3881 What Pisses Me Off About The New York City Terrorist Attack
As a nation prepared to celebrate Halloween with fun costumes and delicious treats, 29-year-old Uzbekistan immigrant Sayfullo Saipov plowed a rented truck into countless pedestrians and rammed a school bus in New York City. Having entered the United States through the Diversity Visa Lottery, Saipov screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the terrorist attack and carried a note pledging allegiance to the Islamic State. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
It's a time for kids to be out on the sidewalks in adorable costumes.
And it's a time when we look back at the medieval horrors of our history with good humor.
Why? Because they're deep in the rear view, you see.
Because we have outgrown them.
Because we have moved past them.
We can dress up as witches because we're not in Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century.
We can dress up as ghosts because we don't really believe in ghosts anymore.
We have put these medieval terrors in the past and now we can indulge in them.
As funny, quirky little shards of our history.
We can walk up to houses with giant spiderwebs on the trees because we don't believe in giant spiders.
We can walk up to houses that have creaking, groaning zombie halves shuddering in the grasses because we don't believe in zombies.
There was a time, of course, and there are still places around the world where these things are believed in as visceral terrors to be managed and inflicted and avoided.
But you see, we have Halloween because we don't believe in these things anymore.
And so they can, for us, be entertainment.
For us, they can be like horror movies.
A sort of delightful little thrill and shiver in a secure and safe environment.
Things can jump out of us from deep in human history, from what is now merely portrayed an artificial imagination, but what was once a visceral part of the mad physics of the universe.
And now we can get the ooga-booga scare And maybe we spill a little popcorn on our shirt and maybe we get startled and then we laugh because we are safe and these ancient terrors no longer move us.
Today, in New York City, mere blocks from the graveyard of the Twin Towers was a terrorist attack.
The man shouted Allahu Akbar.
Allah is the greatest.
The man had a note that referenced ISIS in his car.
The man rented a truck and gripped the wheel in sweaty, steamy ancient hands.
Hit the gas.
and drove down New York City for 17 blocks, veering and crashing into cyclists and pedestrians.
At least eight people are dead, unfortunately.
Another 12 are injured. And the man, Saifulu, He's 29 years old.
He is the suspect that has been described, of course, as an act of terror.
White sheets.
Cover the bodies. The broken, shattered, maimed, destroyed.
Eyeballs exploded, arms dislocated, legs perhaps severed.
The bodies in New York are covered by white sheets.
What is Halloween supposed to be?
You put a little white sheet on because you're going to pretend to be a ghost.
Not actually become one.
The man, of course...
Got out of his pickup truck.
After hitting these pedestrians, he had fake guns and he ended up being shot in the abdomen by the police.
He is expected to survive.
He came to the U.S. from Uzbekistan in 2010.
So, seven years or so for integration to occur.
There are reports that he came in on this random, let's mix it up, diversity lottery that goes on in America.
This lottery! America has about the most desirable piece of real estate that everybody wants to move to in the world.
And America could pretty much ask for just about any standard and would get it.
America could say, we need you to have post-secondary education.
We need you to be fluent in English.
We need you to be somewhat versed in Western culture.
We would like you, say, to have demonstrated some appreciation of Western values.
Oh, I don't know, things like separation of church and state.
A devotion to rationality.
Heck, you could even say, maybe you could just be kind of on the Christian side.
No, he entered this...
He entered America on this diversity visa program that is supposed to diversify the immigrant population in the United States.
No particular standards.
And this is so mad.
Immigration is a huge and complex issue.
But if you get crap people, that's not good for your country.
If you get the best from other countries, it's terrible for their country.
Because we all know how this plays out.
You get the very best from country X. And that means there are fewer competent and intelligent and brilliant and well-organized people to run country X. So you get corruption.
You get mismanagement.
You get voter bribery.
You get money printing.
You get collusion.
And then what happens is country X gets worse.
And so the next wave, the second best, try and get out, try and flee.
Which means there are even fewer competent people left in country X to run it.
And then what happens is...
Oddly enough, country X is doing really badly, so you know what you have to do?
Let's dump foreign aid on them.
Let's take money from the poor people in rich countries and give it to the rich people in poor countries.
And then the government now are washing money.
More and more sociopaths and psychopaths and thieves and pickpockets and sophists are drawn into the vortex, the black hole of state power.
Which means the third and the fourth and the fifth wave Of competent people do anything they can to get out of the country.
Then the country does even worse, because the farmers are leaving.
It's like, oh, well, you see, now we have to give them food aid.
Now you give them food aid, what happens then?
