The first hours of September 11, 2001 brought the kind of crisp Manhattan morning that signals fall has finally arrived after a scorching summer. It was a bright blue morning with a chill in the air, and not a single cloud in the sky. News coverage would return again and again to just how blue and cloudless it had been. It was as though the weather being perfect added insult to injury when black smoke started billowing out across the eastern seaboard. “But the weather was so beautiful” was like saying, after someone dies, “But I just saw him last week!” It became a key detail in my memory of how horrible that day was. I was in Sarasota, Florida at the time, but my brother was in New York City, and we weren’t sure if he was safe. My parents worried we might be attacked, too, since President George W. Bush was in our city reading The Pet Goat to elementary school students. As the decades passed, I thought of 9/11 on cloudless, cool days. Eventually, this memory contorted into my favorite joke. When it’s a day without a cloud in the sky, I always call my brother and say “Man, it is just 9/11 beautiful outside today.” He laughs every time.

Though I would love to think my inside joke makes me special, laughing “at 9/11” is hardly a unique experience. In the past 25 years, dark jokes about the Global War on Terror (GWOT) have become an unavoidable part of American internet culture, spreading across social media in various ways seen by millions. At first, there were the proto-memes on message boards and chain emails that were bloodthirsty and vengeful in the aftermath of the attacks. In the Iraq War invasion era, “Mission Accomplished,” Saddam Hussein’s hiding place, and “Bush learning about 9/11” became favorite meme-able moments because they were so visually ludicrous and instantly recognizable. By 2015, memes about America’s post-9/11 wars were everywhere. The hacker group Anonymous declared a day of meme-trolling against the tech-savvy “ISIS,” and put us on a direct path to today’s AI-generated propaganda war with Iran. But the more 9/11-specific shitposting content only began a few years ago, after many evolutions of meme cycles. If you told someone in 2001 that footage from the attack would one day be used as a hilarious little “easter egg” within an Instagram Reel, or that Rolling Stone would call 9/11 “the internet’s most popular meme,” they might volunteer themselves for a psychiatric hold.

There are thousands of examples of 9/11 memes now. In one video, a glass of beer sits next to a laptop playing real footage of 9/11 news coverage (as the unexpected comedic twist) with a caption that reads, “Showing my beer things it hasn’t seen before.” Another viral video is captioned “When the plane is going down but you don’t want to give her the ick”; in the end, it is revealed at the last second that the characters are crashing into the World Trade Center. A clip from the first Toy Story film, showing Buzz and Woody flying through the air and shouting “we’re not aiming for the truck!,” ends in the same way. (It has 11 million views.) Comments like “this is my personal 9/11” or “you couldn’t waterboard this out of me,” invoked whenever something unfortunate or embarrassing happens, are also ubiquitous.

Part of this is just simple, adolescent shock-value. There’s always been a certain transgressive thrill in mocking the thing you’re supposed to treat seriously; before 9/11, there were Mel Brooks jokes about Nazis, and now there are Charlie Kirk jokes. But underneath all this 9/11 humor, there is also an attempt to reckon with living through a moment of rare violence on U.S. soil while being expected to ignore, or remain silent about, America’s much longer history of brutality and terror.

Amid ongoing censorship of mainstream voices challenging Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the U.S. role in backing it, it is important to remember the suppressed voices of dissent in the wake of 9/11. Representative Barbara Lee was the lone member of the House to vote against the 2001 “blank check” Authorization for Use of Military Force and was subject to severe public backlash, hate mail, and death threats. Bill Maher’s show was canceled after he agreed with guest Dinesh D’Souza objection to calling the hijackers “cowards,” commenting that “Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.” Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC in 2003 because he “accurately, correctly, and morally questioned the horrific U.S. invasion of Iraq,” Jeff Cohen wrote in his obituary. Susan Sontag was viciously attacked for arguing in The New Yorker that 9/11 was a clear response to our violence abroad. “A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen,” Sontag wrote days after the attack. “Let’s not be stupid together,” she pleaded. (So much for that.)

