9/11 Families to New York's Mayor: Do Not Come | Ep. 285

Twenty five years after the towers fell, the men who planned the attack are dead and al Qaeda's command structure is gone. Peter Schweizer argues the war never ended. It changed method.

Osama bin Laden believed you beat the Judeo-Christian West by punching it in the face. The Muslim Brotherhood disagreed with the tactic and agreed with the goal. Their alternative is civilizational jihad: immigration, political organization, elected office, cultural pressure. No explosives required, and no moment of national alarm to trigger a response.

Start with the cost of the first method. 9,677 first responders and survivors have since died of 9/11 related illness, according to federal figures. More than 57,000 documented cancer cases trace back to the toxins released by the burning and collapsing towers. Firefighter Tim Brown was invited to 21 funerals in a single day. The attack itself ran roughly $100 billion in damage, insurance, cleanup and lost business. The war it launched ran $10 trillion, by Brown University's estimate, near 35 percent of the national debt at the time. The Department of Homeland Security was announced 11 days later.

Then look at New York. Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed the city's 9/11 commemoration order and handed the ceremonial pen to a legal aide who had represented an al Qaeda member held at Guantanamo Bay. Victims' families collected 101,000 petition signatures asking him to stay away from the 25th anniversary ceremony. Council member Vickie Paladino told him to stay in City Hall. Hezbollah's newspaper in Lebanon called his election good news for Islamists and floated him as a future Secretary of Homeland Security.

Schweizer draws the line where the episode draws it. The issue is not faith. Zuhdi Jasser, a former Navy physician running in Arizona, is Muslim, loves the country, and names the radicals out loud. The issue is a worldview: officials who defend the goal while softening the method, and a Democratic Socialists of America apparatus giving them a party structure to run in. CAIR reports a record 255 Muslim elected officials now serving across 26 states.

Eric Eggers closes on the intelligence failure of 2001. The CIA and the FBI each held a piece and nobody assembled the picture. The pieces are on the table again.

(00:00) Where you were on September 11 (01:53) The day the news crawl was born (04:21) 9,677 dead after the towers came down (05:33) The $10 trillion war on terror (06:41) Why DHS exists: the pieces nobody connected (08:22) Tw