The Rabbit Hole Has an Exit: 25 Years of 9/11, a Lifetime of Psyops, and Why I Ended Up in Bitcoin

• My 2008
• Two rooms, twenty-five years later
• The half-life of an official story
• The building the Commission forgot
• Who benefits, then prove it
• From the question to the anarchist
• The peaceful exit
• Where the rabbit hole came out
• A note on sourcing

In 2008 I was 21, I’d just voted for a man who promised to end the wars, and I decided to spend one weekend reading the official story of 9/11 so I could stop thinking about it. That was eighteen years ago.

Twenty-five years after the towers fell, we still can’t agree on the question. Here’s how official stories decay, how I fell down the rabbit hole, and why the peaceful way out was money nobody can print for a war.

§My 2008

I already disliked Bush. I was very much against the wars, and in November 2008 I let myself be convinced that voting for Obama was how you ended them. The disappointment came later, and it came slowly: more countries bombed, drone strikes dispatched by the hundreds, and that pesky Guantanamo Bay just never getting closed. The 9/11 questions and the political disillusionment fed each other, but they didn’t arrive as one moment. The questions came first.

Because that same year I did the thing you weren’t supposed to do. I tried to actually understand the official story of 9/11. Not the movie version. The mechanics. I figured I’d spend a weekend and come out reassured.

Instead I watched Loose Change.

Three guys from upstate New York (Dylan Avery, Korey Rowe, Jason Bermas) made it on a laptop for a few thousand dollars, and Vanity Fair called it maybe “the first Internet blockbuster.” It was also wrong about a lot. The Cleveland airport thing. The voice-morphing thing. Later cuts dropped those claims, which, credit to the filmmakers, is more than NIST ever did with its own.

But the film didn’t convince me of any one theory. It broke the spell that said the questions themselves were off limits. It made me watch Building 7 fall, which I’d never seen on television, then read what the government said about it, then notice the distance between the two. Once you’ve noticed that distance once, you notice it everywhere.

That’s the real rabbit hole. Not the specific theories, the habit of questioning and looking deeper. And finding the difference between the truth and the claim, ever widening.

§Two rooms, twenty-five years later

Today a University of Texas panel in Austin takes up “9/11: What Happened, and What It Means Today,” with former NATO ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchison on the dais and a program built around energy security and great power rivalry. In New York, Turning the Tide runs September 10 to 13 at El Museo del Barrio: family members, first responders and researchers, among them Bob McIlvaine, whose son Bobby died at the World Trade Center; James Corbett on the money trail; Richard Grove on the underground history; and, for Thursday night’s opening remarks, Jason Bermas. The guy whose film started all this for me.

One room is maintaining the machine 9/11 built. The other is asking whether the story it was built on is true.

§The half-life of an official story

You see, psyops have a shelf life. Not because the truth eventually “comes out” in some dramatic moment. It doesn’t. It leaks. It gets declassified on a Tuesday when nobody’s watching, and by the time it reaches the public the people responsible are retired, dead, or on a book tour.

March 1962. The Joint Chiefs send Robert McNamara a memo titled Operation Northwoods proposing staged attacks to justify invading Cuba. Their words: “We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.” “Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” A drone painted as a civilian airliner, shot down and blamed on Havana. Kennedy killed it. The documents stayed classified until November 1997. Thirty-five years. Nobody who wrote it ever answered for it.

August 1964. The Pentagon reports a second North Vietnamese attack on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Three days later Congress hands Johnson his war. The attack never happened. NSA historian Robert Hanyok later found the agency passed along only the signals intelligence that supported the attack and withheld the roughly 90 percent that contradicted it. His study stayed classified until November 2005. McNamara, on camera in The Fog of War: “It didn’t happen.” Forty-one years, and 58,000 names on a wall in between.

February 2003. Colin Powell holds up a vial at the UN. Eighteen months later the government’s own Iraq Survey Group reports there were no stockpiles. Fastest correction on this list. Still not fast enough to stop the war it was built to sell.

Do you see it? The lag between the lie and the paperwork isn’t a bug. It is the psyop. A false story only has to hold long enough to get the policy through. After that the correction can arrive whenever it likes, because the resolution, the invasion, the agency already exist. Nobody unbuilds them.

