Eighteen years ago, I crawled out of bed in my Marietta, Georgia apartment and began the thirty minute drive to my job in Alpharetta.  It was about 2:45, and my shift started at three, so I started needed to hustle to get there. I flipped through a few radio stations, looking for some driving music, and I vaguely heard some mention of someone attacking the Pentagon on the talk radio channel.  The idea seemed ludicrous, so I assumed it must be radio nuts just throwing out some hypothetical situation. I quickly flipped over to the classic rock station and drove to work.

I arrived fifteen minutes late, and hustled through the door, hoping to slip in quietly past my supervisor.  It was a call center job, and it was normally easy to slip in through the maze of cubicles unnoticed. But the second I got inside, I quickly realized it was unnecessary.  Crowds of people stood gathered around the monitors that hung at various points around the work areas. The twin towers were on fire. I would quickly discover that this was all footage from earlier that day.  The towers had collapsed while I slept. A few hours later, we witnessed the collapse of building 7 live on television.

Everyone in my generation remembers where they were, and remembers the feeling of fear and shock.  My parents’ generation can remember the same thing when they heard President Kennedy was assassinated, and their parents can remember where they were on December 7th, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  Their feelings of pain and loss, and later anger, were not that different from ours.

For years this was treated as a sacred day of remembrance, and by most people, it still is.  But in recent years, there are certain occupants of the darker corners of the internet that feel the need to post trolly comments in the hashtag.  Some of these are virtue signallers who lecture the rest of us about various past injustices. Others are just blatant anti-government or anti-American nuts.

I have no doubt that some of these schmucks are just people with a superiority complex, trying to hold themselves apart from the hoi polloi, the “normies” who are trying to commemorate a tragedy.  People like this seem to assume that anyone engaged in any vaguely patriotic or pro-American display are merely ignorant members of the unwashed masses. Examples include the creative director of the 9/11 museum, who six years ago initially rejected the iconic photo of three firemen raising the stars and stripes at ground zero.  It had been declared “kitschy” and “too rah-rah America”.

These days, the least offensive of these snooty elitist types will post things like “#timetomoveon”.  Typically, this is justified because “Bin Laden is dead”. This is asinine. For starters, we have moved on.  We’re still living our lives and America is still great. Secondly, Bin Laden may be dead, but Islamist terror and extremism are not.  But the subtext of this statement is that we shouldn’t waste time commemorating this. Which is nonsense. We’ve moved on from WWII and the Cold War, but that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination.  Hashtags like this seem to think that commemorating 9/11 is boorish and trashy behavior.

More annoying variants of this type of troll lecture us about the number of dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, which obviously exceeds, by orders of magnitude, the dead on 9/11.  I could point out that the intervention in Afghanistan was an attack on an Al Qaeda ally, the Taliban, which was entirely justified, even if it may have lasted longer than necessary.  I could point out that many of those dead in both wars are due not to our intervention, but by actions from Iran, Pakistan, or various other foreign actors. But I need not bother.

The simple fact is that the subsequent wars and any questionable or unjust events that may have happened in no way reduce the fact that the attack on us was a blatant act of evil carried out by a madman who was annoyed that there were westerners in the (ostensibly) holy land of Saudi Arabia, amongst other things.  We are allowed to remember and still be outraged by this injustice, regardless of subsequent events.

Some of those triggered by our remembrances are more than just smug, self-aggrandizing imbeciles.  Some are people who are virulently anti-establishment. The worst of these spew the most vile conspiracy theories about the attacks.

Believers in conspiracy theories are almost by definition people falling victim to confirmation bias.  Anti-vaxxers are people who distrust the medical establishment, especially the pharma companies who make the vaccines, and immediately fall victim to any narrative that paints them in a negative light.  People who are convinced that the moon landing was faked seem to almost universally harbor anti-American feelings. Flat earthers, anti-GMO activists, and holocaust deniers are all motivated by ideology, not facts.

So when leftists with anti-American sentiments are given a theory that the entire thing was an inside job, they pounce on it.  The absurd “Loose Change” documentary was one of the early conspiracy screeds. I watched it (I was feeling masochistic that day) and later watched a documentary where experts debunked the documentarians ludicrous claims.  The most striking thing to me was not how easily the experts debunked the lunacies in the documentary, but the fact that the experts were unnecessary.  

High school or low-level college science was all that was necessary.  Almost anyone with a basic knowledge of physics, for example, would know that steel didn’t have to melt for the buildings to collapse.  All that was necessary was enough heat to soften the metal.

But the left wing is not alone in this.  I have heard anarcho capitalist libertarians insist that building 7 was a planned demolition.  And in recent years, I have heard the disgraceful “Q-Anon” activists tweet with absolute certainty that the attack on the towers was orchestrated by the Mossad and the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile launched from an Israeli submarine.  These are merely anti-government and anti-semitic madness. But the 9/11 hashtags are polluted by this nonsense even 18 years later.

Some of the most abhorrent are those engaged in Soviet-style whataboutism.  These are the type of people who are triggered by anything that paints America in a positive or sympathetic light, and go out of their way to point out negative things about us.  Their anti-American, anti-Western beliefs are usually evinced by the presence of a #NWO hashtag in their profile. These are the type of people who celebrate the Fourth of July by reminding everyone that America once practiced slavery, a practice that virtually every civilization has in its history.  

One of the most common tirades tweeted by overwoke trolls is a reference to the overthrow of Salvador Allende by Augusto Pinochet, with CIA assistance.  This incident occurred in Chile, also on September 11th. The obvious intent is to shame the “normies” by pointing to a historical injustice.

I could remind them that declassified documents show that the CIA assisted Pinochet in his anti-Soviet activities after he took power, but the CIA actually refused to help him in his coup attempt.  I could remind them that this took place in the context of the Cold War, against the largest threat to freedom and humanity in the late twentieth century, and perhaps all of history. I could remind them that spies do shady, sneaky stuff for a living, sometimes for the good, sometimes, in retrospect, not.  And in that environment, they had to ally themselves with anyone who could fight the larger threat.

But it makes more sense to simply remind them that this day is not a day to rehash every bad thing America might have done.  It is not a day to spam absurd conspiracy theories which were excreted from the bowels of the internet. It is not a day to snidely insult ordinary Americans for their patriotism.  It’s a day where we remember an earlier, terrible day where a group that was objectively evil attacked and killed thousands of people who wanted nothing more than their freedom.