25th Anniversary of 9/11, Part 1

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson, and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.
Gary Bauer: Welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President of Public Policy at the Dobson Policy and Culture Center. I'm also the host of Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom, our podcast here at JDFI. This is an important week, and these are special shows. First of all, this is the 25th anniversary this week of the horrendous attack on the United States in 2001 on 9/11, an event really extraordinary in American modern history. It has set off a whole series of events and conflicts that are continuing today. Secondly, sadly, this is the anniversary of the assassination of our friend Charlie Kirk. The significance of that, of course, for his family has been extraordinarily difficult, but it also was something that's affected our country and affected the political process. That brings me to the third reason these are a couple of special shows, and that is that this is an election year. It's not a presidential election year, but the entire House of Representatives will be elected, a third of the Senate, and dozens and dozens of governors. Finally, as a sort of an ongoing issue, we've experienced something we didn't really expect in the last year or so, and that's an explosion of anti-Semitism in America and across the Western world. What's a Christian supposed to do with all of these things? This anniversary, how do we process the assassination of a good man like Charlie Kirk? What are we supposed to do as Christians in confronting anti-Semitism? What's our responsibility as Christian citizens? With all those issues on the table, there's only one person that would be the complete logical and appropriate guest for us to have on Family Talk, and that's our good friend Michelle Bachmann. Michelle serves on the Board of Directors of the James Dobson Family Institute. We value her counsel and advice. She served as the co-chair of the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast from 2007 to 2015. Michelle has been very active in American politics. She ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, but she also served in Congress from the 6th District of Minnesota. We probably could do a show just asking Michelle what happened to Minnesota. There are some strange things going on there, but Michelle can address all these issues. She and her husband Marcus are the parents of five adult children and a bunch of grandchildren. She's also famous for the fact that she and her husband fostered 23 teenagers over the years. She knows what family, faith, and freedom is all about. Michelle, I always enjoy these times. We talk many times when we're not on the air, but I always look forward to these times when we can do a show together because when we have you on, the show is inevitably a hit. People always love to find out what you're thinking about the big issues of the day. Let me start, if I could, with asking you to share your thoughts about the horrible assassination of Charlie Kirk since we're talking on the anniversary of that terrible event.
Michelle Bachmann: It was one of the most monstrous events in recent time. I think that what occurred more than anything is the dual reaction that we dealt with in our country. We had people who looked at a live assassination on TV, witnessing something that no one should have ever allowed their eyes to be laid on. This was a calculated assassination, and the attempted perpetrator is currently on trial in Utah, as he should be. We pray that justice would be done in that case. On one hand, we saw people who were just normal, maybe didn't even know Charlie Kirk, look at the situation and say this is a terrible thing that happened. You had people who knew Charlie Kirk who were devastated. Then you had people whose minds and souls have been poisoned by this thing called wokeness. It's really almost like a cult. People are in this cult where if you don't agree with me, I hate you. I hate you to the point where I think you should be dead. All I could think of is the word monster when I saw people who were interviewed, who were on the street, who were trying to recreate in a pantomime format the killing of Charlie Kirk. I'll never forget a Chicago teacher on the street. A parade was going by and she took her finger like it was a gun and put it to the throat. It was horrific and people laughed at that. I thought, I can't believe that the people that I walk down the street with, that about half of them, it seemed like, would have that type of reaction. I couldn't believe it. I know Charlie. I knew Charlie when he was a young man when he was first starting out. I was in Congress and my name became very high-profile at that time. Charlie was putting together his organization, TPUSA. He knocked on my door and he came to see me when I was in Congress. I gave him an appointment. I didn't know him from Adam. He came in and he told me what he wanted to do and what he was about. I just looked at him, I took the measure of him, and I thought he wants my name is what he wants. He was looking for the credibility of different people's names to put on his advisory board so the people would know that real people that believe in conservative values and biblical values believe in him. I thought, I'll take a chance on him. What he wants to do is great, but it's a crapshoot if he was going to make it or not. He did. He worked like a fiend, didn't pay himself, slept on couches, and Charlie ended up building up this organization that effectively may have helped tip the scales so that Donald Trump won in 2024. Charlie did an incredible job and had great influence at the White House. God took this guy with a great idea, who was a sold-out, born-again believer in Jesus Christ, who wanted to do something to make our nation great. He was laying his life down for it. He ended up laying his life down for it because he was gunned down. From the text messages that we have met of the alleged assassin, it was clear this was an intentional effort to kill Charlie because they didn't agree with his message on male-female relationships. That's what it came down to. We're living in an era that I don't think you and I have ever lived through before, where people believe they have the right to commit political violence and assassinations. We're losing count on how many times President Trump has had assassination attempts on him. We're running out of fingers to count them on. This has got to stop, and we need to realize that when the Bible says the purpose of government is to punish evildoers, we need to recognize that is altogether true and right. To punish evildoers is actually the rudder of holding onto society. We're losing our society because of the fact that we are not punishing evildoers anymore the way that we did before. We're seeing the anarchy and the chaos rise in our society.
