oklahoma City today. At least 20 people are confirmed dead. People were screaming. I was screaming. People were hollering, was anybody okay? Was anybody killed? The Oklahoma City bombing is still the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in American history. After the bombing, Cooper was called the most dangerous radio host in America.

A title he wouldn't hold for much longer. Hello, caller, you're on the air.

Yes, Alex, how you doing? Pretty good. I was just kind of curious if it's true that the police can have laser or infrared beams and projectiles into your house to basically... Yeah, the Austin Police Department... In the mid-1990s, there is a young public access host named Alex Jones who is sort of just starting his media career.

Alex Jones grew up in a suburb outside Dallas, listening to Bill Cooper's radio show. And Jones eventually switched from public access television to talk radio and began to make a name for himself as a firebrand, which soon led to him getting fired. Alex Jones, who is either Austin's great exposer of truth or a black helicopter conspiracy nut, depending on your worldview, has been canned from his evening talk show.

The Austin Chronicle. The station manager said his views were just too hard to sell to advertisers. Jones said the real reason was, quote, purely political. Jones then decided to start his own website. He bought the domain name Infowars for $9 and began broadcasting from home. If traditional advertisers didn't want him, he would find new ones on the internet.

Mainstream media, government cover-ups. You want answers? Well, so does he. And now, live from Austin, Texas, Alex Jones. Coming up, the conspiracy theory industrial complex is born. Hi, this is Soka from Fairbanks, Alaska, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

This message comes from our sponsor, Grainger. This is the story of the one. As a maintenance engineer, he hears things differently. To the untrained ear, everything on his shop floor might sound fine, but he can hear gears grinding or a belt slipping. So he steps in to fix the problem at hand before it gets out of hand. And he knows Grainger's got the right product he needs to get the job done, which is music to his ears.

Part 2. Truthers. What the hell was that? It sounded like a plane crash.

For most of us, 9/11 was a jumbled mess of confusion and uncertainty. But Alex Jones, broadcasting from his home in Austin, Texas,

was on air claiming to know exactly what happened. They were CIA with double passports and were being protected. And they thought they were taking part in a hijacking drill that day. You can't find his broadcast from that day anywhere online. But here he is summarizing his thoughts in an interview years later. And then what really happened is they nerve gassed the people on the planes from the best info we have, then remote controlled them into the towers.

Alex Jones becomes really the first voice of what we now call 9-11 truism. 9-11 was an inside job. Don't believe anything the government tells you. Hour by hour, you see this split between Bill Cooper and Alex Jones on the radio. Don't report rumors.

Don't report anything that comes over your fax machine. Don't report anything that you hear from Alex Jones. Bill Cooper was no stranger to outlandish conspiracy theories. But Garrett Graff says Cooper always thought he was telling the truth. The only thing that I want to hear about are facts. I think what he saw emerging in Alex Jones was a willingness to lie.

Bill Cooper died just a couple months after 9-11. He was killed in a confrontation with officers at his home. Alex Jones is left as the sort of last conspiracist standing. But it gets worse. There's thousands of pieces of data. They didn't find one. They found two hijackers' passports unburned. In the weeks after 9-11, we learned that 19 members of the Islamist group Al-Qaeda had hijacked four commercial planes.

Two hit the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. One hit the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. And the fourth one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people. The leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was believed to be hiding in Afghanistan. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps

My local paper did an article on me. The headline is, "Terrorism Must Be Dealt With," which is a quote from me because that's what I believed. A week after completing basic training, Corey Rowe was deployed to Afghanistan. And a couple of years into his service, Corey learned he was being redeployed to Iraq.

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. It was 2003. The Bush administration had contemplated an invasion of Iraq since 2001. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. President Bush consistently connected Iraq to the war on terror, even though there was no clear evidence for Iraq's involvement in 9-11.

But the thing that tipped the scales was a claim cited over and over again by Bush administration officials. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction. Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

Many media outlets across the country reported credulously on the administration's claims, most prominently the New York Times. And with their help, the administration sold the invasion to the American people. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. We were the tip of the spear as George W. Bush gave his ultimatums to Saddam Hussein.

