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Sept. 11, 2019 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes
59:30
#155 | HAPPY SEPTEMBER 11TH

In this extra-special, ad-free, bonus episode of the podcast, we focus exclusively on my experience September 11th, 2001 when I was living in the Lower East Side and had assumed nothing could go wrong with the world. It was a life-changing day and we all said, “Never forget.” Then, we forgot.

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Happy September 11th!
Too soon?
You know who did the most too soon joke on September 11th was Amy Sedaris.
She was dating Philip Seymour Hoffman at the time, and they were standing on their roof, they were watching the carnage, and he's looking at the Twin Towers on fire, And, um, she's staring at him instead of watching.
And he goes, what are you doing?
And she looks at him and smiles and goes, thinking about us.
That was approximately 9 45 AM, September 11th.
And that was the first too soon joke of, I would say the most horrible event in America's history.
The most successful attack on our soil ever done by Muslims.
I was talking to a guy at the gym today who listens to this podcast about how it was an inside job.
We'll get to that.
But in this, actually, we'll get to that on my show on Get Off My Lawn on freespeech.tv.
But on this episode, I just want to go through that day, that night before.
And how consequential it was.
Pearl Harbor was about 2,000 people and September 11th was just under 3,000.
Pearl Harbor was fascist, that was the Japanese teamed up with Hitler and 9-11 was a radical Islam.
And we said never forget, and I would say we started forgetting on September 12th.
I remember going to Union Square in New York the next day, and there was all these people with signs that said, we want justice, not revenge.
Discouraging America from retaliating.
Now, I'm an isolationist, I don't like all these infinite wars in the Middle East, but after 9-11, I wanted a few bombs to go off.
I wanted Saudi Arabia to be punished.
I wanted...
I wanted Osama Bin Laden to be caught.
God that took a long ass time didn't it?
Eventually we split his head open though.
And then I think we just forgot.
I mean right now Islamophobia is a much bigger concern than radical Islam.
You talk to your average American liberal and their concern is that you might not love Muslims enough.
They don't talk about the West Side Highway, they talk about Charlottesville.
Look how much media attention, and especially in college, how much attention Heather Heyer gets, and how little attention the eight victims of the West Side Highway get, or the 89 victims in Orlando at the Pulse shooting, or the, sorry if these numbers are not perfectly accurate, the 14 deaths at Fort Hood.
That was just workplace violence.
San Bernardino.
What was that?
San Bernardino.
Was that like 39?
Muslims are 1% of the population.
Yet, when we look at these attacks, just sit in your armchair.
You don't have to filter through the news.
You don't have to go to Wikipedia.
Just think of all these different attacks.
And even strange one-person attacks like the beheading at that meatpacking plant.
Remember that story where that was Ohio or something?
Or what about these jihadist training camps?
Like Islamberg.
Or the other one where, was it New Mexico, where they found a four-year-old starved to death?
Total and utter media silence.
I'm in shit for saying things like that.
They have attention for Islamophobia.
Robert Spencer, not Richard, gets in shit for his book Islamophobe.
But you don't see a lot of attention to terrorist attacks.
Despite the World Trade Center collapsing on September 11th.
Why is that?
Is it because it's racist?
There's plenty of white Muslims.
What about the Sarnev brothers?
The Sarnev brothers were Boston.
They grew up pretty normal.
See, I think we have a lot of culpability in all of this because we have such self-hatred that when Muslims come to our country, and their parents could be relatively moderate, but they go to class and they hear these fat Marxist bitches, these boomer angry woman liberals, tell them that America sucks and it was built on slavery and it was stolen from the Indians.
Eventually they sort of go, yeah, fuck this place.
And then they become radicals.
This is especially true in Britain.
In fact, remember that series of bombings that happened?
There was on the bus, the double-decker bus, and there was also the train.
Remember that, Ryan?
What are you doing?
What are you looking at your phone for?
I'm multitasking.
What were you looking at your phone for?
I'm playing 2048.
You're playing a video game.
No, it's a puzzle thing.
Okay, please don't play a puzzle.
Please look up stuff.
Okay.
So just put your phone away, and I'm talking about the terror attacks in London with the bus and the subway, and you look at those those killers, those terrorists, those radicalized terrorists.
Actually, it's good that I have my computer because I'm better at your job than you are.
So I'm showing the picture to the podcast audience?
Yeah, that's why I asked you to look it up, because I want you to show pictures.
And you see a lot of Jamaicans in these terror groups.
Not a lot, but a fair smattering, and a lot of white dudes.
And that's because they see, what was it, July 7th, 2005?
Um, they see all this, the West sucks, it's evil, and they start going, yeah, he's right.
And then I look up, I look up the guys responsible and it's, it's a lot of Pakistanis, but then it's also these guys that they'll have their Muslim name, but you look up their original names and you go, wait a minute, you're a Jamaican dude.
You grew up playing soccer and your dad was going to get a Guinness at the pub.
And you realize we are so anti ourselves that not only do we radicalize moderate Muslims in our own country, of all races, but we pull in non-Muslims, like Jamaicans and white guys.
They want to jump aboard.
It's cool.
It's rebellious to want to kill people.
And then when you go, can you do something about this?
They go, well, we're actually focused on white nationalism.
I don't know if you know this, but Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville.
And you go, yeah, yeah, I actually did hear about that.
Isn't it funny that one of the names of the London Bombers is Mohammed Sadiq Khan?
It's not the Mayor Sadiq Khan.
It's a slightly different spelling.
Holy crap.
Now I have to find out that guy.
So anyway, I just wanted to go over my experience there.
Because it's kind of a bummer to talk about any other time but September 11th.
So, I will do it now, but now I'm determined to find that Jamaican guy.
What were their names?