Gary Bauer: You raised so many things there that I was nodding my head up and down about. Charlie was a rising figure in our society. A lot of people were talking about him being on a road where someday it would be logical to think he could be president of the United States. I remember, I believe you were there a few years ago, Charlie spoke at the Gathering, which is an annual meeting that we have at Colorado Springs for supporters of the James Dobson Family Institute. Charlie was one of the speakers, and it was an election year. He was sharing with us some of the polling data and so forth, and he said, "Look, Christians have got to be involved. They've got to get out there in the public square and they've got to get into the voting booth, or we're going to wake up one morning and everything that every previous generation in America had sacrificed for and fought for will be gone. History would record that our generation was the one that failed to do what was necessary to preserve our republic." I wonder what your thoughts are on this. The polling out right now in this election year shows that conservatives generally just don't seem to have enthusiasm, and the Christians particularly may show up at low enough levels that in a couple of weeks, we could wake up and everything will dramatically be more hostile to those of us that believe in faith, family, and freedom.
Michelle Bachmann: If Christians don't realize that yet, let me tell you who does understand this. It's the Islamic community in the United States. I've been doing deep-dive research on this lately, and there are radical organizations, unindicted co-conspirators who were named in the Holy Land Foundation trial of 2007, which was a terrorist financing trial. They realized, groups like CAIR, groups like ISNA, these organizations recognize they have a plan. They're committing jihad now in the United States. Jihad means a surrender, but it's a takeover. They intend to conquer the United States. We sit back and think, "What? We're the land of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. How could we be conquered by Islam?" They see weakness. The Islamists see weakness in the United States. They see that we can be conquered, and this midterm is a way that they can do it. It's unbelievable the people who have won primaries in districts that are Democrat. They're going to be elected. If they're the nominee, they're going to be elected. If you thought Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, some of these people are radical, which they absolutely are. The common thread for the Democratic Socialists of America is they are not a political party. The Democratic Socialists of America is an organization only about 80,000 strong. They punch way above their weight, but they're like a parasite. They're a parasite that's jumped on the back of the Democrat Party and they've taken them over. They're committing a revolution of the Democrat Party and the Democrat Party is just a host for the Democratic Socialists of America, which is effectively communism or socialism. They've hijacked the Democrat Party and they have been wildly successful. Bernie Sanders is a long-time Democratic Socialist, but now they've exploded their ranks to the point where the Democrat nominee in the state of Michigan is a gentleman named El-Sayed. El-Sayed has terrorist connections. His mother worked for years for a terror-financing organization that had connections to terror financing for Osama bin Laden, for Hamas, and for these wild terrorist organizations. That's his mother. His father wanted to leave Egypt because Egypt wasn't radical enough for him for Islam. That's his father and mother. His father-in-law is one of the leaders in the Islamic Society of North America, again, an unindicted co-conspirator. You look at someone with these kind of connections, he's now the Democrat nominee. That's just one election. In Colorado, there's another Democratic Socialist from Ethiopia, and she won. If you look at these people, they generally speaking are not from America. They generally speaking come in from other countries and they're running for these offices, but they're winning. In this midterm, we think, "Well, it's not a presidential year, who cares?" What this means is that the tent of the United States could implode this year. The entire agenda in Washington, D.C., the pro-Israel agenda, the pro-family agenda, the pro-faith agenda, all of it is at risk because we can't just rely on Donald Trump to do everything. We have to have judges. We have to have a House of Representatives and a Senate. Remember what these people want to do. The Democratic Socialists of America literally want a