Do you remember where you were?

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I was on Interstate 70 driving to Indianapolis from a tiny town called Hall, where I was living on a 200-acre horse farm at the time.

I was 23 years old. I had started a new sales job a couple of weeks prior, and I was headed downtown for a week-long training class.

Indiana didn't observe daylight saving time back then, so our clocks ran with Central time in the summer. The first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 am in New York. On my clock it was 7:46.

I was driving past the airport when the radio news report said a small plane had struck the World Trade Center.

A small plane. That's what they told us at first.

I had not yet been to New York City in 2001. I knew those towers were big, but I did not understand how big.

I knew there were people in the world who hated us. I remembered the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and the bombings of our embassies and the USS Cole in the years that followed.

But that was something hard for this 23-year-old to wrap his head around at the time.

As I was getting into Indianapolis, there were reports that the second plane had hit. And immediately I knew — we all knew — this was not an accident. This was war.

The woman teaching my training class had a job to do, so class started as scheduled at 9:00 am. Every so often, we would take a break, and everybody would crowd around the television out in the lobby and watch in shock and horror at the events on the screen.

Sometime later that day, because of the chaos unfolding, they told us we could go home early.

And so I left to return home. At the time, I was serving on the local school board, so I stopped by the school to see if they needed anything because there is no plan for something like that.

At home later that night, I remember walking outside, standing there on the horse farm, looking up at the dark sky and seeing a complete absence of commercial airplanes.

It was eerie.

They had grounded all traffic to prevent any other catastrophes from happening that day.

Like you, I take time to remember September 11th every year. And every year the same thing gets a little bit more obvious to me.

A lot of people simply don't know, don’t understand, or don't remember.

Some of them simply weren't alive when it happened.

Today, there are grown adults in this country with little to no memory of September 11th at all, because they weren't yet born or they were way too young to form long-term memories.

Others simply could not understand the gravity of the situation.

Truth be told, I couldn't understand the gravity of the situation, and I was 23.

Some have let 25 years of distance do what distance does, and some have been handed a story that simply isn't true.

So let me state plainly what happened that day, my friends.

Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists took four airplanes with box cutters and knives. They killed crew members. They took the cockpits.

They shut off the transponders and turned long, heavily fueled cross-country flights back around toward American cities — cities that had become targets.

They then flew those planes into buildings full of people who had gone to work that morning.

Here is the timeline:

All of this happened in just 1 hour and 42 minutes.

It was incomprehensible. None of us had ever witnessed anything like this in our lives. And the speed at which the news was breaking was overwhelming.

2,977 innocent people were killed that day. 2,753 in New York. 184 at the Pentagon. 40 on Flight 93.

Included in the massive death toll in New York City were 343 New York City firefighters who died that day.

The victims’ names were read this morning — all 2,977 of them, plus six more people who were killed in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

There were heroes that day, my friends. Airline crews, passengers, military personnel, first responders, civilian staff, and everyday office workers at the Pentagon and World Trade Center were absolutely courageous — saving countless lives.

When Flight 93’s passengers got word of what had already happened in New York City, they understood that their airplane was going to be crashed into another target. And they weren’t about to let that happen without a fight.

A flight attendant named Sandy Bradshaw called her husband and told him that they were boiling water to throw at the hijackers. Todd Beamer and the rest of the heroes on that plane then stormed the cockpit, trying to regain control of the aircraft.

But it was not to be. The plane crashed nose first into the ground, killing everybody on board.

Because of their heroic actions, everyone who would have been killed either at the Capitol or at the White House was spared that day. (It's believed that one of those locations was the intended target.)

The terrorists trained for a lot that day, my friends, but they weren't ready to face these American heroes.

I visited Ground Zero 10 years ago this month. I took the train from Washington, D.C. and arrived in the city after dark.

I happened to glance out the right side of the train and saw the Freedom Tower off in the distance for the first time. It hit me like a ton of bricks.

I teared up immediately, having no idea that seeing that building was going to have such a profoundly emotional impact on me.

And I know these things have a major impact on you, too.

The tragedy of 9/11 changed us, my friends. Some of us, permanently. Others, temporarily. But the vast, vast majority of Americans had a new perspective on September 12.

For a moment, we stopped being Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Instead, we were all Americans.

