John Tierney, Nicole Gelinas, Park MacDougald, and Isabella Redjai pay tribute to Charlie Kirk, assassinated as he gave a talk on a college campus. Kirk was murdered the day before the nation marked the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. We share personal memories of that day, examine the city’s response, and discuss how the attacks reshaped American politics and culture. The conversation ends with a look at the day’s enduring lessons and prospects for American unity.
Audio Transcript
Isabella Redjai: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. My name is Isabella Redjai, and if you’re not already subscribed to our channel, please be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on future conversations. Today I’m joined by three incredible New York City writers that have been writing about the city and other affairs for a very long time. First City Journal contributing editor John Tierney, also Manhattan Institute’s expert on urban policy and politics and New York Times contributing editor Nicole Gelinas. And then finally, Manhattan Institute fellow and senior writer at The Scroll, excellent newsletter, from Tablet Magazine, Park MacDougald. Thank you to the three of you for joining today. I must briefly say, I know we’re here to reflect on some heavier topics today, but it’s truly an honor to have you all on today’s panels.
So I would be remiss not to mention something that just happened yesterday. The conservative commentator and American Patriot Charlie Kirk was shot and tragically murdered at Utah Valley University while healthily debating college students. It’s really a loss for not only his family but for our country. And I think that it says something about the growing political violence in our country. So we’ll be talking more about that here at City Journal and here on this podcast in the coming days as we learn more details, but we just wanted to send our prayers and condolences to his family. Any of you, do you have any thoughts on yesterday’s tragedy, really quickly?
Nicole Gelinas: Just that I know that there are a lot of people, and particularly younger people, who really followed Charlie carefully and took a lot of heart and what he said and what he wrote, and even my husband who’s not a younger person, followed some of his videos and so forth and was also very, very upset about this. So a lot of people are hurting today and feeling like they lost somebody whom they knew.
Isabella Redjai: Yes, absolutely. Today’s September 11th, so we are also discussing very heavy loss. Twenty-four years ago today, four coordinated Islamist terrorist tax by Al-Qaeda struck the Twin Towers in downtown Manhattan. And not only did this event shake this city in particular, but it shook our country. Nicole and John, you both were living and working in New York City at that time. I want this to be a group discussion, but John, could you just set the scene for us briefly about where you were that day, what the mood of the city was and how you felt? I feel like no one in America doesn’t remember where they were unless you’re younger like me. I was two years old.
John Tierney: No, it’s true. I remember exactly where I was. I was writing a column for the New York Times called “The Big City,” and I just published a column that morning, so it was kind of my day off and I was at the dentist and then I left the dentist and I was on rollerblades. Do you remember them? You probably do. But anyway, and I was standing on Fifth Avenue in the Sixties at a stoplight and the driver rolls down his window and said, “A plane flew into the World Trade Tower.” And I just said, “Come on, are you crazy?” And then he goes, “Look!” And you could look down Fifth Avenue and see the smoke going up. Then I stayed there for the next light. I was just staring at it and the light changed and a new guy came and I said, “A plane flew into the World Trade Tower?” And he goes, “Two planes!” And the whole people were just in shock that day and it was an amazing time to be here.
Isabella Redjai: Nicole, could you tell us what the mood was in New York City before the attack and how it suddenly shifted? You actually sent me a video of a newscast and how they were talking about primary day and all of these very mundane day-to-day news and suddenly there was confusion.
Nicole Gelinas: Right. And anyone who is like yourself too young to remember, I highly recommend going and looking up the New York 1 newscast from 9-11. It is a good place to start just to get an understanding of how this really ruptured what was a very calm, pleasant, mundane day that everything in the news was about the New York City mayoral primary, the four candidates running against each other that day, that was primary day, and then suddenly you see the broadcast switches to exactly what you just said, this very confusing image at first. What exactly happened here? Was this an accident? Is this a fire? And gradually coming to grips with what had happened during the course of that day. It’s just a good place to put your mind in kind of experiencing what people there experienced or people watching experienced.
Park MacDougald: Yeah.
Nicole Gelinas: How old were you?
Park MacDougald: I was nine years old and I remember it very clearly. I’m a non-native New Yorker, so I was in suburban Atlanta and not quite old enough to kind of, I don’t remember the End of History or the nineties, this sort of Arcadia that older people say ended with 9-11.
