September 11, 2026 • 36 mins
Hour 1 of The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show is dominated by a powerful and emotional discussion marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, with Clay and Buck reflecting on the historical significance of 9/11, the ongoing impact on American society, and the importance of preserving the memory of that day for younger generations. Drawing on personal experiences, the hosts note that a growing share of Americans were born after 9/11 and may view the attacks as distant history, underscoring the need for families and educators to pass along firsthand accounts of the tragedy and its consequences. They discuss nationwide memorial ceremonies, the heroism displayed by first responders and ordinary citizens, and the profound ways the attacks reshaped American life, foreign policy, national security, and public consciousness.
The conversation explores the origins and aftermath of the attacks, including the role of al-Qaeda, the U.S. military response in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the generation of Americans who volunteered to serve in the armed forces or intelligence community in response to the terrorist attacks. Buck shares how 9/11 directly influenced his decision to pursue a career in the CIA, while both hosts reflect on the broader impact the attacks had on the trajectory of the country. They discuss the wars that followed, ongoing concerns about radical Islamic terrorism, and the argument that the threat has not entirely disappeared despite major counterterrorism successes over the past two decades.
A major theme throughout the hour is the hosts’ belief that 9/11 should be remembered primarily as an ideological and terrorist attack against the United States rather than simply a tragedy. They criticize what they view as efforts by some political and media figures to downplay the nature of the attackers’ motivations. This includes discussion of comments from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani regarding 9/11 remembrance, as well as criticism of media narratives that focus extensively on post-9/11 Islamophobia. Clay and Buck argue that historical memory should remain centered on the victims, the attackers, and the national response to terrorism.
The hosts also revisit key moments from September 11 itself, including the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the heroic actions of passengers aboard Flight 93. Special attention is given to Todd Beamer and the passengers who prevented the hijackers from reaching their intended target, potentially the U.S. Capitol or the White House. Clay and Buck emphasize how those actions may have altered the course of American history and prevented even greater devastation. They also discuss the stories of survivors, first responders, and individuals whose lives were spared by chance, including current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who missed being in the World Trade Center because he was taking his son to kindergarten that morning.
The hour highlights the continuing work of the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, including efforts to support families affected by 9/11-related illnesses and educational initiatives designed to teach younger generations about the attacks. The hosts praise the organization’s Steel Across America tour and broader mission of ensuring that the sacrifices made on September 11 are never forgotten.
Beyond the anniversary discussion, Clay briefly reviews new inflation data, noting consumer prices rose 3.4% while core inflation remained closer to the Federal Reserve’s target when energy prices are excluded. The hosts also compare the lasting societal impacts of 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic, describing both as transformative events that fundamentally changed American life in unexpected ways.
The latter portion of Hour 1 returns to debates surrounding terrorism, airport security, the creation of the TSA, and media portrayals of terrorism over the last two decades. Buck reflects on his counterterrorism experience and argues that public policy and security measures implemented after 9/11 were direct responses to the threat posed by Islamist terrorist organizations. He also discusses how political and media narratives around terrorism evolved during the years following the attacks.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome in.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
It is the Friday edition of Clay and Buck, a
time of reflection for many of us as it is
the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And there are ceremonies taking
place all over the country, including right now a ceremony
(00:22):
in New York City that is being taken live by
all of the different networks. And I'm sure that we
will have many different thoughts of how we spent 9-11,
what we remember. And it's also important to remember as
well yourself that one in three Americans was not born
(00:45):
on 9-11. So as much as it still may feel
like a moment that many of us remember quite clearly...
It is important to understand that for many young people,
it is history. And, Buck, I was talking about this
yesterday a little bit. I was down in Dallas. I
(01:05):
was born in 1979, 25 years before 1979, 1954, if
I'm doing the math right there, Brown versus Board of Education.
I remember being a kid and Brown versus Board of
Education was might as well have been to me the
Civil War in that it felt ancient because anything that
(01:29):
happens 25 years before you're born, by the time you're 20,
it's been 45 years, it feels like a completely different world.
That's where a lot of 25-year-old kids are today who
were born in the aftermath of 9-11. To them, 2001
is the equivalent to me of Brown versus Board of
(01:51):
Education in It's just a totally different world. And I
do think the way that we teach history, and you
and I are both big history people, oftentimes we never
get to modern era history. We start back, all of
you who remember, you're in history class, you start back
in the 1600s and the 1400s, and you work your
(02:13):
way up through the Civil War, maybe. You very rarely
get into much of the 20th century. Most of the
time don't get past much more than.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
World War II.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Contemporary history is often not known at all. A lot
of kids just don't know anything about 9-11. And so
I think this is an opportunity for everybody out there
in this audience to make sure as you come into
the weekend and you're going to be around your kids
and your grandkids to tell them about the lived history,
your experience on that day and what.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
It can mean.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
So I'll give you an example from the present of
what I think is important to guard against as we
talk about 9-11 and.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
What it meant.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
And we have, Clay, I just want to take a
moment to say I'm sure we have people listening who
lost friends and family.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
On that day.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
We have a WOR, for example, is a station that
goes throughout the entire tri-state or certainly the New York
City and its environs of the tri-state area. My uncle
was on his way to work at Aon Corporation, which
lost the second most people after Cantor Fitzgerald. He was okay.
(03:27):
He was not in the, there were, this is another
part of it that people forget about. Carrie and I
were watching a documentary actually a couple of days ago
about 9-11 and bringing people together who successfully escaped and
sometimes very emotionally thanking someone for helping them get down
the stairs or helping them get out of the, you know,
(03:47):
the office in time or get out of the elevator
or whatever it may have been. Uh, but there were
a lot of people who, because it was early enough
in the day, weren't in the buildings yet.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Um, it was, you know, people show up at, you know, nine,
nine 30, nine 45 to work. And so there were
far fewer people in the buildings. Now we lost almost
3000 people that day. It's a horrific, but it could
have been a higher, much higher body count, including my
own uncle by marriage on one side, And we have
(04:18):
a lot of people, Clay, who are listening right now
who are part of what we call the 9-11 generation,
who joined up to fight, who said, I'm going to
serve the country. A lot of people joined the Army,
the Marines, Air Force, Navy, thinking that rightfully we were
under attack. And we then had decades of war. Let's
(04:42):
just be honest about that. We had decades of war.
