Victor Davis Hanson: 25 Years After 9/11—Has America Forgotten?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc:  It’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and I know that we’ve been watching New York and [New York Mayor] Mamdani, and there are a lot of people who are not happy Mamdani might come to ceremonies commemorating those who died on 9/11.  

I was wondering if you could give us a commemoration on 9/11 itself, and then, address the controversy going on in New York. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, we hadn’t done anything to them. In fact, you could make the argument under the Clinton administration—this is 25 years ago, so 2001—we were still in the shadow of eight years of Bill Clinton, and they had bombed our embassies, for example, and they had done other stuff all over the world, and we hadn’t done much. So they were emboldened and thought… 

They really did believe one of two things, and probably both: that we would not reply and try to go after them in Afghanistan, which we drove them out, and then we destroyed the Taliban for 15 years. And we would remove one of the great sponsors of terrorism, Saddam Hussein, and they didn’t believe that would happen. And more importantly, they thought, that people would rally to their cause in the Arab world, and that didn’t happen either. 

So their plans failed. Everybody said… I went back today and looked at what people were saying 25 years ago, and they all said that a second attack of that magnitude, it was not a question of if, but only when, and that did not happen. And that was because, for all the criticism of George W. Bush, he did clamp down on global terrorism.  

And for all the problems with Homeland Security and all of the bureaucratic stuff, we did not—We had a lot of terrorism incidents, but not anything of that magnitude. 

It did change our lives. You can’t go to an airport and think, even remember, what it was like 25 years prior to this. It changed everything. 

The only lament that I have, and I think a lot of our listeners share it, if you had said after 9/11, 25 years from now, you will have a socialist instead of Rudy Giuliani or someone like him in New York.  

Instead of all those fire guys risking their lives, NYPD, you’re going to have a guy who hates them. And he’s going to be a Muslim radical, and he’s going to represent the new socialist Democratic Party and Islamicist. And he’s going to announce he will confiscate private property of landlords he doesn’t like. 

And on the commemoration day 25 years from now, he will be mayor, and he will hand a pen that he signed the proclamation of observance for 9/11 25 years earlier. And by the way, he was in Uganda as a settler colonialist with the 1% Indian community that was running 65% of the wealth in his Victoria state. 

So he comes over here, and he will hand the pen as a gift to Mr. Ramzi Kassem, who’s standing to his left. And Mr. Kassem will have been the attorney for one of the hijackers that helped kill 3,000 people.  

And in addition to that, he will—in addition to that, he will hand the pen not to Mr. Kassem, but take the iconic head, the commissioner of the NYPD, and almost as a little servant, who was the only Jewish member of his inner cabinet that he inherited, the commissioner, Ms. Tisch, who is a very capable servant. She’s of the utmost professionality. She’s wonderful, and she’s in a beleaguered sense because this guy ran on the NYPD kills people, and it’s out of control, and it should be defunded. 

So then she has to hand this pen to somebody who’s an anti-Semite and tried to get, to qualify this horrible day on 9/11 by defending one of the hijackers and his family. So that, that’s where we are now. Nobody would have imagined that, but that’s where we are. 

And we’re up to a midterms, and if you had said, as we watch those brave people trying to determine whether they should be burned alive or smashed into smithereens, and they dived headfirst from the World Trade. And if you’d said to them, while they’re falling, in 25 years there’ll be a Mr. Abdul El-Sayed, and he will be running ahead in Michigan for Senate, and he will have with him on the campaign trail an associate, as will Mamdani, Hasan Piker, who said that you—you who are falling in the air—deserved this. You deserved it, and your country deserved it. 

I never thought I could imagine that. And what is the reason for that? And very briefly, what is the problem with Europe? What is the problem with Canada? Why did we have this problem with these people— And I’m not a nativist, I’m not a protectionist, but it’s immigration, both legal and illegal. 

Because we did not vet immigrants, we gave them a blank check to come in. We have 53 million people who were not born in the United States, and we don’t know who they are. And we have an additional, of that 53 million, at least 25 to 30 million are here illegally, and they’re coming from the poorest regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. 

Since 9/11, we’ve had about four million people come from the Middle East. And they don’t like us, and they are responsible, not because of colonialism or American imperial— They allowed their countries to be socialist communists, and they failed. And then they ran over here, and they’re in Canada. 

