Today we are boarding a flight called 9/11 Revisited: Racial Solidarity in an Age of Fascism.
We’re revisiting that September morning when our nation was attacked — when nearly 3,000 lives were lost, and when ordinary citizens showed extraordinary courage and solidarity. But as we fly forward, we’ll also look at how that unity has been fractured — how politicians have weaponized race and religion, and how, in the years since the 2024 election of Donald Trump, fascism has begun tightening its grip on this country through rage-bait politics, militarization, and lies sown into our media.
Nearly 3,000 souls gone in a single morning. In those hours, we were united: neighbors carried each other down stairwells, strangers opened homes, first responders gave their lives.
But as time passed, politicians began to turn that unity into division — stoking fear of Muslims, immigrants, and anyone who didn’t fit the image of ‘real America.’
Today, 23 years later, we are once again watching politicians weaponize division. After the 2024 election of Donald Trump, rage-bait has become the currency of politics. Leaders aren’t solving problems — they’re inflaming them.
And we’ve seen where this leads. After 9/11, we were told lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Those weapons were never found. Yet those lies cost us:
- More than $8 trillion in war spending and obligations.
- Over 900,000 people were killed in the post-9/11 wars — soldiers and civilians alike.
- 38 million people displaced from their homes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and surrounding regions.
- 7,000+ U.S. service members lost, and tens of thousands more living with lifelong wounds.
Those trillions could have rebuilt schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and communities here at home. Instead, they lined the pockets of defense contractors and politicians who thrived on fear.
This is fascism: when political leaders merge lies with militarization, when they use race, religion, and rage to keep us divided. And once again, we see politicians today telling us to fear immigrants, to fear Black history, to fear our LGBTQ+ neighbors. The cycle continues.
And it is our children who are paying the price.
- Black children killed because of racial profiling.
- Latino children lost in detention centers at the border.
- LGBTQ+ youth dying by suicide under the weight of hate-driven legislation.
Each of these deaths is not an accident — they are the outcomes of policy, of lies sewn by politicians into the fabric of the media, into the lessons in classrooms, into the very air of our neighborhoods.
Our country is being militarized on lies, just as it was in 2003 when we went to war in Iraq searching for weapons of mass destruction that never existed. Only this time, the war is at home.
We are told to fear our neighbors, to fight each other, while the real danger sits in the halls of power, laughing at how easily divided we’ve become.