against the Middle East and South Asia enemies that had
consolidated against us in the.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Form of al-Qaeda.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
But on the one thing, for example, that is going
to bother me today, and it has been bothering me
for some time, Clay, the mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani,
wrote this. I attended a memorial mass at St. Patrick's
Cathedral in honor of those who died on 9-11. which
(05:12):
I appreciate that he's going in solidarity to the St.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Patrick's Theatres. That's fine.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
A lot of Catholics were lost that day, a lot
of firefighters, a lot of cops, a lot of just
Catholics who worked in those buildings, but a lot of
human beings in general. 25 years ago, he writes, we
bore witness to unimaginable suffering, but New Yorkers met that
moment with a spirit of love, sacrifice, and solidarity that
guided us forward. As we remember those we lost, let
(05:39):
us continue to take refuge in Clay, that could be
the writing from Mamdani about a tsunami or an earthquake
or a structural failure in the building that just happened.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
We were attacked.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
We were attacked by an ideology that had spread around
the world. that sought our eradication, that planned far more attacks,
that has been an ideology of conquest and bloodshed.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
For centuries, I might add.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
And this whitewashing of 9-11 that is always, always coming
from people on the left is something we're going to
have to remind ourselves of.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
No one speaks about Pearl Harbor, Clay.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
When they go to Hawaii and they're thinking about Pearl
Harbor like, yeah, it was a really, it was a
sad day where things happened. No, we were attacked by
Imperial Japan, which allied with the Nazis, which sought world
domination and came pretty close to knocking our fleets entirely
out of the Pacific theater and changing the world and
maybe having us all living under tyranny.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Like, let's remember the real history.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
And I just think that on 9-11, 25 years on,
It is taught to people like a thing that happened,
not the enemy came for us and we rallied and
took the fight back to them. That's my main takeaway
on this. I don't want anyone to forget what really
happened and what it led to.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Also that they would do it again if they could,
which I think is a big part of this too.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
World War II, after Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
You could say we utterly vanquished Japan, obviously the Nazis
lost in Germany, and there was a sense of conclusion
to that conflict. You know, and many of the people
listening to us right now are still working to try
to keep radical Islam terrorists from doing again to us
(07:46):
what they did on 9-11. In other words, the vigilance
necessary to protect innocent people from being taken away is
still necessary. It's not something that just ended and we
can declare victory and we can move on. And by
the way, you mentioned your uncle who hadn't gotten there yet.
(08:06):
I think it's worth mentioning Howard Lutnick is the Commerce
Secretary right now in Trump's cabinet. The only reason he
didn't die on 9-11 that day, Buck, was because it
was his son's first day of kindergarten. And he took
his son to kindergarten that day.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
I believe his.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
I think it was Cantor Fitzgerald was the, uh, employer
that lost the most lives. They were at the very
top of one of the world trade center buildings. I
think over 600 of their individuals died in that, uh,
that attack. And he says, but for the fact that
that morning he was taking his son to kindergarten, uh,
he would have been in that building and he would
(08:43):
have died. And he's commerce secretary now and Trump that day, uh,
And in the immediate aftermath, this was long before Trump
was known as any sort of political figure, was you
can speak to this because you're from New York. And
I know you weren't in New York at the exact
time of the attack. You were away in college and
I was away in law school. But I remember going
(09:06):
within a couple of weeks of the attack, maybe within
10 days or so. and standing on the roof of
a George Washington apartment building, George Washington University apartment building,
you could still see the smoke from the Pentagon for
a long time. And you could see the smoke still
coming from the World Trade Centers for a very, very
long time, too. And in the immediate aftermath, for those
(09:27):
of us who were traveling and those of us who
were moving around, I mean, you went, I mean, you
could speak to it. Would you have joined gone into
the CIA if 9-11 hadn't happened? Or do you think
you might have gone in a different career trajectory if
that attack hadn't happened?
Speaker 1 (09:42):
No, 100%.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
I went into the CIA because of 9-11. And I
had no family history of intelligence work or anything. It's
not like I came to this because that was something
expected of me or anything else. And quite honestly, we
talk about how important it is to read books. And
the effect that books can have on your life. I
knew about the CIA from Tom Clancy and the Jack
(10:04):
Ryan novels, really, and the movies.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
But that was really what made me think of the CIA.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
And I thought because of my background at the time,
I was studying Middle East history and politics and even Arabic,
believe it or not. Before 9-11. I signed up for
Arabic before 9-11, which is quite a coincidence. But then
it was just sort of a ramp, a pathway into
the intelligence service. So that's what ended up happening for me.
But for so many listening, they were army.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
They were rangers. They were Marines.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
They were airborne in Fallujah, in Mosul, in Baghdad, in Jalalabad,
in Kabul, and name it.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
And they've been to all these places.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
And, you know, I understand now there's there's been this
lesson of we shouldn't have these. We don't want to
do Middle East wars interventions. Let's all remember rooting the
Taliban and Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was being hosted by
the Taliban. They were kind of a symbiotic organism at
the time rooting them out of Afghanistan. There was no choice.
That was an absolute must. There wasn't some, oh, maybe
(11:07):
we're going to just sort of let things lie. They
had created terrorist training camps and were plotting to hit us.
not just in America, but all of our allies all
over the world, we had to go in and cut
the head off of that snake. Now, the occupation afterwards
and trying to set up Afghanistan as a stable democracy,
that was a challenge. Iraq, interestingly enough, the justification for
(11:31):
the war, I think people feel particularly shaky about in
the aftermath of 9-11 and what we found out later.
But Iraq is actually doing much better as a country
than a lot of people would think right now. I'm
not saying that was worth the cost in blood and treasure.
I'm just pointing out that it isn't the totalitarian hellscape
that some thought it would descend into. I mean, Afghanistan
(11:51):
is actually in a worse spot than Iraq is as
a country. So it changed the world, Clay. And there's
so much to take from this. One thing is that
you could be an American, you know, especially if you're
in New York City. And everyone remembered this, Clay. It
was in the Northeast just generally, too. It was one
of the most beautiful days. I mean, September, I think,
(12:13):
is the most beautiful time in the Northeast of the
United States. And it was just a perfect, crystal clear day.
And the country was in a good place and a
good feel. And everything was coming along, right? We weren't
at war. We weren't in the midst of a depression.
We didn't have some huge financial calamity.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And then, boom, it all changed.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
We were actually on track to pay off the national debt.
People forget, as we sit $ 40 trillion in debt now,
there was talk of, well, what are we going to
do when the United States suddenly pays off the entirety
of the national debt? Because we had balanced budgets in
the late 90s, and that's what people cared about, balanced budgets.
(12:55):
Don't want to be the womp-womp here on the state
of the country, but I think you're very right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Then we went into Iraq.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
We spent trillions of dollars on Iraq and on Afghanistan,
and we lost thousands of lives. And all of it
was directly connected to what happened on that day in
New York, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We shouldn't forget about the
brave people on Flight 93. And also the fact that
they hit the Pentagon, the loss of life there. But
(13:27):
the fact that they didn't hit the Capitol or hit
the White House, as certainly was intended. Thanks to Todd
Beamer and his crew on Flight 93. And that was
another thing, whether it was the NYPD and the FDNY
running into the buildings and trying to evacuate people in
New York, people who were running into the rubble of
the Pentagon and trying to save those who were severely.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Wounded when the Pentagon got hit. And then on Flight 93,
Todd Beamer lets roll. There is something about that. I
just hope every American school-age child who is old enough
to hear about 9-11, I hope they hear about Todd
Beamer and that moment where he called his wife, where
(14:11):
he knew what he was facing, and he knew what
the stakes were, and he ran into the maelstrom. Lord knows, Clay,
what would have happened to the country if.
That, you know, if we had seen the Capitol destroyed
or the white house or the white house, just, just
obliterated on that day.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
I mean, it was damaging enough what we suffered with.
So never forget.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
I always thought as someone who was in DC buck,
the fact that they chose the Pentagon, I know there
was lost life there instead of the Capitol and the
white house. A lot of people don't think of the
Pentagon as symbolic of the nation in the same way
as they do the white house and the Capitol. Um,
What those guys did on Flight 93 was so important.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
I mean, I think, Clay, if the enemy, in retrospect,
could pick, they were trying to hit the Capitol, too.
