Remembering September 11. Who Won the War on Terror? Vance 2028? Continetti’s Take on GOP Childcare Subsidy. Free-Range Parenting Expert Defends Mom. If You Like Your Health Care Plan … More
Never Forget.
The cover of the New York Post is the iconic photo of New York firefighters in a sea of rubble. “In Our Hearts” is the caption. The other Post also has a good photo spread.
Families of the casualties (I prefer this word to “victims”) and dignitaries will gather in solemn events (here also) around the United States (and the world). We will again be awed and proud of the courage and dignity of those who suffered loss.
But we need to do something in addition to honoring them. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who joined a “Peace Walk” at its final stop (New York’s Islamic Center), says he wants to “stand in solidarity” with “those we’ve lost.” The New York Times this morning portrays Mamdani as a victim himself—of Islamophobia. Mamdani refuses to heed survivor families, who do not want him to attend.
The Free Press has an excellent package on September 11—General David Petraeus on the usually unsung George W. Bush’s leadership and courage and the surge; a doctor who worked the hospital shift that day; and an interview with Frank Siller of the charity Tunnels and Towers, whose firefighter brother died September 11. Niall Ferguson writes a piece headlined “9/11 Did Not Doom the American Empire“:
I predicted its decline 25 years ago. Today, the U.S. has serious problems, but our rivals have even bigger ones.
The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka is not so optimistic (“25 Years after 9/11 Osama bin Laden Is Winning”—not in body perhaps but in spirit). Nor is Spiked on Line’s Brendan O’Neill, who writes, “We are still failing the moral test of 9/11.” O’Neill highlights Western self-loathing and urges the West to assert itself. O’Neill writes:
Imagine if you had told someone on 11 September 2001 that in 25 years’ time the streets of New York City would ring out with sympathy for Islamofascism. Imagine if you had said to one of the startled souls watching American lives be incinerated by Islamist filth that one day the West would swarm with youths cosplaying as Islamist filth.
Imagine if you had said that in a mere quarter of a century even our leafiest campuses would be awash with jihad chic, with silver-spoon students gushing over an Islamo-army (Hamas) every bit as hateful and medieval as the one that burnt New Yorkers alive.
The Federalist, in the same vein, proposes that 9/11 revealed the weakness of a post-Christian West. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal argues that the War on Terror succeeded but the U.S. homeland is more vulnerable now than it was 25 years ago.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Clarke writes about “September 11 and the Loss of Certainty“: Clarke remembers the effect on him of the bodies falling from the Twin Towers. Stephen Kruiser of PJ Media asserts that “Any Moral Equivalence About 9/11 Is Pure Evil.” “Name the Enemy,” Fred Fleitz of AMAC orders. At Independent Women, we especially remember Barbara Olson, one of our own who was on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
Last night was JD night at the GOP midterm convention. “Vance’s Prime-Time Speech Kicks Off Sprint to 2028” is a Wall Street Journal headline:
Vice President JD Vance looked very much like a presidential candidate-in-waiting at the Republican convention this week. He delivered a prime-time address, met with delegates from battleground states and headlined a high-dollar fundraiser with GOP donors.
Vance’s Thursday night speech fired up the crowd, as he laid out his vision for the America he wants his children to grow up in while painting Democrats as extreme. During the speech, audience members said the quiet part out loud, shouting “48!” Donald Trump is the 47th U.S. president, and the next one will be the 48th.
“We’ve got to take care of business this November, then we’ll worry about what comes next,” Vance said.
The report goes on to remark on support for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with some pushing for “VanceRubio.” Vance’s response to a heckler is proclaimed “hilarious.”
Skunk at the Garden Party? Kimberley Strassel argues today that President Trump’s midterm convention targeted the wrong audience: “It’s the ‘traditional Republicans’ he needs to get to the polls, not MAGA enthusiasts.” Here are key takeaways.
“Trumpapalooza is over, but the debate over the GOP’s future is just beginning,” writes Matthew Continetti in the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression section. Continetti is offering his take on the GOP’s childcare proposal. He writes:
Here are the details: The Health and Human Services Department is preparing a rule that would grant stay-at-home parents access to the Child Care and Development Fund, a $12 billion program that currently subsidizes child care for low-income workers. Since the 1990s, the fund has provided eligible parents some $9,000 a year to help pay the cost of child care. Most recipients are single moms.
What’s surprising is how lively conservative discussion has been over the leaked proposal. It’s a reminder that President Trump didn’t settle arguments on the right so much as delay them. The force of his personality has overwhelmed policy debates for over a decade. Politics has been a matter of defining one’s relationship to an individual rather than to a set of principles. Now that the 2028 election is coming into view, conservatives feel liberated to argue the merits of an idea rather than a person.
Listen to the advocates of Mr. Vance’s family policy, and you hear big government conservatism. “The welfare state already exists,” writes Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. “The subsidies already exist. And conservatives do not have the votes to dismantle either. Until that changes, taxpayer dollars should reward family formation, not subsidize its decline.”
Heritage vice president and former Trump administration official Roger Severino adds, “To respond to a clear improvement in allocation of existing funds with cries of ‘socialist!’ is either grossly unserious or grossly uninformed.” The message: Subsidizing stay-at-home moms is realistic, forward-looking and harmless.
Speaking of Families: Free-range parenting advocate Lenore Skenazy has a good Washington Post column about Karyann Parkinson’s decision to permit her five-year-old son to go for a walk that resulted in a six-month suspended jail sentence for her:
This new, limited idea of what kids are capable of explains why a 5-year-old walking around his neighborhood at lunchtime can look like a baby crawling along I-95 at midnight. Thanks to Karyann’s transgression — trusting her son — she was placed on Virginia’s child abuse and neglect registry for seven years. In court, she was found guilty of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” — a Class 1 misdemeanor — and given a six-month suspended jail sentence.
American voters aren’t the only ones paying attention to the midterms. The Iranian regime is too, and President Trump believes they will hang on until after the midterms. But can they last that long? Headline: “Iranians Are Running Out of Gas as Economic Squeeze Takes Hold.” But this isn’t good: Iran’s proxies, the Houthis, have taken control of a Red Sea chokepoint.
If You Like Your Healthcare Plan, You Can Keep Your Healthcare Plan … yeah, I seem to have heard something like that before. James Freeman suggests that we wouldn’t really benefit from “Medicare for All”:
Large federal interventions in U.S. healthcare are a big reason medical inflation has outpaced general inflation for decades. But if politicians now impose a fully government-run system on Americans under the euphemism “Medicare for All,” it is patient suffering that will go through the roof.
More on the Labor Day Socialism conference that drew 3,000 socialists to Chicago’s Hyatt Regency McCormick Place to plan to abolish police, prisons, capitalism, and the family. City Journal has the scoop:
More than three years after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference required attendees to wear masks at all times except for when speakers were actively presenting. … In a session titled “Femme-inism Against Cisness: Bread, Roses, and Hormones, Too,” British Marxist writer Sophie Lewis delivered a talk on concepts such as “whorish artifice” and “transfeminist abolitionism.” At last year’s conference, Lewis provided more detail about what abolition means to her, stating, “When you abolish the police, you do burn down police stations.” This year, she drew on themes from her book Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe to argue against “cisness,” defined as “the naturalization of assigned sex.”