Oh, here we go.
Yeah, I found him.
Jermaine Lindsay, that's his name.
G-E-R, Jermaine Lindsay.
Grew up a normal kid.
In London.
Hello, what are you doing?
Jamaican guy.
And he was radicalized.
Like, do you understand what I'm saying by demanding that we have some culpability here?
What's his biography?
Lindsay was born in Jamaica.
After moving to Britain at age five, he lived in Dalton, West Yorkshire, where he attended Rotherhope Junior High.
Subsequently moved to Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.
He married a woman from Ireland in a tradition.
So he was radicalized, right?
And then he marries some white chick from Ireland and they both become radicals.
He converted to Islam at age 15 after moving to Aylesbury.
Anyway.
So, yes, there's plenty of conspiracy theories and globalists, but we would be remiss if we did not focus today on radical Islam and how we forgot.
I was down there at World Trade by O'Hara's.
It's a pub just off Liberty Street in lower Manhattan.
And it's by the memorial and it just says in big letters on a big giant brass plaque, never forget.
And I just thought, we forgot right after.
We're so concerned with Islamophobia that we embrace radical Islam.
That's really where we're at right now.
And the media turns a blind eye to any... We had Linda Sarsour running the Women's March!
Anyway, I didn't mean to make this.
This will be the show, the Get Off My Lawn.
I want to make this podcast just about the experience.
So September 10th, 2001, Vice moved to New York in '99.
And we were doing pretty good.
We had tons of money.
There was an eccentric billionaire who moved us down there named Richard Sawinski.
We found out later that he allegedly was, uh, it was just running a giant pyramid scheme.
And he didn't have the money that he said he had.
The story I got was that he found this special effects company in Australia or New Zealand.
I think they're called Animalogic.
And he said, I'm going to invest in these guys.
They're really good at their jobs.
And then they ended up doing Jurassic Park.
And that was a huge landslide for him.
And then he had all this money.
And he was just blowing it on us.
I was making 80 grand a year back then, which is Was unfathomable for a 29-year-old.
I think the previous year I was making like 15.
So we had money to burn.
By the way, this only lasted for maybe three years.
Then Vice went completely bankrupt.
He vanished.
We had to move to Williamsburg, which was a complete fucking dump at the time.
You couldn't get taxis to go there.
There were no ATMs.
You'd be talking to a guy and a Puerto Rican eight-year-old would hit him in the back of the head with a golf driver.
That actually happened to me.
And he was knocked out cold.
Like, it sucked.
It was Puerto Ricans fighting with Dominicans.
And there was like a smattering of gays and hipsters, but mostly the only white people you saw were crackheads.
Brutal crackhead junkies, too.
That the Hassids would fuck.
That was the curious part.
We had the, we, so Triple 5 Soul was like this sort of hip-hop clothing line, and they were on North 4th and Wythe, which is beautiful now.
It has a J.Crew on it.
And I think a Levi's store.
But back then it was just truckers and abandoned warehouses.
And we were in their storage room.
They put all their clothes in the back.
So they sort of gave us about 300 square feet, moved some boxes around, and there we were.
And I could see out the window on the second floor, I could see these disgusting crackhead whores.
Like one ski boot, one sock, lipstick on her face like a weird clown, her hair hand cut by herself, some other black dude named Jimmy, who was always shadowboxing.
I actually did crack with him once.
I walked out of work late at night, smoking crack, and I go, what are you doing there, Jimmy?
He apparently was a great boxer in his day.
I never got his last name.
He goes, oh, I'm doing something I shouldn't do, man.
I go, give me a hit on that.
And I smoked crack with him.
Then I went to some dance club and danced like a jitterbug that was being electrocuted.
And, uh, it was an alright buzz.
Nothing to write home about.
I don't see being addicted to it.
But, um, yeah, these disgusting crack whores would write in the lobby of the building, which was just a cement staircase.
And it would say, Miss you, my angels.
Mommy's coming home to you soon.
They'd write these love letters to their children, which I assume had been taken away because their mothers were disgusting crackheads.
Whores.
Is there a more meaningless gesture than writing with a sharpie to your beautiful children that you love, that you're coming back soon, like they're ever going to be in that hallway?
And as I was looking out the window, I'd see Hasidic Jews roll up in minivans, and truckers too.
A trucker would, I guess he'd be done a 12-hour shift, and he'd be like, I need a BJ, no frills.
Just basic Beej.
So truckers would pull up, and they'd jump in, and they would go down to one block, and then pull away no time at all later, five minutes later.
But the Hasids would do it too.
And I met a couple of Hasidic Jews.
I've been around Hasidic Jews since I moved out of my house at 18 and went to Montreal and lived in Mile End.
The three most dense places for Hasidic Jews is Mile End, Montreal, upstate New York, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
That's where I've been since 88.
So you get to meet some.
And I go, what is with the fucking the prostitutes, dude?
And he said, yeah, according to the Torah, it's not my interpretation, but some interpret it as saying that the goyim are not human.
And so you're just having sex with a blow up doll.
So it's not really a sin.
Okay.
Still sounds pretty sinful to me.
And by the way, we saw the Bill Burr special last night and there's a big long thing about fucking robots, just like Whitney Cummings routine.
And I fucking hated it.
I hate robots.
I don't know why people are talking about robots all the time, like they're ever going to exist.
So that kind of ruined it for me, but otherwise it was very good.
Anyway, so that's the sort of, this is just before we had to go to Williamsburg.
So we're still rich.
Things are still crazy.
We just discovered Andrew WK.
I had just discovered Andrew WK.
Andrew WK was a silly nerd.
It's deceiving to look at him because he's, as the British magazine NME wrote, he has runway model looks with mile-high cheekbones.
