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The Ezra Klein Show

We’re Living in the World the War on Terror Built

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.611K Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2021

⏱️ 58 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sept, 11 attacks might have taken place almost 20 years ago, but we’re still living in the America that the war on terror built. Its legacy is not just mass surveillance and drone strikes but birtherism, nativism and Donald Trump. And much of it has been — and continues to be — a bipartisan effort. That’s the argument of Spencer Ackerman’s new book, “Reign of Terror.” Ackerman is the author of the newsletter Forever Wars, a contributing editor at The Daily Beast, and a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team at The Guardian that reported on Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations. In “Reign of Terror,” Ackerman takes all he’s reported on and wraps it into one sweeping argument: We are still in the 9/11 era, and that’s all the more true because we’ve come to take so much of it for granted. We discuss the connection between Sept. 11 and birtherism, the scope of mass surveillance, the ethics of drone strikes, how Trump understood the war on terror’s moral core better than its architects did, the messy choices of national security, the ways America’s belief in its own innocence makes it less safe, Barack Obama’s complicated relationship with the fight against terrorism, the emergence of a genuinely left-wing foreign policy movement, the coalescing bipartisan consensus around a cold war with China, and much more. Book recommendations: American War by Omar El Akkad The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins Overheated by Kate Aronoff The New Gods by Jack Kirby Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark Rise of the Black Panther by Evan Narcisse and Ta-Nehisi Coates You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm Mr. Klein and this is the Ezra Clancho.

0:23.6

My guest today is somebody I've known almost as long as I've been in journalism.

0:27.8

Spencer Ackerman is a leading national security reporter.

0:30.6

He's the author of the newsletter Forever Wars.

0:33.3

He's a contributing editor at the Daily Beast and is a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning

0:37.3

team that reported on Edward Snowden surveillance revelations.

0:41.1

But now he's out with a new book, his first book, Rain of Terror, How the 9-11 Era destabilized

0:46.3

America and produced Trump.

0:48.8

The core premise of Rain on Terror is that the policies and the politics of the 9-11

0:53.7

era.

0:54.7

Not only wreak havoc on the Middle East, but they transformed America itself and they

0:58.4

transformed us so profoundly that we stop seeing the way they've reshaped our country

1:03.3

and culture.

1:04.5

Now it's just what are we swimming?

1:07.4

In Spencer telling the core of the war on Terror itself was this narrative, a narrative

1:11.5

fear.

1:13.0

America faces an existential threat from an undefined, though implicitly brown immigrant

1:19.9

Muslim enemy that it must be defeated at all costs.

1:24.4

Like is innocent in this threat, they hate us for our freedom, they hate us for what

1:28.8

makes America America.

1:30.8

And they are not just trying to defeat us, they are trying to change us.

1:34.6

We are in a war of values, a civilizational conflict.

...

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