Posts Tagged → 9-11
Remember 9-11
Never forget, never forgive until America gets a full apology.
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MIssing Charlie, Missing America
Today is the one year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s murder in Utah, on a college campus supposedly devoted to learning, education, ideas, free speech, debate, and so on. Because you were a kind person with a big heart, I miss you, Charlie, and so do a lot of other people. Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 Islamic jihadi attacks on America.
Since the day Charlie was shot by a political leftist incapable of free thought or debate or learning or free speech, America has been subjected to an increasing onslaught of anti-free thought, anti free speech, anti debate, anti ideas by the political Left, especially on college campuses.
Incapable of standing and debating, the political Left and its Islamic jihadi allies always use violence, coercion, suppression, and censorship. Claiming victim status until they have sufficient power to firmly control their political opposition, political Leftists, and their political and cultural allies, demand equal footing in every venue, in every institution. Then, when they have enough votes, they take away everyone else’s vote.
And now, at Ground Zero in Manhattan, where 25 years ago the Twin Towers were hit by two jet airplanes hijacked by Islamic jihadis, and where over 3,000 Americans subsequently lost their lives in horrible deaths, the political Left is once again demanding shared space. Yes indeed, there are demands for a mosque (!) at the Twin Towers site. Because the murderous Islamic hijackers deserve to be remembered as victims, too. As though the murderers are the same as their victims.
Charlie Kirk stood for reasonable debate, but he also stood up firmly for Western culture, Western ideals, Western values. We must carry on this legacy, most importantly through voting for strong pro America, pro freedom candidates.
Charlie’s vision for America (and Europe) challenged people especially on college campuses, because his message was incompatible with the Left’s destructive moral relativism that has taken hold everywhere.
The same moral relativism that demands the 9-11 Islamic hijackers be treated the same as their victims has also infected the minds of the Lindsay Clancy jurors, who are now openly saying in front of cameras in public interviews that Lindsay Clancy was the real victim, not her three little children that she strangled with her bare hands, in her home, in their bedrooms, surrounded by all their teddy bears, toys, and other symbols of safe, happy, hearth and home. These women jurors are talking about “compassion” for the murderer, to the point where they would have her be found not guilty of brutally murdering three innocent children.
In other words, a year after Charlie was shot in the neck by a Leftist, America is still suffering from the Left’s attack on basic human morality and essential civilizational values held the world over, except in materially successful capitalist countries, like America, where citizens have so much stuff that they can afford to invent their own problems. Like so-called “compassion” for brutal child murderers.
Charlie, we miss you, we need you now more than ever, and I know I speak for many when I say that your legacy of freedom, core Western values, and open debate as fundamental to our American culture is not forgotten. Today we remember your martyrdom, and tomorrow we remember the martyrdom of the 3,000 innocent Americans burned alive, crushed alive, thrown into a fifty story fall to pavement alive, by Islamic jihadi murderers.
Hopefully, the lesson we Americans take from all this remembering is that we do not allow yet more Leftists to take elected office and perpetuate, nay, increase, all of this mayhem.
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Podcasting’s dark side
The other reason I do not have a podcast, is that podcasting has a dark side. And while I may have an occasional “dark side” myself, I neither need any new ones nor do I want this particular extra one added to my already cumbersome burden (hello, this is called self-deprecating humor, something the folks in Rio Linda may not always catch).
Here’s the thing about podcasting: To succeed, you must devote yourself brilliantly, daily, and even then chase clicks. Most of us are not brilliant, nor can we afford to quit our day job to fully implement a podcast, and so that leaves just the click chasing. Or, as many podcasters who now have opened up a clear view into their own dark side, as is pretty commonly called, they/ you / the aspiring podcaster becomes a “click whore.”
In other words, to aggregate as many internet “clicks” as possible, a podcaster must throw a pretty wide net. This wide net requires the aspiring click whore to essentially bite the heads off of chickens, live (the podcaster, not the chicken, which becomes dead), on air. Yes, the old freak show stunt of biting a head off of a live chicken is perhaps just a teensy exaggeration here, but it is a sad fact that in order to attract and hold viewers, the successful podcaster must really stand out in a crowd. Daily.