But I just remember being in class and the teachers were called outside and came back looking very concerned. And then at some point in between the periods we overheard them talking that a plane had hit a building in New York and on accident was it a little plane, nobody knew anything. They called a half day. Our parents came and picked us up and I remember my dad picking me up in the carpool line and the first thing he says is, “we’re at war.” And I asked, “am I going to have to fight?” And he says, “maybe.” And then going home. And then my parents just watching the footage of the towers on a loop all day for what felt like 24 hours, just seeing over and over and over again that television image of the towers burning. So I mean, in a way, my whole life of being kind of conscious of external events started on 9-11. That’s the first event I remember.
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, and that’s interesting, because I think it’s safe to say we’re from three different generations. And when I was your age, the worst thing that happened during my childhood was the challenger exploding, which obviously was a tragedy, but a different magnitude of tragedy. And the same thing, seeing this in school, having very confused idea of what happened for a little while, but it seemed very fixable, that President Reagan went on TV. When you’re a little kid watching him, he seemed very comforting and made a beautiful tribute to the challenger victims, and it seemed like what had gone wrong would be found out and fixed. And I think the mood after 9-11 for a while at least, was that this was this horrific thing, but it also seemed fixable that both in terms of neutralizing the global threat and getting justice for the attacks.
Park MacDougald: You would go kill the bad guys.
Nicole Gelinas: Yes. Would be something we could actually do in rebuilding lower Manhattan would also be something that we could actually do. And it was interesting over the years to see that confidence in ourselves erode on both fronts and help bring us to unfortunately where we are today with something like many of our issues today seem less fixable, and that is something that we have to change politically and culturally.
John Tierney: Well, there was so much anger after that. I did one column just talking to people and all these good sort of Upper West Side liberals who were against capital punishment. I quoted somebody who wanted to see a parade on Broadway with Osama bin LA’s head on a pike, and people were just fantasizing about ways to kill them. It was interesting. I mean the citizens themselves really reacted. There were just great stories about people helping other people get home, doing all that. It was kind of the same way there was in the blackout in 77, you saw all these people directing traffic and doing that, but there was realÉ
There was a huge blackout in 1977 for a whole day the whole city was out, and it had its ugly side because there was some looting, but on the whole you had, everyone was, there were people, there were no stoplights. So people became self-appointed traffic people and there was a lot of people helping that way. And you do see that. It’s one of the myths about disasters and tragedies that people are going to go crazy. And in fact, what they really find is that it’s amazing how helpful people can be. And you did see that. And New York is a place where you don’t usually interact with strangers much. And in those tragedies you do.
Isabella Redjai: I think that it brought out the best parts of New Yorkers in a lot of ways, right? Optimism, unity, courage. I’m sure it was very bizarre coming back weeks later to work. I don’t think people returned right away. Is that correct, Nicole?
Nicole Gelinas: It depends where you were. I mean, lower Manhattan below 14th Street was closed and they gradually opened it up block by block. So it went from 14th Street down to West Fourth Street, eventually down to Canal Street, kind of opening it up week by week. So we went back to work on Halloween. And at the time it seemed like it was a long time. I mean, you could work at home, but it was much harder. I mean, not everyone had cell phones, not everyone had good broadband. So trying to work at home for I guess seven weeks or whatever that is, and just watching
Isabella Redjai: Very different than now.
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, watching Donald Rumsfeld on the TV and following everything that was happening. But that’s a big difference from today, where the idea that you would work at home indefinitely just didn’t exist. I mean, on Halloween when the building opened back up, we were expected to be back at work and kind of had to go back to work just logistically. So we did. So that was, I think it was an optimistic time in that looking out over ground zero when they were soldering the remnants of the World Trade Center down every day. I remember it was starting to get dark earlier and you would leave work and the light would be leaving the sky and you would see that those soldering machines and the torches sort of filing down what was left of that steel. But I think people had an optimistic idea of the sooner they get this cleared, the sooner we can start to rebuild.
Park MacDougald: Well, and what I remember, I mean, I wasn’t in New York again, I was in the south and that’s where my family’s been for a long time. And I still have older relatives that disparagingly refer to the Yankees. The Yankees are always doing this. The Yankees are coming down driving the property prices as they flee their high taxes up north. But it was really galvanizing. I don’t know, the entire country, my portion of the country. I mean there was just this total all of a sudden everybody loved New York City. I grew up a Braves fan. I hated the Yankees. I mean they were always beating us in the World Series. And yet seeing George W. Bush throw out the first pitch at the Yankees game was just this incredible kind of image. And I even remember as a kid the amount of pride I felt that this makes our presidentÉ
John Tierney: For once people really did love New York.
Yeah, I remember the comeback. I mean it was hard to come back, but Tim Zagat who ran this restaurant review scene, which at the time was the bible of restaurant rating, he had these little black-brown books. And so he asked me to go with him downtown on a tour of the restaurants. He was just trying to get business back and he wanted people to go back downtown again. It was funny going around with him because it was like going to Catholic churches with the Pope, the chef would come out and practically genuflect to Tim Zagat, and I was glad to do it. Let’s get people going back. And the restaurants obviously did come back.
