People keep saying @jk_rowling would help me get an attorney and continue my fight for women’s safety here in America. Well I hope yall make this post viral and maybe she will see it. https://t.co/DAmwho6oJI
I don’t care what anyone says,
Sydney Sweeney didn’t set women back decades.
OnlyFans did.
Men competing in women’s sports did.
Lindsay Clancy’s defenders did.
“Sex work is work” did.
Dylan Mulvaney did.
DEI did.
Calling women “birthing people” did.
The total mainstreaming of porn did.
Treating stay-at-home moms like they wasted their lives did.
A beautiful actress isn’t the problem.
A culture that stopped protecting women is.
Tell me I’m wrong. 🤷♂️
On September 11, both towers of the World Trade Center came down less than one hundred yards from a 235-year-old church.
Not one of its windows broke.
For the next eight months, it did not close. Not once. Not for a single hour.
St. Paul's Chapel opened in 1766. It is the oldest church building in Manhattan. On April 30, 1789, George Washington walked out of his inauguration as the first President of the United States and came straight here to pray. His pew is still inside.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a hundred and ten stories of steel fell in the churchyard's direction.
A sycamore tree on the corner of the property, about a hundred years old, took the hit. A steel beam that should have gone through the chapel wall went into the tree instead. The sycamore was torn out by its roots.
The chapel behind it stood. Every pane of glass intact. Only the organ was damaged by dust.
Within days, the church made a decision.
Across the street, thousands of firefighters, police, ironworkers, and volunteers were digging through sixteen acres of rubble for the dead. They were working twelve and sixteen hour shifts. They had nowhere to sit. Nowhere to eat. Nowhere to sleep. Nowhere to be a human being for ten minutes.
So St. Paul's opened its doors. And it left them open, twenty-four hours a day, until May 30, 2002.
Here is what the inside of a church looked like for those eight months.
The choir loft became a dormitory. Cots in rows. Firefighters too exhausted to make it home to Queens or Brooklyn slept there in their turnout gear.
The pews became beds. Men in steel-toed boots lay down on 235-year-old wood and slept for an hour, and got up, and went back to the pile.
Three thousand meals a day. Breakfast, sandwiches, bagels, coffee, and, because New York restaurants were sending whatever they had, Thai food, Italian, Mexican. One volunteer put it simply. If it was Monday, it was meatloaf.
George Washington's pew, the one he knelt in as the first President of this country, became the podiatry station.
Volunteer foot doctors sat there and treated blisters and torn-open feet. The workers were spending sixteen hours a day on twisted steel and broken glass. Their feet were destroyed. A podiatrist would sit them down in Washington's pew, take off their boots, and go to work.
The volunteers said the podiatrists were the most popular people in the building.
Chiropractors worked the aisles. Massage therapists set up tables. Musicians came and played, quietly, so that men who had been pulling bodies out of the ground for twelve hours could sit with their eyes closed and hear something that was not a diesel engine.
More than five thousand volunteers passed through, in twelve-hour shifts, around the clock, for eight months. They came from every state. Most of them had never been to New York. They made beds. They served meals. They washed dishes. They sat with firefighters who did not want to talk and did not want to be alone.
The clergy wore a vestment during services, and workers started pinning their patches to it. FDNY. NYPD. Port Authority. Ironworkers Local 40. Search and rescue teams from Texas and California. By the end it was covered.
Outside, the wrought-iron fence around the churchyard filled up. Flags. Photographs of the missing. Children's drawings. Rosaries. Letters. It stretched the full length of the block. A wall of grief in front of a building that had somehow come through untouched.
A poet who volunteered there said it this way. What happened at Ground Zero was hate. What happened at St. Paul's was the reverse of it.
On May 30, 2002, the recovery operation officially ended. That same day, St. Paul's held a closing service for the workers, and the eight-month ministry ended.
The church cleaned up. They repaired the organ. They refinished the floors.
But there was one thing they decided not to fix.
The pews.
Two hundred and thirty-five years old, and now covered in scratches and gouges. From steel-toed boots. From tool belts. From men who lay down in them, for an hour, in the middle of the worst days of their lives.