That was in the early 2000s, when the attacks were still fresh in everyone’s minds, but the same pattern has continued up to the present day. In 2015, pop singer Bjork attracted a flurry of controversy when she said she found it “very weird” how “shocked” Americans were by 9/11: “Of course it was a terrible event, and 3,000 people were killed. But seeing the policy of war carried out by the U.S., you can’t be completely surprised with the result.” And in this year’s Michigan senate race, Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed has come under fire from the right-wing press for stating that “9/11 scarred our country in profound ways, but what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of other people.”

These are just a few examples of how difficult it was, and still is, to have honest conversations about American violence and the retaliation it caused, and will inevitably continue to cause. Apparently, the narrative we’re supposed to have about 9/11 is that a group of terrorists boarded a plane and crashed it into New York for no reason other than their own inherent evilness—as George W. Bush himself put it, because they “hate our freedoms.” Serious discussion of the United States’ actions in the Middle East, both before and after September 2001, is discouraged. And in the absence of that serious discussion, should it be any surprise that dark jokes and conspiracy theories fill the void?

Existing analysis of how 9/11 memes became popular, including Rolling Stone’s excellent history of the rise of the 9/11 memes and the Nation’s “How 9/11 Became a Joke,” speculates that the proliferation of this content can be attributed to Gen Z, who weren’t alive for the attacks and use gallows humor to process an event they’ve only read about in history books. But as one Reddit user commented in response to Rolling Stone, “9/11 jokes have been around for far longer than gen z have been the joke makers lol.”

It helps to think of 9/11 memes as a corporate vertical under a larger parent company we can call “The Fall of the American Empire.” Memes about Iraq, ISIS, jet fuel, George W. Bush, torture, Building 7, Afghanistan, drone strikes, invading for oil, and forever wars have all circulated since the 2010s as different meme evolutions—or verticals—under the same umbrella. They set the stage for the more literal “9/11 memes” of the past few years, which directly incorporate footage from the attacks.

My life was profoundly influenced by 9/11. I spent years reporting on the victims of Guantánamo Bay and the fight for accountability over U.S. torture. Despite being painfully aware that, in the wake of 9/11, the United States launched unspeakable violence across the Middle East and northern Africa, including three full-scale wars, I confess that like millions of my fellow Americans, I love the 9/11 memes. Some are especially hilarious, but the unfunny part about consuming this media today is that we have failed the victims of that tragedy, both in the U.S. and the Middle East. The war on terror is not over, and it must ruthlessly be criticized. Millions are still in pain while the rest of us have grown numb to suffering. The absurd truth is that those 2,977 killed on 9/11 still have families awaiting justice. The trial for 9/11 has still not happened. Many people wrongly believe that Guantánamo Bay is closed, but the prison remains open, as does its court, where prosecutions and pretrial hearings have dragged on for decades. “Forever prisoners” are still being held without charge. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and his co-defendants have aged two and a half decades at Guantánamo Bay while receiving medical care paid for by our tax dollars, even as U.S. citizens lack universal healthcare. New York City’s government knowingly lied to lower Manhattan residents about the safety of the air they were forced to breathe after the attacks. Three times as many people have now died from 9/11-related illnesses than were killed in the attacks themselves.

In addition to the 9/11 families, those who suffered torture and wrongful imprisonment have been denied any semblance of justice. The men and boys who were victims of U.S. imprisonment at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and CIA black sites, along with other military prisons, have never received apology, exoneration, or compensation from the U.S. government or its contractors. The innocent Muslims illegally surveilled and targeted by the NYPD also deserve not to be forgotten. None of this is funny. It is terribly tragic, and after 25 years, the news cycle has largely abandoned these stories, including what has happened to the innocent GTMO prisoners now living in conditions worse than Guantánamo as the U.S. failed to provide them safe resettlement or adequate rehabilitation. Again, not funny at all.

