ArcaMax

PARIS — A word about Sept. 11, 2001 — 25 years later. And the day that launched my career. My first ever column was written about 9/11 and the heroes who emerged from its ashes. It was also the place where I thought I was literally going to die, just a few years later, as a result of the fallout.

In 2006, I moved into an apartment not far from Ground Zero, where the twin towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed. 63 Wall Street. The only place where I could find any peace and quiet in Manhattan. They were still pulling human remains out of the ground years later. I only knew this because the workers would tell me.

In the years that I lived there — as I regularly walked by the giant crater in the ground en route to the movies or the supermarket — my hair fell out, my skin crawled and my thyroid gave out. The latter produced the scariest heart palpitations that I’ve ever had in my life. The number of times that I would be reading in bed and feel my heart stop for several seconds was so concerning that, had a wonderful, very experienced female doctor there (with her own radio show, of course) not figured it out, I can’t help but suspect that I probably wouldn’t be here. Natural causes would have probably been the verdict. Just a bad ticker. So shocking and sad for such a young person barely out of their 20s.

It wasn’t until I moved to Paris that all of that magically went away. I had long suspected that the whole area was still toxic for years afterwards. How could it not be? Everyone saw the dust produced when those buildings collapsed. Did you see a giant vacuum afterwards? I didn’t.

The extent of the toxicity was officially hidden from the public until just a few days ago, when NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani released previously undisclosed internal documents in which officials at the time “raised alarms regarding environmental testing … which regularly detected elevated levels of toxins, including asbestos and hard-to-detect, dangerous chemicals,” as CNN reported.

First responders fought for years for their resulting illnesses to be officially recognized. In the meantime, the official story stood. And anyone challenging the prevailing assurances was often treated as a distraction from those in charge who had better things to worry about — like exploiting the incident to usher in a technological panopticon and invade every resource-rich country imaginable under the pretext of “fighting them over there so they don’t come here.”

Granted, all of us were on board in the aftermath with whatever needed to be done to stop it from happening again. People were terrified. Want me to strip down naked before my flight? Sure thing! Whatever it takes for the final destination of the flight not to end up being the top half of a skyscraper.

Oh, you think Iraq was in on it, too? Gotta take out Saddam Hussein now? Weren’t 15 of the 19 hijackers Saudis, led by another Saudi, Osama bin Laden — and none of them Iraqi, or Iranian, or Afghan? OK, whatever. Better to be safe than sorry. Guess the government has information that we don’t. Just not the Canadian or French governments that wanted no part of invading Iraq. Because they’re leftist terrorist collaborators, clearly. Weird, since Prime Minister Jean Chretien was a pragmatic centrist and President Jacques Chirac was on the classic right.

It was only later that the extent to which Washington hawks had used the post-9/11 political climate to pursue a much broader foreign-policy agenda became clearer. The goodwill and fear generated by the attacks created extraordinary political latitude for interventions that went well beyond the original hunt for al-Qaeda and its leadership, including wars and regime-change efforts in resource-rich parts of the Middle East and Africa.

So a terrorist problem more closely associated with Washington’s pals in Saudi Arabia was conveniently and strategically spread around.

And while they were at it, they created the entire new Department of Homeland Security — because the attacks exposed serious coordination failures and bureaucratic turf wars among national security agencies. So a babysitter was needed at massive taxpayer expense. And while they were at it, they figured they’d avail themselves of the opportunity to hoover up information and data on citizens, en masse. Only for patriotic reasons, of course. Hence the Patriot Act.

By 2008, everyone had grown a lot more suspicious about Washington’s motives for its Global War on Terrorism. Isn’t there anyone who could just chill for a while?

Enter President Barack Obama, straight out of Chilltown. He’d end up carrying on the same wars, and expanding on them — but with drones piloted from behind joysticks by Cheeto-dust-covered fingers, and using allies as proxies, as he once famously bragged that the U.S. was able to regime change Libya (still in civil war 15 years later) without actually putting American boots on the ground. His secretary of state, former First Lady Hillary Clinton, was a bit less chill, getting all giggly about it in an interview: “We came, we saw, he died,” she cackled. The facade cracked on the nicer face of the same old modus operandi.

It became clear that, regardless of the front man, there was an unshakable continuity in the underlying machinery. So where could America possibly go from here? What was needed was someone who was about as far as possible from the establishment and its blast radius. Preferably someone who wouldn’t be afraid to clean house. Hey, how about that guy from that reality TV show whose tagline is, “You’re fired”?

And that’s how we got to Trump, in a direct political line from the post-9/11 era. Former President Joe Biden was one last chance at giving the establishment an exit ramp to prove that they’d actually listen to the average person’s problems and not prioritize their own globalist agenda. They failed. So it’s back to Trump. Who’s dismantling institutional conventions faster than those towers fell — and replacing them with his largely self-serving own.

The post-9/11 mass gaslighting and government cover-up era has given way to radical transparency, with once-hidden corruption-for-profit now in full view. A quarter-century later, a different set of pillars are coming down. Rotten ones. And we’re witnessing it in real time. What’s built in their place remains a mystery, but it will depend on us. And ideally, the architects will know the difference between a foundation and a grift.