Corey served from 2001 to 2005. He witnessed so much death. He told us about an experience he remembers that still haunts him. She was about six or seven years old. He says a young Iraqi girl was brought to the hospital where his unit was based. And half of her head had been blown off by a bomb that was dropped from our Air Force onto what was considered a target. Before long, she died.

And her father came outside and he sat down next to me and he said, why are you here? What are you hoping to do? And when he got back home after that tour in 2004, he noticed a lot of people had been asking the Bush administration the same thing. Why are you here? What are you hoping to do?

War is not the will of God. War is never blessed. So many different things were happening. The families of 9-11 victims were suing the government. Demanding more information about what happened on 9-11. And the anti-war movement was really building. Now Americans were divided. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. You are with us or against us. That's what President Bush said. Corey wasn't really sure where he fit in that with us or against us equation.

He was a soldier, yes, but he had serious doubts about the wars he was fighting in. Doubts that intensified after it was revealed that there were no weapons of mass destruction being manufactured in Iraq, and that the administration, with help from some in the media, had started a war on false pretenses. I was mad at the United States government. I was mad at the military. I was mad at myself.

to be part of this machine that killed, now that we know, over 100,000 innocent people. When Corey returned to the front lines, he began expressing these doubts in his letters to his best friend back home, Dylan Avery.

You know, it's just like a standard envelope that had like red and blue hatch marks around it. So like whenever I go out and check the mailbox, you know, I immediately look and see if I see that red and blue. This is Dylan. There were times where I would see a newspaper headline and said three killed in Afghanistan helicopter crash and there were no names. And I would just have to wait and and hope that I would get another letter or get an email saying that he was OK.

While Corey was deployed, Dylan was spending a lot of time at anti-war protests. He'd grown up in a pacifist household where NPR played nonstop. There was a poster that we saw at a lot of the rallies and the get-togethers, which was 9-11 truth ends wars. And Dylan had access to something Corey didn't. What do you think the greatest gift of the holidays is?

Internet? I'd say internet. The rise of the World Wide Web had transformed the internet into an easy-to-use network that anyone could navigate. You can have communities of... Welcome. ...thousands of people, millions of people, right, contributing to the narrative. You've got mail. And now you could find them all in your own home any hour of the day. From a conspiracy perspective, you're always finding new doors to open. I was just like, I gotta...

Dylan began to spend a lot of time in his college library. The internet there was much faster than his connection at home, searching for any information he could find about 9-11. He figured he could piece it all together into some kind of movie.

When Corey saw the first cut, he got it immediately. And what he was trying to do with it.

Corey decided to leave the military to work on this documentary with Dylan. Fact-checking wasn't a real thing back there. It was more about what's the best information that we have available today. Let's go with that. By 2005, the documentary was ready. They called it Loose Change. It's a collection of small things that add up to be something greater than their parts. 959, New York City, New York.

The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses to the ground in approximately 10 seconds. 29 minutes later, the North Tower follows suit, collapsing in approximately 10 seconds. The building's tenants included the CIA, Department of Defense, IRS. It definitely feels like a lot of things mashed up together. You're taken from one claim to the next, screenshots of declassified government documents and ground zero footage playing.

Though there are elements of truth to some of the claims, many of them have been outright debunked, including the idea that the Twin Towers were brought down by a planned demolition. But their core message fed into a popular idea online, summed up by an early meme. Bush did 9-11. In the beginning, Corey and Dylan had mostly just handed out DVD copies of Loose Change. But now, they put out a second edition online,

And it went viral. We were number one on Google Video. An early streaming service. Because what happened was he uploaded it in English and then somebody in South Korea would download it and re-narrate it or subtitle it in their language and re-upload it. And then someone in Germany would do it. Someone in Japan would do it. We were the lightning strike. And it happened at the perfect time where...

Video sharing is starting to take off. People are starting to not trust the war, which means that people are starting to not trust the government, which means that people are starting to question what else they've been lied to about.

There was no advertising model in place for viral videos yet, so they weren't actually making much money off of this. We needed money, so we took a loan from Alex Jones. Alex had such a huge platform. And we started working on Final Cut. Loose Change, Final Cut, would be an updated version of the original documentary. Alex Jones was an executive producer. We generally did not understand the danger that he could

could bring to what we were doing. By now, it was 2007 and there was a way to make money on the Internet. A new video streaming service called YouTube let anyone post a video online independently. And whether it was a video of a cat or a conspiracy theory, as long as people were watching, advertisers were paying.

