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Suspicious Minds

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MARCHING ORDERS Conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones leads a protest in New York (Photo: WeAreChange.org)
In fact, Rudkowski's mistrust for authority had been brewing for several years. Shortly after the attacks, at age 15, he took the subway to the nearest enlistment office to sign up for the army. "I just wanted to go fight some muslims," he says. "I thought they did it." Told by the recruiters to try again in three years, he focused on his basketball career. He was a crackerjack point guard, invited to tournaments that had been steppingstones for pro players. But at 17, he suffered a badly broken ankle, destroying his scholarship prospects. Around that time, he recalls, his worldview suddenly changed: He and some black friends had been hanging around in a white neighborhood when some racist cops attacked them. "They called me an 'N-lover,'" he says. "And they beat me up." He filed complaints and pursued them with the same focus and ferocity that made him such a fine point guard, but was dismissed at each turn. Without the focus of basketball, he began to explore his new preoccupation with government abuse of power. "It made me research the police state, which led me to Alex Jones," he says. It was an easy leap into the Truth movement, first as a member of a group called NY 9/11 Truth, and then—frustrated with what he saw as the inefficacy of that organization—as the founder of We Are Change.
Colbert's smile is frozen on his face. "That smirk won't work much longer!" Matt yells at him

Joining him early on in the new group were Mike Knarr, a self-employed 41-year-old who looks a bit like Jesse Ventura; Matt Lepacek, 26, a laconic programmer whose passion, apart from exposing the 9/11 conspiracy, is finishing a play about 16th-century essayist Francis Bacon; Manny Badillo, 32, a corporate-logo salesman who lost an uncle in the World Trade Center; and Sabrina Rivera, a 22-year-old accounting student. Badillo explains the organization's mission like this: "The mainstream media refuses to take on the 9/11 cover-up or hold the people in power accountable. So we're taking over. We're the new fourth estate." The resulting brand of activist amateur journalism is based on direct confrontations—what the group calls "Truth Squads"—that are designed to become mini-media events in their own right.

The strategy seems to be that a constant low-grade presence of conspiracy claims about 9/11 will prove more powerful in shaping public opinion than the many academic and government investigations that have undercut the Truthers' claims. But even among die-hard activists, there is not much agreement about what really happened on that day more than six years ago; while some talk of energy beams from outer space, holographic jets, or mini-nuclear bombs, the most popular hypothesis in the movement is probably the one advanced by Jones on his radio show. He argues that the conspirators likely had remote control overrides installed in the planes that eventually crashed into the Twin Towers. (According to this theory, the hijackers were nobodies who thought they had signed on for a drill.) Long before 9/11, Jones believes the towers themselves had been secretly rigged with demolition charges, specifically one called thermate. The Pentagon may have been hit by a missile while American Airlines 77 landed safely in Ohio—where the passengers were either liquidated or are still being detained.

But nearly everybody in the Truth movement agrees that the fishiest element of the tragedy was the collapse of WTC 7, a 47-story office building adjacent to the Twin Towers, which was never struck by an airplane. At 5:20 on the evening of September 11, 2001, after burning for much of the day, WTC 7 suddenly fell straight to the ground. Truthers maintain that steel skyscrapers simply do not and cannot collapse in this manner, and that nowhere in the annals of structural engineering is there a case of one having done so. They believe that the building was rigged with demolition charges. Ask why, and you're likely to hear murky talk about CIA offices on the 25th floor or insurance money reaped by the site's developer, Larry Silverstein. (While a government team was expected to publish an official explanation for the structural failure shortly after Radar went to press, a Popular Mechanics investigation determined that fire and damage from debris fatally compromised key support columns.)

In the weeks that followed the Brzezinski clash, WAC looked for any opportunity to take on members of the "global elite." They confronted Al Gore, John Edwards, and David Rockefeller. Rudkowski and two friends heckled New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for 16 minutes straight on a subway car, while Bloomberg tried to stand out of view behind his security detail.

But their splashiest success was a face-off with Rudy Giuliani at a press event in the Bronx. While Rudkowski filmed, Rivera approached the candidate and introduced herself as a 9/11 family member (not entirely accurate, though an ex-boyfriend's father did die that day). As Giuliani leaned forward sympathetically, she went into Truth Squad mode: "You told Peter Jennings of ABC News [you knew] that the buildings were going to collapse—how come people in the buildings weren't notified? ... And how do you sleep at night?" The ex-mayor registered surprise, then replied that he'd known no such thing. Lepacek, also on hand, then stepped in and insisted Giuliani had said precisely that to Jennings. Giuliani backpedaled somewhat and said he'd thought any collapse would occur over the course of "seven or eight hours"—not minutes. New York media picked up the story. WNBC reported that Giuliani had been confronted by a "radical group" and showed a transcript from the Jennings broadcast, in which Giuliani does seem to suggest he had been warned. "That part was great," says Rudkowski. "Everyone could see that he was lying."

