SPECIAL REPORT: 9/11: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER: Late, but not wrong: why the truth we dare not speak is the most important of all
(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish; Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) October 20, 2026; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter means my content is actively suppressed, so your help is invaluable. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. See my related AI Reading List here and my nearly-two-million-views-strong ongoing X/Twitter thread on the whole mess in the Middle East with the U.S.-led war against Iran & co. here.
SILVER SPRING—On a personal note, I struggled to write this. On one level, I have had chaos in my life that has made writing articles like this more challenging than ever for me. On another level, I was just so damn depressed that it was just… hard to write. I had grand ambitions to get this out right around 9/11’s recent twenty-fifth anniversary and wrote a significant portion of this to the background of Yo-Yo Ma mourning as only he can, singing through his cello he played during the 9/11 commemoration ceremony a Ground Zero amidst the backdrop of that ever-too-long list of names (“No Day Shall Erase You From the Memory of Time,” the 9/11 Museum quotes the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid prominently).
Yet there is something else I have been struggling with far beyond just writing, and that I wish I could erase from my own memory, one simple truth that horrifies me to the depths of my soul as an American and as a human. Obviously, I failed to finish this in the weeks since 9/11, and I truly apologize for not getting this out sooner. But get this out I must.
I.
Osama bin Laden may be dead on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his sick magnum opus, whatever remains of his mortal remains at the bottom of the sea or part of a marine food chain, but in many ways, we are living in his world. In the final decades of civilization existing as we know it, before the AI slop overlords obliterate the civilization that we possess now, that which we inherited from generations of ancestors, there was a man, a terrorist, who was able to upend that order and, without realizing it, helped to herald in whatever horrific AI age is about to unfold before us.
Because when history looks back, it will see that the United States of America—the most powerful country the world had ever seen, in charge of the most powerful alliances the world had ever seen—at the time when it needed to be focusing very much in part on responsibly shaping AI technology before it shapes humanity for centuries, even perhaps millennia, was instead distracted by stupid wars of choice sparked first by bin Laden, then by Trump (I am talking Afghanistan, Iraq II, and Iran/whatever the hell this is current conflagration is). These disasters of choice sapped biblical amounts of resources, divided Americans even more so against each other, helped ruin our reputation internationally, and eroded core institutions that had helped make America great in the first place, and in large part brought us where we are today.
The first part about this, that bin Laden had won, was obvious (frankly undeniable), even a decade into the post-9/11 world. As I noted twelve years after the attacks, by then, we should by then have been mourning the damage done after the attacks themselves (even while still mourning the gaping void from those) and have been deeply disappointed in many of the paths we were then undertaking, that we had lost a whole decade and would continue to lose more of ourselves. I would revisit this theme again in further years, as I felt compelled to highlight our ongoing hubris and folly. I would not be proven wrong. Even today, his ghost is still winning, haunting us with blatant irony.
It has become hackneyed, now, to say that we are more divided than ever, but we keep surpassing our previous record levels of division so it merits such repetition. And as I have made clear that any fair, sensible examination of the actual narrative of the history that got us from the end of the Cold War to whatever under Zeus’s law the current setup is, there is one side of the political share of the spectrum that bears most, but hardly all, of the blame for the level of partisanship and extremism that is today’s modus operandi in MAGA Washington, worsening for some time but now reaching fascistic, revolutionary levels.
We have failed to honor the dead, instead allowing ourselves to become more and more divided, and, I fear it is as one Star Wars character from one all-too prescient show cries out in one of the key moments of the surprisingly masterful series: “This Republic is failing! It’s only a matter of time.”
II.
The two individuals most responsible for this current collapse? Osama bin Laden (assist from George W. Bush playing right into his plan, near-perfectly over time) and Donald John Trump (assist from Benjamin Netanyahu pressuring him into and joining him in a big portion of his order-destroying misadventures, with assists in Trump’s rise going to a panoply of characters from the ludicrous Jill Stein to a mass-murderer in Vladimir Putin; on the latter, that insecure, vicious little twerp is a distant third behind bin Laden and Trump, Putin’s sorry ass is not the focus of this piece. To my Israeli comrades who think the world revolves around them and their enemies and were, after seeing Netanyahu mentioned, expecting a Sinwar or an ayatollah to be on this list, I do not offer any apologies, only a well-intentioned—if sobering—reality check: just think about how Hamas was not able to regionalize the conflict anywhere near its current level, that it took U.S. and Israeli action to do that when Hamas was isolated and alone).
