20 years after 7/7: why are people still in denial?

We must acknowledge that the State perpetrated this atrocity if we are to make any progress.

Jul 07, 2025

I recently read Lance deHaven-Smith’s book, Conspiracy Theory in America (which you can download for free via that link, made available by the author himself). The book is an exploration of the term ‘conspiracy theorist’, and how it has intentionally been weaponised since the mid-twentieth century to stop people essentially questioning ‘The Powers That Be’ (TPTB). I would say the book is essential reading: if you want to learn the history of how conspiracy theorists came to be persona non grata in society — and who it was who was behind this attack — you need to read the book. It begins with the assassination of JFK and goes into that in some detail before moving on.

Note: I discovered the book through James Corbett’s podcast about it, which might be a good place to start if you’d like an overview of the book before reading it. deHaven-Smith argues for the use of the term SCAD — State Crime Against Democracy — instead of conspiracy theory, but I will stick with the familiar term for this piece.

I think the conspiracy theorist label has been successful beyond the wildest dreams of TPTB. Historians will look back on these days and marvel at how successful the propaganda was. How could it be that intelligent, reasonable people would dismiss government involvement in crimes simply by deploying the term ‘conspiracy theory’?

It certainly worked on me up until about five years ago. I was keen to avoid getting into ‘conspiracy theories’, not least because I thought they were dreamt up by people on the internet with too much time on their hands. Back in about 2005, I remember seeing something online about 9/11 and how the WTC Towers couldn’t have collapsed just because of planes flying into them. I looked into it a little bit, but it was all very technical and someone had written a long piece rebutting it. I decided that it wasn’t worth looking into and that it was ‘just a conspiracy theory’ anyway.

Looking back, one of the biggest issues was simply the label. Once you’re labelled as a conspiracy theorist, it’s hard to come back from. Friends will distance themselves from you, and you’ll find it harder to get a place in public society. Either you take the hit and own the label (and the ensuing consequences), or you distance yourself from it for the sake of your reputation. It’s a bit like the label ‘Christian’, in fact — being a Christian these days has similar consequences and requires similar bravery.

In fact, there are a lot of parallels between being a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and being a Christian: it feels like, once you have embraced the truth, you step into a whole new world. It’s a bit like that scene in The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey’s character emerges from the fake, bubble world that he had been part of and into the real world.

All this has been at the forefront of my mind today, the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings. There has been a lot of media coverage about it — interviews, commentary, commemorative events, and so on. I’ve found it difficult to watch, in fact I’ve been getting more and more angry — because all the while the people who did it are getting away with it. The real perpetrators are getting off scot-free, while the patsies who were set up for it are dead. It’s an utterly scandalous travesty of justice. Despite this, all the (non-woke) commentators are talking about is immigration and Islam.

I believe we are never going to get to grips with the problems in our society unless we embrace the truth about 7/7 and other events like it. And yet, it still seems that this is a very long way away indeed.

What I’m going to do in this piece is look at the reason why people are so resistant to looking at conspiracy theories, what that says about us as a society, and why it’s so important for us to deal with it.

The real criminals of 7/7

If you’ve read this far, you must at least be sympathetic to conspiracy theories and theorists — but you might not know the particular details of 7/7. As such, before we move on, let me explain why it is that I believe the real perpetrators of 7/7 are not Islamists but the British state in some form.

My go-to resource for 7/7 is The Ripple Effect documentary. It puts together the whole case in one video, which is well worth watching all the way through. In my opinion, the evidence presented there is not only comprehensive but overwhelmingly demonstrates that the official narrative is a lie.

