The Ricochet Podcast - A Searing Memory

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

It's been a quarter century, but the fury and grief have not dimmed in the slightest. James, Steve, and Charles recall that fateful day and reflect on life in America since.Sound from this week's open and close: The Brooklyn Youth Chorus sings the Star Bangled Banner at today's September 11th memorial in New York City.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ricochet-podcast--5817275/support.

Alger. Ernest Alacacacos. Edward L. Allegretto. Eric Allen. Joseph Ryan Allen. It's the Ruricey podcast. I'm James Lillix and I'm here with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. Today, we're going to talk about 9-11, 25 years on. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rickashay podcast number 806. I'm James Lillick's in Sunny Edina, Minnesota, and I'm joined by Stephen Hayward in California, also I presume to be sunny and Charles C.W. Cook in Florida, which I also believe is probably sunny and a bit more torpid than the rest of us, our location. Gentlemen, welcome. It is the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And I ate those tedious, where-werey things, but we all have them because it was such a normal day. Actually, for me, it wasn't. It was an extraordinary day because it was the publication date for my next book. And I had real hopes for this one. I had a big publisher behind me.

We're going to be a big push. And, you know, publication date is never really. It's not like all of a sudden there's fireworks and it shows up in the store. It's just, it was just, you know, this is my pub date, 9-11. And I was in the shower that morning, getting ready for what I presume to be a day of interviews. And I heard the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. And I thought it was a small little plane that had strayed from LaGuardia. Went downstairs.

My wife went to work. I took over child care duties and saw what was happening. I grabbed my camcorder and started filming the world as it existed then, and I hit the DVR, the TiVo, to record it as well and sat there like everybody else and watched in horror. And I posted that video at my substack, and I watch it every year at this time, and I have never failed to be brought to tears and fury by the end of it.

grief and fury undimmed for a quarter of a century. Right. Right. What a coincidence, James. That was also going to be book launch day for me for the first volume, my two-volume Reagan Chronicles. And I was in Washington, D.C., four blocks from the White House, due at the White House for a meeting that morning with someone to talk about a possible job with the Bush administration. And it's at the university club up 16th Street there.

And so front row seat in a certain way. A lot of people have their stories, and mine doesn't really amount to that much. I will say today, I'm back in the fury stage. I'm in a very foul mood with one partial exception. And I can describe it this way. Suppose on September 12th, you had made the following predictions about the next 25 years. First, that the next president of the United States would have a middle name Hussein. Second, that on the, they'd go all the way to the end.

At the 25th anniversary of the event, the Taliban in Afghanistan, with a firm grip on the country, would have a lavish military parade featuring billions of dollars of American military equipment. You'd scratch your head and say, oh, and then, you know, Rudy Giuliani's ultimate successor as mayor of New York City would be a radical Muslim. You would have called for the men in the white coats to haul that person off. And not, you can mention all the other things, you know, the wars that were, prosecuted in ways that looking back now, I think we think we didn't, we could have done better. I'll put it mildly that way. The divisions in the country that we've seen since then did not surprise me.

I actually thought within 48 hours that this moment of national unity is not going to last and that the fundamental divisions that have been erupting for two decades or more were going to come back to the fore and maybe become worse, which I think they have. If there's any encouraging spot to me at all, it's that I think maybe slowly, we and are other partners in the West, if we still use that term, without being locked up, are beginning slowly, haltingly to come to grips with the problem of not just radical Islam and security measures, but wondering, how are we going to deal with a large part of a population whose character and who's a religious doctrine, we don't quite understand and know

what to do with. So just a couple of data points. One is I recommend the listeners to read Ion Hershey's article in compact on what Mohammed Ata was trying to tell us, which was not that he's poor and you're rat, no, these are all middle class people in a lot of cases. And that's something else besides poverty and some of the usual stupid excuses. Second, one data point, unbeknownst to most Americans, Sweden has in the last year and a half or so deported 35,000 Muslims back to Syria and Afghanistan. And guess what happened to their crime rate? So it's gone way, way down so much so that

the socialist may be about to come back into power. But, you know, and you're seeing, you know, the election results in Germany last week and the early polls in France, you're starting to see, Britain is still hopeless at but starting to see people saying, you know, something has to be done here. We can't quit doing all this happy talk and denying that we've got a big problem. Charles? I think you're right, by the way, Stephen. Well, I was in England.

my story is therefore less interesting than those who were in America. So I'm going to say instead something that I've thought in the last few days it's important to say, I don't know if this is just for my own catharsis, or perhaps because it's important to acknowledge it, especially for those who weren't around. I'm struggling with this. I'm still very angry. It's the word I used in my piece, but it's more than that.

I'm unhappy this week and not in a way that feels particularly different to me than it did 25 years ago. I don't watch those videos and feel that they're old. No. Or that they've been processed. I feel the same shock watching them, the same anger, the same fear as I did 25 years ago. I've been asked by some of National Review's younger stuff what it was like. And one of the things that I've said to them is to understand the full terror of it. You had to live through it.

