Posts Tagged → 9-11
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.
9/11’s meaning then and now
Today is the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, known as “9/11”.
From October 2001 to October 2003, I worked closely with the National Park Service and with the families of the Flight 93 victims on protecting the crash site, two solid hard-working years, so that it could eventually become a national memorial without worries of losing the physical sense of what the surrounding ground looked like the moment the plane flipped upside down and did a nose-dive into Tim Lambert’s spruce grove.
And for those two years no one ever blamed the victims of 9/11. Nor did anyone try to scapegoat anyone else for 9/11. Solemnly we focused hard on protecting the landscape so that future generations would know and remember not only what happened, but why and by whom. Like a battlefield, which most Americans properly see it as.
However, for a lot of Americans today, the ‘why’ and and ‘whom’ parts of 9/11 are now strangely flipped around.
In a recent conference about 9/11, panelists blamed guns, the NRA, whites, Christians, and a lack of open borders for 9/11. No, I am not making this up. Blaming the American victims of 9/11 is the actual state of mind among many liberal leaders today. At the conference, they refused to mention Islam, Muslim terrorists, or hijacked planes. Instead, they used the event to call attention to their favorite failed policy goals, not to heal the wounded nation or to discuss lessons learned about how to avoid a repeat of 9/11.
And let’s be honest: Open borders will lead to not just one more 9/11, but many more acts of mass terror against Americans. You could fairly argue that the coast-to-coast illegal alien crime wave already is a form of terrorism, or that the liberal policy assault on law enforcement and the resulting mass shootings is a form of terrorism. But what is meant here, and what is the worst, are carefully planned and targeted acts of mass murder. Like what happened on 9/11.
Eighteen years ago 9/11 heightened our awareness. It made Americans feel vulnerable. It taught us that our best intentions and most open-minded policies are seen by most people outside of America as signs of weakness, of decadence, of a lack of willpower to survive, and they were then exploited to our disadvantage. Our federal government at the time properly took revenge on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, mostly hiding in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But then that same government mistakenly tried to implement a repeat of the World War II Marshall Plan, where America re-built the nations we had invaded and occupied. The post-9/11 attempted rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan was overly optimistic, because these Muslim countries are not European. They share none of the values or culture of WWII Europe, and they are immune to our culture and values.
And so now, instead of learning lessons from 9/11 and using them to protect America, we have an entire American political party that has inverted 9/11 and turned it into another forum and stage for promoting policies that have zero to do with 9/11 or preventing something similar from happening again.
Today in America, to one political party, the military veterans who fought to protect America by taking the fight to Iraq and Afghanistan are now the threat to America, not orthodox Muslims following the Koran to the letter of the law. And the patriotic friends of those veterans are the threat to America; the religious Christian friends and family of those veterans are the threat to America; and the hunters and target shooting friends of those veterans are also the threat to America.
Everyone but the actual perpetrators of 9/11, and their supporters like US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, are that political party’s scapegoats for 9/11.
For radical Muslim Ilhan Omar, on 9/11 “Somebody did something.” That’s it, that is her whole take on 9/11, and her political party agrees with her.
And now her political party is coming hard after you and me.
Looks like a whole lot of people missed the lessons-learned part of 9/11. Probably because they don’t care about them. And that right there is the real lesson learned for the rest of us: 9/11 only means something to people who actually care about America staying America.
Remembering 9/11
It is tough to square up the religiously-inspired terror attack on America 17 years ago with our national policies since then.
America went through a ridiculous bout of Political Correctness, instead of rational, logical approaches to minimize the risk of something similar to 9/11 happening again. The PC policies placed American at even greater risk. Our porous borders are a symbol that we are still asleep.
Today, political commentator Jamie Glazov was tossed from Twitter, on 9/11, for posting simple ideas about how to protect America.
FakeBook deleted people’s accounts for simply mentioning 9/11.
PC is alive and well and it will only invite more terror attacks like 9/11 on America if we do not adopt a survival attitude.
God bless America and the brave Americans who put up such a fierce fight on Flight 93, and who showed us all how to deal with this scourge.
