Although Candace Owens had spent several years as a wildly popular right-wing “influencer” on social media and podcasts, she’d never written any substantial articles, so I’d only been vaguely aware of her.
However, as a deeply committed Christian, she became horrified by the ongoing Israeli slaughter in Gaza, and very publicly broke with her longtime pro-Israel employer on that matter, a high-profile ideological rupture that had brought her to my attention in November 2023.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against…
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) November 14, 2023
As a newly independent YouTuber, she began producing videos on all sorts of controversial topics, and a few of these described Israel’s apparent role in the 9/11 Attacks, while others criticized elements of our very distorted mainstream history of World War II. These topics further raised her positive profile in my eyes, and about six months ago I published a long article discussing my considerable surprise that she hadn’t yet been banned from YouTube, but instead was allowed to accumulate a huge audience, including millions of subscribers and viewers.
My rather negative suspicion was that since so many of her views seemed totally outrageous and ridiculous, she was allowed to survive on YouTube because she helped to discredit the important and controversial information she occasionally provided.
For example, she’d produced an entire video arguing that our NASA Space Program was based upon Satanism, and elsewhere she rejected all of science as “a false religion,” declaring that she was open to the possibility that the Earth might be flat. I suspected that partisans of Israel might be pleased if the highest-profile individual arguing that the Israeli Mossad had been involved in 9/11 also held those other views, all of which seemed very doubtful to me.
After watching a number of her videos, I felt that she seemed absolutely sincere in her positions, so her advocacy efforts certainly did not constitute any sort of “controlled opposition.” But I argued that she might instead be what could be called “promoted opposition,” namely an opposing spokesperson who was deliberately protected and elevated by influential organizations such as the ADL in order to discredit the enemy camp. After publishing my article, I discovered that someone else had succinctly summarized my own hypothesis in a simple Tweet:
Nick Fuentes “it’s world Jewry”
Candace Owens – “it’s the frankist pedophiles, and the earth is flat and Macron’s wife is a man and we didn’t go to the moon and dinosaurs are fake”
The public – “ok nvm i think ben shapiro and jordan peterson were right. i love israel now”
— AF Hasbara➕ (@afhasbara) August 23, 2024
At the time, her most prominent project had been her repeated, emphatic claims that Brigitte Macron, the First Lady of France, was actually a biological man. Almost exactly one year ago she’d publicly declared that she’d stake her “entire professional reputation” on that astonishing hypothesis, with her bold Tweet viewed some 7.6 million times:
This episode is blowing up so I just want to say—After looking into this, I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man. Any journalist or publication that is trying to dismiss this plausibility is immediately identifiable as…
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 12, 2024
As I looked into that topic, I discovered that the belief that Mrs. Macron—the mother of three grown children—was actually a man had become far more popular in France than I ever suspected, being endemic in conspiratorial right-wing fringe circles. Indeed, Laurent Guyénot, a longtime French conspiracy-researcher, lamented the gullibility of so many of his French colleagues, and later published an entire article on those sorts of unfortunate trends.
I also soon learned that same notion was embraced by some of the more agitated and gullible commenters on our own website. I suspected that the theory among French right-wingers might have been inspired by the very similar conspiratorial belief among their American counterparts that Michelle Obama was a man. This led me to publish a follow-up article focusing on those bizarre notions, and it once again attracted a great deal of attention and many heated and sometimes angry reactions:
Those two articles ran just over six months ago, and I’d gotten the impression that Owens had subsequently moved away from that peculiar lunacy, a decision that I greatly welcomed. Given her obvious political courage, I hoped that she might begin using her large following and social media footprint to promote far more serious and realistic topics. If she did so, people might gradually forget her previous eccentric statements about “Mr. Brigitte Macron,” the Flat Earth, and other self-discrediting nonsense.
Such hopes seemed to have been vindicated in late 2024 when Owens devoted an hour-long show to an interview with Phil Tourney, one of the survivors of the U.S.S. Liberty, the American ship deliberately targeted in 1967 by Israeli military forces while sailing in international waters. More than two hundred American servicemen had been killed or wounded in that unprovoked attack, representing our greatest naval loss of life since the huge battles of World War II. As I explained in a long 2021 review article, only luck and the tremendous courage under fire of the desperate crew had prevented the Israelis from successfully sinking the ship, leaving no survivors.
At the time that notorious incident was completely covered up by our subservient pro-Israel American government together with its media allies, and that official coverup has now persisted for nearly sixty years. Over the decades, many books, articles, and video documentaries have been produced telling that remarkable story, but these have generally reached only relatively small audiences, so I doubted whether more than two or three Americans in one hundred were today fully aware of that shocking event.
Owens and her huge media following may have begun to change that. Her gripping interview quickly became her most popular video, viewed some 5.5 million times on YouTube, 4.4 million of those within just the first three days. Thus, it quite possibly reached more Americans than the sum total of all the other books, articles, and videos produced on that subject during the previous 57 years, perhaps even by a factor of several.
