It Could Happen Here - The 9/11 Cult

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Robert sits down to talk to his Zoomer colleagues about 9/11, and how it became the source of a secular revenge cultSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks

while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Ah, 9-11 is in a couple of days. I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about 9-11. Well, as Garrison said in the intro that we're not using, it's about things falling apart.

And boy, did that happen on 9-11. Two things that fell apart. Yeah. Yeah. So this was originally going to be a slightly cruder episode than it wound up being. But I'm just going to delve into the scriptuder episode than it wound up being but i'm just gonna i'm just gonna

delve into the script and uh chris garrison you guys just buckle in because the reason i have you both as guests on this is that you are both too young to remember nine that's not true i remember night i remember that's a lie i remember were you like four uh i hope so. Yeah, I was four. But I remember my mom, like, so she was trying to explain the Pentagon, right? And so she has like a coaster on the ground and she's making an airplane with her hand. It's just going. Anyway, so as I said, neither of you properly remember 9-11. I don't remember 9-11. As I said, neither of you properly remember 9-11.

I don't remember 9-11. I was at the age where every moment of it is burnt into my brain, as is the reaction. So I wanted you both on this because we're going to talk about how 9-11 kind of became a cult. Yes. How to maybe deal with that. And then we'll be chatting about Glenn Beck's 9-12 project, which is something I'm sure neither of you are very familiar with. Now, in its sixth season, the popular cartoon South Park ran an episode in which Jared Fogle, who was at that point just a subway spokesman and not a convicted child molester, came to town and announced the start of a new program to give everyone AIDS. announced the start of a new program to give everyone AIDS. Now, he was talking about dieticians and personal trainers to help people lose weight,

but everybody heard AIDS, the disease, which led to wacky hijinks. That's the episode. It ends when everyone realizes they'd misunderstood Fogel, and they all laugh. This leads them to realize that AIDS is finally funny, because things that are tragic become funny exactly 22.3 years after they occur. That's the joke in the episode, and went on to become a minor little internet joke that like, you know, once you hit that 22 year point, you can laugh about something tragic. We are now at like 21 years and change since September 11th, 2001. And I think if we're all honest, most of us can admit that we've laughed at a lot of 9-11 jokes.

We're recording this the day the queen died and people are like photoshopping her face to be the Twin Towers. And it's so good. It's quite a time on the old internet. Now, I think the first, I think the hardest at least that I ever laughed at a 9-11 joke, I'm sure it's not the first time,

was this picture of Trump Tower that was posted to Twitter like right after he got inaugurated with the text, George Bush do your thing. It's still an excellent 9-11 joke. Now, the first person with any kind of platform to making a 9-11 joke was the recently deceased comedian Gilbert Gottfried. On September 29th, 2001, he took part in a roast of Hugh Hefner at the New York Friars

Club. And I'm going to play you the audio of that right now. I have to catch a flight to California. I can't get a direct flight. They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first. Very tame. Very tame joke. Extremely tame joke.

Honestly, not a great joke. But it went on to, it's probably like maybe the most famous in like kind of stand-up history, like bombs. Gottfried himself said that he lost the audience more than anyone else ever has. I think it caused some career problems for him. And this was only a few weeks after. This was days after. So this is at the Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner on September 29th.

Is this where Too soon is from? Well, yeah, this I mean, I don't I don't know that it originated there, but this was the response to him. And I think it's the first time I ever recall hearing someone say that. Gottfried said that, like, the reason he decided to tell a joke this close to 9-11 was that he was personally offended by the fact that anything could be too soon to make a joke about. One of the things that's interesting about this little side thing is that after bombing and getting shouted at by the audience, Gottfried decided to get them back by telling a particularly long and foul version of the Aristocrats, which is a meta joke about jokes primarily. Anyway, it's basically just being as foul-mouthed as you can possibly be to an audience. And that audio has been lost to time, apparently.

