America was swamped with “Never Again” fever after the September 11 attacks of 2001. The terrorists may have hit us hard, but “Never Again.” No amount of money would be too much to spend. Next time, we would Be Prepared. We even put surface-to-air missiles on the roof of the White House.

That’s how prepared we were, so that we would “Never Again” have to go through the sort of crippling shutdowns that we experienced after that terror attack. Like everything else our elites have done over the past few decades, they botched that whole Be Prepared thing badly.

New York City’s hospital system is now buckling due to 4,000 new cases of coronavirus. “Buckling” is the word that all the news reports keep using. Imagine if China had created a much better bioweapon and purposefully unleashed it on us, instead of accidentally unleashing a not-very-effective bioweapon like COVID-19 as it did.

New York was the main target of the 9/11 attacks and that makes sense, because it is the beating (black) heart of America’s debt-ridden financial sector. Striking a blow against New York hurts the rest of the country to a lesser degree. But in the wake of 9/11, the city and state of New York received gobs upon gobs – hundreds of billions – of US taxpayer dollars under the “Never Again” sentiment.

What happened to all that money? Preparing for a biological attack was one of the things that the elites told us they were on top of. Yet here we are with a large city of 8.6 million residents suddenly overwhelmed by 4,000 hospitalized patients.

Here’s what happened with a lot of your tax dollars in New York after 9/11 to pay for “Never Again.”

First, the State of New York was divided into 16 Counter-Terrorism Zones (CTZs). The state set up the Office of Public Security (OPS) in 2001, which was transformed into the Office of Homeland Security (OHS) in 2004.

The Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) was created to coordinate the allocation of the flood of federal dollars that were pouring into New York. In 2010, New York’s offices of Counter Terrorism, Cyber Security, Emergency Management, Fire Prevention and Control, and Interoperable and Emergency Communications were all lumped together in a single new state agency. You know, to streamline things!

That new agency was the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services (DHSES). Not to be confused with OHS, the OPS or the UASI that were in charge of the CTZs, mind you.

Then, New York established the State Homeland Security Grant Program (SHSP), the Joint Task Force Empire Shield (JTFES), the Transit Security Grant Program for the Metro Transportation Authority (MTA), the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC), the HazMat, Technical Rescue and Explosive Detection Canine Teams (HMTREDCT), the Interstate NY-ALERT system, Incident Management Teams (IMTs), and secret caches of WMD trailers stored in strategic locations across the state.

Oh, and they hired 100,000 government employees in New York for the National Incident Management System (NIMS). (But there’s no such thing as a Deep State!)

In addition, New York set up a Medical Emergency Response Cache (MERC) system that was supposed to be stockpiling emergency supplies of things like… masks… respirators… maybe some hand sanitizer?

All of these various overlapping and redundant agencies and offices then set about writing plans and putting those plans into playbooks. And boy do they have a lot of playbooks!

They have plans and playbooks that encompass what they’re supposed to do in an emergency, a terrorist attack, a biological attack, a cyber-attack, a dirty bomb and so on. They should set up a big awards show each year for categories of Best New Playbook. Call the ceremony the Blammies and give recipients a little statue of a nuclear explosion. If you can imagine it, they have a playbook for it!

They spent well over a trillion dollars on this crap over a 20-year period in 50 states – and in the end, they weren’t even ready for an illness that will likely kill fewer people than seasonal flu this year.

Playbooks can be great, but they’re only part of the equation. They don’t do you any good if you don’t have the supplies, tools and resources to back them up. Our elites have spent unimaginable sums of money on playbooks and planning – and they didn’t pause long enough since 9/11 to purchase any of the medical supplies to handle this Chinese virus outbreak.

Those playbooks aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Actually… hold on! I think I just figured out a use for those playbooks that will solve our nation’s toilet paper crisis!

Fortunately, we have a president in office right now who knows how to adjust on the fly and rapidly respond to an evolving crisis. Just remember that the same elites who told us that Donald Trump was an unstable lunatic and unfit to govern are the same people that spent a trillion dollars getting us “ready” for this crisis.