Tunnel Vision

Do you remember September 9?

I spent September 9 in a cave. It wasn’t planned: I had been promised a waterfall. But there was a long drought, and the streams dried up, leaving a cavern of color and a series of interlocking caves. Cliffs soared above and holes gaped below, beckoning me to explore.

I waded through wildflowers and entered the largest lair, calling to my husband that I was alright, and crawled as far as I could go. The view from the cave was clearer than the view from the cliffs. In the dark, every detail of the outside world shines brighter. In the dark, I move slow and gradual, contorting myself to its crevices, observing everything and pursuing nothing. I took pictures because we had stopped at this park on a whim, and it was not supposed to look this way. I had gotten lucky, and I wanted proof that there was such a thing as good luck.

September 9 was a big day. We had dropped our daughter off at college and were taking a detour on a long drive home. The park was a distraction from the pain of leaving our baby behind.

I’m not giving away the location — if you know from the photos below, shhhh — but I will say that it is an oasis near a highway landscape that even I struggle to make interesting. As a result, I spent the ride back reading the news we had missed.

“Israel attacked Qatar,” I announced. “And bombed Lebanon. And killed the prime minister of Yemen. And threatened Turkey. And slaughtered children in Gaza. Again.”

It is hard to catch up with all of Israel’s murders and violations of international law in one car ride. Miss one day, miss countless corpses. Israel had attacked six countries in the last 72 hours. Netanyahu was unrepentant, promising more.

“Even Trump condemned Israel,” I informed my husband. “For Qatar.”

“Trump’s still alive?”

“Still alive!”

Trump’s alleged demise had dominated “news” for weeks. I use quotation marks because there is no longer “news” in the US: only speculation, propaganda in oligarch-run newspapers, dark money posts disguised as articles, the occasional well-researched but paywalled piece, and independent reporting blocked by algorithms.

The rumor that Trump was dying was sparked by a hand bruise and a dream. It was greeted with celebratory anticipation tempered by thoughts of JD Vance.

If that rumor was a test of whether the prospect of Trump’s death would galvanize support, it failed, I thought. I imagined Trump reading the giddy tweets. I imagined his propaganda team reeling, knowing that they would need someone new around whom to consolidate power. Vance would not suffice: he was tainted as VP of the second Trump-Epstein cover-up regime.

In recent weeks, Trump’s base had been shaken by revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as well as the reemergence of old horrors that should have been addressed decades ago.

That Trump had been accused of raping a 13-year-old trafficked by Epstein in 1994 was old news. I reported it in my book Hiding in Plain Sight and included the court documents from her case. But some information was new even to those of us who had covered the Epstein operation for a long time. Unearthed documents revealed deeper ties between Trump and Epstein and hinted at explicit pedophile proclivities. Their release followed a devastating September 3 press conference by Epstein’s victims.

A criminal conspiracy that had been buried for decades, then memed to the point of inscrutability following Epstein’s 2019 “suicide”, then reburied in the Biden years, was finding a mass audience. And they wanted answers.

Insistence that the Epstein conspiracy must be fully revealed had long united not only left and right, but all Americans who hate pedophile rape traffickers — which is to say, almost all Americans, with the unfortunate exception of those inhabiting the highest halls of power.

I wrote in my 2022 book They Knew: “At this sick, sad point in our national history, Jeffrey Epstein may be the only thing holding Americans together. That our unity rests on shared loathing of a billionaire pedophile and his network of wealthy accomplices is an indictment of the United States itself.”

I wrote that paragraph in 2021, hoping that the victims’ cases might be reexamined after the 2020 arrest of Epstein partner Ghislaine Maxwell. But Biden’s approach was no different than Trump’s: install people close to Epstein in major roles (for Trump, Bill Barr, whose father had hired Epstein and launched him into high society; for Biden, Antony Blinken, whose stepfather was the best friend of Robert Maxwell — Ghislaine’s father and a mobbed-up espionage operative for Israel — as well as Epstein’s advisor) and shun the pursuit of justice.

The news was vile, and the 9/11 anniversary loomed. I dreaded media commentary but was curious what regular folks would say. Much as Epstein’s operation had been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” that proved to be an actual criminal conspiracy, aspects of 9/11 once derided — that some US officials may have known the attacks were coming, that some foreign leaders may have welcomed them, that a 1997 paper by Iraq War architects claiming the US needed “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor” may be of note — had entered mainstream discourse.

