 The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 continue to cast a long shadow over American life. Twenty years later, at home and abroad, the world is more chaotic and less free because the U.S. government exploded our fears to erode our liberties and launched two disastrous foreign wars. This is an attack on all that America is. Every nation must take seriously the growing threat of terror on a catastrophic scale. Can we ever feel safe again? Even just like the feeling of security, I think it's so important. War has been declared. The, uh, dogs. We've really got to unleash the dogs of war. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. Today's defining crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, has created another opportunity to restrict freedom in the name of protecting us from a fearsome enemy. In this case, a viral infection. The breaking news. Stay at home. That is the order tonight. These are people who are frightened. Stay home and stay away from others. A certain amount of arm twisting by governments is perfectly justified. If everything is reopened, then what's the carrot going to be? I wasn't thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this. So what will the world look like 20 years from now? 9-11 led to illegal detentions, torture, routine warrantless spying on everyday Americans, two wars, and an explosion of government spending. COVID-19 has brought unconstitutional restrictions on travel between states and cities, vaccine and mask mandates, lockdown orders that closed businesses, schools and churches, restrictions on dining and restaurants and exercising in gyms, and an explosion of government spending. Early in the pandemic, President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to compel businesses to produce ventilators and other supplies for combating the virus when the federal government didn't like the terms offered. After 9-11, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security and nationalized airport security by creating the TSA. The federal government also conscripted communications companies into monitoring customers, even going so far as to install national security agency equipment in AT&T facilities. Politicians seem to understand instinctively that a crisis is an opening to push freedom eroding policies previously too hard to get the public to accept, such as the disastrous war in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks. But regime change in Iraq had been on the wish list of senior Bush administration officials long before 9-11 and the terrorist attack created an opening. You can get him out of there? I'd like to, of course, and I presume this administration would as well. For then Senator Biden, the 9-11 attacks provided an opening for railroading through Congress a bill that he had drafted following the Oklahoma City bombing, but that he couldn't get passed. It became the Patriot Act. Almost the same thing that got passed, the Patriot Act, was introduced by me in 1994, and it was the right wing that defeated it. Twenty years later, even while correctly predicting that the Supreme Court would overturn the order, President Biden extended an emergency federal eviction moratorium that was always based on faulty science, violating the property rights of millions of landlords. September 11th reminds us that dressed policies and accumulated authority of a nasty way of lingering long after the emergencies for which they were invoked have come to an end. It created an opportunity for new government spending on initiatives that had little to do with keeping Americans safe. Congress diverted billions of dollars to often wasteful homeland security spending, including counter-terrorism funding for small towns hundreds of miles from major American cities. Why would Al-Qaeda come to Tiftonville? If I were Al-Qaeda and I wanted to get Memphis, I'd come to Tiftonville. No one would ever expect me here. At 60 Minutes reported in 2005, the money was spent on transporting lawnmowers to lawnmower races, segways, air conditioned garbage trucks, bulletproof dog vests, and decontamination units nobody knew how to operate. The people who view these as not necessary, I think, are wrong. Today's proverbial crisis that's too good to waste has led to trillions in past or proposed spending for so-called recovery and infrastructure. Somehow that's been defined to include Internet access, child tax credits, electric vehicle charging stations, corporate subsidies, and by American mandates. Everything, it turns out, is a necessary expense for fighting COVID-19 when politicians see opportunity. 20 years from now, we may well still be living with crippling debt, emergency government programs that somehow were never phased out, and pandemic-fueled restrictions on our daily lives. Or we'll look back at the pandemic as a turning point in which Americans rediscover their ability to move past a crisis and reclaim control over their own lives if we can break the pattern set after 9-11. The 20-year anniversary of September 11, 2001, is a day for mourning the loss of the nearly 3,000 people who perished tragically on that horrific day, and to dwell on how political leaders used fear to steal our liberties, because history is already repeating itself in ways that we, and our kids, will live to regret.