Her video also attracted nearly 60,000 comments on YouTube, an absolutely astonishing total. By comparison, John Mearsheimer’s very famous, record-breaking 2014 academic lecture on the origins of the Ukraine-Russia conflict has now accumulated more than 30 million views, but only about 20,000 comments.
The second half of her 70 minute segment also focused heavily upon the extremely suspicious circumstances surrounding the JFK Assassination. That killing in Dallas had suddenly halted President Kennedy’s efforts at breaking the growing power of the Israel Lobby and blocking the Jewish State from developing nuclear weapons, very important historical facts today unknown to the overwhelming majority of ordinary Americans. Kennedy was replaced in the White House by Vice President Lyndon Johnson, an ardent Zionist, who ensured that the attack on the Liberty several years later drew no American response. Those important events occurred more than six decades ago, and once again Owens coverage may have reached more Americans on that matter than the combined total of everything else produced during the previous sixty-odd years.
The visibility that Owens provided “the Liberty Incident” was absolutely unprecedented. For example, back in 2020 TruNews had produced an outstanding multipart video documentary entitled Sacrificing Liberty that ran more than four hours, covering all aspects of that historical event. But despite the importance of the topic and the excellent production values of the documentary, I doubt it was ever seen by more than a few tens of thousands of Americans, if even that. A version is currently available on YouTube and I’d strongly recommend watching it, but the total viewership has been less than 9,000, and perhaps Owens’ deeply personal interview would anyway be more appealing to a large American audience.
- Sacrificing Liberty
A Four Episode Docuseries
Matthew Skow • TruHistory Films • 2020 • 4 hours 44 minutes
Owens began her important podcast interview by explaining that it had been prompted by a recent letter she received from Tourney bringing that remarkable story to her attention for the first time, declaring that the letter had changed her life. Promoting the U.S.S. Liberty story to her millions of committed followers represented the ideal use of her extremely powerful media footprint. I naturally hoped that it would become the first of many such breakthroughs she might be able to achieve on topics long banned and blacklisted by our dishonest mainstream media.
I suspect that various powerful organizations agreed with my assessment, but instead viewed that prospect with very serious concern and moved to avert that possibility, perhaps activating some of their most skilled disinformation operatives to do so.
Her enormously successful U.S.S. Liberty interview had been released on December 15th, and soon afterwards Owens explained that she had learned of some very important new evidence regarding her “Mr. Brigitte Macron” theory, soon followed by receiving a threatening legal letter from the lawyers of President Emmanuel Macron and his wife. As she Tweeted out on January 11th, she was outraged that they would attempt to intimidate her and she naturally became even more determined to once again pursue that story, discussing those issues in greater length in a long podcast.
To @EmmanuelMacron:
Please instruct your lawyers to not ever tell an American what they can and cannot publish. You have kept many secrets in your life, but I am not your personal diary—all correspondences between our legal teams will be available for the public to read.
We…— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) January 11, 2025
I doubt that the timing of these new developments was entirely coincidental. Back in 2022, I’d published an article on some of the techniques used by shrewd establishment operatives to divert and discredit their leading conspiratorially-minded opponents:
Many, perhaps most individuals are quite reluctant to embrace any theory not blessed by their personal figures of authority, whether these be the editors of the New York Times or the pundits of FoxNews. Only a small minority of the population is willing to cross such ideological boundaries and risk the stinging epithet of being labeled “a conspiracy theorist.”Transgressive individuals who adhere to some heterodox beliefs are also usually willing to accept many others as well, and are often quite eager to do so, sometimes exhibiting the troubling lack of logical thinking and careful analytical judgment that may taint their entire community. This leaves them open to eagerly nibbling the poisoned bait of fraudulent but attractive theories, whether these are advanced by well-meaning advocates, self-serving charlatans, or covert agents of the establishment engaged in “cognitive infiltration.”
Therefore, at the beginning of February Owens launched an enormously long eight-part podcast series entitled “Becoming Brigitte,” timed to coincide with the release of a book of the same title by her main French source, a young French activist named Xavier Poussard, whom she had previously interviewed on that topic. Nearly the entire month of February was filled with these shows, which totaled well over six hours in length.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the theory of Owens that French President Macron is secretly married to a biological male certainly falls into that former category. But when I’d watched several of her earlier podcasts on that subject six months earlier, I’d considered her evidence as being somewhere between very thin and non-existent, and I had little interest in revisiting that absurd topic.
However, I always try to bend over backwards to be fair in my critical appraisals, and I also found it difficult to believe that she would have produced a new series of eight podcasts without having uncovered some striking new evidence, so I forced myself to sit through more than six hours of her new videos.
