exactly how i felt after 9/11 (but not as well put, of course). Tragedy has struck and a lot of bad powerful people are about to make things way worse.

I miss HST. He would have thrived in our current Golden Age of Stupidity...

I have gone through phases of loving his stuff, and being bugged by his entire Gonzo schtick. Still have several books, and this is making me think I’ll revisit When I first heard of the E Jean case I thought name was familiar. Looked over at shelf to note I had her book on Hunter! I’ll start there.

He was really good. I love him. He made me laugh about Nixon as a tween. I learned a lot from HST. He was correct about the vapidity of the American people. He made me the cynic I am today. I am glad he didn’t live to see this. Rest in power Hunter.

I’ve literally thought ”I am glad he didn’t live to see this“ almost every day since 2016.

Also I spent a lot of time in Bologna. Nice town to be the Archbishop of.

So many of my favorite writers took their own lives: Hunter Frederick Exley David Foster Wallace To name a few. Meanwhile we hear everyday from people without any self awareness inciting violence and punching down.

George W. Bush. He kept you safe?

He uses caps kinda like Trump.

I like to think of words he starts with caps as conceptual variances of them.

this one too, hoo boy, the good doctor called it www.espn.com/page2/s/thom...

. #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN #EPSTEIN Don’t stop talking about it!!!! That’s exactly what they want! .

Brilliant.

Those Hey Rube columns were terrific to read. Between those fun "sports" pieces & Get Your War On comics we managed a really awful time.

Mission "accomplished", dont think about the body count

The big difference this time is that I think the next Great Conflict in America will not be a far away land, but close to home. The closest precedent will be the 1860s, not the distant conflicts we've gotten used to in modern times.

Thanks for sharing this

When this went up, I was a reader of Hey Rube because it was by "the guy from Fear and Loathing" which I'd watched a few times before realizing it was (sort of) nonfiction. I grew up in Texas and figured Hunter was overreacting and this would all pass like Waco had in my childhood. Nnnnnnnooope!

For me, it's the the moment the country went crazy and never came back, as the Vietnam war was for Thompson. These days, I see people saying the same about COVID, and I begin to perceive links on a chain that I can't see the ends of.

Wow. I'm city Texan and was in high school when Waco happened. My friends and I kinda knew it would reverberate. You could even say the propaganda around the trial led to Trump's second term. My mom was flying out of DC the morning of 9/11, so the first 30 minutes or so was not great!

Reminder that he was co-writer with Warren Zevon on “You’re a Whole Different Person When You’re Scared.”

Yuuuuuuuuuuuup. 🫠 And they’re going to “wag the dog” this until no one knows which way is up or down anymore. The disinformation is going to be what kills us in the end.

Hunter's ESPN columns were essential reading in those insane months.

Is it too soon to make the "too soon" joke?

I didn't remember that initial estimates of the dead were 20,000 or higher. It really is incredible that it was so much lower.

ESPN! Incredible how times have changed in big media.

I often think back to when ESPN Page 2 would publish Hunter S. Thompson, Scoop Jackson, Jemele Hill, Gregg Easterbrook, prime Bill Simmons ... hard to believe such a place existed all at once.

I read Page 2 everyday back then and probably read most everything Hunter wrote there, and it’s still shocking today, this very moment, to consider this got published in ESPN dot com

Yeah that context really burns, ouch. English doesn't have such good expressions for the feelings of my heart at this time. I find myself turning to Yiddish or French or Spanish turns of phrase that hold so much more nuanced meanings.

I miss that guy.

Only now, the identified vague enemy is inside the US and the long expensive war will be a regime hostile to dissent making examples of citizens who dared to vote against the tyrant.

Whenever someone awful dies, I like to reread his obituary of Richard Nixon www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

“The scum-sucking pigs on the right have turned politics into a carnival of greed and treachery.”- Hunter S. Thompson

It's sad that too few Americans chose to believe gop propaganda for decades & refused to see them for what they have always been.

oops - too many Americans not too few.