That's not the same thing as being alive at the time. You had to live through it, by which I mean you have to have been aware of it from the first moment and then watched it unfold. If you woke up and learned about it all in one go and it was over, you're going to have a different conception of it, whether that's because you were born afterwards or in different time zone. But I think if you lived through it, today is very, very painful because you remember the before moment. And then you remember as the horror of it slowly ramped up from accident,

to attack to the Pentagon, which was a different thing qualitatively, to the towers collapsing, and then being told that 20,000 people had died, which was the number. I don't know how to put this another way, so I'm just going to be vulnerable and say, I am a mess today. I don't want to hide it. I'm a mess today watching this again. I feel the same way.

I feel exactly the same way. Of course, in your recitation there, you left out the news that a plane had crashed on route. We had no idea. We had absolutely no idea where the planes were going, what was going to happen, when it was going to stop. In the video that I posted, there's a moment from Fox where the Chiron says, DC officials say plane en route to capital. there was a rumor that it was going straight for, you know, the U.S. for the Capitol building. It seemed entirely plausible at the time.

Why wouldn't they? And why wouldn't on 9-12? Why wouldn't it happen again? What was stopping them from doing anything else again? Morals, a sense of right and wrong and decency? The idea, I mean, I remember the World Trade Center bombing of like 1993, I think, where they tried to blow it up from the basement. They put out, you know, tried to make vague some of the support.

bring it down that way, didn't work. But this was such a level of such sophistication and such incomprehensibility that we were all absolutely, as Charles said, watching it unfold, stunned and afraid. Everyone was afraid. And that comes back too. You remember the stock ticker going down and thinking, do I sell everything? I mean, moment by moment by moment, the whole world that we had woken up into was just crumbling around us like the towers eventually would. I remember with hope against hope when I saw them on fire thinking, well, they can put that out.

They can fix, they can shore it up. And then the incomprehensibility of this monument toppling and then thinking, well, there's still one. If they can put it out, it can stand as a memorial to its lost brother. And then both, and then the cloud, and then the entirety of Manhattan shrouded, this gray call. Well, saying nothing that everybody, that none of you guys don't know. But, you know, you were right, Stephen, to say that, you know, 25 years on, I look at this and say, you know, we're fighting Iran. If you told me 25 years ago, well, you know, we'll be having a war with Iran in about 25 years or so. It would been, it's like in the 25th anniversary of D-Day telling somebody, or, you know, the 25th anniversary of,

of the D-Day landing that, you know, there's still going to be Nazi Germany and we're still going to be having trouble with them. But the world's attention is actually going to be focused on the sedaten land because there's a sort of ethnic cleansing and war going on between France and that's the real issue, you know, like Ghazi is today. The inability to wrap our heads around the civilizational differences is a fatal flaw of the West, masquerading as our virtue. Do you agree? We prize ourselves on our decency and George W. Bush saying it's a religion of peace when our inability or unwillingness to look at the civilizational differences may have crippled us from the start. Try that on. What do you think? Fits perfectly. I'm a heated agreement. I can't

add anything to that. I've been trying to think about what people mean when they say everything changed. because at one level it didn't. At one level, the changes are tolerable. The TSA is annoying. It's different flying, but it's not much of your life. Yes, we go to NFL stadiums. Now we walk through metal detectors.

We have the Patriotac. We have some metadata collection and so on. But day-to-day, I don't think that makes a big difference. And I've arrived at the conclusion that what changed, at least for me, was that before. 9-11, I lived in a world in which that wasn't a thing. That wasn't a possibility. And after 9-11, I didn't and don't. And this may sound silly, but again, be brutally honest. So I live on the beach in Florida, and I live near a naval station. I also live near the Coast Guard. And so

a good amount of the week, there are aerial... activities. There are planes flying over and helicopters flying over, and they fly quite low and they're quite loud. And especially if they're fighter jets, if they fly low enough, they're really loud. And so I understand that this is an entirely silly thing to say logically. But this week, I've been on edge. And when I hear a low-flying loud plane, I think, oh my God, is it happening again? I mean, I don't know what to crash into here, the sand. But, but, but, no one that I know would have thought that in September 10th, 2001. I was just in New York City.

We went down to that part of the city. We went over to the Statue of Liberty and we're looking over at one world trade center. And again, I don't mean literally that I think this is about to happen, but I'm staring at it and I'm thinking, what if a plane goes into it? That would not have occurred to me prior to 9-11. And I think when people say everything changed, that's partly what they mean, right? is that you now would not be crazy or too much of a shock if I got a text from you, James, and it said you need to turn the television on.

And I turned the television on and something heinous like that was happening. But it was then. Yeah, I think everything changed. We now, of course, we learned early on that, you know, the FBI and the CIA weren't talking to each other. They missed a lot. They didn't connect the dots. That was the phrase we were using. It turns out that if you go back to the early 70s,

to a time when James and I are old enough to remember the charming existence where you went to the airport, walked out to the gate, and got on a plane, right? And then lit up a cigarette. That's right. And then James will remember this. You may not know this a little bit of trivia history, but originally the hijacking problem was people in America

hijacking planes to Cuba that wanted to join and where they'd be arrested. But all the American air carriers around 1970, they started stocking all their planes with the aerial approach maps to the Havana airport because it was happening so much. And then we sort of started early security and it had lots of holes in it. I've got some funny stories about that from my dad who used to carry in carrying on luggage going to Phoenix to visit some aircraft company, big, heavy electronic parts that would get missed by the one. Okay. It turns out, I learned from a really good, extensive article in the national interest this week that as

early as the Nixon years, there were people warning that, you know, and of course you didn't have the Black September folks hijacking planes and blowing them up. up in the Middle East on the ground and so forth and blowing them up midair in a couple of occasions. They were saying, you know, there's a good chance that sooner or later you're going to have suicide bombers hijacking planes to fly them into buildings. And they actually unraveled a couple of plots to do this in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And so this was well known.

