The 9/11 Question That Exposed A Disturbing Divide
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
There’s a moment in Ami Horowitz’s new Daily Wire video that sticks in your throat, and it isn’t the street interviews themselves. It’s the casualness. He’s standing in Manhattan’s East Village, asking a simple 9/11 question, and too many people answer like they’re debating a movie plot twist instead of the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
As Americans prepare to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a new Daily Wire collaboration with filmmaker Ami Horowitz found a disturbing number of individuals in New York expressing sympathy for or justifying the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Horowitz traveled to Manhattan’s East Village, where he asked people about
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
There’s a moment in Ami Horowitz’s new Daily Wire video that sticks in your throat, and it isn’t the street interviews themselves. It’s the casualness. He’s standing in Manhattan’s East Village, asking a simple 9/11 question, and too many people answer like they’re debating a movie plot twist instead of the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. Not everyone, of course. But enough to make you stop pretending this is just “edgy” talk. If you can’t call 9/11 evil without adding a disclaimer, something’s broken.
We’ve all seen man-on-the-street videos that cherry-pick the dumbest answers for clicks. Fair point. But that objection only goes so far when the clip isn’t just ignorance, it’s sympathy. You don’t have to be a historian to know what you’re being asked. This wasn’t a trick question about foreign policy. It was about whether mass murder in broad daylight is justified. The disturbing part isn’t confusion. It’s comfort with cruelty.
And yes, it matters that this is New York. This city lived through it. Families still carry it. First responders still carry it in their lungs. When a chunk of young, comfortable Americans talk like 9/11 was “understandable,” they’re not making a bold point. They’re signaling that their political identity now comes with permission to shrug at dead countrymen if it flatters a narrative about America always being the villain. That isn’t compassion for anyone overseas. It’s narcissism with a moral vocabulary.
As we head toward the 25th anniversary, we should be honest about the divide this exposes. One side still treats American victims as real people and terrorism as terrorism. The other keeps trying to turn every act of barbarism into a seminar about U.S. “deserving” it. We don’t need a new national script, or a pile of performative statements. We need grown-ups who can say, plainly, that what happened on 9/11 was unjustifiable, and anyone who can’t say that out loud has no business lecturing the rest of the country about decency. A nation that can’t mourn its own is a nation that’s losing itself..
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.