That's the British fucking music press for you.
So he looks deceiving.
And he's not really a partier.
Like, he's a very enthusiastic person that really genuinely cares about people and wants to get involved.
He's a hard worker.
But I've never seen him wasted.
I've seen him smoke a lot of pot.
But I've never seen him, like, do a rail of coke or anything.
He sort of is into partying.
You know the way kids and people with Down Syndrome are into partying?
Like, we love parties!
He's that kind of guy.
Great guy, smarter than me, much more talented.
I'm not disparaging him.
It's just he's not what you think.
If you look at really old pictures of him, you'll see him wearing like a white leather jacket and you realize, oh, I get it.
You're like an art kid.
Like he used to work at Kim's video store.
Which, which had all these really rare indie flicks.
That's what he is.
When I discovered him, he was at Gavin Brown Gallery, which was sort of this hipster art gallery.
And he was, uh, he'd have a ghetto blaster playing his songs and he would sing over top of them and be banging his head and freaking out.
So it was almost like a parody of rock.
The guy's very sensitive too.
So I feel like he's going to hear this and think I'm saying he's a joke and then be really pissed off and never speak to me again.
Like one time I said, I made fun of Meatloaf and he didn't speak to me for like a year.
Anyway, it was Derek Beckles, who's got a show on Adult Swim, Matt Sweeney, who plays guitar with Iggy Pop now, Andrew WK, and Melissa Oftermar.
She's called Oftermar now, but she was in Hole for a while.
And I knew her from Montreal.
I knew her when she was a little kid.
She was the daughter of a politician.
And she used to DJ at this club called Biff Tech.
So I knew her since she was at the bar illegally at 16.
Total hippy-dippy astrology chick.
Really into, like, Scorpio is rising, which I fucking hate.
But we've known each other for so long, I have a deep seat of respect for her.
She's cool.
We just avoid topics like astrology.
So it was a fun night.
And I got an interesting letter recently where they go, you used to hang out with celebrities and then in post Trump, you don't know any anymore.
The fact that they were famous was totally irrelevant to me.
I was in a magazine.
I was running a magazine.
So I tended to, to be around people that were in magazines, but, uh, their personalities were had nothing.
There were no different from the old geezers.
I hang out with at happy hour at my local.
Famous people are not more dynamic than non-famous people.
I hate to break it to you.
In fact, they're often much more boring.
Anyway, we're doing karaoke, me and Derek.
Derek and I were incredibly fun.
Andrew is a good guy, but he's not a crazy partier.
Melissa's kind of quiet.
And Matt Sweeney has just been partying for so long that it's not a party to him anymore.
Like when you karaoke with him and you're doing coke and jumping off the seats and pissing everywhere and getting kicked out.
For him, that's like you and I going to get a coffee at Starbucks.
So while we were singing karaoke, he'd be worried about your cadence.
And he'd be like, all right, if you're doing the boss, you really got to come out from the diaphragm.
Got to be a lot lower and a bit raspier.
And I'd be like, meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
And he'd be with his hand sort of making a level kind of a thing.
I can't do it now.
It looks a little bit like a Zieg Heil.
He'd be sort of like going, no, no, up, up, up.
Yeah, down, down.
Steady, steady.
Yep.
Yep.
Got it.
Got it.
Like coaching the karaoke.
And so that was September, that was September 10th and September 11th.
The clock struck midnight.
And it was really fun in these booths.
Another sort of a crew we would hang out with where it was a younger group that was not famous but much more fun was Ryan McGinley, Dash Snow, Dan Colon, Sam Sagalnick.
They're on the cover of New York Mag.
I think it said the kids are all right.
If you look at all Ryan's old Polaroid stuff, that was that crew.
They would shoplift a lot.
And clothes, expensive clothes, which was called racking.
So they called their little crew I-rack, I-steel.
And they would get tattoos of Saddam Hussein and stuff like that.
Kind of ironic, right?
That Saddam ended up getting bombed the next day.
Or soon after.
And Derek was visiting from Toronto.
We're having a gay old time.
And we're jumping around.
I've got pictures of it.
We're jumping on the chairs.
We used to just totally trash these karaoke rooms.
Because, you know, New York gets packed and you can't really talk to each other or hang out with each other because the bars get shoulder to shoulder.
So we'd rent these karaoke rooms and just sing karaoke songs and get good at it.
Get good at it, if you will.
Um, you know, you keep practicing singing and you get kind of good.
And those other, Melissa, Andrew, and Matt are professional musicians.
So some of the songs are pretty good.
I remember James Eha was there once.
Actually, speaking of celebs, James Eha of Smashing Pumpkins, the Asian dude with the blonde hair.
He's one of the few celebrities you meet where you go, well, this guy's actually an awesome dude in and of his own right.
He's really funny and he's a brawler.
He's sparse.
He's a great boxer.
Who would have thunk James Ehaw could kick your ass?
Another fun dude that's famous, Steven Merchant.
Ricky Gervais' sidekick.
Really interesting guy.
Funny dude.
Great to hang out with.
So we're partying that night.
And I just started dating my girlfriend, who's now my wife.
She wasn't around that night.
I think she went home early.
And we head back to my place.
We probably go to bed four or five.
And I had an apartment above the bar Max Fish on Ludlow.
127 Ludlow, I think.
I believe it's exactly three miles from World Trade.
and uh we get in there he falls asleep on the couch it was just really a tiny tiny tiny living room and a bedroom and then an unimaginably small kitchen it was like when you see those Tokyo apartments and you can't believe a human lives there it was that like you could almost if you stretch your arms out you could almost touch both sides of my living room and then my bedroom was just my small bed nothing else but Back then, being in Manhattan was the best possible way to get pussy.
It's actually how I got my wife.