9-11, still happening in slow motion
“Nine Eleven” evokes images of smoky towers in lower Manhattan, and still photos of planes rocketing toward the towers, and people throwing themselves from the windows to escape the flames, heat, and toxic black smoke.
Finally, the twin towers fell, or rather collapsed, not long after the Muslim hijackers from Saudi Arabia had sacrificed themselves and the passengers on the planes.
Their goal was to attack America, as did their fellow hijackers on other planes that day. Flight 93 went down here in Pennsylvania, and it was my role to try to purchase or protect with conservation easements that landscape around the crash site. Working with staff from the National Park Service was mostly fun, sometimes frustrating, but in the end, the site was secured and the area set aside as a memorial.
Other memorials have been established at the Pentagon and in Manhattan.
But what is a memorial worth if the lesson it memorializes is lost?
After 9-11, our mainstream media did everything it could to cast Muslims as the actual victims of 9-11, not the perpetrators. Certainly not all Muslims can be painted with that hijacker’s brush that day, but it is a fact that throughout the Muslim world the day’s fiery images were greeted with shouts of joy and celebration. Including here in America.
Jihad groups like CAIR quickly went on offense, playing to defensive notions. CAIR and other groups played upon big-hearted Americans’ sense of fairness and justice. And so they demanded that we not only forget that 9-11 was by and for Muslims, but that we actually embrace Islam so that we could come to understand that it is actually a great belief system. Anti-Christian groups like CAIR actually used 9-11 to achieve greater inroads against Christians in America and against Christianity globally.
So far their approach has kind of worked. For example, the mainstream media refuses to report how the Muslim Students Association at a major university is actually holding a big celebratory bake sale today. You have to go one or two layers down into media sources to find this infuriating fact. Another example is that key Trump administration appointees are still cozying up with CAIR and other jihadist groups, in the hopes of makey-nicey public appearances translating into a protection scam on the ground, like the mafia used to do.
“Nice country you got here. Shame it’s so…Islamophobic. We’d hate for some Muslims to take all this Islamophobia stuff the wrong way and start cutting off American heads here…” goes the CAIR sales pitch. And so the State Department and Homeland Security Department are continuing the failed Obama policies, which allowed civilizational jihad to continue.
A new report shows that the government of Saudi Arabia funded a dry-run of the 9-11 events, helping its jihadists perfect their hijacking methods. Why we have not occupied Saudi Arabia and confiscated their oil reserves as punishment and reparations for the damage they caused America is a mystery. Any other self-respecting nation would do that. Like it or not, Russia does that kind of response. And it works.
So here we are, 16 years after 9-11, and the net result is that we are still under attack, just as we were that day. Except this attack is slower, quieter, and playing on our silly notions of fairness and justice, which are being bent and used back against us.
To millions of Americans, the 9-11 memorials are a huge red flag. They are a “WAKE THE HELL UP, AMERICA, YOU ARE UNDER ATTACK” sign, neon on a dark night. As any national memorial should be.
But do Americans have elected leaders who understand what it takes to remember 9-11 in a meaningful way, learn the lesson from that day, and apply that lesson to our laws and policies; that is the question.
Until that question is affirmatively answered in a way that protects and supports America, the answer is that 9-11 continues in slow motion.
A Day of Infamy, Fifteen Years Later
Fifteen years ago, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, just beginning to give testimony on hunting and land conservation issues.
Three minutes into my presentation, our entire room containing 200 people was chased out by the Capitol police, from fear of another attack like had just happened in New York and Shanksville, Pa.
Within weeks I was at the crash site, working with the National Park Service, and I went on to play a central role in shaping the Flight 93 memorial, the heroes of which I often think of.
What irks me is that since that day of infamy, America has become less safe, more politically correct, and less able to talk openly about the single force that created 9/11 (Saudi Arabia, Islam).
Hopefully we get this election right and get our great nation out of the ditch.
God bless America.
A man who loves his nation
How refreshing to witness a leader who loves his country speak passionately about protecting his people.
Netanyahu was speaking for Israel, and also for America, which is leaderless.
One just hopes that enough elected officials can get up enough steam to stop America’s current administration from facilitating Iran getting the nuclear bomb.
Otherwise, the next 9-11 attack won’t be about planes into buildings; it’ll be about entire American cities being vaporized.