September 11, 2026 • 12 mins
Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, Buck reflects on the day that changed America and an entire generation. As a college sophomore, Buck watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center and immediately understood that America was entering a new era. What followed shaped his generation, led thousands of Americans to serve their country and fundamentally changed how we viewed the world. Buck looks back at the fear and uncertainty of September 11, the wars that followed, the courage and sacrifice of those who answered the call and the remarkable resilience of the American people.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I wanted to share with you my thoughts on the
25th anniversary of September 11th, of course, on the day itself,
which is today. And this is certainly a day of
powerful emotions and sadness and tragedy and rage and anger.
(00:23):
It brings all of that together. It is true, just
as is the case in the midst of a war.
In the midst of a natural disaster, we saw the
worst of humanity in the world around us, and we
also saw the best of it. In this case, of course,
it was a terrorist attack, not a natural disaster, or
even a war in the declared and nation-state sense. And
(00:47):
it changed lives for not just the people directly affected
who either lost their lives and their families, but an
entire generation was called to arms. And I... view myself
as part of that generation, the 9-11 generation, who realized
that the world that we thought we were living in,
(01:10):
which was a post-Soviet triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism
and the relatively slow but certain spread of that, the
end of history from the Fukuyama framework, Francis Fukuyama that
the good guys essentially were now going to be in charge.
(01:33):
And we had won and the future was in our hands.
9-11 shook that up dramatically and changed our sense of
the future of the world that we were living in,
in ways that obviously were very ominous at the time
and led us into conflict in Afghanistan, which still to
(01:55):
this day, I like to make sure that people are
reminded in this country, while there's a lot of opposition
to foreign intervention, our intervention in Afghanistan, or rather our
invasion of Afghanistan, was absolutely warranted and absolutely necessary. And
I also think that the sacrifices that were made by
(02:19):
those who fought in what we now call the GWAT,
or we did for a while call it that, the
Global War on Terror, really it was a war against
Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. So it was a war against
jihadist terror entities that were both nation-state backed and transnational
at the same time. So there were countries that supported this,
(02:39):
notably Afghanistan and others. Iran is obviously a state sponsor
of terror. But then there were the affiliates of these
entities as well that either grew, in the case of Iraq,
out of our efforts to fight against the terrorist threat,
or just sprung up on their own. So yeah, there's
(03:03):
a lot that all comes together here. I think that
the 9-11 for me completely changed my perspective on what
my future was going to be. I remember I was
a sophomore in college at Amherst, so an idyllic little
campus in Massachusetts about an hour and a half west
(03:27):
of Boston. And I remember thinking that, and this was
going back even to my freshman year, the great battles
had already been waged, that my generation would be one
of peace and that it would just be about maybe
building wealth in a business, in the private sector, trying
to become successful in our capitalist economy. And yeah, the
(03:51):
great battles, I was a big history buff, always have been.
And my thinking was that the great battles had already
been fought and that I would probably go through my
life and my generation without anything approaching a World War I,
a World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Revolutionary War, the
Civil War, any of these epic struggles, wars of generations
(04:15):
and centuries past. And then 9-11, of course, all at
once changed all that. I was in my first week
of class maybe it was my second week of class.
I can't remember now, but I remember I had, I
had signed up. I was just starting Arabic lessons and
Arabic class. And I was, uh, I had, I had
done Arabic and then I was going actually to a
(04:37):
Shakespeare class though. And I still remember it was a professor.
Schofield was the guy's name. And I walked into the,
what they call the red room at Amherst college, the
amphitheater classroom that they have there. And, He just very calmly,
matter-of-factly said, some of you may have seen reports, a
(04:57):
plane has hit the World Trade Center. I advise that
we all adjourn class and you go back to your
room and that we all see what's going on. That
was when the first plane hit. I got back to
my room, turned on the TV, and watched in real
time on the feed, the news feed, as the second
plane hit. And I remember I turned around to my...
(05:19):
friends i didn't actually lived alone in a room at
that point i didn't have any roommates but friends who
lived on my floor and i just said without even
really thinking about it we're going to war and i
had that just clear recognition that so many did that
this had to be an act of war and that
this was the beginning of something much bigger something else
(05:40):
from that day though i remember there was a lot
of yes there was terror about what had happened people
were terrified There was a lot of fear about what
else might be coming. And it's much easier now to
look at what was done in the aftermath of 9-11
on the military side. Now, there was tremendous political unity.