But boy, you can watch a fun documentary about the aristocrats if you want to learn more about that. Now, I think the first good actual comedy bit about 9-11 came out a little bit after this. This was about two weeks after the day. And a couple of months later, at like the three month point, South Park season five aired and they ran an episode about 9-11. It has been criticized, rightly so, because there's some kind of racist bits of humor in there. Yeah, that's not surprising. That's not surprising. That said, it's also kind of a valuable snapshot of history. For one thing, a huge part of the episode is just kind of like the Afghan child counterparts to the main characters in the show walking around their town as everyone is murdered

by U.S. airstrikes. So it is not like the, it stands kind of in opposition to sort of the kind of like boot licking responses you got. For some context, the show The West Wing, which is the favorite show of everybody who runs anything in politics right now, ran an emergency 9-11 episode like a couple of weeks after the attack, which was the kind of turnaround you didn't do in TV at that point in time. So they put in a ton of effort to have this special 9-11 episode of The West Wing. That number one in the alternate West Wing universe, there's no 9-11.

There's like some vague, like there's basically the episode focuses on like a bunch of kids on a tour getting stuck in the White House because it locks down because some vague terrorist attack thing happens in a fake country they made up when the West Wing needed to talk about Muslims. And kind of like the breakout piece of this. Well, there's two breakouts. One of them is a very racist retelling of the story of Isaac and Ishmael that explains like why Muslims are always so angry all the time. And then the White House press lady, C.J. Craig, goes on a rant about how awesome the intelligence apparatus is and how like what good people, uh, CIA agents are and how like the best thing

to do for politics sometimes is to have a, a guy dressed as a waiter murder somebody with a silenced pistol. Like it was out of its mind unhinged. That's the fucking like, so the fact that South Park does an episode that's like, yeah, we're going to murder a bunch of people in Afghanistan for no reason is like not a, not a bad response, not a bad thing to recognize about that day. The other things that are like pretty good are pretty, I think, meaningful sort of bits in that episode. It opens with all of the kids at

the bus stop wearing gas masks as they stand in line for the bus. There's a piece in that episode that kind of sticks with me today still um that i'm gonna play for you guys remember when life used to be simple and cool not really i don't know i always found that bit fun so when the school bus arrives there's a cop on it searching bags and confiscating items that might be used as weapons the school classroom doors are reinforced with a massive military grade lock uh which resonated more in a time when like school shootings weren't a constant thing. And it kind of hit me because when this episode came out

and I watched it when it came out, I was at middle school, Clark Middle School in Plano, Texas. And on 9-11 and 9-12, the attacks were like the only topic of discussion that anyone had. And I have this vivid memory of a couple of girls in my US history class weeping because

they were scared that Al-Qaeda was coming for our schools next. Like, this was a very real worry for kids that I grew up with. A school in what, like, Midland, Texas or something? No, it was India. It's a big school. But like, I'm certain that fucking Osama bin Laden had never heard the name Plano, Texas. Let alone... Did you all have the thing with, like, anytime a plane was, like, going down, people would point at it and be like, oh my god?

Yeah. Yeah. No, that was definitely a meme. was, you know, one of the most famous ones was this video called triumph.avi that started to spread on the Something Awful forums that was just footage of the September 11th attacks set to Yakety Sax. And again, these were all kind of the comedy that, you know, that South Park put out here and that you saw in stuff like the Triumph video were reactions to how fucking seriously everybody else took 9-11, right? Like I have to, I have to point out that like watching an episode like this or watching something like Triumph felt like legitimately transgressive in

the days and weeks after 9-11 because it was kind of a, as we'll talk about, had turned into kind of like a secular cult. And I think people who were just a few years old then, or born after 9-11, missed this part of 9-11. I think you inherited the wars and the intrusions on civil liberties and the creeping fascism, but not the derangement by terror that had preceded it. Like everybody's permanently deranged from 9-11, but you didn't really get to know people before that kind of happened and drove a lot of them mad. As a kid, it was like a strange and exciting and scary moment. But I think my parents and I think the people who were kind of in their age range completely lost their minds.

