The problem was that America had been terrorized. Weeks after the attacks, body parts were still being dug out of the Louisiana mud. New York hadn’t cleared all the burnt hulks out of the tunnel. In Hawaii, forensic anthropologists were collecting DNA samples from the descendants of sailors who had died on the Arizona eight decades ago to enable them to identify the recovered bones.

Unless you were living in one of the repurposed cold war bomb shelters featured on Flip This House, the fact that the government apparently had mistaken a minor-league drug dealer for the people who had launched the most successful terrorist attack in our history had to shake your confidence in any claims.

The first antigovernment demonstration consisted of an estimated twenty people. (Only the Times would “estimate” twenty people.) On a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, New Yorkers began venturing out to Central Park. Most of them were happy to just be outside, but typically those estimated twenty people were carrying hand-drawn political signs attacking the administration. The roads were a mess. Traffic patterns throughout the city had been changed to deal with the massive problems caused by the loss of the tunnel. Wooden barriers had been set up to funnel all downtown traffic onto Broadway. It worked for vehicles, but less so for pedestrians. Mounted cops tried to stop the jaywalkers from interfering with the flow of traffic, which resulted in a big crowd backed up behind the wooden horses. Additional NYPD officers rushed to the scene to maintain control.

Imagine this scene: Traffic is at a total standstill. A large crowd has been herded into a small area, and more people are showing up with essentially no place to go. Did anybody really think New Yorkers were going to stand there? It took less than a minute for the barriers to be pushed over. With one great cheer pedestrians took over the streets, bringing traffic to a complete stop. Making a confusing situation even worse, an Uber attempting to make a right turn off Central Park West onto 83rd Street collided with a Lubavitch Mitzvah Tank (I can’t make this stuff up!), adding to the gridlock. Emergency vehicles and ambulances from every hospital in the city were trapped racing to get to the accident, their endlessly bleating sirens creating even more panic.

New Yorkers being New Yorkers, the wailing and whooping sirens drew even more curious pedestrians into the area. With fire department and EMS vehicles stalled in traffic, mounted cops began weaving through the cars. They attempted to use their horses to gently force people back onto the sidewalk or into the park, opening a traffic lane for the emergency vehicles. Unfortunately one of the twenty protesters, later identified as an NYU sociology professor, was caught between a horse and a wooden barrier and panicked. He slashed at the animal with his poster, a caricature of Wrightman gleefully blowing up a birdhouse, captioned “Bird Brains!” The horse, being a horse, responded by backing up, unintentionally knocking over the professor. An unidentified person, seeing this, shouted, “Watch out! The cops!”