Owens often has a very chatty, digressive style of presentation, and I think that the factual material she provided in all those videos could have easily been condensed into just thirty minutes or one hour. The overwhelming majority of it was what I had previously seen, including the same handful of photos that seemed totally innocuous to me but that she treated as powerful evidence. As I’d written six months ago, I was sorely disappointed in so much of the material presented:
But I found almost nothing at all. The main item she emphasized was the claim that there existed absolutely no record of Brigitte Macron’s existence for the first thirty years of her life prior to her alleged sex-change operation. Owens said she had originally come across this theory in Britain’s scandal-mongering Daily Mail, but when I Googled that publication I found various articles mentioning that Mrs. Macron’s birth had been reported in a local French newspaper as had been her first marriage at the age of 22. Mrs. Macron has three adult children and one of them was quoted in the newspaper expressing total outrage at the lunatics who were claiming that their mother was actually a man.As an example, Owens seemed to find it extremely strange and suspicious that Mrs. Macron closely resembled her own brother, hardly a great mystery whether or not one has studied simple genetics.
Once again, the theory advanced was that at some point in the 1970s, the real Brigitte had died or otherwise disappeared, and her much older brother had undergone a sex-change operation and replaced her, eventually marrying Macron in 2007, some three decades later.
Sex-change operations had been exceptionally rare back in the 1970s, and one such French individual called “Veronique” had become nationally famous for having been interviewed off-camera by the media during that period, with Owens and her allies claiming that the interview had actually been with the youthful Brigitte.
But according to Wikipedia, for more than twenty years from the 1990s onward, Brigitte had taught high school, first at a local Jesuit school in Amiens, then later at one of the most elite schools in Paris, with the sons of French luxury business tycoon Bernard Arnault, Europe’s wealthiest man, having been among her own students. In 1989 she had unsuccessfully run for a seat on a local city council.
I find it extremely implausible that during all those years neither any of her students nor anyone else in her circle would have ever suspected that she was actually France’s most famous transgendered male. After all, that fact would have been known to her own three children and former spouse, and I find it unlikely that such casual gossip would never have gotten around.
Owens also devoted a considerable portion of her series to the suspiciously rapid political rise of President Emmanuel Macron himself, who in 2017 became the youngest president in French history. He reached that high office at the age of 39 after a brief but very lucrative career as a Rothschild banker and then an economics minister in the preceding French government, and he did so at the helm of an entirely new political party that he himself had created for that purpose.
Macron’s socially-liberal, pro-free-market policies were extremely congenial to France’s powerful business elites, and his surprising political rise was propelled by the unprecedented media coverage of him and his much older wife Brigitte. Owens finds all of this rather suspicious and I fully concur with her appraisal.
Indeed, much like Owens I’d regard Macron as a very likely example of the sort of deeply-compromised political leaders who are so often found these days at the top of Western countries, a situation I’d discussed at length in an article a few years ago:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
In the case of Macron, the official story of his marriage is certainly a rather odd one, given that Brigitte is 25 years older than her husband, whom she originally met when he was a 14-year-old student and she was a teacher at his school, nearly three times his age, though their relationship may have begun years later. There seem to be many stories circulating around on the Internet that he is widely suspected of actually being a closeted homosexual, who had undertaken a marriage of convenience with a much older woman in order to hide that reality and thereby facilitate his planned future political career. All of that would certainly fit quite well with the theory that he was a blackmailed and hence permanently controllable political puppet.
But that framework hardly suggested that Brigitte was actually a biological male, and indeed it strongly diminished that possibility.
If Brigitte were a man, that fact could easily be proven by the DNA contained in any bit of her hair or skin, casually obtained at one of her many public appearances.
Thus, any number of foreign intelligence services or private organizations could have acquired extremely powerful blackmail evidence against Macron, thereby totally diluting the hold already established by his original backers. If half-a-dozen different rival organizations, all having divergent political agendas, shared the same puppet-strings controlling a powerful national leader, the value of such mastery would become almost nil. For that reason, I can’t imagine any nefarious organization ever elevating a political leader having a secretly transgendered wife, whether Emmanuel Macron or Barack Obama.
Also consider the matter of age. Brigitte Macron is supposedly now 71, and she seems extremely well-preserved and much more youthful than someone who has passed her seventh decade, a condition obviously enhanced by the extensive plastic surgery she is reported to have undergone over the years. But the brother who had allegedly replaced her was almost a full decade older, and recently turned 80. I find it very doubtful that many 80-year-old men would be as spry and energetic as Brigitte apparently continues to be.
These sorts of very simple difficulties seem to have totally escaped Owens and all her deeply conspiratorial allies.
But although forcing myself to sit through the more than six hours of Owens’ painfully stupid narrative on Brigitte Macron was hardly a pleasant experience, I am glad that I did so.
After a couple of hours, I discovered that Owens had raised her bizarre theory to even greater heights of absurdity by strongly suggesting that Brigitte was actually Macron’s own biological father, doing so at points in her second and fourth episodes before discussing it in more detail in her Epilogue.
