9/11 Killed Charlie Kirk Too
Provocative, but hear me out...
Today marks the 24th anniversary of 9/11.
But this is a particularly somber anniversary, as these things have gone, because yesterday we lost activist Charlie Kirk to an assassin’s bullet. It puts a new filter on today’s recognitions. It is important not to let the specter of this unimaginable horror erase the specter of that unimaginable horror 24 years ago.
Today, my grief is all mixed up. That fateful September day in 2001 is colliding with yesterday’s fate and it feels silly to pretend they aren’t somehow connected.
I think they are. I think 9/11 killed more than the citizens lost that day…it killed Charlie Kirk yesterday too. Let me explain.
Some of you might not be old enough to remember the aftermath of 9/11, but it was much more than throwing our country into endless wars in the Middle East. President George Bush gave us some very inspiring words that day, but in the following days he also delivered a curse to this nation.
The religion of peace
As Americans were reeling from the cold realization that some people hate us enough to fly planes into our buildings, Bush did not lean into that, instead choosing to scold Americans for looking suspiciously upon the tenants of Islam. He used the power of the Oval Office to make a national pronouncement - Islam is the religion of peace, and we are not at war with their religion.
To help prove his point, the Bush administration opened the floodgates of Muslim immigration. Minneapolis, New York City, Dearborn…the current-day iteration of these cities can be directly traced to the Bush administration’s efforts to normalize Islam.
Intelligent Americans were rightly nervous about this position, and pushed back. Many opinion articles were penned about Islam and its incompatibility with Western culture. This is the exact point the legacy media began to shift from slightly biased to complete sycophants for the Democratic Party. They began to see it as their mission to root out the “racism” of the right. They ran story after story on poor Muslim immigrants facing racism in a post-9/11 America. Every crime that involved a Muslim was swept under the rug. Every Islamic attack on this soil was explained away or outright ignored. If we happened to be lucky enough to notice, the media told us we were racists for noticing it.
Sound familiar?
9/11 was the point the progressive left started seriously policing the culture. Cancel culture began there. The “words are violence” insanity began there. The extreme version of identity politics we now accept as normal began there. The suggestion that recognizing unpleasant realities about certain identity groups is a hate crime began there.
George Bush assured us we needed to open our nation to an influx of unvetted Muslim “refugees” as a way to show the world we didn’t deserve to be attacked. He promised us if we took the war to the Middle East, we could stop terrorism from coming to our own shores instead.
Look around. Is America safer from terrorism in 2025?
No. It has only gotten worse since that terrifying day. All that blood and treasure spilled on foreign soil and what do we have to show for it? A communist Islamist is about to become the mayor of New York City, innocent women are being murdered on trains for simply minding their own business, and Charlie Kirk is dead at the hands of an assassin.
The progressive “snowflake” culture was supercharged after 9/11, and particularly after George Bush wagged his finger at Americans for even suggesting Islam is a problem for our country. That was where the arguments of “justified violence/justified terrorism” were born, and that was where the discussions of what kind of speech deserves to be punished were ignited.
And that is what led us, over the long, painful journey of 24 years, to yesterday’s assassination of a young husband and father who was doing nothing (and DID NOTHING) but sharing his opinions. I believe we can trace a direct line from President Bush’s scolding to now. 9/11 was the moment the insane Americans among us were given permission to express their violent fantasies. That was the moment they realized there was power in speech control and thought control. That was the moment they realized they could saddle right-thinking Americans with violent impulses by simply labeling their natural instincts of self-preservation as racist.
That attitude opened the door to a Muslim problem that is now taking over entire cities.
That attitude opened the door to censorship, 9/11, the Steve Scalise shooting (probably the Vegas shooting too), progressive riots, Black Lives Matter, cancel culture, and every other diabolical effort to crush debate and discussion and cuff Americans with progressive chains.
9/11 was the very beginning of “you can’t say that out loud” culture, and it’s what Charlie was fighting when he was murdered.
The evil attacks on our nation on 9/11 took nearly 3,000 American lives…but yesterday they took one more.
This time, we cannot allow excuses to be made.
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What an astonishing essay. I really think you've put your finger on it, Ms. Davis. Well said.