And oddly, that South Park episode has kind of the best depiction of that too. There's a scene in which Stan, who's one of the main characters, they're all like middle school kids, walks into his house and sees his mom like lying on the couch, staring blankly ahead and just like weeping. She's surrounded by tissues. She's been crying for days.

And as her husband says, she's just been watching CNN for like the last eight weeks straight. And the image of her just kind of like lying on the couch staring at the TV is I can remember every adult that I knew as a kid doing that. And it really did go on for days. Like people moved around as if they were like in kind of a shocked stupor. I'm sure there's places where this wasn't the case. But for my family, who were very, very conservative people, and I think for people

particularly who live closer to the attacks, like it was just this period of like post-traumatic stress for the entire country. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related

to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head,

search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. time's unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I think a good amount of research backs up the fact that this, it had this kind of, and I think it is hard to understand if you weren't there, impact on people. I found a Pew research study that I'm going to quote from now. Our first survey following the attacks went into the field just days after 9-11. From September 13th to 17th, 2001, a sizable majority of adults said they felt depressed. Nearly half said they had difficulty concentrating, and a third said they had trouble sleeping. It was an era in which television was still the public's dominant news source. 90% said they got

most of their news about the attacks from television, compared with just 5% who got their news online. And the televised images of death and destruction had a powerful impact. Around nine in 10 Americans agreed with the statement, I feel sad when watching TV coverage of the terrorist attacks. A sizable majority, 77%, found it frightening to watch,

but most did so anyway. Fear was widespread, not just in the days immediately after the attacks, but throughout the fall of 2001. Most Americans said they were very, 28%, or somewhat, 45%, worried about another attack. When asked a year later to describe how their lives changed in a major way, about half the adults said they felt more afraid, more careful, more distrustful, or more vulnerable as a result of the attacks. And I think you can't separate this because the main people we're talking about here, when we're talking about the response to

this, when we're talking about the people who got to make decisions, it's boomers, right? Which is not all that different from how it is today, but it was even more so boomers then. And my parents and the people of their generation are all children of the Cold War. They both grew up, my parents, on different military bases. And I can remember, you know, my dad told me stories about doing like duck and cover drills as a kid, like literally hiding under a desk to get ready for an atomic bomb. His family like went out into the countryside during the Cuban Missile Crisis to hide because they were afraid all the cities were going to get nuked. And this is not, these are not uncommon experiences. So you have to think like all of the, all of the adults were either very close to this period or had spent most of their formative years, like constantly scared of being murdered

by a nuclear weapon. There have been clinical like studies and stuff that have shown that that fear of nuclear annihilation is a major factor in anxiety. Like it's not ever been properly, I think, explained how much that fucked up that generation. But what you had is all these people who had spent the first couple of decades of their lives living with the sword of Damocles over their heads. And then the war ends, right? The Cold War ends, the USSR falls apart, and suddenly people aren't talking about nuclear warfare for the first time in anybody's memory. And I think for most of that generation,

they felt safe for the first time. There was this kind of celebration that was pretty bipartisan, that capitalism and democracy had triumphed and that like this kind of horror that had stalked through their childhood had been defeated. When people like Francis Fukuyama talked about the end of history, what Fukuyama meant was that liberal democracy was kind of, in his eyes, the end of the evolutionary road for states, which is a flawed idea. But the interpretation that I think people like my parents had was that we didn't need to worry anymore, right? Like that's the end of history, right?

Our way of life had won and we didn't need to worry anymore right like that that's the end of history right our way of life had won and we like we we didn't need to worry and in 9-11 happens and suddenly this decade or so of relief from that all ends in a minute and all of that fear that they lived with their whole lives came roaring back with abandon 9-11 was like the emotional equivalent of splitting an atom and and the energy that was released by that is going to be used for something right i i want to kind of touch on that a little bit because i mean i obviously don't remember the 90s because i wasn't there and it is such a fascinating idea to me of like this time where neoliberalism kind of reached their paradise like like we did it we could we we we did the thing we found the spot and how that you know, talking about the edge of chaos theory, how it was built up to this super high point.

