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Sept. 10, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
20:32
9/11 Twenty Years Later: LIVE Show

To access the full episode, additional content, and support the podcast, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast  Jared and Nick discuss their memories of 9/11 as it unfolded and then trace the history of events that led up to the disastrous day, and how it connects to a lot of political unrest we see today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Cheers!
Long day at the Bullshit Factory.
Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Saxton here with Nick Halseman.
We're doing this live.
We've got a live show going on.
We're very excited to have our patrons here, the Muckrake community.
Thank you for being here.
We appreciate your support so, so much.
We're going to be doing this the whole episode live.
What we're going to do today is we're going to talk, of course, about the 20th anniversary of 9-11.
We're going to break down the history behind it.
We're going to break down the circumstances around it.
We're going to break down the long-term effects, including the Afghan war, the Iraq war, growing fascism, growing authoritarianism.
For the people who are watching live, feel free to ask some questions.
When we're done going through all this stuff, we're happy to talk about some current events and answer whatever quandaries you have.
But before we get to all of that, Nick, I don't know how you feel about it.
It's really strange for me to now have September 11th, which of course was one of those Foundational events that my life obviously is divided up between before and after and now to look at it 20 years later and start to wrestle with what it means and what it meant.
It is really surreal for me to recognize the time that we're dealing with here.
I don't know how you feel about it.
I mean, I'm trying to feel if it, like, does it feel like it's been 20 years?
That's the interesting thing to me.
I mean, in some respects, I think it feels like it could be much longer ago.
You know what I mean?
Like, closer to, like, Pearl Harbor than, you know, present-day events, I think, in some weird way.
I think time, I mean, we say it all the time, what is time, right?
And especially in modern accelerated culture, time is strange.
Time is really, really weird.
And we talk about this sometimes when we talk about culture, how like all of a sudden there's like sort of a crunch, right?
And the last 20 years have been so accelerated that sometimes it feels like we've lived 40 years and other times it feels like 10 or five.
This is one of those things, though.
I do feel all of the miles from the post-9-11 world.
Like, I feel aged by it.
I feel changed by it.
I feel like it has had such a massive effect on my life, but also the way that I sort of view life, the way I go through life, and certainly the political and social environment we live in now.
Well, you know, it's funny because we want to give Reagan credit for... And do you have that really bad echo?
Okay, I do.
But maybe it's gone.
Now it's gone.
We want to blame Reagan.
Gosh, I'm not sure I like listening to my voice.
We want to blame Reagan for a lot of our ills in society and in politics, certainly.
And as I was thinking about what happens before and after 9-11, though, it does feel like, to some extent, the real violence, you know, and really vociferous The differences that we now have between the parties is rooted in 9-11.
I think it's the moderate Republicans who were sort of normal people got radicalized, I think, from that.
Well, I mean, make no mistake, we're going to talk about Ronald Reagan today.
I mean, there's no way to talk about this without doing it.
But if you are actually, and again, one of the things we really like to do on the show is to give it the historical context, to give the information behind this stuff and to put it into something that makes something near sense.
If you actually look at sort of the American epochs, you look at the way that this stuff is divided.
Reagan, of course, is the end of the New Deal coalition, right?
You get rid of labor, you get rid of the idea that the government should help people, and you move towards free market hypercapitalism.
We move towards free trade, we move towards the idea that people should be voting with their wallets, and that money is the only thing that matters.
But as long as you make that agreement, Reaganism tells you, hey, yeah, we may not help you socially, and we may not give you a social safety net, But promise us, we'll keep you safe, right?
The big bad wolf is out there.
Communism is out there.
We'll stop that.
Of course, communism ends at the end of that decade.
And what we have to talk about today is how leading up to September 11, 2001, there was an idea in America, more or less, that America was secure.
That America was going to lead the world into this new order, that we were going to be the dominant sole superpower, and that nobody could ever touch us.
So it is a turning of a page.
It's a new chapter in American history.
