Schools Should Teach the 9/11 Heroism of the American People

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, September 10, 2026

 

The other night, we watched the brief but powerful 9/11 documentary Boatlift with our kids. Made in 2011 and narrated by Tom Hanks, Boatlift is a 12-minute film on the largest waterway evacuation in American history.

 

The story is simple: As the towers fell and people ran through the chaos of lower Manhattan looking to escape the danger without access to mass transit and with roads and bridges closed off, the Coast Guard put out a general call for a volunteer boatlift. The massive response created a civil convoy that surpassed anyone’s expectations and produced one of the better stories of American selflessness and heroism in the country’s history.

 

Yes, in the country’s history. Just to give readers an idea of what this boatlift accomplished: According to Britannica, the Dunkirk evacuation in World War II carried 338,000 British, French and Belgian troops to safety over nine days.

 

The 9/11 boatlift ferried 500,000 people to safety in nine hours.

 

It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, of course, but hopefully it at least paints a picture of the magnitude of the ad hoc effort.

 

“I saw four businessmen lifting up an old woman with a seeing-eye dog… and they lifted her up like a surfboard and passed her over the handrails” and onto a boat, recalled one official. Sometimes spouses, separated and each unaware of the other’s fate, were reunited on these boats.

 

We talk a lot about the lessons of 9/11, of the changed world that emerged from it, of geopolitical realignment, of domestic security policy, of Islamist terrorism and the War on Terror. For my generation in particular, born after Vietnam but too young to fully appreciate the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was a defining moment.

 

And one unforgettable element of that day was the heroism. Younger Americans have no memory of that day, and what they are missing out on, aside from the terror and the grief and the anger, is the way the civilian response filled one with a deep sense of gratitude for the cosmic gift of being an American.

 

Which is why 9/11 education ought to be mandatory, and young Americans should learn not only the Big Ideas around this earthshattering event but what happened on that day itself at the granular level.

 

Here’s what I mean. The Associated Press this week produced a state-by-state summary of 9/11 curriculum requirements. Much of it is optional or flexible, and much of it misses the point.

 

Arkansas requires students to learn about the “change and continuity in foreign policy since 2001 after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.” One world history prompt for California 10th-graders states: “Since 9/11, the hopes for a more peaceful world that the end of the Cold War spawned have been displaced by a resurgence of international conflict.” In Idaho, we learn, “High school U.S. history students now must assess government responses to terrorism, ‘including those after Sept. 11, 2001, and analyze the causes, progression and aftermath’ of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” In Missouri, high-schoolers are tasked with “unpacking post-9/11 foreign policy.”

 

After 9/11, since 9/11, post-9/11, etc. Those are important lessons! So are the ones that require students to talk about what happened before 9/11. But what about on 9/11?

 

I admit I was, at first, rather appalled at the list provided by the AP. But it is just a summary and should not be taken as the full extent of what actually goes on in classrooms around the country, where teachers and administrators have plenty of flexibility to shape students’ understanding of 9/11 and how it should be memorialized. And there is bound to be a range of differences among the 50 states.

 

But I also noticed that some states pretty much nailed it. Here is the AP’s description of Florida’s educational approach to 9/11:

 

A 2023 Florida law requires at least 45 minutes a year of 9/11-related instruction in some middle and high school classes. The statute lists points to cover: historical context on terrorism, the attack timeline, acts of heroism and charity, the ‘importance of respecting civil liberties while ensuring safety and security,’ and more. It notably mentions not only those killed and wounded but also people who fell ill after being exposed to toxins when the World Trade Center’s burning twin towers collapsed. State standards go into still more detail. It’s all intended ‘to ensure this important event in America’s history is not only remembered but also integrated into civics and resiliency education statewide,’ the state Department of Education said.

 

Exemplary. New York’s requirements are a mixed bag with plenty of potential. Pennsylvania’s aren’t bad. Both states were directly affected by the attacks themselves, so it’s no surprise to see their plans include moments of silence on each anniversary.

 

Virginia has the right idea, too. There, middle-schoolers give “special attention to the heroism displayed by passengers on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. High school juniors analyze 9/11 and other ‘key events and conditions that have given rise to terrorism as an attack on democracy and the United States’ role in defending democracy.’”

 

Children aren’t born knowing what happened on 9/11. We have to teach them. And among the earliest lessons that are appropriate for young students is one that reminds them what that day means for Americans, including the miracles that the American people are capable of in the face of terror and tragedy.

No Stone Unturned: Searching for Answers in the Wreckage of 9/11

By Jack Crowe

Saturday, September 12, 2026

 

The men and women who went to work at Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island in the fall of 2001 expected to be confronted by identifiable remnants of the lives that were consumed when the planes hit the towers: office furniture, computer parts, clothing. Instead, when they cleared the extensive security perimeter and arrived on “the hill,” as it came to be called, they were met by a great pile of undifferentiated grey-brown dirt and rubble.

