In Memoriam

Scenes from New York: Twenty-five years ago today, Islamic extremist terrorists hijacked planes headed for Los Angeles and San Francisco from Boston, Newark, and Dulles and flew them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, killing thousands in one fell swoop. A fourth plane was headed for an unspecified location, likely in Washington, D.C., but the terrorists were overtaken by passengers who crashed the plane into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, so the hijackers could do no further damage.

Over the years, many thousands of people died from various conditions resulting from the toxic dust at Ground Zero, including first responders. And many stories have emerged of the many heroes who sacrificed themselves to save others. Here’s some of the best reading about that day and its impact decades later:

“Fighting to Live as the Towers Died” from The New York Times.

A full accounting of the morning—at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville—from The Washington Post.

Pictures of lower Manhattan from 25 years ago, and today, from The New York Times.

Maybe a city forgets, from Vital City.

A tribute to Mychal Judge, FDNY chaplain, from The Irish Times:

Judge was a man who encompassed a number of seeming contradictions. He was not a typical priest. From 1971 to 1978, he struggled with alcoholism, battling his addiction with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. He was gay, a fact known only by a number of his closer friends. Judge synthesised his experiences in order to access a spiritual empathy that allowed him to reach out to the poor and the dispossessed when they needed it most.

He was a peacemaker. In 1986, when Detective Steven McDonald was shot in Central Park by a youth and left paralysed, Judge prayed with the victim and later brought about a reconciliation between the two. Judge and Detective McDonald became lifelong friends and visited a number of communities going through processes of reconciliation, including Northern Ireland and Sarajevo.

The tale of Rick Rescorla, 9/11 hero: “There are certain men born in this world, and they’re supposed to die setting an example for the rest of the weak bastards we’re surrounded with.”

The horrors of that day also shaped our politics for many years to come: “The political response to 9/11 was nearly instantaneous and unidirectional, always pointing to more power and money for the state, at whatever level deemed necessary,” writes Nick Gillespie:

As Ohio State political scientist John Mueller reminded people in the years following the 9/11 attacks, catastrophic events and social panics routinely give rise to laws and policies that long outlive the specific moments that inspire them. He noted that the Red Scare of the postwar era gave rise to loyalty oaths, incursions on civil liberties, and other policies that persisted for years or even decades after anyone seriously feared communist subversion. After 9/11, he wrote, the issue wasn’t simply about government surveillance, but spending patterns on things like the new Department of Homeland Security that could be locked in. Osama bin Laden had declared in 2004 that his goal was ‘bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy’ by spending large amounts on all manner of activities and services dubiously related to safety. …

If eternal funding for, say, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) seems locked in despite no clear evidence of its efficacy, it’s also true that both politicians and voters remain happy to keep on believing that trading freedom for safety is a good idea. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that, compared to 2013, more Americans fear domestic terrorism (33 percent) than foreign terrorism (20 percent). When it comes to wars fought in the name of ending or suppressing terrorism, just 21 percent agree Afghanistan and Iraq were worth it, and just 25 percent think that Iran is worth it. Yet two-thirds of respondents agree that ‘airport security disruptions are worth it because they make flying safer’ and prefer government agencies to private providers.

“As the events of the following years unfurled—the toppling of the Taliban, the invasion of Iraq, the internments at Guantánamo Bay, the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, and so on—it became tempting to blame it all on that singular day of pain and horror,” writes Emma Ashford for Reason (in “9/11 Turbocharged America’s Worst Foreign Policy Impulses—but Didn’t Change Its Direction”). “But as we approach the 25th anniversary of the attacks, it’s important to understand the limits of that story. The events of 9/11 undoubtedly had a major impact on foreign policy. Yet this impact was less a change of direction and more an intensification of already existing trends. The 9/11 attacks would create a permissive political and psychological environment for a particular foreign policy vision, but it did not set America on the path to liberal interventionism and forever war all by itself. For that, we must look back into the 1990s.”

For more on the long political shadow of 9/11, check out the August/September issue of Reason. And may God rest the souls of those who perished.

QUICK HITS

• Rest in peace, Andrew Wimsatt: He was a superfan of Reason and The Fifth Column, as well as Greg Gutfeld and Kat Timpf, and a committed archivist, clipping people’s media appearances (including mine) and now-defunct shows (Red Eye) to make sure they survived. He was a really sweet guy, but the thing I perhaps most admired about him was how well he took care of his mom. It feels gruesome to give details about his killing, but it’s also the truth: Wimsatt was brutally stabbed to death—seemingly by a stranger—in broad daylight in Round Rock, Texas, in a park after visiting his mom at her nursing home on Labor Day. Benedict Ogbodiegwu Jr. has been charged with Wimsatt’s murder. “Jail records show Ogbodiegwu was arrested twice earlier this year,” reports KXAN. “He was arrested in January on a theft charge. In June, he was arrested and charged with failing to identify or providing false identification information.” Many of us are gutted by such a gentle guy being met with such cruelty. Join me in praying for his family and for justice to be served. Linking a few remembrances from around the internet to give you a sense of who he was.
• “On the convention stage Thursday night, as [Vice President J.D.] Vance gave the keynote address, the vice president basked in the kind of affection and praise from the crowd usually reserved only for Trump,” reports The Washington Post. “Audience members broke into roaring cheers of ‘JD!’ as he walked onstage. Midway through his speech, the crowd erupted into a chant of ’48,’ a reference to the fact that Vance would be the 48th president if he were elected in 2028. Vance smiled at the lectern, taking it in. Similar friendly outbursts continued throughout his speech, in which he talked about the kind of country he wanted to raise his children in. He also appealed for Republican unity, while attacking Democrats as the ‘party of hatred.'”
• “Consumer prices overall have risen more than 30 percent since the beginning of 2019,” reports The New York Times in an interactive feature that explores the last 15 years of prices. “That’s two and a half times as much as they went up from 2012 to 2019.”
• CPI report:

BREAKING: August CPI inflation comes in at 3.4%, in-line with expectations of 3.4%

Core CPI inflation falls to 2.4%, also in-line with expectations of 2.4%.

Month-over-month CPI inflation rose +0.4%, the biggest increase since May 2026.

Treasury yields are rising on the news.

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) September 11, 2026