Leadership Quote by David Hunt

The most cutting thing here isn’t the claim that government got worse after 9/11; it’s the split-screen confession of how power protects itself. Hunt sets up a blunt dichotomy - “Publicly” versus “Privately” - to expose the performance layer of post-9/11 governance: a constant reassurance campaign meant to signal competence, resolve, and control. The line reads like an insider’s aside, the kind that punctures official narratives precisely because it implies access to what’s not supposed to be said out loud.

The subtext is an indictment of incentive structures. After a national trauma, the political reward goes to leaders who look decisive, but the career risk belongs to anyone who might later be blamed for the next failure. Hunt’s “scared of being held responsible” points to a bureaucracy that doesn’t simply grow; it calcifies. Rules proliferate, approvals multiply, and decision-making migrates upward, not because that makes anyone safer, but because it distributes accountability so thinly that no one can be singled out. The irony is that a system built to prevent another catastrophe can become one optimized to prevent another scandal.

Context matters: 9/11 wasn’t just an attack; it was a permanent audit of the state. Hunt frames the post-attack security apparatus as a theater of competence masking an internal culture of fear. The quiet accusation is that “fighting terrorism” became a public brand while risk-aversion became the private operating system.