SEPTEMBER | Rick Hummer

 

IF THE MEDIA has its way, and believe me, they’ll try, then the end of the world will be met with sensationalism.

Tuesday was a practice run.

As the sun dawned over America’s eastern shoreline on the eleventh of September, 2001, New York City was in a strangely thoughtful mood. Even its streets were quieter than usual. This is perhaps partly due to the fact that a cold front had swept over the coast on the night prior, bathing the warm and sticky wet of summer with rain and thunderstorms. The following morning delivered a pristine skyline draped in a surreal backdrop of oceanic blue. A full slate of races awaited voters on Staten Island and around the city. Children were also starting school that day. As the clock rounded towards 9AM, the temperature reached a clean and comfortable 65 degrees. From Brooklyn, parents espoused extra time to personally drive their child or see them off at the station, but the trains departing for Manhattan would not return that afternoon.

The atmosphere of that day is truly difficult to define.

 

 

At precisely 8:46AM, most New Yorkers experienced the wreckage to the northern facade of the World Trade Center’s North Tower in precisely the same manner as the rest of us did—through a phone call from friends or by simply turning on the television. A missile, it was often first reported, or maybe it was a plane. By 9:03AM however, the moment in which the southern facade of the South Tower was pounced upon by a second plane (or was it a missile?), the uneasiness which had suddenly gripped the city, particularly among the countless Manhattan residents who quietly started inching their way toward the Financial District of Lower Manhattan for a better view, bled out in a collective symphony of moans.

Within half an hour, at precisely 9:37AM, a third collision was reported at the Pentagon in Washington DC, 227 miles to the south of Manhattan. By 10:03AM, a fourth airliner reportedly crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh.

Chicken Little wasn’t shitting us.

For the remainder of the day, a plume of smoke bellowed high into the sunny canopy above the Hudson, while a lazy wind blew southbound. Smells of the fire seemed to seep through every window, filling every room of every house in Brooklyn. Long afterwards, the stain from that awful September morning, particularly the pulverized steel and concrete which filled the lungs of many, simply wouldn’t wash away. There are those who survived a plight of stairs down some ninety-five stories, nearly two-thousand steps, and would long thereafter wake up at night with swollen ankles—no place left to run and nowhere deeper to descend but to Sheol and the shower.

From several hundred miles away, as the crow flies, Rick Hummer was an afternoon drive jock and also the imaging director for an entire cluster for CBS Radio in and around Charlotte, North Carolina, and driving into work when the first plane hit. “I heard Samantha actually say on the radio, ‘Hey guys, I don’t know what’s going on, but something just happened in New York City, and there’s a gaping hole in one of the World Trade Center towers, and they’re saying on the news right now that quite possibly a plane hit it.”

 

 

Hummer picked up his cell phone and called in on the hotline, hoping to crack a one-liner. Samantha Stone answered.

“Where’s John at?” he asked.

“I don’t think you understand, Rick,” Stone said. John was their boss. John had just received his pilot’s license. “This isn’t a joke.”

Upon entering the building, Hummer “came into the front door, and the conference room had a big glass wall—you could see in; and they had the TV on up in the corner. Hardly anyone ever used it except for meetings.” There were already people gathered around, locking their heads upwards towards the flickering television, fingers inelegantly pronounced upon their lips and noses. The very moment he walked in to join them, Hummer looked up and saw an explosion.

The women in the room screamed.

He asked, “Was that a replay?”

“No, that’s another plane!” They said.

“The first thing I thought was: ‘the radars are off. The radars are off. They’re sending them to the wrong place. Somebody reprogrammed the beacons for the runways.’”

Hummer thought of familiar faces, and immediately returned to his phone, hoping to call friends and associates waddling among the wreckage. “And obviously you couldn’t get through at all. Right away it was hard getting through to New York.”

Susan answered.

“You wouldn’t believe it! You wouldn’t believe all the people coming this way,” she told him.

“What is going on?”

“I have no idea!”

Susan was only ten blocks from the World Trade Center, pushing against the swelling tide of pedestrians scrambling to and fro. Hummer was on the phone with her the precise moment when the North Tower fell—when the howls of hell’s torment seemingly filled his ear.

