The Ben Shapiro Show - September 11, 2026


Remember WHO Did 9-11... And WHY


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

148.18

Word count

3,371

Sentence count

254

Harmful content

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

18

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 25 years after 9 11, a quarter century after Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, here is where we currently stand. 0.98
00:00:08.000 The mayor of New York is an Islamic terrorist sympathizer.
00:00:10.000 So is the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan.
00:00:13.000 So are congresspeople from New York to Michigan to Minnesota. 1.00
00:00:16.000 The West has imported millions of immigrants from Muslim countries, a huge swath of whom do not support Western values. 0.99
00:00:22.000 The West has continued to excuse and appease Islamic radicalism across the globe, with some rare exceptions. 0.97
00:00:27.000 And many Americans, nearly the entire left, along with the horseshoe right, Now, agree with the anti American worldview promoted by Osama bin Laden that the United States and the West are chiefly responsible for suffering around the world and that Islamic terrorism is simply blowback for Western sin.
00:00:42.000 Today, we'll talk about who actually committed 9 11, what they thought, what they still think, and why the West still lacks the intellectual and moral tools to combat it.
00:00:51.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:01:01.000 We're going to start today with a history lesson, a lesson in memory.
00:01:03.000 There are a lot of people listening to this show and just walking around the United States who weren't alive for 9 11.
00:01:08.000 It's been that long.
00:01:09.000 Basically, you have to be about 30 years old or older in order to remember 9 11.
00:01:14.000 So when we remember, for a lot of folks, this is the first time they're even experiencing what the history was.
00:01:21.000 I mean, that's just a reality.
00:01:22.000 As time moves on, things become more distant.
00:01:24.000 But for an entire generation of people, for several generations of people, this was the worst moment in American history.
00:01:31.000 What ought we remember on the 25th anniversary of 9 11?
00:01:35.000 Of course, we should remember the pain that Americans suffered and that America still suffers.
00:01:38.000 Here is President Trump talking about it.
00:01:42.000 We will always remember the victims and the families of September 11th, 2001, very famous date, unfortunately.
00:01:56.000 And it started out as such a beautiful day.
00:01:59.000 We will honor their lives, we will cherish their beautiful memories.
00:02:05.000 And we will protect this country and its freedoms for every future generation.
00:02:13.000 We will protect it like never before.
00:02:16.000 For anyone who lived it, no words can do justice to the anguish of that day.
00:02:24.000 And of course, all of that is true.
00:02:26.000 And we ought to remember the pain.
00:02:27.000 And yes, we ought to remember what we lost.
00:02:29.000 Some 2,977 drones were flown into the skies above New York, recreating the Twin Towers.
00:02:41.000 Frankly, in my opinion, it's a disgrace we didn't rebuild the Twin Towers larger than they ever were, and you just have these gaping holes in the middle of Manhattan.
00:02:49.000 That's a huge shame and a mistake.
00:02:52.000 But listen, when we remember, it is not enough to be vague about that day.
00:02:56.000 And that seems to be the purposeful tendency to be vague.
00:02:59.000 Who did it, and what did they think?
00:03:00.000 If you listen to our politicians, we have no idea.
00:03:02.000 It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
00:03:04.000 It's just a thing that happened, a bad thing that happened.
00:03:07.000 We have no idea why it happened or how it happened.
00:03:10.000 Or the thoughts of the people who did it?
00:03:12.000 Or the people who still agree with them today?
00:03:14.000 Zorhan Mamdani, the mayor of New York, a man who once rapped in solidarity with the Holy Land Five.
00:03:19.000 The Holy Land Five, of course, are people who went to jail for material support of terrorism via the Holy Land Foundation.
00:03:25.000 Zorhan Mamdani has nothing but sympathy for a wide variety of Islamic radicals.
00:03:29.000 He is now the mayor of the city in which 9 11 took place.
00:03:33.000 And here he was making his statement on the 25th anniversary.
00:03:36.000 We remember 9 11 as the darkest day in our city's history.