And then it all, because it got so high, it then immediately crumbled and shot down. 11 kind of became this moment where the world of imagination and the world of like the lowest material visceral reality crashed into each other um and he says a quote the the collapse expressed itself in the material world when the twin towers of the world trade center were reduced to dust by determined extremists when this event occurred reality and fiction began their slow collapse into one another. After the fall of the towers, quote-unquote reality became more fictional, and quote-unquote fiction became more realistic. Think plausible, realistic superhero movies like the Dark Knight films, fake news, deep fakes, AR, VR, and the rise of magical thinking. And I would extrapolate that out to like stuff like you know q anon um and you know the how just these images that we thought were only viewable

in film and television um became descended down onto the onto the dirtiest most visceral material plane um and then things that were fake like this idea like the perfect 90s that's gonna be this is gonna continue like this forever that fiction uh it felt almost more real like it like that that that should have been what's real and it's not anymore yeah it it feels like there's an alternate and i think that's part of why liberals are still so goddamn in love with the West Wing. And by the way, I talk about liberals. My parents, who loved Ronald Reagan more than life itself, watched every episode of that show.

They thought it was wonderful. And the Republicans are always portrayed very sympathetically on the West Wing, right? It's very much this noble opposition sort of idea. And I think there's something in that, that there's this almost sense that we've been locked out of the right reality. And that's what liberals are constantly hearkening back to with 9-11. But it's also, or with stuff like the West Wing, but it's also like what conservatives, I think for a while they were looking for that.

I think that's what George W. Bush promised and failed to deliver. It's what they were hoping to get with Romney. And when that didn't happen, I think part of what's going on with Trump is this desire. Part of the desire to burn it all down is the inability to get back to this imagined prelapsarian world. If you're talking about the collapse of reality and fiction going into each other, that's what Donald Trump represents. He is this so fictional person that in order to meet this new world where reality and fiction are the same thing, you need somebody that represents that.

Yeah. So they turned to him because he was meeting the way they saw the world was going. Reality and fiction are going into each other, so you're going to get the reality television president who kind of embodies that essence on a very, very visceral level. And I think that's part of why when you have 9-11 happen, you have all of this energy released, both parties kind of come together

in this idea that the United States should strike back, and that we were at war. It's rightly pointed out by people that particularly the protests against the Iraq war were massive, and they were, they were historically large. But President Bush was also the most popular president of our lifetime briefly. And it's because people were in line behind this idea that we need to hit someone. Well, and I think something that's important about this that's completely forgotten is that the invasion of Afghanistan, there was like no protests. There were there were a few, but the left imploded. Like, here's I'm going to read a quote from Doug Henwood.

This is an attack on us. There is a near certainty that something will be done soon. Clearly, considerable use of force will have to be used to capture these motherfuckers um like adolf reed is like talking about how like there's gonna have to be military action like a bunch of the people from like who like the old school like anti-vietnam war protesters like from sds are like well we don't oppose all wars we just oppose bad wars so like here we should go evade afghanistan like everyone lost their minds well

and i want to what i really the core of what i talk about today is why that happened because i think there's on particularly kind of some of the more superficial left-wing analysis of this this idea that like george bush did what he did in response because he's like this Christian holy warrior. And there's a couple of reasons people do this, including the fact that he once referred to the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. But as a general rule, what Bush did was not because of his Christianity and had nothing to do with any kind of conflict with Islam in particular. What it was, was the reaction of a group of a kind of fundamentalists, fundamentalists of belief in the American state,

reacting to an attack on the sanctity of that kind of idea. And this is, you know, why all these liberals were on board, at least with, you know, the strike on Afghanistan or attacking Afghanistan. Christopher Hitchens, probably no one embodies like what happened to a lot of the left better than Hitchens. Hitchens was a well-known liberal journalist. He wrote an excoriating book about Henry Kissinger, right? He's one of these people who was criticizing the empire, who was attacking it for its excesses, builds his career on that. And then 9-11 happens. And the first big thing he does is he puts out a massive column titled Bush's Secularist Triumph, in which he argues that the war on terror is not a crusade, but a battle to keep religion and public power separate.

