Politics & Power Quote by Cliff Stearns

The line works like a verbal jolt: it punctures America’s post-9/11 tendency to treat terror as a new invention rather than an old tactic with fresh branding. Cliff Stearns, speaking as a politician, isn’t offering a history seminar so much as repositioning a moral narrative. “Certainly” functions as a throat-clear of authority, signaling that what follows should be obvious - and that anyone who disagrees is indulging in willful amnesia. The phrase “did not just begin” narrows the claim to a single point: whatever emotions 9/11 justifiably triggered, novelty isn’t one of them.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s a call for perspective: political violence against civilians has long been used to communicate power, grievance, and spectacle. On another, it’s an argument about policy - that responses driven by shock and exceptionalism can be manipulated into overreach. By framing attacks as “murder of civilians for political statement,” Stearns strips away euphemisms like “collateral damage” or “acts of war,” but also flattens distinctions between state and non-state violence, insurgency and terrorism. That broadness is the subtextual provocation: if the defining feature is message-making through civilian death, then the uncomfortable ledger includes more than America’s enemies.

Context matters because 9/11 produced a rhetorical “before” and “after” that many leaders used to justify extraordinary measures. Stearns is tugging against that reset button. It’s a reminder that memory is a policy tool: what a nation chooses to remember as unprecedented often determines what it allows itself to do next.