As Jim Seif, the former secretary of PA DEP, said in a hearing back in 1998, after taking the podium from the sixth speaker before him, “I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband. I know what to do, I am just not sure I know how to make it exciting.”
Great line, and I have used it several times myself, including on September 11, 2001, when I had just begun giving testimony in a Pennsylvania House hearing on land conservation. Moments later the 9/11 jihadi terror planes began crashing in NYC and DC and Flight 93 hit in rural PA, and everyone in the room was spared my own attempt to make the same warmed over fare seem appetizing, if not exciting. We were evacuated from the PA Capitol as I was in mid speech. Oh, my fortunate audience…
Anyhow, podcasters who have survived six months at it know that they must make the mundane seem exciting, or they must begin breaking taboos and saying naughty no-no things. All of it exciting, yes, until all those live chicken heads inside their stomach begin pecking away, trying to get out. The pressure to perform well enough to draw an audience every day results in some podcasters making nutty claims, and then doing mental backflips and wild leaps of logic to try and keep the whole dog and pony show going. They go nuts.
This dynamic is what destroyed Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens’ podcast careers, and Nick Fuentes has the rest of the same type of podcast listeners, who must also do hits of meth and huffing spray paint while nodding along with whatever repetitive thing he is saying that day.
As a podcaster, you will always find an audience, and some audiences are made of either really bored or simplistic individuals. Many podcasters have an audience of fifty, some get to fifty thousand. To get beyond that number, and thus begin to get enough clicks to make a living, well, you gotta be like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband and perform like a porn star, every night.
Most normal people cannot or will not do this. I am not normal, but neither will I attempt to bend myself into a pretzel shape in order to chase clicks.
Oh, the irony that the ideologically rich and fabulously diverse ecosystem of podcastistan is ruled by such a hard iron rule! Would it not be somewhat of a relief to be a mainstream media personality, and have an incurious audience, or a dumb audience, or, in the case of CNN, almost no audience? So much easier!
This is the life of, say, George Stephanopoulos at ABC. He is an openly politically partisan activist, masquerading as a “news reporter.” He is not a fair-minded arbiter of accuracy or facts, and his audience would fade away were he to become such a person. No chicken head biting or dog and pony show for George Stephanopoulos. Just rote activism, day in and day out. Same boring narrative (“Donald Trump bad, Democrats good“), every day.
But it was this very vacuousness that created podcastistan!
It was the ABC News / mainstream media’s failure to address real substance, or to use accuracy and real facts, and its nonstop political partisanship, that drove thinking Americans away from the legacy media outlets in the first place. And it is this market failure of the mainstream media that is causing parent companies to turn over, say, CBS, to new editors, in the hope of breathing new life into the dead body.
See? There is no easy answer to this podcast thing. To jump into it, you must have something of value to say and the ability to say it in an engaging way. To get an initial audience started and then held, you have to hit the ground running hard. And to then maintain and grow your audience, you must have greatly incisive wit and glowing personality, as well as either a whole roost of chickens or a three ring circus full of dogs and ponies.
Yes, podcasters are better people than the George Stephanopolusususes of the world, but eventually the line between them can become thin, if one is not careful. Or one can become dark, and break taboos, and say naughty no-no things that hurt people, because stimulating a particular audience’s otherwise hidden sadism streak is all ya got left.
So no, no podcasting for ol’ Josh. Nope. None of it is appealing to me, though I do enjoy listening to some podcasts, here and there.
Thanks for being here and listening!
War is hell
To best understand the world around us, we employ the science of math. And not just any math, but statistics and graphs. Using even just a little bit of good data, we can accurately plot on the basic X-Y graph the trajectory of a national economy, the sales of cars, or the increase in public violence. Well should we do the last first, because all the rest rely upon its resolution.
