Christopher Hitchens: ”In 1786, when the United States was barely a country, it was having its sailors taken as slaves by the Barbary states, the states of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Tripoli, shores of Tripoli. Ships stopped, its crews carried off into slavery. We estimate 1.5 million European and American slaves taken between 1750 and 1815.
Jefferson and Adams went to their ambassador in London and said, why do you do this to us? The United States has never had a quarrel with the Muslim world of any kind. We weren't in the crusades. We weren't at war with Spain. Why do you do this to our people and our ships? Why do you plunder and enslave our people? The ambassador said very plainly, Mr. Abdul Rahman said, because the Quran gives us permission to do so, because you are infidels, and that's our answer. Jefferson said, well, in that case, I will send a navy which will crush your state, which he did.
Islamic fundamentalism is not created by American democracy. It's a lie to say so. It's a masochistic lie, and it excuses those who are the real criminals, and blames us for the attacks made upon us.”
The morning of September 11th, 2001, started like any other Tuesday at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.
Lt. Heather Penney was running training drills in her F-16, perfecting maneuvers she'd practiced a thousand times before.
Then everything changed.
The radio crackled: all aircraft, return immediately.
America was under attack. By the time she touched down, the Twin Towers had been struck. The Pentagon, just fifteen miles away, was burning. And intelligence reported another hijacked plane heading straight for Washington.
Heather and her commanding officer got the order: suit up, get airborne, intercept that plane. But there was a problem. Their F-16s were loaded for training exercises, not combat. No live missiles. No ammunition capable of taking down a commercial airliner. Just practice rounds and fuel tanks.
That's when the impossible order came through her headset: stop that aircraft by any means necessary.
Heather understood immediately what those words meant. If she couldn't shoot down the hijacked Boeing 757, she would have to physically ram it with her fighter jet. A deliberate midair collision at hundreds of miles per hour. No ejection possible.
No parachute. No survival.
She was twenty-six years old. A fighter pilot for less than two years. The daughter of a United Airlines pilot who flew the same type of aircraft now being used as weapons.
Her commanding officer's voice came through: I'II take the cockpit, you take the tail. They were dividing the target between them, ensuring the plane would go down even if one of them missed.
Heather's response was two words: Roger that.
She strapped in, fired up the engine, and rocketed into the sky over Washington, breaking the sound barrier above the capital, something normally forbidden.
The sonic booms rattled windows across the city, a thunderous announcement that American fighters were responding.
As she climbed toward intercept altitude, her mind raced through questions no training had prepared her for. What part of the fuselage should she aim for? What speed? What angle would guarantee the plane went down immediately?
She scanned the skies, searching for United Flight 93. Searching for the target she would destroy with her own body. Accepting, with each passing second, that she was flying toward certain death.
But she never found the plane. Because two hundred miles away, the passengers had already made their choice. They'd stormed the cockpit. Flight 93 crashed into a Pennsylvania field at 10:03am
Heather flew patrol over Washington for hours afterward, protecting skies that had already been saved by ordinary Americans who refused to be weapons. When she finally landed, her crew chief had tears in his eyes. He hadn't expected to see her again. Neither had she.
🙏♥️🇺🇸
You are a disgrace. Young people are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands. You don’t give a damn. Women are treated like animals. You don’t give a damn. The Islamist regime has murdered a thousand Americans. You don’t give a damn. They build ballistic missiles/ICBMs and are hellbent in developing nuclear warheads to obliterate our country. You don’t give a damn. The fund terrorist groups against us. You don’t give a damn. “No war with Iran.” Iran is at war with us, genius! But you’re so beholden to the ideological Marxists for your career you just don’t give a damn.
ALEX CLARK: “What do you say when people say, ‘Well, you’re not a doctor,’ whenever you talk about this [vaccines]?”
JENNY MCCARTHY: “I say, you’re absolutely right. I’m not a doctor, and NEITHER IS BILL GATES!”
“So why is Bill Gates, during the whole pandemic, on every single freaking talk show, talking about getting the COVID vaccine? ‘You should get the COVID vaccine.’ But everyone’s like, ‘You’re right, Bill Gates.’ But then, when Jenny McCarthy talks about DOING YOUR OWN RESEARCH, I’m not a doctor.”