ICYMI - What Actually Happened Before the Towers Fell

Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift · Sep 10, 2026 · 19m

A quarter century after 9/11, Nathan Radke makes the case that understanding what happened requires going back to a Cold War strategy most people never learned about, one built entirely around bleeding the Soviet Union dry in Afghanistan rather than helping the country recover.

That strategy left behind orphaned children, trained fighters, and a power vacuum that a group called the Taliban, a word meaning something far more ordinary than most people assume, eventually filled. Nathan connects that history directly to the rise of a wealthy Saudi man whose name would later become synonymous with…