Metro Weekly

Mark Bingham’s mother takes on 9/11, Boston bombing conspiracy theorists

Alice Hoagland

“I’ve come to the conclusion that you really can’t talk to those folks. You cannot reason with them, because they are so invested in the crazy story that they’ve gotten a hold of — like a Rottweiler — and bitten it and chewed it until it became a really bloody, big lie. The better way is to just use the Serenity Prayer….

“A friend of mine told me –. Remember when they had that goonie group called the Phelps, going around saying, ‘God hates fags?’ Well, they showed up one 9/11 anniversary in Shanksville, and a friend of mine put her arm around me and said, ‘Just think of them as mental patients.’ So, that’s what I do with conspiracy theorists. They’re off their rockers….

“It’s unfortunate that some very impressionable individuals, like [Tamerlan] Tsarnaev, was able to be recruited [by visiting these types of alternative news websites].”

Alice Hoagland, mother of Mark Bingham, a gay man who died when Flight 93, the fourth hijacked plane on September 11, 2001, crashed in Shanksville, PA. He phoned his mother just before the plane went down. It is believed that Bingham and others aboard the plane had been trying to reclaim the airliner after learning that three other planes had purposely crashed into the Twin Towers and Pentagon that morning. 

Hoagland appeared on Rachel Maddow’s show Wednesday to share her observations about people like webcaster Alex Jones and his followers. According to Maddow, conspiracy mantras are having a notable influence on Republican leaders. Hoagland felt that the Boston Marathon bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, had tuned in to “violent forms of Islam” through similarly truth-averse websites.

Hoagland previously participated in a 2011 BBC program, 9/11: Conspiracy Road Trip, which can be viewed online. She has also spoken publicly on many occassions to champion her late son, Mark, as being both gay and an American hero.

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