Isabella Redjai: Not to get too off topic, but I’m curious what the mood was in the New York Times newsroom after all of this. Do you mind sharing?
John Tierney: Well, it was just shock and bewilderment. I think there was one of my beefs with news media in general, the New York Times, is that we just do so much fear mongering and the Times did this enormous thing of every victim. They did a profile of theÉ And to me, they won a Pulitzer for it, but my own feeling is that we should not focus so much on the negative on these things, that you reallyÉ I mean, there were all these predictions that this was the start of a new age of terrorism. We were going to have these things happening every week.
I mean, people were understandably angry and wanted to, and we did, go get Bin Laden eventually, but it just inspired so much… I mean, it just inspired a lot of bad things. For instance, they shut down aviation for like three days, I think. Right after that, they canceled all flights. That did more economic damage than the attack on the trade center. And there was just thisÉ I mean the other thing is that there was just no perspective where that threat of somebody taking over a plane again and flying it into a building, it ended that day because by the afternoon, people figured out you don’t let terrorists into the cockpit. And that threat no longer existed. But we had this enormous reaction where we create the Department of Homeland Security, we create this horrible TSA bureaucracy, all these deprivations of freedom for a threat that actually didn’t exist anymore, but it was just exploited by everyone.
Nicole Gelinas: There was, oh, sorry. There was a lot of bureaucratic shuffling that was unnecessary. I mean, the idea that the INS, which is what immigration was called, had failed. And so you would abolish it and get a new immigration agency that made a lot of people feel better maybe, but you didn’tÉ The same people still work there and the same processes. It wasn’t anything that changed really but the name, in terms of INS, and the same locally when the rebuilding process turned into a bureaucratic morass with all these new public authorities created to do the rebuilding and shield that the governor of New York and New Jersey and the mayor from the political accountability of eventually, why is this taking so long to make the most basic decisions? Well, the state and the city could blame these new bureaucratic entities.
Isabella Redjai: I think when there’s unprecedented times, there’s a lot of growth of bureaucracy. We saw that with COVID in many ways. But one story in the spirit of not focusing on the negative of what happened that day, senior editor of City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman reminded me of the boat lift story and how there were boaters on the Hudson River that were actually picking up people who were either jumping into the river to save their lives or were trying to escape the rubble of the towers falling. And this one boater said, the Coast Guard said to them, not how many people were allowed on the boat, but how many people can you fit? And I think New York’s very regulated, bureaucratic, suddenly the rules were out the window and it was just action. I’d like to go around the table and just in a sentence or two, what do you think it is about these moments that bring out the best qualities and people of unity and courage versus fear?
John Tierney: I mean, it’s true that people voluntarily on their own can do so much. And I mean after the California wildfires and they suspended all the building regulations and somebody had a rule, well, if you suspend these things during an emergency, why are they there in the first place? And I think it shows you that all these regulations, that we didn’t really need it. And people, I mean, it’s amazing. And in fact there are studies that studies the more the government gets involved in dealing with a disaster, it discourages people from helping each other. And it actually sort of slows things down if the feds come in and do it, instead of letting local people do it on their own. There are studies on that, and I think that the boat lift that we had here on 9-11, that’s people at their best. I mean, you saw that in the floods down south and everybody was this armada of pickup trucks on their own were doing things and helping people. So I mean, it’s inspiring.
Isabella Redjai: What about you, Park? What do you think?
Park MacDougald: It’s a great American story and I think Americans behave that way and civilized people behave that way. But I don’t think everyone around the world behaves that way in a crisis moment. And you’ve seen some of the scenes out of Gaza recently, and that’s obviously a very tragic situation. But you also see people sort of scamming each other, ripping each other off, abusing each other, attacking in these conditions of sort of breakdown. And I think one of the worrying legacies of 9-11 for me is we’ve brought a lot more people like that into the country over the lastÉ
John Tierney: From low trust societies
Park MacDougald: From low trust societies and sort of adopted aspects of those political cultures.