00:03:40.000 But we also remember what so many New Yorkers did in that dark.
00:03:44.000 We remember the thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers who lined up for hours to donate blood.
00:03:49.000 We remember the people who opened their homes to those who could not get home.
00:03:54.000 We remember the workers who carried their colleagues down hundreds of stairs, then turned around and went back up to find someone else who needed help.
00:04:02.000 25 years later, we have a sacred obligation to those who were stolen from us to care for one another as they cared for strangers, to live lives worthy of the sacrifices they made.
00:04:14.000 And to build a city worthy of their courage, a city where we run toward one another.
00:04:19.000 That is how we remember.
00:04:22.000 Yeah, again, everything that Mamdani is saying here would be equally applicable if the towers had just collapsed on their own.
00:04:29.000 Every single thing.
00:04:31.000 So if you were just watching this, if you didn't know anything about it, if you are a young person who didn't live through 9 11, if you were an alien who were to land on planet Earth today, you would have literally no idea who did what to whom.
00:04:42.000 And there is a purposeful attempt to obscure what happened on 9 11 and who did it and why.
00:04:46.000 Again, if you were an alien and you arrived on this planet today and you read the headlines from the New York Times this morning from their website, you would assume that 9 11 was actually an American attack on Muslims.
00:04:57.000 The top of the New York Times webpage had the following three headlines Quote, 25 years after 9 11, a nation gathers to remember and to mourn the lives lost.
00:05:06.000 That was headline number one.
00:05:07.000 Headline number two Trump personifies a nation moving on. 0.57
00:05:11.000 And headline number three Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers.
00:05:17.000 There was also a headline from the New York Times Facing Islamophobia, Mom Dhani keeps focus on 9 11 victims.
00:05:22.000 Because that's really who Zoran Mom Dhani is.
00:05:24.000 Never mind that the 9 11 victims, many of them don't want him around, they certainly don't want him attending their events. 0.81
00:05:29.000 This is worse than useless.
00:05:31.000 It is counterproductive.
00:05:32.000 It is a total betrayal of the American people and the victims of 9 11 and their families and all the people who fought to defend America in the aftermath.
00:05:40.000 We have to remember and relive the evil that happened on 9 11 because if we don't, what we really forget is the nature of our enemies who are still out there and still doing things and still think the same things.
00:05:52.000 And we have.
00:05:53.000 As a society, we have forgotten.
00:05:56.000 So today, I'm going to go through what actually happened and what they thought and what's happened since.
00:06:01.000 So to begin.
00:06:03.000 On 9 11, as we know, 2,977 Americans were murdered.
00:06:08.000 Two American airplanes were hijacked and flown directly into the World Trade Center.
00:06:15.000 Flight 11 was the first flight that hit.
00:06:18.000 Here is a tape of flight attendant Betty Ann Ong, who was radioing down and said somebody had been stabbed in business class and that they were being hijacked.
00:06:27.000 This is 8 20 a.m.
00:06:31.000 The cockpit's not answering.
00:06:32.000 Somebody's stabbed in business class.
00:06:34.000 And I think there's maintenance.
00:06:36.000 That we can't breathe.
00:06:37.000 I don't know.
00:06:38.000 I think we're getting hijacked.
00:06:42.000 That first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8 46 a.m.
00:06:48.000 It hit between floors 93 and 99 of the North Tower.
00:06:52.000 There were 87 passengers on board, including the crew.
00:06:54.000 Everyone was killed instantly.
00:06:56.000 Every stairwell route above floor 91 was severed.
00:06:59.000 No one could escape if you were above floor 91.
00:07:02.000 Here is what that video looked like from that horrifying day.
00:07:05.000 Again, many of us remember this.
00:07:43.000 At first, people thought it must have been some sort of accident.
00:07:46.000 When the first plane hit, those were the news reports that there had been some sort of horrifying accident in which a civilian airliner had been flown into the tower.
00:07:57.000 As it turns out, of course, that was not true.
