Our duty to teach about 9/11 | Hour 2

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the peak calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. Right. So 25 years ago today, um, For people who weren't alive at the time, everything changed in America. And everything we are in since, everything that you are aware of now, changed because of what began at 7.59 a.m. with the American Airlines Flight 11 takeoff out of Boston's Logan International Airport. American 11, are you trying to call? Our number one is in staff, and our five is in staff. I am going to call from Washington. I am in a situation where the Americans learned a possible hijack. What's going on, Betty? Their craft is erratic again. Are you ready? Betty, talk to me. Betty, are you there? Betty? A plane just hit 737. What? A 737. It what? Who are you talking to? Oh, God. Oh, my God. United 175, New York. We have some problems over. Here right now. We might have a hijack over here, too. Jules, this is Ryan. We're on an airplane that's been hijacked. Things don't go well. I'm looking good. I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to be good. Go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. I just totally love you, and I'll see you when you get there. Bye, babe. What are those people going to do? All the elevators are blocked out. What the hell is going on? Oh my god, so both towers are now... Crystal City, just going. To Crystal City. Yeah, stop all departures. Pentagon just got hit. I can't even protect the point. From the NCA. United 93, that traffic for you is 1 o'clock, 12 miles eastbound, 370. Negative contact, we're looking. At United 93. United 93, Cleveland, if you hear the sound, right then. I got 10 feet to the dock. Keep remaining to the east. We have a ballpark. Get out of here. Get out of here. Get out of here. Tuesday, 9.47 a.m. Hi, baby. Baby, you have to listen to me carefully. I'm on a plane that's been hijacked. I'm on the plane. I'm calling from the plane. I want to tell you I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very much. And I'm so sorry, babe. I hope to be able to see your face again, baby. I love you. Bye. Number 56865, we have, I believe it is a Boeing 757. Can you see him up there, sir? That's confirmed. It looks like he's rocking his wings. Roger. He's rocking back and forth. Number 56865, advise you to stay away from that aircraft. Go north as fast as you can. United 93, have you got information on that yet? Yeah, he's down. He's down? Yes. When did he land? He did not land. Oh, he's down? Yeah, somewhere up northeast of Camp David. I just wanted to let you know I love you and I'm stuck at my building in New York. There's lots of smoke and we just wanted you to know that I love you always. That's number two for our first hit. Right. Ladies and gentlemen, we're not ready to die, but it's getting bad. Oh, God! Oh! I'm going to die, aren't I? No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to die. Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, say your prayers. We're going to think positive because you've got to help each other get off the floor. I'm going to die. A new type of war. That's what it. Is. Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices, secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, Despicable acts of terror. The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed. Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining. Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature, and we responded with the best of America, with the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could. Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's emergency response plans. Our military is powerful, and it's prepared. Our emergency teams are working in New York City and Washington, D.C. To help with local rescue efforts. Our first priority is to get help to those who have been injured and to take every precaution to protect our citizens at home and around the world from further attacks. The functions of our government continue without interruption. Federal agencies in Washington, which had to be evacuated today, are reopening for essential personnel tonight and will be open for business tomorrow. Our financial institutions remain strong and the American economy will be open for business as well. The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those. Who harbor them. I appreciate so very much the members of Congress who have joined me in strongly condemning these attacks. And on behalf of the American people, I thank the many world leaders who have called to offer their condolences and assistance. America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world. And we stand together to win the war against terrorism. Tonight I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me. This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world. Thank you. Good night, and God bless America. So one of the details I was not aware of until this morning, did you know that there were two unarmed F-16 pilots from Andrews Air Force Base, and they were in the skies ordered to stop Flight 93 before it reached Washington? They had no, but they had no arms. First Lieutenant Heather Penny, a.k.a. Lucky Penny, and Lieutenant Constable Mark Sassville had no missiles. There wasn't any time to load them, so their plan was to ram the