Several reports were put out. It turns out that, of course, never made any press. But people knew this was a prospect. And so what I wonder now is, well, I don't think they may try hijacking again. It's spectacular. on the other hand, what else should we be worrying about? You know, we've talked about dirty bombs and biological weapons and so forth. And I certainly hope there are people who are not only gaming that out,

but taking the idea seriously that's something we need to be alert to and ahead of this time. I get that. You know, you mentioned the airport security thing. After Richard Reed, the shoe bomber, for, you know, for two decades, we had to take our shoes off when we went through TSA lines. And I remember every time I did that with my, daughter and she would wonder why I would tell her that they had to clean them so that the airplane would be clean. Just thinking that these sons of bitches made me lie to my daughter every time we took

a plane about the actual world in which she lived. You know, when Charles talked about how everything changed, everything didn't because, you know, we still went to the store. We still went to the mall. We, however, had a little spidey since tingle at the back of our mall, back of our head when we went to public places because we didn't know for a while. I always thought, what's to keep the sleeper cells from rising up and dumping pillow sacks full of anthrax into the ventilation system of the Mall of America. We'll get to the anthrax in a minute. But you mentioned the planes, Charles,

in my old house, my beloved old house, I lived under a flight path to Minneapolis, part of the St. Paul Airport, and they pulled all the planes down. Everybody landed. And it was one after the other, and this is before my house was soundproofed. And even inside, I could hear the roar of plane after plane

after plane coming in, all of them coming down, until the skies were empty. And then you would hear at night the lone sound of a jet above, circling, circling. And the stillness of the world was a shocking thing. And while you might appreciate the stillness if you were used to the urban racket, it was so unnerving.

It was just this tentative holding of breath waiting for the next thing to come. So, yeah, those things changed. And then came the anthrax. Let's just deal with that for a second here. which I am I wrong or has that never been figured out? I mean I seem to remember somebody was arrested but I don't think that it was the proper guy. Yeah, that's right. And the letter that came that I think that everybody remembers said, you know, death to Israel, death to America.

And the fact that the anthrax was first sent to American media, which I think published National Enquirer or something like that or weekly world news. and also went to American Airlines that somebody was looking in the phone book under A and finding everything that was American and figuring this would be a good symbolic thing to do. Because that was the damnedest odd thing. Charles mentioned looking up at the skyscraper recently and imagining a building going into it.

It's always in the back of our minds and it took me two or three years of walking around in downtown Minneapolis to look up at our big blue, beautiful IDS center and not imagine a plane going into it. It was an instinctive natural reaction. But after that came out of the blue nowhere. This second beat of anthrax, which all of a sudden contaminated your idea of the public square, where powder from a donut on a table in a mall, made you rear back.

Your thoughts on that. Do you think that was phase two? Do you think that was opportunistic? Do you think it was more Islamic terrorism? What? You know, that's a strange one because, you know, we had several of those letters sent and then no more, right, it ended. And like, you're right, they arrested somebody and they exonerated him after looking more closely at it. And I think that's right.

I think we don't know where it originated. Some thought it was, you know, actually from a biolab of ours, a precursor to COVID in some ways, right? I suppose. And, but the factor haven't been more is a curious thing. You know, I think back to not exactly the same, but, you know, I grew up in California at the time of the zone. Podiak killer when it was front page news. And then that all stopped for a while. And people thought, well, was this guy put in jail for another crime? Did he die as he left? Who knows? And so that that's a, and remember that between 9-11 and anthrax, which was what, six weeks later, whatever it was, a month later,

there was the worry we learned later that there was going to be a second wave, that there were rumors and apparently some faulty intelligence of a dirty bomb somewhere. And so the poor Bush administration was very much on edge. And so I don't know. I keep wondering, you know, we're going to see a comeback of that. It sure seems like at some point we would, except there's this. One of the things about the airplanes is it was televised. It's such a spectacular thing. And one thing about the radical jihadists is they like to do things big. They like spectacles. And you're sending poisons through the mail. It does its job, but it's not the same as a big spectacle. They like blowing up the Super Bowl as we, you know, depicted in movies, right? To that point, I've been thinking about this too.

And to that point, I've concluded that they could not have been more successful visually in achieving what they wanted to achieve. Because even if you did something now that was worse, that had greater loss of life, that had more catastrophic effects on the economy or how we live, it's not going to match that. you could quite literally nuke a city and it would be one thing that would be visible and awful and it would be over. You could blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and it would collapse into the water and it would be a terrible, terrible thing.