So where is 9/11 on that clock? Further along than most people think. You don’t need a leak. You need to read what the government already published.

§The building the Commission forgot

At 5:20 that afternoon a third skyscraper fell. World Trade Center 7 was 47 stories of steel, a block north of the towers, and no plane touched it. It came down in under seven seconds, straight down. Steel-framed high-rises had burned far longer and stayed up (One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia burned for 18 hours in 1991); none had ever collapsed from fire. Then the 9/11 Commission published its 567-page report in 2004 and didn’t mention the collapse at all. Not a sentence. The only steel frame skyscraper in history to be brought down at free fall speeds by office fires, on the most scrutinized day in American history, and the official investigation skipped it.

NIST got to it in 2008, seven years later. Its draft said the building fell 40 percent slower than free fall, which mattered, because free fall means nothing underneath is resisting. A high school physics teacher named David Chandler measured the video during the comment period and showed the draft was wrong. NIST’s final report conceded the point: “Stage 2 (1.75 to 4.0 seconds): gravitational acceleration (free fall).” Two and a quarter seconds. Roughly eight stories, about 105 feet, during which the government’s own model requires every supporting column to have given way at once. NIST called it “the first known instance of a tall building brought down primarily by uncontrolled fires.”

Did they test the steel for explosives? No. Their own FAQ: analysis “would not necessarily have been conclusive.” When an engineer filed a FOIA request in 2009 for the computer model that produced the collapse animation, NIST refused, on the grounds that releasing the data “might jeopardize public safety.” A collapse model of a building that no longer exists.

The steel that was examined told its own story. FEMA’s 2002 report, Appendix C, describes a sample from Building 7 eaten through by “high-temperature corrosion due to a combination of oxidation and sulfidation,” a reaction near 1,000 degrees Celsius. “The severe corrosion and subsequent erosion of Samples 1 and 2 are a very unusual event,” the engineers wrote, and “no clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified.” The New York Times called it “perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.” NIST never explained it either. In 2020 a four-year University of Alaska Fairbanks study concluded “that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11,” and that what happened was “the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”

Then there’s the morning itself. NORAD gave the Commission three different timelines for its response. Its co-chairs, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, later wrote that they were “set up to fail,” and Kean said of the military’s testimony: “It was just so far from the truth.” The commission secretly debated referring the Pentagon and FAA to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. Its senior counsel John Farmer, the man who ran the investigation into that morning, put it flatly in his 2009 book: “at some level of the government, at some point in time… there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.” The NORAD tapes explain part of why. At 8:37 a.m., when Boston Center called the air defense sector about a hijacking, the first words from the sergeant who answered were “Is this real-world or exercise?” There were live air-defense exercises running that morning, one of several that happened to be rehearsing the exact threat that happened to be actually happening. The mission crew commander’s first thought, in his words: “Somebody started the exercise early.”

And the investigation that produced all this? The White House resisted an independent investigation for most of a year, agreed to one 442 days after the attacks, and gave it an initial budget of $3 million (it eventually got about $15 million). The Columbia shuttle investigation got $50 million.

None of that is a theory. It’s the record. And the record is still moving: the UK Supreme Court hears Campbell v Attorney General on October 14 and 15, a family’s five-year fight to reopen the inquest into Geoff Campbell’s death in the North Tower after the government refused because 9/11 “had already been fully investigated.” Senator Ron Johnson says he wants hearings on Building 7, and Ted Walter’s team is drafting a thousand-page 9/11 Truth and Accountability Report for his subcommittee; Walter walked through it with Corbett on September 2 and on Grand Theft World this week. Thirty-five years for Northwoods. Forty-one for Tonkin. Twenty-five and counting for this.

§Who benefits, then prove it

The habit needed discipline. Two people gave it to me.

Corbett follows the money instead of the physics, because money leaves receipts. On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced the Pentagon couldn’t account for $2.3 trillion in transactions; it was the top story for one day. Larry Silverstein signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center on July 24, 2001, insured it for $3.55 billion, and eventually collected roughly $4.55 billion after litigating whether two planes were one event or two. Put options on United and American spiked in the days before. A 2006 study in the Journal of Business found the pattern “consistent with informed investors having traded options in advance of the attacks.” And the SEC, after reviewing 9.5 million transactions, said it had “not developed any evidence suggesting that those who had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks traded on the basis of that information.”

