Actor Chris Pratt called on Americans to remember the feelings of unity and patriotism that swept the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, recalling that devastating day — and the groundswell that followed — in a recent speech.

Pratt shared video of the remarks he gave at Pepperdine University, reflecting on that day and what he felt in the moment that he had realized his country was under attack — and he encouraged students to embrace the things that bring Americans together rather than the things that keep people divided.

“Don’t let the 9/11 effect fade,” he captioned the clip. “Just a week ago, we gathered to remember the heroes and the indomitable spirit that emerged from the ashes. Let’s keep that fire of patriotism burning bright, honoring the sacrifices of those who stepped up in the face of adversity. In a world that sometimes feels divided, it’s crucial to remember that we are one nation, united under the same flag, indivisible. Let’s carry the torch forward, ensuring that the lessons of 9/11 continue to shape our future and inspire generations to come.”

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Don't let the 9/11 effect fade. Just a week ago, we gathered to remember the heroes and the indomitable spirit that emerged from the ashes. Let's keep that fire of patriotism burning bright, honoring the sacrifices of those who stepped up in the face of adversity.

In a world… pic.twitter.com/FQkIec9eNy

— Chris Pratt (@prattprattpratt) September 19, 2023

“I remember it so vividly. I stood there alone watching the television,” Pratt recalled, noting that he had been in New Zealand filming at the time. “I watched in horror as the second plane hit the tower. I watched the smoke, the devastation. I watched people jumping from buildings, falling from buildings. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I’d never seen anything like that in my life.”

“I stepped out and I fell to my knees in the snow and I cried and I cried,” he continued. “And in that moment, I gotta say I felt — I felt really alone. And I wanted to go home. I wanted to come back to America.”

He recalled his concern for his older brother “Cully” — who had been in the Army at the time — and wondering what would become of him and his fellow Americans in uniform.

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“My brother, my older brother Cully was in the army at the time. I thought, ‘Oh my God, my brother’s going to go to war,'” he said. “I felt the tectonic plates of the earth shifting beneath my feet. I knew in that moment that the world I lived in was going to be totally different moving forward.”

Pratt went on to say that while the remembrance ceremonies and memorials had been important in the early years after the attacks, he believed that they were more important as time went by — important because they could now teach those who were not there what America was like when the people believed in each other.

“Understanding this history means a future in which policymakers have the opportunity to take the lessons of the past and apply them going forward as wisdom. That’s what we owe those on the planes, and in the buildings, who never made it home that day. It’s what we owe the firefighters, the police officers, and paramedics who responded,” he said. “It’s what we owe those who were already in uniform and those who stepped up in service to this great nation in the aftermath of the attacks.”

“We must remember, we have to teach our children the lessons of 9/11, to rekindle the 9/11 effect and keep it alive,” he concluded. “Faith, religion, love of our fellow citizens and patriotism grew from the ashes of that day.”

If you ask human rights groups, public executions are a thing of the past in the developed world. If you want to see one, according to the experts at Amnesty International, you’d need to go somewhere truly third-world, like Somalia or North Korea. Otherwise, you won’t come across executions in the middle of the day, right out in the open, because we’re more civilized than that. We might have runaway inflation that rivals the late Roman empire, and state-of-the-art fighter jets that the Pentagon loses like spare change. But at least we don’t lop people’s heads off in the town square because they stole a loaf of bread.

What human rights groups will not tell you, because it’s inconvenient for their preferred political narrative, is that public executions are now more common in the first world than they’ve ever been in history. It’s not even close. In fact, these executions are happening all the time right here in the United States. All that’s changed from a century ago is that the authorities aren’t the ones carrying out these killings, in accordance with any kind of legal standard. Instead, the perpetrators are young criminals, who also happen to be — whether we want to acknowledge it or not — disproportionately male and black. 

One of these public executions took place in northwest Las Vegas around 6:00am on the morning of August 14th. A 64-year-old retired police chief named Andreas Probst was out biking when a 17-year-old driver, urged on by his friend, decided that it was time for Probst to die. The passenger in the vehicle recorded what happened next and uploaded the footage on the internet. The video begins with these criminals ramming a random car on the road, performing a PIT maneuver for no apparent reason. Then the thugs spot Probst. We’re going to show you the footage now, but you should know in advance that it’s disturbing. Here it is:

EDITOR’S NOTE: WARNING, THE VIDEO BELOW IS GRAPHIC:

