September 11 Has Become History

By Dan McLaughlin

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Where did 25 years go? If, like me, you lived through the September 11 attacks on the ground in New York (or Washington), the memory remains fresh and vivid. But time never stops marching on.

 

An entire generation has come of age with no living memory of September 11. There are college graduates in the workforce, and even on the National Review staff, who were born after that day. That feels surreal to me, much as it must have felt surreal for people who remembered Pearl Harbor to encounter the Baby Boom generation. But it is the way of the world. Eventually, everything stops being news and becomes history. History means words and pictures, not the smell of the air or the mood of the week. Things that changed everything only feel that way if you remember what it was like before those things changed.

 

That has a lot of implications both for commemoration and for the learning of lessons. It always has. I’ve argued before that the timeline of the building of Confederate statues and monuments should be understood generationally: Many of them were built by the sons and daughters of the Confederate veterans as they were beginning to die off. The pattern recurs; it explains why there was such a large boom in commemorations of the Second World War and its attendant horrors in the 1990s (think of Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List and the coining of the term “Greatest Generation”). The Vietnam War was run by men who had served in the Second World War, who couldn’t understand why the younger generation saw it so differently. One of the recurrent themes of the book I’m writing on the 1850s is that the tempo of wars and revolutions increased as the generation of men who remembered the Napoleonic Wars and would do anything to avoid reopening the Pandora’s box of general European war were passing from the scene. They were replaced by people impatient with the status quo.

 

Predictably, as has happened to past events such as the moon landing, the decay of shared collective memory of what happened offers fertile ground for conspiracy theorists to replace reality with their own narratives. This stuff has old roots in the mid-2000s — in anti-Bush and anti-war politics, in antisemitism, and most of all in the intersection of those impulses — but has taken on a whole new life with YouTube, TikTok, and other forms of non-written social media increasingly bombarding the generation that didn’t experience September 11 as a real event. Nefarious operatives such as Tucker Carlson exploit that opportunity for their own purposes. Douglas Murray has a bracing essay at the Free Press about this. There’s a desperate need on college campuses for the truth of what happened. Many college kids were not adequately inoculated against false 9/11 narratives in advance, in the way that the wisest Americans inoculated their countrymen and children as early as the 1940s against Holocaust denial. There are sources out there that do so, including the invaluable 2005–06 work of Popular Mechanics, but these are useful only to people aware of them.

 

On the other hand, if you were a twentysomething or so on September 11 — I was a month from turning 30 myself — the passage of a quarter century is a vivid reminder of quite how much life was taken from those who died, the bulk of whom were under 40. I’ve seen the two children I had then grow up, and had another five years later. I’ve had a whole second writing career since then, as well as the bulk of my legal career. It’s almost half of my life. All those firemen and traders and secretaries and travelers had a lot more life to live, and never got the chance.

 

Atrocities will do that. Anne Frank was five years younger than Jimmy Carter, who outlived her by eight decades.

 

Memory prefers the vivid to the coldly rational. I remember the doomed fire engines streaming down Manhattan’s avenues (closed to all other traffic) at top speed, their flags flapping in the perfect sunlight, as the rest of us were trudging on foot northward as fast as we could get away from danger. Those men had to know that many of them would not come home. My uncle, who as an FDNY higher-up had overseen many drills of the department’s protocols for responding to fires in the Twin Towers, has always said that he knew right away that the Fire Department was going to lose a lot of good men that day. The firemen were trained to go into danger and stay there until they got everybody else out.

 

I remember the forlorn hopes. The city was festooned with the pictures of missing family members. Almost none were ever found alive, and few were even found in condition to be buried.

 

I remember the smoke and the smell. We lived on a hill in Queens, from where you could see the towers, and then they were gone, but for a few days the cloud lingered, and so did the reek.

 

I remember the spirit of defiance. Nobody wanted to give an inch to the people who had taken so much from us. My law firm, through heroic efforts, was back to work the following Monday. We had nothing to work on — no files, no computers, no telephones. It was like Whoville on Christmas morning. But we were there.

 

I remember not knowing when it was over. It took a while to be sure that the Pentagon was the last attack (well, that and Flight 93). For weeks, there were additional scares — anthrax, bomb scares. Any tunnel was a place from which there could be no escape if it was brought down, and New York is nothing if not a labyrinth of tunnels, bridges, and skyscrapers.

 

The generation that knew Pearl Harbor has all but gone. We know that our own memories will go with us someday, too. We confront, once again, the question that Ronald Reagan faced when he left the Oval Office just shy of his 78th birthday. On his mind was the danger of forgetting where we have been and what it cost:

 

Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. . . . If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. . . .

 

We’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. . . . If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. . . . All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins.

 

It seems quaint today even to speak of talking at the family dinner table. But September 11 is now our history. Make sure it is passed on.