revolution, a communist revolution. I've been doing tremendous research on this lately, and they say outright from their executive committee members that their biggest obstacle is the U.S. Constitution. They want to do away with the U.S. Constitution. They want to get rid of the Senate, they want to get rid of the presidency, they want to get rid of the courts, and they want to make the House of Representatives essentially a dictatorship of the proletariat. In other words, they want to do away with America. What they want is they want to steal everything we have. It's plunder. They want to steal our assets and then use them to further communism, but also to allow Islamic Sharia law to run rampant in the United States. It's the worst possible combination you could have, and if Christians stay home, Charlie Kirk understood this, if Christians stay home and don't vote, communism and socialism will become the law of the land in America together with Islamic Sharia law. It will be Christians who will have allowed this to happen because we sat on our hands and stayed home when we needed to be involved.
Gary Bauer: It's really ironic that this would be happening on the 250th birthday of our constitutional republic, this nation built on the idea that liberty does not come from government, it comes from the God of the Bible. You mentioned El-Sayed. I'm still in shock that that guy could win a primary, even a Democrat Party primary, in Michigan. You outlined very well, I knew you would know that right off the top of your head, the many ties of his family to radical Islam. As you know, he hangs around with this guy Hasan Piker, who's a radical Islamist. Hasan Piker has said so many outrageous things, it would take probably a week just to go through them, but one of the things Piker has said is that we deserved 9/11, that America deserved 9/11. Since this is the week of that 25th anniversary of that terrible day, I want to come back to the great appeal you just made to Christian citizens. I wanted to just take a second reflecting back on that day. Do you recall what you were doing that day and when you first heard the news?
Michelle Bachmann: I do. I will never forget it. I can see it right now in my mind's eye. I was at a pancake house in Woodbury, Minnesota. I was a state senator in Minnesota, a new state senator, and the local school board wanted to meet with me because they get funding obviously from the state. They wanted to meet early, like at a quarter to seven in the morning. I'm a mother with a gazillion kids in my house at that time, and I had three little girls that I had. I had to take them with me because their Christian school didn't start until later. So they were with me at the pancake house and a man kind of ran into this pancake house and said, "A plane just flew into the World Trade Center." I looked up, and my brother and sister-in-law worked right down on Wall Street and sometimes were in the World Trade Center. The Holy Spirit just spoke to me at that moment that this was a really big deal. We didn't have cell phones where everybody would just open up their phone and immediately have access to news. We didn't have that technology at that time in 2001. But yet I knew in my heart this was a big deal. The school board members just kept right on making their case for more money. I thought, we've got to go find out what this is. So we concluded the meeting and I went out to the car and turned the radio on, the Christian radio station. They were talking about what had happened with Flight 11 out of Logan airbase in Boston, and that was the first flight that went into, I think it was the South tower of the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan. I was listening and I knew I had the girls in the car and I had to turn it down. I couldn't have that on when the girls were in there. They were horsing around in the back of the car, but I didn't want them to hear what was going on on the radio. I dropped them off at Christian school and then I went to my house and I spent the rest of the day on my couch crying and praying and watching the events. I couldn't believe it. I spent the entire day in tears and crying and praying and crying out to God. Then that night, like so many Americans, I went to a local prayer service in our community. The one thing that I remember, it was in a Presbyterian church, a liberal Presbyterian church, and I remember praying during that service about the evil that had entered our country. I remember people's heads went up because that wasn't a politically correct thing to say, and they didn't like it that I used that word. Are you serious? 3,000 souls were killed. You can't name that as evil?
