Leadership Quote by Richard Burr

“The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the way we think about security” is the kind of sentence politicians reach for when they want a policy argument to feel like a historical inevitability. Richard Burr isn’t just naming a tragedy; he’s invoking a civic before-and-after that functions like a trump card. If 9/11 “changed the way we think,” then today’s surveillance powers, airport rituals, intelligence budgets, and secrecy norms can be framed not as choices but as the natural, responsible evolution of a wounded nation.

The phrasing is doing careful work. “Changed the way we think” is broad enough to invite bipartisan nods and vague enough to avoid accountability for specific outcomes: the Patriot Act’s expansion, the normalization of mass data collection, the long arc of the War on Terror, the bureaucratic growth of DHS, and the entrenchment of an intelligence culture that often operates behind classification walls. It’s a sentence that seeks consensus by retreating into abstraction.

As a Republican senator long associated with intelligence oversight, Burr’s intent reads as institutional validation: trust the security state because history forced our hand. The subtext is also defensive. Critiques of overreach can be cast as forgetting the lesson of 9/11, a moral failure rather than a policy disagreement. The power of the line comes from its emotional shorthand: it relies on collective memory to pre-empt debate, converting grief into a standing authorization for extraordinary measures.