On the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, Breitbart News Daily host Mike Slater shared the story of the “Great American Boat Lift” that occurred on September 11, 2001, as everyday Americans assisted the U.S. Coast Guard in evacuating hundreds of thousands of individuals away from the carnage unfolding in New York.
Smithsonian Magazine describes the effort as “the largest water evacuation in history,” and Slater shared audio of the scene unfolding and the historic radio call.
“All available boats, this is the United States Coast Guard aboard the pilot boat New York. Anyone wanting to help with evacuation in lower Manhattan report to Governors Island.”
It only took minutes for mariners to answer, as a fleet of boats — boats of all kinds, from ferries to tugboats to yachts — responded.
“There is a picture. There’s a few, of this moment. And it’s seared in my memory, and every time I see it it’s unbelievable,” Slater said.
“It’s an aerial shot and there’s a couple of angles. One angle is from Manhattan basically looking out and there’s just boats. There’s boats as far as you can see coming towards … it’s unbelievable. And then this other picture’s looking at the World Trade Center but it panned back so you can see all the boats going to, and you see what they’re going to. They’re going to a war zone, and all the Coast Guard said was we need your help. And people came swarming to help,” Slater said, describing the regular people responding to the disaster — those in tugboats, fishing boats, and more.
“We have these made-up class distinctions in our world. The executive acts like the window washer is less than, the window washer assumes the executive is greedy or whatever. But every once in a while, there’s something that acts as a great equalizer. And suddenly, we’re all the same again, or we realize that we’ve always been the same. That’s what it is. We realize that we’re all the same. But it’s often only when there’s some tragedy like this,” Slater continued.
“And you just wonder, you hope that all the discord we have today, just pray that it’s all fake. You pray that all of this, all the nonsense today, it’s because of prosperity. Like that’s, that would be the good news. Because in a real tragedy, the prosperity is gone. And then everything flattens back out again. You hope that’s it? We’re like, oh, yeah, sorry, about like, like, everyone’s like in, like a zombie trance. And then when something happens, you hope everyone steps up,” he said.
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“We shared the story earlier of the man with the red bandana, who just kept going back. He kept going back. It wasn’t, let’s get these people out and then go home, which would be fine. No one would blame him. He said, I gotta go back. And then I gotta go back again. And I gotta go back again. I gotta go back. That’s what these people running these boats — they kept going back,” he said, sharing more audio from those who went back and forth, evacuating people on their vessels.
“Love those men. You can go on YouTube and search for 9/11 boatlift and you can watch the whole documentary,” he said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.