But they succeeded in their propaganda. They were lucky that it was a very nice day and that it was sunny and clear. and they did something appalling, which caused every TV camera in the world to train in on the towers, which were themselves uncharacteristically recognisable. I didn't know what the World Trade Center was

because I'd never been to New York. But once I saw what they were, I recognized them from friends and after TV shows and movies that I'd seen. And then you watch the second one go in. And the timing of it is absolutely diabolical. And I don't side with those who say they won. I don't think they won.

I think that they have to have been scarcely able to believe their luck. Right. In what they managed to do. Because as I said at the beginning, it's just, it is burned into my retinas. It has scarred me in a way. And I'll stop. But something has annoyed me. this week. I want to get off my chest. A lot of people who lived through it, as we did,

have said equivalent things to what I've just said. And there are a few people who have said, I thought we were against snowflakes. No, no, no, no. Snowflake is the term you use when people use the sort of language that should be associated with a 9-11 with something that isn't 9-11. Snowflakery is the problem of ascribing to your Starbucks order being trauma. It's not a term that you can use here. This is actual trauma. This is actual national PTSD. This is the thing that we compare trivial things to. Can I give you just a quick real world example of that? I just read this morning on Twitter. Apparently there was a fender bender accident on the George Mason University campus here in suburban Virginia. And the school announcement on their Twitter was,

and we have counselors available for anyone who may be traumatized. There's not even any injuries, right? I mean, that's where we are. Can I very quickly tell you something? When I was at Oxford, I had a bicycle that was padlocked to steal bicycle stand just outside my college. And one night, a gang came in with a truck and some bolt cutters, and they cut everyone's padlocks and stole 40 bikes. And then I guess they went to the next college and did the next thing.

I called the police to report it stolen. I didn't think they were going to find it, but I called them anyway. Just in case they found it, then they would know that they should return it to me. And this was 2007. And the lady at the police station, who was very nice, listened to what I had to say. And then she said, thank you. I've written down the details. And then she said, would you like counseling?

She offered to put me through to a counselor because my bike had been stolen. So that really is when we started to go soft. I hope you said yes, just for the absurd experience of going through it. You probably didn't. You're better. Right. When we described the world changing, in one sense, all of a sudden, the world had purpose. It had a terrible purpose, but it had purpose.

We were certain that something was going to be done about this. We didn't know it was going to be done. We just sort of said maybe do all of the things, all of the things now. All the family business will be settled. This is it. but on the 10th of September you remember we were sort of in a bit of cultural drift the 90s was over we weren't quite sure what the 90s had been about

but they'd also been a lot more paranoid than people tend to remember we'd survived y2K and now here we were heading into 2001 we didn't have moon base or wonderful space stations but we weren't quite sure what the next act was and then we got it and when you talk about the divisions on that day two things emerged I think that had always been there but we're now magnified and sharpened I remember signing onto Metafilter which was an early social media sort of it was a website message boards but

it was very slick and and discuss cultural things still around and I signed off of Metafilter permanently that day because the comments were all about how America deserved it, and now it was just going to be Kretna's calls for war and flag waving. And the people who got that sort of uncomfortable feeling when they saw the wrong people waving flags, all of a sudden, they had a moment here. They had a moment, and they would gather strength and become a lot more anti-American, anti-Western, eventually than they were. I mean, before, it's kind of your basic, you know, progs, but a sort of globalist transnational identity devoted to anti-American,

centered around anti-Americanism, and eventually anti-Westernism, if it wasn't born that day, it was certainly given a great shot of adrenaline. And the second thing would be the conspiracy theories who were previously, you know, confined to yammering away on Usenet, are now all of a sudden centered with books and websites and videos

and the rest of it, determined to tell us that this was a dastardly act perpetrated by our own government. So the two of these things, left and right, because I think the 9-11 truthorism is primarily, seems right-coded, tell me if I'm wrong, were two blows against the, you know, the torso of the Western civilization that have continued unto this day. And I don't know how we get away from that. I mean, I was watching a video of somebody who's describing the mechanics of the building falling, why it fell. And the comments are basically, you know, you're sheeple, you stupid sheeple. And I'm looking at this probably some either a 21-year-old guy who's a complete moron or some bot factory in Thailand or Nigeria or the rest of it.

But it is a corrosive effect on the American spirit. And as much as we would love to think that we got our mojo back when George Bush stood up and said, and pretty soon the people who did this, you know, they're going to hear us. or went out and did the pitch at that baseball game, which is an act of astonishing bravery that did help, that helped a lot, whether or not we actually ever did get our mojo back. Now, I would say yes, that we did.

There was something about Afghanistan falling. There was a bit of a romance to that with a Northern alliance. Do you remember that? Troops on horseback, right. And all of a sudden, you know, oddly enough, The guys who were thanked at the end of the James Bond movie, said in Afghanistan, were put in their place, and we had young women with purple thumbs who were going to vote.

And it seems like we could pull off some sort of civilizational change here. Good for us. And then this stunning defeat of Iraq was another step to that. And I remember the weekly standard before it turned into whatever, before Bill Crystal, whatever, had a cover after Baghdad fell that said, on to Tehran. We had Afghanistan, we had Iraq, we had them, you know, we had bases,

we had them in circle. This was the next logical step. This had to be done or jihadiism or, you know, the funders of it, the spider at the center of the web had to go, had to die. It didn't. Well, Jane, you have two, you put out really sort of two, at least two.

