Show notes
What kind of people would dance in the streets after the 9/11 terrorist attack that killed upwards of 3,000 people? The same ones who have now become elevated martyrs by large swaths of the Global Left: the Palestinians.
Katie Couric, like most mainstream journalists back then, had no problem exposing such monstrous behavior by those fed a steady diet of dehumanization of the American people. Would she do it today? No. Would any of them do it today? No.
Who would celebrate the live execution of a prominent activist on the Right, so much so that they’d lose their jobs for exposing what sociopaths they really are? Hundreds, if not thousands, on the Left did just that. Radicalized or mainstream, it didn’t matter. They have become what the Palestinians were back then: so propagandized and radicalized, they’ve lost their humanity.
You can see it now in those TikTok videos that have turned “When it Happens” into a viral trend. That’s what ten years of dehumanizing can do to otherwise decent people. They say they’re decent, but TikTok proves otherwise.
They have cast themselves as morally superior to the other half of the country and would point to how some on the Right mocked George Floyd after his death in 2020. But the difference is that many prominent Republicans like Ted Cruz instantly condemned it. No Democrat has condemned the mockery and the celebration of Charlie’s death.
Oh sure, they all said what they had to say: the standard “violence has no place in our politics.” They said it, but did they mean it? How could they if they’ve never condemned the rising cult-like fantasies of Trump’s death and the celebration of Charlie's execution?
If anything, the Democrats were more worried Charlie’s influence would grow, so they sent out their One True King, Barack Obama, to put Charlie’s legacy in context.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did the same thing, acting as though what Charlie said - the cherry-picked, out-of-context quotes fed to them- was worse than their own side mocking and celebrating his murder. His words were worse than his death.
But that is who they are now. Speech is violence. Speech is hate. Speech must be tightly monitored and controlled. Is assassinating Charlie Kirk or trying to assassinate Donald Trump any different from the Jihadists who mass-murdered journalists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris for blasphemy against Mohammad?
Hasan Piker, aka the “Twitch streamer in California,” like Dean Withers, condemned those who made jokes of Charlie’s death. At least at first. Once Piker sensed the vacuum left in Charlie’s absence, he turned his death into a viral meme just a month or so later. Credit to Axios’ Alex Thompson for pressing him to explain it.
Piker’s song became a TikTok dance meme and a permission structure for many to showcase themselves as dead-eyed zombies dancing to the sound of the bullet hitting his neck a year later for the “Kirkaversary.”
Utopias only have two paths forward. They either collapse or they become more authoritarian. The Left still hasn’t confronted the radical elements on their side, not just Hasan Piker, but the many shooters who have risen up to become martyrs and heroes.
They mock, they meme, but underneath it all, as with Al-Qaeda or other radical Islamic groups, what motivates them is pure hatred. Words are violence. Words are hatred, and “some hate can’t be negotiated out.” They can laugh it off all they want, but they’ve left a paper trail.
Turning Point put up a Charlie Kirk statue, and it was immediately vandalized.
If they can meme a live execution and feel nothing, then why wouldn’t they see America as bad or worse than Al-Qaeda? The oppressor/oppressed indoctrination factory that is public schools and universities has raised them in the good/evil binary.
Video games, IP, and superhero movies all adopted that binary, and after Columbine and 9/11, parents like me shut our kids indoors to keep them safe, and this good/evil binary would one day become white people evil, brown people good, and Al-Qaeda, like the Palestinians, can’t be seen as the villains.
Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani have arisen as cult leaders almost because there is nothing the Left will hold them accountable for, lest they be called racists. No one will look at El-Sayed’s erased history, the videos or the tweets. What did he think? What does he still think? No one will know because no one would dare ask.
The Democrats have never been held accountable for the sharp rise of radicalized violence and death fantasies that have gone mainstream. They’re rewarded for it with likes and reposts. They’ve never confronted it. They’ve never solved it, and the legacy media has supported them every step of the way, all the while demonizing MAGA as the more extreme side.
Piker was their masculine, patriarchal, non-white Joe Rogan. No more Mr. Nice Guy! Let’s get those Gen-Z and male voters. That was the plan anyway. Now, maybe it’s becoming a mess, a liability. Then again, maybe not. Maybe this is just who they are now.
How We Got Here
I know how we got here because I grew up on the Left. I was one of these people. I know what it felt like that day the towers were hit. I know why we pivoted so quickly to focus on the greater evil that was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and those two wars that did what the war on Gaza has now done: flip the script, so America is the bad guy.
I know what happened in our schools. I know how women like me grew in power in America and changed our society amid the “Great Feminization.” I know what happened to my daughter’s generation, why so many white kids felt such deep shame they were willing to do anything to escape their own skin, even destroying their own bodies at the hands of a fundamentalist cult.
I know what it was like when Obama won and how we built our utopia - a better America shaped by more women and what it was like when our first female president was denied the win but just barely, putting in power a guy who would ultimately redeem Bush and Cheney and be sold as the World’s Greatest Evil to whole generations for the past ten years.
We were just kidding with Bush and Cheney. Trump is the really, really bad guy. And everyone went along with it.
Maybe I didn’t think it would go so far as young men picking up weapons to murder as part of the “resistance.” Maybe I didn’t think, in the wake of Charlie’s death, a guy like Hasan Piker would become such an influential voice and do exactly the opposite of what Charlie did by teaching young people to hate America.
But that’s what happens when a utopia becomes a totalitarian dystopia, closer to fascism than this country has ever gotten and not that far from where Al-Qaeda was on the eve of 9/11 - so full of hate and revenge fantasies that they would take advantage of the same people who welcomed them into their country and treated them with kindness.
