I was just looking through an old New York Magazine article of March, 2006, "The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll" by Mark Jacobson, and while googling around trying to nail down its publication date I noticed the reaction from the Usual Suspects labeling the article a "Hit Piece".
And that reminded me that almost every time we got any media coverage, we (well, not me--some of us) would immediately be labeling it as a "hit piece" because it wasn't conspiratorial enough for us. I see this syndrome in the Amazon reviews of Philip Shenon's very useful book "The Commission," which is panned by truthers because it won't say the magic words they want to hear--even though if they'd bother to read the book they'd see that those words are between almost every line and the book ends (in the "Acknowledgments" section) with the words "If the full truth is ever told about September 11, 2001, it will be [the Jersey widows'] doing. It has not been told yet."
And "hit job"--that's the public reaction. What do you want to bet that almost every journalist who dared to write about the truth movement got bombarded with emails and 3:00 a.m. phone calls delivering death threats from self-professed truthers because the journalist didn't say "inside job"? Not to mention kooky and scary conspiracy theories up the wazoo?
The knee-jerk "Hit Job" reaction was very self-defeating. I'm sure we can all describe a whole lot of activity by truthers--and by false truthers out to do us harm by masquerading as truthers--that has really hurt the movement.
I was late to come to 9/11 truth, only starting to find my feet as an activist in 2005. By 2007 I recognized that while I was in a great big hurry to achieve something and go mainstream so I could have my life back, most of those in the activist group I attended were happy to pursue 9/11 truth as a hobby for the rest of their lives, and didn't really care if we accomplished anything or not, and perhaps even subconsciously wished 9/11 truth to remain arcane knowledge possessed only by superior beings such as themselves. In the spring of 2007 I asked the group, "How do you think we might self-sabotage in the near future?" And I was assured that we were far too enlightened for that.
What I was denying in framing the issue in the future was that by the spring of 2007 we had already been self-sabotaging for some time, though I was dimly aware that major programs of self-sabotage were already underway. The Phoenix Conference, for instance, might have been to the Truth Movement what Altamont was to the hippie movement.
It might be well for us to do a post-mortem, a cautionary tale for truth movements in the future.