The Honest Take

"'Yeah, Israel probably did 9/11. I wouldn't put it past them.' That is one more thing people can put in their knapsack of arguments for why Israel is a uniquely evil country. And I'm just not sure how we're going to argue these people out of it."

That's James B. Meigs, and he has been arguing with these people for twenty years.

In 2005, Popular Mechanics did what almost no newsroom was willing to do: it took the 9/11 truther claims seriously enough to test them one at a time, and it published what it found. Meigs was the editor-in-chief. He spent the next two decades being told he was part of the cover-up.

Twenty-five years after the attacks, the same claims are circulating again — with one substitution. "The government did it" has become "Israel did it." Same anomalies. Same absence of evidence. New target.

Ben Chertoff, who managed the reporters on that Popular Mechanics investigation and ran its fact-checking, is joined by Meigs and by Michael Shermer — founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a Scientific American columnist for eighteen years, and the author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, Denying History, and Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Matters.

They take the machinery apart. Proportionality bias — the intuition that an enormous event must have an enormous cause, and that nineteen men with box cutters cannot be the whole story. Anomaly hunting, and why a handful of loose threads feels more persuasive than a mountain of settled evidence. The Gish Gallop, and why a claim you can make in one sentence takes three thousand words to refute.

And the part that should trouble everyone: how material that originated with Holocaust deniers and professional antisemites — a full-page New York Times ad in 2004, a seismic-spike claim traced to the American Free Press — ended up circulating among people who considered themselves liberal, progressive and open-minded, because they liked where it pointed.

Also in this episode: what happened to Tucker Carlson between 2012 and 2025. Why thermite and Building 7 refuse to die. How the goalposts moved from "made it happen on purpose" to "let it happen on purpose." Why every new story now routes through the Mossad. What it would actually cost to pay off everyone who would have to stay quiet. And what you say to a family member who believes this, without sounding condescending.

Guests: James B. Meigs, former editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics and a columnist for City Journal and Commentary. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.

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