A listener named Benny asked me a question this week, and it's a fair one.

We connected on Facebook years ago, back when our page was small enough that I could still answer people one at a time. He and I seem to agree on a lot of things. We don't agree on this one.

His question, more or less: how can you be open to the idea that an election was rigged and then turn around and say 9/11 wasn't an inside job?

Let me start with definitions, because the words are doing the work here.

A conspiracy is a secret plan by two or more people to do something illegal, harmful, or dishonest. Those are real. And history is full of them.

A conspiracy theory is a little bit different. It's an explanation that blames a secret plot by a powerful group — which we've just established certainly exists — while rejecting the more probable explanation.

I know that isn't how most people use the phrase today. But that last part of the definition is what matters to me. It isn't just another attempt at an explanation. It reaches for the less probable answer instead of the more probable one.

So the question is which explanation is more plausible for what happened on the morning of 9/11.

Nineteen men who believed Americans were infidels boarded four airplanes with box cutters, killed the crews, took the cockpits, and flew them into buildings.

On Flight 93 the passengers fought back. They kept that plane from reaching the White House or the U.S. Capitol, and it went down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania instead. The passengers should be remembered as heroes.

Osama bin Laden had been telling anyone who would listen, for years, why he hated the United States and why he felt justified waging jihad against her. He was enraged that American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, the country that holds Islam's holiest sites.

He said it in 1996. He said it again in 1998, when he put his name to a document calling for the murder of any American, anywhere on earth.

That wasn't a hidden motive somebody had to dig up. He published it, and he was proud of it.

Am I telling you our government did everything right? Absolutely not. Am I telling you our government wouldn't lie to you? Of course not — I tell you the opposite on this program on a regular basis.

Some of those terrorists sat in American flight schools and told their instructors they didn't need to learn how to land the aircraft. Only how to fly it.

That should have set off every alarm bell in our national defense system. It did for a few people, but they weren't able to do anything about it.

The Phoenix memo existed. The warnings existed. The names existed. It all sat inside agencies that didn't hand it across the hallway, and when it finally reached the people who could have acted, nobody moved.

That's not a conspiracy, my friends. That's an inept federal government sitting on a mountain of information it couldn't sort, staffed by people who either weren't motivated enough, didn't understand what they were looking at, or didn't have the tools to make sense of it.

Nearly three thousand Americans died that day, and we've been living with the consequences ever since.

Incompetence explains more about 9/11 than conspiracy ever will.

I know about the Rumsfeld speech. September 10th, 2001 — the day before — he stood up at the Pentagon and said that by some estimates they could not track $2.3 trillion in transactions. People look at the calendar and think they buried that the very next day, intentionally.

I understand the thinking. It just doesn't hold up in this case.

That accounting mess was in a Pentagon inspector general report in February 2000, and in the newspaper a month after that. Rumsfeld was quoting an old problem, not confessing a new one. So in that sense, it really wasn't news.

Also worth remembering: the Bush administration had only been in the White House since January of 2001. Any Pentagon accounting problems — or fraud — would have likely been during the Clinton administration.

A Republican administration wouldn't have had protecting a Democrat administration very high on its priority list.

If the purpose of 9/11 was to stage an attack that buried an announcement, why make the announcement at all? Why not schedule it for 8:00 the next morning, minutes before the first plane hits, and let it vanish in the noise?

Announcing it a full day early is the one thing you would not do.

Remember Chandra Levy? She was a federal intern in Washington who disappeared in the spring of 2001, and her case ate up the news all summer.

Reporters were camped outside a congressman's apartment on the morning of September 11th — she had been linked to him — and by that afternoon they were gone. The story never really came back.

By that same logic you could just as easily say a congressman arranged the whole thing to make his problem disappear. Nobody says that because it just isn’t the best explanation for what happened.

Does that mean every question about that day is settled? Absolutely not. People bring up Building 7, and I understand why. It's perhaps the most inexplicable thing that happened on 9/11. NIST spent years on it and concluded the fires brought it down. You can go read it yourself — I've put it below.

And on stolen elections: I've never definitively said an election was stolen. I've said I have questions, and I do. I may even have my suspicions. Maybe even strong suspicions.

