"Truth" Week Desperation

I found this post over at the Truth Action Forums, where some of the relatively sane 9-11 CTs hang out, and thought it was interesting enough to highlight.

This just keeps getting more and more strange, or out of hand, depending on how you look at it. I suppose this leads me to wonder what Alten's commitment to the movement will be after he moves on to promoting his next book which I understand is another in his series about a prehistoric shark.

I was on the latest conference call. Bill Douglas gave us our "marching orders" while he and others including Alten kept emphasizing that this is an all or nothing opportunity, and that the movement was close to falling apart and needed this kind of shot in the arm. Then everyone lobbied for their pet projects to be the focus of the next week of truth.

A couple of times I honestly felt like some of the people talking were trying to pose this as a last chance. The meeting had a mild feeling of desperation. Everyone involved is REALLY hoping that 10,000 books get sold. Like they saw it as their ticket to the big game. But I wonder how they will be feeling if this doesn't happen. Maybe a bit disenchanted?

I have a theory about what is happening here. In the last year we've seen two major trends in the movement. Hits at our prominent websites have gone down, while new chapters of our grassroots organization and street actions have gone up. The people who have been trying to create national coordination for this movement are likely feeling frustrated as people are turning to local coordination.

In contrast, groups like TruthAction and WeAreChange have been drawing participants and forming chapters that can directly address their regional concerns. I wouldn't be surprised to find that there are more people on the street promoting 9/11 truth than ever before.

So I'm thinking that maybe some of the "movement veterans" that we really do respect a great deal for their knowledge and commitment, are feeling some of their influence diminish. Like librarians in the age of the internet. I'm not saying we don't need these people, but possibly some of them are out of step with the direction this is all heading.

We certainly have noticed that hits at prominent websites are going down; I commented on 9-11 Blogger's pretty substantial year/year drop in February; the March numbers are meaningless because the Sitemeter code was turned off for awhile due to reported problems (probably legit; sometimes Sitemeter, like Digg last week, can cause things to crawl), but I would be very surprised if they didn't have a significant decline from the year earlier; this month so far they're at about 51,100 hits, which projects out to 191,000 for the month, compared to 319,000 last April. Admittedly, April was an unusually high month in 2007 probably because of the launch of the Fat Irish Lesbians for 9-11 Truth (Rosie O'Donnell, charter member), but still, there's little doubt they've hit the iceberg.

There did seem to be some increasing activism by Truthers for awhile there, but even that seems to be dying down. Aside from the San Diego chapter, the groups are still very small in size, and even there the numbers look padded by piggybacking on other causes (like the antiwar movement). The Phoenix group, hot on the heels of a DRG appearance in February, are doing nothing for the second month in a row on the 11th, although Kow-Killer Knudson is talking about an overpass action like they did back in September. Of course, overpass actions are mostly "Google WTC-7" signs, which, you know, should result in increased website traffic, so....

I do think the problem the movement has is lots of followers and no leader, partially because the ones in the forefront have few leadership skills (Griffin, Steven Jones), or turn out to be first class crackpots (Uncle Fetzer, Alex Jones).