Read that sentence twice. It isn’t a denial that anyone knew. It takes for granted that people had advance knowledge and argues only that they didn’t trade on it. The government’s own August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief was titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Foreknowledge was never the question. The question is who had it, how specific it was, and why the people writing the official sentences keep conceding it in the subordinate clause.

Grove’s story is smaller and more human. Before Grand Theft World he sold software to Marsh & McLennan, which occupied floors 93 through 100 of the North Tower. By his account he’d flagged roughly $10 million in suspicious billing on a project inside Marsh as a whistleblower, the people he’d been working with on it were among the 295 Marsh employees killed that morning, and he was late to a meeting in the building because of traffic. His whole project since has been one question: when institutions fail this badly, who inside them benefited, and why does nobody ask?

That is Murray Rothbard’s question, almost word for word. In April 1977 he published a short essay in Reason called “The Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited.” Anyone who offers “a hard-nosed analysis of who our rulers are, of how their political and economic interests interlock,” he wrote, “is invariably denounced” as a conspiracy theorist. Then he gave the method: “The conspiracy theorist asks himself the question cui bono? Who benefits from this measure? If he finds that Measure A benefits X and Y, his next step is to investigate the hypothesis: did X and Y in fact lobby or exert pressure for the passage of Measure A?”

§From the question to the anarchist

Apply the method to the whole quarter century instead of one morning. Who benefited? Not the 2,977 dead. Not the responders now dying of cancers after being told the air was safe. Not you in your socks at the airport. Institutions benefited. The Patriot Act passed 45 days after the attacks, largely unread. Then Homeland Security, the TSA, the surveillance Snowden exposed, two decades of war, a defense budget that never came down. Randolph Bourne wrote in 1918 that “war is the health of the State.” Every psyop above ended with the state bigger than it started. Failure was rewarded. It always is.

They know it, too. In 2004 a senior Bush adviser, widely believed to be Karl Rove, told the journalist Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, judiciously, as you will, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Read that next to the declassification dates. Northwoods, Tonkin, Building 7. That isn’t a boast. It’s the operating manual.

So somewhere in the early 2010s, watching the man I’d voted for run the same wars with a better vocabulary, I’d arrived, without quite meaning to, at anarchism. Not the black bloc version. The Rothbard version: an institution with a monopoly on violence and a documented habit of lying about when it uses it shouldn’t be trusted with either.

The problem was that it made me angry and gave me nowhere to put it. You can’t vote against Northwoods. I’d tried voting against the wars and gotten more wars. You can’t protest a classification schedule. For a few years I was the guy at the party you didn’t want to get stuck with. (Some of you are nodding. Some of you are that guy right now. Keep reading.)

§The peaceful exit

The way out came from asking Rothbard’s question about the mechanism instead of the motive. How does a government pay for a psyop and the war it sells? It prints. Inflation is the tax that never needs a vote, and a state that never needs a vote never needs your consent. (The long version is in The War Machine Runs on Fiat.)

You don’t have to agree with a word I’ve said about Building 7 to follow me here. You can accept the official account in full and still not want your savings in the currency that paid for Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. If you’re against the wars, you’re already against the money.

Bitcoin can’t be printed to fund something you weren’t told about. Its supply is public, verifiable, and unchangeable by any chairman, senator or general. Northwoods was “trust us, we’ll tell you in 35 years.” Bitcoin is “here’s the ledger, check it yourself.” And it’s peaceful. You don’t overthrow anything. You stop holding the thing they print and start holding the thing they can’t. It doesn’t throw a brick. It just declines. One caveat: leave it on an exchange and you’ve rebuilt the trust relationship you were escaping. The keys are the exit. (Our CEO Adam O’Brien wrote about what a custodial customer list becomes in Jump out of the pot.)

§Where the rabbit hole came out

Turning the Tide runs through Sunday, free livestream at TurningTheTide911.org. Jason Bermas had the opening slot yesterday. Eighteen years ago his film knocked me off the official story and into a decade of asking who benefits. I didn’t end up where he probably expected. I ended up holding my own keys and helping other people do the same at a company that has never once held a customer’s coins. Strange place for a rabbit hole to come out. But it’s the only exit I found that didn’t require anyone else to change their mind first.