Today is 9-11, the September 11, 2001 modern day of infamy, when Muslim terrorists hijacked American planes and used them as guided missiles to destroy or damage important symbols of American success. Curiously, 20-some years later, America has more problems associated with more Muslim problem makers than we did in 2001. Almost as if we have failed to learn a lesson from that day, which we will call our first data point.
Yesterday, gentle, kind, civil Charlie Kirk was murdered while he engaged in peaceful dialogue about political issues of the day in America. His killer appears to be a “trans” person or “trans” ally, or maybe a foreign hitman. Whatever, the act is representative of a catch-all of ever increasing political violence committed by far-left allies of West-hating Muslims, including many who actually live here, as naturalized citizens, no less. So, with Charlie’s murder we have data point number two.
Now, let’s connect these two data points by drawing a line on the graph. We see a nice straight line going straight up, showing that as time has gone forward from 2001 to 2025, domestic acts of political violence against Americans and America have increased. A lot. Sure looks like we are headed toward a war, because with a climb that steep who knows what else it could indicate?
Bigger numbers!
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman burned the Confederate South in his “total war” effort. He famously quipped that “War is hell,” and added a lot of other valuable words in various formats and times around that simple phrase, even as he remarked that mangling the bodies of a couple thousand fighting men in a morning was like dashing water against his face. Sherman didn’t balk and he did not back down.
America is back in hell, right now, as a civil war is engulfing us. Sucks to say it, but it is a fact. We did not start it, we have begged for it to stop, but it keeps being brought to us. Might as well be honest about it, say we don’t like it, but by God, the Union is gonna survive and prevail once again.
So, repeat after me… War is hell.
Now let’s win it, and be done with it.
Remembering 9-11
Remembering 9-11 is important, because it was both an enormous islamic terror attack against American civilians, and a warning to Americans about our loose immigration policy.
Here we are, 23 years later, and America’s current immigration policy isn’t. “Border Czar” Kamala Harris has purposefully let the flood gates wide open in what is the largest hostile invasion of a nation in human history. The destruction raining down on Americans everywhere from this illegal invasion is evident daily as reports of rapes, murders, violent gangs, thefts, robberies committed against everyday Americans skyrocket.
This is all avoidable. If Kamala Harris wants it to stop, she would stop it and round up the illegal invaders and deport them. Instead, Kamala Harris is trying to make as many illegal voters out of this as she can.
Imagine using illegal invaders as the basis of your “democratic election”…official lawlessness in order to gain full control of America. It is crazy, treasonous, and destructive of everything a democratic nation stands for. And yet, a lot of American citizens seem perfectly fine with it.
Seems too few Americans remember 9-11 and what it was about. Humans forget history at their own risk. If this cultural amnesia becomes official government policy, America will have no borders, and all of the illegal lawlessness will become daily life coast to coast.
Only one person can fix this and save America: Donald Trump.
The day after 9/11: First impressions are the most accurate
I remember the moment of 9/11, because I was giving testimony to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Environmental Resources Committee about the importance of conserving land for future generations of people that morning.
I had just gotten started, the committee chairman made some quip about the length of my presentation being measured by the inches thickness of my prepared notes, and then the room was cleared because of potential threats to public buildings. My mile-long testimony was entered into the record and I didn’t even have to say more than a few jokes and introduce myself (Also in the record, I used an old Jim Seif ice breaker that goes like this: “My name is Josh First, and it is tough to follow so many august and impressive speakers today. I feel a little bit like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband. I know what to do, I just don’t know if I can make it exciting.”)
What I remember most about 9/11 is the day after the terror attack on the twin towers. Within 24 hours, a great deal of information about the attacks, the attackers, and the losses had been gathered. And yes, I am aware that some people believe 9/11 was an inside job committed by the CIA or some group of American security agencies. And I remain unpersuaded of that allegation.