Some of the most decadent figures of the past such as the Roman emperors Nero and Caligula were accused by their enemies of indulging in extremely bizarre sexual behaviors, but in all my history readings I had never heard of a top political leader who married his own father. So if Owens were correct, she may have helped uncovered a scandal without precedent in all of human history, and I would owe her a deep apology for ridiculing her work and what I regarded as her credulous willingness to swallow total nonsense.
Such a verdict would also certainly justify the abandonment of her previous interest in the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty and similar substantive matters for a project so much more remarkable, one that could establish a new landmark in investigative journalism and permanently enshrine her name in all of our history books. I don’t think that even the most outrageous QAnon activists of a few years ago had ever claimed that a top world leader was secretly married to his own father.
But I tend to doubt that I’ll ever need to make that apology. Indeed, one of the reasons the Epilogue of her series may have focused on such an astonishing new possibility was to deflect attention from a far more mundane if embarrassing development. Owens’ entire conspiratorial framework was based upon the theory that Brigitte’s brother had undergone a sex-change operation a half-century ago and then assumed her identity. But the controversy roiling the political fringe had recently prompted the French media to point out that Brigitte and her purported brother had both attended Macron’s two presidential inaugurations, with their joint presence apparently captured on video footage, an important detail that Owens relegated to the very end of the entire series.
The problem with building enormous castles in the air is that they so easily fall to earth.
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In her series, Owens had heavily emphasized that she drew all her information from the work of Xavier Poussard, a young French political activist who had devoted years of research to that topic. She mentioned that he had just published Becoming Brigitte, his new book documenting his theory, a work that she strongly endorsed and promoted. I always find it much easier to analyze and evaluate a heavily footnoted written text rather than fleeting video segments, so despite my extreme skepticism towards those ideas, I ordered and read the Poussard book, which ran well over 300 pages.
The English translation sometimes seemed a little stilted and his book lacked any index, English table of contents, or even copyright-page at the front, clearly reflecting its self-published origins, and raising some doubts about its factual reliability. But aside from those blemishes, it generally seemed a solidly put-together work of research, presenting all the material that Owens had covered in her numerous podcasts and a great deal more besides.
However, after carefully reading the text I found only one potentially-compelling piece of evidence supporting his conspiratorial hypothesis. This was his application of Chinese facial-recognition technology to the various photographs of Brigitte and her brother, most of them taken many decades apart. Owens had emphasized the same evidence in a couple of her podcasts.
I’d never heard of the particular software product involved, but the author claimed that it was extremely sophisticated and could even reliably match the faces of sixty- or seventy-year-olds with their six- or seven-year-old former appearances, being able to do so despite the passage of many decades and even the use of plastic surgery. He bolstered this very surprising claim by providing some successful examples of its use on the photos of other individuals.
I have absolutely no expertise in these technologies, but simply reviewing the internal evidence of the author’s own material left me quite skeptical about his sweeping claims regarding the identity of Brigitte Macron.
For example, Poussard managed to obtain several elementary school classroom photos that included Brigitte’s older brother. He then compared these both with Brigitte herself and with screenshots of that same alleged brother who had attended both of Macron’s inaugurations, and although the match with Brigitte was sometimes stronger, sometimes it wasn’t, with the difference hardly seeming very large to me. Given that the brother was a decade older and had become very “chubby,” perhaps those factors could account for much of the gap.
To his considerable credit, Poussard attempted to validate his methodology by similarly comparing the photos of other students to those present-day photos he managed to obtain, and the results mostly fell into the same category, even though none of them had experienced the same weight gain. As he admitted at one point, “it is not unlikely that Jean-Michel Trogneux has become the ‘chubby guy’” who attended Macron’s inauguration ceremonies. So although the facial technology results did lean in the direction of supporting his dramatic replacement hypothesis, the evidence actually seemed far less strong than Owens had originally suggested in her videos.
However, in reviewing his facial recognition results, I noted an interesting possibility that neither the author nor Owens had apparently considered.
After activists began claiming that a female Brigitte had never existed, the media published her Catholic communion photo, but doubters soon argued that the photo was actually of someone else, perhaps a daughter. Brigitte came from a very prominent local family in the city of Amiens, and the author located a newspaper photo of her 1974 wedding. Comparing the two, he determined there was a high likelihood they were of the same individual, but he emphasized that neither of these photos seemed to match the more recent ones of Brigitte taken decades later.
This discrepancy might obviously be due to various innocuous factors, such as the weakness of the technology, the impact of aging, or Brigitte’s subsequent plastic surgery. But if that verdict were entirely correct and conclusive, it might suggest that Brigitte’s identity had been quietly assumed by a different woman of roughly the same age and appearance for some unknown reason. Obviously, it would be highly implausible for such a substitution to have remained unmentioned by her family and friends, but that scenario would surely still be vastly less implausible than for a female Brigitte to have been replaced by a much older biological male, whether closely related or not. And depending upon the timing and the circumstances, it’s possible that neither Macron nor any of Brigitte’s children might have ever been aware of what had happened decades earlier.
