I remember where I was when the events of 9/11 first began to occur. Judy and I were eating breakfast at our kitchen table and watching Fox News when we first learned that an airplane had crashed into one of New York’s twin towers. Later that day, I would have driven Judy to DFW airport where she would join Sandra Miller, our software programmer, and fly to Washington DC to visit the Smithsonian, the Air and Space Museum, the Library of Congress, and other notable sites. That visit never happened.
As I was driving into work, public radio reported that a second plane had struck the second tower. To this day, 25 years later, I recall the young talking head reporter’s exact words. She said, “A second plane has struck a tower. It could be a terrorist attack, but perhaps the air traffic control system has gone terribly awry.”
Another excellent column from my friend Paul Gleiser, KTBB 97.5 FM, Tyler, Texas
Freedom itself.
by Paul Gleiser · Published September 10, 2026 · Updated September 11, 2026
Twenty-five years ago on September 11, 2001, as I was arriving at the offices and studios of KTBB to go to work, Garth Maier, then KTBB’s News & Program Director, was vigorously – almost frantically – waving at me to come into the control room to see what he was seeing on the TV monitor.
What soon became clear was that we, and indeed the entire world, were seeing in a terrible instant that freedom has enemies.
Barely four hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – when it wasn’t clear that it was safe for him to return to the White House – President George W. Bush stood at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and said:
“Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended.”
We did defend freedom.
Thousands of Americans went to war. Many of them – too many – didn’t come home. Trillions of dollars were spent. Administrations of both parties fought a conflict that changed forms, changed battlefields and ultimately outlasted much of the country’s attention span.
Yet President Bush’s words of September 11, 2001 are true today even as the battlefield upon which freedom must be defended has changed.
The conflicts in Ukraine and Iran notwithstanding, for most Americans today the fight over freedom isn’t being waged with guns, airplanes and artillery. It’s being waged with words, rhetoric and raw emotion. And the battlefields aren’t distant deserts and mountain passes. They’re college classrooms and city council chambers, social media feeds and family dinner tables.
That’s because ideas that Americans once believed were settled – ideas that were eloquently set forth in the document whose 250th anniversary we celebrated just a few weeks ago – are now very much in dispute.
An entire generation has come of age with no memory of September 11. An even larger share of Americans has no memory of the Soviet Union or of the Berlin Wall. They didn’t see the imprisonment of much of Eastern Europe. They didn’t see the boundless joy on the faces of German citizens as the wall that separated them from their own countrymen at last came down. They didn’t witness what happens when government acquires ultimate authority over the lives, property and choices of ordinary people.
And so, we’re having the argument again.
Socialism—an idea that spent much of my lifetime being discredited by the evidence of its own dismal failures—is enjoying renewed respectability in the United States. Its promises are seductive: greater fairness, greater security, greater equality.
But every such promise comes with a price. Because every decision transferred from the individual to the government necessarily transfers some measure of freedom with it. And as we have said previously, and as millions learned at the price of their very lives, as those transfers occur, the day approaches when there’s nothing left to transfer.
This younger generation inherited freedom. What it didn’t inherit is the understanding of what freedom costs.
So, again, freedom itself is under attack. And freedom must be defended
Buddy’s postscript to the above
- According to innumerable sources, Iran was within days of having a nuclear bomb when American B-1 bombers buried that nation’s nuclear stockpile undertones of rock, and Israeli aircraft sent 10 of their nuclear scientists into the arms of Mohammed’s virgins.
- Astonishingly, there are Americans who regret these acts because they have resulted in higher gas prices.
- Pray tell, dear critics, what would you have done differently to ensure gas prices remain unchanged? Would you have been content to see Iran with a bomb that they would not hesitate to use to obliterate Tel Aviv?
- There is absolutely nothing new about paying high gas prices because of Islamic religious extremism.
- For 45 years the world—not just the United States and Israel—has been paying through the nose to protect itself from Muslim fanatics.
- Paying in the form of military action, a burden mostly borne by the United States and Israel.
- And paying still more, cumulatively vastly more, to cover the not so obvious costs of all aspects of security. A similar cost burden has been borne by most other nations, including the growing number of Middle East nations who are choosing national prosperity over Iran’s monomaniacal efforts to eradicate Jews from the face of the earth.
- Just one example: according to Google AI: American Jewish communal institutions are now spending a record $1.02 billion annually on security amid persistent threats and rising safety concerns. Community leaders have described this financial burden as an alternative “tax” on Jewish life.
- Our current president is working toward the very goal I urged at the onset of this essential war! President Trump is seeking regime change, the only thing that will yield a return to sane governance in Iran.
- Absolutely nothing will change until the Islamic religious fanatics are gone.
- If that change does not happen under Pres. Trump, what future president—Republican or Democrat–will finish the job?
- Past history suggests that none will act.