Alex Jones realizes that there's really good money in these conspiracies. Just type in Pentagon tested gay bomb on Iraq. They consider, no, they didn't consider using it. They've used it on our troops. He got involved in more projects. He also got louder. I don't like them putting chemicals in the water. They turned the frigging frogs gay. For Corey and Dylan, enough was enough.

They started taking Final Cut down. We don't want it being out there because we don't want any association with Alex Jones. He didn't have our and the movement's best interests at heart. We split up and went in our different directions. I mean, it was a bit of a relief. I was tired of just like having to just live inside 9-11 for so long that, you know, I was like, all right, I don't have to do this anymore. ♪

Meanwhile, Alex Jones was building an empire. As the 2000s unfold, wherever there's a conspiracy, there's Alex Jones. Barack Obama runs for president. Jones spreads the theory that he's not a U.S. citizen. The Great Recession hits. Jones says it was orchestrated by shadowy forces. A mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary takes the lives of 20 children between 6 and 7 years old.

Jones tells millions of listeners that it's a hoax. They're recycling a green screen behind him. Above all, he sells the idea that all of this is being engineered by a shadowy deep state.

He was speaking to that same feeling of powerlessness and frustration that Bill Cooper had channeled back in the 90s. The difference was, once Jones had your attention, he then tried selling you on all kinds of other things. Dietary supplements from his brand InfoWars Life.

Disease organisms like bacteria and cancer cannot survive in an alkaline environment. And apocalypse prep gear. Covert phone and voice recorders, powerful binoculars, security systems, hidden safes, and much more. The apocalypse for Alex Jones turns out to be really profitable. Profitable to the tune of tens of millions of dollars each year. I think he really sort of pioneered like the whole shtick.

He's using the internet in a very effective way in terms of getting you to the store that a lot of people have then subsequently copied. By 2016, the InfoWars website had millions of visits per month, and many of Jones' disciples were potential voters. Corey remembers when he realized what that meant.

There was a moment in American politics when everything changed. And that was when presidential candidate Donald Trump went on Alex Jones' InfoWars. And Alex interviewed him. They became friends. Trump becomes sort of the conspiracist-in-chief. And thanks to social media, he was able to share those ideas directly with voters.

In 2018, Alex Jones was removed from Twitter, now X. And all InfoWars content was taken down from YouTube, Apple, and Facebook. But not before he helped get the word out about a new conspiracy theory called QAnon. The post began soon after Trump said this in October 2017. Could be the calm before the storm.

What's going on, Mr. President? You'll find out. And while it has been widely disproven, QAnon has led to real-world consequences. Police say that Welch told them that he showed up at the D.C. pizza restaurant to get to the bottom of what appears to be an utterly bogus story about child abuse promoted on the Internet. On January 6th, QAnon's presence in the mob was unmistakable. Freedom! Freedom!

There have been many think pieces drawing a direct line between 9-11 trutherism, an idea loose change helped popularize, and our current climate of conspiracy. Corey doesn't agree and says traditional news media who have amplified all these false narratives over the years are way more to blame. Now, he says, he just tries to tune out all the noise.

What I want to do is what I can control, what I know to be true in my own world, raising my family and my girls and my businesses and living a life that's important to me on my terms because the world around me is fucking crazy. But then like, where do we go for information? Where do we go for the truth? Yeah.

You go to yourself because it doesn't ultimately matter what the truth is, right? Doesn't it though? Does it? Does the truth matter? That's a great question. Does the actual truth matter anymore? Coming up, does the truth matter anymore? This is MJ from Detroit, Michigan, and you're listening to ThruLine.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, has reported the first case in the United States of a new and deadly coronavirus. I remember January 2020 when the first case hit. A resident of Washington state in the Seattle area is infected. The man had traveled to central China to the city of Wuhan where the virus was first discovered. And I remember thinking,

Please, God, let this be a rich man's disease. Scientists now say humans can transmit the virus to one another. This is going to be about people who travel through airports for a living and wear suits to meetings. It's going to be over there. It's going to burn the coastlines. It's not going to come to us because we're Appalachia. We're rural. We're away. We're reserved. It's going to be okay.

