On Nov. 10, The Federalist Society invited journalist and founder of The Free Press Bari Weiss to deliver the Barbara K. Olsen Memorial Address at their national convention. Weiss, by her own admission, was taken aback by the invitation as she is not a lawyer and she considers herself a liberal. But Barbara Olsen was a political commentator whom Weiss respected. She was also a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.
For those reasons, Weiss accepted the invitation. And we're grateful she did. What followed was one of the most important speeches you may hear this entire year, if not for much longer.
You Are the Last Line of Defense.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) November 13, 2023
This is the speech I gave in the memory of Barbara K. Olson @FedSoc. https://t.co/xzk8SvQkK6
Watch it here:https://t.co/fbMwVC8HRt
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) November 13, 2023
We encourage everyone to read or watch this speech in its entirety. For now, instead of our normal Twitchy practice of highlighting tweets, we want to highlight portions of Weiss' address that everyone needs to hear.
After some gracious thanks for the invitation, Weiss immediately got to the crux of what she wanted to talk about:
I do not think it is a coincidence that Israel is the only country, outside of America, that is home to a 9/11 memorial bearing all of the victims’ names.
Of course that is what we must talk about tonight. The civilizational war we are in. The war that took the life of Barbara Olson and 3,000 other innocent Americans on that morning in September 2001. The war that came, hideously, across the border from Gaza into Israel on that Shabbat morning a month ago. The war that too many had foolishly thought was over.
Civilizational war. The stakes are that high. We would all like to have believed that it was over, at least as an existential threat. But Weiss reminded everyone that it is the same war. And it was never over.
The Hamas terrorists came across the border into southern Israel on foot and on motorbike. They came by truck and by car and by paraglider. And they came with a plan. They came to Israel to murder and maim and mutilate anyone they could find. That is what they did.
These Cossacks had smartphones. They called their families to brag that they had murdered Jews. Dad, Dad, I killed 10 Jews! Others filmed the slaughter with GoPros. Some used the cellphones of their victims to upload the footage of their torture and murder to their Facebook pages. In all of this, the terrorists are euphoric. No one who has watched the unedited footage fails to note the glee of the butchers.
Weiss then recounted many of the horrors of that day, leading up to this point:
The difference between 9/11 and 10/7—two massacres of innocent people, symbols to their killers of Western civilization—was the reaction to the horror.
The difference between 9/11 and 10/7 was that the catastrophe of 10/7 was followed, on October 8, by a different kind of catastrophe. A moral and spiritual catastrophe that was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of those men and women and children had even been identified.
This is where Weiss pivoted from physical war to civilizational war, recounting the horrible actions by students and administrators of American Universities: Harvard, Princeton, George Washington University, Cooper Union, Columbia, NYU and so many more.
Hip, young people with pronouns in their bios are not just chanting the slogans of a genocidal death cult. They are tearing down the photographs of women and children who are currently being held hostage in the tunnels that run under the Gaza Strip. They do so with pleasure. They laugh. They mock the 9-month-old baby who was stolen from his parents.
In doing so, they are tearing down—or at least trying to tear down—-the essence of our common humanity.
Weiss went on to explain that antisemitism cannot be and is not the sole explanation for this behavior. Antisemitism is a symptom of something much worse.
[Postmodernism] seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong. It replaces basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob ...
... Decolonization isn’t just a turn of phrase or a new way to read novels. It is a sincerely held political view that serves as a predicate to violence ...
... That baby? He is a colonizer first and a baby second. That woman raped to death? Shame it had to come to that, but she is a white oppressor ...
... It is the ideology of nihilism. It knows nothing of how to build. It knows only how to tear down and to destroy.
Weiss proceeded to outline what to do about it. First and foremost, don't look away. No matter how horrible it is to see, the barbarism and, just as importantly, the reaction to that barbarism are critical to understanding enemies as well as allies.
I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, I know who my allies are. And my allies are not the people who, looking at facile, external markers of my identity, one might imagine them to be. My allies are people who believe that America is good. That the West is good. That human beings—not cultures—are created equal and that saying so is essential to knowing what we are fighting for. America and our values are worth fighting for—and that is the priority of the day.
Weiss also reminded us to look at the good, not just the evil. To look at shopowners who aren't afraid to put Israeli flags in their windows, despite the risk; to look at cowboys from America who volunteered to travel to Israel to help with their farms and livestock. Because free societies stand together.
Weiss also addressed the importance of enforcing the law, denouncing Soros-funded 'prosecutors' who let crime run rampant, and the importance of one standard for speech, denouncing universities who selectively enforce free speech standards depending on who is doing the speaking.
Then Weiss reached her most powerful call to action of all:
Accept that you are the last line of defense and fight, fight, fight ...
... nothing is guaranteed. The right ideas don’t win on their own. They need a voice. They need prosecutors ...
... We have let far too much go unchallenged. Too many lies have spread in the face of inaction as a result of fear or politesse. No more.Do not bite your tongue. Do not tremble. Do not go along with little lies. Speak up. Break the wall of lies. Let nothing go unchallenged.
Our enemies’ failure is not assured and there is no cavalry coming. We are the cavalry. We are the last line of defense. Our civilization depends on us ...
... There is no place like this country. And there is no second America to run to if this one fails.So let’s get up. Get up and fight for our future. This is the fight of—and for—our lives.
We are the cavalry. She could not have been more on point with this, and everything else she said.
As we noted previously, we encourage everyone to read, watch, or listen to the entire speech. We have only included some important excerpts here. But actor Patricia Heaton summarized our reaction perfectly:
Thank G-d for @bariweiss https://t.co/yrxh7YpKCm
— Patricia Heaton (@PatriciaHeaton) November 14, 2023
Indeed. We can only hope everyone heeds her words and, more importantly, her call to action.
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