Cornwind Evil posted:

In all seriousness, this.

9/11 rammed down on every mental weak point so many Americans had: This Doesn't Happen Here, THOSE PEOPLE Can't Harm Us/Have No Right To Harm Us, and I suspect subconsciously in a lot more people that we think, This Is The Chickens Coming Home To Roost. Then after several decades of supposed increasing paranoia and stripping of rights in the name of supposed security, it happens AGAIN? With a nuclear weapon used for the first time on a live target since the Japanese?

First of all, there would almost certainly and very swiftly be all sorts of innocents being murdered, if not outright lynched, if they have anything to do with Middle Eastern and/or Asian people, including being one; even if it was done by white nationalists, that will likely still keep happening. If it WAS someone in the Middle East, I suspect the nuclear taboo being broken would result in the USA turning it into a seething glass parking lot. I suspect if more 'rational' people were in charge, the next elections would send them flying out in exchange for lunatics who would be promising blood, because most of the nation would be howling for it, I suspect: nothing like fresh horror to sweep away lessons learned. And hell, it wouldn't surprise me if the USA then turned isolationist again, turning inward to 'clean' itself, which of course would probably be more stuff in the vein of ethnic cleansing and misplaced revenge killing than actually going after whoever actually did it if it was domestic.

That's the most cynical assessment I can make. I really can't estimate the stupidity because that has proven to be beyond estimation in every aspect. If you told people in 2001 that 9/11 would lead to a man called Barack Hussein Obama becoming President in less than a decade and then after that Donald Trump would be President and do such a bad job he would make half the nation doubt a deadly virus existed even as they died en masse by it, they'd be calling the men in white coats.