Oh, I'm spitting all kinds of stuff. I'm all over the road here. Let me summarize this way. You talk about the domestic fractures and especially conspiracy theories, which I think, by the way, are equal on left and right. I mean, I think it was Rosie O'Donle who said fire can't melt steel. Yeah, you're right. Come back to that because that's the one that concerns me most, and that's one that's entirely indigenous to America. I have a theory on it.

The other one is, what do you do about the Middle East and Grand Strategy? And that's a big subject. The conspiracy business and, you know, building seven. There's a conference going on in New York City this week for three days. we're going to get a lot of the conspiracy theorists who, by the way, James say, if it wasn't our government, it was a government of a certain other nation that we all know about to demonize, right? Right. A guy with four locks and a hook nose said, that's right.

That's right. And you know, you know all the different claims about that. I go back, I guess conspiracy theories have always been with us. But modern American conspiracy theories, I think maybe it says arbitrary. I make patient zero of that Lee Harvey Oswald. And we don't trust the Warren Commission, right? Just as we didn't trust the 9-11 commission, and they've concealed things about the Saudis and whatever.

Somebody, I think it might have been William Manchester in his book that the Kennedy family tried to suppress the death of a president. He came up with a very pop theory. He's an interesting writer, I always thought. And what he said was, I think the conspiracy theories take hold for a very simple psychological reason. People don't want to believe that some pipsqueak, some nobody like Oswald, could take out our president. And it had to have been something more serious and deliberate and organized.

And I think that explains a lot of conspiracy theories. And like 9-11, like really, it couldn't have been, partly this is avoidance of wanting to confront radical Islam and terrorism. But partly it's the people who saw that spectacle and couldn't believe it and said, and how does building seven fall down? It wasn't hit by an airplane, right? And I've seen the very cogent explanation that you referenced, James. And there's a will to believe in conspiracy theories because it's a way people make sense or try to order something they find incomprehensible. It's greatly mistaken, but that is endemic to us, I'm afraid, and it's always going to have a constituency, I'm afraid.

Charles, tell me if I'm wrong, I'm going to disagree. I think that people believe in conspiracy theories now because it sets them apart. They are in possession of an esoteric piece of knowledge that the sheeple don't get. it's not that it helps them make sense of the world. It's that it makes them special that they can say put on the they put on the they live glasses and they've seen the truth. I think that's true too, James. I think it's both. I think it's a combination of exactly those two things.

And then there's a third category that perhaps overlaps to some degree, which is people who are so utterly obsessed with their own political agendas that they can't help but pull everything else that happens in the world into them. And this is where a conspiracy that I think was historically left-coded, the 9-11 conspiracy theories, has become more right-coded because at the moment there are people on the right who are obsessed with Israel. Many people on the left are obsessed with Israel too. But those on the right have concluded that we're Israel first, not America first. And therefore everything that happens is the result of the Israelis influencing or corrupt. corrupting our politics and that this must have been another example of it. What I think is interesting about this is listening to you to talk about the shift because,

and I'm really not pointing out here that I'm younger than you both, I had no politics whatsoever before 9-11. I was 16. I was ignorant. I was happily ignorant, though, because my whole life had been in the 90s. America and Britain were close. They were getting richer. If there was a war, they won it easily. The Soviet Union had been defeated. And although I didn't see it in the terms it's outlined in the book, which also gets corrupted in the public imagination, I thought history was over. And so when I heard a couple of days after 9-11, Mary Beard, the classicist at Cambridge, near where I lived, say that America had it coming. I didn't react like you, James, in the sense that I thought, okay, that's an appalling view. I hope this doesn't spread.

It had never occurred to me that anyone would think that. I'd never heard that. I'd never met anyone who was likely to express such a sentiment. watching it happen, I hadn't for a single second thought, maybe there are people who think this is good, or maybe there are people who think this is justifiable. It wasn't so much that I was against that, although of course I was, or angered by it, although of course I was.

That had never occurred to me as a thing. And I think my politics came out of that, because I instinctively sided with the people I saw on television, George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, pretty much everyone I knew, who said, this is a terrible, terrible thing that has happened. It is pure unadulterated evil, and we need to kill the people who did it. This seemed totally obvious to me. But it must have been much more depressing to show up on Metafilter and see that,

because if you were aware that that was a current in society, then it was a threat. It was a merry beard is just meretricious intellect. I just can't do it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, my mind is just racing all over the place here with that, that people said it right and were expecting to get applause for it. It didn't come out of nowhere. I mean, I think it was either 9-10 or 9-11.

Wasn't it one of the weatherman, one of Obama's friends, Bill Ayer? Didn't he have an interview or something or a piece about how it took? New York Times piece that went on the same day. It was published at the Times. Right. I wish we'd done more. Right. There were two articles actually on that day in the Times. One was that article, I think it was front page of Bill Ayers. Yeah, which we've done more bombings and things. But then on the op-ed page, there was a terrorism expert whose name I now forget. But he said, oh, there's really no likelihood that terrorists are going to strike inside America. This is a paranoia. But you talk about two ill-timed articles in the same paper. These days, those are kind of memory-hold. But yeah, that's right. But I'll just add, James, that unlike, well, of course, I'm older. and grew up during Vietnam and all the 70s.

