Call me old school, but I think 9/11 should still be off limits.
I still cringe when comedians make jokes about it, when conspiracy theorists claim that it was an inside job, or when people, such as The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last, compare recent ICE shootings to United Flight 93. They are free to say these things, of course, but that does not preclude them scorn and judgment. (RELATED: Longtime Trump-Hating ‘Conservative’ Shows One Of Most Embarrassing Examples Of Trump Derangement Syndrome Yet)
On Tuesday, The Bulwark, a Never Trump “conservative” outlet, published an insane and insanely mawkish take on the memorials to Alex Pretti and Renee Good, the Minnesotans killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in January, and the makeshift memorial that sprang up in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, days after 9/11. The heroes of Flight 93 saved the U.S. Capitol building and countless lives when they retook the plane from the terrorists and crashed it into a field.
SHANKSVILLE, PA – SEPTEMBER 11: American flags fly at a memorial site on the 5th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, where United Flight 93 crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, September 11, 2006. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
“The forty people killed on Flight 93 were murdered by terrorists from foreign countries. Alex Pretti and Renee Good were murdered by terrorists acting under the aegis of the president of the United States. Their murders were not accidents. They were policy. There has never been even the pretense of accountability for the men who perpetrated these crimes,” Last wrote.
Utterly demented. As National Review’s Dan McLaughlin observed, the “position of the Bulwark is now that the government of the United States is a terrorist organization that should be treated the way we treated the Taliban in 2001.”
Position of the Bulwark is now that the government of the United States is a terrorist organization that should be treated the way we treated the Taliban in 2001. https://t.co/sdCLXed9do
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 25, 2026
In a footnote at the bottom of the piece, Last said that his “young adulthood was inextricably bound up with September 11,” that one of his aunts was in the North Tower on 9/11 and died, and that he has never visited Ground Zero because it would be “too painful.”
Well, it’s pretty clear that, in adulthood, he is still bound up with 9/11, to the point that he is willing to draw a comparison to the ICE shooting victims and the victims on Flight 93.
I sincerely hope his rage-bait was worth it. I hope he scored some Substack subscriptions from paranoid liberal wine moms. I hope he doesn’t feel any remorse trying to use 9/11 as a grotesque political and ideological cudgel.