I think they would have rather hit the Capitol than
the Pentagon, but Beamer and his crew stopped them.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Look, we're talking about Tunnel to Towers all week as
we've been talking about the 25th anniversary of 9-11. I
was up in Washington, D.C. for a great event. that
they did to talk about that day. Last week, Frank
Siller was on with us talking about what his brother did,
his life that he gave up. For months, we've been
(15:32):
telling you about the Steel Across America Tour, 16,900-pound steel
beam moving from the World Trade Center all across the
country and back. The goal is to educate so many
people out there in America, one in three of whom
were not alive when 9-11 happened. about just what occurred
on that day. The Steel Beams journey ended this morning
where it began in New York City at the very
(15:53):
place where the story of Stephen Stiller and the Tunnel
to Towers Foundation came to be. You guys know we're
huge supporters of Tunnel to Towers. Foundation is honoring the
anniversary through an ongoing commitment to so many people out there.
They're also helping the families of those who have lost
their lives to 9-11-related illnesses, which now triples the number
(16:15):
who lost their life on 9-11. One way to make
sure we never forget is to support organizations like Tunnel
to Towers. Join us in donating $ 11 a month to
Tunnel to Towers at T2T.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Org. That's T, the number two, T.org.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Clay and Buck, smart, fun, sane, oh, and saving the
country one liberal.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
At a time.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
We will always remember the victims and the families of
September 11th 2001, very famous date, unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And it started out as such a beautiful day. We
will honor their lives. We will cherish their beautiful memories.
And we will protect this country and its freedoms for
every future generation.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
We will protect it like never before.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
A strong and united country, ready to take on all enemies,
foreign and domestic, Clay, 9-11 should be a reminder of
many things for us, but part of, I think, the
central mission of Never Forget, yes, the bravery, the way
that people came together, and the way that people answered
the call, and many of you listening who served and
(17:29):
went after our enemies after 9-11. But also, Clay, we
live in a dangerous and uncertain world, and you never know.
America could wake up, and China could be at war
with Taiwan tomorrow. Any number of things could happen.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Totally. I mean, COVID. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
You know, I would say that if you go to
the 21st century and the two things that most changed
in the country, 9-11 and COVID, we didn't see coming
at all.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
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Speaker 1 (18:57):
Welcome back in.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
A couple of stories worth tracking. Consumer prices rose 3.4%
inflation numbers that came out this morning.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Why does that matter?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
If you strip out oil and gas, I know, I know,
Inflation was at 2.4%, which is very, very close to
the overall goal of 2%. And again, a lot of
times you say, okay, what do you mean by strip
out oil and gas? Because they can fluctuate. Price of
oil right now, $ 98, as I am looking right now
(19:29):
on Fox Business. The price of oil and gas can
fluctuate substantially.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
And so.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
If you strip that out and look at the cost
of everything else, 2.4%.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
They are continuing with.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
The 9-11 ceremonies, and Buck, I was telling you that
I was curious what the New York Times might be doing.
Among other things, they have a story about how Islamophobia
shaped an entire generation of New Yorkers, which is they're
doing basically the Norm MacDonald meme. The headline is, Buck,
(20:07):
after 9-11... Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers.
The attacks unleashed a wave of hate, but the years
since have seen Muslim Americans' political and cultural influence grow.
And this, of course, calls to mind Norm Macdonald saying,
what terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a
(20:29):
nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans, imagine the backlash
against peaceful Muslims. And this is the story. That was,
by the way, a Norm Macdonald tweet from 2016. And
it oftentimes, a decade later, is reiterated on a regular
level again. uh, in the media, which continues to cover
(20:51):
nine 11 as primarily an issue for Muslims, as opposed to, uh,
a issue with Muslims killing a lot of innocent people
based on a perverted version of a religion.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Oh, there's so much here to make sure we have
clarity on and not allow the rewriting of this history
to occur the way that many on the left want
it to. Uh, I would just note that the real, uh,
lesson if you will about islamophobia post 9-11 is that
(21:23):
like so many other things the left is obsessed with
white supremacists and neo-nazis a country was attacked by 19
out of 19 muslim terrorists okay they're all 19 out
of the 19 hijackers and there were others obviously and
there was zacharias musawi and and there were people back
in the caves in afghanistan so to speak they weren't
(21:44):
really caves necessarily but who were planning all this they
were all muslims We're attacked by them all. And the
number of hate crimes and all this sort of thing
that occurred after 9-11 was de minimis. And people can
argue with that, but it's just true. The American people
did not hold their Muslim friends and neighbors to be
(22:07):
responsible for something that.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
They didn't do.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
And this is the right thing, of course, but I'm
just saying it showed what an incredibly tolerant society is.
actually America is, despite all of the whining about Islamophobia.
And then Islamophobia really was deployed, I would argue, as
a weapon years later in many conversations about why do
(22:30):
we have so many problems coming out of the Muslim
world in the form of the worst ideologies and the
worst terrorist groups on the planet. The Buddhists weren't doing it.
The Muslims weren't doing it. You know, we were in
this war on noticing for a while. You're not allowed
to notice that al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Moro Islamic
(22:55):
Liberation Front.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
You know, just list them all. All Muslim terrorist groups
all over the world. And we're supposed to be like, oh,
but it's, you know, and this is.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Why when George Bush says the religion of peace thing,
you know, he's just wrong. I mean, you can argue
that it's not a religion of war. You could argue
that That's arguable, but it's definitely not a religion of
peace uniformly.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
It's just not true. There are, you know, you know
what a religion of peace is? Quakers. The Amish, you know,
or the, I'm sorry, the Quakers. Thank you. That's what
I was looking for. The Quakers. They're a religion of peace.
Islam is not a religion of peace. Okay. This is absurd.
And people say, oh, but are you an Islamic scholar?
This is like when you say I can tell the
(23:38):
difference between a man and a woman. No, I'm not an.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
Islamic scholar, but I have newspaper access and have for
the last 20 years.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
And I've seen what religion has had a lot of
people blowing people up all over the world for really
bad reasons and really vicious ways. And guess what?
Speaker 3 (23:53):
The Amish have been really quiet. The Muslims around the
world have not. Again, just noticing this. People can try
to parse this in a million different ways. And you say, oh,
it's a small percentage. Well, okay, Clay, it's a small percentage.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
And like I said, you always have to do this
sort of preamble. Yes, of course, there are peaceful Muslims
and live in America, and they're our neighbors and our
friends and our family members and everything else.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
It's all true.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
But there are great people who live in the Soviet Union, too.
Doesn't mean communism is good, right? It doesn't mean you
can't talk about the ideology that is behind this. There
are warm, loving people who are behind the Iron Curtain.
It was no fault of their own. And maybe they
believe in communism at some level. Doesn't mean we can't
talk about the ideology, right? Doesn't mean we can't talk
about the beliefs and whether the beliefs are causing problems.
(24:42):
And so this was a very, for about 20 years,
this was a constant discussion post 9-11. And you had
people who really made a career in out of pretending that,
you know, there's nothing to see here.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
There's no problem with Islam. In fact, the problem is
coming from our fighting against it.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
I think it's actually unfortunately applied in many parts of
American life, even more so today, because you can go
through a large, for instance, violent crime. There are lots
of shows out there that would not tell you the
statistic that I'm about to give you. Most murders in
the United States are committed between black men between the
(25:22):
ages of 16 and 40 years old.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
That's the truth, right?
