The New Year Quote by Michael McCaul

Commemoration and mobilization are braided together so tightly here that they become indistinguishable. McCaul opens with the safest possible civic gesture - a House resolution honoring “victims and heroes” - then pivots, almost seamlessly, to a present-tense warning: “the threat is still very real today.” It’s a familiar post-9/11 rhetorical move: grief as shared property, fear as policy fuel.

The intent is less to deepen remembrance than to keep a particular emotional posture alive. By invoking an official resolution, he launderes urgency through bipartisan ritual: the chamber has spoken, therefore the frame is legitimate. “As we commemorate” functions like a moral checkpoint; to participate in national memory is implicitly to accept the next clause. The subtext is that vigilance is a patriotic obligation, and skepticism risks sounding like disrespect.

Notice the vagueness doing heavy lifting. “The threat” is undefined - no group, no geography, no distinction between terrorism, domestic extremism, cyberwar, or lone-actor violence. That ambiguity is strategic. A non-specific menace can be updated to fit whichever security agenda is on deck: expanded surveillance, border hardening, new authorizations, more funding. The phrase “still very real” asserts continuity, collapsing the distance between 2001 and “today” so the exceptional mindset remains ordinary.

Context matters: for years, members of Congress have marked 9/11 not only as a memorial date but as a recurring justification for state power. McCaul’s line keeps the emotional circuitry intact: honor the dead, then accept the premise that the nation remains under siege.