American flags were everywhere. On cars, on shirts, on businesses, flying over homes where they had never flown before.

There were people who quit their jobs to go enlist and fight these evil terrorists. Church attendance shot up. People were kinder to each other on the street.

It became common to love this country again.

Americans were almost completely unified as we fought against an enemy that wanted us all dead.

25 years later, we have completely lost every bit of that.

We ought to be honest about how far we have drifted away from the America of September 12th.

Today we have people who blame America for the terror attacks. We have politicians who won't condemn chants of death to America.

We have podcasters and other influential voices saying that America deserved 9/11.

All of that is utter hogwash, my friends. And we must obliterate the abject evil of those beliefs.

While we have a lot of ground to regain, I still believe it's possible for America to get back to that point. It's hard to see at the moment because of this cold civil war that we're in today.

The absolute lack of morality.

The justification for murdering babies in the womb and now even young children.

The hatred of liberty and freedom.

Drifting towards socialism and even communism.

But I'm still hopeful that America can be saved. Candidly, that’s why I do what do every day.

There's no shame in not understanding what happened on 9/11, or the impact it's had on people in my generation and older. It fundamentally changed us overnight.

I'm sure any one of us would love to explain to others exactly what happened on that fateful day.

We must never forget. 2,977 people went to work and got on airplanes on a sunny, beautiful September morning. And they never came home.

Let's honor their memory. And let's be sure that we never let something like this happen again.

Conservative, not bitter.
Todd

9/11 Memorial & Museum — This morning's ceremony, including a seventh moment of silence added this year for those lost to 9/11-related illness in the years since.

National Park Service — The Park Service's account of the revolt aboard Flight 93, down to the minute it started.

govinfo.gov — The 9/11 Commission's final report, free to read, in the only official government edition.

Federation of American Scientists — The February 1998 fatwa itself, three and a half years ahead of the attack, calling the killing of Americans "an individual duty."

FBI — The Bureau's own file on the 1993 bombing of those same buildings: six killed, more than a thousand hurt.

Bush White House Archives — September 14th at Ground Zero, on a bullhorn: "I can hear you."

Gallup — What that unity actually measured: 90% approval that month, the highest number Gallup has ever recorded for a president.

CBS News — Gander, Newfoundland, a town of about 10,000 that took in 38 diverted airplanes and close to 7,000 stranded travelers and fed every one of them.

There was a time after 9/11 when we saw ourselves as Americans first.

Melat Kiros is the Democratic nominee in Colorado's 1st congressional district. In June she beat Diana DeGette, a fifteen-term incumbent, by almost ten points.

Before that primary, a reporter at Denver's NBC affiliate asked her whether 9/11 was the inevitable consequence of American foreign policy. She said it was.

Her words: "Inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East that forced people to believe that another act of violence was the only response."

According to her, we forced them to kill innocent Americans on September 11th.

Nineteen men with box cutters were forced to believe that murdering 2,977 people was the only option left to them?

That’s absolutely insane and incredibly dangerous.

No one forced them to do this. Osama bin Laden had spent five years telling them their religion required it, and in 1998 he put it in writing — arguing that killing Americans, civilian and military, was "an individual duty."

And these maniacal lunatics believed it. That was their choice. It was evil. It was wicked. It was reprehensible. They made that choice, not us.

Unfortunately, that's the polite version of an argument that shows up elsewhere in American culture.

In 2019 podcaster Hasan Piker said on a livestream that America deserved 9/11. He apologized a few days later for how he said it, but he has never taken it back. Last month he told an interviewer he should have phrased it better.

I know there are many Democrats who do not agree with either of these individuals.

But we're still left with this truth. A woman who called 9/11 inevitable because of U.S. policy is now her party's nominee for a seat in Congress, defeating a fifteen-term incumbent by double digits.

Americans can disagree about foreign policy decisions affecting the Middle East. Those are really important conversations to have.

But the moment we stop trying to understand why they did it and start trying to justify what they did, we've taken the blame off of nineteen murderers and put it on the 2,977 people they murdered that day.

Those people didn't do anything to anybody. They went to work on a Tuesday morning. Some of them got on an airplane.

Twenty-five years hasn't changed that, and no argument about American foreign policy gets around it.

I won't accept it, my friends. Not in 2001. Not in 2026. Never.

And neither should you.

Never. Forget.

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