 

It would take a team of roughly 1,000 workers, operating in shifts around the clock, until July 2002 to surface the objects and human remains that had survived the collapse and incineration of the towers in some recognizable form.

 

As the public fixed its gaze on Ground Zero in the weeks and months after the attack, sanitation workers transported 1.4 million tons of debris to Fresh Kills, all while continuing to make sure the trash was picked up across the city. Clad in white Tyvek suits and masks, workers representing private contractors and dozens of state, federal, and local agencies painstakingly sifted through the debris to find any identifiable human remains or pieces of personal property that might provide closure or offer some small measure of comfort to the bereaved.

 

Overnight, Fresh Kills Landfill became the largest forensic lab on earth.

 

ID Badges, Credit Cards, and Golf Balls

 

In his role investigating mass-casualty events for the FBI, Richard Marx had been exposed to some of the biggest and most complex crime scenes in the world. But nothing prepared him for the scope of the Fresh Kills operation. (The landfill’s grisly name comes from the Dutch word for a body of water.)   

 

Every day for months, sanitation workers would truck debris from Ground Zero to Pier 25 on Manhattan’s west side, where it would be loaded into waiting barges and brought to the docks at Fresh Kills. There, the debris would be unloaded into massive three-sided bins and eventually moved up to the top of the landfill for sorting. An average 650 tons of debris arrived each day, a feat of manpower, machinery, and coordination. None of the sanitation workers took a day off until Thanksgiving.

 

“There’s nowhere else in the world out of New York City that could have handled this,” Marx said.

 

Initially when the debris arrived, it would be spread out over a flat area at the top of the landfill, where teams of NYPD officers and FBI agents would comb through it with rakes, looking for anything that might be considered evidence, human remains, or personal property.

 

Sorting Shed, WTC Recovery, Fresh Kills, 2002 (Courtesy of Mark Schaming/Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum)

 

Eventually, the workers were provided with large sifters that sorted the debris into fine, medium, and large pieces and dropped them onto conveyor belts for examination by NYPD officers and FBI agents. The smallest pieces were just a quarter of an inch wide. Tents were constructed around the conveyor belts, and agents and officers working in 15-minute shifts sorted through it. Working on the conveyor belt was a monotonous task, punctuated by adrenaline spikes, hence the 15-minute shifts. When a worker spotted something worth collecting, they could slow the belt, tag the object, and place it in the relevant area.

 

The devastation was so total and all-encompassing that workers were struck by how little tangible evidence of the thousands of destroyed offices remained.

 

“We didn’t find a single freaking doorknob,” said retired NYPD Inspector James Luongo, who led the police department’s team at Fresh Kills. “Think about the World Trade Center. How many doors were there? And we didn’t see one doorknob.”

 

Articles recovered, WTC Recovery Operation, 2002(Courtesy of Mark Schaming/Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum)

 

But there were a few categories of items that did pop up regularly: laminated identification badges, credit cards, and, oddly, golf balls. Nearly everything else had been consumed by the flames and the compression of the falling towers. Some barely recognizable objects — like a service pistol that had melted into a pool and another firearm that had been sheared clean in half, along with the safe it was being stored in — testified to the ferocity of the heat and the violence of the collapse.

 

Mark Schaming, who went out to Fresh Kills in October to collect artifacts for the New York State Museum’s 9/11 exhibit, spent hours walking around on his first day at the landfill before spotting anything he could put a name to.

 

“I had expected to see some recognizable objects or something. And in all the hours I was there, the only recognizable thing I saw was a FedEx envelope. And that was it. It was just mountains of destruction,” Schaming said.

 

Occasionally, a piece of human remains would come down the conveyor belt. The item would be placed in a container and brought to the medical examiner’s trailer. In some cases, a piece of bone workers believed to be human was actually part of an animal that had been prepared in one of the World Trade Center restaurants.

 

“There was no training for it. You can’t get trained for seeing human remains out in the field. But they did it. And they did it with humanity. . . . I still get overwhelmed when I think about what they’re able to do,” Dennis Diggins, who led the Sanitation Department team at Fresh Kills, said in an interview for a 9/11 Museum oral history project.

 

The workers combing through debris required an incredible amount of logistical support. There were food trailers, heated tents around the conveyor belts, forensic trailers, and an entire team dedicated to ordering supplies. A thousand workers go through a lot of Tyvek suits and masks.

 

“We built a city out of absolutely nothing,” Marx explained.

 

‘A Different Planet’

 

Slowly, as the weeks passed, the workers began to impose some degree of order on the chaos. There was the flat area at the top of the landfill with all of the loose debris being sorted. At the bottom of the hill, sanitation workers lined up 1,300 cars that had been parked under or around the towers when they fell. Those cars acted as sponges, absorbing everything that had fallen from above, Schaming explained. Each of the vehicles told a story. In the trunk of one vehicle, workers found a birthday gift that a husband had purchased for, but would never give to, his wife.