And I want to quote now from a study published in the Journal of Political Theology by William Kavanaugh of DePaul University. It's titled The War on Terror, Secular or Sacred. There may be some Christians who think that we are fighting for Jesus, but the battle is being won in the name of secularism. George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he and the U.S. armed forces have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. While the left makes apologies for religious terrorists, the right supports their obliteration to protect our secular state.

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution and the liberals have gone AWOL. That's Kavanaugh's summary of Hitchens' article. But like, what's going on there is really interesting, because Hitchens is proceeding as an a priori assumption that the attack on the Twin Towers is an attempt

by a theocracy to take over and destroy a secular state, rather than an attempt to damage economically a military enemy and goad it into a war that would weaken it socially, militarily, and economically, which is exactly what had actually happened. The liberals that Hitchens attacks, his former allies, are basically saying, don't take the bait, right? Don't do the thing that he wants you to do because it will lead to the results he wants to achieve. All Hitchens can see is that Muslim extremists are scary and they want to hurt him as an atheist.

Religion is doing things that hurt me. So I must destroy the people who believe in this thing. Yeah. And it's interesting because everybody, all of the people who are kind of on the side of this civic religion, which is, which is why they're responding because their, their civic religion has been attacked in this strike on the towers.

They all find kind of different ways to justify it. Hitchens is a prominent atheist, so it makes sense that he kind of sees it as a fight against theocracy. If you go through a lot of footage of news anchors in the immediate wake of the attack, Garrison, you and I were doing this a couple of nights ago. There were numerous references that the Twin Towers, which were a symbol of capitalism, and that's why they represent capitalist and American supremacy over capital. It's like the American supremacy of the economic system and a reified symbol of capitalism,

almost like it's like an idol to the god of capital. Yeah, there's a number of different things you can find making this point, but in a column that published on 9-12, the Washington Post editorial board wrote, for three decades, the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center stood as the symbol of American economic might,

as powerful an icon for capitalism as the Statue of Liberty is for freedom. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. No, people were just saying this shit the day after. And the other thing that's is for freedom. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. No, people were just saying this shit the day after. And the other thing that's funny about it is like, no one thought this before. Like, these are cheap fucking buildings.

Like, the World Trade Center is like a license. Like, it's literally, it's just like license. It's a name that's licensed out. It's like... That, you know, but that doesn't, because again, what you by saying this, when they're saying like, for three decades, this was the symbol of American economic might people, and I keep going back to my parents, but I think they represent a lot of Americans

saw the defeat of the Soviet Union as being achieved by the US economy by capital, right? And that's the thing that ended history. That's the thing that got them to their neoliberal paradise. It's the thing that saved them from the nukes. And so by taking these towers down, bin Laden basically killed Superman, right? That's how they're reacting to it. Yeah. George Bush and Christopher Hitchens

and the Washington Post editorial board, they all saw their support for war as not based in religion. All of them would have denied this, right? But Kavanaugh argues that they were motivated primarily by what he calls the civil religion of the United States, which is why I've been using that term. I'm going to quote from his paper again. The United States has its own civil religion, which, though relying on the support of Christians and undoubtedly borrowing much from Christian imagery, transcends mere sectarian religion to

unite all Americans on a higher ground. Indeed, this is what makes secularism compatible with civil religion. What Robert Bella calls traditional religion is privatized, while civic rituals revolve around a generic God who underwrites America's identity and purpose in the world. In this sense, Andrew Sullivan is right. This is a religious war. The war of which 9-11 was a significant marker is not extremist and expansionist religion against a peace-loving and neutral secularist order. It is rather the violent confrontation of Islamist terrorism with the civil religion of American expansionism. That is, the evangelical insistence that liberal social order is the only

viable kind of social order. It is what Tariq Ali has called the clash of fundamentalisms. And I think that's important because I think one area in which the left really got things wrong in sort of their interpretation of what happens in this period is seeing it as a clash between kind of Christian fundamentalists as embodied by George Bush and Islamic fundamentalists. No, no, no. The people who were leading this country, including Bush, but including most of the liberals, were America fundamentalists. They were fundamentalists in the idea of the secular American state. And so were my parents, as conservative as they were. My family was never about, you know, Christianity needing to be spread over there. It was about this belief in America as something holy and that something holy and sacred had been struck on September 11th.