Being in Williamsburg was a death sentence.
No, thank you.
You'd get a girl and you'd say, all right, you want to go back to my place?
Sure.
Do you want to cross the Williamsburg bridge after we try for 15 minutes to get a taxi?
No, thank you.
I don't feel like going on a road trip with you.
It's only like 10, 15 minutes away, but at four in the morning in New York City, no.
And in L.A.
at the time, now I think they only care about a Prius, but in L.A.
at the time, it was all about your car.
And of course you're gonna go on a 30 minute trip, no matter where you are.
But if you show up in like a BMW 3 Series, you were good.
Manhattanites never cared about cars, obviously, they don't have one.
You're kind of seen as a doofus if you have a car, because you're paying 250 bucks for your parking garage.
But if you could say, want to go upstairs?
I live walking distance.
Well, that's like being the singer of Guns N' Roses.
So I could say to girls at Max Fish, do you want to come upstairs?
And I was right upstairs.
Right up the stairs.
Remember one time I wrote a bad review about Paul Sevenni's DJing skills?
That's Chloe Sevenni's brother.
And I said, they ought to call him DJ Chloe Sevenni's brother.
That was pretty good.
Really?
I got to know him since.
He's a good guy.
But he wanted to kill me after that, and he knew where my building was.
So he got in through the front door, and I'm sitting there once with a chick, nude, and I just hear, Kevin!
I'm gonna fucking kill you!
Where are you?
And he was going up and down the stairs, trying to find me.
And I'm sitting there looking through the peephole, completely naked, wondering if it's time for some nude MMA.
But I'm a lover, not a fighter, so I fucked her instead.
And he found his way home.
So we go home, go to bed, and then my gal is banging on the door at, I'd say, 9, 10 a.m.
And she goes, uh, turn on the news!
Which is a wonderful song by Husker Du on the album Zen Arcade.
With all the ways of communicating, we can't touch with the who we're hating.
You'll see that I haven't karaoke'd in a while and I've lost that skill.
Um.
So we turn on the news, and there's just a fire in World Trade.
Oh, that's it.
Keep going.
The chorus is coming.
Turn on!
Turn on the news.
Um, so, uh, we turn on the news and it's not a big deal.
I mean, it's kind of a big deal.
There's a very big fire in world trade.
Okay, that sucks.
I hope everyone's okay.
Probably some sort of electrical problem.
And, uh, this continues for a while and then we, we hear, we hear that a plane had been hijacked.
And then they say a plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
Your brain just doesn't believe that when they hear it.
It sounds like a theory, a stupid theory.
There's a fire in world trade.
There's a problem with a plane.
You're conflating the two.
I don't think you know what you're doing.
So we go out onto the roof.
This is Ludlow just below Houston Street.
And we see the smoke is filling up the whole sky.
Like it just keeps going and going and going.
And the smoke was coming towards us.
The wind was going that way.
So it looked even more dramatic as it sort of filled the sky above us.
And so we would vacillate from running up the stairs and watching it live, the fire, to going downstairs and turning on the TV.
No phones worked.
Our cell phones didn't work.
And we were slowly putting the pieces together and then we get up there and we have a kind of a flippant attitude about it.
I had planned a photo shoot that day for Vice Magazine where I had rented a stand-up white limousine and all the clothes I got were white and then I bought a bunch of blonde wigs.
So it's going to be kind of a cool aesthetic in this tall white limousine driving around with everyone wearing all white with blonde hair.
It would look kind of freaky, like outer spacey.
I was looking forward to it.
And my girlfriend was in it actually.
So I thought, we'll just do that later on.
Like my day was still going to be normal.
This isn't a big deal.
And then we're standing there and we see another plane coming to tower two.
And you know, planes always look like they're going to hit a building.
They always look like they're going to hit each other when you're near an airport, but it's, it's a common optical illusion.
And then it hit the second tower.
And that's when we realized, holy shit, this is real.
And we went back downstairs and I remember when we first heard about, I'm jumping backwards now, Derek was sitting on the ground and I was sitting on the couch and he was leaning up with his back against the bottom of the couch and we're watching my little tiny TV.
And he goes, my mother's in there.
My mother works there.
And Scottish people have weak stomachs.
So, whenever there's a problem, you want to avoid me if there's any kind of major catastrophe, because I start farting.
And if it's first thing in the morning after a heavy night of farting, the gas that comes out is so bad, it's interesting.
It doesn't smell like poo.
It smells like some sort of acrid nuclear waste.
So, my anus isn't far from his face, and I just sort of... ...blast a floater up his African nose.
And he gets so pissed off because he was watching his mother die.
And he started punching me in the leg, gave me many charley horses, very painful.
Anyway, so that was earlier when we first heard about it.
I forgot the far detail.
And then we're all up on the roof, Derek, me and my wife.
I'll just call her my wife from now on.
And I have a picture of her on the phone trying to call her mother, actually, from that day.
And you can see the towers smoking in the background.
It's in my book, Death of Cool, which I highly recommend.
This chapter is also in there.
And the audio book of Death of Cool has me telling this story and crying like a little bitch when I find out that Derek's mother is alive.
Derek's mother, Was in the building.
She went down to do some photocopies because the photocopier was broken.
And she watched, from the photocopy place, she watched the towers collapse.
And she had left her purse there.
Her purse collapsed with the tower.
And she watched all her friends die.
And in my audio book, which I guess I recorded 2010, so 10 years ago, I start crying recalling the time that we went to Doc Holliday's, I'll get there in a second.
He got to a payphone, spoke to his brother, found out she was alive.
He came back into the bar and he said, she's alive!
And everyone cheered and hugged him and it was a beautiful moment.
Anyway, we had a falling out around 2015.