Forty-five percent, as I said, of the Canadian population either was not born in Canada or their parents were not born. And they brought— They were used by the Left as useful idiots and let in by the Left in exchange for pushing a Leftist communist agenda. 

So when you look at the people right now, as we head to the midterms, who are the most vocal, they weren’t even here, and their parents weren’t even here during 9/11. And they have made no effort to learn what 9/11 was, or they wouldn’t say stupid things. 

If you ask them, what was the Korean War about? How many people died on D-Day? What was Freedom of Fear speech by FDR? What was the Gettysburg Address? They have no interest. Not that they don’t know anything about our history or proto— They don’t care. 

I’m talking about you, Ilhan Omar, and said, “9/11, that was… Something happened on 9/11.” Yeah, it did. Muslims of your brand came over here and slaughtered 3,000 people, and you think it’s a joke. 

And then you see Mamdani, a radical, and then you have Ms. Melat Kiros comes over here from a completely failed state and wins the lottery to come into the United States with her parents and now says that we owe Black people, as herself, reparations. 

You can be in a state like California, no history of slavery, nobody’s alive for five generations who was a slave, nobody’s alive in California that ever had relatives that were slave owners. The so-called white population is 35% of the population, 35% of the state, and she’s calling for reparations, and they’re calling it in California. 

And you look at all of those. El-Sayed, he doesn’t want to admit that he’s bragging about Sharia law. He was at a campaign event where one of the imams said he wanted to fight United States. He hates the United States. And he’s had Hasan Piker all through him. 

Hasan Piker just warned the Jews. Here’s a second-generation American who’s a multimillionaire Turk, Turkish family. He says, “Hey, you Jews, you keep pushing Israel, we’re going to come after you. People are going to come after you.” 

So that’s where we are, and I never thought it would happen. 

Sami Winc: No, me neither. It seems we’re at a critical moment in our history once again, in fact. 

Victor Davis Hanson: They should remember that when the midterms, when they said, “I’m not—I can’t vote for Trump. He said ‘New America and Lake America.’ I can’t do that. Why would he do that?” 

Well, he did that. Maybe you’d disagree or not, but you do not disagree what he did at the border and what he is trying to do to deport some of these people who came in here illegally and killed people or hate and want to damage the United States. For that one reason, that one issue, they should vote for him. 

Sami Winc: Yeah. You’re reminding me of that interview that Elon Musk did with that reporter who was talking about him cozying up to the, quote, “far right.” And he said, “I wanna—I have a beef with you and the media. What is it that you have against secure borders, safe cities, and, you know, freedom of capital?” I can’t remember what he said, but nonetheless, she just looks at him. He’s— 

They label that far right. 

Victor Davis Hanson: She either didn’t even know when she was mouthing that, or she couldn’t say what she knew. And what she said is, “Well, we have an agenda that nobody wants. Nobody wants our trans agenda. Nobody wants our defund the police, so we have to bring in new constituents. So we opened the border and we got 12 million people. We have 30 here, so we have 42, 30 or 40 million illegal aliens maybe, and they’re going to be good, loyal Democrats, especially under mail-in ballots. So take that.” 

Sami Winc: Yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: That’s what they’re saying to us. 

We hate your country. We hate the country. We wanna re-imagine it. That’s what the term is. Reimagine America. 

Same thing with… Canada’s even worse. It only has 41 million people. 

And about 18 million of them are not born in Canada. Their parents weren’t born, and they’re from— And they don’t have a capitalist economy that can create goods and services to pay the enormous tab for welfare, and that’s one of the subtexts of Mr. [Mark] Carney’s fantasy house. 

Sami Winc: All right, Victor. So when you were commemorating 9/11, you made reference to a thing we—none of us should ever forget, which is the people that were on the top of those trade towers and couldn’t get down, and they were making the decision between being burned to death and jumping hundreds of feet down. And that’s a gruesome image. 

There’s also another gruesome image these days, and it is with that trial of Lindsay Clancy, which met as a mistrial, as everybody probably knows. But some jurors have come out to discuss what went on in the juror room. And they said, you know, things—oh, he—the one juror was very disconcerting. He finally understood, having a reasonable doubt. 

And then they said this, and this is what is getting a lot of play. the juror said, “But I didn’t understand because the guy, he had the hardest time getting over the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.” 

