9/11 Imaginary Unity

Some of the unity we had in the aftermath of 9/11. E.g. how the left was dividing us before the bodies had been buried and the smoke had been cleared.

One of the more enduring lies about 9/11 is that, "in its immediate aftermath, Americans were unified"... usually followed by some variant of, "then Bush divided us by lying to the public in order to invade Iraq" as a pawn of the Neocons. This is one of the left's lies/revisionism.

The truth is that just weeks after the attack (before the smoke had cleared and ground zero had been cleaned up):

• Thousands of protesters were marching in the streets of NYC, blaming the attacks on President Bush.
• They had never dropped their lie that he (or the Supreme Court) had stolen the election from Al Gore, and this just magnified it. (It didn't slow until Bush won resounding re-election against John Kerry... but then the narrative shifted to blaming Bush/allies for telling the truth about Kerry's Swift-boat chicken-hawk heroism).
• The Universities were holding “teach-ins,” with faculty arguing that America had this coming for its colonialism, capitalism, and racism!
• Everyone could hear mumblings from many of their leftist friends about all the things wrong that had contributed, from this was revenge for the Crusades (seriously) or meddling in the middle east, or various other excuses to fit their narrative that America is always wrong.

There were 3 basic leftist conspiracies:

1. Bush had known the attacks were coming (from our ally Saudi Arabia) and that he'd let it happen as an excuse to go to war (and collaborated or protected the Saud's)
2. The Mossad was behind everything because Israel and Jews!
3. The oil companies were behind everything because Dick Cheney and Halliburton (this materialized more over the next year, but the seeds were started early)
   
   

If you doubt any of this, just read Susan Sontag, Ward Churchill, Amiri Baraka or Victor Davis Hanson's collection "An Autumn of War" from this time: that they were reflecting the zeitgeist of the divisive left, not creating it.

🗒️ NOTE:
Much of this section was inspired and/or borrowed from a friend Mark Goldblatt

The idea that Trump is newly divisive, or that Social Media is the cause of our division is clueless revisionism. Leftists have always done this, and always will. They did this on 9/11, they did this on Reagan's election (he as Hitler, he had conspired with Iran to hold the hostages until his election, etc), and a bunch on Nixon as well. The left's undermining of America and trying to divide us gained power in the 1960's with them being puppets ("useful idiots") in the Vietnam War, and has only continued to try to tear us apart by destroying civility and perpetually rewriting our history. Social media and the Internet / Web / Blogs (citizen journalism) increases the division, but only because those who remember the actual history, have more of a voice, and can argue our outrage the revisionists.

9/11   📚 References