No, about four years after that.
Anyway, and I'm just walking down the street one day by myself and I go, he's lying.
I think he's full of shit.
So it took me a good 14 years to suss out what I'm now convinced is a lie.
I think his mother used to work there.
And when something like that happens, you wanna have more gravitas.
So instead of saying my mother used to work there, he said she does work there.
And then the whole photocopying thing, I think that just sort of evolved organically as a way that she could still be alive.
And then I bet he was at Doc Holliday's.
I don't have any evidence on either side, by the way.
That's just my theory.
And then I bet when he said, Doc, holidays and people were crying and holding him, I bet he thought, all right, this is getting kind of out of hand.
And so he ran to a quote unquote pay phone and made the call and then everything was fine and everyone cheered and then he was off the hook.
This is unlike, of course, what's that guy's name?
The comedian who lied about it?
Steve Rannazzisi.
Steve Rannazzisi of the show The League, where he moved to LA and people would go, he just entered the comedy scene and he wanted to meet people and they go, oh my god, you're from New York?
Hey, you just got here, right?
You must have been there at 9-11.
He goes, yeah.
And they go, were you nearby?
And he goes, I was in the towers.
Holy shit, you were?
Yeah.
And so he just invented this story about how he was in the actual Twin Towers.
We'll talk about this on Get Off My Lawn.
I've got the footage.
And it just sort of snowballed.
And then unlike Derek, who allegedly reigned it in, again, it's my theory that he was lying.
I don't have proof.
This Steve guy just let it roll and roll and roll.
Anyway, so that, now we have two towers on fire.
It doesn't seem like a big deal.
Well, sorry, that's a stupid thing to say.
What am I, fucking Ilhan Omar?
Some people did something.
We had no idea it was about to become a much bigger deal, is what I should have said.
And we're freaking out.
Meanwhile, Andrew WK was across the bridge in Williamsburg, actually in Greenpoint, and he had this guitarist, Jimmy Koo, C-O-U-P.
Jimmy Koo was a weird dude, very talented guitarist.
He was sort of Andrew's right-hand man for a long time, especially at the beginning.
And he had a look.
It was like a beard, long hair, Hawaiian shirt and shorts and chucks.
He was a party dude.
I can't even remember if he was karaoke-ing with us the night before.
So Andrew's watching it.
He can't really see it from Greenpoint, but he's watching it on... You could see the sky from Brooklyn, but you couldn't really see what we could see in the Lower East Side.
So he's just sleeping, and Andrew's freaking out watching it, and he wakes up Jimmy.
He goes, Jimmy!
Jimmy!
You gotta see this, man!
Two planes went into the World Trade Center!
And Jimmy goes... And Andrew goes, Wake up!
I don't think you heard me!
I don't think you understand what's going on!
And he explains it again.
And Jimmy goes, Yeah, okay, Andrew.
I'm asleep.
What the fuck do you want me to do about it now?
And then he went back to sleep.
Jimmy Coo, knowingly, slept through 9-11.
Poor fucking Andrew!
He's sitting there!
Oh my god, I just remembered.
Andrew and Melissa Oftmer were an item back then.
And she made out with a dude on tour.
She was probably drunk.
And she called Andrew crying and confessed.
And he's... The dude is weird, man.
He was just like... hung up the phone, never spoke to her again.
Like they were gonna get married.
He's a very like... I think he might have autism.
But you can kind of tell by his voice that he's a very intense... Andrew WK is an intense nerd.
He could beat you up, but on the inside he has more in common with Mark Mothersbaugh than, say, Vince Neil.
Anyway, at the same time there was this photographer that used to work for Vice named Sprague.
And he was right there.
He lived in Soho.
And he walked, he said, I might as well go check it out.
He walked down to World Trade when it was happening.
And the towers hadn't collapsed yet, but people were starting to jump off.
Like, here's what I don't get, by the way, with this bullshit fear of this Islamophobia phobia.
Can you just give me a pass?
I was there.
I watched the whole fucking thing.
I wasn't really political before then.
I hated the government, but it was from an anarchist punk perspective, whatever.
I wasn't paying attention to world affairs.
I liked things about the right and the left, whatever.
That day, and around that time too, I can't remember if it was right before or right after, I read Pat Buchanan's Death of the West.
And those two things combined changed me forever.
Same with Pamela Geller, same with Anthony Cumia, of Opie and Anthony.
They weren't really political before that.
I'm traumatized from that and I've since looked into Islam and though moderate Muslims tend to be pretty good folks, there is a disproportionate number of Muslims who are prone to radical politics.
This is what people don't seem to understand.
Liberals don't get patterns.
They don't get the word disproportionate.
Here's what you have to tell lefties when they roll their eyes at you for being scared of Islam, for being Islamophobic.
One in four Muslim American men between the ages of 18 to 25 think suicide bombing is sometimes or often justified.
Look it up.
Every time I bring up that stat to American lefties, they go, where'd you get that from?
It's a pupil.
I'll look it up right now.
Actually, can you look it up?
That's, like, you talk about these Nazis that are everywhere, there's probably 500 neo-Nazis in America out of 360 million people.
One in four of them does not believe suicide bombing is sometimes or often justified.
And you don't think, you don't have a rational, you lefties don't have a rational view of white nationalists, you think it's like 40% of the country?
So what's that?
130?
About 100 million people?
There's no way 1 in 4 of that 100 million thinks that suicide bombing is sometimes often justified.
Now, Muslims aren't a major threat to us.
They're only 1% of the population.
But what's 1% of 360?
only 1% of the population, but what's 1% of 360, 360,000?
360,000?
360 million is 1% is 360,000, right?
That's a lot of guys.
1 in 4, 360,000 divided by 2 gets you the male-female, right?
