Changers Hit Radar's Screen

I had heard about this piece but couldn't locate it online; thanks to emailer Gary for pointing it out.

Rudkowski, who has a thick Brooklyn accent and an implacable, heavy-lidded stare reminiscent of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, was not directly affected by the attacks. On the morning of September 11, 2001, he was sitting in a ninth-grade Spanish class at a public high school eight miles south of the towers. None of his friends or family members died that day. But exposing the perpetrators of the plot—not the 19 patsies with box cutters, but the real criminals—had in recent years become the focus of his life. He spent Saturdays at Ground Zero with banners and pamphlets, proselytizing to passersby. He knew the material in Loose Change by heart. When he was free on weekday afternoons, which was often, he'd listen to streaming audio of the Alex Jones Show, an immensely popular conspiracy radio program out of Austin, Texas. Jones was his guru. "Seeing Alex Jones's documentaries made me realize that there are a lot of things people don't know," Rudkowski says, "that they should know."

It's a solid piece, perhaps a trifle too balanced in its approach towards the Troofers but the subtitle has got to sting:

How a ragtag group of conspiracy nuts is changing public perception of 9/11

Be sure to read through to the end, where the writer talks about a failed bit of hecklivism towards Stephen Colbert. Typically for the goofballs, they all think he must secretly know that 9-11 was an injside job, so they go nuts when he fails to acknowledge it. Unfortunately, they've decided not to release that video.

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