Speaker 2 (25:27):
So if you went out and you said, okay, there's
going to be, it appears there's going to be around
14,000 murders this year in the United States, about 7,000
roughly of those murderers will be black men between the
ages of 16 and 40. That makes people uncomfortable because
the black male population of between 16 and 40 Most
murders are committed, by the way, between men 16 and 40,
(25:48):
just FYI, not a surprise. It's not sexist to point
out that men commit most murders. It's only about 2%
of the population. So about 2% of the United States
population commits half of all murders. So if you want
to address murder in the United States, you're overwhelmingly going
to have to arrest way more black guys than you
are anybody else. Now, that makes people uncomfortable because when
(26:13):
you look at the data, this is not a uniform,
evenly applied danger, right? There is not in modern society,
to my knowledge, Buck, you can correct me if I'm wrong,
there are not austere Christian religious scholars murdering people in
other countries because they believe they are being driven by
(26:34):
Jesus to do so. That is not a regular problem.
There are certainly not Muslim countries that are having Christians
fly airplanes into their buildings. I think if you ask
the average people who are building tall buildings in the
Middle East, hey, who are you afraid of when it
comes to danger? Most of them would say Muslim terrorists.
(26:55):
They know better than anybody. This is why you stand
in line at the TSA because of Islamic terrorism. You
have to be patted down and go through all this
every time you go to the airport because of the
history of Islamic terrorism and Islamic hijacking of airplanes, not
just on 9-11 but along. Yeah, sorry, Buck, to cut
you off, but to this point, remember when they were
(27:17):
trying to evenly apply TSA and women with bottles that
they were feeding their children with? They were being patted
down and the liquids were being tested as if they
were the danger that might be blowing up the plane.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
I view that as a kind of a harbinger of
what we dealt with with COVID, where the whole point
was to make you believe the stupid rules to make
people feel better. Right. You had to do the stupid
things that were absurd. They had to check the 90-year-old
Asian woman. They had to go make her stand up
at TSA and pat her down and go through all
(27:52):
this stuff because, yeah, that's how they're really going to
sneak in the bomb. But, Clay, this also reminds me,
because I've had to do this before. I was on
CNN where they tried to do the most terrorism comes
from the right, and they showed a chart on the screen,
and I will never forget this. Where do you think
they started their chart probably 2002 oh no 2002 and
(28:16):
i just i just had to laugh like you guys
are just a clown show i mean cnn there this
was big at cnn for a long time they would
have these like very very huffy uh muslim scholars and
stuff on you can go back and see i used
to argue with these people in fact some of you
probably saw me for the first time being the one
guy who would go on cnn When there was a
mass casualty terrorist attack, whether it was like the Bataclan
(28:37):
theater massacre in Paris, which by the people don't even
realize they mutilated people there. They actually took captives, the
jihadist psychopaths in Paris, the Bataclan, they mutilated people just
for sport, just because they could. It wasn't even just
shooting people. Or you look at the Bastille Day truck attack,
(28:59):
which I was on TV talking about, and CNN would
put people on the air.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
You know what the thing was?
Speaker 3 (29:04):
They would put someone on the air, preferably somebody who
had an Arabic accent, and they would have them say,
the real problem is Islamophobia. And this became the thing
on the left for a long time, was that you
were never allowed to talk about, we had a problem,
and it was a strain of Islam or a strain
(29:26):
of believers within the two billion Muslims around the world
were engaged in a violent, jihad against the west i
mean that's just the way it was so you might
say what happened to that We killed a lot of them,
which doesn't get talked about very much. And actually, the
Obama administration, as much as they got a lot of
(29:46):
heat for this, killed a lot of very bad guys
in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Clay, with those drones. I mean,
that was, we've been going after them for a long,
and look, he got bin Laden. But we've been killing
these guys all over the world for a long time.
Trump obviously got Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, which led to Shane Gillis'
beautiful dogs routine, which is one of the funniest things
(30:08):
Shane Gillis has ever done. But I just bring all
this up because people need to remember this history. We
call it the GWAT, the Global War on Terror. I mean,
it really was the global war on jihadism. I mean,
it was an Islamic radicalism that we were fighting. And
it took us 20 years to basically get out of
that era. It really wasn't until right before COVID where
(30:30):
it was, OK, things seem to have calmed down. We
don't have quite as much jihadism clay going on. And
the Democrats in this country all the time were, oh,
it's not really a problem. It's not the real the
real extremist clay where the right wing extremists were the
you know, and I saw this when I was working counterterrorism,
particularly the NYPD intelligence division, where just to make everybody happy.
(30:52):
We're like, OK, we'll look for we'll look for neo-Nazi terrorism, too.
It was a really boring desk to work on, let
me tell you. Really boring desk.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
If you remember going through soon after 9-11, moms carrying babies,
they were making a big deal about whether they could
bring breast milk through the TSA checkpoints because they had
to make sure in the liquids it was very important
that we all make sure that moms out there weren't
going to bring down the plane with their breast milk.
(31:26):
I mean, this was a real thing that was going on.
And to your point, Buck, yes, the reason why we
have to go through TSA is because of Muslim terrorists.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
That's legitimately the reason the TSA exists, not for anybody else.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, and these are all reminders, of course, of 9-11.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
Whenever you go to the airport and you're in a
long line, it's because there are people who think that
they have a right to go and blow up a
lot of innocent people because they're unhappy about historical geopolitical
grievances there you go that and they they feel justified
in doing that same thing with hamas by the way
and dealing with israel they feel like they can go
kill anyone they want because they're unhappy about what has
(32:05):
been going on uh in geopolitics so yeah all right
if you're out there and you're thinking to yourself my
goodness It's been a tough week. Yesterday was the Charlie
Kirk one-year anniversary. This year, 25th anniversary of 9-11. Boom, boom,
you're headed into the weekend. You're probably going to be
watching a lot of football. At least that's what I'm
going to be doing. I watch football Wednesday night. I
(32:26):
watch football Thursday night. I'm going to be watching tonight
Mizzou going up against Kansas. Really great historical rivalry there, Buck.
You know, that's all started back during the decisions about
slave versus free states. Missouri and Kansas have been going
back and forth. That's where John Brown came from. For
those of you who are Harper's Ferry historians, that's where
(32:50):
this whole John Brown era started. Bleeding Kansas, all of
that era. Well, now, thankfully, it's just a big football rivalry.
And I think Mizzou's going to win.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
And I think the over is going to hit in
tonight's game between Missouri and Kansas. Again, sorry, Kansas fans.
Mizzou is going to win in cover, and the over
is going to hit. If you agree or disagree with me,
Picks haven't been doing great, Buck. You can go right
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(33:23):
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(34:07):
between Mizzou and Kansas.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Sorry, Jayhawks.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
It's going to be M-I-Z for the win and the cover.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Welcome back in here to Clay and Buck. We're going
to continue with our 9-11 remembrance today, the 25th anniversary
of 9-11. Our friend Steve Yates will be joining us shortly.