There is a gulf between awareness of an atrocity and justice for its victims. I expected little of the latter but wondered whether talk could be free without being cheap. Anger at preventable deaths is another nonpartisan cause. Americans had stopped viewing skepticism over the official 9/11 narrative as offensive — a belief instilled through the hijacking of honest inquiry by propagandists like Alex Jones — and yearned for truth.

By 9/10, we were home, conservative pundit Charlie Kirk was shot dead, and the damning news stories of 9/9 were dying with him.

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In 2001, I worked at the New York Daily News and spent the summer cataloguing its moronic tales. Gary Condit, the congressman accused of killing an intern, deemed innocent long after the fact. Actress Anne Heche proclaiming that she was “Celestia, the reincarnation of God” and came from “the fourth dimension”. (The press ignored that this was how Heche coped with a lifetime of abuse.) And sharks, always sharks. The sharks weren’t doing much, but the notion that they could strike was considered news. Later, the tabloid replaced its shark template with Muslims.

All these stories collapsed with the Twin Towers. On 9/11, we entered After, and those tales became irrelevant vestiges of Before.

The stories that faded in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder are different. They are serious, and Kirk also covered them. Kirk was close to Trump and his staff. He wanted the Epstein case examined, though he vacillated due to his administrative ties. He was a longtime supporter of Israel, though in 2023 he questioned whether Israel had allowed the 10/7 attacks to happen.

These topics are a live wire. Stories are not being knocked out of the news: news is getting knocked out of the stories, because people are afraid to tell it.

Conservative pundits are debating whether Kirk had retracted, or was considering retracting, his support of Netanyahu’s regime, with several claiming that Kirk worried Israel was targeting him for murder. They say other pundits feel threatened and that pro-Israel donors have been pressuring them. Netanyahu’s many proclamations that Israel did not murder Kirk have raised eyebrows due to their overzealous tone. Kirk had a large audience of Americans under thirty years old: the very group that has the lowest opinion of Israel. Whatever position he took would be influential.

This controversy is but one in the Charlie Kirk murder saga, which has provoked endless theories about the gunman and motive while being weaponized by the Trump administration to slander innocent Americans and curb free speech and assembly.

On September 9, it felt like the only story big enough to stop the Epstein coverage, which had run ceaselessly since July, would be another frightening event laden with celebrity intrigue. On September 10, one arrived, and the state embraced it.

I hesitated over writing this article for many reasons, but the main one is that a snuff film is at its center. That is a sickness, a depravity, that should be neither seen nor overlooked. Whatever one thought of Kirk, he did not deserve to be murdered, nor does he deserve to be dehumanized in a way that has become common in American culture. The defining feature of the 21^st century is disregard for the sanctity of human life. The livestream is a deathstream with no way to turn it off.

* * *

There was a time when I had never seen the murder of a human being. That time was my entire life before I got a smartphone.

In 2025, murder videos circulate regularly. The victims are usually poor and unknown until their posthumous fame. Dead human beings are scrutinized, analyzed, and in the end, degraded, on plastic rectangles of sacrilege. People used to carry snuff in their pockets; now they carry around snuff films.

I saw the killing of Kirk. I wish I hadn’t, but I couldn’t opt out: it played no matter how I adjusted my social media settings. Now the video has taken on a life beyond the life that was taken. His murder is marketed as martyrdom and pushed as proof: of every theory and every rationale, of every worst assumption and every lost cause.

These are dangerous, manipulative times. There is both honest heartache from his fans and cynical directives on mourning from the powerful. There is both a chilling murder and a chilling effect caused by discussing it. A culture of censorship has claimed its spokesman, and he cannot speak, not even to protest his position.

The state seeks to denote a demarcation: September 10, 2025, the new Most Important Day. I don’t know if government attempts at creating a Before and After will succeed, regardless of certain factions’ ever-burning desire for a Reichstag Fire.

But I know two children lost their father, and that they will have to live in the eternal shadow of his murder on replay, and that horror is a sickening shame.

When I feel lost in the morass of threats and violence, I remember September 9. Not the news, but the reprieve from it: the solace of nature, the mystery of the caves, the pool where the tunnel ended, too far down for me to jump. I had to retrace my steps and crawl backward, hoping I would make it to where I began, and travel the same path with new vision.

We must do the same with history, before it is erased.

I document the news of September 9, 2025, in case America is at a turning point. As we learned after 9/11, turning points have a way of dissolving into spin. Remember the recent past — and reclaim the stolen future.

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All photos taken by me, September 2025.

Tunnel vision.