Story highlights SE Cupp: Griffin gratuitously playacted one of most vile, grotesque and evil acts of violence

Cupp: She weakened good arguments against intolerance of Trump and supporters

SE Cupp is the host of an upcoming HLN prime-time program covering contemporary issues and a CNN political commentator. The views expressed in this commentary are solely hers.

(CNN) In the days, weeks, months and years following 9/11, there were countless images, moving and still, that came into our collective consciousness that changed us, as much as those events did.

SE Cupp

For me, a New Yorker who witnessed many of those images live, there are a few that are forever etched in my brain. One, still photos of men in suits jumping from the top floors of the World Trade Center, their ties whipping upward in the wind as they leaped from one helpless fate to another.

Many more images would follow. I was at my desk at The New York Times in May 2004 when news broke that a missing American contractor named Nick Berg had been decapitated by Islamic extremists in Iraq. He'd briefly attended my college, so I'd felt a small connection with him. I made myself watch the video of his decapitation that morning, and immediately regretted it.

Of course, it was grisly and shocking and awful. But that's not what made it such a lasting, haunting image that I can't shake to this day.

It's that he was one of ours, and they took his head as a trophy, held it up to the video camera, and with bloodlust and hatred in their eyes, rubbed it in our faces. I was looking at pure evil.

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