And it didn't surprise me that it happened. And I thought all along that those early weeks at least, the crazies on the left, first they didn't have Twitter and other social media to the cover the country like it does now. I didn't know about Metafilter. But they kind of kept it to themselves, I think, for a little while. And sometime around, I don't know, 2003, 2004, Michael Walzer, who was always referred to as the dean of the American. American left, very smart guy at Princeton, wrote serious books about just war theory.

He published an article in dissent, the flagship journal of Democratic socialism before it went crazy. And the title of the article was, can there be a decent left? And he was calling out leftists who were saying what Charlie observed, what Mary Beard was saying, that we deserved it. And he's saying, you know, yeah, of course we made lots of mistakes. America's racist and sexist and imperialist and colonialist. And he signs on to all of the substantive critiques. But like sort of the older Cold War left of the 50s, he said, there's still a good country and there's no excuse for this and this is very bad for the left. Well, you can imagine the reception he got.

Right. Yeah. It was not, he was not kind, right? And here's what's inexplicable about this to me is that accusing of all these things that were horrible, patriarchal, were expansionist, were colonialists and the rest of it, at the same time, there was on 9-11 and shortly thereafter, this instinctive desire amongst a vast chunk of the population, mostly leftwards, to embrace the very culture that was more guilty of these things today than the culture that they supposedly lived in and hated. The idea somehow that there was no connection whatsoever between fundamental tenets of Islam as practiced and believed in some countries.

It was like, you know, it's like saying the Westboro Baptist people had arranged this. But there was just, there's no conceivable link whatsoever twixt Islam. and the thing that the Islamists were doing. And I think part of this might have been because we had become accustomed with a Palestinian liberation organization to seeing them sort of that through the prism of 70s, 60s, Marxist liberation organizations, right? Yasser Arafat did not parade around in religious gear. He was a guy with a, you know, with a pistol holster. And they didn't seem explicitly fundamentally religious in the way that Al-Qaeda and the rest of them would come to be. So I think that may be part of the reason.

But either it's an instinctive desire to side with what you regard as the oppressed cultures. And if they're over there and of a certain skin color concentration and culture, they've got to be oppressed. And also because if they're against the West, then they've got something going for them. And three, even though the people who are defending Islam would never in a million years move to a country that is ruled by it. and have absolutely no admiration whatsoever for any aspect of it, they don't want to be one of those ignorant fools who's against it because they're raised as xenophobic and all the rest of these things. They don't want to, I mean, I saw that right away.

People moved to the other side of the aisle because they didn't want to be associated with people who said, well, you know what? Take a look. Go back. We've been dealing with these guys, Muslim terrorists for a long time. run and stuff into the coal. They tried to blow it up.

You know, it was so stark exactly. What was the motivation here and what the, and what was producing this. Some people understood it and other people didn't. And I got to tell you, I mean, what was the Ann culture quote that got her in such trouble? That doesn't really narrow it down.

But we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. Let's just say, it said what a lot of people thought. And of course we knew that would never happen. And then there were people who were saying, you know what? Nukukukkah. Just nuke it.

That'll do it. And while you thought, no, no, no, no, no. But you also thought, well, I wouldn't write a complaining letter to the editor if that was the case. That was the mood. That was the mood. Look, I don't need to rehearse with you guys the case against the lefties who did everything that James has just described. But I think as well as it being baffirmed. that the alternative to siding with America

who was siding with radical Islam. The other part of this that has always astonished me is that the vast majority of the victims on 9-11 were normal civilians. If you look back to Pearl Harbor, which was awful, and you read the biographies of those who died, they all contain a line like at 19, he decided to join the Navy.

But the biographies of the people who died in 9-11 don't say things like that. They say things like she was a first-year broker who was going to get married the following year and loved the New York Yankees. And you know, she died? She died because she needed to get out of a window because there was a fire behind her that would have roasted her alive. Like, if you can't side with her, if you can't do that, if you are tempted instead to prioritize the anti-deluvian wishes of extremist cave dwellers over her,

then there's just something about you that is off and our relationship is unbridgeable. No, it means that this person is more sophisticated in their apprehension of the world than you are, Charles. If you look at the DSA people who are applauding the crazy woman who stabbed a bank, you know, a bank official because she was complicit in capitalism and because her bank was connected to Israel, that was the justification. So that woman in the tower who had to leap out of a window to escape fiery death was complicit in the entire apparatus that these guys were dedicated to bringing down.

But she wasn't. And that's the thing, isn't it? I'm not in any way saying that it was more understandable or less heinous at the Pentagon. It wasn't. But I just have read so many stories. and now they're even more, not more poignant, but they're more relatable to me as a 41-year-old father of two, who could have been in a building like that at a meeting.

Right. These people were normal Americans. So many of the kids, because the planes needed to be loaded with fuel, they were long haul flights. I think most, all of them were headed for California. And most of the kids who died on those planes were going to Disneyland. I know.