By last fall, the group was keeping an online calendar of appearances by major public figures, allowing members to sign up to Truth Squad them. Meanwhile, the confrontations became more audacious. When Bill Clinton was appearing at a Manhattan Barnes & Noble, the group went in beforehand and hid a wireless public-address speaker in the store. While the former president signed books, the room was suddenly filled with a mysterious booming voice, proclaiming that "9/11 was an inside job" and alleging that "Bill" had been complicit in CIA drug running. As the former president stoically carried on autographing cover pages for confused customers, security guards and secret service agents hunted frantically for several minutes until they found and turned off the device.

That prank became the prelude to a higher-profile confrontation with Clinton in late October, when a WAC member in Minneapolis heckled him at a large fund-raiser for Hillary. This time, the ex-president fired back. "'9/11 was an inside job?'" he said, angrily repeating the heckler's line. "How dare you! It was not an inside job." The footage immediately went up on Drudge and got heavy play on the cable news networks.

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS We Are Change's Manny Badillo spreads the Truth gospel to a local television reporter (Photo: WeAreChange.org)
Just a few days prior, nine members of WAC's Los Angeles chapter had made even bigger waves by interrupting a live taping of Real Time, unfurling banners and peppering Bill Maher with questions about WTC 7's collapse. The host had drawn their ire by posing the question in a previous show: "How big a lunatic do you have to be to watch two giant airliners packed with jet fuel slam into buildings on live TV, igniting a massive inferno that burned for two hours, and then think, well, if you believe that was the cause [of the collapses] ... ?" While the hecklers shouted about "an inside job," Maher ran up into the audience. "I'll kick your ass out of here!" he threatened one. It made for first-rate unscripted drama, and the clip was one of the most watched videos on YouTube for days afterward.

This blitzkrieg by WAC also made Truther activists the enemy du jour on cable news shows. Maher complained some more about them. Bill O'Reilly delivered a meandering rant describing the "far left" provocateurs as "so out of control that someone is going to get hurt." (In fact, We Are Change is overwhelmingly made up of Ron Paul–supporting libertarian conservatives.) Glenn Beck of CNN declared that Truthers were "dangerous" and "the kind of group a Timothy McVeigh would join."

But strangely, despite all the attention, nobody in the mainstream media seemed to notice that one small organization—Rudkowski doesn't keep an exact membership tally, but estimates it's now about 500 in all—was behind all the stunts. We Are Change was never named in any of the news reports or editorial condemnations. No one from the group was ever asked to defend or explain their actions.

Kevin Smith, a talk show host on the online network We the People Radio, says the larger Truther community was impressed: "You had 20 kids with camcorders drawing more attention to their issue than 100,000 traditional activists would have done."

"Yeah, our actions get a lot of attention," says Badillo, sounding glum. "But they never name us. We've got to figure that one out."

The epicenter of the Truther movement is an unmarked, bunker-like storefront with buttermilk-colored vinyl siding and a no trespassing sign, in a residential section of Austin, Texas. It is the broadcast studio for the Alex Jones Show.
"Yeah, in the Truth movement I'm pretty much as big as it gets," says Jones, a compact former bodybuilder. The 33-year-old speaks in a gravelly baritone fit for the public address announcer at a monster truck rally—a voice so gruff it almost sounds like he's faking it. A Winston burns between the fingers of his right hand in the shag-carpeted front room of his facility, as his employees, five young white guys who could all stand to get some sun, putter around, primed to hop to if summoned by Jones. Though it's a bright day, the office is dim; the windows are all closed and the blinds drawn. The modest building has a highly advanced alarm system. Jones is pretty sure his enemies would like to see him dead. "I get death threats all time," he says.

Who are his enemies? The secret rulers of the world and their functionaries—a group that by his figuring includes, among others, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, Prince Charles, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands ("huge in the arms business," he says), the Bushes, the Clintons, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. These elite, he says, want to seize control of the whole planet and reduce everyone to microchipped, constantly surveilled, brainwashed drones. But even that dismal fate wouldn't satisfy them. The endgame—which just happens to be the subject of Jones's new documentary, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement—is a plan to exterminate approximately 5 billion people. In a nutshell (so to speak) the elites want to steal our stuff and have more elbow room. (Apparently, our betters prefer plenty of pastoral Lebensraum to a bottomless supply of docile slave labor.) "These people are unbelievably evil," Jones says. "They want to enslave and kill my family. But, you know what? I'm not gonna let 'em!" He seems to be laboring to sound outraged, which is understandable, since he rants like this for three hours a day on his radio show. He also makes the point frequently on his network of conspiracy news websites (including prisonplanet.com), which draw more than a million unique visitors a week, he claims.

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