On the menu today: We’re a dramatically different country than we were 25 years ago today. I suspect if you’re old enough to remember, you look around at America, and its political discourse, and you find it all depressingly worse. So how did we get here? Why did we end up here? Read on.
9/11 Changed Media
At the conclusion of yesterday’s short essay on what is remembered and what is largely forgotten from 9/11’s season of terror, I observed, “I’m not so sure we’d react the same way today, if, God forbid, someone hit us like that again.”
Many readers noted their agreement. But the question lingers . . . why? How, in a quarter-century, did we change — devolve — to the point where national unity, even in the face of a shocking terrorist attack, feels like an unlikely scenario?
The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a horrific act on an obviously much smaller scale than the 9/11 attacks. But in the end, it was an act of murderous political violence, caught on camera, with a large crowd watching, including our Eva Terry. In 2001, we were almost entirely united. In 2025, a loud and ghoulish minority thought Kirk’s death was something to celebrate, a phenomenon that continued this week. (USA Today labeled the proliferation of social media posts marking the “Kirkiversary” and “Kirkmas” “odd.” That is indeed an adjective.) Elsewhere, an insufferably vocal chunk of the right was happy to follow Candace Owens down every conspiracy theory rabbit hole. (Never mind that the assassin confessed.) A handful of Owens’s more prominent podcasting allies refused to say, “This is nuts, and you should stop spreading cockamamie conspiracy theories and accusing a grieving widow of masterminding a global plot to murder her husband in broad daylight.”
Somewhere along the line, certain Americans’ capacity for human compassion had to pass a political litmus test; it is as if some people believe their sympathy and empathy are finite resources that must not be “wasted” on someone who disagrees with them politically. If people who vote differently than you are in shock and grief, then that is some sort of “win” for you. And the reaction to Kirk’s death is very far from the only high-profile example of this.
The internet existed in 2001, but it was still fairly new; Netscape had only hit the markets in late 1994. Within six years, we had experienced the dot-com boom and bust, but the internet was just taking its first steps into becoming a more interactive form of media. Social media, at least as we know it today, did not exist then, nor did smartphones. Perhaps blogging and its nascent comment sections were the first step toward the realm of social media, or an intermediate step after internet “bulletin boards.”
Just about every blogger started with no real audience and not knowing if anyone wanted to read what he or she had to say. You just wrote what you felt strongly about and hoped your work would find an audience. Every blog started as a passion project, something someone wrote because they felt the world needed to hear what they had to say, but with no guarantee that anyone cared.
But that would soon change.
As noted yesterday, both during the day of the attacks and in the days and weeks afterward, there was this enormous hunger for information. On September 12, 2001, not a lot of Americans knew much about al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, Afghanistan, or the Northern Alliance. The mainstream news media adapted the best it could; back in 1997, Peter Bergen had interviewed bin Laden for CNN, and he’s been writing and talking about the terrorist leader ever since.
Nature abhors a vacuum; the news media world needs content, particularly online, where there are no printing costs, no expenditures on paper and ink, or limited broadcast or cable airtime.
My old friend Cam Edwards observed that the moment “blogger” appeared as a title on a chyron under someone’s head on a cable news program, the nature of the medium changed.
Once “blogger” was seen as a stepping stone to a cable news or other mainstream media gig . . . well, suddenly it was a path to perceived fame and fortune. (As a longtime intermittent cable news talking head, I can tell you that while it’s always nice to be invited, it doesn’t change your life much. When you get back home, you’re still the same person you were before you appeared, and you still have to take out the garbage.)
Suddenly, just writing whatever you felt and thought seemed like a suboptimal use of the medium — if you played your cards right, you could make a living at it and quit your day job, or use it as a stepping stone to something greater. In May 2002, Markos Moulitsas started Daily Kos. By 2004, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign hired Moulitsas as a “consultant” at $3,000 a month for four months, with the hopes and expectations that Moulitsas would write nice things about their campaign. By June 2006, Moulitsas appeared as a panelist on NBC News’ Meet the Press.
Treating blogging as a hobby, and not pursuing the largest audience possible, or at least an influential audience, was leaving money on the table and passing up who knows what other exciting opportunities.
After all, each day, there were more and more bloggers emerging, competing for the potential audience’s attention and time. And once you had an audience, you had to keep feeding that audience. You couldn’t keep writing the same thing, over and over again.
After 9/11, the media landscape was beginning a multi-decade shift from an era of large, established brands that were institutions — the big three television networks, CNN, The New York Times, USA Today — to smaller personality-based independent entities that were little more than one-man shops — Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Little Green Footballs, Kevin Drum’s CalPundit. (Yes, some of these bloggers ended up being hired by, or getting integrated into, existing larger journalism institutions, but the gist is that these voices were starting to become institutions unto themselves.) Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. Instapundit, who personified the trend as much as anyone, called it An Army of Davids, taking on the Goliaths of big institutions.