OH MY GOD! Susan cried.

ALL THE PEOPLE! ALL THE PEOPLE!

Hummer recalled, “Just hearing her scream, I felt like I was there. I felt so helpless. I really thought something was happening to her. What I was picturing in my mind was this domino effect—all the buildings were going to fall down over each other. The whole fear thing came over me.” While Susan rushed about helping to deliver water and towels to those who were fleeing the cloud of pulverized steel and concrete, Hummer folded into the media’s sensationalism. “I went through that with everybody else, not looking at anything but the terror, the awe.”

It was that very night that Bush held a televised press conference. They had already come out and claimed Osama Ben Laden as the day’s grand orchestrator. “And he said these exact words. He said: ‘We will not tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories.’ And when he said that I was actually sitting on my couch, and I said, ‘Why did he say that?’”

What conspiracy theory is he talking about?

 

 

THE VIEW FROM CONNECTICUT | David Weiss

 

HOWARD STERN HAD SAID SOMETHING to the effect that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and that the North Tower was presently on fire. Thirty-seven-year-old David Weiss was packing his bags, hoping to catch a flight out of LaGuardia Airport for Ohio, when the announcement came through. He turned on the news. The North Tower was smoldering. Weiss then called a client in New York, whom he was expecting to travel with.

“I think our flight is going to be delayed,” he said.

They were still on the phone when the South Tower exploded. Their line went dead.

“I’m pretty sure our flight’s canceled,” he told himself, turning off the television.

The distance from Greenwich Point to New York City is precisely 35 miles, and only a two-mile commute from his house in Connecticut. Nearly fifteen people had gathered by the time he arrived. From the beach, “I had a clear straight-line shot of lower Manhattan over the water. You can see the towers unobstructed. It was probably the clearest day I ever remember.” He watched the smoke plumes for a time. “Then I watched the first building get turned to dust.”

Weiss didn’t stick around to watch the North Tower fall. He simply left to pick his kids up from school. “The second tower came down shortly after. And I knew something was wrong from what I saw—the way the building disappeared, but I really didn’t verbalize it for four years.”

“I live in a town in Connecticut, right outside New York, where half the town works on Wall Street. There’s a lot of people that say nobody died on 9/11—a lot of Truth groups. And I don’t believe that. You can’t pull an event off like that and not have somebody die. Was it 3,000 people? Definitely not. Half of the names on the death list didn’t have social security numbers, and their families never came forward, so that tells you right there something is wrong.”

Fact of the matter is, David Weiss lost friends that day. And as he stood on Greenwich Point, with an unobstructed view of lower Manhattan, he was probably not thinking about the buildings so much as their names. The buildings had names. Thousands upon thousands of names. Every single Cantor Fitzgerald employee who reported for work on floors 101 through 105 of the North Tower died on September 11, 2001. Weiss personally knew two of them. They were about the same age. Robert Noonan was 36 years-old. Mike Rothberg was 39. He windsurfed with Noonan and played squash with Rothberg. On September morning they simply left for work and then never returned.

“I have two friends whom I know personally, who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, and they’re gone. And I used to say that they’re dead. But I don’t know that they’re dead. Their bodies were never found. Were they involved? I have my theories on Cantor Fitzgerald. The way I look at it is, the young guys at Cantor Fitzgerald were making more money than anybody should ever make on anything. So, to me, I would be willing to bet that whatever Cantor Fitzgerald was doing was illegal, and that perhaps they were all approached, saying: ‘You’re all going to jail for the rest of your life, your families are going to be baron, or you could participate in this event that’s coming up, and we’re going to move you to this little island in the south Pacific, and you’re going to live the rest of your life there very happily—in luxury; but you can never contact your family again. That’s a possibility. Do I have any proof of any of that? None.”

