What New York’s Governor Saw on 9/11

Twenty-five years ago, then-governor George Pataki led New York through the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, one that killed nearly 3,000 people and left the nation’s financial capital in ash and rubble. On September 11, 2001, Pataki closed bridges and tunnels and refused his own security detail’s advice to retreat to an underground bunker in Albany. Later that day, he was sitting across from New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in a makeshift command center in Lower Manhattan. In the days and years that followed, Pataki saw a level of national unity that offered the only silver lining to that day. A quarter century later, that unity––even the basic understanding that the United States has been the target of a terrorist attack––has collapsed. That collapse is what I asked Pataki about in our interview. For two decades, he has wrestled with the question he raised in his 2020 book Beyond the Great Divide: whether the terrorists ultimately won, not on the battlefield, but by unraveling the country’s unity, from within. We talked about the rise of figures like Hasan Piker, the controversy over NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani’s planned attendance at this year’s memorial, and why Pataki believes America now faces a different kind of threat today: not hijacked planes, but a moral rot eating away at the foundations of Western civilization.