And he was in the government, in the executive branch,
When this all happened, and he'll share some of his
thoughts on that, too, and even a look ahead to
(34:39):
where we are today. So we'll talk to Steve Yates,
who has Nation States with Yates, which is the best
national security-focused podcast you can listen to anywhere. So please
go and subscribe to it on the Clay and Buck
Podcast Network. Clay, we're going to pivot from this, but
I do want to just get this out there because
we are going to talk about it later. Today, the
(35:00):
story is the 25th anniversary of 9-11, clearly. I mean,
that is where our focus is. Our hearts and minds
are with that, first and foremost. There is also a
story that we will talk about, which is a continuation
of the other biggest news cycle-based story recently. The short
version is, my friends, it has come out that the
(35:20):
one man who refused to go along with the Lindsay
Clancy is not guilty by reason of insanity outcome on
that jury was was a black man and this is
very interesting because we sit here and say hero of
course a man of conviction a man of courage but
(35:41):
clay now the left the democrats the lindsey clancy libs
they're in a weird position weirder than they thought identity
politics creates not truth But it creates oppression narratives. And
the person who is the most oppressed is seen as
the victor in all disputes. So when there are 11
(36:07):
white people yelling at a black guy, you have to
find her not guilty. And they're trying to get him removed.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
From the jury. It definitely is very intriguing.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Now, to my knowledge, this black juror on the Lindsay
Clancy case has not spoken in any way publicly yet.
But Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire asked a good
question that I would actually love to see play out.
What would happen if that juror, that black male juror
who refused to vote not guilty on Lindsay Clancy murdering
her children, what would happen if he asserted that he
(36:39):
found it to be racist the way that the white
jurors who favored Lindsay Clancy were behaving? That would be
an amazing scene. Buck, we also have Oprah hosting an event.
where a black mom said, we have to also honor
black women, basically, who kill their kids, too.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
It's a crazy time.
Welcome in.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
It is the Friday edition of Clay and Buck, a
time of reflection for many of us as it is
the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And there are ceremonies taking
place all over the country, including right now a ceremony
(00:22):
in New York City that is being taken live by
all of the different networks. And I'm sure that we
will have many different thoughts of how we spent 9-11,
what we remember. And it's also important to remember as
well yourself that one in three Americans was not born
(00:45):
on 9-11. So as much as it still may feel
like a moment that many of us remember quite clearly...
It is important to understand that for many young people,
it is history. And, Buck, I was talking about this
yesterday a little bit. I was down in Dallas. I
(01:05):
was born in 1979, 25 years before 1979, 1954, if
I'm doing the math right there, Brown versus Board of Education.
I remember being a kid and Brown versus Board of
Education was might as well have been to me the
Civil War in that it felt ancient because anything that
(01:29):
happens 25 years before you're born, by the time you're 20,
it's been 45 years, it feels like a completely different world.
That's where a lot of 25-year-old kids are today who
were born in the aftermath of 9-11. To them, 2001
is the equivalent to me of Brown versus Board of
(01:51):
Education in It's just a totally different world. And I
do think the way that we teach history, and you
and I are both big history people, oftentimes we never
get to modern era history. We start back, all of
you who remember, you're in history class, you start back
in the 1600s and the 1400s, and you work your
(02:13):
way up through the Civil War, maybe. You very rarely
get into much of the 20th century. Most of the
time don't get past much more than.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
World War II.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Contemporary history is often not known at all. A lot
of kids just don't know anything about 9-11. And so
I think this is an opportunity for everybody out there
in this audience to make sure as you come into
the weekend and you're going to be around your kids
and your grandkids to tell them about the lived history,
your experience on that day and what.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
It can mean.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
So I'll give you an example from the present of
what I think is important to guard against as we
talk about 9-11 and.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
What it meant.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
And we have, Clay, I just want to take a
moment to say I'm sure we have people listening who
lost friends and family.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
On that day.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
We have a WOR, for example, is a station that
goes throughout the entire tri-state or certainly the New York
City and its environs of the tri-state area. My uncle
was on his way to work at Aon Corporation, which
lost the second most people after Cantor Fitzgerald. He was okay.
(03:27):
He was not in the, there were, this is another
part of it that people forget about. Carrie and I
were watching a documentary actually a couple of days ago
about 9-11 and bringing people together who successfully escaped and
sometimes very emotionally thanking someone for helping them get down
the stairs or helping them get out of the, you know,
(03:47):
the office in time or get out of the elevator
or whatever it may have been. Uh, but there were
a lot of people who, because it was early enough
in the day, weren't in the buildings yet.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Um, it was, you know, people show up at, you know, nine,
nine 30, nine 45 to work. And so there were
far fewer people in the buildings. Now we lost almost
3000 people that day. It's a horrific, but it could
have been a higher, much higher body count, including my
own uncle by marriage on one side, And we have
(04:18):
a lot of people, Clay, who are listening right now
who are part of what we call the 9-11 generation,
who joined up to fight, who said, I'm going to
serve the country. A lot of people joined the Army,
the Marines, Air Force, Navy, thinking that rightfully we were
under attack. And we then had decades of war. Let's
(04:42):
just be honest about that. We had decades of war.
against the Middle East and South Asia enemies that had
consolidated against us in the.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Form of al-Qaeda.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
But on the one thing, for example, that is going
to bother me today, and it has been bothering me
for some time, Clay, the mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani,
wrote this. I attended a memorial mass at St. Patrick's
Cathedral in honor of those who died on 9-11. which
(05:12):
I appreciate that he's going in solidarity to the St.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Patrick's Theatres. That's fine.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
A lot of Catholics were lost that day, a lot
of firefighters, a lot of cops, a lot of just
Catholics who worked in those buildings, but a lot of
human beings in general. 25 years ago, he writes, we
bore witness to unimaginable suffering, but New Yorkers met that
moment with a spirit of love, sacrifice, and solidarity that
guided us forward. As we remember those we lost, let
(05:39):
us continue to take refuge in Clay, that could be
the writing from Mamdani about a tsunami or an earthquake
or a structural failure in the building that just happened.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
We were attacked.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
We were attacked by an ideology that had spread around
the world. that sought our eradication, that planned far more attacks,
that has been an ideology of conquest and bloodshed.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
For centuries, I might add.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
And this whitewashing of 9-11 that is always, always coming
from people on the left is something we're going to
have to remind ourselves of.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
No one speaks about Pearl Harbor, Clay.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
When they go to Hawaii and they're thinking about Pearl
Harbor like, yeah, it was a really, it was a
sad day where things happened. No, we were attacked by
Imperial Japan, which allied with the Nazis, which sought world
domination and came pretty close to knocking our fleets entirely
out of the Pacific theater and changing the world and
maybe having us all living under tyranny.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Like, let's remember the real history.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
And I just think that on 9-11, 25 years on,
It is taught to people like a thing that happened,
not the enemy came for us and we rallied and
took the fight back to them. That's my main takeaway
on this. I don't want anyone to forget what really
happened and what it led to.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Also that they would do it again if they could,
which I think is a big part of this too.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
World War II, after Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
You could say we utterly vanquished Japan, obviously the Nazis
lost in Germany, and there was a sense of conclusion
to that conflict. You know, and many of the people
listening to us right now are still working to try
to keep radical Islam terrorists from doing again to us
(07:46):
what they did on 9-11. In other words, the vigilance
necessary to protect innocent people from being taken away is
still necessary. It's not something that just ended and we
can declare victory and we can move on. And by
the way, you mentioned your uncle who hadn't gotten there yet.
