Did America Lose Some of Its Faith in Science After 9/11?

I've been thinking about something lately.

And I'm not entirely sure I'm right about it.

But I can't shake the feeling that America used to have a somewhat different relationship with science.

Before 9/11, it sometimes felt like science was regarded with a certain level of awe.

Scientists were the experts.

Science represented progress.

Space exploration represented the future.

Technology represented possibility.

There was this general cultural idea that understanding the world was a good thing.

And then September 11, 2001 happened.

And over the decades that followed, something seemed to change.

I'm not saying 9/11 suddenly made America anti-science.

I'm not saying Americans woke up on September 12 and decided scientists were full of shit.

Obviously not.

And I'm certainly not saying that 9/11 is solely responsible for the distrust of science that exists today.

There are WAY too many factors involved for something that simple.

But I do wonder whether 9/11 was one of the events that helped accelerate a broader cultural shift toward distrust.

Because when you look at the United States after 9/11, distrust became fucking everywhere.

Distrust of government.

Distrust of institutions.

Distrust of the media.

Distrust of politicians.

Distrust of intelligence agencies.

Distrust of corporations.

Distrust of experts.

And eventually, distrust of scientists.

And that's where this gets interesting.

Because one of the strangest things about the post-9/11 conspiracy era is how often conspiracy theories started presenting themselves as if they were scientific investigations.

Take 9/11 itself.

You've probably heard the arguments.

"What was the temperature of jet fuel?"

"How could the steel melt?"

"How could the buildings collapse?"

"Why did Building 7 fall?"

"Wouldn't a plane impact have behaved differently?"

"What about the explosions?"

"What about the physics?"

And here's where I want to be extremely fucking clear.

I'm not saying people shouldn't ask those questions.

Questions are good.

Skepticism is good.

Science literally depends upon skepticism.

Science is not:

"Believe whatever the scientist says."

Science is:

"Here's the evidence. Here's how we reached the conclusion. Now try to prove us wrong."

That's the entire fucking point.

Scientists should be challenged.

Scientific papers should be challenged.

Scientific theories should be challenged.

Experiments should be replicated.

Data should be scrutinized.

Methods should be questioned.

Experts can be wrong.

Experts HAVE been wrong.

Scientists are human beings.

They make mistakes.

They have biases.

They sometimes disagree.

Sometimes scientific consensus changes because new evidence comes along.

That's not a failure of science.

That's science working.

But there's a massive difference between challenging science and rejecting expertise because you don't like the answer.

And I think we've increasingly blurred that distinction.

Because we're living in a world where someone can watch a few YouTube videos about structural engineering and suddenly decide they have discovered something that thousands of engineers, physicists, architects, investigators, and researchers somehow missed.

And it's not just 9/11.

That's the larger problem.

9/11 conspiracy theories were just one early and particularly visible example of a much broader phenomenon.

Someone learns a little bit about a subject.

They discover an anomaly.

They find a paper.

They watch a documentary.

They read a blog.

They find someone with a PhD who agrees with them.

And suddenly they're convinced they've uncovered a massive conspiracy.

And the argument becomes:

"See? I'm doing my own research."

Sometimes doing your own research is fantastic.

But there is a difference between researching a subject and actually becoming competent in that subject.

I can read about structural engineering.

That doesn't make me a structural engineer.

I can read about virology.

That doesn't make me a virologist.

I can watch videos about astrophysics.

That doesn't make me an astrophysicist.

I can read a dozen papers about genetics.

That doesn't make me a geneticist.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

I don't need to be a scientist to be curious about science.

I don't need a PhD to ask a scientist a question.

I don't need a degree to say, "Wait, I don't understand this. Can you explain it?"

That's actually fucking healthy.

Curiosity is good.

But there's a difference between saying:

"Can someone explain this to me?"

and:

"I watched three hours of YouTube and therefore I know more than the people who spent thirty years studying this."

Those are not the same thing.

And somehow, we've gotten increasingly comfortable treating them as though they are.

I think that's part of the larger post-9/11 cultural shift I'm talking about.

Because once you stop trusting institutions, you start looking for alternative explanations.

And sometimes that's understandable.

The American government did lie.

