Twenty-Five Years Later: Our Staff Remembers 9/11

The UnPopulist's writers on where they were that morning—and how they've come to see the events that followed

Shikha Dalmia

What Might Have Been, and What Wouldn't Have Changed

On this fateful day 25 years ago, I was driving to The Detroit News, on whose conservative editorial board I had been a writer for about six years. As usual, I had the car radio on, trying to catch the latest news before going into the morning board meeting where we planned the lineup for the day.

Suddenly, a breaking news bulletin, can’t remember which station it was, announced that a plane had collided into the World Trade Center’s north tower. That seemed odd, but I chalked it to an unfortunate accident. Seventeen minutes later, another news bulletin blared that a second plane had hit the other tower.

The statistical probability that this might be a coincidence was nil. It was clear at that point that this was a deliberate, coordinated attack. I called my husband (from my unsmart phone!) and told him to turn on the TV while I hit the gas pedal to speed to the office.

The entire newsroom was gathered around the TV, watching the footage of the planes crashing into the twin towers on replay. There was a stunned lull before the frenzy to cover the unfolding horror set in. One of my colleagues observed, “This is another Pearl Harbor.”

It was not really, given that the hijackers were not state actors and had planned no followup strikes. But no one knew that at the moment—or for weeks and months after that. Grief, panic, confusion, anger and—above all—fear gripped the country. In an open society with an infinite number of vulnerabilities, the next attack could come from anywhere, anytime. A mall could be bombed; a water supply poisoned; a dirty bomb detonated; anthrax released (there was an anthrax scare but the culprit was not an Islamist terrorist); and on and on and on. That was the emotion that most shaped the decisions of our political leaders.

I have often played the counterfactual in my head as to what might have been the same—and what different—had the Supreme Court settled the contested 2000 election in Al Gore’s favor instead of George Bush’s.

There is no doubt in my mind that Gore would have appealed for calm and done everything in his power to prevent reprisals against Muslims, just like Bush. Our liberal norms and values —honoring the dignity of all; ensuring equal protection of the law for all; extending basic human decency to all—were still intact at that time. We had not yet been taken over by a leader who thrives on chaos and cruelty so we knew in our bones that Islamophobia, like other bigotries, was wrong.

One of Bush’s finest hours was six days after the event when he motorcaded to the Islamic Center of Washington DC and said, “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country.” He added, “Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.”

These were not mere platitudes meant to maintain law and order; they were an affirmation of our values. That even such quotidian pieties exceed our grasp now is a measure of how much our country has changed.

There is also no doubt in my mind that, like Bush, Gore would have escalated the War on Terrorism. After all, President Bill Clinton, whom he served as vice president, had already gotten the ball rolling when he pushed for and signed the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. That draconian piece of legislation narrowed the right of habeas corpus, expanded roving wiretap authority to track terrorism suspects across devices, created new powers to designate terrorist organizations, and expanded deportation authority.

Gore might not have pushed for everything in the Patriot Act—a sprawling bill that Congress passed in six weeks flat after 9/11. It handed the federal government sweeping new powers to issue secret warrants, hold terrorism suspects indefinitely, snoop around in homes without notifying the homeowners immediately etc etc. (For a fuller litany of the act’s civil liberties-busting provisions, read Radley Balko’s excellent New York Times article this week.) But, like Bush, he would have insisted that only a strong executive could keep the country safe and demanded many of its tools.

It is also inconceivable that Gore would have refrained from attacking Afghanistan given that Osama-bin-Laden, the 9/11 mastermind, and al-Qaeda were still holed up there. There is no universe in which the leader of a targeted country, let alone one so militarily powerful, would have simply turned a blind eye to something this audacious.

But there the similarity ends.

I don’t believe that Gore would have toppled the Taliban and deployed troops for 10 years in a bid to plant liberal democracy on its inhospitable, rugged terrain. He would have lobbed some bombs, perhaps launched covert operations to hunt down bin-Laden, as Obama did subsequently, and called it a day.

And I am absolutely convinced that Gore would not have dragged America into its disastrous war of choice in Iraq, a country that, as it turned out, had zilch to do with 9/11. He wouldn’t have deposed and executed Saddam Hussein. He would not have created an intelligence cell in the Pentagon to manufacture a connection between the Baghdadi butcher and al Qaeda to retroactively justify his epic blunder. And he would not have embroiled America in a nation-building exercise that it was ill-equipped to undertake.

Those were choices unique to Bush that no other leader in his position would have made. He ran for office, ironically, against the use of secret evidence against Arab Americans being held on terrorism charges, a gift of Clinton’s anti-terrorism law, earning him 70-plus percent of the national Muslim vote.

He pivoted quickly after 9/11 and threw all that to the wind. He seemed convinced that providence had put him in office to keep the country safe and therefore it was his moral duty to do everything in his power to do so. His post-9/11 language drew explicitly and repeatedly on Christian moral vocabulary. He also considered Iraq the unfinished business of his father’s presidency. And his cabinet was staffed with neoconservative hawks who believed in using America’s might to reshape the world in its own image and saw the post-9/11 moment as their chance.

But the Iraq debacle was a more existentially confusing event for the right than the left. The latter was always opposed to a muscular use of America’s military might and it was a no-brainer that it would not have gone along with Iraq. (The Democratic establishment is another matter.)