So Owens, Poussard, and their allies should consider the possibility that they might have inadvertently stumbled across a very strange aspect of Brigitte Macron’s personal history, but one that was entirely different and far less explosive than the transgenderism case that they had proposed.
Owens has accumulated a huge following on YouTube and social media, sometimes using it to tremendously positive effect and sometimes not.
Given the recent legal destruction of Alex Jones, she might easily rank as the most prominent and influential conspiracy-activist in today’s media landscape, expressing her sincere views on numerous different topics.
All of this contrasts very sharply with the case of Ryan Dawson, another conspiracy podcaster whose topical focus has been much more narrowly tailored, generally involving such traditional subjects as the JFK Assassination, the 9/11 Attacks, and the supposedly nefarious policies of the Zionist State of Israel and its Mossad. Probably as a consequence of these choices of subject matter, Dawson has been harshly condemned by the ADL and similar organizations and subsequently banned from YouTube and most other social media for about the last decade. Although he was later allowed back on Elon Musk’s Twitter, he has claimed he is shadow-banned on that platform.
Much like Owens, Dawson has only rarely if ever published any written articles, so for similar reasons I had been only very slightly aware of him, though I had watched one of his long video documentaries a couple of years ago. Dawson maintains his rudimentary website called the Anti-Neocon Report and loads his various videos and interviews on a Rumble playlist.
But around the same time that Owens was releasing her remarkable podcast video on the U.S.S. Liberty, someone sent me a long letter expressing huge admiration for Dawson’s work as a conspiracy-researcher, claiming that he was one of the best in today’s world, and after I happened to read it, I became much more curious about the latter’s work. Dawson’s admirer described him as the true heir to the late Michael Collins Piper, a renowned conspiracy-researcher, a comparison that certainly caught my attention.
Since I’d never paid any attention to conspiratorial matters, I’d only been very dimly aware of Piper when he died in 2015 at the untimely age of 54. But a year or two later, I’d discovered his large body of written work, and since then I’d read about a dozen of his books, growing very impressed with the quality of his ground-breaking research analysis. So comparing Dawson with Piper was certainly high praise, and I felt I should more carefully investigate Dawson’s work.
Kevin Barrett has been very actively involved in the conspiracy community for decades, especially in the wake of the 9/11 Attacks. But when I asked him what he knew about Dawson, he explained that he was also only vaguely familiar with the latter’s activities. Like me, Barrett tends to concentrate upon books and articles, and Dawson hadn’t produced such written work.
Barrett also mentioned that he’d once or twice invited Dawson as a guest on his podcast, and never heard back from him. But probably as a consequence of my inquiry, he made another attempt with much better luck. Last week, I watched that long, 100 minute podcast interview with Dawson, and wasn’t overly impressed.
For obvious reasons, many of the individuals drawn to the conspiracy community tend to be eccentrics of one sort or another, and they are often rather unrealistic in assessing the world, its recent history, or their own place within it.
In listening to Barrett’s interview with Dawson, I was a little surprised to hear the guest repeatedly declare that around 99% of all 9/11 Truthers were wrong and even ridiculous in their ideas and he himself was almost alone in providing an accurate and sensible description of what had taken place in September 2001, dismissing the work of all the major 9/11 Truth organizations in similarly sweeping terms.
This certainly seemed a rather grandiose position for Dawson to take, especially given his own obscurity and his near-total lack of any published books or major articles.
Although I’ve been interested in 9/11 issues for nearly the last decade, I’d freely admit that I’m no great expert on the detailed history of that topic. But across the fifteen or twenty books that I’d read and the many dozens of major articles and videos I’d absorbed, I don’t think I’d ever seen Dawson’s name mentioned anywhere, so it wasn’t clear to me that he had personally contributed anything of much significance to that field. Perhaps I might be mistaken for having that impression, but it still seemed very odd for him to characterize himself as its towering figure.
Some of the points that Barrett raised in the discussion seemed like very logical ones.
Like Dawson, Barrett believed that the WTC towers had actually been brought down by explosives, in what amounted to a gigantic controlled-demolition operation. But since the plan had been to pretend that the destruction had been the result of the crashed jetliners, it was absolutely essential that the planes successfully hit the towers, and relying upon human hijackers to do so would have been extremely risky. Therefore, some sort of remote control system must have been used to achieve that result, a theory reinforced by the statements of experienced pilots that the speed and maneuvering of the planes would have been very difficult with any humans at the controls, let alone the half-trained pilots that the government alleged had been responsible.
Dawson strongly disagreed with that conclusion, but instead of attempting to respond to those reasonable arguments, he merely dismissed and ignored them.
