As of September 8, Forbes reports, more than 100,000 people have signed a petition asking organizers of New York City’s 9/11 Commemoration Ceremony to “carefully consider whether [New York City mayor Zohran] Mamdani’s participation would align with the intention of the ceremony and the expectations of the families most directly affected by the tragedy.”

Coming from family members of people who died in the 9/11 attacks, the petition deserves a respectful hearing, whether the claims about Mamdani’s sentiments, sympathies and past actions ring true or not. They’re the people who lost loved ones. The ceremony is, or should be, for them.

Unfortunately, some less deserving people compulsively run to the front of parades that aren’t about them. One such person is former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.

“It offends me that he’s coming,” Giuliani said in a weekend interview, following up with claims that Muslims in general want to “take us over” and that Mamdani is “a clear supporter of that.”

At least 32, and possibly more than 60, Muslims died in the 9/11 attacks (excluding the attackers, of course). I wonder what their loved ones think about the guest list at the Commemoration Ceremony?

As for Giuliani, he’s now spent 25 years milking 9/11 for every drop of personal and political benefit he can get out of it, including a run for president in 2008, during which then US Senator Joe Biden of Delaware characterized Giuliani’s every stump speech and question response as “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

Let’s take a quick look at Giuliani’s actual record concerning that sad day.

He was elected mayor shortly after a 1993 terror attack on the World Trade Center.

One major recommendation coming out of that attack was to equip the city’s first responders with compatible radio gear such that police officers, firefighters, and paramedics could communicate with each other during such events.  Seven years later, as his second term was ending, that hadn’t been done.

Another recommendation was the creation of a city “crisis management center” to coordinate the response to terror attacks and other major emergencies. He did follow through on that one … and chose the most prominent terror target in the city, the World Trade Center complex (building WTC 7), as the center’s site. On the day of the attacks, the center had to be evacuated due to fire instead of serving the city’s needs.

Afterward, he capered around the country calling himself “America’s mayor,” while rushing the site cleanup such that many victims’ remains went unrecovered, and declaring the site “safe” despite significant environmental hazards —  skimping on safety and causing more deaths among cleanup workers from illness than were caused by the attacks themselves.

By 2007, Giuliani was the one victims’ families didn’t want at their events, and for good reason.  He’d used them as backdrops for his constant antics instead of treating them with respect. And he never gives up trying to make that day all about Rudy Giuliani. What Rudy Giuliani thinks. Whether Rudy Giuliani’s “offended.” Quick, someone buy Rudy Giuliani an ice cream cone.

The actual loved ones of the actual victims are entitled to hold their days of remembrance without being used as props. And after 25 years of pointless and murderous wars, increasing domestic police statism, and fake “patriotic” caterwauling, all using 9/11 as the launchpad,  it’s long past time to start ignoring Giuliani and his ilk.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In 2024, Floridians voted, by a margin of 55.9% to 44.1%, to legalize recreational marijuana. Unfortunately, the threshold for passage of “Amendment 3” was 60% and the measure failed.

So far so bad … but it gets worse.

Nearly two years later we’ve learned that state government officials misappropriated millions of dollars in taxpayer money; funneled it through a charity founded by governor Ron DeSantis’s wife and into Republican PACs operated by the man who later became the state’s attorney general, with the approval of the then sitting attorney general, now a US Senator; and poured it into a campaign to defeat the measure.

We know this because someone leaked a grand jury report on the matter to CBS News Miami.

“Based on the impending ballot initiative, the expedited nature of the movement of these funds  … and the quick disbursement of the funds to their final destination,” the report reads, “we conclude that these funds were misappropriated as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.”

Unfortunately, the grand jury couldn’t figure out exactly who to charge  with which elements of the criminal conspiracy and didn’t issue indictments: “Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida … or had any memory of who made it.”

De Santis’s response to the matter: “The only crime that was apparent was whoever leaked the grand jury report.”

Now-AG James Uthmeier, who seems to have been the central figure running the $10 million embezzlement operation, calls the affair “a politically motivated hoax” which “shows that the Democrats had to collude with the press to break the law.”

It’s not their fault they embezzled taxpayer money to rig an election, see? It’s everybody else’s fault for finding out!

If that grand jury had minded its own business, if that whistleblower had kept the report under wraps, if the media hadn’t told the public about it, IF IT WEREN’T FOR THOSE MEDDLING KIDS … the word that comes immediately to mind is “Clintonesque.”

What’s next?

Hopefully we’ll get a new, more vigorous investigation that finds out who did and knew what, when they did and knew it, and charges those responsible. I hate to leave anything to the federal government, but Florida’s state government is too tightly under the control of the perpetrators for it to get done any other way.

We should also get another vote on the recreational marijuana measure, this time an un-rigged one.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“California,” Milo Yiannopoulos wrote last year on X, “needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally.”

On August 27, ICE agents abducted Yiannopoulos at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, briefly detained him at one of the gang’s concentration camps in Alexandria, Louisiana, and deported him the next day to his native country, the United Kingdom. It seems he had overstayed his visa, and after failing to appear for a hearing, had become subject to a “final order of removal.”

Oops.

You can see, I hope, temptation to  schadenfreude from those of us who support truth, justice, and the American way  (i.e. “open borders” as called for in the Declaration of Independence and mandated by the US Constitution).

Do we really need a mouthy Brit jetting over here at will, spouting stupid, evil, and abhorrent opinions at high volume, then overstaying the “welcome” he insists everyone else must continually bow and scrape for both initially and on a recurring basis, on pain of abduction and deportation?

In my opinion, yes, that’s exactly what we need.

I don’t have to like Milo Yiannopoulos, or agree with his odious ideas, in order to understand that where he travels to or chooses to live is neither my business nor the US government’s.

In fact,  the case against deporting Yiannopoulos is strengthened, not weakened, by his 24/7 public stupidity.

It’s pretty easy for anti-immigration advocates to make the case for deporting, say, a (non-ICE) gang member who has committed violent crimes in the US or seems likely to based on having committed such crimes elsewhere.

It’s not quite as easy to make the case for deporting immigrant workers to “protect American jobs.” That requires preying on abject economic ignorance to convince Americans that immigration makes them less, rather than more, prosperous. But it’s obviously doable, at least for a little while, until a head of lettuce costs ten bucks.

Yiannopoulos, however, traffics mainly in speech.

Speech is not a violent crime. In fact, it’s not a crime at all.

Speech moves easily across borders. If Yiannopoulos wants to say something, we can listen whether he says it in London or in Los Angeles.

And the ability to speak isn’t a resource of fixed quantity. When Yiannopoulos speaks, he isn’t reducing the ability of anyone else to speak. He can speak all he wants … and the rest of us can too. As we should.

Even “bad” speech has value. As Louis Brandeis put it, “if there be time to expose through discussion the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

The rants of a Milo Yiannopoulos embody ideas — bad ideas — that, unfortunately, many other people also hold. The cure for bad ideas isn’t to deport a particular mouthpiece, it’s to entertain those ideas and expose them as bankrupt with better ideas.

Back in the UK, Yiannopoulos will continue doing the  same things he was doing in the US, just as successfully … and spending his money, probably mostly earned from US sources, there instead of here.

No schadenfreude from me. He’s owed an apology and his freedom to travel.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY