In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

The Sept. 11 attacks came during a boom time for conspiracy theories. A vast industry of radio talkers, book writers, and cranks was finding new audiences on the nascent internet and using new technology to spread their messages faster and farther.

This was a new generation of media savvy personalities who knew how to tap into the fears of white evangelicals, revenge-seeking militia members, anti-tax activists, libertarians, Clinton haters, and paranoids on both the far left and far right. Many believed a traumatic event, whether real or “false flag,” was imminent. Some even claimed that the government would perpetrate it, then blame a convenient figure around whom the country could rally its bloodlust and need for revenge.

When it finally happened, though, they were just as baffled and desperate for answers as the rest of us. And they turned to the gurus helping them shape their world views — who were also baffled. 

Three major figures in the conspiracy theory world broadcast live on the radio in those first hours after the Twin Towers went down. They started to solidify narratives that would drive the next two decades of conspiracy theories and myths about the attacks — even as basic facts about what had happened were hard to come by.

Bill Cooper, Alex Jones, and Art Bell were probably the three biggest names in fringe discourse in America in 2001. While they mostly disliked each other, they all essentially had the same audience and the same approach. They had huge audiences, their shows ran on hundreds of affiliates, and they had well-oiled monetization vectors – books, gold, supplements, radio advertisers. 

Bell was a foundational figure in conspiracy theorist circles thanks to his long-running late night show Coast to Coast AM, where his callers and guests explored everything from looming martial law to past lives to whether there was a human face carved into Mars. Meanwhile, Jones’s attention-getting stunts transformed him from an Austin, Texas public television curiosity into a national broadcaster in just a few years. And Cooper had spent the ‘90s as an almost prophetic figure in the U.S. militia movement, whose own dark journey had taken him to a looming crossroads with federal law enforcement that would cost him his life .

Their reactions to the attacks, the theories they endorsed, and the influence they had over how the event was perceived in those first hours are a critical window into how the conditions for the 9/11 Truth movement were set, and predicted America’s descent into the reflexive belief that any event, no matter how traumatic, was staged by the personal enemies of the believer.

And in an ironic twist of fate, September 2001 was one of the only times all three were broadcasting at the same time in the 21st century.

And so, on Sept. 11, as confusion reigned about how many people had died and what would happen next, the conspiracy theories that would become the drivers of a massive movement that crossed political and cultural lines around the world took form. It didn’t take months or days. It took minutes. And they didn’t start on obscure message boards or dank bookstores, they started on radio outlets with millions of listeners, minutes after the planes hit the Towers.

Bill Cooper had been on the air for hours by the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. He was desperate for real information, not something someone saw in a fax or forwarded email. And he was losing his cool with both callers and cable TV talking heads. He was, to use a word that might not have existed then, hangry.

Cooper was the biggest star in a loud, hostile movement that mashed up anti-government militias and UFO believers. That movement’s bible was Cooper’s 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse. Massively popular and never out of print, Horse became a secret history of the recent past that, despite being almost unreadable and heavily plagiarized from other sources, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Shortly after Pale Horse came out, Cooper launched his shortwave program The Hour of the Time. He would spend the next decade blasting conspiracy theories of every kind to the 100,000-watt transmitter at Nashville’s WWCR — World Wide Christian Radio — which in turn, transmitted Cooper all over the world.  

Cooper’s shows began with an anxiety-inducing barrage of barking dogs and blaring sirens, and were an encyclopedia of Clinton-era paranoia. Every night, Cooper would pontificate about Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, government coverups, black helicopters dropping federal jackbooted thugs on your property, the illegality of taxes and the Federal Reserve, and Biblical end times prophecy. 

Cooper’s style was both annoyingly pompous and deeply personal. Sometimes he sounded so depressed it was a wonder he got out of bed, while other times he happily chit-chatted live with his young daughter. He was often clearly drunk on the air, and would spend hours on rants about his own personal grievances, which were often deeply racist. Other times, he’d pass the minutes singing oldies, or just reminiscing. It was an unedited window into a very chaotic mind. 

But if Cooper’s shows could be erratic and vaguely terrifying, his performance on 9/11 could be described with another word: herculean.

Starting at about 9:30 a.m. in Arizona, an audibly stunned Cooper would spend the next 10 hours on the air, supposedly at the request of WWCR........

© Talking Points Memo