Initially the highbrow conservative establishment and the lowbrow opinion makers strongly rallied around the invasion. But the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or establish the al Qaeda connection or make Iraq a functioning democracy despite a huge sacrifice of American blood and treasure started to dent the confidence of the increasingly war-weary rightwing rank-and-file against its leaders and its elite. If it didn’t hold its leaders to account, it’s in large part because a whole industry of talk show hosts—speaking in a fluent populist argot and led by Rush Limbaugh —emerged to bamboozle them and change the subject. It enflamed tribal passions by doubling down on nativism and xenophobia, ratcheting up the culture wars and relentlessly attacking “liberals” as the enemies of the nation. When Obama became president, the Tea Party was locked and loaded to knock him down not through normal argumentation and deliberation— but through racist dog whistles and outlandish conspiracy theories.

It was left up to a failed businessman-turned-TV host to engineer a Hegelian synthesis that combined a deep antipathy toward the conservative establishment and a tribal fury against the left into a successful electoral formula.

Whatever one thinks of the great man theory—that history is driven primarily by the decisions, character, and actions of exceptional individuals rather than by broader social, economic, or structural forces—it is hard to deny that the choices leaders make at key moments shape the trajectory of nations. Those of ours on 9/11 have changed our ways, tragically.

We wanted to spread liberal democracy around the world—and have ended up jeopardizing our own. We wanted to vanquish authoritarianism abroad—but we are on the brink of one ourselves. And after all that, we couldn’t even avoid another disastrous war in the same region.

The only thing that stands in the way right now is America’s strong historical commitment to freedom and the resistance movement it has spawned. And on this tragic day in our history, we have to renew that commitment.

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Andy Craig

The Birth of a Generation of News Junkies

I was sick and home from school on September 11, 2001, and spent it watching the news unfold on TV, the same as the rest of the country. Not a particularly novel personal experience of the day. But it was the first breaking news event I’d ever paid attention to. Like many millennials around the same age, I suspect it was a bit of a jumpstart to news consumption and political habits we’ve seen play out since.

Cable was the medium for most of it, at first. But then millennials also became the audience for political comedy such as The Daily Show and South Park, whose jokes depended on at least a passing familiarity with the news of the day. Those shows drew a young audience that had the motive and opportunity to get the references. And then we were also the first generation on Facebook, and consumed the proliferation of political social media that followed. By the time smartphones arrived, the habit of checking in on the world several times a day was already well formed.

Which isn’t to say this made millennials as a group necessarily more politically engaged than other generations, to be sure. As always, many are not. Nor that other generations were, by any means, tuned out from what was going on in the world. But among a broad slice of my generation, I do think the period left an indelible mark on the consumption of news and politics. We consumed it in greater volumes, and it was more pervasive in our daily life, than was typical for the preceding era of nightly network newscasts and legacy newspapers. The war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, and the global financial crisis arrived in relatively quick succession, all within the scope of a generation’s teenage and college years.

This observation is not necessarily a point of praise. News junkies are at least as prone to be more neurotic and polarized as they are to be better informed citizens. The attention economy is not the same thing as better understanding or productive engagement with national and global affairs. 9/11 and what followed in the months and years in its wake were not particularly positive events for anyone’s formative years of political awareness, either. But for a time, in a big in-your-face way, the news wasn’t something you could easily ignore. The habit outlasted the moment that formed it. Many of us are still glued to our screens a quarter century later.

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Berny Belvedere

We Have to Recommit to an Open Society Everyday

There are many ways we try to capture the world-altering power of a mass casualty event like what happened 25 years ago on Sept. 11, 2001. We call it a “you know exactly where you were” moment. And rightly so—certainly no event in my lifetime has earned “unforgettable” status as 9/11 has. We also use it to distinguish eras, as our frequent use of “pre-9/11” and “post-9/11” as categories attests—a hint of the event’s outsize impact on society.

But there’s a subjective element to its lasting, singular impact, too. It is the only event I have ever experienced as, simultaneously, an unfolding mass-scale tragedy of unimaginable horror as well as an attack that, for all I knew, would continue to unfold and also target me.

Genuinely, my strongest, most immediate reaction was pure heartbreak for the people trapped in the towers, the thousands on the streets below in harm’s way, and the first responders rushing straight into the abyss. The sheer scale of human suffering was overwhelming, the kind of atrocity that makes the ordinary vocabulary of tragedy feel rather inadequate to the task. Yet alongside that profound grief for those in the thick of it, a more self-attuned instinct took hold—one that, in retrospect, I understand but regret. I was personally panicked over what might loom around the corner. It wasn’t just a sense of tragedy happening “over there.” To a degree, it’s understandable: as a very young child during the height of Cold War fears, 9/11 was the first real immediate, visceral worry for me that the ground beneath our own feet was no longer safe.

I was a senior in a South Florida high school just minutes from the Turkey Point nuclear plant, and the sudden realization that critical infrastructure—that we—could be next was ... a lot. Every passing minute felt heavy with the question of whether this was merely the opening volley of a much larger, relentless strike. We were grieving American lives lost in real time while simultaneously tracking the skies, watching the news, and calculating our own proximity to potential targets, especially as reports increasingly made clear that this was a multi-pronged assault. That fear started local but it didn’t stay that way for long. Soon it widened into something closer to global dread: not a specific prediction but just the sense that whatever this was, it wasn’t finished. Many of these fears, even the ones that turned out to be true, were ill-founded, of course. But we did not experience them that way.

Twenty-five years on, the memory—the experiencing of—9/11, even at what turned out to be a very safe distance, remains singularly haunting, an event that for me is truly one of one. But it also taught me something I didn’t have language for as a teenager: that the safety that open societies like ours run on is a choice people have to keep making, not a background condition they can take for granted or assume will always be in place.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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