We don’t often write up videos post­ed by 9–11 Truthers, but you can watch an inter­est­ing exchange when this par­tic­u­lar Truther con­fronts well-known lin­guist and polit­i­cal observ­er Noam Chom­sky dur­ing the ques­tion ses­sion after the lat­ter’s talk at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da. “You’ve men­tioned quite a few con­tra­dic­tions from the media and their pre­sen­ta­tions on things, and I think the most noto­ri­ous case of this is with Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001,” says the Truther after tak­ing the micro­phone. “You want­ed to see a con­sen­sus of engi­neers and spe­cial­ists that under­stand the actu­al struc­tures of these build­ings and their pos­si­ble col­lapse, and there is such a group. It’s called Archi­tects and Engi­neers for 9–11 Truth.” As the Truther gets into the “con­sen­sus of over 2000 of them,” the mod­er­a­tor inter­rupts, won­der­ing if he actu­al­ly has a ques­tion. (Sure­ly we’ve all endured these moments in ques­tion seg­ment.) But the Truther con­tin­ues: “This con­sen­sus shows that Build­ing 7, the third build­ing that fell on 9/11, fell in freefall speed as the [Nation­al Insti­tute of Stan­dard and Tech­nol­o­gy] report acknowl­edges. Are you ready to come for­ward and jump on board with 9/11?” Thus asked to com­ment on whether the media has cov­ered up the man­ner in which this par­tic­u­lar build­ing col­lapsed, Chom­sky replies with a defense of stan­dard sci­en­tif­ic pro­ce­dures.

“In fact, you’re right that there’s a con­sen­sus among a minis­cule num­ber of archi­tects and engi­neers. They are not doing what sci­en­tists and engi­neers do when they think they’ve dis­cov­ered some­thing. What you do is write arti­cles in sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals, give talks at the pro­fes­sion­al soci­eties, go to the civ­il engi­neer­ing depart­ment at MIT or Flori­da or wher­ev­er you are, and present your results, then pro­ceed to try to con­vince the nation­al acad­e­mies, the pro­fes­sion­al soci­ety of physi­cists and civ­il engi­neers, the depart­ments of the major uni­ver­si­ties, that you’ve dis­cov­ered some­thing. There hap­pen to be a lot of peo­ple around who spend an hour on the inter­net and think they know a lot physics, but it does­n’t work like that. There’s a rea­son there are grad­u­ate schools in these depart­ments.” But has­n’t the gov­ern­ment intim­i­dat­ed those who know the real sto­ry from speak­ing out against the offi­cial line? “Any­body who has any famil­iar­i­ty with polit­i­cal activism knows that this is one of the safest things you can do. It’s almost risk­less. Peo­ple take risks far beyond this con­stant­ly — includ­ing sci­en­tists and engi­neers.” Chom­sky has more to say about the facts we can use, the opin­ions he dis­avows, and the forces dri­ving the Iraq War in the remain­der of the sev­en-minute clip. “We will let you be the judge of his response,” say the video’s notes. Indeed.

via Crit­i­cal The­o­ry

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky and Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature and Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Noam Chom­sky vs. William F. Buck­ley, 1969

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.