If you can't look at this as being an attack using the quotidian tools of our free society, then there's just something wrong with you. If you can't see that these were commercial airliners, not fighter jets, that these were, especially in the case of the World Trade Center, these were buildings where people communed together to freely transact. If you can't see that these were families going to see family members, and then there's just something so wrong with you. And I've always thought this. I can't get past that first step into the minds of anyone who would equivocate, let alone the fact that they end up

on the side of Osama bin Laden. Well put. Yeah, boy, not for the first time this week and not just this particular issue. I wonder how much longer Americans can live peacefully with each other when you have this created divide. And of course, you know, the other thing on our mind. But what we'll be talking about this week, and we're talking about it a lot, is the crazy Lindsay Clancy mistrial, right? And how can people think the... Okay. I just add one more complaint about what's happening this week.

That's really grump for me because it goes back to the line of work I used to do. Mayor Mondami the other day had a big press conference where he said, we now have the data on how dangerous the air was in Lower Manhattan in the days and weeks after 9-11. And he added the claim more people have died from that area. pollution that was covered up or suppressed whatever, then died in the attacks. I doubt that is true. But this was known back in 2005. This was not a secret. Right. And someone actually I was in the EPA I was talking to said, you know, everybody knew the air was very dangerous and asbestos from the buildings collapsing,

says, do you think it would have been possible to prevent the firefighters and first responders from rushing to those buildings, even if they knew the risk. See, once again, we sort of leave that out that the people who were working there at a scene, they didn't give a rip about that. And how disgusting a Mondami to say that. Yeah, I think it may actually be true that more people have died subsequently, and it seems in the last five years to have got particularly bad. I just think that it's an amazing indictment of progressivism,

that the only thing that he seems to be able to get genuinely upset about in connection with 9-11 is the Clean Air Act violation. It's almost farcical, right? When he talks about 9-11, he uses phrases like people who died. He's quite happy to tweet out that if you don't implement proper road safety in New York, that's equivalent to murder. That's a real tweet of his. But when it's 9-11, it's people who die.

But the thing that he actually got viscerally upset about was the lack of clean air in the aftermath. Now, of course, that's a problem. But that is an insight into a world. worldview that I find utterly alien. It's like the Norm MacDonald joker. Oh, right. With, you know, Bill Cosby, right? Really? I thought the worst bit was the raping. No, the worst part of this was not, as you say, that first responders who couldn't have been kept away for anything, ended up with stomach cancer, although that is a great tragedy. The worst thing about this was that 19 Islamist hijackers flew planes into buildings, for goodness sake.

have here in front of me. I was doing some research on this. A 1967 ad placed in the daily news and it has a headline, the time has come to stop the ridiculous plan for the World Trade Center. The ad was brought to you by the committee for a reasonable world trade center. Oh, wow. Is that a real thing? It was. Wow. Now, there were two towers actually on the site that were demolished. They were very big themselves. And I imagine people probably complained about them when they went up in 1910 or 1920 or whatever. But the height of the towers was opposed by a lot of people. And let me just get the pull quote from the ad.

If the proposed World Trade Center buildings are erected, at least one million television households in the New York metropolitan area will have impaired reception with double images. Perhaps five million people will suffer because one man wants to erect the tallest buildings in the world which no one else wants and nobody needs. For years, these organizations were pretty. testing the world trade centers effect on television reception and even pointed out because the transmitters were on the world were on the empire state building and if you were on the wrong

side of the wTC you would actually see the image of the wTC on your tv as it you would see the outline of it you'd see ghosts and so they did all these surveys and i think the FCC came out and said no no no no not gonna happen and retroactively yeah it did it happened for many years. And one of the reasons I think that they installed the mast as quickly as they did was to get all the broadcasters up on top of the tower as soon as it was topped off. But they didn't do it quick enough and people were still complaining. I got an 1872 ad that says, you know, the world, you know, Port Authority doesn't care about your television reception, you know, which given the majesty in the marvel of the building is sort of like the thing about complaining, you know, complaining about air quality, complaining about

your television reception and the rest of it. In the end, the buildings, I think Paul Goldberger had it right was then he said they weren't particularly great buildings one would have been banal two of them were like abstract sculpture the way they set off at angles to each other was good but he said there were three steps first was rejection how dare you do this taller than the empire state building these flat top boxes without any filigrees except for the columns at the bottom yamasaki what are you thinking the second acceptance the second point was was grudging acceptance but nobody ever really loved them. And the final stage was martyrdom, was that the buildings were never really loved for

what they were. Charles said that he saw them from television. And that's absolutely true. They were iconic, a landmark, because there are two of them, because they're really big, and they were there. They became like an anchor point that you would orient yourself as you were walking around. Now they're replaced by building that I don't think is particularly good, but that's a whole other issue. But what I want to end with, maybe, is something that is to me as I always seem to miss out missed opportunity but at the same time is absolutely the

most powerful piece of memorial that I have ever seen in my lifetime. I wanted there to be some great allegorical statue on the site like we always had when whenever any, when a war was won or there was a tragedy. The Beaux-Arts sculptured would come together and they would create something that that summed up our mythos, our virtues, our values. The World Trade Center Memorial. There's a beautiful building and appears to be made out of birds, bones. It's a shopping center. I like that.

