Just a heads up, this episode contains some very painful descriptions of racial violence.

On this season, we'll be exploring our bizarre beliefs, unfounded fears, and fantastical thinking,

how they shape our psychology and culture, and how much of our past we can find in the present.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American hysteria.

If you want to find us, this is really us. The kids are making us, nothing goes, and nothing goes.

You can dare a revolution here, but you can't dare a revolution.

The clan also sponsors softball teams. This team is made up from 100% pure white American ball players.

They don't want us to use black power. I got news for them.

Because I was just standing there, pretty much looking out the window. I didn't see what caused it or if there was an impact.

So you have no idea where I'm going?

Another plane just hit. Right, oh my god, another plane has just hit another building.

We'll right into the middle of it. Explosion. Right, it's right in the middle of the building.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I padded out of my room, probably moody and sore-eyed from staying up too late,

and I saw my parents huddled near our TV far closer than I'd ever seen them sit.

I pushed between them and I saw it, smoke pouring up and into the air,

and all it could remind me of them were the disaster movies so popular in the 90s.

Its quality was completely unreal.

I didn't understand the depth of what I was seeing when the camera held steady on the reporter and the burning tower

and then what looked like a black fly cut across the background, hitting the second tower right before our eyes.

Later that afternoon, on the other coast in a suburb of Seattle, I would walk the black top with my friends

for the first time talking about the possibility of war.

Of course, wars were constantly being fought overseas in distant places that felt hard to even imagine,

...