 

Vehicle Recovery, WTC Recovery, Fresh Kills, 2002 (Courtesy of Mark Schaming/Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum)

 

The ruined fire trucks that were hauled to the landfill stood as a testament to the incredible bravery of the men who threw themselves headlong toward the danger — and the sheer randomness of the destruction they confronted. Mark Wagner, lead architect for the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, went out to Fresh Kills to select vehicles that would eventually be displayed in the museum. The burn patterns on the trucks revealed the razor-thin margin between life and death.

 

“I see one end of a fire truck, and it’s completely burnt. There’s not a speck of paint on the front end of the fire truck, and the back end almost looks intact,” said Wagner. “If I was standing at the front end of the fire truck, I may not be standing here today. And if I’m standing near the back, I could be totally fine. This loss of life was random. It was instant. It was unpredictable.”

 

Wagner, who had visited Ground Zero just days after 9/11, was struck by the sense of dislocation he felt upon arriving at Fresh Kills. It was like a “different planet.” Seeing the vast piles of debris that had been transported from Ground Zero truly revealed the scale of what had taken place.

 

“You know it wasn’t just this cleanup effort at Ground Zero, it was moving to other locations because of the enormity of the event and the sheer amount of material that had to be processed and understood,” Wagner said. “So, Fresh Kills in some ways was even more difficult emotionally.”

 

That sense of dislocation, the feeling that the items piling up at the landfill shouldn’t be there, was especially poignant at night, as activity at the site died down and the remaining workers could hear the crackle of fire and police radios still running in their destroyed vehicles.

 

Looking for Answers

 

Inspector Luongo said they never found any evidence relevant to their investigation, so ultimately, the months-long debris-sorting effort was really about bringing a measure of closure to the families of the deceased. Once a week, on Wednesdays, groups of family members would come out and tour Fresh Kills and witness for themselves all that was being done to identify their loved ones. Some of the family members were appreciative, while others demanded answers the workers could not provide.

 

“Families started coming there looking for an answer,” Gloria Coletti, who worked as an executive assistant to the Fresh Kills director, told an interviewer for the Memorial Museum’s oral history project.

 

“I don’t know how I would react if something happened to one of my children, and I had nowhere to go and nothing to show. I also knew — the logical side of me knew — that when those explosions happened, the people who they never found and never got nothing back from, they disintegrated. They went up in the air. They went straight to heaven. But I could never say that to these mothers. So I would just talk to them and grieve with them and hold their hands.”

 

Some family members were never able to accept that the remains of their son or father or sister could not be found and would ultimately be interred in a landfill. They kept showing up at the site until as late as 2006, some demanding to know what more could be done. A group of family members filed suit against the city in federal court in 2005 in an effort to force the city to relocate and continue sifting through the debris. A judge dismissed the suit.

 

When the Fresh Kills project began, “they did not trust us. They did not trust the process. They thought we were just burying stuff, and . . . that naturally was not true,” Luongo said of some of the families.

 

But the men who led the sorting effort are confident they did all they could to make sure no possible trace of human remains was missed. As the operation was wrapping up, workers went back through the debris that had been sorted first, when their procedures hadn’t been as reliable, just to make sure nothing was overlooked. Sanitation workers even power-washed the barges and collected the resulting dust. They also excavated the roadsides in the landfill to make sure nothing had fallen off the front-end loaders and trucks and been missed.

 

“We did the best job we possibly could,” Luongo said.

 

For some families, seeing the extraordinary effort being made in their behalf did make a difference. Some families arrived asking critical questions and left “our biggest fans,” Luongo said. One woman who had lost her husband arrived with a big bag of candy for Luongo and his team — a thank you from her young daughter.

 

The events of September 11, 2001, transfigured the most unlikely of places — a landfill in Staten Island — into sacred ground. Before the towers came down, Fresh Kills was an eyesore the residents of Staten Island had for years urged the city to shut down. The government eventually relented: The site was slated to close at the end of 2001. Instead, it became the final resting place for an untold number of New Yorkers, closing down in August 2002 as the work moved off-site. Today, the rubble from Ground Zero is covered by a grassy hillside, part of a city park that replaced the defunct landfill.

 

The Fresh Kills team would ultimately identify 4,500 human remains and 73,000 personal effects. Roughly half of those killed in the World Trade Center attack still have not been identified, and efforts to bring that closure are ongoing: Thousands of unidentified human remains are kept in a designated secure area in the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

Why We Need to Remember 9/11

National Review Online

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

On a perfectly clear morning 25 years ago, America changed forever.

 

At 8:46 a.m. on that day, a team of Islamic terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 76 passengers and eleven crew members, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was followed 17 minutes later by United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 51 passengers and nine crew members, which terrorists steered into the South Tower. Less than 90 minutes later, both of those towers had collapsed into a massive pile of rubble.

 

Meanwhile, as Americans’ televisions were tuned to live footage of the burning buildings, American Airlines Flight 77, carrying 53 passengers and six crew members, was slammed into the Pentagon. And shortly after, United Airlines Flight 93, with 33 passengers and seven crew members, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa.

 

Today, we remember the 2,977 innocent victims who were the first casualties in what would become known as the War on Terror. We also remember the extraordinary heroism displayed that day, without which the horrific losses would have been far worse.

 

One of the most miraculous facts about that day was that at the World Trade Center, which may have had an occupancy of 19,000 people between the two buildings at the time, 99 percent of those who were below the point of impact of the planes survived. This achievement is owed to the extraordinary evacuation efforts of first responders, who ran into burning buildings, no doubt knowing that there was a good chance they wouldn’t make it out. In the end, 441 firefighters, police officers, and paramedics did not.

 

Then there was the civilian heroism displayed by the passengers on Flight 93, who had heard about what happened at the World Trade Center, overtook the plane, and ensured that it crashed in an empty field rather than into the U.S. Capitol or White House, one of which was believed to be the potential target. Passenger Todd Beamer’s remark to his fellow passengers, “Let’s roll,” overheard from a phone call, became a rallying cry as the nation fought back.

 

At the time, everyone expected another attack in short order. There was a network of highly trained terrorists imbued with radical Islamic ideology and determined to cripple America and bring down the West. There have been a number of subsequent attacks throughout the world (such as the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the 2005 London bombings, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting and other attacks in Paris, and of course, the October 7 attacks in 2023). There have also been smaller-scale jihadi-inspired attacks in the​ U.S., such as the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting. But none of these attacks on U.S. soil were anything close to what happened on September 11.

 

Some argue that the lack of major terrorist incidents in ensuing years proves that the nation overreacted after  September 11. Clearly, though, increasing domestic security, pursuing more aggressive intelligence gathering, killing rank-and-file jihadis as well as their leaders, and disrupting and dismantling terrorist networks made it much harder to pull off a second mass-casualty attack. We know, based on terrorist plots that were foiled, that the failure of Islamists to pull anything off akin to 9/11 was not for lack of trying.

 

On ​September 11, George W. Bush was out of sight most of the day, as he was being safely moved from an event in Florida back to Washington. At the time, it was New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani who filled the vacuum in an exemplary way, soberly conveying the scale of the tragedy, offering practical information on rescue efforts, and delivering a message of defiance. It wasn’t until Bush visited rescue workers at the site days later that he emerged as a wartime leader. In perhaps the most iconic moment of his presidency, the crowd struggled to hear him and he shouted back through a bullhorn, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

 

One thing worth stating about the initial response is that it defied Osama bin Laden’s impression of America when planning the attacks. The terrorist leader had often cited previous examples in which the U.S. had pulled back when dealing with losses, including after the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia.

 

The invasion of Afghanistan almost surely would have happened in some form or other under any U.S. president and was a matter of near-universal consensus at the time. The Iraq War was more controversial at the outset, but Congress voted to authorize the conflict. The decision-making in the run-up to the war is impossible to understand absent the context of September 11, which made it seem intolerable that Saddam Hussein would have weapons of mass destruction (as we eventually learned, the intelligence on this question was desperately flawed).

 

In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. got entangled in long engagements in societies we didn’t fully understand. Joe Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan handed the country back to the Taliban, while Iraq — after the expenditure of much U.S. blood and treasure — has emerged as a flawed democracy and a flawed security partner of the United States. The disillusionment caused by the wars had a large hand in electing Barack Obama and then Donald Trump.

 

Twenty-five years later, Islamism is still a threat, and the moral clarity in the immediate aftermath of September 11 is long gone; in fact, the third-worldist ideology increasingly ascendant in the Democratic Party has significant overlap with the worldview of the anti-Western forces arrayed against us.

 

One antidote to this poison is to remember what happened on September 11, and who did it and why.

Twenty-Five Years Later, We Must Rebuild

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

My mother called, of course. She would call to tell me about the weather where I lived, nearly 2,000 miles from her, and I would patiently (I hope) remind her that I was both the editor of the local newspaper and a man with windows and, as such, generally au courant on the weather. On that infamous day, as she watched the bloody events unfold in Manhattan and in Washington, she called to make sure that I was safe and to inquire how close I had been to the terrible scene. I told her the truth, which on an ordinary day might not have been all that reassuring but which should have settled the matter on September 11, 2001:

 

“Mom, I live in Philadelphia.”

 

There is a strange human emotional need to feel closer to important events—and especially to terrifying events—than we actually are. I suspect that feeling closer to the event makes us feel more like participants, which seems to put us in a stronger position than that of being people that things simply happen to. But, mostly, in reality, we are people that things simply happen to.