“But I do have two friends that disappeared on 9/11. Where are they—are they dead? I couldn’t tell you. If you look at Robbie’s memorial picture, it’s very strange. The photo of them, it totally looks photoshopped. Like, the person’s head looks too big. And his body looks too small. And it’s just weird. And if you’re a conspiracy minded person, you’ll go, that’s fake. That’s not real. This person never existed. That’s a fair conclusion based on this shitty little picture that was photographed through a glass frame—because it was pre-digital. But that’s not the case. That’s a real picture. I know him. I know his family. And the fact that they have memorials for him every year, or that they used to, that doesn’t prove anything. That proves that either they believe it, or they’re lying. I don’t think they’re lying. I think they believe it. And so, I don’t know why their memorial pages are so screwed up.”

 

 

A SELF-INFLICTING WOUND | Bob Knodel

 

CAMI LET HER HUSBAND IN ON THE NEWS from work that morning. In Denver, Colorado, the hour had not yet pronounced 7AM, and 40-year old Bob Knodel was lying in bed when she called. “We had a TV in our bedroom, and so I turned it on, and I was looking at the gaping hole in World Trade Center. The first thing I thought is, ‘Man, that guy must have been a really shitty pilot.’”

Maybe not from bed, where he “watched the news and all the sensationalism going on” and the immediate finger pointing with a growing sense of paranoia (after all, he did work in several downtown high rises), Bob Knodel wisened up to September 11^th from the very beginning—in fact, that very week.

“The September 11^th attacks were a self-inflicting wound. A lot of people, it took them a lot lot longer to catch onto that. But just looking at things with a critical eye, especially the terminal velocity that these buildings came down at; I looked at that as an engineer and a pilot and I said: ‘There is no way that could have possibly happened that way.’” Knodel quickly began noticing other irregularities. “You look at the towers, and they fell at 10.4 and 10.6 seconds respectively, which for 110 stories is absolute freefall. So the idea of a pancake theory, as they were trying to push, one floor weakening under the other, I mean, any engineer worth half of his salt would realize that’s utter BS, and there’s no way that could have possibly happened.”

The asymmetry went on and on from there, “the missing gold, the cheering Israeli’s, the people that were notified beforehand—they put options on stock,” on and on and on. “I had concluded that it was a complete hoax. And I think one of the things that did it for me was the molten metal that was still running under the streets a week later. And I’m thinking to myself, from a hydrocarbon fire? There’s no way! There is no way that a hydrocarbon fuel could possibly burn that hot. Not only could it not burn hot enough to melt steel, but surely it could never burn hot enough to make it molten and keep it molten for over a week. The only thing that can possibly get hot enough to make steel do that and to keep it that way would be thermite or thermate; and thermate is just a variation of thermite; there’s just a chemical added to it where it burns even hotter.”

As discussions quickly broke out in online chat rooms, Knodel even began considering the possibility that the pancake freefall denoted a controlled demolition. “NIST had not come out with their report yet stating that there was this weakening and pancake effect and all that, which ultimately turned out to be BS anyway. The only way that those could have come down at freefall speed is if the foundations were removed from underneath their floors. It had to be that they were literally, simultaneously destroying all the core columns, all at the same time. It also explains the reason why it fell straight down on itself. And at one point, you know, it’s interesting, because one of the towers had started leaning, like it was going to topple over, and then, you know, I guess the chargers were slightly late. And then when they finally went off, they dropped it down into its own footprint. At that point I knew—I knew that this was a self-inflicted wound. This could never have just happened by airplanes crashing into the buildings, spilling JP-4 fuel and having it ignite. It just didn’t add up at all.”

The University of Alaska at Fairbanks “just released a new report from their engineering department that was a four-year study that talked about the collapse of WTC 7, and of course they ran through all these scenarios, and they ran a simulation, and they concluded that the only possible way to have 7 collapse the way that it did is to have simultaneous core column failures. They didn’t say that it was a controlled demolition. They didn’t go that far. But they didn’t have to. It was obvious that that was exactly what they were implying.”

And another thing, while Knodel lay in bed watching the horror unfold, constant replays seemed to show the buildings swallowing the planes whole, while their noses exited the other end, still perfectly rounded.

