Remembering 9/11 and the Unreal Moments of the 1990s
Revisionist history is taking hold 25 years later.
Just a few days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the conversation turned to the Bush-Gore presidential election of 2000—and the conversation turned heated.
So much so that the bartenders had to temporarily step in and remind us that we were friends. What were we arguing about? Foreign policy was not front and center since the Cold War was a distant memory. This was about election integrity, "hanging chads," the role of the judiciary, the ethics of former President Bill Clinton in the White House, the utility of tax cuts, and the federal government's role in education. Terrorism did not come up. But we did touch on the challenges of illegal immigration, a topic just beginning to brew at the time.
This all went down during Labor Day weekend in New York City, at an Irish dive bar in lower Manhattan. George W. Bush, the Republican governor of Texas, famously won over Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat who had served under Clinton for eight years.
But my friend "Francisco," who knew the city and its dive bar community inside and out, insisted the popular vote should be the one that counts, and Bush narrowly lost the popular vote after prevailing in the Electoral College. In his mind, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that brought an end to the chaotic recounts in Florida was a national scandal.
After 36 days of intense legal disputes and agonizing ballot recounts, Bush finally managed to pull in the crucial swing state by a mere 537 votes. But in the summer of 2001, the new president was still struggling to unite the country. After leaving our location on Cedar Street, we made our way to the World Trade Center to catch a train back to Jersey City. The conversation quickly turned to "Seinfeld," "The X-Files," and "The Sopranos," all shows in their heyday or perhaps near the end of their heyday at the turn of the century.
The city was relatively quiet and empty that Labor Day in 2001, just like it was this year. It was also bright, sunny, and peaceful, just like it was this year. Francisco and I were both unhappy with our boring, corporate jobs and looking to move on. We had been colleagues at Forbes Newspapers in Somerville, New Jersey, where we began our journalism careers.
Yes, Steve Forbes, the magazine publisher and businessman, owned a newspaper chain he inherited from his father. Forbes had to sell the chain when he ran for president in 1996. Yet, we had fun while covering the political intrigue of local municipalities and school boards in our first jobs out of college. We miss those days; moreover, we miss the unreal placidity of the 1990s. History may have been on a holiday after the Berlin Wall fell, but the corruption in the "Soprano State" gave us plenty of opportunities to have fun.
Rediscovering the Post 9/11 George W. Bush in the Age of Mayor Mamdani
That Labor Day in 2001, Francisco and I made our way back to the very popular "Commuter Bar" in the World Trade Center's concourse near the Port Authority Trans-Hudson, or PATH, Station. It was strange to see this hopping spot closed, but it was a holiday, and it was time to make our way back to Jersey City.
In a few days, the Commuter Bar we repeatedly visited would be beneath tons of rubble along with the rest of the World Trade Center. The president—elected in one of the closest, most divisive elections in U.S. history—would become a unifying figure, and the country would be at war. In many ways, the months that followed were as good as they were painful. There was a resurgence of patriotism, a renewed appreciation for the founding period, and a willingness to confront radical Islam.
Some images that stand out include President Bush standing on top of the ruins at Ground Zero after the attacks on New York City. He placed himself on top of a crushed fire truck with his arm around a retired firefighter named Bob Beckwith and began to speak with a handheld bullhorn. When the crowd said, "We can't hear you!" Bush shouted back: "I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!" A few weeks later "GW" would also throw out the first pitch during Game Three of the World Series at Yankee Stadium.
Probably a stadium filled with mostly registered Democrats? But they were Clinton-era Democrats who came rushing back to the political center when the moment called for it. By and large, they do not exist anymore. In fact, some prominent Democrats such as Abdul El-Sayed, the party's U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan, appear to have come close to embracing the 9/11 attacks before a politically forced backpedal. Others have operated more on the sly, but they remain every bit as devoted to a far-left anti-American agenda. Zohran Mamdani stands at the top of that list. Even so, the Muslim mayor of New York City, elected in November 2025, does occasionally drop the mask, like he did last Friday during a 9/11 ceremony at City Hall.
Mamdani, at the ceremony, passed the pen he used to Ramzi Kassem, his chief counsel. This matters because Kassem spent several years working as a civilian defense counsel for Ahmed al-Darbi, a Guantanamo detainee and al Qaeda operative who pled guilty in 2002 to terrorist exercises. The 9/11 connections run deep since al-Darbi's sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the five hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon on 9/11. The attack resulted in the deaths of 59 innocent people on the plane and 125 military personnel and civilians in the Pentagon.
