09/11/2026
Twenty-five years ago today , Muslim jihadists flew passenger jets into the World Trade Center. They killed 2,977 people. Three hundred forty-three firefighters never came home.
New Yorkers ran toward the fire. The country stood still, then stood together.
Death to America was not a joke. It was a plan. The men who carried it out said so in their own words.
New York was resilient. Flags went up on porches and overpasses. Churches filled. People who disagreed on everything agreed on this. This was our city. This was our country.
That spirit did not hold.
New York City now has 3.1 million foreign-born residents. That is more than a third of the city. Two-thirds of New Yorkers are first- or second-generation. Nearly half speak a language other than English at home.
The Muslim population has grown into the hundreds of thousands. The city added more than 100 mosques after the attacks. In January, New Yorkers made Zohran Mamdani the first Muslim mayor in the city's history. He is a democratic socialist. He took the oath on a Quran.
Coming together is gone. Patriotism is treated like a punch line. The American dream is something you apologize for.
New York used to call itself a melting pot. A melting pot asks you to become an American. What the city has now is a collection of camps. The mayor governs a city that cannot even agree on what 9/11 was.
Equal application of the law and a common American identity used to hold the place together. Those are not decorations. They are the reason a city of strangers can live as neighbors.
The men who flew those planes hated this country. They hated the freedom the Statue of Liberty stands for. Twenty-five years later the towers are gone, and so is the unity that rose from the dust.
New York did not just rebuild the skyline. It forgot why the skyline was attacked.