This is Wendy Welch, whose books include... COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories...

and then masks, misinformation, and making do. She spoke to us from her home in Wytheville, Virginia. By April, when it was evident that this thing was going to rip through America... From San Jose to Salt Lake to Boston, so-called surge tents popping up. The hospitals in our regions geared up their emergency units ready to catch the patients who were coming with COVID. And the patients didn't come.

We were sitting in our houses going, literally, the angel of death is passing us over. Wendy says many people in her community already didn't trust authorities. Appalachia was ground zero of the opioid crisis, a crisis that was manufactured by pharmaceutical companies. One town in rural West Virginia became one of the busiest distribution endpoints for opioids in the country. It is impossible to overestimate the effects of opioids

The Oxycontin sellout on medicine in Appalachia. Three major distributors of prescription opiates, McKesson, Cardinal Health, and Amerisource Bergen, made $17 billion, sending 423 million opioid painkillers to West Virginia between 2007 and 2012.

It is the core of conspiracy thinking to believe that you are part of a group that is marginalized, to believe that you are losing power or never had power in the first place. Also to be part of a group that holds itself slightly apart. If you only understood us better, you would know how awesome we are is classic conspiracy breeding ground. And into that climate of distrust came COVID.

The conspiracy theories started early. Misinformation is spreading fast. There was the one about whether the virus was related to biological weapons research. Was it built in a lab by scientists and unleashed on the masses? Another said that the CDC and Bill Gates were in on it. Do people really believe that stuff? Alex Jones was selling toothpaste, dietary supplements, creams, and several other products, saying they'd kill COVID. Medical conspiracy theory...

fairly often involves someone who realizes there is, put bluntly, money and power to be made by playing on what people are afraid of or by stoking what angers people. Outrage sells, and then it hit us.

But by the time COVID hit Wendy's community, the seeds of distrust had already been sown. Those people said, you need this vaccine to keep you and your family safe. And these people said, yeah, that's what you said about Oxy. As the unknown started stacking up and the conspiracy theories started flying, many people were looking to scientists to lead us through the pandemic.

But science wasn't certain. And scientists weren't immune to politics. A lot of people know that I'm a natural born shitster. My stance was I'm not going to let what politicians say determine what I write. I'm not going to be there calculating the political outcomes of what is scientifically true or not. The truth is the truth. This is Alina Chan.

While Wendy was hunkering down in her home in Appalachia, Alina was doing the same thing in her apartment in Boston, asking herself questions that many of us were asking then. Is this serious? What should we do to protect ourselves and our families? Is it safe enough to go back to work? But Alina is a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who specializes in gene therapy and cell engineering. So she was also asking questions about the virus itself.

So I started just reading as much as I could about the other closely related coronaviruses like SARS and MERS. And she noticed that COVID-19 was behaving differently. It wasn't mutating very quickly, almost like it was already adapted to humans. I started to worry that this might have come from a lab.

And there was another reason she thought this. Wuhan, China, where the first case of COVID was detected, is home to China's premier coronavirus research laboratory. And it was actually scientists from Wuhan who were first sounding the alarm. Scientists in Wuhan actually pointed out that it could have come from the markets, but hey, also look at these labs in our city. And they have been collecting exactly these types of viruses from these beds, bringing them back to the lab.

But right away, the Chinese government rejected the idea of a lab leak. And while all this confusion was happening about how bad it was going to get and where it came from and how to stop it, the political rhetoric in the U.S. was also heating up. So many of America's elites are so committed to propping up the Chinese Communist Party. This is the Wuhan coronavirus. The Kong flu, yeah.

As the Trump administration and right-wing politicians consistently blamed China for the virus, it was leading to real violence against Asian and Asian American communities in the U.S. Meanwhile, U.S. investigators were focused on the theory that the virus had jumped to humans from an animal market. Top virologists had also stepped into the game.

