Two decades ago, a somewhat infamous July 2006 poll found that 51% of Democrats believed the Bush Administration either “assisted in the 9/11 attacks” or knowingly allowed it to happen.
These beliefs correlated with regular use of the internet to consume news and information, as opposed to more “mainstream” sources.
Age, therefore, was also a strong predictor: younger people were considerably more likely to believe the 9/11 theories, while older people were considerably less likely — consistent with who tended to use the internet at the time.
In the ensuing 20 years, though, almost everyone, regardless of age, now receives some or most of their news / information from online and/or social media. It’s become by far the most dominant medium in shaping people’s views about current events.
This has coincided with partisan polarization increasingly coming to be commingled with the most maximalist, online-fueled theories.
Case in point: a February 2026 poll found 91% of Democrats believed “Donald Trump is trying to cover up Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes” — 86% believed Trump was personally “involved” in those (unspecified) crimes.
This can be placed in the same rough continuum as a November 2018 poll which found that 67% of Democrats believed “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President.”
Don’t get the idea it’s a Democrat-specific phenomenon, though.
Relatively few Republicans (18%) believed the 9/11 theories in July 2006 — but this can be understood mainly as a function of the standard partisan polarization effects. Almost certainly, the numbers would have been flipped if, say, it was Bill Clinton still in the White House at the time, rather than George W. Bush.
In a February 2014 poll, 66% of Republicans stated their belief that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (A theory notoriously promoted, and later retracted, by Trump himself.)
This was after five or six years of mounting negative polarization against Obama. Just like Dems’ views on Bush and 9/11 had peaked in 2006, after roughly the same length of time for negative polarization to mount against the incumbent president.
And with Trump, it’s been over a decade of beating red-hot vitriol — Dems will believe almost anything negative about him.
So, in conclusion... happy 9/11.
It's wild that in our age the oft-derided "reflexive contrarian" Michael Tracey is the one who does NOT believe in sinister cabals. And gets accused daily of running cover for sinister cabals.
The truth is there ARE some conspiracies, but they're utterly banal and usually wide in the open if you look with any kind of industry knowledge to make them legible. The real conspiracies are of the character that Michael exposed w/r/t to the law firms siphoning cash from banks by exploiting the alleged Epstein victims.
Are there polls indicating belief in the existence of a pedophile ring today? I sus0ect it has broad bipartisan support.