A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
Conservatives commemorated the 16th anniversary of 9/11 on Monday. At National Review, Kevin Williamson wrote that 9/11 marked the end of a “golden age”:
Those of us who knew the world before are refugees from the past, residents of a different world from the one inhabited by those who have never known anything different. That may be a return to normal: The paranoid atmosphere of 2017 is really not so different from the one at the end of the Cold War, when we elementary-school students were being taught to duck under our desks in the event of thermonuclear warfare. Those desks must have been sturdier than they looked.
[…]We might have done anything during the postwar boom, with the United States standing practically alone on the global stage as the unchallengeable economic power and leader of the free world, whose only global rival was a grimy, backward, hungry gulag state whose only real influence in the world came from its apparent willingness to destroy that world out of ideological pique. What we did was build a bigger welfare state and hope that the good times would last forever, while doing very little to ensure that they did. We repeated that mistake in the 1990s, so impressed by our victory over the vast red armies of the Communist world that we failed to appreciate that 19 Islamic fanatics with box-cutters had a sense of History, too, and a program for a future very different from the one we’d imagined for ourselves.
In the Federalist, David Harsanyi argued that America is more split now than anyone could have imagined in the days immediately after the attack:
The day after 9/11, and many days after that, I was unable to commute into my office in Manhattan. The local train station was littered with the cars of those who I assumed would never come home. So I sat in front of my TV staring at cable news most hours of the coming days. For those few weeks, I don’t remember anyone ever using the event to bludgeon their political opponents.
So here’s a depressing thought on the anniversary of 9/11: What if those two or three weeks of harmony 16 years ago will be the last we experience for a very long time? Considering our trajectory, this seems more likely than not. After all, surveying the coverage of the anniversary of 9/11 this morning, it’s difficult not to notice that Americans don’t really share a coherent, unifying cultural or idealistic value system anymore.
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro listed five lessons that America has forgotten since 9/11, including the ideas that “immigration matters” and “money can’t buy off islamists.” “Many of the lessons we learned on 9/11 have faded with time,” he wrote. “We seem to be back where we started—in the miasma of Clintonian isolationism, although tempered by a stronger anti-terror mechanism abroad.”
President Trump and Vice President Pence earned praise for their remarks at the day’s 9/11 memorials. “Although the U.S. is still struggling with the bitter partisan divides the 2016 presidential election etched into the nation, both Trump and Pence urged their fellow Americans to honor the memory of those who died on 9/11 by striving for national unity,” LifeZette’s Kathryn Blackhurst wrote. The Daily Wire’s Joseph Curl wrote that Trump made the Pentagon’s event “highly personal” by telling the story of one particular fallen police officer while the Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti noted Pence’s almost tearful remembrance of the passengers of Flight 93.
In other news:
Several conservative outlets ran posts on a report from UtahPolicy.com that Mitt Romney plans to enter Utah’s 2018 Senate race if incumbent Orrin Hatch retires. “Romney has been exploring a possible Senate run for months; sources familiar with the situation back in April said he was discussing the matter with GOP leaders, but would not make a move without Hatch’s blessing,” the Washington Free Beacon’s Charles Russell wrote. “A longtime political adviser to Hatch, Dave Hansen, said last month that the senator would make up his mind in October, but sources recently told UtahPolicy.com he may not decide on his political future until December.”
“I checked Romney’s Twitter account and there’s no denials of this report yet, so it sounds like it may be true,” a post at the Right Scoop read. “While I would lament Romney running for Senate, given his moderate tendencies, I would also admit that it’s doubtful he’d be any worse than Hatch if he were to win.”
The Resurgent’s Clayton Felts welcomed a potential Romney run:
After losing the race for the White House in 2012, Romney prophecy has been vindicated. In foreign policy, Romney correctly predicted that Russia was America top geopolitical foe. He also correctly predicted the rise of ISIS in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled, The Price of Failed Leadership. Romney’s critique of the slow economic recovery has also panned out, as did his prediction of an implosion of Obamacare.
Many conservatives have seen Romney as squishy or too moderate. I am not one of those. He is not as conservative as I would be on some issues, but he is a serious leader. In the era of Trump, we need serious leaders who are honest and can get agendas passed. A turnaround expert by trade, Mitt Romney has improved almost all the positions he has held. Maybe he can improve the U.S. Senate next.