Nicole Gelinas: I think one of the more positive aspects that came out over the weeks afterward wasÉ It’s not to compare the bankers and the traders and us to the firefighters and the police who voluntarily ran into the building of course, but there was a great level of caring in terms of the average age of the victims was 39, very, very young. We didn’t really realize how young they were at the time because we ourselves were very young and people who had lost coworkers, lost friends, had been in fear themselves, all immediately called each other, emailed each other, are you all right? Are you going back to work? Is there anything you need? People lent each other offices. There were tens of thousands of people who needed an office. It was very quick to say, you can come work at our office and so forth. So it turned the Wall Street firms that lost hundreds of people collectively, even thousands, often not thought of as a caring community, but they really did get together and care for each other and also just did their work. I think it’s important to note that you still had to do your private sector job and do what you were supposed to be doing and get it out there while going through all of this. And I think people managed to do both of these things in grieving and trying to come to terms with their own fears and thoughts and also just managed to keep doing some work every day, which maybe people don’t think of quite as much.
Isabella Redjai: I know this is a bit of a broad question, but if something like this tragic event were to happen today, do you think that we would see that same sense of unity and patriotism in New York City or across the country?
Park MacDougald: I can start off, I do not for a lot of reasons, but I don’t think we saw that with COVID. I don’t think we’ve seen that with otherÉ I mean, we were talking about the Charlie Kirk assassination to start with. I know he was a partisan figure. He was obviously a conservative and liberals probably didn’t like him very much or didn’t agree with it. But I also don’t think the country we were in 2000 or 2002 would’ve seen such a, so many people kind of celebrating that kind of in a really, really gruesome, I mean, some of the footage that was going around on social media was really I found very difficult to watch, to someone with family and everyone seeing pictures of the family.
John Tierney: But the COVID comparison, I mean, that’s interesting because that was something, and on one level, people in COVID, there was this huge, we’re all in this together, the banging the pots, do you remember? The people would all do that. And so there was this feeling of togetherness, but at the same time, you just had this horrible response from the government of shutting everything down. And one side, blue states especially, that’s it just went for this basically authoritarian line. And again, I’m repeating myself, but that the fear mongering by the media. We saw it after 9-11 that there was going to be endless terrorist attacks and everything has to be secure, but with social media 24/7, so there’s so much fear mongering all the time and in COVID was just the worst response ever. I mean, I did, I call it “the crisis crisis,” which I think is our biggest problem that we just had this crisis industry of media, academics, activists, and they went into hyperdrive on COVID and destroyed the economy, destroyed all these people’s lives, and it became a partisan issue. And I think today it would becomeÉ And with this political violence that we’re seeing, you’ve got this, media and activists are so demonizing the other side that each side is an existential threat to democracy and this ridiculous stuff.
Park MacDougald: Stuff. It’s a really different media environment, is what I mean. Arguably the Global War on Terror was a similar scale, or maybe not as condensed as COVID and not as obvious in the time or in the moment, but the media environment’s so fractured now, there’s not, and it was already getting that way with the advent of cable, you have more partisan networks. But I think we’ve just been continuing where the kind of center basically has less and less ability to set the agenda and kind of police the bounds of conversation. And it’s much more anarchic now where extreme positions can get a hearing.
Nicole Gelinas: And it was very, although the New York Times had video on the website, and that was important, and that was a new thing. People got their news from the Times from the Post, from the Daily News from New York 1 and from the major networks. There was a little fragmentation, but there was no social media and there were not a lot of images. To my knowledge, there have not been images that came out of the inside of the towers, and there’s only a couple of images of the planes crashing into the towers. And I think that’s probably better that we didn’t watch over and over what was going on in the towers. And that would not have been the case today. Another aspect that wasn’t dwelled upon was the income disparities that you had, the cooks and the dishwashers and the kitchen staff on Windows on the World, which is at the top of one of the trade towers. And then of course you had the bankers and traders making millions of dollars a year, and nobody really said, this is not fair that some people get more resources than others for their survivors, for their spouses, for their children. It was an attitude that everybody died together and everybody will be treated equally. Some of that because of the victim’s compensation fund, which basically made everybody able to continue to support their families. But there was not attempts to divide people into different classes of victims by how much money they made, which I think is probably good.
Park MacDougald: You didn’t have influencers or Russian botnets or whatever it might be, jumping out to say that this was a false flag, this was the CIA, this was Mossad, which we’re watching right now with the Kirk assassination and that sort of stuff starting to get traction.
John Tierney: But the one thing that I will say, and I agree with all of that, but to me, I think in many ways it’s a better media environment today or I’m more hopeful for the future because you have alternatives to these mainstream narratives. I mean, during COVID mainstream narratives were absolutely disaster. I think it was the worst policy mistake in American history, most costly. But fortunately there was social media. I mean, I was writing about COVID and basically I just stopped paying any attention to the mainstream media. They were just completely into fear-mongering mode. But fortunately on social media, you had all these, you had City Journal, you had all these alternative ways to get information. And I think that’s the hopeful thing. And I think in a way, people are still figuring out, you’ve got to figure out who to follow on social media, and there are same voices out there, so you have to figure out how to follow them.
