Rip’s Newsletter
September 11, 2026
Compiled and Edited
by
Jim Reynolds
Articles in This Issue
John Daniel Davidson - 9/11 Exposed The Weakness Of A Post-Christian West
Kevin McCullough - A Month of Remembrance
Alex Berenson - Another day, another terrible anniversary
Chris Bray - Stories About 9/11 Are Stories About Shared Identity And Mutuality
Overview
Today’s pieces circle the same hard truth: memory is never neutral, and the stories we tell about violence shape the politics that follow.
Several essays revisit 9/11 not just as a date of mourning, but as a test of whether the West still understands the nature of the threats it faces and the bonds that hold a nation together.
Others widen the frame to show how grief, hatred, and ideology can turn anniversaries into warnings about what happens when civic trust frays.
What runs through all of them is a tension between remembrance as ritual and remembrance as responsibility.
9/11 Exposed The Weakness Of A Post-Christian West
By: John Daniel Davidson The Federalist
Date: 2026-09-11 · Words: 749
A quarter-century after 9/11, the article argues that American elites still misunderstand the attacks as a geopolitical or material problem rather than a religious war the West is losing.
It says the post-9/11 response was shaped by secular liberal assumptions that reduced cultural and religious differences to economics, foreign policy, or governance, leading to regime-change wars, nation-building, and expanded Muslim immigration.
The piece contends that these policies failed because they ignored the reality that the West’s tolerance and neutrality were products of a specifically Christian civilization, not universal secular principles.
It also argues that efforts to export Western democracy to the Muslim world and import large numbers of Muslims into the West have both exposed the limits of multiculturalism and assimilation.
The author concludes that America should stop treating itself as a blank slate and instead recover an explicitly Christian understanding of national identity and moral order.
Read the full original article here
A Month of Remembrance
By: Kevin McCullough Townhall
Date: 2026-09-10 · Words: 1,189
The column links three September-October anniversaries—Charlie Kirk’s killing on Sept. 10, 9/11, and the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre—as reminders of how hatred turns grievance into mass murder.
McCullough argues that while America has become adept at killing terrorists, it has not solved the deeper problem of terrorism because the real battleground is the human heart.
He frames Kirk’s public witness to Jesus Christ as a model for addressing the spiritual roots of violence, insisting that the Gospel offers forgiveness, repentance, and transformation where revenge and ideology demand blood.
The piece says force is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but stopping killers is not the same as defeating the hatred that produces them.
It closes by urging Christians and ordinary citizens to interrupt isolation and radicalization early—through friendship, church, truth-telling, and forgiveness—before anger hardens into violence.
Read the full original article here
Another day, another terrible anniversary
By: Alex Berenson alexberenson.substack.com
Date: 2026-09-11 · Words: 805
The essay argues that unlike slow historical collapses, Sept. 11 was a world-changing event driven by one man, Osama bin Laden, whose small network exploited passenger jets as mass-casualty weapons and forced a lasting American response.
It says the attacks did not devastate the U.S. in military terms, but they did supercharge domestic surveillance, create the Department of Homeland Security, and push the country into two wars.
The author contends Iraq, despite its origins, ended in a more stable and democratic outcome, while Afghanistan became a costly, futile quagmire that produced dead soldiers, rich contractors, and no durable state-building success.
He argues that the dishonesty and exhaustion surrounding those wars helped fuel Donald Trump’s rise, and that the anger behind that movement will outlast Trump himself.
Even with bin Laden dead, al Qaeda diminished, and a new World Trade Center tower standing, the article says Sept. 11 still shapes American politics and security.
Read the full original article here
Stories About 9/11 Are Stories About Shared Identity And Mutuality
By: Chris Bray The Federalist
Date: 2026-09-11 · Words: 781
The article argues that the most revealing stories about 9/11 are not only about terror and loss, but about the older American habit of seeing strangers as “us.” It opens with the 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy, where soldiers crossing the country were met by towns that treated them like honored guests, as evidence of a once-common sense of shared identity and mutual pleasure in hosting one another.
The piece then contrasts that civic warmth with the immediate, self-sacrificing behavior seen on 9/11, when civilians, firefighters, and boat owners repeatedly risked or gave their lives to help others without waiting for orders.
It emphasizes that this response was spontaneous and ruleless, driven by instinctive solidarity rather than duty or coercion.
The author closes by asking what kind of culture exists now, and whether Americans today would respond to a future attack with the same mutuality.
Read the full original article here
You may also be interested in the following selected stories:
A Disgrace To The 9/11 Victims — Don Brown, American Thinker
Securing The Skies Before The Next 9/11 — Arik Arad, American Thinker
9/11 Was The Beginning Of A Religious War That We Lost — John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist
Name the Enemy: The 25th Anniversary of 9/11 Still Demands It — Fred Fleitz, American Greatness
Twenty-Five Years Later: The Warnings Still Remain — Lawrence Kadish, The Gatestone Institute
I Lived Through 9/11 As A New Yorker. Here’s What I Saw — Pablo Kleinman, The Federalist
My Son Had Six Weeks to Learn Two Years of Saxon Math. We Used AI. — DataRepublican, datarepublican.substack.com