 

For the first couple of hours, my 9/11 unfolded in the same way it did for many other people. I heard that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center, and I pictured something about the size and shape of a Cessna turboprop. “Hell of a thing to not be able to miss,” I thought. And then I learned that it had been an airliner. I continued to assume that it was some kind of unlikely accident until I saw—I was watching the television news like everybody else—the second airplane strike the second tower.

 

From there, I spent the day in much the same way as the few thousand other Americans working in news media: I threw out what we had planned for the next issue and got to work. We looked for local connections, of course—that is much of what local newspapers do—but there were not very many, at least of the headline-generating kind. A few residents of our affluent suburb were semi-regular Manhattan commuters, but we did not identify any that had been killed in the attack that day. The story was different in Yardley, Pennsylvania, on the northeastern side of Philadelphia, where at least three residents died in the World Trade Center. Michael R. Horrocks, co-pilot of United 175, was from another suburb to the west of the city and died when his flight crashed into the south tower. Over time, the web of local connections would grow, as, indeed, such connections reached into communities across the country: a brother or a sister or a cousin who died in the World Trade Center, a colleague who lost her life when her flight was crashed into the Pentagon, a high school friend who had rescued men and women from the burning buildings and lived to tell the story. In time, these would be supplemented by the experiences of men and women serving in the military or intelligence agencies and deployed to Afghanistan. But for most of us, what touched us most directly was an agent of the newly constituted Transportation Security Administration. At some level, we wanted more. We did not want to be spectators.

 

Life did go on. And, yet, it is true that everything changed.

 

Beyond the literal bloodshed, the attacks were a cultural catastrophe for the United States, unleashing waves of paranoia, resentment, and sourness that have permanently defaced American public life. The effect probably was intensified by its timing, coming in the wake of the extended contestation of the 2000 presidential election and shaping a particularly ugly political period, the final months of which were consumed by the 2008 financial crisis.

 

Just as we feel a need to be directly connected to dramatic events, we also feel an evident need to believe that we live in remarkable times. Allow me to posit something different: We live in the most ordinary kind of times. Murder, war, economic and social upheaval, domestic insecurity, predatory authoritarianism, political corruption—these are the most ordinary things in the world. People sometimes speak about the damage done by “normalizing” Donald Trump and his brand of politics, as though these required normalizing, as though they were not absolutely normal in the same way poverty and malaria and child abuse are normal and have been for most people at most times.

 

What was unusual was the period that might be narrowly defined as running from November 9, 1989, to September 11, 2001—which is to say, from the fall of the Berlin Wall until 9/11—or perhaps more generously defined as beginning in October 1946, when the World War II draft came to an end and Americans began to enjoy the emerging postwar reality, which was defined by an American-made, American-led, and, at times, American-enforced world order based on economic liberalism and international democratic cooperation that merited—how easy it is to forget—the use of that much-abused word unprecedented.

 

We now talk a great deal, and generally stupidly, about “unity,” but there was little of that commodity to be had in those remarkable postwar years, certainly not among such figures as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Sam Rayburn, and Barry Goldwater—every man on that list despised at least one of the others and had slight regard for most of the rest—but from the point of view of the degraded present, it is impossible not to see that each had more in common—a world more in common—with his most bitter political rival than any of them would have in common with such a contemptibly decadent figure as Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mike Johnson, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Chuck Schumer, or Ron DeSantis, each of whom is, in his own especial way, emblematic of the post-9/11 American condition.

 

With due respect for the efforts of the excellent men and women in our intelligence and national security agencies, the reason we have not had another 9/11-level attack is because no one has decided to inflict such an attack on the United States. As regards the original Al-Qaeda, that was, I am told, an unexpected benefit of the group’s ideology: Osama bin Laden et al. were disinclined to carry out another terror spectacular unless it could exceed 9/11 in scope and carnage, and it never had the opportunity. It is much more difficult to orchestrate a large and complex conspiracy than it is to fight an intifada. But the United States remains an open and liberal society offering a rich selection of soft targets, and anybody with a decent array of financial and political resources—to say nothing of the state power of Russia or China—could inflict five times the death toll of 9/11 on any given Tuesday, if they chose. We ought to consider it likely, if not certain, that someone at some point will choose to do that.

 

We are not ready. We are not ready militarily, logistically, politically, or financially. We are not ready morally. We are, at the moment, ill-prepared for even the ordinary challenges facing an ordinary liberal democracy: demographic pressure on public spending and the general economy, the burden of public debt, managing the movement of people, capital, and data in a technologically empowered, low-friction world.