Park MacDougald: For sure. I think it’s just a different environment with different trade-offs, but I think one of the offs of the current one is it’s much harder to find consensus.
Nicole Gelinas: And there wasn’t the same level of sophistication about global news. I think it’s safe to say I knew about Al-Qaeda partly because I had just read a New York Times magazine article like a year before, and so this popped into my head immediately and a few people started talking about it. But for the broad public, this was the first introduction to deep global geopolitics and the elites and regular people got a lot wrong in the years after. But ever since then, I don’t think people have really separated global news from national news. There’s not any sense that the border stops here and we don’t have to worry about what’s happening in Israel or Pakistan or wherever, that these are things that impact us here.
Isabella Redjai: I think what’s going on too with the newer generation, I’m 26 years old. I was born in 1999, so I’m a member of Gen Z. There’s a bit of a misunderstanding also with the idea of terrorism today, and I kind of want to get into that a little bit. We’re now seeing a troubling rise of extremist rhetoric on college campuses. Of course, there are instances where people are calling very ordinary political opponents domestic terrorists, which is inappropriate and wrong, but there is actually very Hamas open praise for terror groups happening on university campuses, but even K through 12 schools in cities and some of social media too. So I do want to get into how rhetoric has impacted the state of our culture and whether my generation and even some of Park’s generation, because you guys were a little bit younger during the time of 9-11, if we’ve forgotten or if we’re too far removed from what happened to have sensitivity to what happened on September 11th, 2001? Anybody?
Park MacDougald: I’ll start us off again. I mean, I think a lot of it, there’s a lot there, but I think the main thing I would say is I feel like among say people under 40 or so, millennials and Gen Z, there is this sense of demoralization and some of the pathological, a lot of factors leading into some of these pathological expressions we’re seeing. But the sense that what we did after 9-11 was just a total failure. It was endless. It was expensive, it was divisive.
John Tierney: The Iraq war, which had nothing to do with it.
Park MacDougald: It did nothing for us except get a lot of people killed for no discernible purpose. And then personally, I think the Obama administration and Obama himself kind of embraced some of this narrative in sort of a softer, more sophisticated way than you see now. But that the United States itself was the kind of main malign actor in the world. And the real problem in the Middle East was we had mistreated the Muslim world and backed colonial powers or these artificial constructs like Saudi Arabia or whatever. But this idea that it’s sort of basically we suck. Everything’s our fault. We can’t do anything. If we try to do anything or think we do anything, we’ll either fail or it’s some sort of malevolent op where we’re being manipulated by shadowy forces we don’t understand. And Osama bin Laden was misunderstood because he’s an enemy of America, so he must have had good reasons because America’s bad, that sort of thing.
Isabella Redjai: I mean, there were people, it was trending on social media about a year or so ago, Osama bin Laden’s letter to America, and there were Gen Z TikTok users saying, I think that everything we’ve learned about 9-11 and terrorism is wrong, and that somehow we’ve misremembered the actual narrative, and it amassed over 719 million impressions on social media. I mean, there’s a cognitive dissonance happening there.
Park MacDougald: Yeah, I mean, what I was saying earlier about us kind of adopting Middle Eastern categories of thought in some ways over the last, over our long encounter with the Middle East since 9-11 is there’s a lot of feeling on the left and the right that America’s kind of the great Satan and the font of all evil in the world. And I don’t really know how you go about addressing that other than demonstrating success, I think, and giving
John Tierney: What’s interesting that in 9-11 when people suddenly felt terrorism hitting them, there was this huge surge of patriotism and a recognition that the world’s a dangerous place and we have to defend ourselves. But it’s been 24 years since then. So there’s a thing that peace time, the old saying that hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men. I mean, we haven’t really had major threats for 20 years. And so people think, well, we’re just this colossus. We don’t have to worry about threats to us. And I think really the other thing about terrorism and that you say this acceptance of it. It’s related to this fear-mongering that they get in the media that the other side is an existential, he’s Hitler, so it’s okay to kill Hitler, and that’s just a terrible development.
Nicole Gelinas: I think what you were saying about constantly being in this level of fear, I don’t agree with you entirely, but I do think one thing that is adding to people’s day-to-day stressors and getting worse is the constant monitoring. I came to New York in Ô99 for the two years from 99 to 2001, you could just walk into any office building. You didn’t have a badge unless you had a super sensitive job. You just walked up to the elevators. You said hi to the people at the door. They knew you. If they saw a stranger or suspicious person, they’d probably stop you. But what they worried about was stealing computers. And suddenly everything went to the badge. You check in, and then they went to the elevators where you can’t press the number, you have to press the number outside. And just now, of course, with the mass shooting in July, many buildings, now you have to sign in before you even get access to the building. Really a loss of more casual, spontaneous, you know, having to wait for the metal detector to go see a Broadway show. These things do, none of them are particularly sinister, but they do combine to just make people feel constantly on edge.
