Some conspiracy theorists echo democratic assumptions insofar as they don't provide theories but instead ask questions. They desire the truthj they want to know. They endeavor to reveal secrets and thereby call into being a public that wil get rid of the corrupt conspirators and restore legitimate government. In so doing, they situate themselves firmly in the democratic, anti-absolutist tradition (a tradition in which the American Declaration of Independence also belongs). Asking questions, making links, such conspiracy theorists try to persuade readers and hearers to think, to find out for themselves. Yet under contemporary conditions of comunicative capitalism, this desire to reveal is a trap. For all its aspirat�ons to democracy it remains caught in a pseudo-activity that reduces politics to a single operation-revelation.
Appeals to "find out for yourself" appear in the videos, books, and web sites of those involved in 9 I 11 truth. But frequently accompanying these injunctions to ask questions and chalenge authority is another sort of claim, a claim to certainty. This introduction of certainty changes the mode of the injunction to "find out for yourself' It now indicates less the openness of desire, a desire to know, than the closed circuit of drive. The facts are already there, we can be certain of that. There's no need to accept anything on the basis of belief Commemorating the first anniversary of the group Scholars for 9 I 1 Truth, its founder James Fetzer writes: "We have established beyond reasonable doubt that the Twin Towers were destroyed by a novel form of controlled demolition from the top down, that WTC-7 was brought down by a classic form of controlled demolition from the bottom up, and that, whatever may have hit the Pentagon, multiple lines of argument support the conclusion that it was not a Boeing 757:'5 Fetzer, a university professor, doesn't adopt the discourse of the hysteric. He is certain. The Scholars for 9 I 11 Truth know some things to be true. They don't need to persuade people to consider the evidence. The facts speak for themselves.
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