Now that the dust has settled (no pun intended) on 9/11, the american left abandoned all of the truther stuff and the right has picked up the mantle. I remember when questioning the official story was what the fringe left was into, and the right was still waving flags and beating battle drums. How did we end up flipping on this?
I think the reason the truther stuff was so popular was because it was one of the only angles you could take to be opposed to going to war, at the time. Basically everyone in the country was pissing and shidding all over the place at that point, what, were you supposed to say like, "I don't see how US interventionism is supposed to achieve anything but petty revenge and more bloodshed?" They'd just respond like, "Good." And of course if you thought, "Huh, I wonder if there's something in history about the Taliban or Osama bin Laden that might explain why they did this," then just for asking that question people would regard you with suspicion, like you're a terrorist sympathizer or something. People were not open to learning more details about the situation or thinking ahead to what the eventual outcome might be, so the conspiracy theory gained popularity because it was a direct challenge to the narrative that didn't really require much in the way of introspection or learning.
As time passed, more people were able to look at things with cooler heads and knowledge spread, and we also got to see how things actually played out, and so it became unnecessary to resort to a conspiracy to say that the war was bad, or even that 9/11 was the government's fault. To the extent that it's still around on the right, it's probably because they haven't adapted to the later criticisms. They don't care about history or necessarily see the US supporting mujaheddin against the USSR as a bad thing, and they don't care about civilian casualties because they're brown and Muslim. There's a sliver of people who have those perspectives but also oppose the war because government bad, and they know that government bad generally isn't persuasive so there's still use for the conspiracy theory.
I think the reason the truther stuff was so popular was because it was one of the only angles you could take to be opposed to going to war, at the time. Basically everyone in the country was pissing and shidding all over the place at that point, what, were you supposed to say like, "I don't see how US interventionism is supposed to achieve anything but petty revenge and more bloodshed?" They'd just respond like, "Good." And of course if you thought, "Huh, I wonder if there's something in history about the Taliban or Osama bin Laden that might explain why they did this," then just for asking that question people would regard you with suspicion, like you're a terrorist sympathizer or something. People were not open to learning more details about the situation or thinking ahead to what the eventual outcome might be, so the conspiracy theory gained popularity because it was a direct challenge to the narrative that didn't really require much in the way of introspection or learning.
As time passed, more people were able to look at things with cooler heads and knowledge spread, and we also got to see how things actually played out, and so it became unnecessary to resort to a conspiracy to say that the war was bad, or even that 9/11 was the government's fault. To the extent that it's still around on the right, it's probably because they haven't adapted to the later criticisms. They don't care about history or necessarily see the US supporting mujaheddin against the USSR as a bad thing, and they don't care about civilian casualties because they're brown and Muslim. There's a sliver of people who have those perspectives but also oppose the war because government bad, and they know that government bad generally isn't persuasive so there's still use for the conspiracy theory.