The planes were “an after production effect” intended for broadcast, he said. Witnesses saw missiles. “There was one helicopter that caught most of that footage, and that was the Fox helicopter. And essentially, the reason the nose came out the other side is, as they were filming this, and they were augmenting it, there was probably like a wind gust or something that kind of jolted the helicopter slightly, and so they mistakenly had the nose appear to come out the other side. Now again, these are all post-editing, semi-real time editing effects that were going on. So no, I don’t believe the planes were holographic because the eye-witnesses, many of them said, ‘No, we didn’t see planes. They looked like missiles.’ And the only people that were saying planes were people that were actually hired by the media. Almost every single witness that was interviewed on 9/11 had a connection or was employed by the mainstream media at one point or another. But when you get to the other people, a lot of them were saying they were missiles. And the power of suggestion agrees that some people, if they indeed saw a missile, when it was suggested to them that it was an airliner, then their mind will go along with that. It’s kind of a basic psychological tactic, especially when it’s repeated over and over and over and over again. That’s how you get people to buy into stuff, repeating it over and over and over and over again.”

“Ironically the other really strange thing that happened during 9/11 is that all of the video and cameras, or the majority of them, were disabled, like there was some sort of an EMP that was released that disabled these devices, so you didn’t have a whole lot of amateur footage. But then what you did get was people coming forward saying that this was posing as amateur footage. The same sort of CGI errors and glitches were going on in those as well. And they were consistent with each other. Of course, in 2001 the techniques weren’t nearly what they have today. So there were things like a disappearing wing or disappearing tail sections that would fade in or out. You would have perspective errors that didn’t add up, things like that. Nowadays, if they were to pull that off, the production value would have been so much better. It would be pretty convincing.” Still, “this was a massive—massive psyop to try to convince people, complete with amateur witnesses—the whole nine yards. They had almost every contingency covered. But obviously no plan can be perfect, especially when you’ve got a good portion of the world population scrutinizing over it, and especially the amount of engineers and scientists out there that are looking at this.”

On the morning of September 11^th, Bob Knodel sat there in bed and contemplated the media narrative before him, and then for the longest time afterward he thought about it some more, until finally he thought, My God.

It’s a self-inflicting wound.

We’ve been lied to again.

“These are all conclusions that I came to within the first week to the first month of the September 11 attack, based on my experiences as an engineer and as a pilot. I know there’s simply no way that that happened as they say it did. It defies the laws of physics and everything that I knew about science.”

As Knodel went around telling people this, the typical reaction was to be expected. You’ve lost your marbles, old man. But “I persisted, and managed to piss off a lot of people. And these were my customers too, by the way. As time went on they started taking heed to my word, and saying, ‘You know, Bob, you were right. There is no way that this could have possibly gone down the way they said that it did.’”

All of this, Knodel concluded, was to lay the ground work for what’s still to come.

 

 

 

THE CANADIAN PATRIOT | Robbie Davidson

 

“I THINK WHEN THE EVENT FIRST HAPPENED it caught everyone off guard,” Robbie Davidson said. Davidson was at home, running his internet company on the morning of September 11^th, and like almost everyone else, he didn’t catch the drama until moments before the second plane hit.

“It’s hard putting into words the feeling you actually have when you see this unfolding.” And for almost everyone who witnessed that event, the outrage was almost instantaneous. Among a profusion of swirling emotions, Davidson settled comfortably in upon the anger. People need to pay for this. “I think it really created that patriotic attitude of, ‘Let’s move forward,’” Davidson said, and by that he means:

Let’s bomb the crap out of these people.

“I fell for it, for sure. There was no hesitation. There was no doubt in my mind. The event happened the way it happened—the way the news told us it happened. At that point, I would say 9/11 was pivotal in this truth journey for so many individuals, because it really awakened people to how dark and how evil this world truly is. How in the world could an entire government, in the very least, allow the event to happen, and at its very worst, be complacent in everything?”