The simple reality is that Trump’s willingness and eagerness to risk in and engage in irresponsible warfare was demonstrated before his latest spectacularly grandiose miscalculation: not even two months before in Venezuela, in his 2025 Iran strikes (the first time he Pearl Harbored Iran in the middle of negotiations, only to surpassed that in the repeat treachery this year), his assassination of a Soleimani engaging then in diplomacy, airstrikes against Iran he called off ten minutes before they would have happened in 2019, and, of course, don’t forget the general glee with which Trump, Hegseth, and his other MAGA minions announced they were reducing safeguards in our military to protect civilians from being killed and maimed. Trump even amply displayed his bloodlust before his second term, and now he has the people around him who will be mostly willing to indulge and execute this bloodlust, much as they have had few qualms executing his overall fascist agenda since being reelected. A party embracing in power, then in opposition, some of the worst tendencies of distortion and gaslighting from both the fascists and the communists of Orwell’s time did not lessen any of these tendencies now that it has returned to power with a ferocious vengeance. Yes, I and many others for years wared that a second Trump term would be far worse than most imagined, and it is even worse than I warned or imagined as an extinction-level event for American democracy.
For Trump has now demonstrated he does not understand the meaning of the word “peace,’ despite his romantic longings for Nobel, and has turned into more of a Shiva—“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” yes, that Shiva—of any modern ruler since Stalin, Hitler, and Mao (even if not anywhere near their body counts). Because Trump did not just succeed in undoing “woke” (whatever he thinks that means), many of the LGBTQ protections, or parts of Obamacare, he is dismantling the 1964-1965 grand Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts—the reforms that made us a real republic; he is dismantling the U.S.-led post-World War II international order, including the United Nations system; he is not only undoing that, but the Reconstruction Amendments that remade a part-slavery-based society anew in Lincoln’s new birth of freedom, earned through seas of blood. And still, he is even going much further than that: Trump is undoing the very Westphalian international system in place since the mid-seventeenth century, in which states—not individual rulers and whimsical caprice—along with international law and norms would become the bedrock of international relations and diplomacy in the modern world, careening instead into “militarized interstate anarchy” that characterizes much of world history before the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years’ War and going back to the anarchy of most of the ancient world (à la Eckstein).
Again, whether the Soleimani hit or the 2025 strikes, Trump’s moves against Iran could easily have exploded into far worse before, but the third time truly was the charm for him, put into overdrive in 2026 with the assist of Netanyahu, and while everyone should blame the latter for much of the region’s ills in general and specifically unfolding now, let’s dispel with longstanding anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish “control” over the American presidency and political system: Donald Trump chose to do what he did and saw his own aims and reasons for taking the plunge (does he ever see anyone else’s?). Ultimately, Netanyahu never forced him, only tried persuade and pressure, but it is up to a leader to resist persuasion and pressure into a bad path: Trump chose to join Netanyahu when all others before him declined, and this clear reality and responsibility must not be forgotten.
III.
In many ways, then, the two people who have defined this era globally more than any other two people are Osama bin Laden and Donald J. Trump. And, each step along the way, it was American government followed by American voters that empowered their rise and handed them more and more power, one stupid, myopic decision after another, even if there was a shining interregnum under Biden and some relief, if temporary and mostly undone, under Obama. But, since Biden and Obama played by the rules, it was fairly easy for Trump to undo so much of what they had corrected or started to do, that it is hard to even remember at this point that there was a break from the Trumpian madness, that we had two well-intentioned Democratic presidents and their teams accomplish much despite bookending Trump 1.0 and before the current insanity of Trump 2.0. Those memories feel so distant now, one wonders if they were even real. Because our current reality seems so surreal, but that is because we are witnessing the collapse of history and civilization.
Has the graveyard of our empire been built upon the graves of so many in Gaza and Sudan, living under a world order that promised to protect them, but instead, is presiding over their annihilation? Should it be any surprise that that any system that could allow such atrocities to persist for years would be collapsing rapidly now under its own weight with bad-faith warmongers leading it?
Osama bin Laden played us like a harp, but we had many chances, even after many mistakes, to right our ship of state (we even succeeded few times, if temporarily). But it took a Donald Trump to see American power and alliances in the Middle East self-immolate in 2026 the way bin Laden dreamed of and to which he dedicated his most spectacularly awful attack of his storied career, to see the regimes so long propped by America to rapidly weaken and teeter. It took a quarter-century since 9/11, but, thanks to Donald Trump but most especially, thanks to the American voters who fell for and gave into al-Qaeda terror—who turned in terror to hate and eventually Trump, who, in turn, tore down the system that used to send terror into the hearts of the bin Ladens and Putins of the world and refashioned it serve the hate of bin Ladenism and other hate-filled ideologies, from Putinism to Kahanism—bin Laden has long been proverbially laughing at us before in life and since proverbially from the grave, reveling in his radical, raging, revolutionary reverie’s realization (even if the caliphate part is missing and failing, it is still a mind-bending historical achievement).