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Barrett also noted the important work of investigative journalist Daniel Hopsticker, whose 2004 book Welcome to Terrorland had revealed that during their many months living in Florida, the future hijackers had become notorious for their heavy use of alcohol and drugs and their regular visits to strip-clubs and involvement with local prostitutes. Just before 9/11, one of the supposed leaders had notoriously left an alcohol-soaked Koran at a local bar. This certainly seemed extremely strange behavior for allegedly fanatic Islamic militants about to sacrifice their own lives on a suicide mission, and it obviously raised huge doubts about the the official government narrative. Once again, Dawson seemed to merely deny those reported facts without citing any solid evidence to the contrary.
Dawson similarly seemed absolutely convinced that the Saudi government had been heavily involved in the 9/11 Attacks without providing any logical motive for them to have done so. Barrett far more plausibly argued that their financial association with the hijackers had probably been intended to lay down a false trail, allowing them to be blamed as patsies if the initial cover story were penetrated by the media and also making the Saudis hugely vulnerable to later political blackmail.
Dawson also suggested that explosives-laden vans parked in the basement of the WTC towers had been responsible for bringing down the buildings even though the collapses had very clearly begun closer to the top, making his position an extremely implausible one, at least if I understood it correctly.
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Some of Dawson’s focus seemed rather narrow and parochial. For example, he ridiculed the 9/11 Truth movement for claiming that a missile rather than a plane had struck the Pentagon. Although that indeed had often been maintained by many of the earliest Truthers around twenty years ago, it had hardly remained a central tenet of more recent advocates. For example, the late Prof. David Ray Griffin was widely acknowledged as a leading figure in the movement, and in his 2011 book 9/11: Ten Years Later, he had written:
The title of that following chapter—“A Consensus Approach to the Pentagon”—alludes to the widespread sense, both in and outside the 9/11 Truth community, that, whereas there is a lot of consensus within this community about the destruction of the World Trade Center, there is no such consensus about the attack on the Pentagon. In this chapter, I argue that, although there is indeed much disagreement on the issue that has received the most debate—was the Pentagon hit by a Boeing 757?—this is a relatively trivial point in comparison with an issue about the Pentagon attack on which the 9/11 Truth Movement has reached consensus.
The 9/11 Truth movement that Griffin described had been jump-started in 2005 by the independently produced hour-long documentary Loose Change: 9/11 – An American Coup, which was released on DVD and also went super-viral on YouTube, reportedly racking up many millions of views over the years. Dawson was scathing towards that production, declaring that it got everything wrong except the date of the attacks. But even if his criticism were warranted, spending his time denouncing such a very early research project whose twentieth anniversary arrives next month hardly seemed a worthwhile focus of someone’s current efforts.
Nearly a quarter century has passed since the 9/11 Attacks, and with so many other controversial events having occurred during that period, fewer and fewer members of the conspiracy-community remain focused on that fading topic. Many of the leading 9/11 figures have retired, moved on to different issues, or else departed our world.
As a direct consequence, I have noticed that much of the continuing 9/11 debate seems to have become dominated by individuals having some of the most eccentric and implausible views. These activists insist that no planes were ever involved in the attacks or that the WTC towers were brought down by nuclear explosions, or such other equally foolish notions. But although Dawson thankfully steered clear of those especially absurd beliefs and even denounced them, his very long interview with Barrett suggested that he otherwise seemed to embody some of the more negative personality traits of such conspiracy movement activists.
In order to be fair to Dawson, I decided to watch his own very long 9/11 documentary entitled 9/11 and War by Deception, originally produced in 2011 and running more than two hours.
Some of the content material that appeared in the first hour or so seemed quite useful and valuable.
For example, over the years I had seen several news stories reporting that just after the 9/11 Attacks, NYC police had stopped several white vans driven by Israelis believed to be Mossad agents and these had been found to contain traces of explosives. This suggested that the operatives involved might have been planning to commit additional terrorist attacks, false-flag operations that would be blamed upon Islamicists, much like the hijackings themselves. I had also seen some claims floating around the Internet that one or more of those vans contained actual loads of explosives as well as other highly-incriminating materials, but I had never been too sure about the credibility of those stories.
However, Dawson as a very diligent researcher, and his video provided numerous television news clips and newspaper stories documenting exactly those shocking facts, as well as declassified government files confirming much of that same information. Those news stories also reported that various maps had been found in the vans indicating some of the intended targets, notably including the vital George Washington Bridge. All of this constituted an important trove of material for those interested in such details, so it’s quite unfortunate that he has never bothered publishing a long article presenting it in a form that other researchers could more easily cite and use.
None of Dawson’s facts were revelatory, but they did tend to further solidify our reconstruction of the 9/11 events and the obvious responsibility of the Israeli Mossad.
Unfortunately, except for those bits of useful factual information, I found the rest of his very long video much less worthwhile.
