If there's one thing science tells us, it's that obscenely wealthy people have their own peculiar notions about things that cannot be challenged by actual facts. I mention no names, of course, but one or two might spring to mind. (Okay, one particular cheery neofascist.) Also, we already suffered through one president who hallucinated things that didn't actually happen, and he turned out to have Alzheimer's disease.
The media, of course, was asleep at the switch.
So it seems only fair that is the job of Your Librul Media to straighten this shit out. Will the largest national "news" organizations follow the example set by New Jersey media? Stay tuned!
TRENTON — As the horror and confusion unfolded on Sept. 11, 2001, John Farmer Jr. — then New Jersey's top law enforcement official — heard a rumor about Jersey City. Word was spreading that people in the state's second-largest city— located directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan — were celebrating the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center that day.
"We checked that out instantly," Farmer, who was New Jersey's attorney general at the time, recalled in an interview Tuesday with NJ Advance Media. "If it had been going on — especially in the thousands — we would have locked that place down. Because it would have been a serious threat to public safety."
The story became relevant again in recent days after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed this weekend that he saw television footage of "thousands and thousands" of people in Jersey City cheering on 9/11. It was part of his argument that the U.S. needs to institute surveillance at mosques in the wake of the Nov. 13 Paris terrorist attacks.
But various officials and news reports have vehemently disputed Trump's claims.
Farmer said the rumors about Jersey City and of celebrating elsewhere in New Jersey were never confirmed. "There was no dancing on the rooftops in Jersey City or Paterson on 9/11," said Farmer, who also served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, co-chaired by former Gov. Tom Kean. "That was one of several confused, false reports that circulated that day that we checked out. Obviously, if there had been, it would have been a serious thing."
"There was no evidence that that happened," he concluded. "It didn't happen."
