“Anyone who is willing to drive a plane into a building to kill Jews is alright by me. I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude,” white supremacist Billy Roper wrote in an email to members of the neo-Nazi National Alliance on Sept. 11, 2001, even before the World Trade Center towers had collapsed.
Today, 24 years later, white supremacists have gained enormous political power in America. America belongs to real Americans — the white people who’ve been here since at least the Civil War, according to Vice President Vance, and it really doesn’t matter which side of that war they fought on. Hardcore white supremacists remain junior partners to a more sophisticated identitarian creed, claiming to stand for traditional Western values, even as they destroy them in practice. And the rules-based international order — which they falsely accuse of being Jewish-controlled — is in a state of chaos, with its once-prime guarantor, the United States, abandoning its commitments to democracy, the rule of law, and universal human rights.
Those commitments were always imperfectly honored, at best, and those imperfections played a key role in the tale of how the Al Qaeda terrorists, with their hatred of Western secular democracy, and their white supremacist fans, have succeeded so dramatically in undermining American democracy as it existed before the 9/11 attacks.
The attacks themselves were clearly a crime carried out by terrorists attacking civilians, not an act of war carried out by soldiers on the battlefield. Yet the neoconservative George Bush administration responded by declaring war — though not constitutionally, and not against those who had attacked us — but rather on the governments of Afghanistan, which had sheltered them, and Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, but did have a lot of oil. In the process, the violence we employed created far more terrorists than it killed — and not just on the other side.
Overwhelming majorities of the world’s people opposed these actions, but the U.S. government and its NATO allies pursued them nonetheless, and the eventual, inevitable flood of refugees from the region did a great deal to turn mass opinion from one form of opposition to another: from an open-hearted humanitarian opposition to needless war to a xenophobic response to the resulting failures: the emergence of ISIS, the flood of refugees in Europe, and the loss of elite credibility, due to the magnitude of the lies and the lack of accountability.
Along the way, the Bush administration’s many failures led to disillusionment so widespread that many conservatives stopped seeing him as one of their own, calling him a “globalist” instead; and Democrats who had gone along with him — particularly on Iraq — were so damaged that a relative newcomer, Barack Obama, was able to become America’s first Black president. This, in turn, supercharged the reactionary shift in the Republican base, in synergy with the wider disillusionment with elite politics. Baseless conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate were a prime organizing narrative in fueling this shift, and Donald Trump switched parties to take advantage of it, laying the ground for his eventual run for president.
There was a strange moment in U.S. history in early 2011, when Obama finally released his long-form birth certificate, and days later teased Trump a bit at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, after which he oversaw the operation in which Osama bin Laden was killed. It appeared to be a peak moment of accomplishment in compensating for errors of the past. Obama didn’t oppose all wars; he had assured the donor class — only the dumb ones. Finally getting bin Laden, whom Bush had tellingly lost interest in, was right in line with that. And the seriousness of ridding the world of bin Laden contrasted nicely with Trump’s frivolous foolishness that Obama had mocked just hours before.
But all that proved quite mistaken. Killing bin Laden, like releasing Obama’s birth certificate, was closing the barn door after the horse had gone. ISIS soon emerged as a far more organized and effective terrorist force, and the release of Obama’s long-form birth certificate only reduced birtherism temporarily. A poll one year later found birtherism was stronger than ever within the GOP. And with that base of support, Trump was elected president in 2016.
The year 2011 was an inflection point. Less than three months after bin Laden’s death, a white supremacist terrorist attack left 77 dead in Norway. It was justified as a defense of Europe against looming destruction in a 1500-page conspiracist manifesto, which called for the deportation of Muslims from Europe, blaming both Muslims and “cultural Marxism” — an alleged Jewish conspiracy to destroy Western culture and civilization by promoting multiculturalism and undermining traditional values. That attack inspired a series of copycats across the globe in the years to come — including several in America.
That same year, French conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacement, advancing the great replacement theory that the ethnic French and white European populations were being replaced by non-whites — especially from Muslim-majority countries — with the complicity or cooperation of “replacist” elites. This echoed the plot of a 1973 novel, Camp of The Saints but with a new urgency in the post-9/11 world.
The influence of that terrorist attack and the great replacement theory first spread in hard right circles before gaining new prominence during Trump’s first term in office, with Trump’s solicitations of armed rightwing supporters — who eventually showed up at the Jan. 6 insurrection — and Tucker Carlson’s repeated broadcasts combining great replacement theory with voter fraud conspiracies hundreds of times.
Throughout all this, the corporate media failed the basic responsibility of journalism: to make the world legible, so that the public can make informed decisions shaping our collective future. This failure was evident from the beginning. The media watch group FAIR found that alternatives to war were “nearly non-existent” in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post in the three weeks following the attacks. Forty-four columns were pushing for a military response, versus only two stressing non-military solutions.
Yet, a global Gallup poll painted a very different picture: American public opinion was more divided, while the worldwide public overwhelmingly opposed going to war.
Super-majorities of 2-1 or 3-1 up to 10-1 and more in some cases opposed the war in almost every country across the world. Finding the terrorists and putting them on trial had far more support. It was 75-18 in Britain, our main ally in the push for war, the high was 94-2 in Mexico. There were three exceptions: There was strong support for war in India (72% supported, 28% opposed) and Israel (77% supported, 19% opposed), who both had generations of conflicts with Muslim adversaries, which war had only made worse. And there was a modest 54% majority for war in America itself (with 16% undecided, 30% favoring trials), where there was virtually no discussion of any alternative.