Governments have lied throughout history.

The Iraq War was justified using intelligence claims that turned out to be disastrously wrong.

Government agencies have made serious mistakes.

Institutions have covered things up.

Corporations have lied to consumers.

Scientists have made unethical decisions.

Journalists have gotten stories wrong.

Experts have fucked up.

None of that is controversial.

And those failures can absolutely damage public trust.

But here's the problem.

If the government lies, that doesn't mean gravity is fake.

If a corporation manipulates research, that doesn't mean biology is fake.

If a politician lies about climate change, that doesn't mean climate science is fake.

If a scientist commits fraud, that doesn't mean the scientific method is fake.

If one expert is wrong, that doesn't mean every expert is wrong.

And yet we increasingly see this strange leap:

"This institution was wrong about something."

therefore

"Everything this institution says is bullshit."

That's not skepticism.

That's nihilism.

And it can become incredibly dangerous.

Because science is one of the few systems we've developed specifically to help us distinguish between what we want to be true and what the evidence actually supports.

It's imperfect.

Of course it's imperfect.

But the alternative isn't some magical world where everyone independently figures out the truth.

The alternative is often just whoever is the loudest.

Whoever has the biggest audience.

Whoever makes the most compelling video.

Whoever can make the most emotionally satisfying argument.

And that's a fucking terrible way to determine reality.

Especially now.

Because the internet has made scientific misinformation incredibly easy to distribute.

You don't need a laboratory.

You don't need credentials.

You don't need peer review.

You don't even need particularly good evidence.

You just need a camera and an audience.

And if you can explain something confidently enough, people will assume you know what you're talking about.

That's one of the strangest things about misinformation.

It often doesn't sound stupid.

That's why it's misinformation.

The most effective pseudoscience often borrows the language of science.

It uses graphs.

It uses numbers.

It uses technical terminology.

It references studies.

It talks about "evidence."

It says "do your own research."

It presents itself as the brave outsider challenging the establishment.

And sometimes the person making the argument really believes they're doing something scientific.

But science isn't just a collection of words and aesthetics.

You can't make something scientific simply by putting a graph next to it.

You can't make something scientific by saying "data."

You can't make something scientific by saying "peer review" five times.

Science is a methodology.

It's evidence.

It's reproducibility.

It's testing.

It's falsifiability.

It's critical evaluation.

It's comparing competing explanations.

It's acknowledging uncertainty.

It's being willing to change your conclusion when the evidence changes.

And perhaps most importantly:

It's being willing to discover that you're wrong.

That's the part I think a lot of conspiracy culture misses.

Science doesn't promise that scientists will always be right.

It promises something much more useful:

That we can keep trying to get closer to what's actually true.

And that distinction matters.

Because sometimes the scientific answer is:

"We don't know yet."

And that's okay.

Actually, that's fucking fascinating.

"We don't know yet" means there's something left to discover.

It means there's work to do.

It means someone might eventually find the answer.

But conspiracy culture often has an entirely different relationship with uncertainty.

Uncertainty becomes evidence of a conspiracy.

"I don't understand how this happened."

therefore

"They must be hiding something."

But sometimes the answer is simply:

"This is complicated."

The universe is complicated.

Human biology is complicated.

Climate systems are complicated.

Geology is complicated.

Structural engineering is complicated.

Medicine is complicated.

Physics is complicated.

And sometimes reality doesn't give us a satisfying five-minute explanation.

That's okay.

We should be able to tolerate uncertainty without immediately filling the gap with bullshit.

And that's another reason I wonder whether 9/11 played a role in this broader cultural transformation.

Because 9/11 was an event that shattered a lot of assumptions.

America wasn't invulnerable.

The government didn't know everything.

Intelligence agencies didn't know everything.

The military couldn't prevent everything.

The media didn't have all the answers.

And the explanations offered by institutions afterward weren't always trustworthy.

That created fertile ground for suspicion.

And some of that suspicion was justified.

But suspicion can become a habit.

And once suspicion becomes your default worldview, everything starts looking like evidence of a conspiracy.

That's where things can go completely off the rails.

You stop asking:

"What does the evidence show?"

and start asking:

"How does this evidence prove what I already believe?"