If you’re wondering about whether to watch or not, let me give a few highlights from memory:

One of the key pieces of evidence which uncovered the conspiracy was… a cancelled train! (Could there be anything more British than discovering a plot via a train cancellation?) The alleged terrorists were originally reported to have caught a particular train, but it was later on discovered that this train had been cancelled due to the hot weather. The next train would have been too late for them to have arrived in London in time for them to be on the Underground trains they were supposed to have been on.
The alleged terrorists bought return tickets — because, obviously, suicide bombers would be thinking about their return journeys?! (Interestingly, I can find an Independent article with the subtitle “Why did they buy return tickets if they were intending to die?” but with no answer to the question in the article).
There are no eyewitnesses who actually remember seeing them on the tube carriages.
The damage pattern of the tube carriages are more consistent with explosives being detonated from underneath the trains rather than from within the carriage.
People who were sitting next to where the alleged terrorists were sitting received few injuries, while those who were sitting further away were badly injured or killed.
It was reported that at least one terrorist had been shot outside Canary Wharf - this was reported but disappeared very quickly.
It gets weirder… a year before 7/7, there was a Panorama programme which discussed a terrorist attack in London. The targets: three tube trains and one bus.
On the day of 7/7, a company who help organisations like TFL respond to emergencies was doing a training exercise with TFL to help them respond to almost the exact events which happened. THAT. VERY. DAY. Check out this interview, it’s wild.
Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Prime Minister, was in London at the time and was warned about 30 minutes before it happened to stay in his hotel room.
Finally, remember the killing of Jean Charles De Menezes, the Brazilian electrician who was brutally killed by the police? Why was he killed… did he know something?

These are just some of the pieces of evidence which stick in my mind, the documentary has much more. (One more extra which isn’t in the documentary: the woman who led the independent inquest into the 7/7 bombings was none other than Baroness Hallett, who has also chaired the covid ~~whitewash~~ inquiry, need I say more?)

In summary, there is absolutely no way the ‘official’ story is true. I believe any fair-minded independent observer would agree that the evidence points to some kind of crime perpetrated by the British state, or elements within it, rather than to the alleged terrorists. The evidence is overwhelming.

So, why is it that, twenty years on, people still cannot seem to accept the true criminals behind 7/7?

Why do people not accept the truth about 7/7?

One important reason why people don’t accept the truth about 7/7 is that they don’t even realise there is an alternative. When 9/11 happened, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the collapse of the towers looked very much like a controlled demolition. We’ve all seen footage of tall buildings being demolished, we know what it looks like. If even someone like me, who had until that point no interest in conspiracy theories, saw things online about how the collapse of the towers was engineered, it must have been pretty widespread.

By contrast, 7/7 had a more plausible ring to it: if you saw no reason to be suspicious, why would you think there was something wrong with the official story? No-one ever flew planes into buildings before, at least not like 9/11; but there have been plenty of suicide bombers. Not to mention the fact that, by that point, Islamist groups were a known threat in the media — we were primed to be expecting acts of Islamist terror, and so we weren’t surprised when it (allegedly) happened. In addition to all this, the media have done an excellent job in covering up all question marks about 7/7: before watching the Ripple Effect documentary, I had no idea at all that there any problems with the official story.

Note: the documentary was popular enough for the BBC to commission a programme debunking it, so clearly it must have had a big enough impact for them to respond like that. Interestingly, all but one of the published comments are cautiously supportive of the Ripple Effect documentary.

However, I believe the problem is not simply the fact that people don’t realise there are problems with the official story about 7/7. As I said above, there are parallels between Christianity and ‘conspiracy theories’. It’s not so much a matter of facts and logical argument, it’s more like two opposing worldviews at war: people don’t want to believe in Christianity because they don’t want to be answerable to God. Similarly, people don’t want to believe in conspiracies, because they prefer the kind of world where our government doesn’t do terrible things.

Lance deHaven-Smith said this in the opening chapter of his book:

This is because most of the criticism directed at conspiracy beliefs is based on sentimentality about America’s political leaders and institutions rather than on unbiased reasoning and objective observation. Most authors who criticize conspiracy theories not only disagree with the theories’ factual claims, they find the ideas offensive. Among the most common conspiracy theories are allegations of U.S. government complicity in terrible crimes against the American people, crimes that include the assassination of President Kennedy and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. For conspiracy deniers, such allegations constitute outlandish slurs against America’s leaders and political institutions, slurs that damage the nation’s reputation and may encourage violence against U.S. officials at home and abroad.