Blogger JD Rucker describes why the passing of the pen to Kassem was not some "clerical accident" but was instead a "staged insult to the dead" delivered exactly one week before the 25th anniversary of 9/11. The moral clarity that held sway in the months immediately following the attacks has, over time, given way to phony concepts like "Islamophobia" designed to shield violent actors from legitimate criticism and scrutiny. There's also a resurgent Marxism alive among America's youth that swaps out the original version's emphasis on class with ethnicity. Remember, unlike Karl Marx, today's leftists are not living in the poor house. From billionaire investor George Soros to Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN.), and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), to name a few contemporary figures, they are all quite wealthy. That makes the class struggle angle a bit awkward, but one can always yell racism in a crowded little theater and divide the country along the way—all while tearing down the capitalist structure that makes wealth and upward mobility possible.
Revisionist History Takes Hold
How did the United States get here to this strange moment of rising Anti-Americanism that most infects those with no living memory of the terrorist attacks? The greatest villain in today's politics here at the 25th anniversary of 9/11 may be revisionist history. As Victoria Manning notes in a piece for Restoration News, Virginia Democrats just mandated the revival of a 9/11 video that warns teachers against "American exceptionalism" and Muslim trauma. That's right, a quarter of a century after nineteen Muslim hijackers murdered almost 3,000 Americans in the name of Jihad, Virginia, with Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) leading the charge, is telling public school teachers and their students that the real victims were Muslims. Revisionist history is addictive.
Manning writes, Connecticut created a new state law in 2026 that requires the State Board of Education to make curriculum materials available to local school boards on Islamic and Arab studies. Judaism and Christianity are left out. So as not to be outdone, California got in on the act when its Palo Alto Unified School District took students on a high school trip to a mosque where the Jewish students were compelled to wear head coverings, given Qurans, and taught that Islam "promotes social justice." Parents filed suit against the district on August 7, demonstrating that revisionist history is not going unchecked.
The Associated Press has compiled a list of the teaching approaches to of 9/11 across 40 states. There's cause for concern and encouragement on the list. But on the positive side, even deep-blue New Jersey has adopted what seems to be an even-handed standard. High school history classes look at how the debate between national security and civil liberties evolved after 9/11. The Patriot Act, anyone? The students also take stock of U.S. decisions to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq; all fair game.
For a whole set of reasons, New Jersey, out of all 50 states, just might offer the most compelling historical window into 9/11. About 750 residents died during the attacks. Todd Beamer was one of them. He was among the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who stormed the cockpit, confronted hijackers, and forced the plane to crash in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Flight 93 was presumably on its way to either the White House or the Capitol Building.
One question that remains unanswered is how many Muslims in New Jersey, if any, were celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center. President Donald Trump had said there were "thousands and thousands." Media outlets have been quick to dismiss Trump's accusations, but subsequent reports have emerged saying there were celebrations, although no hard information has ever confirmed the actual number.
The 9/11 Commission Report Comes Full Circle
Perhaps the most important and relevant Jersey connection to 9/11 is with Tom Kean, the popular two-term Republican governor from the 1980s. Kean served as chair of the 9/11 Commission Report that determined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) failed to share information with each other. The report found that the lack of interagency coordination and cooperation made it more difficult for investigators to connect the dots leading to 9/11. Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) of New Jersey ought to go back and revisit her predecessor's report. She's a leading critic of the 287(g) program that enables federal officials to partner with state officials for the purpose of enforcing federal immigration law.
As Restoration News has previously reported, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has become an essential component of U.S. national security strategy. ICE recently partnered with the FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Protection in an operation that resulted in the detention, arrest, and deportation of a Cuban spy in Miami. This is a kind of cooperative effort Sherrill has opposed to the detriment of legal Jersey residents. But reality is catching up.
After fleeing ICE agents in a vehicle on September 2, an illegal alien crashed into another vehicle on a busy highway in New Jersey and injured the wife of Democrat East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen. There's room to argue that an active 287(g) program could have made ICE's job much easier while preempting dangerous encounters. That's certainly the case in red areas of the country where 287(g) is prevalent.
Turning back now to that dive bar conversation that unfolded in the earliest days of the 21st Century, it's clear that the 1990s were a great time to be alive. The "End of History" was a phrase that caught on. Peace and prosperity, no messy foreign entanglements, no serious strategic competitors, and advancements in computer technology. But "Holiday from History" might be a more apt description of that era. Look close enough, and it is clear international terrorism was gaining a foothold. There was the 1993 World Trade Center, where Islamists tried but failed to collapse the buildings. So, the country just went back to sleep. That part about the necessity of the elected president winning the popular vote still reverberates. My argument then and now is that it's the Electoral College that counts, but certainly candidates should try to win the popular vote.
Bush did in fact win the popular vote when he was re-elected in 2004. But he would be the last Republican candidate to do so until Trump was re-elected in 2024. One reason Trump won handily is because of public concern over crime, broadly speaking, and the indisputable nexus between illegal immigration and crime. If blue state governors like Sherrill get their way and sanctuary policies prevail over 287(g), we could be looking at a domestic terror attack that makes 9/11 look small in comparison. The 1990s seem so far away.
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