“And here’s the really interesting thing, even when that event happened, it wasn’t like there was a lot of YouTube videos on the subject. There weren’t a lot of people talking about it—not that I came across.” It’s almost as if the truther community, tens or hundreds of thousands of voices, woke up at the same time. In fact, if it hadn’t been for September 11^th, the flat earth Movement may not have happened at all. “If you look at everybody’s timeline, they all woke up at the same time. I find that fascinating. Rob Skiba’s story, he’s sitting on a plane. He hears people talking—questioning the official narrative. And he’s mad. He’s upset. I mean, here’s a guy that is in the army, he’s all about being patriotic. And yet, here’s some people questioning the official narrative, and it made Rob mad. I think that was for a lot of us at the same time. At first you’re like, ‘No, this can’t be.’ And yet when you get sucked into it you find out that there’s a mountain of evidence, and I mean a mountain of evidence to support the fact that the official story is definitely not the truth—whatsoever, in the same way as when you get into enclosed cosmology, there’s such a mountain of evidence.”

People often ask Davidson: “What will it take for you not to believe what you believe?”

Davidson’s reply: “And I’m like, you have to understand, there are so many aspects to this.”

 “I have friends that thought I was crazy when I was bringing this up, and they really knew structural engineering. A few of them were into building themselves. When I brought up Building 7, they stopped, and they said, ‘Woah, buildings don’t fall like that.’ It took Building 7 for a lot of friends that I knew. Everything else wasn’t resonating with them. But when it came to Building 7—no planes had hit it. There was no structural damage. There were a couple of fires going on; and yet at freefall speed, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon or whatever, all of the sudden it collapses into its own footprint.” Something’s going on.

In fact, when the 9/11 Commission Report was released on the 22^nd of July, 2004, its glaring omission was Building 7. “That was the issue that woke up a ton of people. There were a lot of researchers, a lot of people, not just in America.” In the years after America’s tragic involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, a deluge of documentaries started gushing out onto the web and filling every crack and crevice of the rabbit hole, for anyone simply willing to peek their head in. “This led to engineers for 9/11 truth; it led to firefighters for 9/11 truth; the police. I mean, when you start looking at it, there were many credited scientists that were coming on board. Demolition experts all over the world were chiming in outside of America and saying, ‘I’m sorry, but that is controlled demolition.’ There is so much proof. There are so many people adding their voices to what’s going in. I think one of the most powerful testimonies is victims—parents who lost people in the actual event itself, speaking out the loudest and crying foul.”

 “We could talk for days about everything that went down. We could talk about thermite. We could talk about how the steel beams were cut. We could talk about the fact that they were one of the strongest buildings ever. You have people on record saying that it would take multiple planes, and it still wouldn’t come down, the way it was created with a net, created to withstand almost anything. And yet on September 11^th, at freefall speed, these buildings collapse into their own footprint.”

Davidson said, “The Pentagon—that was the craziest thing. They confiscated like twenty-six cameras, CTV cameras from every gas station and hotel. It was an issue of national security. If you are going to hide something from the public, first of all, it’s a plane crashing into a building. What is unsecure about releasing the footage from the CTV cameras from all the adjacent hotels and gas stations? It made no sense that they would confiscate all the video on that. Not to mention that the only release was a freeze frame, three frames of—you can’t even see it; it’s hidden—something hitting the Pentagon.” It looks almost like—a missile. “It’s so mind boggling when you get into every aspect of 9/11. The fact that the plane would actually do an aerial maneuver in which pilots even came forward and said, ‘We can’t do that with that jet.’ It’s almost practically impossible from the highest level combat pilot. They had to do this aerial maneuver, circle around, sit there, and then go into the pentagon, basically at the area where nobody was present. It was all under construction. If you’re a terrorist and you want to take something out, then you want maximum damage. Why would you come straight down and go conveniently into the place where there’s nothing going on?”

Interestingly enough though, the striking point “was where all the financial documents were, and all that stuff was destroyed. A lot of stuff mysteriously disappeared, like the gold in the vaults.” 2.3 trillion dollars. “The fact that people were placing put options—if you understand the stock market, you can place calls and puts. A call option is when you think the stock is going to go up, and a put is when the stock is going to go down. They were putting put calls a day before 9/11 on American Airlines and United. You can see a spike on the put option that was placed on the two airlines. Somebody was in the know.”