So that's 130.
We're looking at like tens of thousands of people in America think suicide bombing is sometimes often justified.
And, as Ben Shapiro pointed out in his video, The Myth of the Radical Muslim Minority, when you leave America, you get much higher numbers than 1 in 4.
Especially like Palestine, and Jordan, and Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia.
So, you know, you listen to Howard Stern and he hates Germany because of the Nazis.
And he goes every time you'll notice when a German is calling in or when Germany as a subject comes up, it could be about wiener schnitzels.
He just gets kind of tight lipped and you can tell he's pissed off and he's being prejudiced.
He's he's a bigot.
He's a xenophobe.
And you go, you know what?
Your dad traumatized you with stories of his dad and his mother and surviving the Holocaust.
I get it.
You get a pass to be irrational about Germany.
Can I please get a pass to be irrational about Islam?
If I was there on 9-11?
Can you cut me some slack here?
Mind if I'm a bit of a jerk?
Anyway, so Sprague was rocking around that area and people started to jump off and you can find this if you look up body parts 9-11.
By the way, buildings in the area were finding body parts, hands, cufflinks, jewelry.
They were finding parts of people's personal belongings on their roofs for weeks afterwards.
But but when people decided what I think what happened was that the the heat became so intense right that They were standing sort of by the opening they took you can see them.
They all have their shirts off.
We couldn't see this on TV And we couldn't obviously see this from where we were three miles away So that we learned about this later, but Sprague saw it live these people were jumping off the buildings when I think it got to the point where You saw people dying of smoke inhalation.
This way was just opaque with smoke.
To walk into the smoke was just guaranteed smoke annihilation and it wasn't like the smoke was high up and you could crawl on your hands and knees.
It was just a mountain of billowing smoke coming stronger and stronger and stronger.
You stand on the edge of the building by the hole.
You're holding on to fragmented steel.
The heat is unbearable.
You see the flames growing and you just go, it's either burn alive Or jump.
And so they started jumping in droves.
They started holding hands, jumping.
They started going head first, diving down.
And when they would hit the ground, there was these explosive popping sounds.
This is when we say never forget.
Remember there was the Islamic Center?
They were talking about it wasn't a mosque and it wasn't next to the site.
It was a block away and it was a Muslim fucking awareness center or something.
No, it was like a hundred, it was like 350 feet from where there was explosions and shrapnel and death and destruction.
No, it's a community center.
Okay, well then you won't mind if we open up, remember Greg Gutfeld was going to open up a Muslim gay bar near World Trade and he had a lot of people excited to invest.
That never manifested.
So when these bodies hit the ground they would pop and it was a pop that sounded like gunshot.
It was like an explosion, almost like a firework.
Imagine that, pop!
Multiplied by a thousand.
Just this deafening pop as these bodies exploded.
And so as he's walking by, this is after the, this is just before the towers collapse, right?
There's body parts everywhere.
They don't think the towers are gonna collapse.
And they go, you!
And they grab him, a bunch of volunteers, firemen are there, cops.
They grab him and they say, start grabbing parts!
I don't understand why there was such a rush.
And by the way, when I say I was walking down the street and I just started thinking Derek's story was a lie, when I was walking down the street, a thing of Sprague's story is not a lie.
You know what I mean?
Like stories sit with you.
And as they age, they either age like a fine wine, or they go bad like milk.
Sprague's story has aged like a fine wine, and I think he became a junkie after, for a while, because he was so fucking traumatized.
I couldn't imagine this.
He told me this haunting story, and when I got it out of him, by the way, this is not at a bar, this is at his house, I think he was high, and he was slowly eked out this fucking horrible story.
About grabbing body parts, hands, torsos, legs, and putting them on pallets.
They had these pallets of body parts.
They were moving out of the way.
I guess they wanted to get them out of the way before they were buried by dust or something, or that's just what you do.
There's probably FDNY protocol for when you see body parts, immediately start collecting them and getting them somewhere where they can be sorted.
We can do the DNA test.
So, we're back up on the roof, and when the buildings collapse, There's a part of your brain that goes, meh, it's just fires, and oh, it was a plane accident.
The first one was a fire, the second one was a plane accident.
They'll put this out, and then they'll fix the hole, and there'll be a death toll of 57, and people will go, it was the great fires of world trade, 2001.
And then you'll, we'll move on, and that would be terrible.
When they collapsed, Tower One collapsed first and then you went, holy shit, all the lies I was telling myself about this not being a big deal are lies.
This is as consequential as my worst nightmare.
And then the second one went down and everyone was on the roof crying.
My wife was in tears.
And we were just gobsmacked.
I mean, there was, my whole building was on the roof, but it was like a old school Dutch 1800s tenement type of building.
So there was only about 15 of us on the roof, but there was, most of the women were crying, but a lot of us were just gobsmacked, just staring and looking at each other and shaking our heads.
Everyone was giving up trying to make phone calls.
And then we stared for a while and we watched the plumes of smoke and uh, Fuck, we didn't know what to do.
So, we went downstairs, back on Ludlow.
Everyone was out on the street, talking.
No one was at work.
Plenty were at work that day at World Trade.
2,977 dead.
So we walk up Avenue A, and we go to Nice Guy Eddie's, which isn't around anymore.
And then we all end up congregated at Doc Holidays, which I believe is still around.
It's kind of a seedy bar and we just watch the news all day.
We watched the news for, I think, 36 hours straight without sleep.
It was just always on.
So you'd see the same clip again and again, but more clips would come.
There was one Frenchman who was doing a documentary at the time and his camera was at his hip.
And he accidentally caught the second plane going into the tower from a very close range.
And I don't think he realized it till later when he looked at his tape because he was just carrying his camera running.
Jesus.
