MS NOW All In host Chris Hayes made a morally obscene analogy on his Monday show as he lamented that the United States allegedly does not appreciate the fact that the people who die in war are real human beings. To prove his point, Hayes tried to claim that the terror Americans felt after 9/11 is “commonplace” in other parts of the world because of “the kinds of war of aggression that Donald Trump just started.”
Hayes started with what may have seemed to be a friendly reminder that this war is taking place in the real world with real people being caught in the middle, “But outside these borders, war is having a bomb dropped on your daughter’s elementary school, seeing some alert or getting a panicked call, or on your apartment building, or the hospital where you are receiving care. Death from above. And when you only view war through our perspective, the understanding that bombs are never coming for us, it becomes nothing more than an abstraction. Gets far too easy to wave away the loss of human life. It’s priced in. It’s the cost of doing business.”
Chris Hayes compares bombing Iran to 9/11, “there was one instance in my lifetime when we in America experienced death from above. September 11th, 2001… For us, that kind of violence is an anomaly. It is a once in a lifetime tragedy. For other people, in other countries, the… pic.twitter.com/Vhmm59sUY4
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) March 3, 2026
The fact that Israel joined the U.S. in this effort knowing it would face Iranian blowback directly does not appear to have impacted Hayes’s lecture. Instead, Hayes declared, “Remember, there was one instance in my lifetime when we in America experienced death from above. September 11th, 2001. One of the darkest days I’ve ever been through, that we’ve all ever been through. The shared trauma from that one day caused a decades-long shift in American culture and foreign policy and American politics. It defined multiple generations.”
That is when Hayes made his outrageous comparison, “For us, that kind of violence is an anomaly. It is a once in a lifetime tragedy. For other people, in other countries, the terror is commonplace because, in part, of the kinds of war of aggression that Donald Trump just started.”
Hayes’s initial remarks had the potential to be interesting. A segment about how people should view war as an undesirable but necessary business and not as an opportunity to beat their chests could have been an interesting discussion, but Hayes chose to attack the “cost of doing business” idea altogether. Taken to its logical conclusion that leads to a morally depraved pacifism that sees no difference between right and wrong. What made 9/11 so evil was that it deliberately targeted civilians and that there was no legitimate justification for it—as opposed to Iran’s history of terrorism, nuclear program, and crossing of Trump’s red line about mass murdering its own people. If Hayes still doesn’t think attacking Iran is worth it, then that’s fine, but he should leave 9/11 out of it.
Here is a transcript for the March 2 show:
MS NOW All In With Chris Hayes
3/2/2026
8:09 PM ET
CHRIS HAYES: But outside these borders, war is having a bomb dropped on your daughter’s elementary school, seeing some alert or getting a panicked call, or on your apartment building, or the hospital where you are receiving care. Death from above. And when you only view war through our perspective, the understanding that bombs are never coming for us, it becomes nothing more than an abstraction. Gets far too easy to wave away the loss of human life. It’s priced in. It’s the cost of doing business.
Remember, there was one instance in my lifetime when we in America experienced death from above. September 11th, 2001. One of the darkest days I’ve ever been through, that we’ve all ever been through. The shared trauma from that one day caused a decades-long shift in American culture and foreign policy and American politics. It defined multiple generations.
For us, that kind of violence is an anomaly. It is a once in a lifetime tragedy. For other people, in other countries, the terror is commonplace because, in part, of the kinds of war of aggression that Donald Trump just started.