airliner. Sassville was supposed to go into the cockpit and Penny into the tail. They launched at 10.30 a.m., Flight 93 had already gone down in Pennsylvania 25 to 30 minutes earlier after the passengers stormed the cockpit, fought back, and crashed it into that field in Shanksville. So the two pilots never intercepted it. Most people know what the passengers did. But almost nobody, including myself, until this morning knew that two fighter pilots had gone up there to die. So that's what people who were alive on 9-11, that's what we remember. And there are a lot of people now who don't remember, they choose not to remember, or they weren't alive to remember. And the people who should be telling all the younger generations about what that day was have abdicated their responsibility in doing so. You've sugar-coated it, you've dismissed it, you've ignored it. You do the whataboutism thing or, you know, I'm not saying it should have happened, but. So that's why we do this every year. That's why we talk about it. And we'll continue to do so. I will. I know I will. All right. For over a year now, you've heard me talking about Create A Video. 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And he was, or she was responding to, um, another tweet by an account called tastes like pork who said it'll never happen, but the network should just run their broadcasts from nine 11, 2001 all day, which I would endorse that. Um, So that prompted Futuristic Fudge to say people that remember 9-11 have this weird worshipful attitude. This person claims to be a Baptist, conservative college student from Alaska. I don't know if that's true. With a name like Futuristic Fudge, it's hard to know. But this then prompted, this is our world by the way, these names, prompted a response from from an account named Brain Leakage, who identifies himself as a former grunt and a veteran of the global war on terror, who said, since you weren't even born yet, I'm going to answer your question in good faith. 9-11 was America's collective loss of innocence. In the decades prior, we had won the Cold War by outspending the Soviets. We were the sole remaining superpower, and we were in a period of peace and economic prosperity. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we suffered a suicide attack with a higher death toll than Pearl Harbor. It struck a city on the U.S. mainland, the first attack of that scale to hit the continental U.S. since the Civil War. In a violent flash, and on live television, our collective illusions of safety, security, and peace disappeared. For most Americans, it was the first time we ever had to contend with that scale of horror and what it implied about the fragility of our way of life. It was simultaneously sobering and terrifying. The American response was to launch two wars— and to restructure domestic life around the government's presumed duty to spy on everyone so nothing like it could ever happen again. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say the America we grew up in, imagined or not, but the America we grew up in vanished on 9-11. And so what you're calling a worshipful attitude is a mix of reverence for the dead and mourning for the loss of what existed before. And for people who didn't ever experience what existed before, how could they know? They weren't here. There's no before and after. It's just all after for them. And again, this is why it's critical that education inform all the generations about what happened that day. I grew up learning about Pearl Harbor We were taught about Pearl Harbor. And there wasn't any couching of it. There wasn't anything like, well, you know, we kind of sort of had it coming. But that's what we get with 9-11 lessons. In fact, a bunch of reports, we'll get into this in the next hour, a bunch of reports about how 9-11 is actually being taught and whether it's being taught in American schools. And on the one hand, it's like, yes, I want it taught, but on the other hand, I'm not sure I want those people teaching it. Let me jump over to the phones and chat with Lisa. Hello, Lisa. Welcome to the show. Hi, how are you today? Hey, I'm all right. How are you? Good. I just was listening to some of the comments you're getting on your text line. I wanted to say that brain leakage guy really had a good synopsis of things, how they really did affect us. People that just aren't aware, especially someone who talked about how we worship today, have no idea what it was like for us. I was just like an average American mom with four teenagers, and my kids were falling apart. Everybody was terrified. No one knew what was going on. Thousands of people died, which meant tens of I mean, it changed our whole country in so many ways, and we continue to suffer from it to this very day. And this morning I heard a Fox News guy talking about how not only does he continue to suffer with four different kinds of cancer because he covered everything down, but so many people still to this day are suffering. And it's not just 9-11 syndrome. Al-Qaeda is still killing us to this day. Ben Laden may be dead, but the effects of that day are still killing Americans. And I thought that was something really important that needed to be pointed out. And it's really important that we teach our children. And like you had shared, we were told about Pearl Harbor. We were definitely told over and over again about many things that they're not teaching anymore in the schools. And it's just, it's a sad day when people don't know history. That's all I can say about that. Yeah, Lisa, I appreciate the call. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, this is, This is our responsibility. It's our duty to teach younger people about what life was like before 9-11, the day of 9-11, and then after 9-11. Because, in my opinion, we are still in a pre-9-11 mindset. We have slipped back into slumber. Despite all of the evidence... See, I've not forgotten. I've told this story before. I was working here. I was a reporter at WBT. I'd actually given my notice to quit. I gave a one-month notice so they would have time to find somebody to replace me in the newsroom. Because I wasn't making any money. People who work in radio know this very well. I was a young cub reporter. I'd been on staff here for about two years. And I thought I was just rocking it. I was doing such a great job in all of this. And I go in for my review and they're like, okay, you get a 2% pay raise. I was like, wait, what? And they were like, yeah, you basically have to move a mountain to get three. And so I went home and I did the math and I was like, well, I'm going to be 50 years old before I get close to like 45 grand or something. And so I knew I was like, okay, well, I'm not going to be able to afford to keep this job. So a friend of mine said, you should come sell, come work with me. We're selling health and life insurance. So I started studying, got my license, was working for this insurance company in the mornings, making cold calls for clients and stuff like that. And so it was a Tuesday, 9-11 was a Tuesday, and I was getting ready to go into work at that company. I'd already given my notice here at BT. And I hear on the radio about the first plane. So I turn on the television. So I got the radio going. I got the TV on. And then the second plane hits. And at that point, it's like, okay, I'm not going into the insurance company. I'm going into... WBT. So I came into work and my dad worked in an office building across the street. And, uh, I've actually interviewed him on this right in this studio. Um, he did survive, but he was in an office building across the street. He was in a subway car right under the towers when, uh, the first plane hit and the train got held and then they moved him up to the next stop. And then they told everybody get out of the, uh, subway cars. So he walks back to where his office is. He sees the tower smoking, you know, the first plane had hit. He goes into his building. The second plane hits and, you know, he runs down and tells the security, the guy at the front desk who he described as just like kind of not really comprehending what's going on. But dad being a Vietnam veteran, a combat veteran, he, he, he knew right away. He said, we're under attack. You need to get everybody out of this building. And they evacuated the building and, Dad goes out into the streets, and the towers come down. Manhattan gets shut down. We ran the, they ran, what was it, the largest, I have it here in the stack of stuff, that was like the largest, I don't want to say flotilla, but maybe it was, since Dunkirk. Like, the amount of boats that they used to get people, yeah, the Coast Guard led a water evacuation program of more than half a million people from Manhattan. That was the, it was larger than Dunkirk. Like the sheer scale, everything was shut down. All the roads, all the subways, all the trains, everything was shut down. Dad could not get home. And of course the cell, all the comms went out. So all this, because the world trade center housed the, you know, the highest cell phone towers. And when those things came down, And then you have all the people trying to call their loved ones and it just overloaded all the systems. So we couldn't get a hold of him for hours. I was in that newsroom making phone calls to dad's cell phone. And then I get a hold of mom. I talked to mom and she's like, yeah, I talked to your uncle and can't, you know, he was like, oh, I'm sure Terry's fine. I'm sure he's fine. It's not like he would, you know, go running into one of the buildings. And then we all just kind of stopped and thought, actually, He is the kind of guy that would run into one of those buildings. The buildings collapsed. He couldn't get off the island. And he had to get he found some guy on the street who was selling motor scooters like like these. I don't know. They got the little handlebar and the thing you stand on. It's got a little, you know, gas engine on the back. And he bought that. He bought one from this guy. And he rode that thing like 40-plus miles home, covered in ash. And as Lisa mentioned, there were thousands of people. By some counts, more people died after 9-11 because of the toxic air that was all around Ground Zero while they were clearing it out. I visited Ground Zero shortly afterward. And they were still, well, I say shortly. It was about a month later, I want to say. And they were still finding remains. See, so if you don't understand it, I can understand kids not understanding because you didn't live through it. And there's no way to truly understand it unless you live through it. So I tried to understand it. And that's what I did. I stayed here at BT. I actually went and did an entire series on