I will say I, I think I, I don't know, it's easy for me to see why people think about this on the left sort of as this Christian holy war. Because like I grew up with a lot of people who like in the wake of this who like really were full-on into the crusade thing like i had classmates who would talk about how they were going to join the military to kill all muslims like there was i mean like i think this is a real thing sure and that's what i mean that's sort of analytic wrong that's what that's what kavanaugh is saying and that it's kind of scaffolded on christianity but like that's's fundamentally like the fact that there are some people who are going in there being like, this is finally a religious crusade doesn't mean that's like what the leadership of the country is doing. And as I'm about to do, I think that's part of why

we get Trump and the current Christian extremist surge is that it's a reaction to how kind of the neocons go with this. Because for the neocons, this isn't really about, this isn't about, Christianity is something you use in this fight, but like, that's not what you're fighting for here. And I think there's a good amount of evidence for the fact that Americans identified something as being like holy about the Twin Towers, particularly after the attack. From Kavanaugh's study in Public Theology, quote, An August 2010 poll found that 56% of Americans regard Ground Zero as sacred ground,

and a slightly larger majority opposes construction of a mosque nearby for this region. A sacred aura surrounds the identity of the nation that was attacked on that day, and the attacks concentrated that sacredness in a particular location and time. It is not necessary to go back to the more famously evangelical George W. Bush to make the link between piety and 9-11. In his speech at Ground Zero last September 11, 2010, Barack Obama talked about gathering at this sacred hour on hallowed ground, and talked about how those who were not only killed but sacrificed in the attacks. God was invoked, of course, but it was a generic God who belonged to no particular faith, because as Obama made clear, the victims themselves were of many faiths. Yeah, this is, I mean, one of the things that I think is interesting,

if you're actually trying to analyze this, and you want to see kind of the degree to which why I think it's important to look at how people treated the space itself as sacred is how actual religion responded in the wake of 9-11 and how Americans responded to religion in the wake of 9-11. Because, you know, it says there about 56% of the country see this as like hallowed ground in some way. And I think there's evidence that people kind of rose up to defend this civic religion more than they actually did their real faiths. And this is because primarily the reaction on a population basis to September 11th is that religiosity in the United States continued to decline, right? There's a public idea that it led to this like surge of

people coming back to the church and getting religious again, but there's really no demographic evidence to back that up. And I want to quote from an article I found in Christianity Today. For a few weeks after 9-11, people packed the pews, but it soon became apparent there was not a great awakening or a profound change in America's religious practices, as Frank M. Newport, Gallup poll editor-in-chief, told the New York Times in November of 2001. Barna Group confirmed that conclusion in 2006. It tracked 19 dimensions of spirituality and beliefs and found none of those 19 indicators were statistically different from pre-attack measures.

In other words, the 9-11 attacks didn't put American Christians on a trajectory towards more orthodox beliefs or more consistent habits of prayer, church attendance, or scripture reading. Insofar as we can measure matters of faith, the decline of American religiosity continued apace. Spiritually speaking, said Barna's David Kinnaman, it's as if nothing significant ever happened. And that's something evangelicals have had to grapple with ever since. The U.S. did not turn back to God demographically. And while hateful attacks against Muslims surged, you have to acknowledge that a lot of those were from people who were more or less secular in the traditional sense. And this is part of why so many of the online atheists set sided with the alt-right in 2015 and 2016, right? It's because a lot of those people,