 

Whatever kind of vandalism the populists may get up to, we will continue to live in a world that is technologically and economically integrated to a degree that would have been difficult to imagine in 1989, to say nothing of 1946. The trauma of 9/11, amplified by the financial crisis and aggravated by factors such as mass migration, deepened the socioeconomic rift between the so-called elites and Michael Brendan Dougherty’s emblematic disability fraudsters in Garbutt, New York. What we call, for lack of a better term, globalization presents itself to the former group mainly as a set of economic and cultural opportunities and to the latter group mainly as a set of economic and cultural burdens, real and imagined. And so the quadrille of American politics today is defined by the left and right wings of the so-called elite that alternately compete and coordinate with each other and with left and right wings of the considerably larger group of incoherent populists who believe that their lives can be improved by pillaging those who are financially better off and by inflicting ritual humiliation on those occupying superior social positions. As political conditions go, that is pretty normal, too: The arrangement would have been recognizable enough to Cicero or to Julius Caesar, a patricians’ patrician who knew something about coopting the plebs.

 

One short decade after that 9/11 telephone call with my mother, I was living in an apartment in Lower Manhattan from which I could watch, from my kitchen window, the continuing work on the tower at One World Trade Center. I got a phone call from someone claiming to be Donald Trump’s publicist—I assume it was Trump himself, in the persona of his imaginary friend “John Barron,” though I do not remember precisely—informing me that the celebrity game show host was planning to run for president in 2012 and was eager to speak with me about his economic ideas. Would I be interested in interviewing him? “Of course,” I said, thinking to myself: “This will be hilarious.” The interview did not happen—Trump abruptly decided against running. I thought of the episode as nothing other than a missed opportunity for me as a journalist.

 

These things can be unpredictable.

 

It was not necessary that the post-9/11 political reality would be one dominated by a honking bridge-and-tunnel demagogue (or two), with the president lying about how he spent that day, trying to intensify his personal connection to the events while waving around the promise of $5,000 checks with his name on them, a “Trump dividend.” It is only in retrospect that things seem to have the quality of inevitability. But one can see the shadow of the thing early in the post-9/11 era, for instance in the Kulturkampf fight over a proposal to build an Islamic cultural center near the ruins of the World Trade Center, the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, a controversy that helped to make a big figure out of Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld and which inspired Trump to stage a publicity stunt, offering to buy out the project’s investors. The Republican Party quickly lurched from millennial optimism to embrace a coalition of the fearful and resentful—people who had not thought much about free markets or regulatory reform, who had not read much Buckley or Hayek, but who knew who they feared and hated: Them. Things were more complicated for progressives, with their cultural and financial investments in elite institutions and the professional prestige conferred by them, but a politics of Them fit—and fits—easily enough with a politics of grievance-led redistribution and left-oriented economic resentment, all that dumb talk of the “1 percent” and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “allah-garks,” as he pronounces the word.

 

The politics of Them has been the dominant theme of American public life ever since.

 

More than a third of the U.S. population today is under 30 years of age. This is the only America they ever have known. They may have seen the new World Trade Center, which is, in a kind of perverse victory for continuity in aesthetics if nothing else, about as ugly as the old one, but its symbolic status is mostly lost on them. Those of us who are older want to tell them that this is not normal, but, of course, it is we who are the outliers, we graybeards with our books and our memories. This is not the “new normal”—it is just normal, from the wider historical point of view. What we should be trying to make them understand is not that this is not normal but that normal is not good enough. The thing to get at is the truth that finally confronts every philosopher and every alcoholic: that the great enemy cannot be put down on the battlefield because that is not where we meet him. We meet him at home, at work, in our most private thoughts, in the mirror. Today, on the anniversary of that terrible day, we will have flags and flags and flags and a barrage of treacly social media commentary. In an older age, we would have called for a day of prayer and fasting. And that is what is really called for—that is the beginning of the thing that needs doing, the long and uncomfortable work of renewal.

 

A quarter of a century in, it is time at last to begin the real work of rebuilding.

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.

What September 11 Took From Us

By Mike Nelson

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

On September 9, 2001, Americans across the country gathered in front of their TVs for the first episode of a new HBO miniseries—a series that remains one of their most enduring successes. After the distinctive HBO logo and static played, but before the opening theme music that would later become iconic, audiences watched a series of short interviews with old men. These men had lived full lives as fathers and grandfathers and had succeeded in a wide range of careers. But despite these long personal histories, separate from one another, they were speaking about a relatively brief period that would prove to be the defining event of their lives. They were the paratroopers of Easy Company 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and between June 6, 1944 and May 8, 1945, they fought and defeated Nazi evil. We know them, of course, as the Band of Brothers.

 

Two days after this premier episode, a different group of paratroopers was culminating a brigade field training exercise on Fort Bragg when, roughly 500 miles away, the event that would set in motion the defining period of their history was happening—and changing the course of the world. September 11 was not only a shocking tragedy and an inhuman mass murder, it marked a delineation in history, a turning point from the path the world had been on, and a denial of what might have been. Like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or the fall of the Iron Curtain, there was the world before these events, and then there was the very different world afterward.