I still want answers about 9/11. I also want less of my life tied to the money that pays for the wars I marched against at 21. I don’t have to finish the first before starting the second.

Not your keys, not your coins. And if you can’t verify it yourself, it was never your truth to begin with.

§A note on sourcing

The events. Program, speakers and livestream details from TurningTheTide911.org and IC911.org (coalition: IC911, DC 9/11 Truth, The 9/11 War Room, Firefighters For 9/11 Truth, Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, RichardGage911). The Austin panel (“9/11: What Happened, and What It Means Today,” September 11, 2026, 4:00 pm, Kay Bailey Hutchison et al.) from the Clements Center and Strauss Center pages at UT Austin.

Corbett Report. “Ted Walter Helps Turn the Tide on 9/11” (September 2, 2026); “9/11 Battle Royale” (September 6, 2026); the money figures as compiled in “9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money” (September 11, 2015). Re-verify the Silverstein settlement at publish; sources range from $4.55 billion to $4.6 billion. Marsh itself puts its dead at 295.

Grand Theft World. Episode 303, “Solving 9/11,” with Ted Walter and Richard Gage (September 7, 2026); clips at gtw.clipgenie.com. Grove’s Marsh and SilverStream account is his own testimony, first given in 2006, presented here as his account.

Building 7 and the Commission. NIST, “Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC 7 Investigation” (free-fall wording, “first known instance,” thermite testing, and the Section 7d “might jeopardize public safety” exemption); NIST NCSTAR 1A (November 2008) and the revised November 2008 technical briefing (free fall “over approximately 8 stories”). David Chandler’s comment is documented in the August 2008 briefing record. FEMA 403, Appendix C (May 2002); note Sample 1 is from WTC 7 and Sample 2 from one of the towers. James Glanz, “Engineers Have a Culprit in the Strange Collapse of 7 World Trade Center,” New York Times, November 29, 2001. University of Alaska Fairbanks, “A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7,” final report March 2020 (funded by AE911Truth). 9/11 Commission Report, chapter 9 (7 WTC appears only as the OEM headquarters). Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent (2006); Dan Eggen, “9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon,” Washington Post, August 2, 2006 (the criminal-referral debate and Kean’s “so far from the truth”). John Farmer, The Ground Truth (2009). Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes,” Vanity Fair, August 2006. Time, “9/11 Commission Funding Woes,” March 26, 2003 ($3 million initial vs $50 million for Columbia); the Commission’s July 22, 2004 media advisory gives its cumulative budget as $15 million. One Meridian Plaza: NFPA / USFA fire investigation reports, 1991.

The trading and the warning. SEC Division of Enforcement, “Pre-September 11, 2001 Trading Review,” memorandum of May 15, 2002 (the quoted sentence). Allen M. Poteshman, “Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” Journal of Business 79, no. 4 (2006), pp. 1703–1726. CIA, President’s Daily Brief, August 6, 2001, “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” declassified 2004.

UK case. R (Campbell) v His Majesty’s Attorney General, UKSC/2025/0162, hearing October 14 and 15, 2026, per the UK Supreme Court and Doughty Street Chambers.

Ron Johnson. IC911’s April 22, 2025 report on his remarks to Benny Johnson; NBC News coverage of the same.

Historical psyops. Northwoods: March 13, 1962 Joint Chiefs memorandum (quotes are from the memo’s appendix, “Pretexts to Justify US Military Intervention in Cuba”), released by the Assassination Records Review Board November 18, 1997, popularized in Bamford’s Body of Secrets (2001). Tonkin: Hanyok’s NSA study, declassified November 30, 2005; McNamara in The Fog of War (2003). Iraq Survey Group final report, September 30, 2004.

Loose Change. Original April 2005; Second Edition December 2005, recut June 2006; Final Cut November 2007. Vanity Fair, August 2006.

The Suskind quote. Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004. Attributed there to an unnamed senior Bush adviser; widely credited to Karl Rove, who has denied it. Internal dashes rendered as commas per house style.

Thinkers. Murray Rothbard, “The Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited,” Reason, April 1977, pp. 39–40. Randolph Bourne, “The State” (1918, published 1919). Mises on war finance as discussed in the linked War Machine piece.

Originally published at bitcoinwell.com/blog