Indeed, our most telling reaction to al-Qaeda was our formation of its American counterpart in MAGA, penetrating far deeper, and doing far more damage over time, than al-Qaeda. Trying to explain Trump’s January 6, 2021, insurrection to an Israeli audience for an Israeli publication, I noted that MAGA combined the terrorist white supremacy of the rebel “Confederacy,” Ku Kluk Klan, and Jim Crow; the racial switch and focus of Republicans under Nixon to court racist white votes; the nihilist anti-government ideology of Reagan; and the scorched-earth partisanship of Gingrich. Far more than the wasted wars, blood, and treasure, it was our self-destruction and transformation at home, especially after Trump’s emergence, that most fueled bin Laden’s victory from his watery grave.
Certainly, bin Laden as a man on the world stage can be said to have played a role in toppling the Soviet Union and, it, seems, the United States; his place in history is etched and then some. He may be an evil bastard, but he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, more so not because of the president who was on watch during 9/11, not his great rival W. Bush, but because it took a special kind of historic, unprecedented stupidity and greed in the human personified form of Donald Trump, a leader who publicly resembles more an aging Col. Qaddafi than any previous American president, an orange buffoon who is far more dangerous than amusing, prepping to build a Roman-style arch to himself in Arlington for a phantom victory that is actually a historic defeat. If bankrupt is he who builds massive monuments to his minor victories, what is he who builds them to honor his own defeats?
IV.
Consider where America was in 2001 and consider it now: anti-genocide then, but today, when it comes to the two worst current genocides, the U.S. is directly supporting its key ally Israel carrying out genocide in Gaza (or mass ethnic cleansing and mass murder if you really want to quibble on that other term, keep your eyes on the prize), while it also supports its key ally the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in supporting forces in Sudan (Rapid Support Forces [RSF] et al.) carrying out genocide there. Today, also, America has come from promoting freedom and democracy in Venezuela to decapitating the Venezuelan regime in order to plunder its oil riches. We condemned secret police paramilitaries, now have our own ICE murdering American citizens on the street with impunity and no serious accountability. In just a quarter-century since 9/11, we have literally now sadly become the caricatures not only that folks like Noam Chomsky incorrectly saw us as even then, but in many ways how bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb before him characterized us. A telling summary can also be seen in the shifts in power for bin Laden’s “far enemy,” most exemplified by the U.S. for supporting his “near enemy,” in turn most exemplified by the Saudi Arabian regime: both the U.S. and the House of Saud are each easily currently at their weakest since 9/11 and, in fact, going back to include many decades before, at their nadirs of the modern era.
The open secret of Trump’s triumphal arch is that it will actually be a monument to bin Laden’s victory. That pathetic arch, if built, may stand longer than U.S. bases and alliances in the Middle East.
With a looming AI catastrophe facing humanity as a whole, with that threat desperately needing coordination and cooperation, instead, led by Donald Trump in a chain of events set in motion by bin Laden himself, history will note that the world and humanity tore itself apart when it needed to unify the most. According to himself, Trump has a “very good brain” and claims: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” As Trump continually outs himself as wholly unfit to oversee this transition, this thing or things we call AI may take less pity on us than we have had for Palestinians and Sudanese. That is a truly scary thought, if ever there was one.
It could even be far, far less pity (think pets, livestock, slaves, or worse). Whatever you want to call this new artificial intelligence threat (a species? technology? conscious? “persons”?), just the fact that we do not even really know what to call it means we really are in trouble.
This combination of Andor, Jurassic Park, Westworld, The Matrix, and Terminator is not the story you want to be in.
Whether you want to or not, in the end, it will be a democratically-elected Trump (with Putin’s and Netanyahu’s help) leading us hand-in-hand with bin Laden’s ghost into this irony-laden dystopian real-world hell of both their and our making, from the Strait of Hormuz to a near-Skynet in cyberspace.
If there is any such metaphysical Hades in which bin Laden can roast, you can be sure he is celebrating there with his friends, but keeping a seat of honor empty and ready at the table for his most glorious of all accomplices in achieving his drastic dream of derailment and destruction, not Ayman al-Zawahiri, but one Donald John Trump. Yet when a once great people has elevated a thieving charlatan demagogue to rob their own nation and the world blind on a road to abysmal cruelty, rampant avarice, and techno-fascism paved with the literal skulls of tens of thousands of Palestinian and Sudanese children, perhaps there is little else worth saying.
I very much wish to be wrong. Please prove me so.
See my related AI Reading List here and Andor viewing guide here. Also see my nearly-two-million-views-strong ongoing X/Twitter thread on the whole mess in the Middle East with the U.S.-led war against Iran et al. right here.
© 2026 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome
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