The Terrorists’ Real Victory Wasn’t The Towers; It Was Much Worse

The year 2026 is an interesting one. It has both the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States and, simultaneously, the 25th anniversary of September 11.

The two events are inescapably intertwined. For me, 9/11 shattered much of what had come before it.

I was born twenty years after World War II ended. Growing up—and being educated—in the 1970s and 1980s, I knew America was good. Raised on military bases in Italy and Cuba, I was exposed to parades, marches, and military drills that bred patriotism.

We flew on military planes, we sang the National Anthem before every movie in the theater, and my friends and I would regularly eat lunch in the Gold Hill Barracks galley (cafeteria), with a table of Marines on one side of us and a table of Navy NCOs on the other.

While my specific experience was unique, the feeling of patriotism wasn’t. For the most part, Americans knew America was fundamentally good.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I had imprinted on my soul that America was always destined to win WWII. Not because the Kaiser shipyards together delivered a new Liberty Ship every day for years, or because North American Aviation could produce 30 Mustang fighters per day, but rather because we were the good guys and the Nazis and the Japanese were the bad guys. Like Manifest Destiny before it, America was destined to triumph.

I carried that same framework long after college. Sure, you could look at Vietnam and make the argument that the United States was involved in something that it should not have been—an arguable, but far from convincing, point—but that didn’t change the fundamental nature of America. Nations, like humans, make mistakes, but ours was essentially good.

For me, that was the backdrop upon which everything else operated. Like gravity, it’s not something that you think about regularly; you just know it’s there. It’s true, and you go about your everyday life.

September 11 shattered that for me. Like most Americans alive on that day, I remember exactly where I was. I was in Atlanta, having gone back to bed after returning from the gym. My sister called me after the first plane hit the tower, and I turned on the TV and watched.

“What the hell!” I asked myself. “How the hell does that happen?” It was only a couple of minutes later when the second plane crashed into the South Tower. Suddenly, it was like Americans must have felt when they heard of Pearl Harbor. America was being attacked!

I spent the next seven days sitting in front of my TV, probably 20 hours a day. Other than going to the eerily empty Publix across the street for food, I was glued to my set. Of course, it didn’t take long to understand exactly what was going on. Osama bin Laden’s Muslim terrorists had attacked America.

I must confess, I knew very little about Islam or Muslims at the time, and what little I knew was from headlines: the ’72 Munich Olympics, Ayatollah Khomeini’s takeover of Iran, the 1993 WTC bombing, the twin embassy bombings in 1998, and a few other events.

So I did some reading… Things like Bernard Lewis’s The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years, Dore Gold’s Hatred’s Kingdom, Steven Emerson’s American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, as well as anything I could get my hands on from Robert Spencer and David Horowitz.

That reading, along with observing actual events, made it clear we were seeing the revival of a 1,400-year clash of civilizations that had largely waned for most of the last 400 years. A crystal-clear result of 9/11 for me was the realization that Islam is simply incompatible with the United States.

But 9/11 turned out to be a catalyst for much more. George Bush, against all observable facts, claiming “Islam is peace,” was just the beginning and the latest iteration of political correctness that was beginning to infect America.

Although Americans were united in a way not seen in decades in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it would not last. The media would showcase every American wartime mistake and lionize those calling for America to withdraw.

By 2003, rallies were common, with activists calling George Bush “Hitler”, and in 2004, the Democrats would nominate a globalist, John Kerry, for president. Four years later, America would send Mr. “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” to the White House.

The quarter-century following 9/11 would see “political correctness” meld the interests of Communists, environmentalists, gays, minorities, and Islam, and together they would morph into a largely anti-American party, i.e., Democrats. They were and are anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and, fundamentally, anti-Western civilization. Their immediate need to protect the “religion of peace” started an avalanche of victimization that would pick up every minority or disgruntled group along the way.

Statues would come down, and not only those of Confederate Civil War generals, but men who built our history, men like Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and more. Language would change. Marriage, which had meant one man and one woman for more than 2,000 years of Western civilization, was suddenly something else.

Wearing a sombrero or dressing like an Indian for Halloween was suddenly cultural appropriation. The “Broken Windows” policing and “stop and frisk” approach to manifest criminals that had saved urban America from the devastating crime rates of the 1990s were replaced with “Defund the Police” and “community responders.”

Our borders were essentially eliminated, and blue states and cities decided that protecting invaders was more important than immigration law. Not to mention that millions of years of biology were erased by the sudden “reality” that men could become women and women could become men. And from that, children could be butchered without their parents’ consent.

For too many Americans, the legacy of September 11 is a nation that is something of a Bizarro world, where up is down, right is wrong, and anything pro-American is somehow bad.

I’m not one of them. For me, the legacy of September 11 is just the opposite. It reinforced much of what I already knew to be true and, regrettably, took for granted.

By forcing me to examine the history of America, of the world, and of civilization in general, I now understand that I was right to believe that America is the greatest nation in human history, but now I understand why. Our Founding Fathers, while imperfect, left us with the greatest document since the Bible.

The freedoms protected by it, the separation of powers dictated by it, the limited government established by it, and the entrepreneurial tsunami it unleashed combined to birth a people who created more prosperity for more people than any nation in human history and saved the world from fiery suicide twice along the way.

My blog is called Imperfect America, and the subtitle is Voltaire’s observation that “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Nothing demonstrates that reality more than America. From her “Original Sin” to today, America is imperfect, but very much a force for good.

To the degree that September 11 set in motion the cleaving of too many Americans from the understanding of the things that make her the greatest of God’s creation, the terrorists succeeded far more than they ever imagined.