(08:06):
I think it's worth mentioning Howard Lutnick is the Commerce
Secretary right now in Trump's cabinet. The only reason he
didn't die on 9-11 that day, Buck, was because it
was his son's first day of kindergarten. And he took
his son to kindergarten that day.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
I believe his.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
I think it was Cantor Fitzgerald was the, uh, employer
that lost the most lives. They were at the very
top of one of the world trade center buildings. I
think over 600 of their individuals died in that, uh,
that attack. And he says, but for the fact that
that morning he was taking his son to kindergarten, uh,
he would have been in that building and he would
(08:43):
have died. And he's commerce secretary now and Trump that day, uh,
And in the immediate aftermath, this was long before Trump
was known as any sort of political figure, was you
can speak to this because you're from New York. And
I know you weren't in New York at the exact
time of the attack. You were away in college and
I was away in law school. But I remember going
(09:06):
within a couple of weeks of the attack, maybe within
10 days or so. and standing on the roof of
a George Washington apartment building, George Washington University apartment building,
you could still see the smoke from the Pentagon for
a long time. And you could see the smoke still
coming from the World Trade Centers for a very, very
long time, too. And in the immediate aftermath, for those
(09:27):
of us who were traveling and those of us who
were moving around, I mean, you went, I mean, you
could speak to it. Would you have joined gone into
the CIA if 9-11 hadn't happened? Or do you think
you might have gone in a different career trajectory if
that attack hadn't happened?
Speaker 1 (09:42):
No, 100%.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
I went into the CIA because of 9-11. And I
had no family history of intelligence work or anything. It's
not like I came to this because that was something
expected of me or anything else. And quite honestly, we
talk about how important it is to read books. And
the effect that books can have on your life. I
knew about the CIA from Tom Clancy and the Jack
(10:04):
Ryan novels, really, and the movies.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
But that was really what made me think of the CIA.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
And I thought because of my background at the time,
I was studying Middle East history and politics and even Arabic,
believe it or not. Before 9-11. I signed up for
Arabic before 9-11, which is quite a coincidence. But then
it was just sort of a ramp, a pathway into
the intelligence service. So that's what ended up happening for me.
But for so many listening, they were army.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
They were rangers. They were Marines.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
They were airborne in Fallujah, in Mosul, in Baghdad, in Jalalabad,
in Kabul, and name it.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
And they've been to all these places.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
And, you know, I understand now there's there's been this
lesson of we shouldn't have these. We don't want to
do Middle East wars interventions. Let's all remember rooting the
Taliban and Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was being hosted by
the Taliban. They were kind of a symbiotic organism at
the time rooting them out of Afghanistan. There was no choice.
That was an absolute must. There wasn't some, oh, maybe
(11:07):
we're going to just sort of let things lie. They
had created terrorist training camps and were plotting to hit us.
not just in America, but all of our allies all
over the world, we had to go in and cut
the head off of that snake. Now, the occupation afterwards
and trying to set up Afghanistan as a stable democracy,
that was a challenge. Iraq, interestingly enough, the justification for
(11:31):
the war, I think people feel particularly shaky about in
the aftermath of 9-11 and what we found out later.
But Iraq is actually doing much better as a country
than a lot of people would think right now. I'm
not saying that was worth the cost in blood and treasure.
I'm just pointing out that it isn't the totalitarian hellscape
that some thought it would descend into. I mean, Afghanistan
(11:51):
is actually in a worse spot than Iraq is as
a country. So it changed the world, Clay. And there's
so much to take from this. One thing is that
you could be an American, you know, especially if you're
in New York City. And everyone remembered this, Clay. It
was in the Northeast just generally, too. It was one
of the most beautiful days. I mean, September, I think,
(12:13):
is the most beautiful time in the Northeast of the
United States. And it was just a perfect, crystal clear day.
And the country was in a good place and a
good feel. And everything was coming along, right? We weren't
at war. We weren't in the midst of a depression.
We didn't have some huge financial calamity.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And then, boom, it all changed.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
We were actually on track to pay off the national debt.
People forget, as we sit $ 40 trillion in debt now,
there was talk of, well, what are we going to
do when the United States suddenly pays off the entirety
of the national debt? Because we had balanced budgets in
the late 90s, and that's what people cared about, balanced budgets.
(12:55):
Don't want to be the womp-womp here on the state
of the country, but I think you're very right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Then we went into Iraq.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
We spent trillions of dollars on Iraq and on Afghanistan,
and we lost thousands of lives. And all of it
was directly connected to what happened on that day in
New York, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We shouldn't forget about the
brave people on Flight 93. And also the fact that
they hit the Pentagon, the loss of life there. But
(13:27):
the fact that they didn't hit the Capitol or hit
the White House, as certainly was intended. Thanks to Todd
Beamer and his crew on Flight 93. And that was
another thing, whether it was the NYPD and the FDNY
running into the buildings and trying to evacuate people in
New York, people who were running into the rubble of
the Pentagon and trying to save those who were severely.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Wounded when the Pentagon got hit. And then on Flight 93,
Todd Beamer lets roll. There is something about that. I
just hope every American school-age child who is old enough
to hear about 9-11, I hope they hear about Todd
Beamer and that moment where he called his wife, where
(14:11):
he knew what he was facing, and he knew what
the stakes were, and he ran into the maelstrom. Lord knows, Clay,
what would have happened to the country if.
That, you know, if we had seen the Capitol destroyed
or the white house or the white house, just, just
obliterated on that day.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
I mean, it was damaging enough what we suffered with.
So never forget.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
I always thought as someone who was in DC buck,
the fact that they chose the Pentagon, I know there
was lost life there instead of the Capitol and the
white house. A lot of people don't think of the
Pentagon as symbolic of the nation in the same way
as they do the white house and the Capitol. Um,
What those guys did on Flight 93 was so important.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
I mean, I think, Clay, if the enemy, in retrospect,
could pick, they were trying to hit the Capitol, too.
I think they would have rather hit the Capitol than
the Pentagon, but Beamer and his crew stopped them.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Look, we're talking about Tunnel to Towers all week as
we've been talking about the 25th anniversary of 9-11. I
was up in Washington, D.C. for a great event. that
they did to talk about that day. Last week, Frank
Siller was on with us talking about what his brother did,
his life that he gave up. For months, we've been
(15:32):
telling you about the Steel Across America Tour, 16,900-pound steel
beam moving from the World Trade Center all across the
country and back. The goal is to educate so many
people out there in America, one in three of whom
were not alive when 9-11 happened. about just what occurred
on that day. The Steel Beams journey ended this morning
where it began in New York City at the very
(15:53):
place where the story of Stephen Stiller and the Tunnel
to Towers Foundation came to be. You guys know we're
huge supporters of Tunnel to Towers. Foundation is honoring the
anniversary through an ongoing commitment to so many people out there.
They're also helping the families of those who have lost
their lives to 9-11-related illnesses, which now triples the number
(16:15):
who lost their life on 9-11. One way to make
sure we never forget is to support organizations like Tunnel
to Towers. Join us in donating $ 11 a month to
Tunnel to Towers at T2T.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Org. That's T, the number two, T.org.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Clay and Buck, smart, fun, sane, oh, and saving the
country one liberal.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
At a time.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
We will always remember the victims and the families of
September 11th 2001, very famous date, unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And it started out as such a beautiful day. We
will honor their lives. We will cherish their beautiful memories.