John Tierney: Well, taking off your shoes in the airport, which they finally after 24 year, I mean, but there was never a reason to do it.
Isabella Redjai: I do want to shift a little bit, just more on reflections 24 years later on what happened. We’ve been doing that throughout this conversation, but I want to look a little bit at the heroes on that day, our first responders, the NYPD. How is it that in about the last five years or so we’re saying defund the police, ACAB, all cops are bad. These are things that are trending for the younger generation. How did this happen?
John Tierney: I mean, I think part of it is that a lot of discourse, those are sort of traditional manly virtues. You go into a building when everyone’s leaving, and there’s been this kind of, for decades now, just that’s toxic masculinity. And so there’s been this denigration, I think of those virtues and of that kind of courage. I mean, suddenly when there’s a tragedy, then when someone’s stuck in the flood and the guy goes in and rescues him, then there’s a nice, but otherwise there’s so much anti-male. I mean, I did a piece for City Journal called “The Misogyny Myth” and just the bias against men and traditional male virtues. I think it’s very hard for young men especially, they’ve just grown up being told that they’re responsible for all the problems in the world. And I think that helps feed that police and the whole victim mentality where we give so much status to being victims that therefore that becomes its own kind of heroism and saving people isn’t the thing. It’s being a victim.
Nicole Gelinas: And 77 percent of the 9-11 victims were men. And that’s not only because of the 343 firefighters and the police officers and the port authority officers, it’s also just a function of the high-powered jobs, the Cantor Fitzgerald people, the car futures people, and also the working-class jobs as well. I mean, this is not obviously entirely, 23 percent is not negligible, but it was a very male event in terms of the victims and leaving behind young children, fiancees and so forth, not something obviously that New York had ever experienced something like this before.
Isabella Redjai: We’ve seen and we’ve written about it at City Journal, that there are a lot of students at Ivy League universities and student visas that have put forth a lot of this pro-Hamas like rhetoric and what’s going on there? Why are people coming to our universities or why is our younger generation so out of touch with love for America? What has captured the minds of the youth? And I mean, I think social media has an impact on some of it, but what has capture the minds of the youth in America? Is it outer influences? Is it social media? Is it just we don’t know our history? We haven’t been educated on these things? There was just a piece in the Post today about how we need to be better about educating the younger generation on 9-11. Why is this happening? Why is this rhetoric so prevalent and why are we giving it a place and a soapbox in many ways?
John Tierney: Well, I think one reason, I mean, there is a long tradition of academics, of left-wing academics who are sympathetic to communism in the forties and fifties.
Park MacDougald: Zohran’s father.
John Tierney: Yeah, exactly. And there’s always been, there’s a status element to it that if you’re an academic and you’re not making that much money, you’re jealous of people who are. And you sort of get status in that community by being against America, and you get status by being a victim. So it used to be that immigrants came here and they wanted to assimilate to be an American. Now you get more status by being a victim, and being a minority, and you get rewards for it. So people do respond to those things.
Isabella Redjai: It’s creating a victim identity.
John Tierney: And also just academia has gotten, it’s been captured by the left. So that’s the message they get nonstop on campus, and that’s how to get status, that’s how to be rewarded. And there was a, Heather Mac Donald I think did a nice piece about this Asian woman who was involved in the Hamas protest thinking, why is an Asian woman out there doing it? She said, well, if you’re an Asian, you’re white adjacent, so you have no status. But, so you have to align yourself with a victims group to somehow get some status on campus and make up for your privilege.
Isabella Redjai: So you don’t think people are responding like this just because 9-11 happened 24 years ago. That generation either wasn’t born or wasn’t properly educated on it. You actually think that it’s this culture of victim mentality,
John Tierney: Right. No, I mean I think that’s a huge part of it. And just the ideological monoculture on campus that the kids, I mean, most college students don’t realize that slavery existed in every society. They think America was a singular, and that’s the education system. I mean, they should learn that.
Park MacDougald: I think John’s totally, I mean, I would say that in general, the best guide to understanding this would be Tom Wolfe writing about the sort of mores of the upper class, “Radical Chic,” “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” to an extent Bonfire of the Vanities, all these books that are sort of satirizing upper class liberals flirtations with radicalism. And it’s really what he writes about is this really about social status. You don’t hold these beliefs deeply necessarily. You’re trying to fit in. You don’t want to look stupid at a party by notÉ
Isabella Redjai: Similar to what Rob Henderson describes as luxury beliefs.
