In the unlikely event that you're like 19 and considering listening to professional revisionists like Paul Krugman: the US went fully out of its mind fascist for like three straight years after 9/11. It felt unreal, like we had abruptly slipped into a parallel universe.

America has always been bad but 9/11 slammed it up to 11. Over night, popular country music turned into a giant army recruiting ad. Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu communities had to form alliances and mutual support networks because of all the hate crimes.

The lead-up to the invasion of Iraq is still probably the most unhinged governmental process I've seen. The fever only sort of broke after we did that and realized how bad it was. I remember the adults around me fully expecting us to move onto land war in Syria for abut a year.

And underneath all of that, the fascists knew the opportunity they had. The feds were reorganized into the DHS and unprecedented levels of corporate-private telecom surveillance happened. Liberals would call you an America-hating hippy if you looked at any of it sideways.

The Obama administration was largely a process of revising the forever war we uncritically dove into as a sort of solemn nation-building obligation. Nobody ever got in trouble, nobody ever admitted to being wrong, obviously none of the fascist laws got rolled back.