Islam. to try to understand. And I made a mistake. I'll tell you what it was. All right, so for the last 25 years, I have tried to understand why 9-11 happened. Not focusing only on 9-11. Now, obviously, every year we do these types of shows, so I always am learning news stories about different people, acts of heroism, loss, pain. Every year I learned something else. But, you know, trying to understand what would motivate, what would animate some 19, would have been 20, people to do what they did, right? And so when it first happened, I had this idea, well, I'm going to go and I'm going to do a, a series on Islam. And so I started reading up. I started studying it. And I even, uh, went and interviewed, uh, the, the local head Imam over at, uh, the Islamic center of Charlotte and seemed like a very kindly man, very kind eyes. He had a smile. It reminds me of, uh, Zoram Mamdani. Now that I think about it, um, And, you know, he said, Islam means peace. Islam means peace. I'll never forget it. I was standing two feet from his face, microphone in front of his mouth, and he's looking at me and he's smiling, and Islam means peace. And I made a mistake. I believed him. That made it into the story. So I acted as a mouthpiece for a lie, because that's a lie. It's not peace. It's a kind of peace. It's peace through the submission to the will of Allah. And by the way, you cannot come to Allah as anything but a slave. That's what they teach. That's not what I teach. I'm not Muslim. That's what they teach. And if you ask them, they will tell you. That's true. See, we come to Christ, we come to the Father through Christ as a child, as a son, as a daughter. They don't. They come to their God as a slave. I also made a mistake in believing that, oh, don't you know we're all of the same Abrahamic religion? That's not true either. That's what they tell you. That's what they tell us. But that's not true either. I actually won an award for that series. Yeah, I won an award. It tells you, I guess, the quality of the, I guess, the value of such an award. What I have learned in 25 years is that Islam, not radical Islam, not Islamism, but Islam, because of its core tenets, because of its texts, the Hadiths, the Sira, the scholars, all of it. It is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and the freedoms that our Constitution guarantees. It's just incompatible. And now, if you want to say, oh, don't you, you can't say that, that's, you know, that's, you're discriminating against all people of a religion. I'm talking about Islam. Not talking about Muslims. I'm talking about the ideology, which is a totalizing ideology. It's one of the other things I learned. It's not just a religion. A religion is part of a larger ideology. The executive director for the Center for Renewing America, a fellow by the name of Wade Miller, he said, after 9-11, I dropped out of college and joined the Marine Corps, volunteering for the infantry. I knew that radical Islam was responsible for the attack and I wanted to have a rifle in my hand to go after those who were responsible for and in league with those who attacked us. Obviously, in hindsight, our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were poorly executed with no achievable objective ever clearly articulated devolving into nonsensical nation-building exercises. And by the way, one side note I will add to Wade Miller's point here. We rebuilt Germany after World War II. We rebuilt Japan after World War II. But we could not rebuild Iraq or Afghanistan. Why? Because Germany and Japan are not Islamic. Anyway, he goes on to say, in the 25 years since, all of my experiences, including multiple deployments and decades of research, have led me to a more important realization. Here it comes. It wasn't radical Islam that attacked the U.S. It was just Islam. And more importantly, virtually no society that has seen a large influx of Islam has remained intact and otherwise survived it. Islam is the problem. And I realize how uncomfortable it is for Americans to speak in absolutes. There may be outliers, yes. But at large scale, Islam has never resulted in a society that embraces and appreciates human liberty. In the wild, Islam at scale destroys liberty. It doesn't foster and build it. And again, I know what I am saying. is going to make people uncomfortable. It's going to make people angry. I may be getting a fatwa on me or something. I recognize what it is that I am saying is not something people want to hear, particularly Americans, for various reasons. You can call me any name in the book you would like, but I don't care. Doing this for 25 years, I don't care about the names that you call me. I have come to this conclusion after hearing for years debates and arguments, and from their own mouths, the scholars and leaders, listening to what it is that they say, understanding what their texts teach them. Islam is a political ideology doctrinally dedicated to the conquering and subjugation of all non-Muslims. Radical Islam isn't a national security threat to the United States. Islam is. And people need to learn to be comfortable saying that because if enough people don't, our children and grandchildren will not inherit liberty. They will inherit Islamic theocracy. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to ThePeteCalenderShow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.