It’ll be interesting to see which issue congressional Republicans decide to campaign on during the 2026 midterm elections. “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams?” “Epstein didn’t kill himself?” “Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone?” Who knows? Maybe all three.
In a recent interview with podcaster Benny Johnson, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) indicated that he wants congressional hearings on whether Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex was brought down by “a controlled demolition” in the aftermath of the Twin Towers collapse.
Really, what Ron Johnson said was that he wants to know “what actually happened on 9/11,” implying that the official story is a lie. Sure, Islamic terrorists promised to take down the towers, flew jet planes into the buildings, and then claimed responsibility. But Johnson isn’t convinced.
In any event, the senator is just asking questions, the favorite pastime of the cocooned online populist set. These are the only people clamoring for this conversation. The senator, in fact, says he spoke to former Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon, who just happened to appear recently on Tucker Carlson’s conspiratorial podcast to “tell the truth about what actually happened on Sept. 11, 2001.”
The “controlled demolition” question has been a big part of 9/11 conspiracy theories for decades now. I’ll save you the list of scientific agencies, studies, physicists, structural engineers, and others who have debunked them. But it’s one thing to prey on credulous incels on X for hits, and another to import this nonsense into the government.
Democrats spent much of the Biden years taking cues from and mollifying the progressive social media mob. This ended with Democrats making a slew of bad decisions and embracing weirdo social positions they still can’t shed. The GOP seems to be miscalculating the mood of normie voters as well.
Let’s, for a moment, forget that Congress can barely pass a budget. Let’s forget it’s done nothing to curb our spiraling spending and debt. Let’s forget that Congress has done nothing to constrain President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional, unpopular, and disastrous tariff agenda.
Congress hasn’t even bothered trying to codify the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, either. It has done nothing to streamline laws on deportations to help the administration. It has yet to extend tax cuts. It has done nothing to inhibit lower court judges from intervening in executive branch business. All that excitement over shuttering the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development will mean nothing unless Congress overturns the laws that created them.
And considering historical electorate trends and the economic mess we’re likely in, the GOP has only until the midterm elections to do anything.
Then again, doing absolutely nothing is preferable to embarrassing yourself.
Not one vote hinges on the fate of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Watching a platoon of Make America Great Again sycophants waving around those White House binders filled with useless documents as if they were about to crack the biggest case in history made the administration look ridiculous to any normie.
What do these people think is going to happen? Government agencies classify information for many reasons, most of them quite mundane. Sure, the FBI and CIA have engaged in much misconduct. Very rarely, maybe never, has a declassification revealed a major secret or conspiracy. The notion that hundreds of government officials — sometimes over decades — are hoarding some epic history-shattering mystery is the stuff of movies.
Of course, overclassification has needlessly engendered public suspicion. However, declassification can offer valuable historical perspectives. That was the case when Trump signed an executive order directing the National Archives to declassify the John F. Kennedy assassination files.
The problem is that Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) promised voters that they would finally get to the bottom of “one of the biggest cold case files in U.S. history” and “give Americans the answers they deserve.” Luna, whose knowledge of this topic can comfortably fit in a thimble, had already decided that “two shooters” assassinated Kennedy and invited filmmaker Oliver Stone, who has pinned the assassination and cover-up on the “military-industrial complex,” the CIA, the FBI, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Cosa Nostra, anti-communists, and big business, to offer expert testimony.
IF EVERYONE IS AN EXPERT, NO ONE IS
Someone needs to tell Luna that 1991’s JFK was not a documentary. Then again, perhaps Johnson will invite Stone, who maintains that 9/11 was somehow linked to the 2000 presidential election, to appear for the Senate hearing and relitigate the most traumatic terrorist event in our history.
No, none of these congressional hearings is the end of the world. They simply feed the perception that the GOP is frivolous and nutty. Because the preponderance of evidence tells us a terrorist group destroyed the Twin Towers, and an unhinged and disgruntled communist shot Kennedy. It’s fine if you disagree, but those conversations should be had in the Reddit comment section or the waning hours of an alcohol-fueled party, not in Congress.