☕️ HEALING AT LAST ☙ Friday, September 11, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A C&C Special Edition Monologue on the anniversary of the attacks, how they metastasized into a wound that wouldn’t heal, and how a change in presidents got us back out of bed.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday, September 11th. In recognition of the anniversary, please enjoy this brief C&C Special Monologue about our Nation’s unresolved PTSD over the horrific attack, and marking how now —25 years on— we may be finally starting to recover our bearings. It may also surprise you to see how deep and broad the injuries were. I hope you enjoy it.

⛑️ SPECIAL SEPTEMBER 11TH REMEMBRANCE MONOLOGUE ⛑️

This morning, the New York Times ran what it probably considers a poignant memorial essay at the top of its website, headlined “Sept. 11 and the Persistence of Memory.” The Times marveled at how 25 years later, though life goes on, Americans remain stuck in passion and grief over the attacks. But the Grey Lady should not be surprised. September 11th never really ended.

September 11th isn’t an officially federally recognized day when courts and banks close, but it should be. It is the day we unofficially recognize not just the slain but also America’s deepest psychic injury, a tragedy we’ve never fully reconciled, a wound that has partly scabbed over but has never fully healed. It is not only the day 3,000 Americans were killed by terroristic attacks. It is the day when trust in our institutions began to fracture, and civil rights we long took for granted began to fray.

On September 11, we unknowingly traded confident “party like it’s 1999” normality for the perpetual surreality of boundless security theater. For almost 25 years, until we re-elected President Trump, a widening gyre of irrational safetyism gobbled up more and more everydayness, as though the crazy geniuses at CERN accidentally launched an artificial black hole into the Earth’s core, and every year since 2001 a little more pre-9/11 reality has been sucked into its event horizon.

Worst of all, the post-attack injuries were self-inflicted. We canceled an American tradition we grew up with —seeing your loved ones off at the gate— and replaced it with a useless barefoot humiliation ritual for everyone, forever, only because one ridiculous “shoe bomber” supposedly tried to ignite his Air Jordans. (It could have been worse. Thank goodness he wasn’t an underpants bomber. Please remove your briefs and panties before entering the scanner.)

Then came the long parade of post-9/11 ‘emergency’ politics. Congress raced to pass the Patriot Act in the weeks after the attacks, vastly expanding surveillance and investigative powers. It passed the PREP Act in 2005, tucked into a massive defense authorization bill amid fears of bioterrorism; in 2020, that liability-shield architecture became one of the most destructive legal foundations of the covid emergency.

The national-security mentality metastasized into constant surveillance, censorship, public health mandates, travel restrictions, law enforcement, speech, and even private life.

Thus, the emergency never really ended. Actually, though the dust settled and the buildings were rebuilt, the state of emergency kept getting bigger.

🔥 After the attacks, and not coincidentally, strange anti-government conspiracy theories bloomed like springtime poppies in Afghanistan. Lizard people. 9/11 Truthers. Flat Earthers. Moon landing deniers. Satan’s Little Season theologists. Mudflooders. Tartarians. People who denied cloth masks worked. None of those conspiracy theories were wrong, per se. Many things that arrogant elites sneeringly called “conspiracy theories” were promptly proven correct. Others, like the ‘lizard people’ theory, can be viewed as valid folk allegories describing true underlying realities.

Spanning all that time, for nearly a quarter century, culture, art, science, literature, music, fashion, architecture, everything— it all stalled or devolved. Violent crime surged as states dropped bail requirements and stopped prosecuting “lifestyle crimes.” The center was not holding.

In short, September 11th shattered the old timeline. It somehow spun us off into a bizarre Twilight Zone dimension where progress froze and everything just kept getting worse and worse and worse. It was all self-inflicted; the nation became an emo teenager with a cutting fetish. We stopped advancing, and for the first time in American history, we started going backwards.

We made dishwashers stop washing so they could “save the water.” We made our cars —which used to last 300,000 miles or more— break down the day after the warranty expired, to “save the planet.”

We replaced beauty with compliance, durability with energy efficiency, journalism with a giant, heavy-handed op-ed wearing lipstick, and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition with catalogs for body positivity. In one of the strangest paradoxes imaginable, after poorly vetted non-citizens succeeded in the September 11th attacks, instead of fixing the alien vetting process, we shoved natural citizens into a high-security annex.

Then Biden tossed vetting out the window altogether and threw the borders open.

🔥 With unidentified aliens streaming into the country by the thousands and millions, the people who were born here, or who’d legally immigrated, we still had to take our shoes off, submit to facial recognition, and endure escalating rituals of official suspicion. Citizens were presumed to be terrorists until they displayed their nude feet, turned their devices on, and proved their identities to skeptical TSA agents— evidence not required from unidentified aliens who used Biden’s convenient CBP One app to self-identify.