while they would have described themselves as an opposition to Christianity as well, were very much a part of the same civic religion as everybody else and were willing to engage in racist attacks against members of a religion as a result of that. You know, when you look at the fact that a majority of Americans saw Ground Zero as sacred and opposed building a mosque because of that, a decent chunk of those people are not Christians who oppose the building of a mosque, right? They're areligious or they're atheist and they oppose the building of a mosque because of that, a decent chunk of those people are not Christians who oppose the building of a mosque, right? They're areligious or they're atheists, and they oppose the building of a mosque because they still see Islam as an enemy. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Israel, won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous

strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head

and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong,

though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. yeah it's uh it's interesting but americans were not moved to embrace religion by the attacks and the deterioration of our sense of security that followed and i think that evangelicals have never been able to actually accept this a A 2013 Barna Group survey found that most Americans,

but particularly born-again Christians, believe 9-11, quote, made people turn back to God. And this, again, has led to kind of a fetishization of the period right after 9-11. The writer of that Christianity Today article I cited earlier theorizes, quote, my first suggestion is what we thought was hope wasn't lost at all. It was less Christian trust in character and redemption of God than American optimism coated with not quite biblical bromides that when there's bad, good will follow. Americans love to believe that everything happens for a reason and that after a short period of time, sorrow will always turn into joy and suffering into sanctifications.

We quote Romans 8.28. We know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him and incorrectly interpret it to mean that everything that happens to us will also somehow work out okay. And I think that they're onto something here. And this really, this goes back to what Kavanaugh was saying about how this civil religion is kind of grafted on over the bones of Christianity, right? And it's, it's, there's so much, part of what's interesting to me here is that, well, I think it's, it's worthwhile that he quotes Romans 828. I have to think that this, this

belief that Americans have that everything happens for a reason is at least as undergirded by like Disney as it is with scripture. It's undergirded by the way we tell stories, by the way fiction works in our society, which is a very unique to us, right? Every culture does not tell stories the same way. Well, and I think like, if you want to trace that out too, like I think that's part of the reason why people are so unbelievably into conspiracy theories here.

Yeah. If everything needs to have a reason that it's part of an overarching grand narrative that ties everything together. Yeah. And it obviously, again, I don't want to like underplay and perhaps we should do an episode of maybe Behind the Bastards

on the reaction of the religious right to 9-11, which was nuts and vicious and horrific. I'm not trying to deny that. But I think one of the things that happens in this period is they grow increasingly infuriated that that is not shared by a majority of the country, that it doesn't bring a religious revival, right? That that doesn't follow September 11th.

Now, it is kind of, there's a couple of things that are interesting here one of them is that the apocalyptic Christian believers they do have kind of this this in with the Bush administration we know that at one point a bunch of apocalyptic like Christian representatives like people who are kind of heading churches and stuff that believe there's this belief among certain Christians that you need to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem and bring about the end of days and all this stuff. There's a bunch of shit that has to happen in Palestine in order for the apocalypse to come.

And they're trying to get U.S. presidents to make it happen. This is why Trump made some of the calls that he made was to deliberately like give those people a win, which is why some of the shit that happened in Jerusalem during the Trump administration was able to happen. All of that stuff is stuff that they went to George Bush. They had a two-hour meeting with him and Elliott Abrams and a bunch of his staff, where these representatives of kind of like the Pentecostal movement tried to get him to carry out this wishlist policy of acts around Israel and Iraq to help them bring about the rapture.

And the Bush administration didn't really do any of that. They have to take the meeting, right? They bring these guys in. They don't give them what they want. It's not until Trump that a lot of these guys get what they want. And what happens here, because you've got this death cult Christian group who see this as a crusade and who want a war with Islam. And they're constantly frustrated by the fact that even though he's supposed to be their guy, Bush doesn't go all the way for them, right?