The long and continuing post-9/11 era has brought about a U.S. political and spiritual freefall into a Christofascist oligarchy. The rise of the authoritarian right, the militarization of the police, the rise of the surveillance state, the intentional cruelty of immigration policies, and the creation of DHS and ICE all grew out of the political and security apparatus built in the aftermath of 9/11. With this in mind, we can see how laughing at all of this can become a nihilistic response as we watch activists and whistleblowers suffer draconian prison sentences for basic acts of protest. We couldn’t stop the invasion of Iraq, even with the largest single-day mass protest in history. Two decades later, even though the invasion of Iran was deeply unpopular from the beginning, protests occurred mainly after the attack had already happened, and have had no effect on Trump’s aggression.
This long history of post-9/11 fascist horrors, ultimately leading us to Donald Trump, is meticulously laid out in the 2021 book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman. Everyone laughing at 9/11 memes really needs to be able to say they understand that reporting. It is the most crucial and urgent analysis we have available; and to be giggling about all this without understanding the irony of knowing we are making the same mistakes again is troubling. Similarly, any person who has not read Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 should not be laughing so flippantly at 9/11 memes either. The dangerous combination is being both detached from the tragedy of 9/11 and ignorant of who was responsible and how it happened.

The jokes are one thing, but most of the top ranking comments on any given 9/11 meme or post circulating today are utterly conspiratorial. One recent post on Threads that illustrates this showed a simple black and white photo from Sept 11th—not even a meme—with the caption:

On Sept 11th 2001, 15 Saudi Arabians launched attacks of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Whitehouse. 3000 people died, the biggest attack on US soil since Pearl Harbour[sic]. Iran condemned the attacks and offered their deepest condolences. They pledged to assist the USA in response, even helping them fight the Taliban. On the 25th anniversary of the attack, the USA is bombing Iran and helping Saudi Arabia develop a nuclear weapon.

This is all true, and received 1.8K likes, but the top comment on this post was “Hands up if you think Israel did it.” It received 12K likes and counting.

In another incredible bit of irony, TikTok users in 2023 recirculated an old letter that Osama bin Laden wrote to Americans explaining his deed, and came to the conclusion that bin Laden made some pretty good points about U.S. foreign policy. Sympathy with his grievances was so widespread that the Guardian removed the letter, which had been hosted on their website for decades. But being too young to remember does not excuse ignorance on the topic. Saying that “Bush did it” or “Israel did it” to be cool, and then never studying what actually happened, is very dangerous. So, too, is cherry picking the “best of” Osama bin Laden’s foreign policy bangers.

This normalization of ultra-violence, with people becoming unfazed over time as the sheer amount of images becomes too much to process mentally, will continue. Once the shocking footage in the meme referred to ISIS beheading videos; right now it’s 9/11 footage; and one day, most likely, it will be the genocide in Gaza. Sharing a meme with a friend who has similar beliefs, like “Maybe we shouldn’t be giving Israel defense spending any longer,” is a much safer way to feel like you have freedom of speech than writing or speaking about it publicly and getting fired from your job. But at the same time, quick internet quips and shitposting keep us complacent towards the real harm being done and our powerlessness to stop it. The internet addiction, apathetic doomscrolling, and numbness we’ve created means real foreign policy criticism has no weight, and we’ve accepted that we have little power to actually stop unpopular military actions that spring from the War on Terror, like Iran, Venezuela, and Gaza. These quagmires, including Iraq and Afghanistan, have been deeply unpopular, protested endlessly, yet still carry on.

We pretend the War on Terror is over, while it continues to rage. We have been trained that questioning motives behind “terrorism” is totally unacceptable, unless we share it in a harmless little internet joke. This, coupled with the rise of internet access and social media since 9/11, has all but ensured that using memes makes us feel like we have a voice, while really, the rise of fascism in America is accepted quietly and we’re placated by laughing at how bad it all is with our friends.

Elise Swain is a multimedia journalist based in New York City. A former Photo Editor at the Intercept, prior to that role, she was an associate producer for the Intercepted podcast with Jeremy Scahill, while working across various mediums for the Intercept, including reporting, photography, video, and illustration. Swain reported for years on Guantánamo Bay and the U.S. government’s failures of accountability surrounding it for The Intercept. Her reporting has been shaped by direct relationships she built with former detainees, several of whom she came to know personally while reporting their stories and now considers friends. Her work has also examined the U.S. government’s efforts to control the narrative around Guantánamo and what took place at the prison, underscoring the broader theme of unaccountability that runs through her national security reporting.