Everyone was thinking "it was a controlled demolition" or talking about Lazer beams, trying to explain that the plane was edited in, maybe the towers never even existed and were invented by the media. But in reality it was a lot simpler, the Saudis sent people to fly planes into towers. Was the "jet fuel can't melt steel beams", like, purposeful misdirection or were conspiracy theorists just too imaginative for their own good
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
"hijacking planes to be shot down or given the appearance of being shot down" just some food for thought.
vis a vis 9/11 and trying to understand the facts of the case, because I think its an important part of demystifying the world, understanding the fact that people in power(bush cheney rumsfeld et all) would kill thousands of their own citizens in order to stoke the fires of war. That one can come to incorrect conclusions about our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the modern american security state/industrial complex if they dont understand that salient facts about how we got there and this key event in the process.
but I would also posit that a lot of liberals and folks still believe in some fundamental goodness in the world today, that neoliberal capitalism arcs towards justice, and find it impossible to reckon with the reality that the bad guys really do control the world, and do terrible things to keep their control. To understand that would be to drop the illusions, and maybe to have to do something about it all(revolution eh?), so they prefer to remain in their preformed opinions about it all.
It is wild that people can know about operation condor, our involvement in drug smuggling in Vietman and Afghanistan, the gulf of Tonkin incident, getting Nazis out of Europe and into places of power around the globe post WWII, our wholesale support of genocides and their subtle coverups in nearly every armed conflict we've been in since WWII, etc etc and yet when they come around to JFK or 9/11 its just "his head did that" and "idk m8 maybe the planes missed the airport"
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Especially about such a public and large scale event.
at a certain point "occam's razor" just defaults to "what can I say that's still respectable in most circles" and not "what does the evidence add up to"