The Trojan Horse Works
What to know: Today marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks.
The TPPF take: America’s adversaries do not have to defeat us on a battlefield if they can weaken us from within.
“On September 12, 2001, Americans understood, with painful clarity, that there are ideologies fundamentally hostile to our nation, our freedoms, and our cherished way of life. Recognizing that fact was not considered hateful or intolerant. We understood that protecting a free society may require having the courage to identify those who seek to undermine it,” says TPPF’s Selene Rodriguez & State Representative Brent Money. “A quarter-century later, that clarity has faded. Too many of my fellow Americans have come to believe that tolerance requires acceptance of almost any ideology or cultural value brought into our society, even when those ideas conflict with the principles that make American pluralism possible in the first place.”
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It’s On Us
What to Know: United Flight 93 carried 40 passengers and crew when hijackers seized it as part of the attack on America.
The TPPF take: Americans should ask what those sacrifices require of us.
“Many firefighters climbing the towers went to save people they had never met. The passengers of Flight 93 could not know the people on the ground their resistance might spare, and Michael Murphy could not know the Americans who would someday read his name. They did not need to know us for us to inherit what they preserved,” says TPPF’s Ammon Blair. “We are the people they sacrificed for. As America marks 250 years of independence, the measure of our generation is whether we still possess the character to leave them a free country, knowing they will never know our names.”
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They Deserve Better
What to know: TPPF’s Joshua Treviño was in New York City on September 11 and the days that followed.
The TPPF take: The victims needed a nation that would vindicate them — not just in care, though care they deserved in full, but in blood.
“When Al Qaeda set forth to murder thousands of Americans on September 11th, 2001, it did so in the belief that America would not sustain a long-term retaliatory effort, that the cost to America would be ruinous, and that America would wound itself in its own reaction. Osama bin Laden is dead at American hands, but his strategic calculus was vindicated,” says TPPF’s Joshua Trevino. “The enemy achieved its major strategic objects in its attack upon the United States of America. For the past quarter century, we have succumbed to it. There are exceptions — much of the Trump Administration may be understood as a reaction and correction against it — but the aggregate is its own record. On this twenty-fifth anniversary of death on a clear blue morning, we do not commemorate a victory.”