Sometime in late 1995, I was in a Manhattan theatre waiting to watch “Batman Forever.” The last promo trailer was for an upcoming film called “Independence Day.” An overly dramatic voice boomed about the gloom of an attack on the world by little green men. A flying saucer hovered over New York City’s Empire State Building and vaporized it with a laser. The audience, likely a bunch of country-hating liberals like myself (at that time), cheered the destruction of our city.
On September 11, 2001, that joke wouldn’t be funny anymore.
9/11, 8:52 a.m. ET
I got a phone call from a close friend who was walking down 6th Ave. to a job I also worked at. He told me a jetliner flew over him, almost in slow motion, merely several thousand feet over his head. New Yorkers were busily heading to work, stopping at donut carts for coffee and a morning sugar buzz. Everyone stopped and watched in silence.
“That a**hole is way too low,” someone finally said. Moments later, the first plane hit its target. Bedlam broke out.
“How does a pilot screw up that bad?” I asked my friend.
“I don’t think he screwed up. It looks like he did it on purpose.”
No way, I thought.
I was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, two blocks from the East River. The neighborhood was and is a far-left hipster playground.
My roommate and I drove to the coast of the East River to see it for ourselves. We assumed it had been an accident, but when we got there, the second building was also on fire, many floors lower than the first. Flames from the first building couldn’t possibly have leaped over to the other tower.
“How did the other building catch fire?” I asked aloud to no one in particular.
Another onlooker answered, “Another plane hit it. You just missed it.” That’s when we all knew we were under attack. And that’s also when I became a Republican.
My roommate, who also went red on 9/11, and I tried to donate blood but we were refused as the line was already too long and the hospital didn’t have the resources to accept so much blood. Sadly, as we were to learn, it wouldn’t be needed anyway.
We went to the local bar beneath our apartment to be with our neighbors. We watched people jump from the towers to avoid the flames. Dazed survivors traversing the Williamsburg Bridge on foot began to trickle in, each with a harrowing story. Cell phones didn’t work. We had no idea who was dead and alive. The towers collapsed.
The first three days after the attack were filled with hope for survivors. We had heard insane rumors of survival, most of which turned out to be false. People heard pounding on pipes and the rescue teams were on it. Pockets of survivors were trapped under rubble and simply needed to be delivered from evil. A priest spoke to thousands at a vigil in Central Park and told a bogus story about a man “surfing” down the rubble as Tower One crumbled. None of it was true.
By Sept. 13, hundreds of buildings around Manhattan were covered with thousands of pieces of Xeroxed papers that read something along the lines of “Missing: Joe Smith, Tower 2, 88th floor. Last seen in conference room #4.”
By the fourth day, with very few people coming out of the rubble alive, we New Yorkers fell into an infinite sadness, the likes of which I didn’t know existed. Those people on the Xerox papers — mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, and friends — all of them were gone.
FACT-O-RAMA! IN 2001, many New Yorkers like myself felt New York City was the center of the universe. We were proud, maybe too much, of our town. We couldn’t believe we’d been bested by cave-dwelling animals in sandals.
Then something wonderful happened. New Yorkers came together in a way I’d never seen, which is odd because New Yorkers have a long, frequently ugly history of confrontation amongst each other.
DONNYBROOK-O-RAMA! If you go watch the NY Rangers play the NY Islanders, you’ll see more fights in the stands than on the ice.
More New Yorkers fought for the king during the Revolution than for the Patriots. Many New Yorkers wanted to secede from the Union during the Civil War rather than lose their business ties to Southern cotton. In what was the worst riot in U.S. history, working-class white New Yorkers burned much of their city during the draft riots of 1863 and murdered hundreds of black people and white abolitionists. German-Americans, some of whom may have survived the Gen. Slocum disaster — the deadliest catastrophe in New York City prior to 9/11 — were attacked in NYC’s East Village neighborhood during WWI.
On September 11, 2001, New Yorkers put aside our petty differences and united, some out of sadness, many out of anger. Even some of the far lefties felt a sense of patriotism. Then-relevent commie comedian Janeane Garofalo hung an American flag out her window.
”Who would have thought that I’d be angry on behalf of my country,” Garofalo told the then-relevant New York Times. ”I’m used to being angry at my country.”
Everyone, for perhaps the first time in the Big Apple’s history, was united. Nothing else mattered. Yankees fans were friendly to Mets fans. Race wasn’t an issue.
Before he was considered a “threat to democracy” by New York City apparatchiks, Donald Trump was at Ground Zero as his men tried to rescue survivors.
FLASHBACK: Donald Trump interviewed at Ground Zero days after 9/11
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 11, 2023
We all smelled the burning bodies. Everyone found a piece of paper from an office that blew over the East River into Brooklyn. I located an ex-girlfriend I hadn’t spoken with in years on a survivor website. She had been hospitalized. I brought flowers but she had been released. I took the bouquet to the FDNY Engine 3, Tower Ladder 12, Battalion 7 on W. 19th St., near my job, and left them in a mountain of others. The FDNY lost 343 firefighters that day and some came from that station. The survivors were heroes. Firefighters walked into bars, were applauded, and instantly found themselves showered with free drinks.
Today, New York City, like other towns, is yet again a war zone. People on the far left are crippling NYC with a tsunami of illegal immigrants. Communists have created a crime wave. Jackpuddings like Hakim Jeffiries and Al Sharpton are back to peddling race angst.
Once united, New York City and the entire nation are back in hate mode.
PINKO-RAMA! An individual from Antifa named Steve Wilson was fired after telling a 9/11 widow, “Your husband should probably f–king rot in the grave.”
September 11, 2001, was horrific for the nation, especially for those living in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Penn. But We the People, for a brief time, were on the same side — the side of patriotism.
Related: A Prayer From a 9/11 Hero and the Meaning of ‘Never Forget’
Today, our greatest threats aren’t men in kaftans. Our existential threats now wear useless masks and “Save the Climate” t-shirts. They walk around in “Harvard” sweatshirts during the day and black bloc clothes at night when they burn cities. They sit on air at CNN and spew lies. They wear doctors’ coats and push bogus “vaccines.” They teach your kids to hate you.
I’ve seen the nation come together before, even crotchety New Yorkers. I know it can happen again, but hopefully, we won’t have to watch our neighbors die on a dive bar television to make that happen.
The fight against Marxism is real. Let’s unite now.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member