I certainly would not have thought any of them, let alone most of them, would see the war in Gaza as “genocide” and then apply that to all of America and its history, redeeming the monsters who attacked us on 9/11. We’re the bad guys, they insist. We’re the terrorists.
But here we are, America. We are about to put these people who hate this country, its history, and many of its citizens, in power. We’re about to sell out the American dream because of high gas prices.
It’s not lost on me that Democrats have been saying the same thing to their voters. I was one of them. I see the mirror image of this moment: when gas prices and inflation were too high under Biden, Democrats begged Americans to vote for Kamala to save the country. I know they see it that way too.
But I’ve been on both sides. I know each side’s strengths and weaknesses. And that’s why I know the side that either celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk or said nothing about those who did is the side that is dangerous not just for America but for humanity.
President Select
My daughter was just three when the towers were hit. It was three hours early in California. My French boyfriend at the time had a habit of waking up with CNN, and there it was. Smoke billowing out of one of the towers at the World Trade Center. “Turn on the news,” I told my friend that day.
It took us all a while to figure out who did it and why, and the first thing that happened was everyone felt fear that Muslims would be attacked. Even George W. Bush felt it necessary to say Islam is peace. And it’s true, not all Muslims- like it’s true, not all people on the Left but you have to condemn the radicalized, or else they consume the whole.
We were still haunted by the Japanese Internment camps after the Pearl Harbor attack, which took us to World War II. We didn’t want to be that America, not us progressive liberals. We were the good guys.
The 2000 election left us bitter and unable to accept that Bush was legitimately elected. And that mattered more to us than the tragedy on 9/11. It had to, because Bush was the president, so everything had to go not just wrong but catastrophically wrong - the wars, Wall Street, Katrina. We were making our own reality even back then because we could.
In 2004, Michael Moore released Fahrenheit 911, which began with the premise that the 2000 election had been stolen.
The villain of Fahrenheit 9/11 was the Commander in Chief, and much was made of this moment, when he heard of the attacks and people like me nodded furiously along. We knew who the bad guys were, and they weren’t Al-Qaeda.
And in 2003, just two years after 9/11, when Michael Moore accepted the Oscar for Bowling for Columbine, he was booed, with a part of the Left with their perspective still intact. Needless to say, that wouldn’t happen now.
We were beginning a new origin story, one where the worst people in the world were put in power by the Supreme Court and Big Oil. We weren’t quite at the place where we would divide and measure goodness by skin color or gender, but we weren’t far off. We just needed a leader to believe in.
And as our hero rose in the form of a “skinny kid with a funny name,” we began to find marginalized groups as our protected, sacred symbols because of our love and devotion to Barack Obama.
Just as our first black President became our savior, our villain was rising too. It was Sarah Palin and her demonization of Radical Islamic Terror. That, we knew, made her a “racist” and a villain.
In 2012, she was depicted as a paranoid idiot whose bigotry clouded her judgment in Game Change.
The Tea Party had already been cast as a “white power” movement to thwart its growth, even if by 2016 it would elect a president with the help of Charlie Kirk.
By 2012, we were a bitterly divided country with the Left deciding its enemies were not the brown people in the Middle East but rather the homegrown racists in our own country. We began to slowly separate ourselves from them. Whatever unity we felt after 9/11 vanished.
That same year, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty was released about the killing of Bin Laden. But the movie had no heroes. The final scene is brutal and haunting, full of children screaming and women crying.
The main character, whose life had been devoted to hunting Bin Laden, is left shaken and alone with the thought lingering in the air: what was it all for? Hardly the rousing moment of heroism we would expect when America won.
Game Change and Zero Dark Thirty were pure propaganda for the Democrats and the beginning of how we stopped seeing America as the hero after 9/11.
Not that America anymore
After 9/11, some questioned whether the Oscars would be held at all. Tom Cruise took to the stage and spoke to all of America, not just the blue half. He wanted to bring this country together, and that, he said, is what movies are for.
Remember that Hollywood? Remember that America?
After Charlie Kirk’s live execution, the cowards in Hollywood didn’t even have the courage to say his name at the Oscars or the Emmys, and still don’t. That shows you how divided we are, how scared they are, how they see their enemies as half the country, and how their deaths do not matter.
I think what hurts the most, watching so many of the 9/11 videos as I’ve been doing, is seeing and remembering when it was like back then, when we were one America, how everyone came through, how we held together, how so many ordinary people became heroes to help those who were trapped, many of them giving their lives for others.
Mothers lost sons and daughters. Wives lost husbands. 40% of those who were killed are still unaccounted for. It doesn’t seem like we’ve ever really come to terms with the tragedy of that day because, in its aftermath, the keepers of culture could not make America the hero.
But America was, and remains, the hero fighting the good fight. It’s the better fight, for a better world, even if I didn’t realize it until 25 years later. Now I see it. Now I understand because now I can see what dehumanization and radicalization can do.
Here is a clip from Triggernometry and guest Richard Miniter (watch the whole thing, it’s great).
I finally watchedThe Great Boatlift - the largest sea rescue in history - where so many New Yorkers volunteered their boats to rescue 500,000 people off the Island of Manhattan.
In these videos, I see the America I remember, the one I fled 30 years ago to spend the rest of my life online. I miss that America, the one that believed in our collective goodness, not the one where one side took all of the power and abused that power by seeing the other half of the country as their enemy.
And worse, became radicalized to the point of violence, to the point of mocking the assassinated and believing they have no other choice but to wish for the death of their president, in video after video after video.
9/10 and 9/11 will come back to us every year to remind us of what is great about this country and what is trying to destroy this country. Every year, we will be forced to stare evil in the face and fight for the forces of good standing in its way.
Godspeed, America. Godspeed.
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