And of course, 9-11, you know, we're not, you know, We're not overplaying it saying it's this massive historical moment, but it is definitely one of those signposts in the road that tells us something has changed, something has shifted.
And I think we've entered into a new one.
I think that what we're looking at, that 20-year period that we're getting ready to discuss, we're now moving into a new epoch.
For sure.
And let's not forget, like, yeah, the 90s, as Will has commented, was an unprecedented era of prosperity and peace throughout the world.
It actually did feel like we were getting somewhere.
And the country was run competently.
And we had, you know, people were able to get jobs out of college.
You know, the economy was completely humming.
And so 2000, we avoided any kind of Y2K glitches that we were really worried about.
Like, that was the biggest success we had, right?
The global fear at that moment was something that all was going to shut down.
We're going to nothing's going to work after 2000 or once 2000 hit.
And that didn't happen.
So it felt like, OK, this is we're on to something here.
I think that the foreshadowing obviously was the election and how Gore and Bush or Bush ended up winning that election.
That should have told us something that we were in for, you know, a bumpy night.
Well, I'm really glad that you brought up Y2K because it's turned into a punchline, right?
But the biggest fear about Y2K was that the systems that made society hum and work, right, the things that took care of the stock market, the things that took care of algorithms, the things that took care of the computers that made sure society worked, That those things would go away, right?
And suddenly this wonderful order that we had created, and do not do not mistake this, that was based on computers.
The Clinton swell was based on the idea that somehow or another they were going to automate the economy and that they were going to bring all Americans into a middle class.
And we were never going to be touched.
We were never going to have any attacks.
All Americans were going to be brought into at least the middle class while we started exploiting other countries through free trade.
The democratic idea was that we would all have white collar jobs, right?
None of us were going to be in industry.
None of us were going to work on construction sites.
And when eventually we move people up into the middle class, America would have this new era of uh you know plenty we would all have the money that we need we would all have surpluses which you know goes back to the budget surpluses and all that but it was a total lie all along the the things that we were told and this is where we kind of want to start we want to go through this a little bit chronologically And I want to start personally, and I would love to hear about this from you, Nick.
On September 11th, which was a Tuesday, I was a freshman at Indiana State University.
I was supposed to go to my Greek mythology class, and I woke up, and as I did, and tell me if this is the most 2001 thing you've ever heard, I first heard about the plane hitting the tower on AOL Instant Messenger.
Yeah, my AOL was going crazy, people telling me about this.
I turned on the TV just in time to see the second plane crash into the second tower.
What happened from there, and I told this story the other day on Substack, the men around me, the guys who were in my dorm, we kind of went into a war frenzy.
It was a mixture of fear and terror, but trying to overcompensate.
There was a lot of casual racism.
There was a lot of casual militarism.
We drank, we talked about war, we daydreamed about wiping the Middle East off the face of the map, which is both shameful, but I also think a really good idea of where it goes, right?
Like what ended up happening, and we'll talk about that.
But I also wanted to say before we get into your experience that I never heard an explanation on September 11, 2001, of why something like this might have happened.
It was just a terrorist attack and we took it for granted that obviously they're attacking us because we're so wonderful, we have so many freedoms, they hate us.
And so the question that I walked away from September 11, 2001, which is something that I want to talk about today and we're going to, Which is, how does something like this happen?
What is the real reason?
What is the real history of why something like September 11th happened?
And why does that misunderstanding lead to some really disgusting crimes and behaviors?
Sure.
By the way, Malcolm Gladwell did a podcast about this.
I don't know if you ever heard it.
We're allowed to talk about him, right?
He's still, he's still okay.
And he interviewed people from, you know, five years ago about in the 9-11 and what they were doing, what happened, people who were together on that day.
And the stories were so completely different from the memories were of what maybe what really happened to the point where you don't know what really happened, right?
Because somebody was sure that they were, we were with you, we walked here, and they're like, no, we didn't do that.
I wasn't there until hours later.
Fascinating stuff.
So the memory is interesting.
I remember being in my bedroom because remember on the West Coast, it was early.