In short, the government that kept asking citizens to trust it gave every sign it didn’t trust the citizens. We discarded mutual trust for one-way trust with an exemption for illegal aliens.

Those weren’t things that happened to us. We were not victims or passive bystanders. Those were choices. We punished ourselves. We let it happen. The reasons why are complex, inscrutable, and too depressing to contemplate. Regardless of reason, the point is the September 11th attacks did not end in 2001. They continued— until November 2024.

To be clear: President Trump is not Superman. He is not an anointed savior; there has been, and will only be, one Savior. He is better seen as the apotheosis of a civilizational immune response, ordinary citizens finally rising up against globalist elites and Epstein-class “lizard people.” If you prefer, he is Nemesis to elite Hubris.

But still. Against all odds and predictions, we managed to elect a crude, mean-tweeting real-estate showman, a political outsider who’d never held any public office. We did that. Meanwhile, the corrupt globalists did everything they could to stop it. Twice.

🔥 Now for the best news. In 2026, for the first time in 25 years, we can see clear signs that the nation is beginning to heal from its deep September 11th injury. We no longer must take our shoes off and walk 25 feet on a dirty concrete floor to board an airplane. Cars are starting to drive themselves. Rap is vanishing from the Top 40. We are building new monuments in DC. The border is shut. The truth about Patriot Act abuses is trickling out.

One vexing obstacle is that only half the country wants to heal. Democrats are mired in the slough of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Polls show they dislike America. They prefer to keep the communal self-punishment going and continue the slow descent into wrecking everything, this time by openly embracing communism. For a reason I will never understand, they continue to defend their globalist elite overlords.

It’s tempting to be depressed about that, but that is glass-half-full thinking. The reality is that last November, right over half the country —enough to elect a president by popular vote— showed it was finally ready to move on.

As I assured regular readers many times during the pandemic, political change happens when even small minorities become highly motivated and organized. The excesses of the pandemic spurred a conservative counter-revolution strong enough to turn the ship of state around. And it is turning the culture around, too. Twenty-five years after Muslim terrorists killed 3,000 Americans, the wokest newsmag of them all, the Economist, ran this headline yesterday:

Even though the Economist is British, and even though it included the obligatory nod to non-violent Muslims, I doubt that the timing of that tardy admission —one day before 9/11— was coincidental. By its own rules, the Economist just outed itself as an Islamophobe. But never mind. (It changed the rules while you weren’t looking.)

Here’s why I highlighted that particular example. That concession by the left, the admission that Islamism is a threat, was necessary for us to move forward from September 11 and stop arguing about whether America was really to blame. We didn’t need an apology from them. We just needed them to admit there was an Islamist problem and stop reflexively calling everyone phobic. It took 25 years.

For the first time in a quarter century, we can start recalling September 11th not as an ongoing trauma that is slowly becoming more acute, but as a healing injury showing that our range of motion is finally coming back.

This September 11th, as we remember our murdered fellow Americans, we should also remember that we have a lot for which to be thankful.

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Twenty-five years ago this morning, most of us can tell you exactly where we were standing. Janette Reynolds turned that question into a book — twice. She first published Where Were You On 9/11? in 2002, and this week, at a Washington, D.C. launch, she released the 25-Year Anniversary Edition — Stories That Inspire and Endure.

Part memoir, part reporting, the book follows nine people whose lives bent around that horrible day, including Gary Sinise (Lieutenant Dan, and the man who has done more for wounded veterans than most federal agencies), Pastor Carter Conlon of Times Square Church, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece Alveda King, and three people who walked out of the Twin Towers— two from above the South Tower’s impact zone, and a blind man led down 78 floors of the North Tower by his guide dog.

Fifteen years before he would become president, Donald Trump wrote the foreword to the original edition (also included in the new one).

In the interest of full disclosure, and because you will find out anyway, one of the nine profiles is me. The back cover is a row of pencil-sketched faces — Sinise, King, Conlon, a President — and then, down in the corner, a Florida lawyer who writes a blog before sunrise. I am identified as a “legal commentator and popular blogger,” which is the kindest thing anyone has called me in print and which Michelle has agreed not to comment on. I did not write my chapter, so for once I cannot be blamed for it.

The rest of the book is sobering but also uplifting. Janette describes her own unexpected encounter at Ground Zero a few weeks after the attacks, and how it re-routed her life; the nine interviews are threaded with that same theme: God tends to work quietly behind the scenes right up until the moment He doesn’t. It runs 370 pages and carries a strong, unapologetic Christian message.

The release’s timing was a meaningful way to mark today’s somber anniversary of 25 years and counting. If it interests you, Where Were You on 9/11? can be ordered here.

I hope you have a thoughtful and ultimately optimistic Friday. Return tomorrow morning with fresh eyes, when we’ll round up a stimulating batch of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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