The overall organization seemed terrible, with Dawson constantly jumping back and forth in time and topic. Although the purported subject was the 9/11 Attacks, he also included considerable discussion of the 1993 WTC bombing, the Iran-Contra Affair, the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, the First and Second World Wars, Zionist terrorism in Palestine, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the CIA drug trade, and a host of other major geopolitical events of the last hundred years or more, even digressing to the sixteenth century conflict between Queen Elizabeth’s England and the Spanish Empire. If presented properly, some of these other elements might have been relevant to an extended analysis of 9/11, but given the very poor organization of the video, they merely seemed a jumble of facts and different historical outrages.
Moreover, rather than being analytical, most of the two-plus hours came across as largely a propaganda project, frequently including screen shots showing dead bodies along with a sentence or two blaming those atrocities upon American imperialism. Dawson almost never provided any mention of the sources for his claims, so nearly his entire presentation relied upon such argument-by-assertion, hardly the best means of presenting extremely controversial material that directly challenged the official narrative of the American government and its mainstream media allies. If Dawson had written a heavily documented book or series of long articles, he could at least point to those, but his cupboard was bare of such written work, leaving any skeptical viewers with nowhere to turn.
I also found other serious, but admittedly subjective flaws in his documentary. He struck me as one of the worst narrators I had ever encountered, generally speaking in a strangely flat and rather robotic style that made him seem like a grim fanatic, almost the stereotype of a conspiracy-crank, and this included his very strange and wooden delivery of occasional sarcastic jokes or asides. Many of his brief allusions would also have seemed rather unintelligible to anyone not totally immersed in the more arcane issues of the conspiracy-community.
The bulk of the substance in Dawson’s video documentary seemed correct or at least relatively reasonable if hardly new, but unfortunately those stylistic problems in presentation would have probably raised huge doubts in the minds of any somewhat mainstream individuals who might be casually curious about 9/11 issues.
For all of Dawson’s apparent claims to have produced so much ground-breaking research, his 9/11 documentary seemed almost entirely focused upon the sort of details that I’d never found very interesting or important. For example, I’ve published numerous long articles providing my own analysis of the 9/11 Attacks and after watching his hours-long documentary, I’d scarcely feel compelled to change more than a word or two, nor would I have ever considered citing his work in my own writing.
Just as in the case of his recent podcast interview with Barrett, a significant portion of Dawson’s 2011 documentary on 9/11 was devoted to attacking and ridiculing the Loose Change documentary from nearly twenty years ago. When that earlier work had been released, I’d had no interest in such conspiratorial matters, and therefore hadn’t been aware of it, nor the huge controversy and excitement it generated in some circles. And by the time I became interested in 9/11 issues, it was already considered completely antiquated and although I’d heard of it, I’d never considered viewing it.
But Dawson’s repeated denunciations made me curious enough that I tracked down a copy on Archive.org and watched it for the first time.
Considering that Loose Change had been produced on an absolutely shoestring budget of $2,000 by several young activists twenty years ago next month, I found it much better than I had expected.
The main purpose of the hour-long documentary had obviously been to challenge the official government narrative of the 9/11 Attacks, and it did so by raising a very wide range of different issues. Over the last two decades, some of these had been effectively refuted and debunked, with few mainstream 9/11 Truthers even continuing to defend them, but as far as I could tell, roughly half of the total still remained just as telling today as they had been back in 2005. Meanwhile, the gigantic attention and viewership their documentary attracted became a crucial factor in launching the 9/11 Truth movement, a movement that gradually sanded off the rougher edges of that very early effort, thereby producing a much more detailed, compelling, and factually-accurate counter-narrative.
Some of Dawson’s harsh criticism had been that Loose Change amounted to a whitewash, entirely blaming the attacks on the American government and totally exonerating Israel. But although this might have been nominally correct, it seemed to constitute only a trivial part of the material. Indeed, like a large majority of the mainstream 9/11 Truth movement that it inspired, the documentary almost entirely steered clear of pointing towards any guilty parties and instead devoted the overwhelming bulk of its coverage to directly challenging the plausibility of the official narrative of events. Such an approach was obviously a vital first-stage of the 9/11 Truth project, far more defensible in 2005 than it would have been five or ten or fifteen years later. Indeed, subsequent editions of the same film, none of which I have watched, apparently focused heavy attention upon the Neocons at the core of the Bush Administration and other culprits often implicated by leading 9/11 Truthers.
Since I hadn’t been impressed with most of Dawson’s 9/11 documentary, I decided to revisit the video he’d produced a couple of years ago on the Israeli nuclear weapons program and the closely-connected JFK Assassination, which I’d watched soon after its release and generally regarded somewhat favorably at the time.
Upon my second viewing, this documentary seemed much more polished and professional than the other one, and also somewhat less disorganized, although it still jumped across a considerable number of different crimes, time periods, and personalities. Dawson’s style of narration was just as bad as before, but I simply ignored that.