Park MacDougald: Éby not posting the black square on Instagram.
Isabella Redjai: Any thoughts, Nicole?
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, I mean, you just remind me that everybody put out the American flag, which I think is now seen as a conservative thing. I mean, you see the flag on X, youÉ
John Tierney: It’s a nazi.
Isabella Redjai r you’re conservative cowboy or something.
Nicole Gelinas: Nicole Gelinas: probably think that’s a conservative. There were American flags all over New York City. And when I walked over, Saks still has the little American flag for 9-11 in the window, which I think is good, but it was not seen as a partisan symbol that people wore the flag and had the flag in their window for a long time.
John Tierney: Well, as Reihan has pointed out that we also just have more and more of these over-educated people who have spent a fortune going to college to get a degree, and then they’re working at baristas and they’re really angry about that. And so a way that you sort of get status is, well, I’m an activist. I’m in the vanguard against this. The system’s horrible because I don’t have a good job because I don’t have status. So the system has to be torn down.
Park MacDougald: Which is in a way rational for them. Shake it up and maybe they’ll end up in a better spot. But what I was going to say earlier, but sort of forgot, is that the victim culture has also been turned into a organizing tool for the Democratic party and how it kind of manages its coalition. And I mean, take Council on American-Islamic Relations is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. It is, which is, so is Hamas, but there are just different branches. And that has been elevated into the NAACP for that demographic slice within the Democratic Party. So much so that under Biden, they were getting invited as one of the partner NGOs to sort of develop and implement the Biden administration’s countering antisemitism strategy. But the kind of cultivation of victimhood, the cultivation of resentment against mainstream American society and white Americans and male Americans and Americans who are more socioeconomically successful, this is really the kind of glue that holds that party together.
John Tierney: That’s a great point you’ve made in that great piece in City Journal about how they’ve got these affluent college educated people with luxury beliefs, but they have to somehow get these minority voters to go along with them. And it’s the glue, as you said.
Park MacDougald: And I think we saw that break apart. We saw the country reject that last November. And now certain people in the Democratic party and their intellectuals are saying, we need to pull back on this because the American people don’t like it. They’re sick of it. We just got our butts handed to us. But they’re having a lot of trouble steering the, steering the machine basically because it’s been built out to be this thing. And it’s very hard to now change it and say, oh no, we want to be patriotic too, because that’s what people want.
John Tierney: Yeah, I mean, once these groups are formed, they never go away. I mean, I did a piece for City Journal, the “March of Dimes Syndrome.” The March of Dimes didn’t go out of business when polio was cured. It found a new cause. And I mean, the trans stuff now is just, the gay rights movement got every single thing it wanted. It achieved every single goal, but they had staffs that had to keep the lights on, so they seized on this trans thing that is not even popular with gays. It’s not popular with their own people, but it keeps them employed. And so they seized on this and they’ll drag the Democratic party down with them as long as they keep a job. And I mean, the civil rights movement was the same. It achieved so much in the sixties. And then most blacks, a great majority of blacks were against affirmative action, but the civil rights leaders needed a new cause, so that kept them employed.
Park MacDougald: And you see in the pages of the New York Times, you see Democratic Party elites trying to figure out a way to say no to these groups, and they can’t quite do it yet.
Isabella Redjai: So I want to refocus us on our last little piece of this conversation here. Again, I mentioned I’m Gen Z, Park, you’re a little bit younger like me, but as long as I’ve been alive, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen America totally, totally unified and kind of this sense of brotherhood with citizen in arm of citizen. It’s very much as I’ve gotten older, looked a lot more polarized. It’s gotten progressively polarized to a point where now we’re seeing a lot of political violence. It’s edging on civil war territory, but if people can’t even be friends and they don’t even want to talk to you because you voted differently than them, or you have a different idea in a certain conversation, things are just becoming so extreme on both sides. How can we revive this spirit of comradery unity that we once saw 24 years ago? I mean, I hope it wouldn’t have to take a tragedy like that, but quickly around the table, I’d love for each of us to share something that America could think about the younger generation could dwell on that could bring about a sense of unity and patriotism again.
Nicole Gelinas: Well, I think one thing that maybe calming and centering is to actually think about the people who were the real victims. There’s the victim culture, and then there’s the people who did lose their lives on 9-11 who only wanted to go to work that day and do their jobs and come home. Some of them not having even thought about starting families yet, and some of them wanting to go home to their families. My company lost seven people. Amy Toyen was only 24, which it’s fitting that it’s 24 years, so that is half a lifetime, which was a real person’s lifetime that was lost. And I sometimes think the people who were stuck at the top of the building and had no way out, they were still alive for a little while, but they were stranded already in this past world that they’re up there, they’re not going to make it into the post 9-11 world.