It was 6 a.m.
or something.
And just before that, my mother-in-law called me, called us and told me, my wife, actually, we weren't married yet, that, you know, I think the first plane hit.
My memory was the first plane had hit and she called us to tell us we turned it on.
And then my memory was we saw it.
We watched the second plane hit live without having any idea what was going on.
And I had to go in to teach.
I was teaching high school at that point.
And I remember waiting as long as I possibly could to continue watching TV until I had to drive the, you know, 25 minutes to school.
And I don't even remember.
That's what's interesting.
I don't remember what happened at school that day.
I remember, like, signing in and being just demoralized as an American, I suppose, because we were under attack.
Probably scared, too, because I think that we thought there was going to be more.
I remember my dad worked not far from the Sears Tower in downtown Chicago.
And I remember there was a lot of rumors about that was being targeted.
And, you know, it's like, don't go downtown.
Don't go to that area.
So, I think we were really expecting even more at that point, once the first couple planes hit the towers.
How old were you at that point?
So, I was 29.
You were 29.
Okay, so I was 19 and still very young and naive and also sheltered.
So I was 19 and still very young and naive and also sheltered.
My immediate reaction was, again, both terror but also anger.
There was like a militarism that came out, the idea that, you know, people were running around the dorm excited about the possibility that a nuclear bomb would be dropped that night, right?
That if we watch TV long enough, we would eventually see a nuclear bomb dropped over a country.
So I guess I was wondering, at 29, what do you think at that point?
Like, what was your immediate, like, visceral reaction?
What did you want?
What did you expect?
What was the thought that you had?
Oh, I mean, I think it was it was a fear, abject fear, you know, and worry.
I didn't have anger.
I didn't start to plot, like, revenge.
That wasn't coming up in my mind at all.
And I certainly think it was like, well, who did this and why?
Like, that was really the puzzle we needed to start to figure out right away, obviously, because that was going to then affect what we did and how we reacted to this.
Um, so I think that was, that was my biggest, uh, you know, uh, emotional reaction to that was, was, was, I definitely was really, really scared.
Um, you know, and that notion of like, okay, what, what is going to happen?
What, what is, you know, is there, can I get on a plane again ever?
You know, those kinds of thoughts.
And then certainly, you know, we, we didn't know, it wasn't really clear in my memory, correct me if I'm wrong, like Al Qaeda doesn't come up for a couple of days at least.
Right.
You know, I think immediately there was some conversation about the possibility that Osama Bin Laden was behind it, and that, you know, this terrorist cell, Al-Qaeda, might have played a role in it.
You know, at that point, of course, Al-Qaeda had attacked the USS Cole, we had had the embassy bombing, and of course, already by then, we'd had the first bombing of the World Trade Center.
And so there was an idea, but it was also this momentary Idea that it might have just been a massive Muslim sort of attack.
And that was one of the things that I heard within my communities was not the idea that it was like an isolated group of people who were trying to carry out, you know, revolutionary activities, but that it was a religious crusade.
Which I think is really important to point out because that is eventually the message that wins out that gets us to the Iraq War, right?
It's the misunderstanding of how something like this might have happened.
And almost immediately, America starts telling itself a story.
And I don't know what the conversations were that you had, but what I was inundated with almost immediately was the idea, again, that they hate our freedom.
That we're too wonderful, right?
That we were such an amazing country and such an amazing superpower that they need to take us down, right?
And instantly, when you hear that message, what gets across, the rhetoric of it, is, oh, we're now in something like a holy crusade.
Right?
And it's us versus evildoers.
And one or the other has to win, and the other more or less has to become annihilated.
And already, within hours of 9-11, I had people that I knew in my dorm and friends who were either reservists or, you know, they were Marines or they were on leave or whatever, and they instantaneously We're like, I am going to war and I'm going to war to save the country, right?
We are under attack.
This is an existential threat.
This thing has to move forward.
And meanwhile, what I missed, and I didn't understand that this was out there.
