When the Twin Towers fell in 2001, Niall Ferguson wrote that the attack was a result of complex historical trends—post-2000 economic downturn, the rise of American imperialism, and the fragmentation of ethnic pluralism in Western nations. But Niall now thinks he was wrong. And he explains why in his essay for The Free Press today. Read it below, and then read Matt Labash’s dispatch from the streets of New York City after the attack, which we’re honored to republish today: “South Toward Hell After September 11.” —The Editors

This week’s azure September skies over New York brought back memories. Twenty-four years ago, I was due to give a lecture at New York University. The date of the lecture was 9/12. I never flew.

On the day of the attacks, I sat in my study at Jesus College, Oxford, staring incredulously at the pixelated live video of the Twin Towers first blazing, then collapsing. Not long after, in April 2002, I accepted a chair at the Stern School of Business at NYU and resigned my Oxford professorship.

My motivation was partly the hereditary Scottish tendency to march toward the sound of gunfire. As a teenager in 1914, my grandfather John Ferguson had volunteered to fight the Germans. This seemed easier.

Regardless of the 9/11 attackers’ motives, I had a strong objection to terrorism as a political method—a result of growing up in Glasgow in the 1970s, when “the Troubles” in nearby Northern Ireland did more than merely resonate. My first impulse after the attacks, in a piece for The New York Times, was to liken the sympathetic British reaction to 9/11 to the American reaction to the Blitz of 1940-41. But I also warned Americans to “steel themselves for a long, inglorious kind of war that governments in Europe already know only too well.” In wars against terrorists, I wrote, “there are no quick victories. The foe does not line up his tanks for you to flatten, his ships for you to sink. His troops live among you.”

Yet this was not the Provisional IRA. Rereading a transcript of Osama bin Laden’s first post-9/11 video, from November 3, 2001, I am reminded how explicitly he declared a war of religion. “People were divided into two parts” after 9/11, he declared. “The first part supported these strikes against U.S. tyranny, while the second denounced them.”

“The vast majority of the sons of the Islamic world were happy about these strikes,” bin Laden went on, “because they believe that the strikes were in reaction to the huge criminality practiced by Israel and the United States in Palestine and other Muslim countries.” There were demonstrations of support for his action “from the farthest point in the eastern part of the Islamic world to the farthest point in the western part of the Islamic world.” This revealed the key reality: “This war is fundamentally religious. The people of the East are Muslims. They sympathized with Muslims against the people of the West, who are the crusaders.”

In the days after the Twin Towers fell, writer Matt Labash headed to Manhattan. His firsthand account of the wreckage and its aftermath was first published in The Weekly Standard in September 2001. We’re honored to bring it to you today. —The Editors

It doesn’t seem right, really—romanticizing catastrophe instead of just confronting its grim particulars head-on. Still, they cut quite a swath at Sir Harry’s Bar in the Waldorf Astoria, these brave men with forearm tattoos and walrus mustaches—firefighting volunteers who have swooped in from places like Danbury and Pittsburgh to shore up New York’s own decimated ranks.

The hotel has graciously provided free accommodations. So after a 12-hour shift sifting through World Trade Center rubble, firemen stagger into the bar like flame-retardant cowboys, still wearing their charbroiled gear. As they fill the room, I turn to a well-heeled patron, trying to summon an appropriate reference from a Peckinpah movie. “They look like somebody,” I say, struggling. “Like goddamned heroes,” he replies, as the fireman douse their dust-infested insides with complimentary rounds.

It’s Thursday, September 11. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Later today we’ll bring you an essay by our Niall Ferguson on the anniversary of 9/11. But this morning, there is just one story we’re covering: the murder of 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

With increasing urgency and horror, we have been covering the terrible upsurge in political violence that threatens to tear our country apart. Yesterday came the most shocking example yet: the assassination of 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA and drew thousands of young people to conservatism.

He was murdered while speaking to a crowd of some 3,000 students at Utah Valley University. He was standing under a canopy that read “PROVE ME WRONG,” urging students to debate him. He was the living embodiment of the First Amendment.

Kirk’s killer reportedly shot him from a distance of 200 yards—the murder was obviously planned. As of this writing, investigators are searching for a suspect, but this much we can already say: Whoever assassinated Kirk was also attacking democracy itself, using political violence as a response to ideas he didn’t agree with. Political violence has become far too common in recent times, and we will continue to call for America to recapture values that will help lower the political temperature. Values like family and faith and a genuine reverence for free speech. Values that Charlie Kirk held dear.

Today, we’re offering a series of stories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination—and what it means for America.

Adam Rubenstein recalls spending time with the activist when he was 24, and marveling at “how someone at such a young age could command the attention and respect that he did—and in such a short period.”

