If you needed any more proof that Late Night host Seth Meyers isn't doing a comedy show, you got it on Tuesday night. The program is an unfunny smug showcase for liberal insomniacs who can’t get enough left-wing hate on MSNBC during the day. The latest example came as Meyers welcomed hard left journalist Spencer Ackerman onto the program to ponder how America's "nativist" 9/11 response led to Donald Trump getting elected president.
Meyers asked Ackerman, who was on to promote his book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America And Produced Trump, "You talk about how this War on Terror, the, you know, basically American foreign policy after 9/11, sort of planted the seeds that lead to Donald Trump what is -- what are those seeds, and how do they take root?"
Ackerman then launched to a wild series of bad faith attacks on just about every American other than himself and Meyers, "Yeah. So 9/11, and the U.S. response to it, is this doorway into the ugliest, the most nativist aspects of American history."
All the unity that everyone talks about on 9/11 anniversaries is, according to Ackerman, an ugly thing, "It's been a lot of talk about how united America was after 9/11. In fact, it was marshalled by political elites, primarily in the Republican Party, but with a quick acquiescence of the Democratic Party against a definably non-white enemy that is both at home and abroad."
That statement is clearly false, not that Ackerman or Meyers care, as Ackerman proved as he continued:
And abroad and the apparatus of repression that gets created and gets expanded, all of which takes the form of loosening restraints, legal restraints, cultural restrains, bureaucratic restraints against surveillance. Against brutality, like torture. Against indefinite detention, against watchlists that you can't ever get off. All of that becomes entrenched, institutionalized, and marshalled against this enemy that the politics of it has as an internal foe that you're not really, if you're, frankly a white American, able to trust. All of that is marshalled against our Muslim-American neighbors.
Still, Ackerman claimed that normalizing such bigotry "against this definably non-white internal enemy that spreads like wildfire" helped lead to Trump's election "The War on Terror isn't the only reason that Donald Trump becomes president, but the War on Terror is a pathway to power under conditions of national patriotic emergency that allows all that other racism and nativism to unite under this rubric of emergency."
Such comments are, unfortunately, not unique to Ackerman. Earlier this month, Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post accused the U.S. of having "blood lust" after 9/11 and CNN's David Gregory also drew a more-or-less direct line from 9/11 to Trump's election.
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Here is a transcript for the September 28 show. Click "expand" to read more.
NBC
Late Night with Seth Meyers9/28/2021
1:31 AM ET
SETH MEYERS: You talk about how this war on terror, the, you know, basically American foreign policy after 9/11, sort of planted the seeds that lead to Donald Trump what is -- what are those seeds, and how do they take root?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yeah. So 9/11, and the U.S. response to it, is this doorway into the ugliest, the most nativist aspects of American history. It's been a lot of talk about how united America was after 9/11. In fact, it was marshalled by political elites, primarily in the Republican Party, but with a quick acquiescence of the Democratic Party against a definably non-white enemy that is both at home and abroad and the apparatus of repression that gets created and gets expanded, all of which takes the form of loosening restraints, legal restraints, cultural restrains, bureaucratic restraints against surveillance. Against brutality, like torture.
Against indefinite detention, against watchlists that you can't ever get off. All of that becomes entrenched, institutionalized, and marshalled against this enemy that the politics of it has as an internal foe that you're not really, if you're, frankly a white American, able to trust. All of that is marshalled against our Muslim-American neighbors. And once that is unleashed, once that is normalized, once that is sustained, once that's shown that the political system will accommodate that kind of repression against this definably non-white internal enemy that spreads like wildfire. The war on terror isn't the only reason that Donald Trump becomes president, but the war on terror is a pathway to power under conditions of national patriotic emergency that allows all that other racism and nativism to unite under this rubric of emergency.