I think this is an important paragraph: people oppose conspiracy theories not simply because they disagree with the factual claims, but because they find conspiracy theories offensive. In other words, the reaction against conspiracies is emotional, not rational. People don’t want to believe, because they prefer the world is as they believe it to be, and it would be deeply unsettling to find out that is not the case.

As if that’s not enough, I believe there’s a reason which goes even deeper. There’s an episode of Yes, Prime Minister (one of my all-time favourite comedy programmes) called One of Us. The former head of MI5 is discovered to have been a spy, despite the fact that he was cleared by Sir Humphrey (many years ago). When questioned, Sir Humphrey says he didn’t investigate because he was “one of us”.

It’s like that when it comes to conspiracies. When it comes to evil, it’s easier to believe that the bad guys are the Islamists, them, rather than seeing the perpetrators as ‘one of us’. If the problem is Islamists, they can be vilified and demonised as ‘other’: “They’re just monsters” — which is what TPTB want for their war agenda. All we need to do is wipe the bad guys out, then we’re all good.

In my opinion, that’s the root cause of why people don’t believe in conspiracy theories. We don’t like to think that ‘we’ are the evil ones, not just ‘them’. In the words of Solzhenitsyn:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Why it matters so much

As I said earlier, there are parallels between Christianity and the world of conspiracies. One of the things which strikes me is how people react against conspiracies not simply because of the facts, but because they find them offensive. Similarly, people react against the idea of sin because they find it offensive. This in spite of the fact that, as someone once said, “Original Sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith”!

The problem with Christianity, and the problem with conspiracies, is that we can’t simply say that the problem is ‘out there’: we have to turn a rather uncomfortable eye on ourselves.

When it comes to conspiracies, we have to admit that we had the wool pulled over our eyes. We have to admit that we bought into the propaganda, we believed what TPTB were telling us. We have to even admit that we are complicit — we voted for these people, we bought their newspapers, we watched their TV shows, we didn’t ask questions and looked the other way. Above all, we trusted them. We trusted that there was a line they would not cross, because they were British, they were ours — ‘one of us’. We trusted that, even if they may be incompetent, they would never, ever stoop to the level of murdering innocent people — and that trust has been betrayed. Coming to believe in the truth of these conspiracy theories means acknowledging, at some level, that you were wrong.

It’s like that with Christianity: becoming a Christian means owning up to your sinfulness and shame. You can’t simply point the finger at the bad people out there, you have to own up to your own sin and evil. We have to admit that we have been wrong about many things, we have not lived in the way that God wanted us to and we have brought many of our problems upon ourselves. It means admitting that we trusted in things other than God, and that trust has betrayed us. In the words of Jeremiah:

“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who draws strength from mere flesh
and whose heart turns away from the Lord.
Jeremiah 17:5

Conspiracies expose the fact that we were trusting in our governments and institutions rather than trusting in God. They expose the fact that we believed it was possible to run the country in an entirely secular way — without reference to God. They expose the fact that evil was not simply done by ‘them’, but enabled by us.

This, in a nutshell, is why it’s so important to reckon with the truth about conspiracies if we are to make any progress as a society. People think that the way forward is in political movements, such as Reform or the new party started by Ben Habib or the new movement started by Rupert Lowe. But, as much as these movements may have good in them, they will never be what we need because they do not go far enough.

I truly believe that the work of healing in our society will happen when we can start to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about our leaders. We need to repent of our unwillingness to listen to the truth when we had opportunity, and we need to commit — with the Lord’s help — to seeking the truth hereon out.

Jesus said: “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). If there was one Bible verse which could act as a slogan for what we need at the moment, this is it. We will only find true freedom as a society when we embrace the truth — primarily about Jesus and about ourselves, then the truth about the world we live in.

Sacred Musings

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