Todd Beamer unexpectedly found himself on a hijacked airplane on September 11, 2001. Rather than submit, he and other captive Americans fought back. They brought Flight 93 down in a field in Pennsylvania, saving the United States Capitol from suffering an attack similar to those that struck the Pentagon and brought down the World Trade Center on the same day. Todd Beamer and the heroes of Flight 93 gave their lives saving others and also one of the greatest symbols of the American republic.
Leftists call that republic nothing but “systemic racism” now. So in their minds, what were Beamer and his trapped compatriots really fighting for?
How long will it be before some journalists and Democrat officeholders dub Beamer a racist who was not brave?
That’s not an idle question. In the leftist tome Forget the Alamo, a journalist, an author, and a Democrat activist in good standing with his political party posit that the defenders of the Alamo were racists who were not brave. That’s literally the thesis of their book — page 99.
And, sad to say, how anything that happened after Santa Anna’s appearance on February 23 can be held up as “bravery” is beyond us. Once Santa Anna appeared, Travis and his men were trapped. Despite the legends, there was never any conscious decision or vote in which the defenders elected to stay and fight. They had simply lingered too long, and now they were trapped. Every one was a dead man walking.
Well, so was Todd Beamer and so were the other Americans who fought back on Flight 93 on 9/11 years ago. They were dead and they knew it as soon as they knew the aircraft had been hijacked. But they rose up, said “Let’s roll,” and fought anyway. The al Qaeda hijackers who had seized control of the aircraft, effectively surrounding Beamer and his comrades, weren’t Anglos from Madison. The logic of Chris Tomlinson, Bryan Burrough, and Jason Stanford in the quote above is analogous, just displaced by nearly two centuries from the events they examine and the defenders they smear. In the not too distant future, either they or someone of similar mind will — not may, but will — trash the men who brought Flight 93 down as racist defenders of the American white supremacist patriarchy. And they will sell books when they do. Woke America laps up anything and everything that smears heroes and attacks the nation. The media will help them sell books and probably fete them with awards.
This logic is already out there on the fringe, as Robert Spencer noted Saturday. The left has no logical limiting principles and never met an anti-American who was too far beyond the pale to embrace.
At the Alamo there was racist oppression at work, just not the oppression the Forget authors posit. Santa Anna the dictator sought to drive Anglo settlers entirely out of Texas. In our times he could be accused of engaging in ethnic cleansing. It might even be suggested that the elite criollo dictator of Spanish descent oppressed mestizos by conscripting them into military service to pursue his dictatorial aims, and he oppressed the Tejanos who sought to restore the federalist 1824 constitution he had tossed aside.
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Woke simple-mindedness doesn’t allow any of this to be possible. Their whole world is “Anglo bad, everyone else good.” Ask them about the elitist caste system among the Maya or the Chacoans in pro-Columbian America and they just short circuit. Don’t even bother to bring up the ghastly practices of the Aztec. The Spaniards were evil conquerors until one of their elite descendants, Santa Anna, went to war in Texas, at which point the self-proclaimed Napoleonic dictator became some sort of liberator in some leftists’ minds.
When Forget came out, the media marched in lockstep as if they were parroting the same talking points — which they were, direct from the publisher’s PR packet — to make sure no one critically examined the book’s claims. No media interviewer anywhere asked the authors even a mildly difficult question. They uncritically extended the publisher’s marketing and gleefully joined in on the smear.
The Forget authors didn’t come up with their anti-defenders ideas on their own; they parroted those ideas from far-left academics who spent decades inventing ways to invert history. One of those academics, Walter Buenger, heads up the Texas State Historical Association.
If you sense that there’s a lot of parroting going on, well, that’s how it works. Someone on the academic, taxpayer-funded fringe left comes up with something anti-American, and then others on the left mainstream it and then weaponize it against everyone else.
For the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, Joe Biden sought a photo-op. Not a real battlefield victory, which was still possible, but a photo-op to fool the world. In the phone call with then-Afghanistan President Ghani that the media has already swept into the memory hole, Biden flatly ignored the battlefield reality. He just wanted his photo-op of ending — but not actually winning — the war, so America would forget about it all. Optics — public relations — were all he cared about, and the optics he did care about were foolish.
As is obvious now, Joe Biden handed the Taliban and al Qaeda a whole country. He also gave them a huge arsenal of weapons and other U.S. military gear, and the optics of actually winning a theater of the war on terror against the United States. That’s going to be good for the terrorists’ PR. It’s also going to get us more war and probably more major attacks on U.S. soil (Biden’s open border policies aren’t enhancing our security). During the Obama years, Biden supported freeing terrorists from Guantanamo in exchange for the convicted traitor Bowe Bergdahl, again for the sake of optics. Those terrorists have resumed their bloody work, even taking up positions ruling the country Biden gave them. He also left Americans behind enemy lines so he could stick to the optics of getting U.S. troops out by August 31.
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Sidebar question: Were the 13 Americans killed during the siege at the Kabul airport brave? They didn’t vote to go there; Biden ordered them there after his hasty retreat caused chaos. They didn’t get any say in whether they stayed or not. Were they brave? Are they heroes?
Most Americans would say yes. But for how long will we be allowed to without coming under assault from the left?
We are far less safe than we were 20 years ago. That’s not optics or PR, it’s reality, and it’s down to how the left views our country in relation to everything and everyone else. The terrorists have a country again and a firmer grip than they had on it prior to 9-11. The Democratic Party and its mouthpieces in the media have spent the past year openly trashing, undermining, and defunding police, who gave their lives in great numbers on 9-11 and keep us safe every day. The left has busied itself attacking the nation itself at its very foundations, via the 1619 Project, critical race theory, and leftist books such as Forget the Alamo.
Today the media is still able to call Americans who took brave and noble actions on 9-11 a “saint” and a “hero.” But for how long? It was a given just a short time ago that the Alamo defenders were heroes and George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the American founders bequeathed us the greatest, freest, and least oppressive republic the world has ever known despite their own imperfections. All of them have come under systemic and sustained attack by the left. The nation the founders created is called “systemically racist” even while leftists who call it that want to grant that very government far more power over everyone. Pretzels have straighter lines than leftist logic.
Leftist agitators mostly leave praise for the 9-11 heroes alone now, though they seldom join in. Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar infamously downplayed 9-11. Her party didn’t kick her out for that; in fact, she’s still one of its ideological leaders. The logical tracks are in place for the left to not only forget the heroes of 9-11 but to launch smear campaigns against them and celebrate the terrorists who attacked the United States and killed thousands in cold blood. Their top officeholder has already given the terrorists a country and is plotting to give them financial aid, and you don’t hear many on the left even suggesting they have a problem with it. They would rather launch a “whole of government” attack on Texas than the Taliban. They would rather use the 9-11 anniversary to criticize America instead of defending it.
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