Never Forget

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

All America, all the time. Sit down, buckle up, and get ready for The Dan Bongino Show.

Shawn Farash (0:12)

Good morning and welcome to The Dan Bongino Show. It's Shawn Farash filling in. It is the 25th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. And obviously that is going to be a major, that's what the entire show is about. It's titled Never Forget. Because unfortunately, as we've seen, whether it's because of education or toxic social media algorithms or just this, this short attention span that our nation finds itself in. You say never forget, and we've been saying it for 25 years. And somehow, that message just isn't sinking in for some. A lot of people forgot or are in the process of forgetting. Or they're in the process of erasing what happened 25 years ago today. I will give you today in this episode the perspective of someone who was in 5th grade. That was me. On Long Island, about 40 miles east of New York City. And the aftermath and what that meant, and all the details that I can remember, and all the conversations and things involving 9-11 that I have been through, and I mean to say for pity, I mean to just have experienced since that day. And we will not retcon. We will not sugarcoat. And we will not distort or pervert what happened on that day to fit an agenda. We're just going to tell you the truth. It's hard to believe it was 25 years ago to this day that those attacks happened. But it has been that long. But it still feels fresh. So we'll get to all that. And a whole lot more revolving around 9-11 today, the September 11th attacks 25 years ago. Before we do that, I want to get to a word from our friends at American Financing. It's American Financing. Folks, everyday expenses keep climbing. And high credit card interest isn't making life any easier. If your budget is feeling squeezed lately, there is a smarter way to take back control. 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As you know, you can catch my show live every day, one o'clock Eastern time, rumble.com/sean, S-H-A-W-N, rumble.com/bonginoreport. The show is called Shawn Farash Live. We will be there again, of course, today, and on the radio show, Bongino Report PM, every day at three o'clock Eastern time as well. 9-11, 25 years ago, today. Is a goldmine of a piece, written by one of my favorite writers in the space, David Strom. He writes for hotair.com. He's got a really cool style. And he wrote just a banger of a piece yesterday, sorry, two days ago on September 9th, regarding 9-11 and what a lot of people have tried to do to the narrative surrounding September 11th for a number of different agendas. David Strom leads off the piece by saying, 25 years after the terrorist attacks, I, David, remember 9-11 as if it were yesterday. Although I can't remember dates to save my life, I can name things I did just before or just after that day because 9-11 is an anchor that is seared into my mind. And I can tell you, it's one of those things where everyone knows, you know, if you were old enough, you know where you were when John F. Kennedy was shot or when Martin Luther King was shot. And, you know, I was in fifth grade. I was 10 years old in elementary school. It's the beginning of the school year, right? September 11th. So very early on in the school year. And I can tell you, I mean, the rumors started to spread around the elementary school that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I remember being in the lunchroom and hearing this rumor and kind of thinking like this is ridiculous, but like who would make something like that up? One thought it was a small plane, etc. There were some children in that school. And in, you know, in the fifth grade with a different teacher who had it on in the classroom. But our teacher didn't do that. But all of a sudden, I remember a lot of people getting signed out of school. A lot of kids getting signed out of school, which was weird. But then I remember getting signed out of school, which was something that basically never happened. You know, it was like the rule basically was if I didn't have a fever, I wasn't getting pulled from school. So I get in the car after getting signed out, I could tell something's wrong. I already heard the rumors about, you know, 9-11, but my mom picked me up from school that day. And the look on her face, it just wasn't what I was used to seeing. Clearly something, clearly something devastating had happened. And she told me that the Twin Towers were not there anymore. I'm sitting there in fifth grade, going, what do you mean they're not there? These things are huge. And she explained to me, terrorist attacks and this is what happened. And I'll tell you, I mean, not having, I could not imagine if we had actual family members and people who we were extremely close to who were in there that day. But boy, I'll tell you what, fifth grade, 10 years old, it'll screw with your head. You're used to life a certain way, you're a kid, right, so you're, there's an innocence about you. And then to know that such evil exists and would kill thousands of people in the blink of an eye, because they wanted to, because of a religious motivator, whatever, it was a slap across the face. I mean, there was a news broadcast I was watching on YouTube, and, you know, the guy said, if you're a child and you're watching this and you don't have a parent next to you, I don't know what to say, and I don't know how you even begin to understand it. I mean, I didn't fully understand exactly, I still don't fully understand it, but, you know, we have a greater understanding now, you know, a lot more about the dynamics at play, you know, we're a lot more connected, you could do a little bit more research about these dynamics and such. But I remember that, I mean, I never got signed out of school. I'm talking never, right? And getting, I mean, we had a tropical, two years earlier, we had tropical storm Floyd on Long Island. I was like the last kid in the class. I get out my mom, it's just rain, it's okay. I was like, we're in like a tropical storm. People are getting signed out left and right. You left me in the school. It was just, so I knew something was up that day. And the aftermath of that was obviously very significant. Strom continues on this piece, and I'm sure that's true for everybody, right? That this is one of those things that has just seared into your mind. For those of us who were adults or teens at the time, there was a pre 9-11 America and a post 9-11 America. I somewhat remember that pre 9-11 America because our family used to travel a lot when I was younger. And things changed in the airport after that. As I'd mentioned before, for folks who were at that point, in that 9-11 range, too young to remember the Kennedy assassination, same thing. For us, it was 9-11. For us, it was 9-11. That was that watershed moment. And the problem that I have now, because I know the impact that it had on me, and I know the impact that it had on so many people. I wanted to explain something to you. If you're not from New York, the dynamic on Long Island at that time, early 2000s, and it had been that way for a while, there were a lot of people on Long Island that worked for the New York City FDNY, Fire Department, or NYPD. And it's still like that today, but it was very prevalent then. There were a lot of people, or maybe he didn't work as FDNY or NYPD. My dad used to work in the city. He used to get on a train and go to work every day in New York City. And a lot of folks who lived out there on Long Island would either, they would find somewhere to work on the island, but a lot of folks would go into the city and work there. But they would come out of the city and live in a more peaceful environment, which Long Island isn't very peaceful anymore. It's not bad in terms of crime, it's just a lot of people, it's crowded. But the island was very much tied, and still is in a way, but back then very much tied to New York City. 40 miles east of the city, I remember the following day in school, there were still fighter jets flying, right? Scrambling, you know, they were in the airspace and things of that nature. I remember the first time that day that I saw a commercial jetliner, a plane, we've flown on a bunch of planes like that, flying into a building. Just, how could people be so consumed with hatred to think that that's the way they should behave?