Within 24 hours, literally the day after, the world discovered the cost of open American borders and of tolerating people who hate us living amongst us. Our first impressions were the most accurate understanding of the situation, the cause and the effect of the terror attack. Open borders and providing a safe home to people who want to murder us carries a very high cost. Only a nation that believes either it is bullet and bomb proof, and too big to fail, or that is asleep at the wheel, will permit these conditions to persist.
No nation is too big to fail. No nation is bomb proof. And any nation that is asleep at the wheel by allowing failed policies to persist is going to crash and burn and fail disastrously. And so we never learned the harsh lessons of 9/11, and we ignored our accurate first impressions to make way for ridiculous multiculturalism nonsense that continues to shape our national policies even now.
So today it is the day after 9/11, and a lot of Americans will understand when I ask: Have we Americans learned anything since the day after 9/11? Given that right now we have a wide-open southern border and millions of unknown people pouring over it, including lots of Middle Eastern terrorists, we all can say No. No, we have not learned that lesson we were so painfully taught on 9/11.
Because our biggest enemies are again living under our roof, it is just a matter of time before America experiences another 9/11-type attack. Only this time, the mass destruction mass -casualty attack will most certainly be a direct result of federal government bureaucrats and elected “leaders.” Of that purposeful culpability, there will be zero denial. They know exactly what they are doing.
Which makes us ask another question on this impression we get: Who are these American “leaders” and federal bureaucrats actually working for, if not us American citizens? They clearly don’t have our interests at heart, and they punish us when we try to put America and Americans first.
On 9/11, W proved R vs D a false choice
Earlier this month, on the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 plane hijackings and subsequent terrorist attacks against the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the Flight 93 crash at the Shanksville “battlefield,” past president George W. Bush gave some remarkable remarks.
“W” said that today’s law-abiding America-first patriots, who are American citizens with a First Amendment right to peacefully protest, some of whom peacefully protested at the January 6th Washington DC rally against the stolen election and media lies, are the same as the Muslim terrorists who used the jets to destroy over 3,000 Americans on 9/11.
Yep, a supposedly “Republican” former president used his unique opportunity not to promote unity among increasingly fragmenting dis-united Americans, not to promote a sense of solidarity among Americans and other Western Civilizations against the forces of evil that attacked America on September 11, 2001, and who still seek to destroy our freedoms and turn the planet into a shariah-compliant hellhole.
Nor did “W” talk about the racist, violent domestic terrorist groups ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter, whose members have caused billions of dollars of happy-vandal damage and murder across American cities in the past year.
Instead, “W” used the poor behavior of a couple hundred people, some of whom were BLM members and Federal Bureau of Investigation employees instigating violence outside and inside the US Capitol building, to attack and mischaracterize everyone (roughly half a million to a million people) who was peacefully protesting on January 6th, and he used the murderous behavior of the 9/11 terrorists to smear everyone who was not only at the January 6th protest, but who had voted for Donald Trump and who also thinks that America ought to be first and foremost about its citizens and our Constitutional rights.
No other speech given by any other public figure on American soil could have been less accurate or more divisive than W’s ten minutes of infamy at the Shanksville field, that I helped conserve for moments expected to be better than this.
Setting aside all of the Bush family globalist loyalties and warmongering money making at the life-and-limb expense of America’s young warriors, my own takeaway from his speech is that he proved once and for all that there is no real material distinction between the Democrat Party and the Republican Party. Not on the whole. Not really in any deeply meaningful way.
Based on his comments at the Flight 93 memorial, W might as well have been any present-day Democrat Party politician engaging in the dehumanization of their American political opponents.
Both main political parties are run by people who stand firmly against the survival of America as a free constitutional republic, rooted in individual liberty and minimalist government. Both main political parties are run by people who believe they are elite, an entitled aristocracy of sorts without even the noblesse oblige of old, meant to rule over an increasingly disenfranchised, enslaved pool of serfs. Both main political parties increasingly oppose individual freedoms and support increasingly powerful government, with all of the personal invasions and masked thugs that a powerful surveillance state can muster.