These facts alone should have been enough to prevent any war. The lesson of Vietnam was clear: that sustained war required sustained public support, and clear goals, both of which were lacking from the very beginning. And the only countries whose people favored war were ones whose own histories showed its folly and their own inability to learn from past mistakes.
Nonetheless, the U.S. and allies swiftly rushed into war against Afghanistan, ignoring the government’s offer to turn the terrorists over to an Islamic court, where, contrary to Western opinion, they would not have faced sympathetic judges. The war against Iraq took longer to arrange because there was simply no connection, and it took time to manufacture one.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, USA Today ran a story detailing how the decision to go to war with Iraq came about “without a formal decision-making meeting” within weeks of 9/11. It was later revealed by Bush’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that getting rid of Saddam Hussein had been a Bush administration goal since their first day in office. 9/11 was just an excuse. Yet, at the same time, repeated intelligence community warnings of a planned terrorist attack by al Qaeda were simply ignored — in part precisely because it wasn’t linked to a state sponsor.
If most of the world’s people were united in opposing the war as a response to 9/11 terror, they were far more divided in how to deal with the catastrophic outcome. It was a predictable result of war, and one of the reasons it was so broadly opposed. Different people found different facets of the catastrophe more alarming, and ultimately more orienting in their political views. And this was complicated not just by the continued insistence that war was just and good, but by the addition of multiple new false narratives.
One such narrative was that of Islam as an existential threat to America and the West. This narrative didn’t arise spontaneously. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the American public responded with an increased level of acceptance and support for Muslims. President Bush, who’d successfully courted the Muslim vote in 2000, visited a mosque shortly after the attacks and publicly praised American Muslims multiple times in the following year.
Yet, a handful of ill-informed extremist voices — mostly centered in three small organizations — were eventually able to spread their profoundly paranoid views into the mainstream, in a fact-free process described by sociologist Christopher Bail in his 2015 book, Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream. They hijacked public discourse about Islam, first by stoking fears with emotional, attention-grabbing messaging, then by forging ties with established elite organizations, and ultimately building their own organizational and media infrastructure. As a result, Islamophobia became completely normalized within the GOP and beyond.
While the processes Bail describes unfolded primarily in elite networks, with neoconservative institutions and individuals playing key roles, the results helped drive a mass-based shift toward a nativist, paleoconservative worldview. Other factors facilitated this as well.
Even as Bush explicitly praised American Muslims, his claim that terrorists and their sympathizers “hate us because of our freedoms” obscured the long history of U.S. involvement in thwarting their political self-determination, falsely painting foreign Muslims as implacable, irrational enemies of an enlightened West, led by America. This basic war on terror anti-jihadi narrative was ripe for hijacking by far-right groups, which was exactly what rightwing terrorists and great replacement ideologues did.
In a 2012 paper, “Blind Spot? Security Narratives and Far-Right Violence in Europe,” Dr. Arun Kundnani noted that since the 1980s the French National Front and similar rightwing parties began downplaying their neo‐Nazi roots and “speaking of the need to preserve cultural identity” which was supposedly “under threat from a ruling elite that enabled excessive immigration” and “promoted policies of multiculturalism,” allowing them to “maintain their own cultural identities.” He went to say:
“Following 9/11, a new version of this identitarian narrative began to circulate. … In the ‘counter‐jihadist’ narrative, the identity that needs to be defended is no longer a conservative notion of national identity but an idea of liberal values, seen as a civilisational inheritance. Islam becomes the new threat to this identity, regarded as both an alien culture and an extremist political ideology. … Unlike the traditional far‐Right, these new movements rhetorically embrace what they regard as Enlightenment values of individual liberty, freedom of speech, gender equality, and gay rights.”
In short, by adopting this new “counter-jihad” narrative, we have European neo-Nazis pretending to be liberals, in the ultimate wolf-in-sheep-clothing move:
“In moving from neo‐Nazism to counter‐jihadism, the underlying structure of the narrative remains the same, but the protagonists have changed: the identity of Western liberal values has been substituted for white racial identity, Muslims have taken the place of blacks, and multiculturalists are the new Jews.”
Of course, treating universalist liberal values as an identity fundamentally disfigures them, making them tools of repression. Sadly, there’s a long history of doing this — denying rights to women, Black people, Indigenous people, non-white immigrants, gay people, the disabled, etc. This was just more of the same.
Nothing this sophisticated was happening at scale in America in 2012. But similar ideas were circulating in more limited circles and began emerging after Trump first took office. They now lie at the heart, for example, of Trump’s heavy-handed attacks on higher education, and of his attempts to control cultural institutions more generally — from national museums to local public schools and libraries.
When trumpeting “viewpoint diversity” goes hand-in-hand with getting rid of entire academic departments, as Trump has demanded, the gaslighting involved is obvious. But it goes much farther than higher education, or even cultural institutions as a whole. The inversion of democratic values lies at the very heart of the neofascist project seen around the world today, taking on similar, but distinct forms in different situations.
Almost everywhere there are elections, for example, but there are different ways in which elections are rigged so that they can’t result in the transfer of power. The Trump-demanded Texas gerrymander is just one facet of that here in America. Troops in the streets to suppress dissent and voter turnout is another, which Trump is just starting to use, more than a year before the midterms, when a Democratic victory could begin to check his autocratic power-grab.
To defeat Trump in the short run, we need all the allies we can get, including Republicans and former Republicans who oppose him. But to defeat the deeper reactionary authoritarian threat that he is the current superspreader of, we need to understand how we got here, as summarized above. Those who helped bring us here from 9/11 may be welcome allies in the moment. But their errors — and yes, even their sins — must be squarely faced, accounted for, and corrected, for the long-range task of rebuilding the promise of America with liberty and justice for all.