We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. This is a letter co-signed in the medical journal The Lancet by more than two dozen scientists. Given how politicized COVID was becoming, they felt the need to weigh in with clear information. And they lumped the lab leak theory in with all the other conspiracy theories floating around.

Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. The letter got a ton of coverage. But in private messages around this time, some scientists wondered if a lab leak actually was possible.

I literally swiveled day by day thinking it is lab escape or natural. We only know about these messages because they were leaked in 2023. The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely. It's not some French theory. They discussed many concerns in their private messages. One of them was the geopolitical shitshow, using their words, not mine.

Nobody wanted to be blamed for a virus that was killing millions and millions of people. Here we should mention that the U.S. funded and supported projects coming from the Wuhan lab.

If the lab was at fault for leaking the virus, the U.S. would also likely have to answer. But Alina says she wasn't focused on the politics. She was convinced that a lab leak in Wuhan was plausible. And she felt like it was important to investigate all plausible scenarios. So she took what others had said privately and went public.

In a paper, which she also tweeted about, she questioned why the virus seemed to be mutating slowly. So it's that very last statement that got me into a lot of trouble.

Suddenly, she was getting hate mail. From some people who thought she was spreading a conspiracy theory, and from others who didn't think she was taking her theory far enough. And from scientists who thought she was damaging the integrity of science. You know, I could have stepped back at any time. I could have completely deleted my online presence and gone into hiding. But I was just like, I'm not ashamed of my scientific analysis. I'm not ashamed of what I wrote because it's true.

Over time, the U.S. government and science community have come around to the plausibility of a lab leak. In 2021, President Biden asked the U.S. intelligence community to investigate the two leading theories again. Today, institutions including the World Health Organization, intelligence agencies, and some media outlets characterize the lab leak as plausible.

For me, I've gone all the way from in early 2020 being cast as an anti-science conspiracy theorist to now a lot of people do see me as some sort of shining example of scientific integrity. COVID was a crisis, and people needed to take rapid action to prevent its spread. Some scientists believed simplifying the narrative was the way to do that.

But Alina thinks a show of certainty was the wrong move. It's better to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them rather than pretend that you're infallible. Or to curate it so much to the point where you're only saying half-truths all the time. So I think sometimes that can be a fatal flaw of a law of public communication to simplify to the point of making something untrue. Or to say things so confidently that...

that they fail to convey uncertainty. Sometimes it's refreshing just to hear from experts we don't know yet, but these are the things we're going to do to find out what's happening. Because then in the future, people won't trust you anymore and they won't trust the system, which bodes even more ill for the next crisis. The time to build alliances, the time to build trust, the time to build friendships is before you need them.

The limits of conspiracy thinking are being challenged today by individuals like Alina and people who have been targets of conspiracy theories, like the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, who after years of fighting Alex Jones in court, finally won nearly $1.5 billion in damages.

And maybe more significant, after years of calling the mass shooting a hoax, in 2022, Jones admitted that it was, quote, 100% real. Alex Jones' stunning admission came during a contentious cross-examination. It's 100% real. Finally conceding the Sandy Hook school shooting did happen. We reached out to Alex Jones for comment on this episode, but did not receive a response back.

This was a moment where the truth broke through all the noise. And yet, not all conspiracy thinking is this obvious. But it feels like a big win in a world where we all have to wade through this conspiracy theory industrial complex and increasingly AI algorithms that fill our feeds, blurring the lines even more. The question is, is the truth enough?

The collapse of faith and trust in institutions has so permeated civic life and public life and politics in America today. There's sort of a chunk of the American people who will sort of never believe again the things that they are being told in the media and that

American politics in too many ways has become completely unmoored from the basic facts and the sort of small-t truths that are necessary for a society to agree upon in order for a democracy to function. If we give up our belief

that truth matters, everything is up for grabs. And that has major consequences in some cases, life and death. Who are we if we don't believe that we should tell the truth to each other and we don't hold our leaders accountable for telling the truth to us? Who are we?

That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Thank you to Johanna Sturgey, Shannon Bond, Brett Neely, Tony Cavan, Barclay Walsh, Albert Jung, and Puneet Matiwala. And special thanks to Casey Miner, Devin Katiyama, Ali Katiyama, and Anya Steinberg for their voiceover work.

Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.

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