We were just kids; high school seniors, college freshmen standing at the edge of adulthood with no real idea how the world worked. On a sunny Tuesday in September, we learned horrifyingly quickly.
From classrooms and dorm rooms, watched the second plane hit and didn’t so much feel the shock and pain as it wholly consumed us. The smoke, the flames, the tiny specks falling from the towers that we gradually realized were people. By the time the first tower fell, our childhoods were over.
In our first few hours and days of a new form of adulthood, we swore we would never forget the moment that shaped us—the anguish and hopelessness, sure, but also the sense of duty and resolve that filled us with a sense of solidarity and national pride that we promised would never fade.
And for a while, it didn’t. In that defining moment, patriotism wasn’t a buzzword; it was a way of life. It was our way of life. We flew the flag proudly, we volunteered to help in recovery efforts in whatever way we could, many of us enlisted in the military to fight what we decided was the most just and necessary war of our lifetimes.
From classrooms and dorm rooms, watched the second plane hit and didn’t so much feel the shock and pain as it wholly consumed us.
“Never forget,” we told ourselves, and, really, how could we? We weren’t the millennial generation anymore. We were the 9/11 generation; shaped forever by an event that felt simultaneously larger than life itself but also intensely personal. It was an attack on all Americans, but it felt especially targeted at us—an effort to darken the future of the nation we were just about to inherit.
But the passage of time is both inevitable and inescapable, and now a generation has passed since the 9/11 generation made those promises. We haven’t broken them so much as they have slowly faded. Somewhere in the past 25 years, emotion became memory and immediacy became history.
The concerns that 25 years ago seemed so trivial again consume us, so much so that a nation so united in purpose seems more divided than ever—and the 9/11 generation is at the vanguard of a new generation of anti-Americanism.
A new Islamist-tinged socialism has descended on this country, and its leading adherents—millennials all—espouse not only empathy for terrorists but also many of the same radical beliefs that motivated them.
Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s radical left-wing Senate candidate, embodies this jarring shift.
“I think the approach that we’ve often taken with terrorism has been to figure out how to leverage the might of the U.S. military to go in and root out, right, certain terrorist organizations, et cetera. And where that’s necessary, that’s necessary,” he said at a town hall event in 2025. “But I also think we need to be curious about why those things happen in the first place. Like, what drives somebody to want to commit such a heinous act?
“I have to be a student of people’s pain. Like, that’s what I did in medicine. That’s what I try to do in politics.”
He’s not alone in his politics, either. Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar minimized the devastation of 9/11 to argue that its real impact was…Islamophobia.
“Here’s the truth,” she infamously said in 2019. “For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen, and frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
The passage of time is both inevitable and inescapable, and now a generation has passed since the 9/11 generation made those promises. We haven’t broken them so much as they have slowly faded. Somewhere in the past 25 years, emotion became memory and immediacy became history.
That’s obviously factually untrue—CAIR was founded in 1994—but her meaning is crystal clear: America wasn’t the real victim of 9/11 but rather the ultimate perpetrator because of the way it mistreats marginalized people. How could those marginalized people not want to attack it?
Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib echoed this sentiment in 2019, arguing that America’s innate hatred was the real evil.
“I was probably in my second year of law school when 9/11 happened and I was really terrified of what was going to happen to my husband, who was only a green card holder at the time,” she recalled in 2019. ““I immediately called my brothers and told them to be very careful who you hang out with. Telling my sisters, ‘Just be real careful out there,’ and being really afraid of my fellow Americans.”
In a tragic irony, nowhere is this anti-Americanism more prevalent or aggressive than in New York City itself. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, now arguably this country’s most famous communist, has spent years minimizing 9/11 and framing it as mere pretext for the real evil of American imperialism.
This culminated in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of 9/11, when Mamdani signed an executive order designating the day as an official day of remembrance. He handed the ceremonial pen to his chief legal counsel—a literal terrorist defender whose brother-in-law was one of the 9/11 hijackers.
Video from the ceremony shows Ramzi Kassem receiving the pen and then smirking as though he was fully aware of the obvious symbolism of Mamdani’s gesture.
Kassem has represented Ahmed al-Darbi, a Guantánamo detainee convicted in the 2002 bombing of a French oil tanker. Kassem’s sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Half of the generation that swore it would never forget the lessons it learned on the first day of its adulthood grew into a generation of children seduced by the promise of free toys if we simply pledge allegiance to a new flag.
In just 25 years, roughly half of the 9/11 generation is just fine with this. Half of the 9/11 generation voted for this. Half of the 9/11 generation apparently thinks like this.
Half of the generation that swore it would never forget the lessons it learned on the first day of its adulthood grew into a generation of children seduced by the promise of free toys if we simply pledge allegiance to a new flag.
Yet half of that generation has refused. Half of that generation rejects socialism, Islamism, and anti-Americanism in all its forms. And, most significantly, half of that generation is raising what may be the single most pro-American generation of young men in at least a half-century.
We haven’t just taught them the lessons of 9/11; we have lived them each and every day of the 25 years since the day that still shapes us and always will. Now our children’s generation stands ready to inherit this nation and ready to fight the same ideology that we did.
That ideology, that hatred, that fundamental belief that America is the world’s greatest threat is no longer a world away and striking only on a sunny September morning; it’s embedded in our culture. It’s in our politics, our schools, our media, seemingly everywhere.
But the 9/11 generation is still here, still ready to fight it and fight for this country by teaching our children’s and eventually grandchildren’s generations why today, just as much as 25 years ago, this fight is not one we can afford to lose.