The church left every mark.
They are still there.
You can walk in today, sit down where a firefighter slept in October 2001, and run your hand along the wood, and feel where his belt buckle caught.
The roots of the sycamore are cast in bronze in the churchyard now.
The tree died. The church lived. And then it spent eight months keeping other people alive.
Not one window broke.
Not one door closed. 🇺🇸
At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating.
So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual.
They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive.
More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground.
That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something.
The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her.
She was the last.
After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody.
Nobody.
Day after day.
The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone.
A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite.
It was breaking them.
An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next.
They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers.
The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in.
Picture that.
A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog.
And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive.
And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates.
They called them mock finds.
They did it for the dogs.
They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for.
One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors.
But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur.
One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers.
Corliss asked where his friend was.
The man pointed at the pile.
"He's in there somewhere."
He kept petting the dog.
Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11.
On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep.
Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past.
They draped her in an American flag on the way out.
Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living.
They found one.
And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart.
That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really.
Nobody could save the dead.
So they saved each other. 🇺🇸
They do this to little girls every single day because men won’t marry an uncut girl. In Somalia, they do it in private homes with no anesthetic. In the US and the UK, it’s done in doctor’s offices with modern pain meds, but that doesn’t make it any less barbarous.
This is what feminism was born to fight, but modern liberal feminists turn a blind eye because it goes against their narrative about how white men are the epitome of evil and Islam is a religion of peace. They ignore unimaginable female suffering because the people causing it aren’t the ones their ideology tells them to oppose.
@mkhammer Fell in love with my future husband the day we were playing pool and it was my turn to break but I didn’t sink any balls. He said, “ Good God, Dolly Parton! All busy and no balls!” 🤣🤣🤣
A cleric in Iran just announced that if a woman gets to choose her own clothes, then a man gets the right to rape her.
Do not scroll past that. Read it twice.
That is not a slip of the tongue. That is not a fringe opinion from the back of a mosque. That is Kazem Rohbakhsh an official worldview of the Islamic Republic of Iran, finally spoken without the mask.
For 45 years this regime has told women they are the problem. Cover yourself, or you "tempt" men. Dress modestly, or you "deserve" what comes next. And now the punchline, straight from the cleric's mouth: If you dare to be free, then we are free to sexually assault you.
Let me be clear about something.
That is the whole ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran in one sentence. A regime so terrified of women that it believes your only choice is a headscarf or a predator.
So here is my answer to the mullah, in simple words:
Women don’t need to cover themselves to control men’s behavior. Men need to control themselves.
A woman's body is not a bargaining chip. Our freedom is not a crime. And your "right to rape" is not a right. It is a confession. A confession that your ideology is too weak to win a single woman's heart, so you must crush her body instead.
One of the all-time great Rock Hall moments: Dolly’s “Jolene” with Rob Halford (Judas Priest), Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox, Simon Le Bon (Duran Duran), Pink, and Sheryl Crow. Zac Brown Band held it down as the house band.
Rest easy, Dolly 🤘
This is Marziyeh a woman from my country Iran. Look at her face. She had acid thrown on her face because her hijab was considered “inappropriate.”
Two things about her story break my heart.
First: for more than a decade, I have watched powerful female politicians from the West visit my country, cover their hair, and tell us they are doing it to “respect Iranian culture.”
Iranian culture didn’t do this to her. Theocracy did.
Compulsory hijab is not our culture. It is the culture of those who use religion to control women. Iranian women have paid with prison, lashes, their eyes, their faces, and sometimes their lives for saying NO to it.
Second: the United Nations elected the Islamic Republic to its Commission on the Status of Women.
Yes. The regime that brutalizes women over their hair was chosen to help oversee women’s rights.
That’s like putting the arsonist on the fire-safety committee.
So that is why I am determined to ate the West to respect women. Not the Islamic Ideology that destroy our lives.
My speech at United Against Gender confers Apartheid in Berlin
Look at the greedy colonialist Jews (in red) expanding into the small territory of the Muslims (in green). Remember, Israel is a colonizing project but Islam is a peaceful religion that did not spread via colonialism.