And everyone on the ground is looking up at them, is already moved into a different world. They just didn’t realize that they had moved into a different world. But the point is, would those people at the top of the building looking down on us, would they like what we have become 24 years ago? And of course, none of us are going to be saints. None of us conduct our lives perfectly or sometimes even very well. But I think it’s a good idea to think once in a while would they like what we have done with our extra time that they didn’t get, and would they like what our politics have become and try to center on how can we be trying to make things a little bit better than making things worse?
Isabella Redjai: Yeah. What would they think about America today?
Nicole Gelinas: Right, exactly.
Park MacDougald: I’ve sort of a optimistic individual answer and a pessimistic, maybe not pessimistic, but at the individual level, and I was thinking this a lot after yesterday, the shooting yesterday, but if you’re watching this podcast, you probably are interested in politics and policy, but it’s always good to not spend too much time on social media. I think it can have a kind of deranging effect on people and on our discourse. And Nicole, you were talking about how we didn’t have grizzly video of the event. Being bombarded with that on a daily basis is probably not healthy. So log off, at least for a time.
Nicole Gelinas: And see people in person, which was what Charlie Kirk was trying to do. I mean, very intense one-on-one debates, including at these college campuses with people whom he disagreed with. I think that’s much mentally healthier than blocking people on X.
Park MacDougald: Yeah
Isabella Redjai: Well, and I think a lot of people that disagreed with him are feeling the loss of him too, because they loved the style and grace in which he debated issues
Nicole Gelinas: And a real role model. And having a wife and having two children and saying just a few months ago, that was very important to him as part of his legacy and knowing you only get so much time. So he did use his time well
Park MacDougald: And observing the Sabbath too. And speaking of logging off, as a Protestant evangelical Christian, he was observing the Jewish Sabbath to just have a day where you’re unplugged. But I’ll just quickly add my kind of more pessimisticÉ.
Isabella Redjai: Really got to bring us down, Park.
Park MacDougald: Well, I’m not sure there is a way through the current impasse, just sort of exhorting people to think nicer thoughts about one another. My sense is that I forget if this is a sort of Ruy Teixeira and John Judis argument or someone else, but that every so often the American political system has periods of relative stability where there’s sort of a broad consensus and settlement around political economy and things like that. And then that every so often cracks up as coalitions fall apart, conditions in the world change, and then there’s a sort of fight for basically hegemony in the new system that’s going to be constructed. And they said in the past that usually one party has a period of dominance for 30 or 40 years where they’re really setting, they resolve the core debate in their favor, and the other party has to reinvent itself to operate in this new system. And I think we’re in one of those kind of transition periods. That’s part of the reason why the partisan combat is so intense, because the kind of competing visions for what America is going to be going forward are very far apart right now.
John Tierney: I mean, part of what’s going on now with the discourse and the mainstream media being so hysterical against Trump and everything is that that establishment is losing power. And it’s really, I mean, it amazed me to see journalists in favor of censorship, but the mainstream media wants that now because losing control, the old democratic establishments losing control. So they’re sort of panicking and lashing out, favoring censorship and demonizing the other side so much. And I think just going back to lessons from 9-11 that when things look bad is not to overreact. I mean, we had these two wars after 9-11. We had so many mistakes that were made, and I call it “the crisis crisis” that we have these people who are always the merchants of bad, I call them always exploiting crises to get their agenda forward. And so my rules for trying to deal with that, it’s hard to have a simple solution. You have to try and have your rational brain override that primal anger, that primal hatred. But my rules are that number one, the world will always seem to be in crisis. Number two, the crisis is never as bad as it sounds. And number three, the solution will probably make things worse. And so I think we shouldn’t overreact to these things and try to avoid the fear.
Isabella Redjai: Well, and I think we can end on agreeing that the best part, if there was any of that day, were New Yorkers coming together and this city coming together. And that’s where I think our country needs to go back to that sort of spirit of unity. So thank you, all three of you, for joining the City Journal Podcast, John Tierney, Park MacDougald, and Nicole Gelinas. It was great to have you. And thank you for listening to the City Journal Podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our channel. Leave a like and leave a comment of what you thought about today’s conversation. We’ll talk to you all next time.
Nicole Gelinas: Thank you, Isabella.
Photos: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images (left) / Carolyn Schaefer/Getty Images (right)