This video has received 1/1000th of the coverage of the Jordan Neely subway incident. If the races were reversed, it would be the only thing the media would be talking about. The life of the guy they ran over simply doesn’t matter because he is white. pic.twitter.com/Gk1Huwt7Bs

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 16, 2023

At the outset, it’s important to note how commonplace it is to see footage like that on social media these days. We’ll get more into the reasons for that in a second. But it used to be that you would only see people dying if you were disturbed enough to seek out that kind of material from LiveLeak videos out of Iraq, or on some horrific snuff porn forum in some dark and terrible corner of the internet. Now the videos are all over the place on the internet, and you’re likely to see them whether you sought them out or not. This is a very bad thing, obviously. Bad that people are being killed on video. Bad that we have to see it. But you would think that if one positive thing could possibly come out of the proliferation and accessibility of these kinds of videos, it would at least be honesty. We all know what’s going on in these videos. We can see them. We have seen them. We should at least be able to be honest about them, and have an honest conversation. But we can’t, because even if the videos are all over the place, the institutions tasked with reporting on them, and giving us all the information we need about them, are determined to protect their own narratives. 

Back to this case. The driver of that vehicle has been arrested. He was initially picked up for vehicular homicide, before cops saw this video. Then, once they saw this footage, they upgraded the charges to murder. That’s the good news. The bad news is that authorities won’t release the name of this driver, supposedly because he’s 17-years-old, and for that reason, they’re protecting him. You see, in our legal system, thugs who mow down retirees are entitled to anonymity. Conveniently enough, that policy makes it a lot harder to track which demographic groups are committing these horrible crimes, almost as if it’s by design.

Therefore, to be completely honest and forthright with you, we can’t tell you with certainty who the driver or his passenger are. Apparently, police still haven’t even arrested the passenger, somehow. So we can’t really tell you anything about them. We can’t look up their social media profiles and see if they offered a motive for this killing, for example. The government wants us to remain as clueless as possible about this heinous crime, all for the benefit of the murderers.

But to the extent possible, I’m not going to play along with that, because when you run over an elderly man on a bike, no sane person would want to silence an open and honest conversation about what happened. So let’s have that conversation.

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It appears that the video depicts one, probably two black teenagers killing an elderly white man. That’s not an observation, that’s unique to my deft skills of perception. A lot of people have come to the same conclusion, because they have two working eyes and ears.

Before anyone says, “That’s not confirmed; you shouldn’t spread unconfirmed information” — I agree with you in a sense. Speculation, however well-founded it may be, shouldn’t be necessary. Ideally, your government is honest with you about the people who are running over innocent men in the middle of the street. Ideally they release perpetrators’ photos and names and social media feeds immediately. That’s what they do when the police kill someone, even if it’s an accident. You have the cop’s entire life story, printed in every major newspaper, within 24 hours. But, like Europe, we’re now hiding demographic information about the perpetrators of violent crime in this country, as long as they fit certain characteristics. And until our leaders stop doing what they’re doing in Europe, they’d better get used to speculation.

But it doesn’t appear our leaders will stop doing what they’re doing, because if we’re being honest, it’s working. There’s a complete media blackout on the identity of the killers in this case. Let’s take a look at the media coverage of the footage you just saw. Here’s the New York Post: “Footage shows teen driver appear to deliberately hit and kill retired police chief Andreas Probst.” Fox News: “Teen driver appears to intentionally hit, kill retired police chief in viral video.” People Magazine: “Teen Charged with Murder After Video Appears to Show Driver Hit Retired Police Chief on Purpose.” The Independent: “Video allegedly shows teen driver intentionally striking retired police chief in deadly bike crash.” And on it goes. 

All of these headlines don’t just obscure the racial element of this murder. They omit it entirely. This is almost too obvious a point to make, but consider what would happen if the races were reversed in this scenario. Imagine that two white teens mow down an elderly black man on a bicycle. Would the headlines say, “Teens appear to kill a retired cop”?  Would there be any hesitation whatsoever to report on the race of everyone involved in this incident, and front-load it as quickly as possible?

You know the answer to that question. At every opportunity, when there’s a black victim and a white perpetrator, the media makes sure to mention race as much as possible. “Shot Black teenager crying ‘buckets of tears,’ 84-year-old in custody,” reads one recent PBS headline. “After years of threats, a feud ends with a Black mom dead and her white neighbor arrested,” reads an AP headline from this summer. “Ta’Kiya Young’s family urges officer’s arrest after video shows him killing the pregnant Black woman,” reads a more recent AP story. In none of these cases was it clear, or even plausible, that race motivated the killing. But our media led with race because it allowed them to force-feed the BLM narrative.