00:07:59.000 Paul Battaglia, there are many, many, many tapes of people who are located in the towers who are calling their families to tell them they love them because they knew they would never come home to them.
00:08:09.000 A man named Paul Battaglia calling 911 from the 100th floor of the North Tower.
00:08:13.000 This is 8 54 a.m.
00:08:16.000 Hi.
00:08:17.000 It's hard to talk.
00:08:18.000 Yeah.
00:08:18.000 There's a lot of smoke.
00:08:20.000 Right.
00:08:21.000 We're all overreacting.
00:08:23.000 Please come right now.
00:08:25.000 What floor are you on?
00:08:26.000 100 Northeast.
00:08:26.000 Okay, so what's your phone number there?
00:08:34.000 I'm on a cell phone.
00:08:35.000 All right, no problem.
00:08:37.000 We'll get to you.
00:08:40.000 And of course, firefighters immediately started rushing the buildings, trying to get people out.
00:08:44.000 Literally, hundreds of firefighters were killed on 9 11.
00:08:47.000 Again, at the beginning, for those who don't remember this, and I think anyone who's alive at this point remembers this vividly.
00:08:52.000 I was in Los Angeles at the time, and I first found out about this because we were dropping off my sister at school, and all the teachers were crowded around a TV, and we kind of went inside and saw all of this unfold.
00:09:02.000 The second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.
00:09:10.000 It's so good you're dead! 1.00
00:09:12.000 Holy shit! I'm dead! 1.00
00:09:37.000 When this happened, as we'll see in a little bit, when the actual towers fell, people believed that up to 60 to 80,000 people could have been dead because that's the number of people who were actually working in the towers.
00:09:48.000 This plane hit between 477 and 85 at the South Tower.
00:09:50.000 The 60 passengers who were on board, including the crew, were instantly killed.
00:09:56.000 There's some pretty extraordinary heroism stories.
00:09:59.000 There's a man wearing a red bandana who turns out was named Wells Crowder.
00:10:02.000 He was a trader.
00:10:03.000 He's a 24 year old equities trader, former volunteer firefighter.
00:10:07.000 He was going up and down and carrying people down the stairs before he lost his own life.
00:10:11.000 In the collapse, Brian Sweeney is one of the people who sent a voicemail to his wife.
00:10:21.000 Here he was talking to his family.
00:10:50.000 People who are on the street were trying to dodge the debris because debris immediately began raining down from the towers.
00:10:54.000 The footage, again, is astonishing.
00:10:56.000 A lot of this footage was not made publicly available for years.
00:10:59.000 For years, because we'll talk about there was essentially a conspiracy of silence not to allow for these images to be ingrained in an entire generation of Americans beyond the very basics because, you know, Americans might be too terrible in our response.
00:11:14.000 People began leaning out of the towers, trying to breathe, trying to survive.
00:11:19.000 Again, if they were above the stories that had been hit, there was no place for them to go, literally, no place for them to go.
00:11:27.000 And then at least 37 people, probably well over 50, ended up jumping to their death from the North Towers because people were trapped in the heat, they were trapped in the fires, they couldn't get out.
00:11:43.000 People began leaping to their death.
00:11:45.000 From the towers.
00:11:48.000 Those are human bodies dropping.
00:11:51.000 This is what happened on 9 11.
00:11:52.000 I'm playing all this because it is important to recognize what America's enemies are willing to do.
00:11:57.000 And we'll get to what they believe in a second, but this is what they were willing to do.
00:11:59.000 This is what they celebrated.
00:12:00.000 People were dancing in the streets in certain places on planet Earth.
00:12:04.000 Of course, there was a third plane that was American Airlines Flight 77 that impacted the Pentagon at 9 37 a.m.
00:12:13.000 The 59 passengers and crew were killed instantly.
00:12:15.000 125 military and civilian personnel died inside the building as well.
00:12:19.000 Here are some of the footage.
00:12:32.000 See, essentially the same as a missile hitting the Pentagon.
00:12:40.000 Entire side of the Pentagon essentially blown out by the impact.
00:12:44.000 The scene at the Pentagon after the impact, the footage, of course, incredibly upsetting.
00:12:58.000 But there were people that are still trapped in the building.
00:13:01.000 And so I ran down to the doorway.