And this is part of why his military adventurism gets criticized effectively by guys like Trump, who win the evangelical right. Because the evangelicals say like, well, if we're not going to have a holy war, then like, what was this stuff? We just wasted a bunch of money and a bunch of treasure and a bunch of young men for nothing over there. And that's part of like what Trump wins on. Now, these two factions, these neocons, the guys who wind up, by the way, the guys who are sort of on the civic religion side of the response to 9-11 are all the people who wind up running the Lincoln Project, right? When you're talking about the Republicans on that side of things. And then the part, the folks who break off, the Lincoln Project, right? When you're talking about the Republicans on that side of things. And then the folks who break off,

the evangelicals, the people who want a holy war, that's who winds up making the core of Trump's support. And yeah, and that's, I think, mostly where I'm going to leave us for today. On 9-12 next week, we'll have another special episode about Glenn Beck's 9-12 project that will be kind of the finishing of this. But I want to end because we're talking about why I did this and why I started by talking about jokes about nine 11 is because I think understanding, understanding

the attack on the towers as like an attack on what would have effectively become a God to a lot of Americans, even if they didn't realize it, right? The sanctity of this kind of neoliberal capitalist order and its historic inevitability, right? The fact that that's what was going on, that that was so dear to people, that justified so much violence, 20 years of war, of bombings, millions of deaths, is part of why I think there's a value in joking about 9-11, which is not to say that what happened wasn't terrible. 3,000 and change innocent people were murdered in a truly horrific way. If you actually sit down and watch the footage, the people falling out of the buildings, it's a nightmare. If you think

about stuff like Flight 93, it's really stirring. You have these people who one moment they're heading to like see their families or go on a work trip or something. They're on a fucking plane, an experience I'm sure everybody has, where you're just like trying to get from A to B. And in the space of like a few minutes, they have to all decide they're going to charge a bunch of terrorists, fight in hand-to-hand combat, and then pilot a plane into the ground in order to stop it from killing other people. That's powerful stuff. What I think is important is desacralizing it because there's nothing sacred about mass murder. there is anything but what it is, which is a tragic, um, a tragic act of violence against innocent people, but taking it as like an attack on our soul as an attack on like our, our collective God. Um, when you start to do that again, it, it kind of justifies any sort of violence. Like there's nothing, there's nothing that's off the table. And in, in the first few years after 9-11, there was nothing off the table. And we're, we're never

getting back to the world that we had before, which is ultimately like what all that violence was about, right? All of everything terrible that was done in the wake of 9-11 was justified, even if people didn't say it, in the desire to get back to where we were in the 90s, right, in their heads and their sense of security. I'm not talking about anything as like coarse as economic projections. I'm talking about in the sense of like optimism and basic security. And I think one of the people who got this best in the immediate wake of the attack was Hunter S. Thompson, who, you know, was still alive at that point for a couple of years. And he wrote a column, I think it was for ESPN.com, because that's who he was writing for in those days. His career was

well past its peak. But he wrote probably the best thing anyone wrote a week after 9-11. And I'm going to read you the end of that now. We are at war now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this war might last for a very long time. Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or ten years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history, which is no doubt true. But history also tells us that ten years of martial law and a wartime economy are going to feel like a lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard

of living than their parents enjoyed. This is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids compared to what's coming

now. The party's over folks yeah that is kind of the feeling uh yeah growing up in the early 2000s and not not knowing not never actually experiencing the 90s i mean in some ways you know 9-11 feels very similar to me as something like pearl harbor like they're both things that happened i guess before i was around and it just they created the world that i already existed in like it never it never like it you know it it never changed the world i was in it just it just became the world that i was in yeah for me 9-11 is my first memory like that is the first thing i remember and i yeah we got exactly the world that you would expect yeah from your first memory being 9-11 yeah it's um i mean again for

me i think the thing i identify most is that little clip i played from south park where one of the kids is like do you remember when everything didn't suck? She's like, not really. So yeah, go out, tell a tasteful joke about 9-11 and try not to worship the state. It doesn't end well. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was should the boy go back to his father in Cuba Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him or stay with his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace the Eliane Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands

or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T., connecting changes everything. Hey, I'm Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jamee Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and

iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions. So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.