Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

It is 50 weeks that shaped America. We are in week four. We're in late January, which as you no doubt know,

is the time when presidents tend to give their State of the Union address.

There is no shortage of notable State of the Union speeches over the years. In 1975,

Gerald Ford straight up told Congress, the state of our Union is not good. In 2020, maybe you'll

remember that the State of the Union is when Nancy Pelosi tore up her copy of

Donald Trump's speech from the podium.

But perhaps the most notable State of the Union speech of this century, at least, and

one that certainly helped shape this century was January 2002.

George W. Bush and his State of the Union just four months after the 9-11 attacks.

In that speech, Bush, who had sky-high approval ratings and the backing of basically the entire Congress,

talked about the aftermath of the Twin Towers attacks, the efforts in Afghanistan to go after the perpetrators.

And then he talked about what he called a second goal. And that goal was,

as he put it, to, quote, prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America and our

friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. He mentioned Iran, North Korea, and Iraq. And he used

the phrase that is the focus of our episode today,

axis of evil. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an access of evil,

arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction. These regimes pose a grave and growing danger.

And in that phrase, something shifted. The post-9-11 era went from anger and retribution for the

attacks to a bigger project, one that evoked the world war, one underpinned by a sense of

morality, and one that would set the stage

for the invasion of Iraq. So, this week, a look at the axis of evil as a rhetorical device

...