Yesterday the NY Times published an interview in which Spike Lee revealed a) he’s a 9/11 truther and b) part of new documentary which will air on or near 9/11 involves interviews with a 9/11 truther group. As I said yesterday, “Lee is free to believe whatever garbage he wants but HBO didn’t have to fund it or to air it.” Today, Slate has a piece saying the documentary is every bit as stupid as it sounds.

Lee devotes 30 minutes near the very end of his series to relitigating arguments that have been debunked a thousand times. Specifically, he presents about a dozen conspiracy theorists and members of Gage’s group, including Gage himself, in a back-and-forth with three credible scientists who investigated the 9/11 attacks in a teach the controversy–style format that presents the truth behind 9/11 as an open debate between two equally valid sides…

In the documentary, Lee is presented with an explanation of the facts by Shyam Sunder, who led 200 scientists in examining the evidence of the 9/11 attacks to produce a three-year-long, $16 million investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. When Sunder finishes and says, “Hopefully that answers your question,” Lee laughs and responds, “Well, not really.” Interspersed through that part of the film are Gage and members of his group promoting falsehoods that the buildings could only have been brought down by a controlled demolition, citing faulty premises about “jet fuel” and “evidence of explosions” and repeating the claim that “Building 7 is the smoking gun of 9/11.” Ultimately, Lee calls for a new congressional investigation into how the towers came down. “I hope that maybe the legacy of this documentary is that Congress holds a hearing, a congressional hearing about 9/11,” he told the Times.

But Jeremy Stahl, the author of the Slate piece, points out it’s even worse that that. Not only is the expert Lee relies on a conspiracy theorist, he also apparently believes The Jews were the real culprits behind the attack.

When I visited one of his group’s gatherings in 2012, he offered an open platform to participants claiming “that our government and the Israeli government, the Israeli Mossad, could be responsible for the Twin Towers demolition.” In one recent interview, Gage endorsed the ideas of a podcast host who said that Israel’s use of COVID-19 passports means that it “has the database that collects all of our phone calls” and that “Israel benefited” from 9/11 and “it’s pretty obvious who” the real perpetrators of the attacks were. In response to the podcast host essentially suggesting the Jews did it, Gage responded: “It’s not too difficult to figure that out. You just have to listen to some really, really good people—your station, which I’ve heard many times, your TV or video exposés are extraordinary.” The 9/11 truther movement is awash in this sort of antisemitism, and Gage seemingly never disputes it.

Stahl contacted HBO and Warner Media to ask why they are promoting this garbage and they didn’t respond. He concludes that there’s still time for Spike Lee to remove this section of the documentary before it airs but it’s hard see why that would happen at this late date unless he’s forced to do so by HBO.

Addendum: Popular mechanics has done a solid job debunking these conspiracies including the one about fire melting steel:

FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn’t need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength—and that required exposure to much less heat…

“Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F,” notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. “And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent.”

The same point was made in this entertaining visual way in this video which has been viewed nearly 12 million times since 2015. Someone needs to send this clip to Spike Lee.