As I’ve gotten older and reflected on 9/11, I’ve realized how much I truly experienced that day through a child’s eyes.
I was in 10th grade. I was just about to turn 15. My dad was in the Pentagon that morning.
I can still remember nearly every moment of it, though I understand now that memory is a tricky thing. Images shift. Details blur or sharpen with time. But as different pieces of that day have slotted and settled into place in my mind, I have increasingly come to understand just how profoundly September 11 shaped my life.
There are the obvious consequences - my decision to go to West Point, my time in Afghanistan, my work years later helping evacuate people from that same country. But 9/11 did more than shape my professional life. It profoundly altered my relationship with America.
For so many people, the years that followed corrupted something small inside them. Disappointment became cynicism. Then cynicism hardened into bitterness. And from those seeds, conspiratorial trees began to grow.
I harbor no illusions about the limitations of our government - the mistakes made in waging war, the terrible costs of some of those decisions, or our failures in managing what came afterward. I have known many who died in those wars, and many more who died after coming home, taking their own lives because, somewhere along the way, we became very good at prescribing trauma and remarkably bad at prescribing the most essential elements of being human - purpose, meaning, and belonging.
I watched fellow veterans fall prey to that same disillusionment and embrace the idea that war is simply a racket; that because we had fought in wars where good intentions coexisted with terrible decisions, every war must therefore be bad, every sacrifice a manipulation, and every cause fraudulent.
And perhaps the greatest tragedy is that this is exactly what those hijackers hoped for.
Their objective was never limited to the thousands of Americans they murdered that morning. Terrorism is designed to reach beyond the bodies it destroys. It seeks to poison what remains - to replace confidence with fear, unity with suspicion, and patriotism with contempt.
They already hated this country. What greater victory could we hand them than learning to hate it too?
I have always refused to grant them that.
We used to say that we could not let the terrorists win. That choice is every bit as meaningful today as it was on September 12, 2001.
We cannot let ourselves hate America.
She is imperfect because she is human, but she and her people are also remarkably good in ways that can be difficult to quantify. We create. We innovate. We reach for the stars and then try to tame the chaos of space. We are joyous and silly and loud and overexuberant. We like things big, supersized, occasionally absurdly so - and somehow it matches the size of our hearts. We rush toward strangers in danger. We rebuild. We volunteer. We argue ferociously about what this country ought to be because, beneath all that noise, we still believe she is worth fighting over and fighting for.
I experienced 9/11 as a frightened girl who did not know whether her father was safe, and who could not possibly understand what it would mean when her country went to war.
Now I see it as a mother of two daughters.
And in an extraordinarily strange, deeply painful, almost paradoxical way, September 11 became the opening salvo in my love story with America.
Because if someone could hate her that fiercely, then we must love her more fiercely in return.
Some high school kids were talking and said “No way Gen X wrote 10-page papers without AI.”
Oh, honey.
We wrote them without reading the book…the night before they were due…by hand and in cursive.
We are not the same.
For anyone doubting any of this here is a more complete history of what's been going on in the region:
Since China invaded Tibet they have ethnically cleansed the region, shipped off all the children to re-education camps, and have begun massive tunneling and terraforming projects in the Himalayas. This has been focused on a region outside of the Nepali border that controls 4 rivers which provide to over 2.5 Billion people in Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh, and India.
The Chinese government sees these water ways as a means of controlling these other governments and has been tirelessly developing dams, hydroelectric plants, roads, tunnels, and railways to consolidate control of all the water to then strongarm these nations into Chinese dependence.
Nobody is talking about this and within a day every news outlet on earth miraculously had some "climate change" expert insisting that the reason why this flood happened was because of your car and not because of the rapid terraforming happening by the CCP.
This is intentional becuase the entire "Climate Change" alarmist movement is a CCP backed global network to brainwash the west into degrowth and Chinese imperialism. This is why the climate change experts LITERALLY NEVER talk about the CCP or denounce them.
China is the MOST pollutant country in the world, the most animal abusive, the most environmentally damaging, and these people never say a word about any of it because they are paid to.
The CCP, the Chinese, and it's national electric-water company which runs all the hydroelectric power in the country are to blame for this flood. Not you.
I’ve spent many weeks doing fieldwork in Tibet, sitting above these enormous, deeply incised Himalayan river systems and seeing firsthand just how geologically active this landscape is.
So spare me the climate-change grift every time a natural disaster strikes.
Catastrophic glacial outburst floods are not new. The 1981 Zhangzangbo GLOF released ~20 million m³ of water and debris into Nepal, with estimated peak discharge approaching 16,000 m³/s. The Himalayas experienced enormous GLOFs long before today's atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.
If it happened naturally in the past, we should expect it to happen naturally again in the future—regardless of atmospheric CO₂.
Turning a horrific loss of life into an immediate climate-change narrative without demonstrating that CO₂ caused this particular event isn't attribution. It's opportunism.
And the people exploiting tragedy to do it are grifters.
At his press conference today, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro accused me of promoting conspiracy theories because I told him, during an earlier telephone conversation, that some Americans had religious objections to the MMR vaccine because it contained fetal tissue. “There is no fetal tissue in the MMR,” he told me.
This is a segment from a videotaped deposition of Stanley Plotkin, the inventor of the MMR vaccine. Plotkin admits to butchering 76 aborted normally developing fetuses, all over three months old, in just one of the many studies that led to the development of his vaccine.
The rubella virus used in MMR-II is grown on the cultured cell line composed of lung tissue from an aborted three-month-old female embryo and listed as “WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts” in the ingredients of MMR-II as portions of these cells end up in each vial of MMR II.
During Dr. Plotkin’s deposition, Attorney Aaron Siri asked: “Isn’t it true that MMR II contains approximately 150 nanograms cells substrate double-strand DNA and single-strand DNA per dose purposefully fragmented to approximately 215 base pairs in length?” Dr. Plotkin answered: “Yeah, that’s probably correct, yes.”
This equals approximately 646 billion pieces of human DNA from an aborted fetal cell line in each vial of MMR-II.
In addition to the human DNA, there is also an unspecified amount of human cellular debris in each dose of MMR-II.
During our phone conversation, Governor Shapiro also accused me of promoting vaccine misinformation. When I asked him for an example, he was unable to provide one, but this did not deter him from publicly repeating that accusation during his press event. As I told him, HHS does not tolerate misinformation by any employee. I offered to point to hundreds of instances of vaccine misinformation by the Biden administration about which I had never heard him complain.
Governor Shapiro also faulted me for the decline in Pennsylvania vaccination rates from 97% - 93.2%. When I pushed back on this assertion, he acknowledged that most of the decline occurred during the Biden administration. It’s unfortunately true that the government lockdowns, deceptions, manipulation, and overreach during Covid severely damaged public faith in the vaccine program.
Governor Shapiro’s press conference was an example of the same species of gaslighting.
The Trump administration is working to restore public trust not by gaslighting or manipulating, but by being truthful, at last, with the public.