Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the most unsettling fact is not only the memory of the dead. It is the collapse of a common account of what happened and what it meant.
The record in the source is clear. The World Trade Center was destroyed by Islamist terrorists who murdered almost 3,000 innocent Americans. The article says the immediate unity after the attacks has dissipated almost completely, and that Americans are now divided over basic questions of national identity and purpose. It goes further: the country is even divided over who is to blame.
That matters because nations do not remain coherent by sentiment alone. They remain coherent by shared memory, by first principles, and by a willingness to tell the truth about violence when it comes. When that memory fractures, institutions do not become stronger. They become easier to manipulate.
The piece names two public figures as examples of how the meaning of 9/11 is being distorted. It cites Hasan Piker, who once declared that 'America deserved 9/11,' and Tucker Carlson, who the article says recycles conspiracy theories suggesting that Israeli and American Jews were in on the plot. Whether one is on the left or the right, the pattern is the same: public attention rewards provocation, and the incentive is not clarity but reach.
That is the deeper problem. The dead are still owed honor. The first responders are still owed gratitude. And the citizens who came of age after 2001 are still owed a truthful account of the attacks and their aftermath. Instead, the country increasingly treats history as a weapon, not a record.
Say it plainly. A republic cannot afford to lose its memory of a national trauma of this scale. The costs are not abstract. They show up in mistrust, in polarization, and in a culture that can no longer agree on the difference between remembrance and grievance.
The editors are right about the consequence if not the cure. The unity of 2001 was real, but it did not survive the years that followed. What remains is the work to be done: restore the habit of truth, defend the meaning of the day, and stop letting the loudest voices rewrite what should be common ground. Without that, the country keeps the ceremony and loses the lesson.
