[JeremyNT]

I think there's a reasonable case to make that 9/11 broke American politics in a fundamental way, by fully unlocking and granting a permission structure for politicians to reach for nativism and xenophobia to justify basically everything.

It's clear that Bin Laden did not "win" in any immediate sense, but America might have still lost, so there's a claim to a Pyrrhic victory.

The truly erratic and unstable nature of the US regime in this moment unlocks strange possibilities that would otherwise have been unthinkable - for example, the current regime seeming to throw Israel to the wolves in order to cover its own military blunders.

[pas]

9/11 was just a bloody blip compared to the decades of spiraling indoctrination with varying focal points.

the same way that now "progressive leftists" are completely working themselves into an anticapitalist frenzy, and before them the (performative) woke and the reactive antiwoke mania spread like wildfire, before that it was the homophobia and islamophobia (triggered by 9/11), and before that the red scare, and the reefer madness, and whatnot.

https://www.npr.org/2004/12/15/4229442/from-direct-mail-to-a...

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con (2012 by Rick Perlstein)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_the_Un... (Richard Hofstadter, 1964)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-682x.... (Three Kinds of Anti-Intellectualism: Rethinking Hofstadter, 1991 by Daniel Rigney)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2018.1... (Anti-intellectualism is a virus, 2018 by Michael A. Peters)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teqkK0RLNkI (Conspiracy, 2025 by ContraPoints)

[Schmerika]

> America might have still lost, so there's a claim to a Pyrrhic victory.

Might have??

America has spent - at the lowest possible estimate - at least 8 trillion dollars on the "war on terror". Probably more like 20-something. Trillion.

That's enough money to have transitioned to entirely clean energy, housed every homeless American, and solved world hunger. With change.

The DOW is over 50 thousand though, I guess, and the Epstein class are richer than ever.

> for example, the current regime seeming to throw Israel to the wolves in order to cover its own military blunders.

Uh, what?

Israel threw themselves to the wolves, if 'wolves' are what we're calling the consequences of doing ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide.

America have been the single greatest force by far holding the 'wolves' at bay. If they stop because the 'wolves' are threatening their own stability, that's not really "throwing Israel" anywhere.