It actually took the Iraq war, which we'll talk about later.
I didn't understand that there was a deeper story than that.
I didn't understand that there was history.
I didn't understand, like, Al Qaeda suddenly got on a TV as if it just happened.
You know what I mean?
Like, Al Qaeda just suddenly emerged one day, like, through a diabolical plot.
There was no discussion on the news about what happened in the Middle East.
There was no discussion of history.
There was no discussion of politics, these ties, or anything.
It was a simple good versus evil story, and that's all that we were told.
Right.
Now, the Atlantic has a really good article today talking about September 11th and the history and where we went from there.
And they quote George W. Bush and his address on the September 20th to Congress.
I think it's worthy to hear it because it touches upon what you're just talking about as far as who we were blaming and who we were fingering.
So here's the excerpt.
President Bush, it's worth remembering, worked hard initially to ensure that the fight against Al Qaeda wasn't seen as a war on Islam.
The enemy, quote, the enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends, he said in the national address before a joint session of Congress on September 20th, 2001.
Quote, it is not our many Arab friends.
Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists.
And by the way, when he says it's not our many Arab friends, he means the Saudis, right?
Who are extremely chummy with the pushes.
He says, our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.
Okay.
But he also broadened the fight to include the defeat of, quote, every terrorist group of global reach, and then flattened it into a conflict of cultural values.
In an address to the American people, he declared, Americans are asking, why do they hate us?
They hate what they see right here in this chamber, a democratically elected government.
Their leaders are self-appointed.
They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble, and to disagree with each other.
I think it's nonsense.
Also, by the way, undoubtedly a person who played a role in writing that speech and also the axis of evil speech, which we'll talk about, was David Frum.
And David Frum, speaking of the Atlantic, is somebody who now in 2021 looks around like, how the hell did we get here?
How did the Republican Party lose its way?
How in the world did any of this happen?
And you've got David Frum, who is right there on the front lines with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
And before we get moving on this, I want to point something out.
We sometimes throw around the phrase neoconservative.
And I want to go ahead and give people some context before we move forward, because this is going to play a major, major role in the story that we're telling.
So these neoconservatives, including Donald Rumsfeld, including Dick Cheney, including Paul Wolfowitz, including a lot of the think tankers, a lot of the people who were writing these things.
The neoconservatives were part of the Straussian model.
And the Straussian model says, You know, the specifics aren't important.
It's the larger story of good versus evil, and if you can find a good versus evil narrative, you can bring people over and do anything at all, including wars, including crusades, all of those things.
It's important to point out that a lot of the people involved, and now I'm talking about Cheney, I'm talking about Rumsfeld, They have their fingerprints on all of this.
They had a role in all of the things that led to September 11th.
Saying it's a war of good versus evil, they hate us because, you know, we're better than them and we have democracy and they hate our culture and our freedom.
What does that do?
It distracts people from asking what really happened.
It distracts people from saying, hey, how did we end up at this point?
And people like Rumsfeld and Cheney, who were parts of all of these different operations that eventually led to September 11, 2001, all of a sudden it says, hey, don't look here, look over there.
Now it's a battle between good and evil.
And when you move to good versus evil, the particularities don't matter at that point.
You know, I am willing to believe when you listen to the rhetoric that was coming out of the extreme Muslim camps about why they hated America, I'm willing to believe them what they said, which was that they don't want the quote-unquote infidels in their lands.
And that was why they wanted to attack the United States.
And that makes much more sense to me.
And also throw in the fact that we've been bombing these countries across the world with impunity without ever caring about the individual people who are dying and all these things.
And we just did it again, right?
When we retaliated against the suicide bombers at the Kabul airport, they killed a family of 10 people that just happened to be around.
out that is why they wanted to you know destroy America and kill and attack us like they did and you've been listening to a free preview of our patreon exclusive weekender show if you want to get in on all the fun and get that bonus episode every week not to mention exclusive content live hangouts question and answer sessions We're even going to do some of these live so you can come and watch how the sausage is made.
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