As a farmer, can you compete with free food from the West?
No, you can't. So you give up on farming.
The entire country has become a basket case of high IQ pillaging, And that's what we call helping people these days.
This visa lottery, this beautiful woman in a crowded bar of random man just closes the rise, says eeny, meeny, miny, whatever.
Okay, we're married.
What sense does this make?
This visa program that the terrorist, alleged terrorist, It came in on.
Trump wants to end it.
Trump wants to move to a skills-based immigration system.
I don't know. What is immigration these days except a massive government program to continue to drive up the prices of the homes that the boomers have?
Oh, look! Hundreds and hundreds of thousands more people pouring into the country.
No chance to build infrastructure.
No chance to get schools ready.
No chance to expand the number of doctors.
No chance to do anything. But look, they need land.
They need houses. So if you've got land and you've got a house, the price goes through the roof.
Another goddamn subsidy for the boomers.
Seventeen blocks.
This guy chewed up the landscape and the population.
He plowed into, by reports, the short bus, a short school bus, I assume, full of mentally handicapped, mentally challenged children.
And what happens?
It's so repetitive.
What happens? Well, he's Islamic, so Twitter, Facebook, the mainstream media immediately go into, oh no, here comes the Islamophobia!
This irrational fear.
Namals! Not all Muslims are like that.
See, it's not accurate, I think.
Let's say That you are taking a walk in New York on a beautiful, cool fall evening.
The air is crisp.
There are the pungent aromas of close proximate living, of a wide variety, a true spread on the bell curve of human achievement.
There are beautiful apartments like vertical ice cube trays of upper middle class glory that reach straight up into the heavens themselves.
And there are people who've puked into their beard while lying on a sleeping grate.
On a subway grate. There are lights.
There is entrepreneurship. There is energy.
Financial, sexual, artistic.
Lights everywhere.
Shops with suspiciously low prices.
And beauty and glory and variety.
And a true panoramic view of human squandering, human potential and human achievement.
And maybe you're coming to the city for the first time, or maybe you haven't been for a while, and the energy, the dusty, hairy, crackling with energy and potential energy of New York seeps into your veins, seeps into your skin, seeps into your lungs, seeps into your nose. And you're dazzled by the bright, decadent, opportunistic glory that is New York.
And then you hear the screams.
And you don't know what it is.
Is it a siren? You hear the screams.
And you look up and you see a truck careening down the road, high beams up, because you want to see what you're plowing into.
He's veering from side to side.
You think, is he drunk?
Is he having a seizure? Did he have an aneurysm?
What is going on? And you think, well, this isn't Paris.
What the hell is going on? And you see the terrible, terrifying thing that the driver appears to be veering towards people and you see someone smashed and flying through the air like a smashed up, broken, torn apart, child rage rag doll hurled against a wall.
Boom! And people are screaming and fleeing.
And parents stand there reaching to grab their children to pull them out of harm's way.
And you are no longer in New York.
You are no longer in the city so nice they named it twice.
You are back in time.
And back into a very primitive place.
With all the terrors of modern technology.
Of the internet that is used to transmit radicalizing material, of the airplanes that are used to bring down the twin towers, of the cars that are used as battering rams to dislocate and dismember and destroy others.
And the truck hits another person, smashes their hips from one side to another, and they go flying, headfirst into a plate glass window.
And knock over the mannequin spattered with blood.
And you see, in a visceral, electrical, spinal sense, you see, you feel, you understand what a thin line it is between the past and the present, between reason and anti-rationality, between individualism and tribalism.
Between the now and the then.
The then, the past that is trying to whiplash and swing round and become our future.
And you see a dark, scowling face.
face you see perhaps the flash of a beard without a mustache.
And you see the truck and you don't know which way it's going to go.
Because you can dodge something that's acting randomly, but it's pretty damn hard to dodge thousands of pounds of flying metal that wishes to splatter you across its hood like an unholy hood ornament.
Where do you go? What do you do?
Do you duck? Do you dodge? Do you look around you?
Is there anyone I can save?
The instant calculus.
Of survival of the self versus salvation of others.
This guy apparently was stopped by somebody in a bus who went in front of him so that when he stopped he could go no further.
That's when he jumped out with his artificial guns and was shot.
Do you save people?
Do you save yourself? Where do you go?
And the truck veers towards you with the high beams like two devilish lightning eyes.
And the truck revs!
And thousands of pounds of metal are flying across a chilled road with bits of human parts, skulls, bones, limbs stuck to its greasy, bloody hood.