Ben Shapiro went even further back with Kirk, meeting him for the first time when the activist was 18. Some 13 years ago, he recalls telling a friend, “That kid is going to be the head of the Republican National Committee one day.” Ben adds, “I was wrong. Charlie became far more important than that.”

Matthew Continetti says Kirk’s assassination is a watershed moment in American history. “It is the most stunning evidence we have to date that America is becoming two nations,” he warns. “Weak institutions, corrupted data, rampant distrust, political enmity, and an apparent inability to control criminality and the dangerously mentally ill tear us apart like a centrifugal force.” So what can bring us back from the brink? Read his piece to find out.

Kirk was perhaps the most effective conservative activist of his generation. And so we asked seven young conservatives how Kirk influenced their view of the world. Here’s what they told us.

Finally, our editors look at the other shocking murder that made headlines this week—that of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina—and the policies that helped lead to her death.

• In her new book, former vice president Kamala Harris openly criticizes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection in 2024. “In retrospect, I think it was recklessness,” she says of Biden’s decision to campaign again.

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called on the Federal Reserve to revise its interest rates on Tuesday. Bessent’s pressure comes after new data revealed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics overestimated employment rates by almost one million jobs in late 2024 and early 2025. “It turns out that we didn’t have good facts,” Bessent said.

• Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said Wednesday that his country is the “closest we have been to open conflict since World War II.” The remarks came after Poland, a NATO member, shot down at least three Russian drones that entered its airspace early Wednesday morning.

• Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the U.S. Senate, told reporters Wednesday that he would move to force a vote to release the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein files. “There’s been so much lying, obfuscation, cover-ups—the American people need to see everything that’s in the Epstein file,” Schumer said.

• Democratic governors in New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois are racing to stockpile their vaccine supplies. The governors’ move comes after Florida’s decision to remove all vaccine mandates, and contentious congressional testimony from Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• A new poll shows New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani beating former governor Andrew Cuomo by a whopping 15 percentage points in November’s general election. According to the poll, Mamdani has the support of 43 percent of New Yorkers, followed by Cuomo at 28 percent, Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa at 10 percent, and incumbent mayor Eric Adams at seven percent.

• President Trump’s youngest son Barron has moved into the White House for his sophomore year of college. After garnering a semester’s worth of headlines at NYU’s Greenwich Village campus, Barron will continue his studies from the school’s D.C. outpost, which focuses on politics.

• U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt wants Pat Buchanan to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In a letter sent to President Donald Trump on Monday, Schmitt called Buchanan a “courageous intellectual and political trailblazer” and “one of the great patriots of our time.” Buchanan, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan who ran for president several times, has sometimes been accused of antisemitism.

• One Battle After Another, the latest film from acclaimed director Paul Thomas Anderson, is being called a leading contender for this year’s Oscar for Best Picture. The film, which comes out later this month, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland.

A House committee will pressure 13 U.S. colleges and universities to shut down their joint programs with Chinese universities, according to a report exclusively obtained by The Free Press.

The report by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, set for release on Thursday, says that the so-called joint institutes, many of which are focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, pose national security threats to America by funding and advancing research used to bolster China’s military capabilities.

“American universities should never be a pipeline for the Chinese Communist Party’s military ambitions, and this report reveals alarming new details about their partnerships with CCP-controlled institutions,” Rep. John Moolenaar, the Republican from Michigan who leads the committee, told The Free Press. “These collaborations empower China’s military and exploit research paid for by American taxpayers.”

Moolenaar said that he is seeking to “end joint institutes” and “stop our tax dollars from aiding our adversaries.”

The report defines joint institutes as pairings of U.S. universities and Chinese institutions that are located in China, operate under Chinese law and with Chinese-majority boards, and are aligned with the strategy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

A few shuffle in their seats. Some look up for a brief, wary glance. Most back away. Not a single person intervenes to stop him.

This was the scene in the moments immediately after Decarlos Brown Jr. allegedly stabbed Iryna Zarutska in the neck on the Lynx Blue Line train in Charlotte, North Carolina. She looks up in terror and slumps over moments later, bleeding out. Brown calmly disembarks at the next station. Nobody in the video tries to restrain him. Nobody, it seems, comes to her rescue.

In a sense, who could blame them? We know what can happen when a bystander intervenes in these situations. If things go wrong, you could be vilified in the press, lose your job, get charged with murder. That is what happened to Daniel Penny.

The video of Zarutska’s murder and its aftermath sheds light on the spirit of the age, one in which police, prisons, and mandatory hospital treatment for those who require it were sidelined with demonizing euphemisms like “mass incarceration” that made the goal abolition rather than reform.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is shocking on every level. He was shot in public, in front of a large crowd, and on video. The 31-year-old husband and father of two was not an elected official, but the most successful conservative activist in a generation. The attack didn’t just deprive a family of its center. It struck at the ties that hold a free society together: open assembly, civil debate, viewpoint diversity. Like every terrorist act, the shooting was meant to instill fear—in this case, fear of speaking out, of exposure, of making a difference.