Oh, is that it?
You got the shot?
We'll show it on Get Off My Lawn, which is at freespeech.tv.
We went to Doc Holidays and there was a, I mean, it was obviously very macabre and sad and there was a pallor of sadness, but there was also a great sort of coming together.
I saw this later in 2004 at the Blackout, but there was some real sort of like camaraderie and are you okay?
And what should we do?
None of us went down there to volunteer.
We weren't that good and brave.
Um, we just sat there watching the news and, uh, people were, were roaming the streets like zombies covered in dust, walking away from the site.
And so we started, uh, we, we drank there for a while.
And then there was the incident with Derek where everyone was happy.
He was, his mom was okay.
Um, And then Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow and those guys, they went down there.
I was reading today, he said he went down there to volunteer.
I don't think so.
He went down there to take pictures because that was his thing.
He was a party documentary.
Not that 9-11 was a party, but you know, big events, big things, action.
So he went down there and recorded them riding around on their bikes.
You know, In our defense, as far as going down there to volunteer, you went near there and all the cops and firemen were saying, get back, get back, go away!
It wasn't until the next day there was people volunteering.
They were just trying to get you the hell out of there.
You couldn't get near it the day of.
And it was just an absolute, massive, Ghostbusters-like cloud of smoke.
That entire lower Manhattan was just a big ash bomb.
In fact, you were seeing people covered in ash where we were, in the Lower East Side.
Still walking up in a daze.
But eventually we started driving around.
We rode down to Liberty Street where the church is and actually up by 14th too, there was a hospital there.
And here's one of the most disturbing parts of the whole thing as far as my personal experience goes.
When we went near the hospital on Beth Israel Hospital on 14th Street, near 14th, There was, this is by, we're now about 2 p.m.
There was these flyers people had made with their own printers.
Oh Jesus, they were laminated too.
I don't know how they laminated them.
Sometimes they used those sort of things you get in a folder where you can put it in a little window envelope thing, those clear envelope things.
And they were taped and wired and zip tied to the fences all over the churches and the hospitals and it was missing posters.
It was missing.
John Avery, worked in finance, United Fund, age, weight, thousands of them.
They just appeared out of nowhere that day.
And of course they grew over the course of the next few days.
But it was things like, have you seen my daddy?
And missing, and pictures of her.
Like someone was gonna see her and say, oh, there's Diane.
Yeah, hey Diane, your family's looking for you.
Oh shit, really?
Oh, okay.
Like it was the most powerfully naive and sad gesture imaginable that you would put up these flyers thinking this is all just a big misunderstanding.
And I gotta admit, I'll get more into the details of the truthers on my show, but a lot of this truther mentality, I blame on people's brains just going, I can't handle this.
There must be, it's not real, it's a conspiracy.
The government did it.
It's impossible that two radical Muslims could be evil enough To take over planes and crash them into the World Trade Center.
And this just be a bunch of fucking disgusting terrorists.
This must be all the globalist elites together doing this.
It can't have happened.
And those, those flyers I sort of see as the same thing.
It was like someone saying, this can't, this didn't happen.
This is just a misunderstanding.
It's just a matter of me putting up a flyer and getting my daddy back, getting my husband back, getting my wife back.
I heard that Westchester was so devastated by this that a lot of the kids were kind of rich.
A lot of the victim's sons were wealthy.
And when their dad in finance dies, they're left with like three million bucks.
They're also fucking gutted, obviously.
So they'd have their money, they'd go move to Manhattan to a nice apartment.
And what do you do if you're a kid who's 19, 20, you got tons of money all of a sudden, And you're alone in Manhattan.
You do heroin.
You get wasted.
You'd numb the pain.
You take Xanax.
If it was now, you'd be doing oxy and opioids.
And they started dying.
And I was told that Vampire Weekend were sort of of that gang.
And the reason their music was so optimistic and cheery was it was their way of saying to their fellow Westchester friends, guys, stop dying.
Stop killing yourselves.
We can make it through this.
Jesus.
I feel weird reading from my sponsors today.
I'm not gonna do any sponsor reads on this episode.
And then some time went by and we go to my friend's house and we're still watching the news.
Now it's like 11 p.m.
on September 11th.
And I just said to my buddy, let's just go, let's get an eight ball of Coke.
And he goes, are you out of your fucking mind?
And I said, I don't know, man, we've spent so much time doing that drug talking about how owls are cool.
Why not do it when we actually have something to talk about?
And he was totally apolitical at the time.
He barely knew where Israel was.
So we sat and talked about, you know, the tension between Christianity and Islam, the tension between Israel, Judaism and Islam, and their side of the story, the Islam side, which I don't support, and our side, which I clearly do.
Meanwhile, the news is still going.
We're still seeing more footage.
We're still seeing more deaths.
The news didn't show you too much deaths.
It took us a while.
And the internet had to show us the jumpers and the dead bodies.
The news just sort of kept replaying that and pontificating.
And some of the news was fucking annoying.
I'll never forget this one newscaster woman saying, you know, it's sort of like New York lost its two front teeth.
I just remember thinking, fuck you, bitch.
Some other guy said, you know, I used to use, it's kind of hard sometimes when you're in the city to situate what's north and south.
And I used to use the world trade to, to ground me and I don't have that anymore.
Oh, that was another annoying news take.
It's amazing how many people, too, weren't even there and say they have PTSD.
I remember some chick, I was walking around lower Manhattan like five years later, and she said, I have to sit down, I'm traumatized, because this is where World Trade was.
And I go, oh yeah, you were here?
She goes, no, I was in LA, but I watched it on TV.
Oh, you poor thing.
So we stayed up all night getting wasted and watching more of it.
And it changed us forever.
And you know what was weird too?
It didn't change everybody.