That was—is a mind-boggling statement because how did 11 of them— 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I heard a lot of the jurors. They were all therapeutic. He wasn’t kind. He didn’t worry. He didn’t think about what she’s going through. 

And I can tell you that there was already another copycat killing where a woman just killed her child, hung him, hanged him. And, when “American Sniper” Chris Kyle, when he was killed by somebody he was trying to help who was traumatized. He was a hero of Iraq. He took this disturbed— 

And I can tell you that I’m not deprecating postpartum depression, but it’s not the same as going over to Iraq. I went to Iraq twice as an embedded reporter. I can tell you it’s not the same. 

And this distressed, traumatized guy repaid the magnanimity of these—our American sniper hero, and he shot him and killed him. And then he pleaded, “Well, I was disturbed.” 

And a Texas jury said, “You were disturbed. Yes, you were. And you were traumatized. Yes, you were. And so were 30, 40, 50,000 others that came over, but they don’t shoot and murder their friend right next to them. And you did, so we’re gonna convict you of murder,” and he is sitting in a state prison right now as I speak. 

And would you think, were there a lot of vets that were outside the courtroom and said, “This is terrible. We all suffer post… This is terrible. He’s our hero,” and not worry about the two people he butchered? No, there wasn’t. 

So there’s a sickness with this young generation of women and men. This is a Luigi Mangione. This is this new song on the internet where a woman has a million views, this rotund young woman, and she’s play-acting and wrote a song about killing Charlie Kirk, and how happy she is, and then she puts her finger to her jugular vein and starts pulling the trigger, and this is great. 

This is Hassan Piker leading a cheer about his death. This is Luigi Mangione getting a musical. It’s the same concept of these young, completely arrogant and ignorant generation that wanna virtue signal their caring or their performance or pity or… 

And they know that deep down inside, they would not want to be a child and have the mother that they, we all love and say, “Over here,” and then see her strangle your older sibling and then strangle you and then look at a baby who’s next and do this methodically, methodically and preplanned, and then said, “Well, I was depressed. I was depressed. I had postpartum depression, and I had too many …”

I have had problems after my surgery. I could not sleep because of all the drugs they gave me, 50 different drugs, and I had two huge incisions, one four-hour operation, another four. I had AFib. I had anemia. I had—I couldn’t—I’d lost four— 

Did I ever say, “Well, I took a Vicodin they gave me, and it must have, you know… They gave me a, a shot in the, I think it was kind of like an OxyContin shot, and I just freaked out”? No, no, I didn’t. 

Some—there were days in the hospital I didn’t even remember what the surgeon told me, but that’s no excuse to do something. 

And so, millions of women have births all over the United States every—in the Western Hemisphere—in the world every year, and they don’t go out and kill their children. And yet they were trying to make sure that she doesn’t have to account for that fact. 

And then the second thing they were all saying, “Well, she fell out of the balcony. She fell 13 feet. She jumped out.” Okay, so every time you got somebody who murders three people and they’re going to prison, or right before their sentence, they’re saying, “Well, I’m gonna jump out my window and I’ll probably be paralyzed. That means I don’t have to go to prison. I can stay home.” No. No. There’s something called deterrence. 

And for all you young men out there who are having problems as part of the lost generation, mostly of white males, and you’re bitter that you’ve been passed over for affirmative action reasons or DEI, and your degree is no good, and you don’t want to be an electrician or a plumber, and you’re in your basement of your parents’ proverbially, and you’re playing video games, and you’re not gonna get married, you don’t want the responsibility, you don’t want to be a father, you better be very careful when you date one of these types of women. 

You should ask them when you’re dating, “What do you feel about the Clancy case?” And if she said, “Well, I really feel sorry,” would you want to have children with that woman? Because she’s basically saying she’s sanctioning the killing of three people. 

And so, this act and the way that feminists reacted to it is only gonna further polarize the sexes. 

And the key subtext of this whole debate was that the husband—and now there’s a conspiracy theory that he was involved. I don’t know if Candace Owens is on that yet or not. 

But that the male is not—doesn’t have any say. He had no role in the procreation because the woman bears the child, and therefore it’s 100% her, her, her, her, her, not the husband. 

We don’t know anything about him, but we don’t even think, “Well, he loved these children and he was raising them and you deprived him of his own children.” And we don’t even think about that. 

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