Yet Kirk’s murder did not happen in a vacuum. Political violence in America is on the rise. Some of it targets officials: the congressional baseball shooting, the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, arson at the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, the killing of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman. The rest is aimed at private citizens. Shooters attack Christian churches and schools. A Hamas sympathizer is accused of gunning down an American Jew and her German Israeli boyfriend outside a Jewish museum in Washington. Luigi Mangione faces trial for the murder of a healthcare executive.

“Hi, Mr. Shapiro, I’m Charlie Kirk.”

Charlie was 18 years old when I met him at an event at The Breakers, the rather ritzy Palm Beach hotel that served as the gathering spot for the annual David Horowitz Freedom Center donor weekend. Charlie had just started an organization called Turning Point USA, and he was pitching me on it. I’d never heard of it, of course: He had just graduated high school, and the group had its seed donors but was still in its infancy.

Charlie was eager, and he was aggressive, and he was whip-smart. His energy was almost exhausting.

When he walked away, I turned to my friend Jeremy Boreing and said, “That kid is going to be the head of the Republican National Committee one day.”

I was wrong. Charlie became far more important than that.

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on Wednesday afternoon at Utah Valley University while doing what he had done hundreds of times before: debating college students.

Many of them credited Kirk with giving them the courage to want ordinary things: family, faith, and marriage. For them, he did something that Republicans had failed to do since Reagan: He made conservatism cool.

Below are the voices of seven people who described how Kirk changed their lives.

This afternoon, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking onstage at an event on the campus of Utah Valley University. Kirk, 31, was one of the most influential figures on the contemporary American right. In the below essay, Adam Rubenstein remembers Kirk, the subject of his 2018 profile “Kid Trump.” Here he is on “The Charlie Kirk I Knew.” We’ll be bringing you more on this story in the coming hours and days. —The Editors

In 2019, Charlie Kirk and I were, by complete coincidence, on the same flight, Denver to Chicago. I was going to visit my girlfriend in law school, and he was going home to visit his family in Lemont, a Chicago suburb. He technically still lived with his parents—for the few days a year he wasn’t on the road building his organization, Turning Point USA—and was returning home after a campus visit in Colorado.

While walking down the aisle, Charlie spotted me, sitting in a middle seat at the back of the plane, and asked the person next to me to switch seats so we could catch up. She obliged, and Charlie sat down next to me. It had been about a year since I’d seen him last. We knew each other because I had written a profile of him in The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that was shuttered later that year—a sign of how the conservative movement was transforming in the age of Trump. While we closed our doors, Charlie was raising millions and speaking in front of sold out audiences.

The profile I wrote ended up on the magazine’s cover in August 2018. “Kid Trump” was its headline. To deliver the story, I had spent a week with Charlie, then 24 years old, in Washington, D.C., backstage at a summit he put on for high schoolers in Turning Point USA, on George Washington University’s campus. Five members of the cabinet appeared, as did Mark Cuban, Kellyanne Conway, and Fox News’ Jesse Watters. Students traveled from across the country to attend. Parents came with their children, thrilled by the prospect of seeing Charlie up close.

In the months before publication, I’d meet him periodically at “The Trump,” as he called it—the old post office where President Trump had a hotel.

“Oh, oh—guys, over here!”

Kathleen Corradi, New York City’s first “rat czar,” pulled a flashlight from her back pocket and aimed it at the base of a trash can. She clicked off the light, almost smirking: “Yep, we’ve got droppings.”

Nearly two dozen New Yorkers—plus one concerned homeowner from Jersey City, New Jersey—raced toward the find. “Droppings!” a woman squealed, dragging her friend closer. On a summer evening in Brooklyn’s Herbert Von King Park, no one could quite explain why they had gathered to hunt vermin. The closest thing to an answer came from Alisa Lazear, a 35-year-old librarian at New York University who took the subway from Hell’s Kitchen just to be here. 

“I’m starstruck,” she gushed about Corradi. “She’s my hero. There’s nothing more New York than learning about rats.”

Corradi—five feet, two inches, a lesbian, and handpicked by Mayor Eric Adams out of hundreds of applicants in 2023 as citywide director of rodent mitigation, to use her official title—has become a kind of folk hero for rat enthusiasts. She calls garbage her “first love,” has hosted more than 40 public “rat walks” like this one in the heart of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and talks about rats the way that most people talk about dogs, even though she aims to eradicate them. Her mandate, straight from Adams himself, is to “send rats packing.”