How are The Sopranos and Jews connected? You'll never guess...

If you're reading a blog, I'm sure you've seen Loose Change.
It is a video that is part of the 9/11 Press for Truth organization, a loose collection of bloggers, forums, public speakers and videos that don't have any stated goals except to "expose the truth." Loose Change's creator and narrator, Dylan Avery, spliced together footage taken mainly from CNN and FOX News, along with additional footage from the Naudet Brothers (who made the documentary 9/11). Loose Change has grown in popularity since its creation, mainly spread by word of mouth and over conspiracy theory websites. In 2006 alone it had over 10 million viewers.

Immensely popular, Loose Change or its creators have made appearances in Vanity Fair, TIME Magazine, Empire Magazine and assorted smaller magazines. It has been aired on television in Pakistan, Portugal and Australia.

Dylan Avery was not a very successful man before Loose Change. He'd grown up in Oneota, New York, and by the age of 19 had applied twice to Purchase College's Film School and been rejected both times. He still holds only a high school diploma. It was his dream to be a famous director.

In May, 2002, Dylan was working construction when he ran into James Gandolfini at an opening party. That's right, the actor who plays Tony in The Sopranos. Dylan Avery apperantly cornered James Gandolfini and talked to him about his troubled film career (Dylan's, not James. James film career is going great, I hear he's getting a million an episode for Sopranos). Dylan paraphrases Gandolfini as saying, "if you want to be a successful director, you have to have something to say to the world." That month Dylan started working on Loose Change.

Originally Loose Change started as a fictional story about a group of friends that discover that their own government was behind the attacks of 9/11. Dylan himself has admitted this in an interview with "Movie Minutiae: Loose Change" :

"It was supposed to be making a fictional story about me and my friends discovering that 9/11 was an inside job, and doing something about it, and basically that happened in real life."

That fictional story was called Loose Change, and while Dylan changed the genre from fiction to fact, the name stayed. That right there is every college kid's dream, becoming famous, making a difference and living in a James Bond-type world all rolled into one. Except that it never happens.

But Dylan Avery was becoming more convinced the more old footage he surveyed. The first edition of Loose Change cost 2,000 dollars to make and is basically an hour and a half long Powerpoint. The first edition was not as well cut as the edition that followed, and Dylan was distributing it on cds that he was selling. When it was put on the internet it was originally funded and set up by one Phil Jayhan. Phil Jayhan runs letsroll911.org, a website that features Loose Change prominently. It also features a conspiracy theory that George Bush and Dick Cheney entertain male hookers (not kidding).

Loose Change is available on Google video, and held the top ranking position of most watched video until mid 2006. A Scripps Howard and Ohio University poll in July 2006, in the height of Loose Change frenzy, came up with these numbers. 16% of the respondents said "it's very likely" or "somewhat likely"..... "that the collapse of the twin towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings." And 12% said that they "suspect the Pentagon was struck by a military cruise missile in 2001 rather than an airliner captured by terrorists."

How just is it to promote such theories? The families of those aboard Flight 93 have been regarding their dead loved ones as heroes for years, and now there is a new view, on the most watched online video, that their loved one is alive somewhere, kept in an unused NASA station (this is actually asserted in the video). Is this an appropriate message to be sending to the public? To decide this I took a look at the 9/11 Truth Movement and its intentions.

Phil Jayhan, another member of the 9/11 Truth Movement, runs the website letsroll911.org. There he promotes Loose Change and other conspiracies. He is also known for suggesting that the September 11th attacks were caused by Jews. That's right, letsroll911.org suggests that a cabal of Jewish bankers control the world and orchestrate events like this to steal money and manipulate nations. He is also intensely anti-Israeli, and on his site you will find links to anti-Zionism sites that portray 9/11 as an attempt by Israel to gain more leverage in the Middle East. The words "Zionism" and "Zionist" pop up a lot on sites like letsroll911.org. And that site is considered a prominent member of the 9/11 Truth Movement.

And Loose Change is heavily connected to the 9/11 Truth Movement. In Loose Change there is a part where it states who the film is "Featuring Research" from. One of the four researchers is a blogger whose forum name is Killtown. The following is a quote by Killtown, posted on a holocaust forum.

"I've always had a problem with the claimed number of Jews that allegedly died there [Auschwitz]. I keep hearing "6 million" or "1.5 million" that alone is a HUGE discrepancy. Some say the number was as low as 280,000.
Suspecting what the Israeli/Palestine conflict is really about, the strong evidence Israel was involved with 9/11, and seeing how 9/11 was faked in general, it makes me wonder how much of the Holocaust was true or not."

All through Loose Change the screen zooms in and circles or focuses on one article of text. But almost all of those articles are articles that appeared in The American Free Press. The American Free Press is a political magazine that many have declared to be neo-Nazi, and takes a very strong anti-Israeli stance. It also features articles about a Jewish takeover of the world.

If one looks deep enough into the 9/11 Truth Movement, if one clicks on the links on the side of the many sites, there is usually a shadowy underground of anti-Semitic views, bigotry, and sometimes utter insanity.

A constant criticism of Loose Change has been that it cherry picked facts and photographs. I see little difference (in terms of moral intent) in cherry picking facts and photographs to promote a conspiracy theory or to promote a way in Iraq. This is called a documentary and thus degrades all documentaries. Loose Change makes it so when real independent investigative journalism comes along, the American public is likely to dismiss it.

Dylan Avery now appears constantly on talk shows and in news articles, and is becoming a recognizable face. on the 5th anniversary of 9/11 he was portrayed as a leader of the crowd of people standing outside Ground Zero. But he still has a facebook account. Reading an excerpt from that, it is easy to see the teenager with a high school diploma behind this phenomena.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006.
"its my birthday. again.

yeehaw i'm 23. i can.... be a year older. when i turn 25 i can rent a car, so there's something to look forward to.

thanks for all the well wishes, guys. i read almost every single one. don't be concerned, btw, just because we're driving around los angeles and meeting with charlie sheen doesn't mean we're letting fame get to our heads. it means we're making the necessary moves to get the truth into theaters next fall. that's all.

i'll always be a hippie from upstate new york. :D"

Dylan Avery was a hippie from upstate New York. While working construction because he had been rejected twice by a film school he got advice to shock the American public from Tony of the Sopranos, then he spliced together a fictional film about a group of friends finding out that 9/11 was an inside job, then he became convinced that his fictional film was real and started marketing it online to people like Phil Jayhan, who runs an anti-Semitic website, then he used sources from an anti-Semitic newspaper in his once-fiction-now-fact documentary, and research from a Holocaust-denier, and then it became one of the most watched videos on the web, and four years after he started in May 2002, he is riding around Los Angeles meeting Charlie Sheen.

Dylan Avery is certainly living his dream as a great director, with his own studio company and his own star power. But is it really clear that he's doing this to expose the truth? Or is he just living out a fantasy? And if he is just living out a fantasy, is it right to take the American public along for the ride?