That's confirmation bias.

And scientists aren't immune to it either.

Nobody is.

That's why science has systems designed to fight against individual bias.

Peer review.

Replication.

Independent researchers.

Statistical analysis.

Competing hypotheses.

Scientific debate.

These things exist because human beings are fucking terrible at being perfectly objective.

Science doesn't assume we're unbiased.

It assumes we're biased and tries to build systems that account for that.

That's one of the reasons I still have so much faith in science.

Not because scientists are perfect.

But because science gives us mechanisms for catching our own bullshit.

And I think America needs to rediscover that.

Not blindly trusting scientists.

Not worshipping experts.

Not assuming every institution is automatically correct.

But also not assuming every expert is secretly lying.

There has to be a middle ground.

We should be able to say:

"Prove it."

But then we should actually look at the proof.

We should be able to say:

"I don't believe you."

Fine.

Then investigate.

We should be able to say:

"Could scientists be wrong?"

Absolutely.

Then let's examine the evidence.

But eventually, we have to accept conclusions when the evidence overwhelmingly supports them.

Otherwise, skepticism becomes an excuse for believing literally anything.

And that's where I think America has gotten into trouble.

We've confused skepticism with contrarianism.

We've confused questioning with rejection.

We've confused curiosity with certainty.

We've confused "I have questions" with "I have disproven decades of research."

And we've confused having access to information with actually understanding that information.

The internet gave us unprecedented access to knowledge.

That's incredible.

But it also gave everyone unprecedented access to bullshit.

And unfortunately, bullshit is often easier to understand.

"Scientists spent decades investigating this incredibly complicated phenomenon and reached a nuanced conclusion involving uncertainty and probability."

versus:

"THEY'RE LYING TO YOU."

Guess which one gets more clicks?

The second one.

Of course it fucking does.

It's simple.

It's emotional.

It's exciting.

It gives you an enemy.

It gives you the feeling that you're one of the people who knows the "real truth."

And that's incredibly seductive.

But reality doesn't care whether an explanation makes us feel special.

Reality doesn't care whether we think we're smarter than the experts.

Reality doesn't care how many people agree with us online.

Reality is reality.

And our job is to figure out what the fuck it actually is.

So did 9/11 cause America to lose respect for science?

I don't know.

I genuinely don't.

I don't think we can honestly point to September 11, 2001 and say:

"Yep. That's the moment Americans stopped trusting science."

The story is much more complicated than that.

And current data actually complicates the idea further. Scientists remain among the more trusted groups in American society. Pew's 2026 survey found that 77% of Americans express at least a fair amount of confidence in scientists, even though that's below the 87% recorded at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So maybe the better question isn't:

"Did America stop believing in science?"

Maybe it's:

"Did something change in the way Americans relate to expertise, institutions, and truth?"

And I think the answer to that question is probably yes.

9/11 may have been part of it.

The Iraq War may have been part of it.

The financial crisis may have been part of it.

The rise of the internet may have been part of it.

Social media may have been part of it.

Political polarization may have been part of it.

COVID-19 certainly affected public trust in scientists.

All of these things probably interact with one another.

History usually isn't one event causing one outcome.

It's a fucking web of causes.

But regardless of exactly where this shift came from, I think we should be concerned about the growing popularity of ideas that deliberately imitate the appearance of science while rejecting the actual process of science.

Because I don't want a society where people blindly believe scientists.

But I also don't want a society where being a scientist means absolutely nothing.

I don't want a world where someone spends thirty years studying a subject and gets dismissed because a random guy on YouTube watched a documentary.

I don't want expertise to become meaningless.

And I don't want curiosity to become synonymous with conspiracy.

Challenge science.

Absolutely.

Question experts.

Absolutely.

Ask uncomfortable questions.

Please fucking do.

But then be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Even if it leads somewhere you don't like.

Even if it proves you wrong.

Especially if it proves you wrong.

Because that's the beauty of science.

You don't have to be right forever.

You just have to be willing to keep searching for what's true.

And in a world increasingly filled with people who are absolutely fucking certain about things they don't understand, that willingness to say "I might be wrong" may be one of the most scientifically minded attitudes we can have.