Personal Reflections on Life After 9/11

National Review framed 9/11 as a dividing line in Americans’ sense of themselves and the world and published an essay on people who learned of the attacks years after they happened. The Federalist ran a first-person account by a writer who said he watched the towers fall from West 11th Street and Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, recalled almost no ambulances reaching St. Vincent’s Hospital, and argued that post-2000 polarization, later immigration and cultural change, and New York’s January 2026 election of socialist Zohran Mamdani as its first Muslim mayor marked a break from the late-1990s city he knew. That essay said Mamdani repeatedly refused to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” associated with figures who minimized the attacks, and on Sept. 5, 2026, while signing a 25th-anniversary executive order, handed the ceremonial pen to chief counsel Ramzi Kassem, described as a lawyer who once represented an al-Qaeda operative connected to the Pentagon attack; it said more than 100,000 people had signed a petition to keep Mamdani out of official commemorations. A second Federalist piece, based on an interview with former Justice Department national-security attorney and Guantanamo prosecutor Michael Lebowitz, said Mohammed Ahmad al-Qahtani was detained at Orlando International Airport on Aug. 4, 2001, then released as a “migrant,” that he was meant to be the 20th hijacker, and that the United States is no safer 25 years later because of intelligence gaps, immigration policy, and domestic political division.