00:13:03.000 I got a few feet inside and I trip over somebody.
00:13:13.000 And I could feel there's what I think is a woman.
00:13:17.000 Two army guys ran back in with me and the three of us half dragged, half carried her just a few feet outside the building and laid her down again.
00:13:35.000 Again, all of this was happening moment by moment.
00:13:38.000 Everybody in America was watching by this point.
00:13:40.000 And then, of course, the horrifying sight of the South Tower collapsing at 9 59 a.m.
00:13:47.000 Somewhere between 600 and 1,000 people dying inside the South Tower, including 343 New York City Fire Department firefighters, 71 law enforcement officers.
00:13:57.000 About 18 to 40 people at or above the impact zone survived by evacuating down stairwell A below the impact zone.
00:14:03.000 About 6,000 people have been evacuated before the collapse.
00:14:06.000 The attacks happened before 9 a.m., which is when the main body of workers is going to show up at the building.
00:14:12.000 But the footage, of course, is horrifying.
00:14:50.000 Now, meanwhile, one of the great stories of heroism in American history was taking place aboard United Airlines Flight 93.
00:14:56.000 That Flight 2, the fourth plane, had been hijacked.
00:14:58.000 It was likely headed for the Capitol building, and the passengers breached the cockpit and counterattacked the hijackers, forcing the plane to crash into an empty field at 560 miles per hour.
00:15:10.000 All 40 of the passengers and crew died.
00:15:12.000 This became an iconic moment in American history.
00:15:14.000 Passenger Todd Beamer told the others, Are you guys ready?
00:15:17.000 Let's roll, which became a battle cry for Americans.
00:15:24.000 The North Tower collapsed at 10 28 a.m.
00:15:26.000 1,600 people died inside the North Tower.
00:15:30.000 Everyone above the impact zone died.
00:15:32.000 Some 7,400 people had been evacuated before the collapse.
00:15:35.000 In that short period between the strikes and the collapse of the towers, combined, almost 10,000 people were evacuated.
00:15:45.000 Again, the horrors of the day are just emblazoned on everybody's memory who was alive when this happened and has memory.
00:15:52.000 From when this happened, people were running from the tower collapses.
00:15:55.000 The streets were covered in ash.
00:15:56.000 Obviously, pretty much all of Midtown Manhattan was a war zone.
00:16:01.000 Lower Manhattan was a war zone.
00:16:36.000 There were virtually no survivors.
00:16:44.000 Only 20 people were pulled alive from the collapsed ruins.
00:16:47.000 Here was President Bush at ground zero three days after 9 11.
00:17:29.000 Now, we do know precisely what happened with an extraordinary amount of detail.
00:17:35.000 There's a full 9 11 Commission report released in July 2004.
00:17:39.000 Of course, conspiracists will claim the report was rigged from the start and all this kind of nonsense.
00:17:43.000 But the reality is that the Commission did an incredibly thorough report.
00:17:50.000 The report summarized institutional breakdowns before 9 11, the failures of intelligence to communicate with one another.
00:17:57.000 The Commission reviewed some 2.5 million pages of documents, interviewed 1,200 individuals.
00:18:03.000 They eventually accessed George W. Bush's daily briefs as well.
00:18:07.000 The chief failure was the failure of imagination. 0.75
00:18:10.000 People just did not think that Islamic terrorists could carry off anything of this size and scale. 0.51
00:18:14.000 Also, the use of commercial jets as actual weapons, as opposed to just hijacking commercial jets, had never happened before.
00:18:21.000 So there was a failure of imagination there.
00:18:23.000 Terrorism was not regarded as a paramount national security concern before 9 11.
00:18:28.000 Counterterrorism was treated as a law enforcement issue rather than as a foreign policy and intelligence issue.
00:18:35.000 Our intelligence agencies failed.
00:18:36.000 The FBI was more reactive than proactive.
00:18:39.000 The CIA had been weakened.
00:18:40.000 There was a Chinese firewall between the CIA and the FBI, so they could not share information.
00:18:46.000 The FAA had a no fly watch list.
00:18:48.000 It had a grand total of 12 people on its total.
00:18:50.000 None of the hijackers were on the list.
00:18:54.000 Extra pre screening would only withhold the hijackers' luggage, but not their actual boarding materials.
00:19:00.000 Blades and knives were permitted on board, and flight crews were trained to cooperate with hijackers. 0.69