And the truck flies towards you, jumps the curve, and you're frozen.
The one thing I can tell you about your mind in that moment, my friends, is you are not afraid of some abstract ideology.
You understand? You are not afraid of words in a book.
You are not afraid of mere ideas.
You are not afraid of the passive contents of someone's mind.
You are afraid of dying.
Under the grinding, hurtling, deadly weight of thousands of pounds of truck.
It's not Islamophobia.
It's bullet phobia.
It's truck phobia.
And that is why this word is so fundamentally meaningless.
Now, of course, not all Muslims are like that.
Absolutely. No question.
We cannot generalize from an instance to a collective.
But the problem I have, and where I think people's resolution to accept this fair statement is beginning to weaken and beginning to crumble, is this.
If you remember Charlottesville, where a bunch of low-rent pseudo-Nazis went larping around pretending that they had some power to do anything in society, but instead served as a prop to inflate a hysterical sense of white nationalism, white racism, and some towering imaginary devil called the alt-right supremacists, suddenly this extrapolated out like a shockwave.
Boom! To all whites.
Or all people on the right, or all people that some hysterical linguistic pseudo-sound canon called alt-right stickiness could attach to.
From very specific, a few dozen individuals, to suddenly a huge swath of people.
Hillary Clinton could not keep her mouth shut and threw away an election.
By saying that a quarter of the American population, half of Trump's supporters, were the deplorables.
Not people who had specific concerns about cultural dilution through immigration.
Not people who had specific concerns about a dying manufacturing industry.
Not people who had specific concerns about cultural decay and the dominance of Hollywood values across a fairly conservative and often middle-class landscape known as America, particularly what they call flyover country in New York to Las Vegas.
They call it flyover country. Why the hell would you ever want to land there?
Well, now we've seen what the Hollywood values are.
And so all of these people are now collectively smeared.
Homophobic, sexist, racist.
Oh, if you're white, you see, you have this magical white privilege.
How is that not entirely collectivist in its judgment?
Can't judge all Muslims, of course not.
Can we judge all whites as privileged?
Absolutely! Can we judge all white males as privileged and sexist?
Absolutely! Can we judge whites as racist?
Absolutely! But by God, don't you dare judge other groups collectively.
People will not stand for this for long.
When there is a confused and confusing altercation between a black man and a white police officer.
It's not an individual occurrence.
It's not something we should be patient and find out about.
No, it's systemic racism.
Cops just gunning down people.
Trayvon Martin was 12.
Is that not collectivist judgment?
Of course it is.
This is what people do, on the left, largely.
They say, you cannot judge an ideology by any of its adherents, but you can judge an entire race, which is not an ideology, by those who, through no fault of their own, happen to wear that on their skin.
You can't judge an ideology.
Well, of course you can judge an ideology.
Can you judge a belief system?
Of course you can judge a belief system.
Can you judge a race? Of course not, because race is not an ideology.
Race is not a belief system.
Race is a genetic accident.
You are far more justified in judging an ideology than in judging a race, because there is no justification to judge based on race.
Yes, a tiny minority of white people are Nazis, so what?
A tiny minority of any group are lunatics, but somehow this seeps into all whiteness.
But don't you dare judge any other group by the extremist elements within them, even if that group is, in fact, an ideology which can't be judged.
So, Now that this has happened, people will be more concerned with Islamophobia than the bodies.
No criticisms will be allowed into the mainstream media of any ideas or belief systems.
People will change their avatars.
Buildings will light up.
They'll be hashtag pray for New York.
And the paramedics will have come and gone and the body parts will have been scooped up and the bodies taken to the morgue and the white sheets taken down from the cold and waxy and shattered faces.
And the bodies will be identified.
And the radiating waves of pain and loss and sorrow that will last for generations will go out from the morgue.
And scarcely anybody will understand the real issues.
And scarcely anybody will talk about the real issues.
And this suffering will be repeated.
And it will escalate until people can open their mouths and talk about the real issues.
Today is Halloween.
Amen.
Thank you.
A time for imagined scary monsters from deep in our history.
But some of that history is back.
Halloween is a time where people dress up as vampires and watch vampire movies.
And maybe, maybe, it is worth remembering one of the old truths about vampires, that vampires cannot come into your house unless you invite them.
See, I woke up today Looking forward to Halloween with my child, helping her with her costume, talking about how slowly or how quickly we were going to eat the candy, meeting up with friends, traveling the darkened landscapes of imaginary anxiety.
Meeting neighbors, chatting, feeling the bond of human community that can occur when people engage in a shared celebration of terror's long past.