W proved that the choice between Democrat Party and Republican Party is a false choice. We can see that these two political parties are really just two well-heeled street gangs battling each other for the spoils of war, taxpayer money, power, and control. Neither party is committed to the individual freedoms of We, The People.
A 1960s philosopher whose name I presently forget, Eric something, quipped “Both the Left and the Right want you to obey them. But the Left also wants you to love them.”
And how right he was! Supposedly representing the American “right,” RINO W makes it clear that neither he nor his fellow Republicans give a damn about what we citizens think of him or them. They think we American patriots are just the same scum of the earth as the Taliban, ISIS, and al-Qaeda terrorists.
At least the Democrat Party is trying to persuade us that their censorship, suppression, lies, stolen education, vote stealing, government spying on us citizens, armed FBI Gestapo thugs at our doors over made-up political accusations, and innocent American political prisoners held in solitary confinement without access to medicine or lawyers and with no formal charges (or no real formal charges that are not laughable, like trespassing) is really for our own good and safety.
I would say of the two political parties, at least the Democrat Party gets an “A” for effort, for cooing lies into our ear. The Republicans are flat-out contemptuous of us; they don’t even care to try to get us to love them!
9/11? How about 11/3?!
Twenty years after the only modern act of mass terrorism against the USA, America is still under attack, but this time from within.
Yes, some people claim the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in Manhattan were an “inside job,” as in someone or some people from within the USA committed the attack as an act of treachery against their own (our) nation. I don’t know if I can be persuaded of this claim, because what is presented as evidence of this is at best conjecture and at worst the worst of lame conspiracy theories.
But it takes no leap of faith or embracing of wild, unsupported conjecture to see what is plainly in front of our eyes right now: An all-out assault on every corner, fiber, and element of America as a free democratic Republic.
Whether it is Joe Biden’s blatantly illegal and unilateral attempt to singlehandedly impose a vaccine requirement on every American citizen (but not on the illegal aliens his administration is literally shipping across our borders in to every corner of America), or the arrogant diffidence the Obama-appointed judges have toward upholding the most simple aspects of the law, or the abandonment of American soldiers, citizens, and allies in Afghanistan along with some $83 billion in high tech materiel, little is being left to chance in this open war against America’s physical wellbeing, morality, rule of law, and its sense of self.
There is no secret cabal at work behind the scenes here. We can see them in front of us. And this is not just happening in America. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and all of Western Europe are also seeing brutal police state assaults on self-governance and individual liberties.
The morning of 9/11 I was sitting in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives giving testimony to the chamber’s Environmental Quality Committee (or whatever it was then called). We were told to evacuate in the middle of my long presentation, which must have come as a relief to many, without explanation. Only when I returned to my office did we learn what had happened, and how state capitol buildings across America were being evacuated as a precaution.
A week later a National Park Service employee I was working with on conserving Braddock’s Trace in western PA contacted me and invited me out to the Flight 93 crash site. Over the next two years I worked very closely with the Families of Flight 93, the National Park Service, the Somerset County commissioners and the county coroner Wally, landowners at the site, the press, and many others to design a land protection plan for the crash site sufficient to preserve and tell the story to future generations. I still have the maps we printed in my office as we made the rounds and presentations, and got public support.
The crash site land conservation plan is one of the signature projects I have worked on in what has been a really amazing career. Ten years ago my daughter and I visited the Flight 93 crash site for the 10th anniversary remarks, and I felt good about how much of what really is a battlefield was protected from being altered into something unrecognizable.
However, if I were to be asked today to come up with a similar land protection plan for the current assault on America, I would respond that we are presently looking at a potential impact area the size of the Chicxulub meteor crater (which resulted in the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out the Jurassic dinosaurs). How do we try to conserve a nation the size of America that has its historic monuments and statues torn down weekly, its borders erased daily, its history falsified hourly, its base institutions corrupted?