 

I was one of the paratroopers of 2^nd Brigade, 82^nd Airborne Division who had been in the field that day. We are not alone in saying September 11 changed our lives forever and set in motion a course of events that would define who we were for the rest of our days–just as their service in World War II defined who the men of Easy Company had been. We thought we would be off to war, almost immediately, to respond to this attack on the United States—in fact, we would have to wait 18 months until the invasion of Iraq to get “our war.” For many of us, September 11 began a new constant in our lives, of repeated deployments over the course of two decades, to the point where the deployments became “real life” more than the time at home between them, a phenomenon written about by Special Forces Team Sgt. Josh Thompson.

 

Some deployed once but had their lives altered by what they saw and did. Some, like my fellow Dispatch contributor David French, or Sen. Tom Cotton, or Pete Hegseth, decided to leave lucrative, stable, and safe careers behind to answer their country’s call, when nothing but patriotism compelled them to do so. Many did not return and, unlike the men speaking at the beginning of Band of Brothers, would not have long lives to reflect on their service. Many of us who served over the course of two decades remember exactly where we were on September 11; others were not born yet or were too young to remember, including Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, and Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui. Despite all being 8 months old or younger on September 11, they were five of the final 13 American casualties of the war that September 11 started. They were killed in 2021 at Abbey Gate during the evacuation from Afghanistan. These Marines had literally lived their entire lives in the shadow of the war on terror, and, ultimately, their life stories and that of America’s involvement in Afghanistan tragically ended together. Who knows what they might have done with their lives had September 11 never happened—a question that applies equally to all service members lost in the war and the thousands who died 25 years ago during the attacks.

 

The attacks affected thousands of families in New York, Virginia, and across the country. There were empty chairs at Thanksgiving dinner, representing those who had merely gone to work or boarded a plane as though it were any other day. Graduation parties and wedding ceremonies would forever feel incomplete because a loved one was missing. That scale of the loss of that day is hard to fathom. Any tragedy that claimed 343 firefighters would have been previously unimaginable, but that represented just about 11 percent of the human toll that day. September 11 shook us all to our core. But for the families of those lost to hatred and evil that day, it was not just a day of horror, fear, and anger but also incalculable grief, in some cases without confirmation of what had happened to their loved ones for days.

 

I had grown up as an Army brat, attended a military college, and then served in the Army. The war after September 11 had a bit of a siloing effect for me. Most of my college friends had gone into the military. All the friends I made after college were those I met in the military. The war was a constant and common factor in our lives, complete with too-frequent reports that a friend one hadn’t seen in years had been killed in combat. In 2011, when I was on my fifth deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, my younger brother was deployed to Iraq at the same time. I found myself anxious and worried because, despite my experience, my brother was in a situation I could not control, affect, or even have day-to-day visibility on. It was my first time experiencing the stress of the unknown borne by so many families in the United States.

 

The sudden departure from the post-Cold War new world order and relative stability of the ’90s has been attributed to a “failure of imagination,” that American intelligence and law enforcement services did not anticipate the means by which determined, malign actors could exploit the seams in our security network and use everyday civilian items (boxcutters and airplane tickets) to inflict the worst attack against the American homeland since Pearl Harbor—this one primarily against our civilian population. While the nature of the attack was something with which we were not prepared to contend, the larger issue was that we, as a country, did not take the threats against us seriously. Al-Qaeda, for its part, had not been hiding its desire to attack Americans. Al-Qaeda terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, killed American service members in Saudi Arabia in 1995, bombed two American embassies in 1998, and attacked the USS Cole in 2000. They went so far as to explicitly tell us their intentions with a declaration of war in 1996 and a fatwa against the United States in 1998. Despite all of this, we continued to believe terror would remain an unfortunate but manageable threat. We did not properly understand how destructive it could be, nor how much the subsequent effort to defeat it would set a new course for America around the world.

 

While we may wonder to ourselves what the world and our country would be like had it not been for September 11, a less theoretical and more practical exercise would be to ask ourselves what threats today represent the modern equivalent of al-Qaeda’s growing danger that was unleashed that day. What enemies and adversaries, while signaling their nefarious intent, are mistakenly believed to be manageable nuisances instead of actors bent on carrying out the next world-altering action? The number of adversaries is myriad, their intent and desire to disrupt the world order is growing, and the potential to invite attacks in the face of American insouciance and impulsiveness is real. If we are not vigilant now, we may find ourselves asking similar questions about the human lives lost on some other 25^th anniversary in the future.

 

I have now lived more of my life in a post-9/11 world than the one in which I grew up. But even without the passage of time, the attacks and the subsequent wars that resulted would still be what defined so much of my life and the lives of those close to me, just as it did to those men speaking in interviews on HBO. And, as much as I love and will constantly rewatch this series about the heroes who came before, one thing gives me pause. After the interviews, the opening credits play to the familiar notes of the series theme song. I cannot stand that iconic music. You see, that’s what would play at the beginning of every memorial ceremony held at 5^th Special Forces Group for those killed in the wars that defined my generation. It has come to represent those lives that, without the attacks of September 11, would not have been lost.