(06:01):
And I wonder if we would have that same amount
of political unity today. I think the answer is no.
I think that I will make this a partisan issue.
I think that there are elements of the Democrat Party
who are true fifth columnists and are subversives. and view
the pain and suffering and even perhaps the downfall of
(06:22):
America as something to be celebrated. And so I think
that that in that way, it is, it would be
different if we were hit with a, an attack on
the scale of nine 11 now than we were then,
but the military response and the intelligence response, I should
say CIA response specifically, uh, was at a time when
(06:44):
we weren't sure what else was going to happen. And
we didn't know there could have been dozens of suicide
bombers infiltrated throughout our society causing mass casualty attacks in
every American city. There could have been, especially when the
planes first hit, there could have been more planes that
we were worried about hitting or more things hijacked. You know,
(07:05):
who knows? They could have had people taken vehicles, trucks
in major cities and just started running people over. You know,
this was the mentality. This was the thought process that
we had at the time So to mount up and
gear up and take the fight to the enemy in
whatever way we could was the only, only reasonable, logical
(07:30):
response to what had happened. And I think there's a
little too much Monday morning quarterbacking many, many years later
now of all that was done. And I also think
that while people like me and many others on the
right mock the Islamophobia talk because it was always overblown.
(07:51):
It was remarkable that in this country, Americans were as
tolerant and respectful of Muslims living in this country as
we were. I mean, you compare this to previous generations,
even of Americans. We know what happened with the Japanese
in World War II and the internment camps. We handled
(08:12):
a massive sneak attack on us all by one group
that had one thing in common, and that was their religion. uh,
we handled it as a free society where we didn't
hold individuals responsible for their, uh, religious or tangential ideological
connections to the perpetrators of the act. So we don't get,
(08:32):
I think nearly enough credit for that as a country.
And we should, uh, we were not Islamophobic. Uh, the
United States actually came together and there are far more
Muslims now, by the way, living in America than there
were on September 11th. So that also tells you something. Um,
But I think that there is a sense among the
(08:54):
younger generation, among a lot of people who were not
around during 9-11, that it's something in history that couldn't
happen again. And unfortunately, something like this will happen again,
meaning there will be another war. There will be another
sneak attack. There will be another great struggle ahead. It
(09:14):
is just the reality of our species throughout history And
we have to be prepared for that as best we
can by being a resilient society, by being a society,
by being a country, a nation that elevates courage, that
is willing to make tremendous sacrifice for others, for those
(09:37):
that we don't even know, you know, people outside of
our family, outside of our community, and to be willing
to fight whatever enemies we have to and do so
in the most virtuous and humane way we can, which
is never going to be perfect and is always going
to be a subject of criticism and reflection. But overall,
(10:00):
I think America 25 years after 9-11 has shown it
is a deeply resilient, we're a deeply resilient society. Those
who fought in the GWAT did so with incredible skill
and bravery on the whole. And we have gone through
a relative period of peace here apart from the Iran
(10:21):
conflict right now, which is very much just military to military,
at least with respect to us. We have not had
attacks on American civilians here at home yet. We are
in a very strong place as a country, and I
think people were worried that things would get far more
bleak for us right after 9-11. So we came out
(10:42):
of the ashes of 9-11 intact, and We should be
proud of that as a country, and we should be
proud of all those who fought to get us to
where we are today. And of course, remember and say
a prayer for those who lost their lives, both on
9-11 and in the wars that came after, the battles
(11:03):
that came after. So that's my sense for you on 9-11,
and thank you for listening. Our sponsor here is Incogni.
When police searched the car of the man who assassinated
a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband in their own home,
They found a notebook inside a handwritten list of 11 websites,
not weapons sites, data brokers, people search sites that sell
your home address for a couple of dollars. Type your
(11:24):
name into one right now. There you are, your address,
your phone, your family's name, a photo of your front door.
Anyone can look you up in seconds and you'll never
know who did. That's why I'm using Incogni. It forces
data brokers and people search sites to delete you, then
keeps checking because deleted data creeps back. Incogni has scrubbed
my info from over 223 sites while I did exactly nothing.
(11:46):
You lock your doors every night tonight, lock down your information.