All of this overwhelming and daily ongoing attack on America is a result of the stolen election on November 3rd, 2020, the greatest act of treachery in American history and probably in world history. America’s worst enemies grabbed the keys to our country and are using them to destroy the country from under our feet.
It turns out that as bad as 9/11 was, 11/3 was much, much worse.
2020’s Jacobins vs. 9/11
Today is 9/11, the 19th anniversary of a devastating Islamic terrorism attack against America via jet airliners crashing into major targets. Over 3,000 Americans were murdered on September 11, 2001, almost all of them incinerated as the different planes were deliberately crashed and burned in an effort to damage America’s economy and create widespread fear.
The 9/11 attack was a huge blow to America. Not just our economy was hurt, and not just our national pride, but also our culture and self-identity. A great deal of uncertainty resulted, too. A lot of questions were asked about America’s place in the world, our role in world politics, and how we should interract with other nations. Questions are good, and to me and many others, those questions were clearly answered: America is the world’s sole superpower, we stand for all that is good and just, and we want to keep it this way.
You would think that nineteen years later virtually all Americans would be strongly unified behind a strong pro-America identity and protective policy array meant to shield us from another similar attack or series of attacks. Strong pro-America policies make sense when we all can see just how vulnerable our open society is to all kinds of attacks and exploitations, especially from within.
But two potentially fatal misconceptions have accelerated since 9/11. First, what appears to be a majority of Americans still incorrectly believe that America is too big, too rich, too successful to fail. They believe that no matter how devastating or sustained an attack is, America can withstand it.
Second, far too many Americans believe that sedition and treason against America are legitimate forms of communication and “protest.” Even though sedition and treason are the gravest crimes punishable by immediate execution.
Both of these misconceptions have led a surprisingly high number of Americans to passively stand back and allow American universities and other institutions to lead the way in overt efforts to overturn America’s form of government and economy. Even violently. To the point where the modern day equivalent of 1790s Jacobins are running the streets across major cities. Some critics have compared the wild, angry, violent people burning down our cities to the NAZI Brown Shirts, the NSDAP (Nazi socialists) street militia who helped Adolf Hitler gain control of Germany in the 1930s.
But there is a better argument to be made comparing today’s Democrat Militia “mostly peaceful” arsonists and looters to the Jacobins of 1790s France. The Jacobins started out as a freedom movement resulting from the 1789 French Revolution against the monarchy. However, in just a year or two, the Jacobins coupled their promises of perfect freedom, liberty, and equality for all to the extremely violent Reign of Terror. The Reign of Terror was the mass jailing and summary execution of anyone deemed a possible threat to Robespierre and his power-hungry angels.
Every day for almost two solid years, Robespierre would read a list of names in the French congress, and hundreds of innocent people would be dragged off to the guillotine. Their cases had already been determined by a small committee that heard no witnesses, considered no evidence, gave no due process. Someone simply had to be named and that was it – off with his or her head. It was ‘freedom-through-death’.
The thing about the Jacobins that separates them from the Nazi Brown Shirts is that the Jacobins had such beautiful intentions. Really, quite perfect and well-meaning. Right? After all, what is so wrong with absolute anarchic freedom for everyone? They were going to achieve justice for all when the very last ‘bad guy’ had his head chopped off.
It brings to mind a classic 1960s quote, often attributed to Eric Hoffer: “Both the left and the right want you to obey, but the left wants you to love them.” Because the Left has such beautiful intentions, anything they do is excused, no matter how violent or wrong. It is simply that beautiful intention that exonerates the Left’s great evil and cruelty. Their ends justify their means.
Today, on the anniversary of 9/11, America is facing its own Jacobins. In the name of justice for some criminals, they demand that America be utterly destroyed from the ground up, and re-created into some sort of Reign of Terror utopia, where some new Robespierre types will sit above us and declare us to live or to die.
If you care about America and your own happiness, your bank account, your safe streets, you are encouraged to remember 9/11 and stand up for America, its constitution, its traditions and laws, all of which are under attack.
Vote for Donald Trump, and not for the Jacobins.