And we will protect this country and its freedoms for
every future generation.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
We will protect it like never before.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
A strong and united country, ready to take on all enemies,
foreign and domestic, Clay, 9-11 should be a reminder of
many things for us, but part of, I think, the
central mission of Never Forget, yes, the bravery, the way
that people came together, and the way that people answered
the call, and many of you listening who served and
(17:29):
went after our enemies after 9-11. But also, Clay, we
live in a dangerous and uncertain world, and you never know.
America could wake up, and China could be at war
with Taiwan tomorrow. Any number of things could happen.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Totally. I mean, COVID. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
You know, I would say that if you go to
the 21st century and the two things that most changed
in the country, 9-11 and COVID, we didn't see coming
at all.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
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Speaker 1 (18:57):
Welcome back in.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
A couple of stories worth tracking. Consumer prices rose 3.4%
inflation numbers that came out this morning.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Why does that matter?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
If you strip out oil and gas, I know, I know,
Inflation was at 2.4%, which is very, very close to
the overall goal of 2%. And again, a lot of
times you say, okay, what do you mean by strip
out oil and gas? Because they can fluctuate. Price of
oil right now, $ 98, as I am looking right now
(19:29):
on Fox Business. The price of oil and gas can
fluctuate substantially.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
And so.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
If you strip that out and look at the cost
of everything else, 2.4%.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
They are continuing with.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
The 9-11 ceremonies, and Buck, I was telling you that
I was curious what the New York Times might be doing.
Among other things, they have a story about how Islamophobia
shaped an entire generation of New Yorkers, which is they're
doing basically the Norm MacDonald meme. The headline is, Buck,
(20:07):
after 9-11... Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers.
The attacks unleashed a wave of hate, but the years
since have seen Muslim Americans' political and cultural influence grow.
And this, of course, calls to mind Norm Macdonald saying,
what terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a
(20:29):
nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans, imagine the backlash
against peaceful Muslims. And this is the story. That was,
by the way, a Norm Macdonald tweet from 2016. And
it oftentimes, a decade later, is reiterated on a regular
level again. uh, in the media, which continues to cover
(20:51):
nine 11 as primarily an issue for Muslims, as opposed to, uh,
a issue with Muslims killing a lot of innocent people
based on a perverted version of a religion.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Oh, there's so much here to make sure we have
clarity on and not allow the rewriting of this history
to occur the way that many on the left want
it to. Uh, I would just note that the real, uh,
lesson if you will about islamophobia post 9-11 is that
(21:23):
like so many other things the left is obsessed with
white supremacists and neo-nazis a country was attacked by 19
out of 19 muslim terrorists okay they're all 19 out
of the 19 hijackers and there were others obviously and
there was zacharias musawi and and there were people back
in the caves in afghanistan so to speak they weren't
(21:44):
really caves necessarily but who were planning all this they
were all muslims We're attacked by them all. And the
number of hate crimes and all this sort of thing
that occurred after 9-11 was de minimis. And people can
argue with that, but it's just true. The American people
did not hold their Muslim friends and neighbors to be
(22:07):
responsible for something that.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
They didn't do.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
And this is the right thing, of course, but I'm
just saying it showed what an incredibly tolerant society is.
actually America is, despite all of the whining about Islamophobia.
And then Islamophobia really was deployed, I would argue, as
a weapon years later in many conversations about why do
(22:30):
we have so many problems coming out of the Muslim
world in the form of the worst ideologies and the
worst terrorist groups on the planet. The Buddhists weren't doing it.
The Muslims weren't doing it. You know, we were in
this war on noticing for a while. You're not allowed
to notice that al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Moro Islamic
(22:55):
Liberation Front.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
You know, just list them all. All Muslim terrorist groups
all over the world. And we're supposed to be like, oh,
but it's, you know, and this is.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Why when George Bush says the religion of peace thing,
you know, he's just wrong. I mean, you can argue
that it's not a religion of war. You could argue
that That's arguable, but it's definitely not a religion of
peace uniformly.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
It's just not true. There are, you know, you know
what a religion of peace is? Quakers. The Amish, you know,
or the, I'm sorry, the Quakers. Thank you. That's what
I was looking for. The Quakers. They're a religion of peace.
Islam is not a religion of peace. Okay. This is absurd.
And people say, oh, but are you an Islamic scholar?
This is like when you say I can tell the
(23:38):
difference between a man and a woman. No, I'm not an.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
Islamic scholar, but I have newspaper access and have for
the last 20 years.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
And I've seen what religion has had a lot of
people blowing people up all over the world for really
bad reasons and really vicious ways. And guess what?
Speaker 3 (23:53):
The Amish have been really quiet. The Muslims around the
world have not. Again, just noticing this. People can try
to parse this in a million different ways. And you say, oh,
it's a small percentage. Well, okay, Clay, it's a small percentage.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
And like I said, you always have to do this
sort of preamble. Yes, of course, there are peaceful Muslims
and live in America, and they're our neighbors and our
friends and our family members and everything else.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
It's all true.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
But there are great people who live in the Soviet Union, too.
Doesn't mean communism is good, right? It doesn't mean you
can't talk about the ideology that is behind this. There
are warm, loving people who are behind the Iron Curtain.
It was no fault of their own. And maybe they
believe in communism at some level. Doesn't mean we can't
talk about the ideology, right? Doesn't mean we can't talk
about the beliefs and whether the beliefs are causing problems.
(24:42):
And so this was a very, for about 20 years,
this was a constant discussion post 9-11. And you had
people who really made a career in out of pretending that,
you know, there's nothing to see here.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
There's no problem with Islam. In fact, the problem is
coming from our fighting against it.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
I think it's actually unfortunately applied in many parts of
American life, even more so today, because you can go
through a large, for instance, violent crime. There are lots
of shows out there that would not tell you the
statistic that I'm about to give you. Most murders in
the United States are committed between black men between the
(25:22):
ages of 16 and 40 years old.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
That's the truth, right?
Speaker 2 (25:27):
So if you went out and you said, okay, there's
going to be, it appears there's going to be around
14,000 murders this year in the United States, about 7,000
roughly of those murderers will be black men between the
ages of 16 and 40. That makes people uncomfortable because
the black male population of between 16 and 40 Most
murders are committed, by the way, between men 16 and 40,
(25:48):
just FYI, not a surprise. It's not sexist to point
out that men commit most murders. It's only about 2%
of the population. So about 2% of the United States
population commits half of all murders. So if you want
to address murder in the United States, you're overwhelmingly going
to have to arrest way more black guys than you
are anybody else. Now, that makes people uncomfortable because when
(26:13):
you look at the data, this is not a uniform,
evenly applied danger, right? There is not in modern society,
to my knowledge, Buck, you can correct me if I'm wrong,
there are not austere Christian religious scholars murdering people in
other countries because they believe they are being driven by
(26:34):
Jesus to do so. That is not a regular problem.
There are certainly not Muslim countries that are having Christians
fly airplanes into their buildings. I think if you ask
the average people who are building tall buildings in the
Middle East, hey, who are you afraid of when it
comes to danger? Most of them would say Muslim terrorists.