Hunter loved Ducatis 🏍

And the actual perpetrators, the Saudis, have not only never been punished - but always elevated.

They didn’t do it.

Tell that to the families.

ok, once the government tells us more about USS Liberty as well the dancing people.

Relax guy!!!! We r still besties!!! I♥️CHEAPOIL

what's depressing is how optimistic he was. Imagine a war on terror that only lasted 8 years.

Prescient for the specific length of the second Iraq War though, which was 8 years 9 months.

Never followed or enthused by Thompson's gonzo journalism. And so this dead-on-the-money accurate and perpetually prescient analysis makes me wonder what else I missed. W's GOP came in with a firing mood, poo-pooed and cut off Richard Clarke's warnings and institutional memory. Bad habits die hard.

You write similarly to him, you might actually like his stuff. I really like his coverage of the Kentucky Derby.

I will have to dig up his derby write-up. Thanks!

Hey Rube! was great.

I wish he was still alive. He missed some pretty interesting things in the last 20 years… Sometimes I wonder what he would have written about all this. I can only try to imagine…

RIP 💔

My god, it was Charlie Kirk, not 9/11. You have got to have more fortitude than this. Nothing is going to happen that wasn't already happening or in the works.

Look at the date, pookie. Tim posted this bc it IS a 9/11 anniversary today. This doesn’t even have anything to do with Kirk bc he didn’t intend for it to be anyway :P

Huh. Surprised all the Page 2 links haven’t succumbed to link rot. Good news

The party's over, kids

So glad we destroyed Saudi Arabia for their involvement…. Oh. No? We didn’t? We r besties?

Posting a different 9/11 Page 2 remembrance

I really hope you added the yellow background yourself 🙏

If you can believe it, you are looking at the web design for ESPN's Page2 that persisted for essentially its entire life as a website... and which you can relive in all its glory right here www.espn.com/page2/030605...

🤯

Jesus I had no idea.

Same

It’s always wonderful to teach people new things.

Holy shit.

wait. what???

He worked so close to Steve Rannazzisi on the 54th floor

going back in time not to prevent 9/11, but rather..

this is blowing my mind

Yes, I knew from memory exactly what phrase to search for…..

Oh my God

This is both the most surprising and the least surprising thing I've learned in a while.

Oh my god

putting that in the “seth, you’re gonna miss your flight” folder

Always good to remember that Bill Simmons is to blame for the Baseball Crank

Prescient.

yup 💯

ESPN. Amazing what they used to be.

what podcasts would he appear on were he alive today. all? none? just Bill Simmons once in a while? impossible to nail it down.

He would call in to Steve Bannon’s once a month and fart into the phone.

RIP HST. You would've loved X.

But he LOVED Ducatis 🏍 though.

It's always a good time for Hunter.

Give the idiots in charge a decent casus belli and you can bet they’ll charge in like idiots without any concern for the collateral damage they impose on the rest of us.

As always

I revisit this every year.

Glad that someone is remembering 9/11 today. And this is a great quote to post right now, for so many reasons.

I was in high school then. There are two things I’d do when I got home from school: 1) turn on TRL 2) log on to Page 2 I don’t think I truly understood the situation until I read this article. I’ve thought about it a lot since then.

ESPN man

9/11 happened and America lost its damn mind.

I still can't believe ESPN actually published this. My how times have changed.

Page 2 was really something, spent a lot of time on it back in the day. It wasn’t stellar all the way through top to bottom, but it didn’t take itself too seriously and left room for writers to expand outside of sports. It made for a lot of gems I wish I had saved.

I spent many hours in my high school's library reading Page 2 during study hall. I will admit I really enjoyed Bill Simmons' columns as the Boston Sports Guy but I eventually matured while he seemingly didn't.

Publishing things on the internet in 2001 was a very different activity than it is now

HST missing the Trump presidencies is up there with him punting Ali-Foreman sideways into the stands. At least we had O'Rourke still writing for part of Trump.

I was thinking about him and his thoughts.🔊

Been thinking about this piece since yesterday actually; almost forgot the date.

“The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now --with somebody - and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.”