9/11. What is left to say? This.

After 25 years, what is left to say?

One word would be too much; 1,000 words would be too little.

Can we say that our sacred sense of invulnerability was irrevocably shattered by the forces of evil, yes — evil, devoted to destroying western, Judeo-Christian liberal values?

The atrocious attack on defenseless civilians by Al Qaeda, which shares its aims with Hamas, another terrorist group that is praised by some on the American Left. Add ISIS, Islamic Jihad, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, and so many more with many different tactics, but with a single purpose.

Where we are today, how we got here from 9/11/01, is not a straight line. It is as twisty as the lower Mississippi river.

Of all the horrific images of that bright, shiny September morn, the ones that remain with me are the bodies, the people, who threw themselves out of 90-story windows to escape the blazing orange of jet-fueled flames grasping for them. 

Their fall to the debris-covered sidewalks below took eight long seconds.

What were they thinking?  Can you imagine their heart-stopping terror?

They were victims of Islamic terrorism, yet today we seem to be more afraid of data centers than of the one-third of global Muslims who found the 9/11 attack at least somewhat justified. (Only 7% said they were “completely justified,” but that amounts to 140 million of the world’s 2 billion Muslims.)

Some will take this as an attack on Muslims. It is not. It is a statement calling for defense against Islamic extremists, in exactly the same way we should confront Christian-identity hate groups such as the KKK and neo-Nazis.

Each is a threat to America.

As are the 3 in 10 Americans who say political violence may be justified to achieve their goals. 

Would we have seen numbers like that 25 years ago? 

Does this represent a shredding of traditional American values?

I think it does. I’m not sure if it represents the communist Left, or the fascist Right. The two are mirror images.

But what has this to do with 9/11?

This: 9/11 was an attack not just on America, but on what America stands for — those western, Judeo-Christian liberal values I mentioned earlier.

It was an attack on modernism, on freedom — of choice, belief, religion, movement, language. 

I wish I could say you fight a bad idea with a better idea, but that is naive.

When Gandhi was able to pull India from the grasp of Britain, without violence, that was only because of those western values — so despised in corners of academia — were embraced by Britain. Would nonviolence have worked against Hitler, Tojo, Mao, or Stalin? 

Of course not.

We must stop pretending that peace is the default setting of human history. This is a warring planet where, somewhere, the “other” is almost always under attack. For vast stretches of our planet, liberal, democratic values are the “other.” They are unwanted.

The comfortable illusion—that bad ideas simply wither when exposed to better ones—ignores every grim lesson of the 20th century. Ideologies forged in hatred do not surrender to gentle persuasion; they press forward until they hit a wall of uncompromising resolve. 

The tragedy of the post-9/11 era is not that we fought to defend free societies, but that we gradually lost the moral clarity required to explain why those societies were worth defending in the first place. That is why so many Americans count pennies when we should be defending Ukraine as if it — not Canada — were our 51st state. It yearns to be us. Russia yearns to stop them. Whose side should we be on?

The 9/11 attack was designed to break our spirit.  In the immediate aftermath, it achieved the opposite: an unparalleled surge of unity, patriotism, and shared purpose. But 25 years later, that resolve has given way to an exhausting internal retreat. 

Today, the greatest vulnerability facing the West is no longer just the external threat lurking in distant caves, but the rot of self-doubt within our own institutions. In America, most of that sickening doubt has been spread by our own President, who acts out of facts as he wishes them to be, rather than what they are.

When political violence — as yet unconvicted Luigi Mangione (Brian Thompson) and Tyler Robinson (Charlie Kirk) — becomes a normalized tool in domestic debate, and when the core principles of free speech, tolerance, and liberty are treated as relics of an oppressive past, we are doing the work of our enemies. Terrorists destroy buildings, but only a culture itself can dismantle its own soul.

The Islamic extremism that killed nearly 3,000 people that bright, shiny morning has killed many more since in the name of a totalizing ideology, one that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, in America and abroad, want no part of it. Refusing to name the first out of fear of shaming the second is not tolerance. It’s cowardice dressed as sensitivity.

An enemy who attacks liberal values from outside is dangerous. A citizenry that abandons them from within does the enemy’s work for free.

Twenty-five years after the smoke cleared from the Manhattan sky, the ultimate memorial to those lost cannot be found in stone or steel, but in our willingness to fight for what they represented. 

We owe it to the victims of that bright, shiny September morning to remember that our freedoms were hard-won, fragile, and entirely worth preserving. If we lose the courage to defend Western civilization against those who seek its destruction—both from without and from within—then those eight seconds of agony will not be a tragic chapter in our history, but the beginning of our end.