00:19:06.000 Now, Al Qaeda. 0.70
00:19:08.000 Which carried out the attacks obviously had a strategy in the lead up to 9 11.
00:19:13.000 Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda, in 1998 declared it a religious duty for Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world, both military and civilian.
00:19:21.000 And Al Qaeda built a network of state sanctuaries during the 90s in Sudan, in Afghanistan, under the Taliban.
00:19:26.000 Between 10 and 20,000 recruits passed through Al Qaeda training camps at the time.
00:19:31.000 And bin Laden began to shift focus from just regional terror to far enemy attack planning. 0.51
00:19:36.000 The airplane plot was masterminded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
00:19:40.000 The cell of hijackers were radicalized in Germany, like Mohammed Atta, who we'll get to in a moment, and they enrolled in U.S. flight schools. 0.74
00:19:46.000 In 2000, the USS Cole bombing in Yemen killed 17 U.S. sailors.
00:19:51.000 In 2001, intelligence chatter spiked significantly, but there was no true actionable data regarding targets or dates at the time. 0.95
00:20:01.000 Now, as we know, a wide variety of idiotic conspiracy theories have cropped up since 9 11. 0.85
00:20:06.000 This happens in the wake of every American tragedy, but these ones have had a particularly long life. 0.91
00:20:12.000 People claiming that there was controlled demolition that happened at the crash sites, despite the fact that there was zero trace of explosives at the crash sites, and the hijackers said openly they had a bomb.
00:20:22.000 There is no evidence the hijackers brought bombs onto the planes after a view of airport security.
00:20:29.000 You can't inconspicuously rig an entire building with bombs along its most fundamental steel infrastructure without being noticed.
00:20:36.000 There are conspiracy theories on the collapse of the World Trade Center 7, which is a building nearby.
00:20:46.000 An analysis was conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology on the collapse of WTC 7.
00:20:51.000 They conducted a millisecond by millisecond analysis of the building's collapse.
00:20:55.000 Even a small explosive charge capable of bringing down the building would have generated an extremely loud sound nobody heard that day and was not recorded on any of the footage from that day.
00:21:04.000 The collapse of WTC 7 was a result of the collapse of the North Tower, which ejected flaming heavy debris that struck that building, severing exterior columns and igniting fires on 10 different floors.
00:21:20.000 And the structural steel in World Trade Center 7 did not need to reach extreme temperatures to fail because steel beams heated and expanded that pushed girders out of alignment and set off a cascade of flooring failures.
00:21:30.000 Again, there are a wide variety of conspiracy theories here, and all of them are nonsense.
00:21:34.000 They are just nonsense.
00:21:37.000 Now we get to the ideology behind all of this. 0.90
00:21:40.000 We know why Osama bin Laden did this. 0.54
00:21:44.000 It is not a mystery. 0.81
00:21:45.000 The answer is that Osama bin Laden was a terrorist devotee of Islam. 0.97
00:21:50.000 That is the reason. 0.85
00:21:51.000 This does not mean that all Muslims are terrorists or that all Muslims agreed with Osama bin Laden, but this is why Osama bin Laden did this. 0.79
00:22:03.000 Let's talk about eating healthy for a second. 0.64
00:22:05.000 So, eating healthy, it's tough.
00:22:07.000 And you go to the grocery store and you're like, you know what I need?
00:22:09.000 I need this many fruits and this many veggies.
00:22:10.000 I'm going to buy all of it and put it in my fridge.
00:22:12.000 And then you look at it a week later and it's all wilted and gross because it turns out that actually you're not going to do any of that, especially when you, like I am, are balancing five children.
00:22:22.000 Work tours, keeping up with the news, everyday life.
00:22:24.000 Balance of Nature makes consistency easier.
00:22:27.000 Their whole health system uses real whole food ingredients, fruits, veggies, spices, fiber, and makes them simple enough to incorporate into the routine you actually have rather than the imaginary perfect routine.
00:22:36.000 Go to Balance of Nature.com and subscribe to the whole health system.
00:22:39.000 Use promo code Shapiro for an additional 10% off plus a free guiltless snack.
00:22:43.000 Balance of Nature.com, code Shapiro.