Here at the Excel Center, we just finished watching a “never again” video about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, complete with stirring images of New York City. You know, that “cosmopolitan” place filled with “media elites” and “liberals” who don’t put “Country First” — or at least that’s what the message was during the previous three days of this convention.

Of course, I’m having the thought I always do when politicians use 9/11 to manipulate people’s emotions. New Yorkers — the people actually targeted by the terrorist attack — tend not to believe the GOP is the party best suited to keep them safe. Shouldn’t that count for something? Or is 9/11 just a lens through which to filter nationalism?

—Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.