My problem is that we aren't allowed to discuss these things openly without the threat of censorship, or worse.

When a state doesn't require an ID to vote and mails out ballots by the millions to mismanaged voter databases, you don't need a secret plot to end up somewhere bad. You just need a system built loosely enough that nobody can prove anything either way.

That's a different claim than saying somebody conspired to steal it — though I certainly imagine there are plenty of people who'd be happy to pull it off if they could.

My claim when it comes to election integrity is simple. It's about a system that can't answer basic questions about itself: about the integrity of the ballots, about the identification of the people casting them, about whether those people were eligible to vote in the first place.

I don't want to relitigate 2020. I want the system fixed so that whether it happened or not, it's prevented from ever happening again.

So here's where I land with Benny, and with you.

We don't have to agree on every last detail of every single thing that happens in this country. I don't want uniformity of thought. I want people who actually think for themselves. Sometimes that means they'll draw a different conclusion than I do — risky though that may be! 😂

Test the claim. Ask what the better explanation is. Then follow it where it goes, even when if lands somewhere a lot less interesting.

Conservative, not bitter.
Todd

PolitiFact — What Rumsfeld actually said on September 10th, 2001, and where that $2.3 trillion figure came from a year and a half earlier.

Justice Department Inspector General — The government's own review of what the FBI knew before that morning, including the Phoenix memo and five separate chances to focus on two of the hijackers.

The 9/11 Commission — Chapter two of the final report, where bin Laden's 1996 and 1998 declarations are laid out in his own words, troops in Saudi Arabia and all.

NIST — The Building 7 findings, straight from the agency that ran the investigation, including why they ruled out a controlled demolition.

NIST — The companion answers on the towers themselves, including the steel question that comes up every single time.

NPR — Where the Chandra Levy case finally landed: charges dropped, nobody convicted, still unsolved.

I've told you where I land. Now I'd like to know where the Inner Circle lands. One click.

I'm not a natural fan of social media. Never have been.

But it isn't good or bad on its own. It's amoral. The intent of the person using it is what makes it one or the other.

It's a tool sitting in the tool chest, and the person who picks it up decides what it does.

People use it to tell the truth, to share the gospel, to build communities of folks trying to do good things, to put an idea in front of somebody who never would have heard it otherwise.

People also use it for cruelty vicious enough to do real damage to real human beings. For exploitation. For filth I'm not going to describe in your inbox.

Same tool. Different hearts.

It's like a gun. In the hands of a criminal it's an armed robbery. In the hands of a good person it's the thing that stops one. The tool didn't change. The intent did.

What social media takes away is the part where you have to say it out loud, directly to somebody's face.

A twenty or thirty second clip of me gets shared, and the number of people willing to call little old me names over it is unfathomable. They wouldn't dare say it to my face. Most of them wouldn't come within ten feet of trying.

I'm the opposite of that, and not because I can't control my words. When I type something out, I look at it before I hit post and think: what if that isn't clear? You can't hear my tone. You can't tell whether I'm exaggerating, being satirical, having a little fun, or dead serious.

Face to face, I can say it, watch how it landed, and go from there. That's a conversation.

Social media comments are a broadcast into the void, without the nonverbal parts of communication that actually help deliver the intended message.

So I rarely respond to comments on social media anymore. Truth is, there are truly thousands of them and I can't manage it. If you want me, email me directly through here. That's the best way to reach me, and I see every one of them.

And when somebody does take the time to comment about how stupid I am, or that this program is a waste of their time, I can't help but chuckle. Then why are you taking the time? Why are you putting in the effort to engage? If it’s that bad, just ignore it and move on.

But they can’t.

And there they are — engaging on my page. Telling the algorithm they’d like some more of our content!

I’m happy to deliver exactly that, too. Besides, isn’t one of them eventually going to be persuaded? I sure hope so.

But regardless of what they say, I don't hate them. They can hate me if they want. It bothers me exactly zero percent.

Nineteen men boarded four airplanes and flew them into buildings because of what they believed — and they didn’t hide it.

There’s was a belief system that justified mass murder, and it's the part people skip right past when they go looking for a hidden hand. About a minute of it here. Pass it along to somebody who needs to hear it said plainly.

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