“When you get into Pennsylvania, the coroner went on record and said, ‘I’ve never been at a crime scene where I couldn’t find blood.’ There was no fuselage. There was no engine. There was no luggage. There were no bodies. In Pennsylvania, there was just a hole in the ground. Same thing with the Pentagon—Where were the wings? Where was the fuselage? Where were the bodies—the blood—the luggage? I mean, on any plane, there’s a lot of luggage. Where’s the luggage? Nothing—it just evaporated inside that hole inside the Pentagon.”

Attempting to harvest facts from the tares, the false media-saturated narrative of 9/11, is a Pandora’s Box in and of itself. “From there you basically can’t shut it off. From there I went into learning about the monetary system, the Federal Reserve, researching the Bohemian Grove, Skull & Bones. For me as a Christian, I wanted to understand the spiritual implications as to what was going on in the world. I wasn’t so much fascinated with the physical aspects. I wanted to know the spiritual aspects that were going on. When I found out that almost every president had been a 33-degree Freemason; when I found out that the higher elite, the Rockefeller’s and the Rothschild’s were pretty much controlling everything—they were controlling both sides of the war; when I studied the world itself from a spiritual angle, I discovered that Satan truly was the god of this world. Even though I knew that Satan was the adversary, I never understood the level of infiltration he had in the world. I looked at him more as an abstract force. He was there; he was going to be there; he was going to cause trouble; but I didn’t see him inside world elite systems; inside the presidential office; inside the political parties—the democrat and republican; I didn’t understand the high levels of Satanism within the world structure.”

The Bohemian Grove, what President Richard M. Nixon once referred to as, ‘the most-faggy god dammed thing you could ever imagine,’ should be a deeply unsettling discovery for every Biblical believer. Davidson said, “Alex Jones broke that open. What’s going on here when you have the most powerful men in the world each year meeting in California, worshiping Moloch, a carved owl, doing mock human sacrifices and chanting in a forest, wearing robes? For me, that was showing Christians, look, look at the people going to these events! These are the most powerful men in the world, and yet this is true, full-on Satanism. This is what is warned about in the Bible!”

September 11^th was so pivotal, Davidson says, that if someone has looked into chemtrails, looked into vaccinations, or the lies of Scientism, especially the flat earth, “I would bet that most had an introduction through the 9/11 event. The majority of people will say they’ve gone into this research,” and all because of the September attacks, “for a number of years leading up to what was coming next. So I always look at it like, these things are coming at different points, because it’s all a part of His story [History], it’s all a part of His awakening. Truly, this is not something that we’re wizening up to. It’s not something that we’re suddenly smarter than the rest of the population. It’s not that at all. For whatever reason, we’re being picked. We’re being chosen to be a representation of this truth and bringing it forward—even with all the opposition and attacks coming our way. For whatever reason, there are certain individuals that are called to face this ridicule and persecution. Moving forward, there’s more to come. And I think of everything that has been going on, and I can’t imagine things getting crazier in the world. But still we’re going to be getting to a point where there’s going to be a lot more happening in the future. To me, 9/11 is pivotal to this entire discussion, because when people understand how dark and evil this world can be, you can’t really hold anything past anyone when it comes to how sophisticated the lies will go, especially when it comes to NASA—when it comes to the creation of the space agencies. When you start connecting all these dots, you have the same players; you have the same connections. The world is a stage. It’s a show. And they control everything. We’re here, not to be a part of it, but to bring hope and to spread the truth.”

If only the individual can overcome the spiritual blinders of patriotism—and I admit, this is a tall order; after looking into, and attempting to separate, the glaring errors from the facts. And yet, this is the hope. If only the critical thinker can “get past the whole, rah—rah—America, the government can do no wrong!” attitude, Davidson concludes, “When presented with the facts, they’re going to be left with, hmmm, that’s interesting.”

 

WAR DRUMS | Rick Hummer

 

NEARLY A YEAR AFTER 9/11, RICK HUMMER had moved back from Charlotte to Indiana in order to take care of his ailing father. The fact that his wife decided to stay in the Carolinas seemed to imply, in rather broad and bitter strokes, that their marriage was over. Despite the fact that his father died almost immediately thereafter, Hummer never returned. He simply hired a private investigator to catch his wife in the act, and then hunkered down for the prolonged divorce proceedings.

