9/11: The annual remembrance of the day liberty died in America
On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists waged war on liberty in America when they hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and a third into the Pentagon. The fourth jet — believed to be heading for the US Capital — crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers on the plane attempted to overpower the hijackers and regain control.
On 9/11/24, we recognize the 23rd anniversary of those tragic events: the thousands who died, the first responders who risked their lives to save others along with the many who died trying, and the heroism of the Flight 93 passengers on the fourth plane.
In the days following 9/11, Americans vowed to never forget that deadly day, and they committed themselves to do all they could to ensure that the terrorists wouldn’t win. Such sentiments were noble and inspiring at the time, but over the years they have proven to be little more than political rhetoric used by big-government Democrats AND Republicans to chip away at liberty and freedom in the name of safety and security.
Because, in hindsight, actions taken by our government did what the terrorist failed to do. Almost immediately, government seized the events of that tragic day to begin working on numerous ways to destroy liberty, including: the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), passage of the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act II, and granting new powers to the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct warrantless spying on everyday Americans. All created to ensure a “safe” America.
Most of these liberty-killing actions were birthed under George W. Bush — proving that “compassionate conservative” was really code for “big government tyrant” — and they were expanded under Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden to create a defacto police state.
Speaking of Donald Trump — a lover of 9/11 “Truther” conspiracy theories — he accused Bush of knowing the attacks were coming and of doing nothing to stop them. According to Trump, the attacks wouldn’t have happened had he been president at the time, and he would have captured Osama Bin Laden before the attacks occurred.
In a 2017 piece I wrote commemorating 9/11, I documented some of the ways Trump not only kept Bush’s and Obama’s liberty-killing policies in place, but also how he added a tyrannical touch — with help from the Republican Party.
Shortly after Trump and the Republicans assumed full control of Washington in 2016, they created the US Cyber Command within the NSA — an idea originally proposed by Obama — giving the agency greater power to spy on Americans. Throughout his presidency, Trump and the Republican Party reauthorized FISA-702 numerous times, thus expanding the NSA’s ability to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance on Americans.
During the two-plus years of COVID Tyranny, Donald Trump and his Republican allies found new-and-improved ways to kill liberty inspired by the post-9/11 frenzy.
During his presidency, Trump’s son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, introduced a Patriot Act for healthcare to form a government/private sector partnership responsible for creating a new “surveillance and data collection system” that could be used to track COVID Americans 24/7.
Apple and Google had already begun developing new hardware and software that gave Kushner exactly what he wanted. Though the two tech giants claimed that this new tracking system would completely protect privacy, the reality is that the Patriot Act for healthcare was intended to make the names, phone numbers, and locations of people available to the government in real-time.
In other words, protecting privacy was never the prime objective.
Some of Kushner’s goals were realized with the development of COVID vaccine passports, technology that, as we later learned, could be used as a model to replace the credit reporting system with a totalitarian “social credit system” like the one used in Communist China.
In November 2020, Trump’s Treasury Department introduced a plan to expand government’s power to spy on the international financial transactions of everyday Americans by “deputizing” banks to act on behalf of the government and gather private information on people without due process — an idea that took off under Joe Biden.
In August 2021, Biden identified a new terrorist threat when he labeled Americans exercising their God-given constitutionally protected right to free speech to criticize government policies as enemies of the state. For example, his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determined three years ago that people pushing “anti-government rhetoric” — including people standing in “opposition to COVID measures” — would be classified as “domestic terrorists.”
Biden lumped people exercising their free speech rights to disagree with COVID restrictions and Al-Qaeda into one all-encompassing category. In the eyes of Joe Biden, exercising your free speech right to protest masks and vaccine mandates and/or using social media to do so meant that you’re no different than the terrorists who crashed planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Joe Biden also introduced a plan designed to give the IRS unlimited power to spy on our bank accounts using an often-overlooked provision in the PATRIOT Act that changed the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act. Under the change, new standards were established for banks to identify customers and maintain records, requiring them to report cash transactions over $10,000, resulting in numerous violations of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.
However, government’s overall power to spy on our bank accounts was “limited” under the PATRIOT Act until Joe Biden expanded it with what I’ve come to call a Patriot Act for the IRS to lay the groundwork for making it easier for Big Brother Washington to track every dollar made by every entrepreneur and small-business owner — regardless of how little money they made.
With the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law in 2022, Biden authorized an addition $80 billion to weaponize the IRS against every taxpayer by adding 87,000 new agents to the payroll, giving the IRS more employees than the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and the Border Patrol combined. Biden claimed that this new IRS power only affected the rich, but it ultimately gave the agency financial data on nearly every law-abiding, tax-compliant entrepreneur and small-business owner because every bank and financial institution is required to participate.
In retrospect, the rationale used to justify the government’s liberty-killing response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks has led us to where we are today. Some may call that an unintended consequence. But then again, maybe it wasn’t unintended after all.
Liberty died on 9/11 . . . not at the hands of Islamic terrorists, but at the hands of our own government.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He is the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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