That's good. But the pool, the pit. You guys have been to the pit, right? It's the size, the footprint of the building. Water pours over the edge. And then water goes to a well, a black well at the center. It's vast, the whole thing. And the water is,

ever going down the well. It is an absolutely obstinate in its refusal to give you anything that feels like a resolution. It won't do that for you. It won't elevate you. It is all grief and loss perpetually. And I have never been so stunned by a public artwork in my life. not in a good way, but in the way that was possibly intended. And I think that it keeps that day the grief and the loss and the water going down into the void,

the bottom of which you cannot see. It's stunning. Well, James, I mean, this is of a piece with, I think the bookend of this was the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., which, you know, is sort of that gash in the ground and all the names put up there, which is pointing in a certain way. And you know, that was very controversial. And the, I don't know, National Parks, whoever did it, added traditional statues of three soldiers to go along with it. I always thought, myself, and I'm no expert in this, but I always thought that, and some people at Time pointed this out, that the picture we saw the next day of the firefighters raising the American flag over the wreckage, it looks very similar in its form to the Iwojee Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

Why not do that? And then maybe add a couple of things to it about, I don't know, the war of the first. I agree with you completely. It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful image and it ought to be there. Last thoughts, Charles, before we get to the albums that you guys have on the walls, a little cheery thing to get to end with. Well, I have always thought that Trump was right and they should have rebuilt them. I think that there is something psychically scarring about the fact that the skyline is different. If they were going to build the building, they have one world trade center now. They should have built two of them. They're now building World Trade Center, too.

I saw this week, American Express will own the entire thing. It's okay, but it's a boring Canadian-style glass building with trees along the outside of it. And look, it's a difficult question. I understand there are lots of people who lost their loved ones who didn't want them to be rebuilt. Also, I asked my colleague Dan McLaughlin, who worked in the World Trade Center and very narrowly missed being in the North Tower that morning, if he would have gone back to work there after 9-11. He said, no. So I do understand that this is difficult,

but we do have to acknowledge as a country that what they did permanently changed the New York skyline and is therefore permanently a part of our country. And I don't like that. I think that that is a concession of sorts. If people would like more about this, not to self-promote, but to self-promote, James Lilex.com. I have a piece up today about the building

and its history and its replacement and all of these things, and it ends with a video that I shot on 9-11 and cobbled together from the stuff I got scraped off my T-Vo. So there's that. Now we end with the albums that people have put on their shelves. Why not? Because every week, for some reason, I don't know how this got started.

I guess I was looking at Charles' room and said I could name, what he had up in his shelf at the other side. Grainy, tiny, they're literally posted, they're like a quarter of the size of a postage stamp, and I have to use all my visual mojo to see if I can get them. So Stephen has got one popping out on his. His is easy, and it's also easier to see. It's Todd Rungren, something, anything, everything, whatever.

So thank you for that. I appreciate that. That's just absolutely easy. Charles, however, has given me three. that are absolutely the easiest possible ones you can imagine. I don't know the yellow one that is that is sideways. I'm afraid. I can't tell.

Some sort of yellow blossom looks like a big sun records 45 label, but I don't know. What is that one, Charles? That's Jesus Christ Superstar, the original studio recording. Okay. I thought that was different hues, but there you go. So what he's got facing out, I mean, do you think I'm stupid? Do I look stupid to you? As Kevin Spacey said in a bug's life.

The left one far, is rubber sole by the Beatles. The one on the far right, interestingly enough, it pertains today's conversation because it's Elton John in an earlier iteration where he has a beard. And Elton John is famously the owner of the fall, the picture of the man who jumped out of the world trade center because he believes it's one of the world's perfect pictures. Thanks for Elton.

Didn't need to know that. The one in the middle is something that prematurely long. the adolescence of a great number of young men who would go to Ben Franklin and page through the racks until they could find the Herb Alpert album in which a woman is covered entirely in whipped cream. So that's what that is. I had that album as a kid. There we go.

There we go. And then, of course, we'll also end with, we believe, a stunning announcement that should glide in the hearts of all because Charles, Charles. All right. So RICOchet version 5 is finished and will be launched imminently. Now, I'm still unfortunately waiting on Apple. So the app may be delayed after the website launch. But the website in the next few weeks will be launched.

So there will be messages previewing this, explaining this on RICOchet soon. But the work is done. The test is over. And I think most of the bugs have been done. lined out, although I'm sure once it launches, new ones will scuttle out, as is always the case in production. But we're pretty much there, so look forward to that. A new day awaits. In the meantime, if you haven't joined Rurkishay, do so now so that you can steep yourself in the idiosyncrasies of version 4 and then say like everybody else does when somebody

new comes out. I hate it. Why don't you turn it back to the old thing? But you've only been here 45 minutes. Yeah, I know, but you're going to love Rurcache 4. You're going to adore RICOC 5, and it's going to be great. Why should you go there? Because of the code of conduct because they have a little skin in the game that's required as founder Rob Long likes to say because you pay just a little bit and that keeps the riff-riff out and also gives you access

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next week Charles Steven been great fun and we'll see everybody in the comments at soon to be R ricochet 5.0. Goodbye.