At a time when news reports are awash with warnings about misinformation and conspiracy theories, it’s surprising that more attention is not being paid to the fact that filmmaker Spike Lee has just come out as a 9/11 truther — and HBO has agreed to spread his crazy conspiracy theory.
Lee has produced a new series for HBO, titled New York Epicenters 9/11-2021½, covering both the pandemic and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The series is airing in four parts, with the final episode (the one featuring guests who claim the Twin Towers were likely destroyed by a controlled demolition, possibly as part of an inside job) airing on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
In promoting the series, Lee sat down for an interview with the New York Times. During the discussion, the interviewer, Reggie Ugwu, broached the topic of Lee’s insane 9/11 trutherism, asking the director to address the parts of the series that descend headfirst into “inside job” kookery.
“The last episode of the series devotes a lot of time to questioning how and why the towers fell,” said Ugwu. “You interview several members of the conspiracy group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Why did you want to include their perspective?”
Lee replied, “Because I still don’t … I mean, I got questions. And I hope that maybe the legacy of this documentary is that Congress holds a hearing, a congressional hearing about 9/11.”
Great idea. Maybe they should call it the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. No one has thought of this before.
“You don’t buy the official explanations?” Ugwu pressed.
“The amount of heat that it takes to make steel melt,” Lee said, actually trotting out the “fire can’t melt steel” canard, “that temperature’s not reached. And then the juxtaposition of the way Building 7 fell to the ground — when you put it next to other building collapses that were demolitions, it’s like you’re looking at the same thing. But people going to make up their own mind. My approach is: Put the information in the movie, and let people decide for themselves. I respect the intelligence of the audience.”
As a side note, it’s strange this interview promoting Lee’s new series exists at all, considering Ugwu said in 2019 of the pro-life film Unplanned: “Of course, no film is entitled to media exposure.” Well, that’s an interesting view for someone who is now promoting truly insane conspiracy theories, isn’t it?
Ugwu persisted, telling Lee, “Right, but you don’t say ‘make up your own mind’ about whether or not the vaccine is poison or ‘make up your own mind’ about whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected.”
“People are going to think what they think, regardless,” Lee deflected. “I’m not dancing around your question,” he went on, dancing around the question. “People are going to think what they think. … And you know what? I’m still here, going on four decades of filmmaking.”
After the interview was published — why? — and after a few responsible newsrooms rightly asked, “What the hell?”, Lee amended his series to edit out the 9/11 truther guests.
Well, at least the filmmaker didn’t question the efficacy of cloth masks. That surely would’ve earned him at least an angry segment from NBC News’s “disinformation” specialists or even CNN’s crackerjack “this is an apple” fact-checking squad. He might have even been banned from Twitter — who knows?
As things stand now, neither CNN nor NBC News has had anything to say about Lee’s embrace of a very old, completely insane, false, and worn-out conspiracy theory.
