Reflecting on the 25 Years Since September 11

Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. You’re reading The Weekly, a Saturday morning recap of the best Dispatch content of the week, with some additional commentary from Managing Editor Rachael Larimore. Hello. Yesterday was a somber day, and rightfully so, as we marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. In fact, the entire week has been full of retrospectives, essays, and analyses—heartbreaking personal narratives, critiques of American policy in the years that followed, reflections on how that terrible event changed America. Those of us who are old enough remember where we were when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. (I was asleep on the West Coast—my husband answered the phone call from my brother and immediately reached for the TV remote. His tone made me think something had happened to the president.) And we remember certain moments—the chaotic confusion about car bombs at the State Department and potentially even more hijacked planes, President Bush standing on the rubble at ground zero with a bullhorn, the “missing person” posters plastered on walls throughout Manhattan. But how accurately do we remember all those things? That’s the subject of a fascinating essay on memory and major events by Tim Townsend. Townsend was a young reporter at the Wall Street Journal on September 11, and he tells a very detailed story of meeting up with our own Steve Hayes and Steve’s colleague Matt Labash in the days that followed. And then he reveals that Steve remembers their encounter very differently, and Labash doesn’t remember seeing Townsend in New York at all. Townsend then discusses research on memory and traumatic events, focusing on what two Harvard researchers described as “flashbulb memories,” or “memories for the circumstances in which one first learned of a very surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event.” While those memories help us feel connected to a traumatizing event like September 11, they aren’t likely to remain accurate, but we tend to be confident that they are. Townsend spoke to William Hirst, a psychology professor, who explained: Some of that may have to do with the sense of belonging to a community that memories afford us. Generally, flashbulb memories “allow you to claim that you were there,” Hirst said. “You weren’t literally there, but you make that assertion by telling your flashbulb memory.” They are important because, as Hirst said, they are “one of the few times that your personal history intersects with history writ large.” And importantly, they “ground your identity as an American.” In his piece, Townsend shared the story of Tom Brennan, a friend of his who worked in the South Tower and died on September 11, leaving behind a wife and two children—the younger of whom was born six weeks after his father’s death. Brennan’s daughter Cat wrote an essay for us about her experience growing up with a father she doesn’t remember but whose death was featured in her school textbooks. She writes, touchingly, of dealing with her own personal grief about a very public tragedy while reckoning with the responses she would get: I remember feeling my classmates steal glances at me as my teachers walked through the lesson, waiting to see how I’d react. And of course they did. How many of my classmates had a parent’s death detailed and photographed in their textbook? This attention, coupled with the fact that everyone already knew the day my father died, made me feel exposed in a way most middle schoolers would do anything to avoid. Growing up, I remember walking into school on the anniversary, feeling as if I had something to prove to my classmates, though I’m not sure what. But every year, as I walked through the front doors, I felt my face get hot as every single student and teacher turned to stare at me in unison like something out of a movie. Personal reflections help us keep alive the horror and awfulness of that day, and let us remember those we lost. But, as contributing writer Mike Nelson writes, the events of September 11 also “marked a delineation in history, a turning point from the path the world had been on, and a denial of what might have been. Like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or the fall of the Iron Curtain, there was the world before these events, and then there was the very different world afterward.” After 25 years, it’s more than fair to cast a critical eye on America’s response to those horrific events. And it’s necessary to grapple with who we’ve become in the decades that followed. Contributing writer Paul D. Miller, who served in Afghanistan as a naval officer and later as director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council staff, argues that, unpleasant as it is to say, “Al-Qaeda did not win in any traditional sense, but America and the free world assuredly lost.” He explains: Al-Qaeda correctly understood that America’s moral aspiration to be an exemplar of liberty and equality for the world was the principal obstacle to the kind of world al-Qaeda wanted to build. And, from a certain point of view, if al-Qaeda wanted to destroy America’s sense of mission in the world, the terrorists are winning. Kevin Williamson doesn’t disagree with that sentiment. He notes that “only in retrospect [do] things seem to have the quality of inevitability,” but that there were signs of our turn toward populism and culture warring even in the months after al-Qaeda struck. And he warns that we are particularly ill-suited to weathering another such attack. We are not ready. We are not ready militarily, logistically, politically, or financially. We are not ready morally. We are, at the moment, ill-prepared for even the ordinary challenges facing an ordinary liberal democracy: demographic pressure on public spending and the general economy, the burden of public debt, managing the movement of people, capital, and data in a technologically empowered, low-friction world. Please don’t miss the rest of our coverage on the anniversary of September 11. And thank you for reading. Have a great weekend. In 20 years, will we look back on the Trump era as a parenthetical aberration or as the front-page headline announcing the arrival of something new, enduring, and ghastly—something alien to the best of our traditions and principles? As our own Jonah Goldberg has observed, a two-party system cannot have a single sane political party: It will have two reasonably responsible and sober parties, or it will have two irresponsible and demagogic parties. At this moment, it may seem we are headed for the double-basketcase scenario rather than for a return to our senses. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are sane and serious people in both parties. What the good people lack is either the incentives or the courage to take a stand. One year after the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, the organization he founded more than a decade ago and turned into an indispensable cog in President Donald Trump’s political machine is still reeling. In many ways, Kirk’s killing only strengthened Turning Point’s appeal to a generation of young conservatives, who responded by turning out in droves for chapter meetings at colleges across the country and launching new chapters on campuses with largely liberal monocultures. Yet Kirk’s absence has also left a considerable leadership void, both within his organization and on the right more broadly. As more extreme members of Kirk’s coalition have increasingly sown distrust in Turning Point’s new direction under his widow, Erika Kirk, and sought to gain control of the post-Trump right with a groundswell of support among young conservatives, the national organization has had to perform a delicate balancing act. Even as Kirk’s accused killer, Tyler Robinson, awaits a potential death penalty trial, TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet and other leading Turning Point figures have waged rhetorical war against far-right commentator Candace Owens for promoting conspiracy theories alleging that Israel, or even Erika Kirk herself, was behind the assassination, drawing a distinct line in the sand of self-defense. The organization has been more reluctant to take a firm stand against extreme and conspiratorial rhetoric when it comes from within or adjacent to its own college chapters, however. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are tired of talking about measles. Kennedy and adviser Calley Means say they want to shift attention to chronic disease, specifically conditions like obesity and diabetes that are linked to food and lifestyle choices, because those conditions are responsible for more death and suffering than infectious disease. As a matter of raw numbers, they are right: Chronic disease is the greatest healthcare burden on the country, in terms of both deaths and cost. A large portion of this burden can be attributed to poor diet and lack of exercise, but shifting Americans’ lifestyles in a better direction at scale is a complex public policy and cultural challenge involving deeper and broader issues than media attention and narratives. Best of the Rest Unserious Men On the GOP convention’s two unsurprising surprises. Rachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.