‘Sign Me Up’

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, September 10, 2026

 

The first thing anyone will tell you about that day is how beautiful it was. The kind of Tuesday you can go a whole late summer and early fall without getting one of. The kind that by rights should have been a Saturday. Pure blue with little white cotton balls, warmth without humidity, the mildest breeze. In the 25 years since, I can remember maybe two or three that were that beautiful. Honest to God maybe none.

 

It was so nice that my first-period physics class went outside to run some impromptu experiment or other on the football field, so we missed the first announcement over the loudspeaker. When we came back inside, there was a kid in the hall who mumbled the news. He didn’t seem too worked up. We figured a Cessna, something like that, just like everybody else did.

 

When the second one hit, there wasn’t any doubt. That’s when every channel preempted and started looping the first video that came in. It was senior year, Ramsey High School, Ramsey, N.J.

 

I don’t think they officially said we could leave, but a good number of parents who were in a position to do so came and picked up their kids. Most of us stayed, though, even the upperclassmen with cars. What else were you supposed to do?

 

We shuffled from class to class. With few exceptions, the teachers had the TVs on, muted, and none of them said much. Someone from the front office was covering my AP Spanish class — our teacher’s husband had been at work in the North Tower. He made it out.

 

My biology lab partner from the year before — her dad didn’t.

 

I had gotten my first cellphone, a little gray brick manufactured by the Siemens corporation, over the summer. I placed my first-ever phone call from school property and during school hours to my Uncle Richie, who worked in Midtown. I thought I should check in, just to be safe. We’re sorry. All circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later.

 

I want to say the first tower collapsed during political science class, on the nose as it sounds. I say that because I distinctly remember the voice of our white-haired social studies teacher — and defending state champion varsity-baseball coach — cracking as we watched it live. I don’t remember if it was an Oh God or an Oh no, just that it was some vocalized anguish in a register I had never heard from him before and never did after.

 

At lunch a few of us piled into my friend Ed’s piece of junk and went to the McDonald’s on the hill. That’s when we actually saw it, staring south and east down Route 17. The city skyline etched on the horizon, the righthand side of it enfolded in a wall of black smoke.

 

At a bank of plastic tables over Big Macs, one of the guys shook his head slowly and said, “Sign me up.” A few others nodded. I don’t think Ed nodded. But he served in Afghanistan all the same, working on helicopters for the Marine Corps.

 

I didn’t know it at the time, but I saw lots of Marines that day. Some soldiers and sailors and airmen too, but a disproportionate number of Marines. The soccer captain, a good-natured goofball, became an exceptional Marine infantry officer, commanding a platoon and then serving as XO of a rifle company. Ten years later, he and I sat across a bar just a couple of blocks from National Review and he told me things about — Helmand Province maybe? — that filled me with dread.

 

The closest thing my grade had to Zack Morris, a megawatt-smiled guy I’ll call Bryan, was enlisted, and I think he was in Iraq. He still pops up on my Facebook, either to post pictures of his kids or remembrances on the anniversaries of the suicides of his brothers-in-arms.

 

I can count off a dozen or so others in the few grades above me and the few grades below whom I didn’t know as well, but who turned their lives 90 degrees from whatever else they were destined to be to serve their country. So a lot of kids in Ramsey, N.J., said “sign me up” that day, and a lot of them actually meant it.

 

Of those who meant it, some never came home.

 

Staff Sergeant Eric D. Christian, a few years older than me, enlisted in the Corps not long after that day and endured an incredible five combat deployments before being killed in a “green on blue” attack in Afghanistan in 2013.

 

Sergeant Michael Reilly, class of 2000, worked on Marine helicopters like my friend Ed, though in Michael’s case in Iraq. He made it home, but the call of duty brought him to Engine Company 75 of the FDNY, and he died in a roof collapse in the Bronx in 2006.

 

Staff Sergeant Timothy R. McGill graduated a year before me. He deployed to Iraq in 2005, returning to Ramsey on his discharge. Duty called him as it did Reilly, and Tim reenlisted, this time in the Army, where he eventually became a Green Beret. On September 13, 2013, he was killed in a place called Gardez near the Pakistani border. He left Ramsey six foot six, and according to one of the obituaries, his once lanky frame had filled out to 280 pounds. “A gentle giant,” it says.

 

There’s a stretch of Route 17 that today bears his name, not far from the McDonald’s where some of the guys said “Sign me up.”

 

Twenty-five years later, I remember them and all the others, and the sublime sacrifices to which they consecrated themselves on that most sublimely beautiful of days.