We on the right critique the old era of big institutions, and rightly so. They could enforce a rigid sense of the political mainstream — a narrow “Overton Window,” to use a term popularized by Glenn Beck in 2010 — and exclude too many voices. Their thinking and leadership could grow calcified, stale, boring, and predictable.
But the old institutions of that pre-9/11 era tended to be protective of their reputations, with some glaring exceptions that I’d argue proved the rule.
While the New York Times might hire, keep, and celebrate a correspondent who relentlessly lied and sang the praises of Soviet Communism . . . I have a hard time believing they would keep someone who went on a yearlong bender of unhinged conspiracy theories the way Candace Owens has. The first time Owens submitted a column contending that Brigitte Macron is a man, the op-ed page editor would likely say to Owens that she had to find some proof, or the paper wouldn’t run the column.
Podcaster Joe Schmo has little to lose by contending that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that Venezuela hacked the vote tabulation machines to elect Joe Biden. Fox News Channel has 787 million reasons to not ever offer any oxygen to those discredited conspiracy theories again. Institutions have responsibilities that individuals do not.
The joy of some podcasts is that they’re freewheeling, unscripted, unpredictable, and that you never know what the hosts or guests will say. (This is how Greg and I end up with unplanned, oddly detailed analyses of how realistic the politics of 1990s action thrillers are.)
The downside of this is that the only guardrails are the host and guests’ sense of responsibility, and perhaps their sense of shame. And this is how you end up with Milo Yiannopoulos arguing that Charlie Kirk faked his own death, or Tim Pool arguing that the U.S. should apologize to Russia for its past support of Ukraine, or whatever guest on Tucker Carlson’s show this week is arguing that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II. Or Hasan Piker’s greatest hits, including “America deserved 9/11.” Or Jennifer Welch contending that Trump voters should be banned from ethnic restaurants.
Many of us would be embarrassed to say something like those comments in front of people, much less say it into a hot mic with an audience watching via livestream. But there is an unnervingly plausible argument that lack of shame is a superpower. If you want to be famous, you need to stand out, and if you want to stand out, saying really controversial, incendiary, hateful, or unpopular things will make you stand out. If you write a book about World War II and conclude Adolf Hitler was the villain, you’re just another guy with a book. If you write a book arguing that Churchill was the real villain, Carlson probably can’t wait to talk to you.
It’s a much broader, wider, wilder, noisier media landscape today compared to 2001. We can debate when the “monoculture” ended — the time when it felt like everyone was watching the same shows and movies, talking about the same topics, instead of splitting into a thousand or more Balkanized little cultural enclaves — but there was much more of a monoculture then than there is now. It is more difficult to be united when we no longer share a common cultural frame of reference.
The rise of social media gave everyone the ability to become a small-scale talking head or small-scale celebrity. It has also given crazy people their turn at the microphone in the public square, and it has allowed crazy people to connect and form their own little online communities.
I don’t want to blame social media algorithms for everything that has gotten worse in our culture for the past quarter-century. But it’s a healthy chunk of it. Social media algorithms rarely discern whether a post is getting a lot of responses because it is good or because it is bad; all reactions are equally worthwhile.
One last stark contrast I think about every now and then: In the 1990s, there was a popular late-night talk-radio host named Art Bell. His radio show’s typical topics of discussion were basically one The X-Files episode after another — UFOs, supernatural events, time travel, crop circles, telepathy, you name it. There was a very fun vibe to it, even if one of the most popular recurring theories — that the U.S. government had captured a crashed alien spacecraft in Roswell, N.M., in 1947, and had been studying it at Area 51 — had a sinister, ominous vibe to it.
And then, emerging from Austin in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was this other radio talk-show host who also talked a lot about conspiracy theories. In fact, the day of the 9/11 attacks, this host contended that there was a “98 percent chance this was a government-orchestrated controlled bombing.”
That host, of course, was Alex Jones, who is simultaneously bankrupt and yet still disturbingly influential in certain circles. Before 9/11, we were the kind of country where we could all watch and laugh at Alien Autopsy, a pseudo-documentary claiming to depict the dissection of an alien recovered from a UFO crash site in Roswell. After 9/11, we were the kind of country where people would harass grieving parents of Sandy Hook children, because Alex Jones had claimed the mass shooting was a “false flag.”
I miss the old us.
ADDENDUM: All over NR today, remembrances of 9/11. Our Dan McLaughlin worked on the 54th floor of one of the World Trade Center’s towers. Today he writes:
If you were a twentysomething or so on September 11 — I was a month from turning 30 myself — the passage of a quarter century is a vivid reminder of quite how much life was taken from those who died, the bulk of whom were under 40.
Elsewhere at NR, Andy McCarthy warns that Sharia supremacism is still on the march. Christopher Scalia writes about how strange it felt to hear an airplane again, after all air traffic had halted for several days.
National Review has six writers who were not born on 9/11, which makes me feel old, and I’ll bet it makes you feel old, too. Kamden, John, Skyler, Eva, Lauren, and Charles share what they learned about 9/11 here.