I, for one, try every single day to correct that, either by writing here and elsewhere or by suggesting that we might not want to take it all for granted. Because if history shows us anything, unappreciated and unprotected civilizations can collapse, and sometimes do very rapidly.

Follow me\ on X at: @ImperfectUSA

Cloward, Piven, And Zinn Told Us They Wanted To Bankrupt America

I remember when the National Debt Clock first went up.  I don’t remember the actual day, and honestly, I thought it had gone up during Reagan’s 2^nd term, but I was wrong. I looked it up and it actually went up on February 20^th 1989, exactly a month after Reagan left office. 

I’m certain my confusion was because, the entire time Reagan was in office, all the Democrats could talk about was the national debt.  And it was a big deal. The growth under Reagan was unprecedented, rising about 184% during his 8 years, more than double that of Nixon and Ford combined (as a percent), 4 times that of Carter in one term, not to mention 5 times Clinton, and more than double Bush and Obama combined.

Now of course we all know why the debt ballooned so much under Reagan.  Tax cuts and the military, especially Star Wars!  Well, all of that, but really the most important thing was: Democrats.  What did Democrats have to do with anything?  Pretty much everything.  Democrats, led by the liar / streetfighter / Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, never saw a government program outside of Defense that they wanted to cut. Well, technically, to be fair, there was something else they didn’t spend money on… the boarder wall they promised Reagan in 1986 in exchange for his granting amnesty for 2.7 million illegal aliens.  The illegals got amnesty, but Reagan never got the promised wall.

And so it goes. 

That first clock clocked in at $2.7 trillion. Boy, does that feel like a long time ago!  And it was.  Back then a trillion dollars actually meant something.  Today’s Debt Clock just recently crossed the $40 trillion mark.  At some point these numbers stop feeling real.  We hear things like if the government spent $1 million a second it would take them over a year to spend $40 trillion and other things we can’t quite wrap our heads around. 

An easier way to think about it is this:  In 1989 the $2.7 trillion National Debt worked out to be about $11,500 per American. Today, at $40 trillion that number has jumped to about $116,000 per person,

What’s worse is the pool of “Unfunded liabilities” that are mostly Social Security and Medicare.  In 1989 such liabilities sat at approximately $4 trillion, or about $17,000 per American.  Today, unfunded liabilities sit at approximately $130 trillion, or… about $250,000 per person.

To put this in perspective, forty years ago it would have taken the average American about a year and a half to work off all of their “share” of the nation’s public debt.  Today, it would take five years! I thought computers and the Internet were supposed to make things more efficient.    

Those numbers are simply insane.  One simply has to ask:  “How the hell did we end up here?”

Well… since you’ve asked, I can tell you.  We are largely here for three reasons, or more accurately, because of three people:  Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Howard Zinn… and the tens of millions of useful idiots who believe their ideas. 

Cloward and Piven were the authors of the Cloward–Piven strategy. At its most fundamental level the 1966 strategy is a roadmap for destroying the United States as a free-market, capitalist society and turning it into a “socialist” nirvana. Specifically, the goal was to collapse the federal government by overwhelming it with welfare and redistribution obligations.  Doing so, in turn, would create a permanent dependency class that could be counted on to vote Democrat for basically forever:  “If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalty to their benefactors.” 

Given that their strategy was such a big departure from most of American history, they understood that they would need the media to help sell the idea: “As the crisis develops, it will be important to use the mass media to inform the broader liberal community about the inefficiencies and injustices of welfare.”

Basically Cloward & Piven wanted to drive poor people from across America into her major cities, access public services, spark anarchy and watch as the various levels of government became overwhelmed and dysfunctional and reached out to the federal government for help.  Eventually Capitalism would be obliterated and the central government would control everything and wealth would be distributed evenly. 

So, they had a blueprint (which Democrats have been following for 60 years) and a complicit media, but that wasn’t enough. It takes a lot of work and a long time to convince people who grew up in a free and prosperous nation that somehow the driver of that prosperity is evil…

It would be much easier to teach that lesson to young people and let them grow up knowing it.  Fortunately, a fellow traveler – and fellow professor at Boston University with Piven – Howard Zinn – stepped up to the plate.  In 1980 he published A People's History of the United States, possibly the most cancerous history of America that’s ever been written.  For him, America is a history driven by a tyranny of whites over everyone else, men over women and rich over poor.  Practically everything, from her founding documents up to the middle of the 20th century was designed to either subjugate minorities, women and the poor or maintain that reality. For him, America is a nation created by, controlled by and controlled for white elites, at the expense of everyone else.

His book has sold millions of copies commercially and its used by almost 200,000 teachers around the country and fully a quarter of high school history teachers!  It’s no surprise that less than half of young people are proud to be Americans. 

Between Cloward, Piven and Zinn, they created the victimization / government largesse ecosystem that we see playing itself out in America today. That has been the Democrat party for the last 60 years, and it worked exactly as they suggested it would, a mass of dependent voters who march to whatever tune the Democrat party is playing, and bankrupting America along the way.

At some point the bill comes due. America has third world levels of debt and the reality is, it can’t go on forever.  This year alone the federal government will spend in the ballpark of 25% more than it brings in… and it’s been going on like that for almost a decade.

Make no mistake, Communists like Mamdani, AOC and El-Sayed are simply executing the Cloward, Piven & Zinn playbook.  The mistake they make is that they think it will lead to some “socialist” nirvana.  It won’t. It will lead to Armageddon. And the sad part of it is, Cloward, Piven & Zinn told us what they were doing for decades… we should have listened.  

As an aside, if you want to refresh your American history or teach your kids what America is really all about, I recommend Paul Johnson’s History of the American People and Harold Evans’ They Made America.  Both written by Brits who were not poisoned by America’s leftist media and academia, they are easily two of the best books on American history you will ever read.