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When smart people memory hole and sanitize the past you wind up where we are https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1304385740063805440
Thinking about this. The legacy of 9/11 is a lot of things, almost all tragic, starting with the people lost. Never Forget, people said. But then, the tragedy of the reaction, too.
The legacy of 9/11 was the spike in a cowing of free speech, from Ari Fleischer down, and in anti-Muslim feelings and actions, and there are still U.S troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, atop piles of hundreds of thousands of bodies, despite Iraq having nothing to do with the attacks
The legacy of 9/11 is 18 years after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, it is tasked with minimizing a growing wave of white supremacist terrorism and inventing left-wing terrorism instead. Ari Fleischer, by the way, is one of many casual participants in this
The legacy of 9/11 is the memory holing and welcoming back of the Bush administration, and a lack a reckoning with its actions, including war crimes. It's forgetting and therefore forgiving everything, for the sake of civility.
And the legacy of 9/11 is a guy boasted about having a building taller than the Twin Towers as they burned, lied abut helping clear the rubble, lied about donating to the 9/11 fund, lied about seeing Muslims celebrate, embraced Islamophobia, and 15 years later he was President
So when people like @paulkrugman — who was there as it happened, and in fact chronicled so much of it, and is galaxies from the worst actor in all this — just forgets what happened, and what it was like, it's all part of the slide to the current state of things. Never forget.