A lot of people became more steadfast in their love of multiculturalism and their tolerance of Islam.
And a lot of people didn't give a shit.
I heard some horrible shit.
I heard about Muslims dancing across the East River.
I've spoken to people who said they saw it with their own eyes.
There were these Puerto Ricans across the street from my buddy's house.
This is on Avenue A in the East Village, so maybe like four or five blocks north of me.
And they saw the second plane go in and they screamed, yeah!
Bomb that shit, nigga!
Bomb that shit!
And they were laughing their heads off.
Isn't that kind of profound?
Sheesh.
It shows a culture That is just totally separated from the country it's in.
Like, those kids lived for A, between A and B, between 5th and 6th.
Their block.
And if you want to blow up World Trade, I don't give a shit.
That's miles away from here.
Bomb that shit, nigga.
That was infuriating.
Um, and then the next day, we would, uh, I couldn't go home.
To go home, I had to, uh, show notes.
I had to, sorry, I was looking at my notes to make sure I got everything.
That's why I said notes.
Um, you needed a utility bill.
There was tanks going up Houston street, military everywhere.
And, uh, and, uh, you'd have to show your ID to get into your house.
And it took a good 24 hours.
Oh, there's footage of people dancing.
Yeah, there was people dancing all over the Middle East, that's for sure.
And you gotta hand it to them, it was a very effective attack.
I'm sorry.
Bill Maher got in trouble for saying it was brave.
It technically is brave.
You could say it technically was, by the very dictionary definition, awesome, in the sense that it was awe-inspiring.
It was horrible and awesome.
We've bastardized a lot of words from their literal meaning.
But, you know, I read somewhere it cost ten grand to send those two guys to flight school.
Why wasn't anyone dubious of those two guys in flight school?
We're not allowed to be dubious anymore.
Juan Williams said he's uncomfortable when he sees Muslims at his gate praying right before a flight.
And he got fired from NPR for having those emotions.
We're consistently punished for noticing patterns, for noticing that a disproportionate number of a group is linked to terrorism.
And no, White supremacy, white supremacist terrorism does not outnumber Muslim terrorism in America.
Those stats are skewed by a very wide definition of what redneck terrorism is, including some fight by two KKK guys over some chick.
That's now a terrorist act.
And they reduced September 11th to one terrorist act.
So now we're one for one, even though it's 2,977 versus one.
And it's also a very narrow-minded view of what Islamic terrorism is.
For example, the beheading in Ohio, was it?
That's seen as workplace violence.
Fort Hood is listed as workplace violence.
They narrow it down.
They call Orlando homophobia.
And by the way, even if we did take your bullshit statistics, you call 40% of America white nationalists, Trump is Hitler, And we know for a fact that Muslims are only 1% of the population.
So even by your crazy standards, 1% of the population and 40% of the population have about the same numbers of terror attacks.
That should disturb you.
Your own shitty numbers should disturb you.
And then.
Things changed.
I decided to get more involved in politics.
I decided that my hatred of the government was no longer passive.
I decided I wanted to dismantle the government and help people.
Liberate themselves from tyranny?
Liberate themselves from the government?
I guess you could say I became right-wing.
I mean, I... I don't give a shit who's gay.
I don't... I think all drugs should be legalized.
That doesn't feel very far-right to me.
I don't care about your lifestyle.
Um...
But that's considered far right in this day and age.
And people say, well, how can you like Trump?
He's not presidential.
Trump is a stick of dynamite in the White House.
And I have no respect for the White House.
I have no respect for the president.
I love that he's not presidential.
I love that we sent in a deranged pitbull into that shitting building, and he's just draining the swamp.
That's really why we love Trump, because we want to drain the swamp, because we don't trust the swamp.
And as far as these truthers go, well, we have one thing in common.
We both hate globalists.
I don't like open borders and blind tolerance of backwards cultures like radical Islam.
And I don't like globalists.
You say, well the problem is the globalists.
The radical Muslims are not that big of a deal.
Okay.
So your number one is my number two and my number two is your number one.
Okay.
We both accept that it's the powers that be that put us in this shitty situation.
And Glenn Beck talks about that in his book, uh, what's it called?
Miracles and Massacres.
Where he says there's a pattern with all these horrible events in history, and it's people giving up their own personal liberty to someone else.
At Wounded Knee, The Indian prisoners were able to carry their own guns.
Then the bosses, fuck the police's boss, the bosses show up and say, you can't have the prisoners have guns.
And so they said, oh, our bosses say we can't.
They were moving along and they were being transported very peacefully.
And then they said, no, our bosses.
The government said we have to take away your guns, Indians.
That's when the shit started hitting the fan.
That's when women and children were killed running away.
That's when we have one of America's most shameful events in history, now in our books.
And that was men giving away their own personal liberty to someone else.
So whether you think 9-11 was an inside job, or whether you think it was our own blind love of all other cultures, even ones that suck, At the end of the day, in both cases, it's you handing over your personal liberty to tyranny.
And that's what we should never forget.
We should never forget that we are most powerful as individuals, not as the state.
The government does not control us.
The government is not in charge.
We are in charge.
And we allow them, when we allow them to play God, people die.
There's only one thing that can play God, and that's God.
Anyway, thanks for tuning in.
This, by the way, is not an episode of Get Off My Lawn.
We'll be airing Get Off My Lawn tonight.
We'll be talking about 9-11, too, for most of it, and that will involve a lot of visuals.
We'll get more into the truth or argument.
The podcast will go live tomorrow.
Basically, the short version of all this is you're not, Missing out on anything.
This is a total freebie.
I just wanted to get this in for 9-11, because it changed me irrevocably forever, and I wish it changed the Western world.
They seem to have forgotten about it.
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