(26:55):
They know better than anybody. This is why you stand
in line at the TSA because of Islamic terrorism. You
have to be patted down and go through all this
every time you go to the airport because of the
history of Islamic terrorism and Islamic hijacking of airplanes, not
just on 9-11 but along. Yeah, sorry, Buck, to cut
you off, but to this point, remember when they were
(27:17):
trying to evenly apply TSA and women with bottles that
they were feeding their children with? They were being patted
down and the liquids were being tested as if they
were the danger that might be blowing up the plane.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
I view that as a kind of a harbinger of
what we dealt with with COVID, where the whole point
was to make you believe the stupid rules to make
people feel better. Right. You had to do the stupid
things that were absurd. They had to check the 90-year-old
Asian woman. They had to go make her stand up
at TSA and pat her down and go through all
(27:52):
this stuff because, yeah, that's how they're really going to
sneak in the bomb. But, Clay, this also reminds me,
because I've had to do this before. I was on
CNN where they tried to do the most terrorism comes
from the right, and they showed a chart on the screen,
and I will never forget this. Where do you think
they started their chart probably 2002 oh no 2002 and
(28:16):
i just i just had to laugh like you guys
are just a clown show i mean cnn there this
was big at cnn for a long time they would
have these like very very huffy uh muslim scholars and
stuff on you can go back and see i used
to argue with these people in fact some of you
probably saw me for the first time being the one
guy who would go on cnn When there was a
mass casualty terrorist attack, whether it was like the Bataclan
(28:37):
theater massacre in Paris, which by the people don't even
realize they mutilated people there. They actually took captives, the
jihadist psychopaths in Paris, the Bataclan, they mutilated people just
for sport, just because they could. It wasn't even just
shooting people. Or you look at the Bastille Day truck attack,
(28:59):
which I was on TV talking about, and CNN would
put people on the air.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
You know what the thing was?
Speaker 3 (29:04):
They would put someone on the air, preferably somebody who
had an Arabic accent, and they would have them say,
the real problem is Islamophobia. And this became the thing
on the left for a long time, was that you
were never allowed to talk about, we had a problem,
and it was a strain of Islam or a strain
(29:26):
of believers within the two billion Muslims around the world
were engaged in a violent, jihad against the west i
mean that's just the way it was so you might
say what happened to that We killed a lot of them,
which doesn't get talked about very much. And actually, the
Obama administration, as much as they got a lot of
(29:46):
heat for this, killed a lot of very bad guys
in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Clay, with those drones. I mean,
that was, we've been going after them for a long,
and look, he got bin Laden. But we've been killing
these guys all over the world for a long time.
Trump obviously got Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, which led to Shane Gillis'
beautiful dogs routine, which is one of the funniest things
(30:08):
Shane Gillis has ever done. But I just bring all
this up because people need to remember this history. We
call it the GWAT, the Global War on Terror. I mean,
it really was the global war on jihadism. I mean,
it was an Islamic radicalism that we were fighting. And
it took us 20 years to basically get out of
that era. It really wasn't until right before COVID where
(30:30):
it was, OK, things seem to have calmed down. We
don't have quite as much jihadism clay going on. And
the Democrats in this country all the time were, oh,
it's not really a problem. It's not the real the
real extremist clay where the right wing extremists were the
you know, and I saw this when I was working counterterrorism,
particularly the NYPD intelligence division, where just to make everybody happy.
(30:52):
We're like, OK, we'll look for we'll look for neo-Nazi terrorism, too.
It was a really boring desk to work on, let
me tell you. Really boring desk.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
If you remember going through soon after 9-11, moms carrying babies,
they were making a big deal about whether they could
bring breast milk through the TSA checkpoints because they had
to make sure in the liquids it was very important
that we all make sure that moms out there weren't
going to bring down the plane with their breast milk.
(31:26):
I mean, this was a real thing that was going on.
And to your point, Buck, yes, the reason why we
have to go through TSA is because of Muslim terrorists.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
That's legitimately the reason the TSA exists, not for anybody else.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, and these are all reminders, of course, of 9-11.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
Whenever you go to the airport and you're in a
long line, it's because there are people who think that
they have a right to go and blow up a
lot of innocent people because they're unhappy about historical geopolitical
grievances there you go that and they they feel justified
in doing that same thing with hamas by the way
and dealing with israel they feel like they can go
kill anyone they want because they're unhappy about what has
(32:05):
been going on uh in geopolitics so yeah all right
if you're out there and you're thinking to yourself my
goodness It's been a tough week. Yesterday was the Charlie
Kirk one-year anniversary. This year, 25th anniversary of 9-11. Boom, boom,
you're headed into the weekend. You're probably going to be
watching a lot of football. At least that's what I'm
going to be doing. I watch football Wednesday night. I
(32:26):
watch football Thursday night. I'm going to be watching tonight
Mizzou going up against Kansas. Really great historical rivalry there, Buck.
You know, that's all started back during the decisions about
slave versus free states. Missouri and Kansas have been going
back and forth. That's where John Brown came from. For
those of you who are Harper's Ferry historians, that's where
(32:50):
this whole John Brown era started. Bleeding Kansas, all of
that era. Well, now, thankfully, it's just a big football rivalry.
And I think Mizzou's going to win.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
And I think the over is going to hit in
tonight's game between Missouri and Kansas. Again, sorry, Kansas fans.
Mizzou is going to win in cover, and the over
is going to hit. If you agree or disagree with me,
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(33:23):
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(34:07):
between Mizzou and Kansas.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Sorry, Jayhawks.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
It's going to be M-I-Z for the win and the cover.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Welcome back in here to Clay and Buck. We're going
to continue with our 9-11 remembrance today, the 25th anniversary
of 9-11. Our friend Steve Yates will be joining us shortly.
And he was in the government, in the executive branch,
When this all happened, and he'll share some of his
thoughts on that, too, and even a look ahead to
(34:39):
where we are today. So we'll talk to Steve Yates,
who has Nation States with Yates, which is the best
national security-focused podcast you can listen to anywhere. So please
go and subscribe to it on the Clay and Buck
Podcast Network. Clay, we're going to pivot from this, but
I do want to just get this out there because
we are going to talk about it later. Today, the
(35:00):
story is the 25th anniversary of 9-11, clearly. I mean,
that is where our focus is. Our hearts and minds
are with that, first and foremost. There is also a
story that we will talk about, which is a continuation
of the other biggest news cycle-based story recently. The short
version is, my friends, it has come out that the
(35:20):
one man who refused to go along with the Lindsay
Clancy is not guilty by reason of insanity outcome on
that jury was was a black man and this is
very interesting because we sit here and say hero of
course a man of conviction a man of courage but
(35:41):
clay now the left the democrats the lindsey clancy libs
they're in a weird position weirder than they thought identity
politics creates not truth But it creates oppression narratives. And
the person who is the most oppressed is seen as
the victor in all disputes. So when there are 11
(36:07):
white people yelling at a black guy, you have to
find her not guilty. And they're trying to get him removed.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
From the jury. It definitely is very intriguing.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Now, to my knowledge, this black juror on the Lindsay
Clancy case has not spoken in any way publicly yet.
But Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire asked a good
question that I would actually love to see play out.
What would happen if that juror, that black male juror
who refused to vote not guilty on Lindsay Clancy murdering
her children, what would happen if he asserted that he
(36:39):
found it to be racist the way that the white
jurors who favored Lindsay Clancy were behaving? That would be
an amazing scene. Buck, we also have Oprah hosting an event.
where a black mom said, we have to also honor
black women, basically, who kill their kids, too.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
It's a crazy time.
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