If you’re wondering why a certain large portion of the public still believes that black Americans are being hunted and killed en masse by whites, this is why. This is why so many people still march and shout “Black Lives Matter” to protest this phantom injustice. The majority of Americans are fed a carefully curated version of events that bears very little resemblance to what’s actually happening in this country. The truth is that, as the X account “Data Hazard” has pointed out, more than 27% of white murder victims are killed by non-whites. By contrast, less than 10% black murder victims are killed by criminals who aren’t black. Black people are roughly ten times more likely to kill a white person, as compared to the odds of a white person killing a black person.

This fact isn’t factored into the equation because the powers that be work to conceal it. They hide the truth in headlines. And when there is obvious racial violence — like the attacks by predominantly black offenders against Asians in San Francisco, or Orthodox Jews in New York — the media simply looks the other way. If we’re being charitable, which we shouldn’t be, then we can conclude that these media organizations are petrified that they might give fuel to all the dreaded MAGA Republican white supremacists lurking in this country. So they ‘re lying to us.

But all these concerns about racial violence, real and imagined, obscure a very uncomfortable truth — which is that the vast majority of violence in this country isn’t motivated specifically by race. It’s not motivated by white supremacy, or black supremacy, or any kind of racial supremacy. Take that video of the police chief who was killed. Everyone watching that footage knows that it’s likely these kids in the car would have hit that cyclist no matter who he was and what he looked like. 

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The data are clear on this point: The epidemic of violent crime is fueled not by racial animosity for the most part. Even if you use the government’s cooked “hate crime” stats, you don’t explain the vast majority of violent crime in this country. The truth is that lots of kids who weren’t raised to be civilized human beings are unleashed onto the world as barbarians looking to inflict pain and suffering just for the sake of it. For the most part, these are kids who aren’t raised in stable two-parent households, which includes a very high percentage of black children. Without a stable family life, or a father figure, these kids are going out and committing heinous, arbitrary acts of violence — and they’re targeting people of all races.

It’s because these violent crimes are so blatant, so unrestrained, that you can often find footage of them on social media. For example, consider the viral video this week of a killing in Philadelphia. You can see a guy standing on a street corner looking at his phone. Someone in a hoodie walks by, pulls a gun and shoots him in the back of the head, before robbing him. Both the victim and the assailant are black. And that’s the kind of barbarism that’s regularly on display in major American cities. 

But videos like that will never appear on CNN or MSNBC. And if they ever do, there won’t be any honest conversation about them. There’s another one just this week of a man being shot down in the middle of a parking lot in broad daylight. Again the killer casually murders his victim then strolls away as if nothing happened, entirely unfazed by what he’d done. Probably because it wasn’t his first time. Again, in that case, both the victim and the assailant were black.

BLM has not issued any statement about any of these cases. There will be no mass protests or vigils to honor the man shot for holding a cell phone in Philadelphia, or the men in the parking lot in that apartment complex. None of these deaths fit a convenient narrative, even though they involve black victims, so they’re ignored.

But at a certain point, if we care about victims — of all racial backgrounds, including white and black victims, and every other kind of victim — we need to ask ourselves why society is filled with so many thugs who have no compunction about executing people in broad daylight. 

This wasn’t always the case. As the blogger Devin Helton noted recently, homicide rates in U.S. cities all blew up somewhere around the mid-20th century. Baltimore’s homicides went up by 346% from 1950 to 1991; Chicago’s homicide rate went up by 322%; Detroit by more than 1,400%; New York City’s by 692%; New Orleans’ by 504%; San Francisco by 128%, and so on. In all of these cases, Helton notes, homicide rates were higher in 1991 than they were in the early 1900s, before the invention of antibiotics and modern surgical techniques.

What these figures demonstrate is that the violence we accept as normal is, in fact, a choice. It is not inevitable. The BLM regime and corporate media have done everything they can to obscure that fact, but it’s true. And it’s incumbent on all of the liars in the media, and the political class, to explain why we’ve gone backwards to such an enormous and measurable degree. 

If they start screaming about white supremacy and dog whistles, then you know they’re not interested in a truthful discussion. A few years ago, they could get away with that. But now the bodies are piling up, on camera. Now the suspects are recording themselves in the act of committing murder. So the lies need to end, it’s time for actual solutions. And if our leaders can’t provide them, then inevitably, this country will elect leaders who will. These may not be the solutions Amnesty International wants, but if we continue to ignore what’s happening in bike lanes and parking lots all over the country, then these solutions will be inevitable.