Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, a commentary published in American Thinker argues that terrorism’s real power lies not in the body count but in its ability to bend the political trajectory of democracies — provided that domestic political forces are willing to help it along.
The essay, written by frequent contributor W. Galt and dated September 11, 2026, pairs the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington with the 2004 Madrid train bombings to make a broader argument about what it calls the “complicity of progressive forces” in the West. The piece is explicitly polemical, and several of its central claims are contested or framed as the author’s interpretation rather than established fact.
Two attacks, two outcomes
Galt recounts the basic facts of September 11, 2001: nineteen Al Qaeda hijackers flew commercial jets into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people. He describes the American response as “immediate and monumental” — the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, passage of the Patriot Act, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a vast expansion of domestic surveillance and the security apparatus.
The long-term bill, he writes, has been steep. Citing Brown University’s Costs of War project, he says budgetary spending tied to the post-9/11 wars runs well into the trillions of dollars. He lists other costs as well: American soldiers killed, executive power strengthened at Congress’s expense, mass surveillance normalized, and political polarization deepened. From there the essay takes a sharply partisan turn, asserting that the Democratic Party “has exploited the resulting climate to betray American democracy” — a claim the piece states without supporting evidence.
Spain, in Galt’s telling, offers a starker case. Three days before the country’s 2004 general election, bombs planted on commuter trains in Madrid killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800. The author asserts that a narrative was constructed claiming the Islamists acted in retaliation for then-President José María Aznar’s support for President Bush, and that “evidence was eliminated, scapegoats were prepared, false leads were planted.”
He does not elaborate on who allegedly did this or cite any source for the allegation. He then describes the political consequence: the People’s Party of Aznar, which was governing and which he says polls showed was headed for a comfortable majority, lost, handing power to the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
Galt writes that the electoral impact of the 11-M attacks, as they are known in Spain, is documented — increased turnout and the mobilization of young and left-wing voters — and concludes that terrorism changed the outcome of a democratic election and the destiny of a country. Much of the scholarly literature on 11-M does discuss elevated turnout and shifting vote patterns, though attributions of the result to the attacks alone remain a subject of debate among Spanish political scientists.
From Zapatero to Sánchez
The essay tracks what it presents as a chain of consequences. Zapatero, Galt writes, withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq, “betraying Spain’s natural allies”; promoted a Historical Memory Law that reopened wounds of the Civil War and the Franco era under what he calls a unilateral reading; negotiated with the entourage of ETA, the Basque separatist group; and sought support from nationalist secessionist forces and the radical left. In the name of “peace” and “plurality,” he argues, national unity was attacked — and the lesson was that terrorism can rearrange the political chessboard and that those who capitalize on fear or historical guilt collect political dividends.
Current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Galt continues, represents the continuation of that logic. The piece accuses Sánchez of allying with secessionist movements, “heirs to terrorism,” and far-left parties, and describes his government as “clearly national-socialist” — a term the essay uses without definition or substantiation. It further claims Sánchez has enacted unconstitutional judicial reforms and systematically weakened institutional checks and balances, and that his policies have “cloned” Hugo Chávez’s trajectory in Venezuela by eroding genuine political alternation behind formally democratic appearances. Galt’s conclusion is blunt: “Spain today lives under an authoritarian regime.”
The essay also alleges that Sánchez has submitted to the Moroccan regime, pointing to what it calls the recent “invasion” of the city of Ceuta by Moroccan migrants whom it says were “directly sent and directed” by the government in Rabat — an accusation Spain’s government has not made and which the piece does not support with evidence.
A pattern, and a request for radical policy
From the two cases, Galt draws a single thesis: Islamist terrorism “does not act in a vacuum” but needs or finds the passive or active complicity of political forces that prioritize multicultural narrative, Western guilt, or electoral calculation over what he frames as the defense of sovereignty and cultural identity.
He accuses the European progressive left and its American counterparts of consistently minimizing the ideological dimension of jihadism, treating political Islamism as just another expression of diversity, and effectively allying with those who reject the foundations of liberal civilization. The result, he writes, is a double weakness: capitulation before the blackmail of terror and eroding internal cohesion.
The two national responses, however, diverged — and that divergence is where Galt locates his remaining optimism. The United States met 9/11 with displays of patriotism, he writes, and went to war to defend itself and exact what he calls just retribution. Spain, by contrast, saw conspicuous displays of patriotism absent, withdrew from the war, and moved further left, with consequences he describes as economic backwardness and democratic devaluation. The American response had, in his view, the courage to confront the crime culturally and overcome it; Spain’s wound was closed superficially, with a trial that never identified the intellectual authors and produced convictions he calls more than questionable.
Galt then widens the lens, asserting that the left-wing terrorism that struck Europe in the 1960s and 1970s always had the financial and logistical backing of Islamic regimes — Libya, Iraq, Iran — and that no terrorist group can change history without powerful political organizations or states behind it. That claim is stated flatly, without sourcing.
The essay’s closing passages move from analysis to prescription. Galt argues that large parts of the populations in both countries have accepted a “guilt narrative” instilled by the aggressors, dividing each nation into two radicalized camps. He asserts that the left sides with terrorists and their culture and accepts mass Muslim immigration as though assimilation were possible, adding that “nowhere in the world, as history demonstrates, has Islam been able to coexist with another religion or another culture.” On that basis he calls for what he terms “radical policies of mass expulsion and remigration of the millions of Muslims” who, in his estimate, will become majorities in many Western territories within a couple of generations — after which, he warns, no solution will be possible.
That final argument is the essay’s most extreme, and it rests on sweeping historical generalizations rather than evidence. It also marks the distance between the piece’s opening observation — that terrorist attacks can reshape democracies — and its conclusion, which proposes demographic expulsion as policy.
The commentary appears in American Thinker’s opinion section, which publishes argument and analysis rather than reported news. It is accompanied by a note identifying W. Galt as a regular contributor and promoting his political thriller, Cold Monster, described as a dystopian novel set in a collapsing West of 2050.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/how-terrorists-change-history/