The post-9/11 era was... really it's impossible to explain it to people who didn't live through it. And it was about a 5 year period, not a few weeks. It also made the careers of people who are still with us now. The wronger they were the more successful they have been! Such is The Discourse.
The Atlantic is a bad magazine run by a bad person who occasionally runs good things by good people in order to cover for the fact that it is a bad magazine.
My "favorite" post-9/11 nonsense was in the greatest of magazines, the New Yorker, which is known for its attention to detail and truth and its fact checking and the amount of shrooms someone must have eaten to have written this.