What If 9/11 Had Never Taken Place?
No Department of Homeland Security. No Paramilitarized Border Enforcement. No War on Terror. No Trump.
by Naomi Braine
Without the War on Terror, the Department of Homeland Security would likely never have been created; the Border Patrol and ICE wouldn’t have become semi-autonomous paramilitaries; state and local police departments would have less military grade weaponry and surveillance equipment; and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq might not have happened. Without the War on Terror, Trump’s White nationalist rhetoric—from the “birther” smears he used to launch his political career, to his campaign promise to expel Muslim and Black migrants—might have gotten him marginalized, rather than elected.
In New York City before 9/11, there was a vibrant, multiracial, people of color-led movement against police brutality in response to a series of police killings but after the attacks, protests against law enforcement were silenced for years...
The January 6 insurrection drew attention to the extent of law enforcement and military participation in far-right movements, but this has a long and well-established history in the United States. If we take that history seriously, as we should, then we need to consider the ways in which the political and cultural response to 9/11 created nearly ideal conditions for far-right network building both institutionally, in military and law enforcement contexts, and culturally through the deliberate fostering of fear of outsiders and non-Americans determined to undermine “our” values and culture.
21st Century White Nationalism: 9/11 and the Anti-Immigrant Movement
by Ethan Fauré
As FAIR’s ads in Michigan in 2000 indicate, the anti-immigrant movement didn’t need to change much to adapt to this new political climate. Its agenda and rhetoric were already inherently exclusionary, and its leaders already eager to foment bigotry and discriminatory policies against Muslims in the U.S. and abroad. But they were aided by a new right-wing ecosystem that coalesced in the years following 9/11, comprised of bloggers, politicians, cable news anchors, and NGOs, all amplifying anti-Muslim/-Islam narratives and calling to limit the entry of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers from abroad. With the rise of these narratives, the anti-immigrant movement identified this burgeoning anti-Muslim coalition as a natural constituency for many of its preferred policies and began collaborating with them.
Groups like FAIR would mobilize in a variety of ways, citing 9/11 as a new justification for their long-held policy positions...
Many aspects of FAIR’s and the anti-immigrant movement’s vision were already realized before Trump entered office. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 offered a pretense to build upon the criminalization and mass deportation apparatus created by laws the movement helped author in the 1990s. It also helped popularize FAIR’s crusade against multiculturalism and non-White population growth—implicit expressions of the movement’s White nationalist orientation.
By Carolyn Gallaher
In many respects, 9/11 was the first attack of its kind in the U.S.: the first to successfully strike the Pentagon, to use commercial jets as weapons, or to hit three large targets at once. It was also unique politically, as the first attack in which many of the perpetrators were citizens of a close U.S. ally-state, Saudi Arabia. Casualties also made 9/11 stand out, with a death toll that remains the largest of any terrorist attack inside U.S. borders.
Despite all of these firsts, the country’s far-right conspiratorial lexicon remained firmly rooted in tradition. Government was the enemy because it had supposedly been co-opted, if not fully “occupied,” by foreign Jewish infiltrators. Indeed, most far-right theories ignored or downplayed seemingly obvious targets of suspicion like the Saudi government.
The legacy of 9/11 conspiracism continues today. The same narrative that underpins many 9/11 conspiracies—Jewish masterminds infiltrating the U.S. government—also inform contemporary QAnon conspiracy theories. The main difference is one of scale. When 9/11 happened, Facebook and Twitter didn’t yet exist. Today, both social media giants, as well as dozens of smaller platforms, have allowed conspiracy theories to spread even more quickly, and over even larger territories, than talk radio or earlier internet forums ever achieved.