It took yet another year after America’s invasion of Iraq on the 19^th of March, 2003, for Rick Hummer to finally wake up. In the meantime, he beat the war drum.

“I was doing country radio, so it was really my job to play the patriotic tunes,” he said. Alan Jackson, ‘Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?’ and Darryl Worley, ‘Have You Forgotten?’ comes to mind. “I was even on an NBC affiliate talking about how it’s our duty to be patriotic and back our troops. I was so brainwashed—full blown brainwashed. I had no idea that I had been programmed by the system. Even when people were trying to reach out to me at that time,” irate over the fact that we were going into Afghanistan and Iraq, “I was like, you guys just don’t get it. They did this to us. We need to go in there. We need to get them. We need to get them.”

Hummer may have very well been playing Worley or Jackson when a veteran of the Second World War called into the station.

“You sound stupid to those who know the truth,” the grizzly old voice told the disc jockey.

“What do you mean, I’m stupid?” Hummer replied.

“Well, let me ask you something…”

Hummer shrugged with indifference.

“Can I ask you three questions, because you keep banging this war drum, son, and I’ve got to ask. Every day when you get off the radio, when you’re leaving your show, you say, ‘Have a great day, God bless you.’”

Yeah, so…?

“What God are you talking about—the one in the Bible?”

Uh, yeah—

“Well the God of the Bible doesn’t talk about married women like you do, like Shaniah Twain and some of these other women you’re playing on the radio. You sound very lustful.”

Hummer’s throat went dry.

“We weren’t on the air,” he recalled. “I mean, I wasn’t putting the man on the air with me. I was just playing music in the background. And he basically said to me, ‘You sound stupid for saying God bless you and simultaneously banging the war drum’ when I wasn’t talking anything about what the Bible taught. I was proud and haughty, a get-in-your-face shock-jock at times, doing prank phone calls, airing them, and having fun.”

“He basically just broke me down, out of love. He was knocking my character down. It humbled me. I stood there and listened because my grandfather was a World War 2 veteran. By that point in time I had already looked into what happened at Pearl Harbor, and why some of the generals were going over to the other side of the island.” That smells fishy. “How did we not know there were planes coming to bomb Pearl Harbor? I always felt bad for my grandfather, because he told me what he went through in Europe, watching his friends die; watching some of them freeze to death; how they would take the socks off of dead men to keep themselves warm. It was awful—just some of the worst conditions imaginable.”

The old man then asked him, “How many buildings fell on 9/11?”

Hummer thought about it, “Five or six…?”

“No, there were only three.”

Hummer recalled, “When he said that a lightbulb came on.”

“You’re right. I think a third building did come down.”

“Son, you need to goggle building seven.”

“You mean Google building seven?”

“Whatever. Look it up.”

Okay.

Hummer typed Building 7 into his search engine, hoping to multi-task, and promptly asked: “What’s your next question?”

One of the first things he saw was, ‘Building 7 omitted from 9/11 Commission.’ Huh?

The grizzly old voice did not wait around for reality to continue nipping him in the intellectual buns, and asked, “What if the media and the government are lying to you?”

“I wouldn’t like that. Nobody likes being duped.”

“Well then, son, I’m going to ask you one more thing. When you finally figure out what the truth is, what are you going to do with it?”

Hummer recalled, “I knew exactly what he was talking about. I heard the confidence in the man’s voice, and I was stunned. Here was a guy who’d been listening to me for a couple of years and knew me probably better than I knew myself at that point in my life, and he gave me exactly what I needed to hear. I got convicted.”

The disc jockey stared into dead air for a matter of seconds.

“I don’t know,” was his response. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Just tell the truth, son,” the old man said. “That’s all we’re expected to do.” He then added, “If I were you, rather than slamming shot glasses down, I’d be getting on my knees more often.”

The truth, as they say, set Rick Hummer free.

But he wasn’t the only one. In the months after the 9/11 Commission Report was finally released, the truth set innumerable people free.

 

Noel