Gary Bauer: That takes us back to Charlie Kirk. Are you serious? Here's a young father and husband and he's assassinated in real time, and you can't call this for what it is? Evil? That's how deep the delusion and deception in our country is now, that we can't even call an obvious evil like the murder of innocent people evil. It was evil for Charlie. It was evil for the 3,000 people who wrongly lost their lives to these Islamic assassins. I was ironically going into Washington that morning. I can't remember who all was going to be involved, but there were a group of us and we were going to have a press conference on Capitol Hill about the growing danger of radical Islam.
Michelle Bachmann: It was probably Frank Gaffney.
Gary Bauer: I know. I was stuck in a traffic jam that had nothing to do with the events that were unfolding in New York. But as I was sitting there in the car, I looked over to my right and I was on that exit off of a main highway here right next to the Pentagon. Then I heard the roar of a jet engine, and immediately I thought, "Wait a minute, that's way too loud." Just seconds later, that plane flew into the side of the Pentagon. Now, it was behind me and to the right. So to those who have theories about this, no, I did not actually see the plane. But I have heard the roars of jet engines, and I'm pretty sure that was a plane. If it wasn't a plane, where'd that plane go? A plane went into the side of the Pentagon, and of course it was a terrible moment. The blast literally shook the car. At that point, I just wanted to get into Washington because our daughter was working on Capitol Hill and I wanted to get her out of there. I was the last car to cross the Memorial Bridge because I looked in the rearview mirror and they were closing the bridge behind me. I ended up spending the day with my daughter in her apartment on Capitol Hill, and I remember running into a Democrat member of Congress from Maryland, Steny Hoyer. He said, "Gary, this changes everything. This changes everything." It ended up that it really did not, not in the way that he thought. The country came together, but not for long, and then we went back to our divisions. It was a terrible day. It reminds me, Michelle, and I know you'll want to talk about this, on that one plane where the passengers knew exactly what was happening and they ended up fighting back.
Michelle Bachmann: United 93. It left Newark, New Jersey, headed to San Francisco.
Gary Bauer: There was a division of opinion on the plane. We know this from the phone messages that they left. The passengers, many of them gathered in the back of the plane, and some people said, "We need to fight," and others said, "No, we ought to sit down and the plane will land, there'll be negotiations." They had this division, and somebody, we don't know exactly who, said, "Well, let's vote on it." The passengers voted, and the ones that wanted to fight back won that vote. They did fight. They perished in the process, but they saved the nation from even worse tragedies that were planned for us that day. I just thought it was interesting and maybe even a God thing that on the day that Osama bin Laden meant to lay our democracy, our republic low, the American people on that plane voted and then they fought. Of course, we don't have to die today to go to the voting booth, and it's just a reminder of how important the voting is that Christians must do. Michelle, I could listen to you all day long. You're bringing up so many great points, and the clock just keeps ticking away. We're hoping you were able to commit for two days. Can you come back with us tomorrow?
Michelle Bachmann: I'd be honored to, yes. Of course.
Roger Marsh: The Dr. James Dobson Family Institute exists to defend religious freedom, the respect for the American founding, and righteousness in our culture. We take that mission very seriously, and we carry it out every weekday by bringing you trusted voices and biblical truth on the issues that matter most to you and your family. But we can't do it alone. First and foremost, share information about this broadcast with your friends. Also, remember to keep our ministry in prayer as well. We rely on the prayers and the faithful support of listeners just like you to keep our ministry strong in the days ahead, carrying out the legacy of Dr. Dobson and his ministry that has extended now nearly 50 years. For more information about the ministry, you can go to jdfi.org or drjamesdobson.org. You can also speak with a member of our constituent care team. That number is 877-732-6825. I'm Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for joining us today. Be sure to tune in again next time when Gary Bauer and Michelle Bachmann will turn to this election year and the choices facing Christian citizens, especially as we also commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. That's coming up right here on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.