Go to incogni.com slash buck for 60% off. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I
dot com slash buck. Use my first name buck as
your promo code to ensure you get that 60% savings
because the next time a stranger searches for your name,
let them find nothing. That is the show. Shields high.
I wanted to share with you my thoughts on the
25th anniversary of September 11th, of course, on the day itself,
which is today. And this is certainly a day of
powerful emotions and sadness and tragedy and rage and anger.
(00:23):
It brings all of that together. It is true, just
as is the case in the midst of a war.
In the midst of a natural disaster, we saw the
worst of humanity in the world around us, and we
also saw the best of it. In this case, of course,
it was a terrorist attack, not a natural disaster, or
even a war in the declared and nation-state sense. And
(00:47):
it changed lives for not just the people directly affected
who either lost their lives and their families, but an
entire generation was called to arms. And I... view myself
as part of that generation, the 9-11 generation, who realized
that the world that we thought we were living in,
(01:10):
which was a post-Soviet triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism
and the relatively slow but certain spread of that, the
end of history from the Fukuyama framework, Francis Fukuyama that
the good guys essentially were now going to be in charge.
(01:33):
And we had won and the future was in our hands.
9-11 shook that up dramatically and changed our sense of
the future of the world that we were living in,
in ways that obviously were very ominous at the time
and led us into conflict in Afghanistan, which still to
(01:55):
this day, I like to make sure that people are
reminded in this country, while there's a lot of opposition
to foreign intervention, our intervention in Afghanistan, or rather our
invasion of Afghanistan, was absolutely warranted and absolutely necessary. And
I also think that the sacrifices that were made by
(02:19):
those who fought in what we now call the GWAT,
or we did for a while call it that, the
Global War on Terror, really it was a war against
Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. So it was a war against
jihadist terror entities that were both nation-state backed and transnational
at the same time. So there were countries that supported this,
(02:39):
notably Afghanistan and others. Iran is obviously a state sponsor
of terror. But then there were the affiliates of these
entities as well that either grew, in the case of Iraq,
out of our efforts to fight against the terrorist threat,
or just sprung up on their own. So yeah, there's
(03:03):
a lot that all comes together here. I think that
the 9-11 for me completely changed my perspective on what
my future was going to be. I remember I was
a sophomore in college at Amherst, so an idyllic little
campus in Massachusetts about an hour and a half west
(03:27):
of Boston. And I remember thinking that, and this was
going back even to my freshman year, the great battles
had already been waged, that my generation would be one
of peace and that it would just be about maybe
building wealth in a business, in the private sector, trying
to become successful in our capitalist economy. And yeah, the
(03:51):
great battles, I was a big history buff, always have been.
And my thinking was that the great battles had already
been fought and that I would probably go through my
life and my generation without anything approaching a World War I,
a World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Revolutionary War, the
Civil War, any of these epic struggles, wars of generations
(04:15):
and centuries past. And then 9-11, of course, all at
once changed all that. I was in my first week
of class maybe it was my second week of class.
I can't remember now, but I remember I had, I
had signed up. I was just starting Arabic lessons and
Arabic class. And I was, uh, I had, I had
done Arabic and then I was going actually to a
(04:37):
Shakespeare class though. And I still remember it was a professor.
Schofield was the guy's name. And I walked into the,
what they call the red room at Amherst college, the
amphitheater classroom that they have there. And, He just very calmly,
matter-of-factly said, some of you may have seen reports, a
(04:57):
plane has hit the World Trade Center. I advise that
we all adjourn class and you go back to your
room and that we all see what's going on. That
was when the first plane hit. I got back to
my room, turned on the TV, and watched in real
time on the feed, the news feed, as the second
plane hit. And I remember I turned around to my...
(05:19):
friends i didn't actually lived alone in a room at
that point i didn't have any roommates but friends who
lived on my floor and i just said without even
really thinking about it we're going to war and i
had that just clear recognition that so many did that
this had to be an act of war and that
this was the beginning of something much bigger something else
(05:40):
from that day though i remember there was a lot
of yes there was terror about what had happened people
were terrified There was a lot of fear about what
else might be coming. And it's much easier now to
look at what was done in the aftermath of 9-11
on the military side. Now, there was tremendous political unity.
(06:01):
And I wonder if we would have that same amount
of political unity today. I think the answer is no.
I think that I will make this a partisan issue.
I think that there are elements of the Democrat Party
who are true fifth columnists and are subversives. and view
the pain and suffering and even perhaps the downfall of
(06:22):
America as something to be celebrated. And so I think
that that in that way, it is, it would be
different if we were hit with a, an attack on
the scale of nine 11 now than we were then,
but the military response and the intelligence response, I should
say CIA response specifically, uh, was at a time when
(06:44):
we weren't sure what else was going to happen. And
we didn't know there could have been dozens of suicide
bombers infiltrated throughout our society causing mass casualty attacks in
every American city. There could have been, especially when the
planes first hit, there could have been more planes that
we were worried about hitting or more things hijacked. You know,
(07:05):
who knows? They could have had people taken vehicles, trucks
in major cities and just started running people over. You know,
this was the mentality. This was the thought process that
we had at the time So to mount up and
gear up and take the fight to the enemy in
whatever way we could was the only, only reasonable, logical
(07:30):
response to what had happened. And I think there's a
little too much Monday morning quarterbacking many, many years later
now of all that was done. And I also think
that while people like me and many others on the
right mock the Islamophobia talk because it was always overblown.
(07:51):
It was remarkable that in this country, Americans were as
tolerant and respectful of Muslims living in this country as
we were. I mean, you compare this to previous generations,
even of Americans. We know what happened with the Japanese
in World War II and the internment camps. We handled
(08:12):
a massive sneak attack on us all by one group
that had one thing in common, and that was their religion. uh,
we handled it as a free society where we didn't
hold individuals responsible for their, uh, religious or tangential ideological
connections to the perpetrators of the act. So we don't get,
(08:32):
I think nearly enough credit for that as a country.
And we should, uh, we were not Islamophobic. Uh, the
United States actually came together and there are far more
Muslims now, by the way, living in America than there
were on September 11th. So that also tells you something. Um,
But I think that there is a sense among the
(08:54):
younger generation, among a lot of people who were not
around during 9-11, that it's something in history that couldn't
happen again. And unfortunately, something like this will happen again,
meaning there will be another war. There will be another
sneak attack. There will be another great struggle ahead. It
(09:14):
is just the reality of our species throughout history And
we have to be prepared for that as best we
can by being a resilient society, by being a society,
by being a country, a nation that elevates courage, that
is willing to make tremendous sacrifice for others, for those
(09:37):
that we don't even know, you know, people outside of
our family, outside of our community, and to be willing
to fight whatever enemies we have to and do so
in the most virtuous and humane way we can, which
is never going to be perfect and is always going
to be a subject of criticism and reflection. But overall,
(10:00):
I think America 25 years after 9-11 has shown it
is a deeply resilient, we're a deeply resilient society. Those
who fought in the GWAT did so with incredible skill
and bravery on the whole. And we have gone through
a relative period of peace here apart from the Iran
(10:21):
conflict right now, which is very much just military to military,
at least with respect to us. We have not had
attacks on American civilians here at home yet. We are
in a very strong place as a country, and I
think people were worried that things would get far more
bleak for us right after 9-11. So we came out
(10:42):
of the ashes of 9-11 intact, and We should be
proud of that as a country, and we should be
proud of all those who fought to get us to
where we are today. And of course, remember and say
a prayer for those who lost their lives, both on
9-11 and in the wars that came after, the battles
(11:03):
that came after. So that's my sense for you on 9-11,
and thank you for listening. Our sponsor here is Incogni.
When police searched the car of the man who assassinated
a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband in their own home,
They found a notebook inside a handwritten list of 11 websites,
not weapons sites, data brokers, people search sites that sell
your home address for a couple of dollars. Type your
(11:24):
name into one right now. There you are, your address,
your phone, your family's name, a photo of your front door.
Anyone can look you up in seconds and you'll never
know who did. That's why I'm using Incogni. It forces
data brokers and people search sites to delete you, then
keeps checking because deleted data creeps back. Incogni has scrubbed
my info from over 223 sites while I did exactly nothing.
(11:46):
You lock your doors every night tonight, lock down your information.
Go to incogni.com slash buck for 60% off. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I
dot com slash buck. Use my first name buck as
your promo code to ensure you get that 60% savings
because the next time a stranger searches for your name,
let them find nothing. That is the show. Shields high.
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Clay Travis
Buck Sexton
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