On the positive side, he did include a large quantity of reasonably good graphics to organize his information, including charts showing the supposed interconnections of the various individuals involved.
Unfortunately his work presented an enormous, almost eye-glazing large quantity of material, including a vast multitude of named individuals, most of them described in barely a sentence or two, with all of this surely tending to deaden the impact upon any viewers who were not already very well versed in all of these details. Once again, the almost total lack of any sources amounted to argument-by-assertion, with viewers forced to take almost all of Dawson’s claims entirely upon faith, even the most dramatic ones. If Dawson had produced a heavily-footnoted book or series of major articles to which he could refer, that situation would be less of a problem, but he hadn’t.
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As far as I could tell, almost all of Dawson’s claims were correct or at least reasonably defensible, and indeed about 80% or more of his material seemed to have originally appeared in Piper’s seminal 1995 work Final Judgment, with most of the rest coming from various other books and articles that I had read over the years, though in some cases it was difficult for me to remember exactly which ones. But obviously most individuals who had not previously encountered all of these facts would probably have a far more skeptical reaction, and Dawson’s documentary could offer them nothing in that regard.
Some of the FOIA documents he included were interesting and useful, but I wasn’t sure whether he himself had obtained them or whether someone else had been responsible, and since most of them weren’t identified in detail, it might take some Googling to even locate them, if that were actually possible.
One clip that I found quite interesting was of Prof. John Mearsheimer speaking at a conference perhaps about a decade ago and describing Israel’s total impunity on virtually all matters. As the scholar very forcefully put it, if he or any of the other academics attending happened to travel to Israel and were shot dead, there would be absolutely no consequences for that crime. Unfortunately, Dawson failed to identify the source for either that clip or the many others he provided, making it difficult for me to date or locate those remarks.
So once again, despite the wealth of material provided, most casual viewers would probably get the impression that the documentary was more a work of fervent anti-Zionist propaganda rather than any sort of objective analysis. This obviously reduced the likelihood that it would convince those who were not already squarely in Dawson’s camp, thereby defeating his purpose.
In order to better evaluate Dawson’s JFK-related documentary, I decided to compare it with a different one of the same length and general topic released a year earlier on YouTube. Israel and the Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers by French conspiracy-researcher Laurent Guyénot came to similar conclusions regarding the central role of Israel and its Mossad in those historical events, but it was much more narrowly focused on the killings themselves, though also giving some attention to the secret Israeli nuclear weapons program that had likely been a leading motive.
The organization of this documentary seemed far superior, shrewdly beginning its reconstruction of events with the later 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and then working backwards to the killing of his older brother in Dallas five years earlier. Unlike the vast quantity of names and dates that Dawson threw out in a huge jumble, the crucial material here was presented in much more targeted fashion, with the sources usually cited.
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Since Guyénot had published a couple of books and numerous articles on these topics, anyone interested in further details or documentation could easily turn to those. I also suspect that the superior organization of his documentary also partly reflected the discipline he had required in order to produce previous written works on the same subject.
His strong French accent was only a very slight distraction, and his simple, unadorned narrative was greatly superior to that of Dawson.
On the negative side, I did notice a certain amount of Kennedy hagiography, but that seemed only a minor blemish. And the brief epilogue on the 1999 death of JFK Jr. in a plane crash might have been omitted since the evidence for any foul play in that incident has always seemed extremely thin to me.
In some respects, the two documentaries of Dawson and Guyénot might fit well together, given that they came to very similar conclusions, with the former focusing more upon Israel’s nuclear weapons development program and the latter upon the JFK Assassination itself, thereby effectively complementing each other.
However, I did think that the Guyénot documentary was far better organized, documented, and analytical, and therefore would be much more likely to persuade viewers who were not already committed to the conclusions it presents.
Although Dawson’s viewership totals on Rumble were far higher, I’ve sadly discovered that such Rumble metrics are completely worthless since every time a page embedding a Rumble video is refreshed, the supposed viewership count is incremented. Meanwhile, YouTube totals are based upon actual, honest-to-goodness views. So given the roughly comparable number of comments, I’d guess that the relative viewership of the two documentaries was also reasonably comparable.
Over the last decade there has been a dramatic collapse of credibility in our traditional mainstream media, coupled with a huge rise in the power of social media and video platforms, and the impact of these changes has been greatest for younger generations.
As with many such transformations, there have been both positive and negative effects. To the extent that our traditional media was dishonest in so many ways, breaking its monopoly power has enabled the propagation of controversial ideas long banned from such public dissemination. But unfortunately, many of those controversial ideas happen to be entirely incorrect, and that often includes some of the most exciting ones, that propagate most widely on social media.
Although podcasts and video documentaries may possess a great deal of reach, unless they are backed by a solid base of written material and documentation, I think they are often closer to being propaganda projects than any sort of careful attempt to analyze the world. As a consequence, sensible people should be very cautious about trusting any of the claims that they make.
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