The World and Everything in It: September 9, 2026

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MARY REICHARD: Good morning!

Republicans gather in Dallas for a presidential-style convention for the midterm, going all-in on the president’s ability to turn out voters.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Turning out Republicans and turning out Democrats. We’ll talk it over with Hunter Baker on Washington Wednesday.

Also today World Tour: A crisis of censorship in the U.K.

And later:

TAMUCCIO: When I walk that wall, I see a lot of names. Like I remember having a drink with that guy. I remember her.

At the 9/11 Memorial in New York, remembering the people behind the names on the wall.

And WORLD Commentator Cal Thomas remembering the lessons of 9-11.

REICHARD: It’s Wednesday, September 9th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: U.S. strikes more Iranian oil tankers » The U.S. military says it has destroyed five more Iranian oil tankers.

U.S. Central Command says Iran fired ballistic missiles at a Navy warship twice this week. Those missiles did not find their mark.

American forces then struck four tankers in the Gulf of Oman and one near Iran's main oil port at Kharg Island. Central Command says it first ordered the crews to abandon ship.

Secretary of State and acting national security advisor Marco Rubio:

RUBIO: The back and forth is pretty straightforward, and that is that Iran continues to try to hit U.S. naval ships and, uh, for every time they do that or try to do that, they're gonna lose tankers.

That makes eight Iranian tankers in four days.

Iranian state media say Iran answered by firing missiles at American bases in Jordan. The Pentagon hasn't confirmed that.

The renewed fighting has sent energy prices higher. Brent crude nearly hit $100 per barrel Tuesday, the highest since late July.

Election » Voters in New Hampshire cast primary ballots on Tuesday. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher reports.

BENJAMIN EICHER: In the U.S. Senate primary, Republicans picked John E. Sununu … whose brother and father both served as a governor of the state.

Sununu had President Trump's endorsement … and soundly defeated former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who was running for a seat in New Hampshire, which he now calls home.

Democrats chose Congressman Chris Pappas … for the U.S. Senate seat the retiring Jeanne Shaheen is giving up. Pappas defeated Karishma Manzur [kah-RISH-mah man-ZOOR], who was favored by the party’s socialist wing. She ran on government-run healthcare and on cutting off military aid to Israel.

And GOP Governor Kelly Ayotte cruised to the nomination in her reelection bid.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

9/11 event at White House » President Trump stood on the grass at the Ellipse near the White House Tuesday … next to a large steel beam cut from the wreckage of the World Trade Center’s South Tower after 9/11.

TRUMP: This battered piece of steel here today on the Ellipse is a reminder that America is blessed with a strength no fire can consume, no evil can conquer, and no terror can destroy.

The Tunnel to Towers Foundation brought the beam. The group takes its name from Stephen Siller … the New York firefighter who ran the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel on foot, gear on his back, to reach the towers that morning, giving his life to save others.

Friday, 25 years to the day, the beam goes back through that same tunnel.

And Trump Tuesday posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Welles Crowther. He died in the South Tower at age 24 … after leading people to safety … and running back into the building to save more.

TRUMP: We will never forget. We say it and we mean it. We will never forget those we lost, and we will never forget the immortal heroes of September 11th, 2001.

Trump will mark the 25th anniversary on Friday at the Pentagon.

Russia-Ukraine latest » The head of NATO is calling for member states to step up their financial support of Ukraine.

Secretary General Mark Rutte on Tuesday said Ukrainian allies had recently pledged 70 billion euros...that's about 81 billion dollars...to help Kyiv in its war against Russia. But he says...that's not enough.

RUTTE: Nations must dig deeper. We do not have a choice, I believe.

U.S. Pentagon Policy Chief Elbridge Colby added that NATO allies must be prepared to dig in for the long haul:

COLBY: As you all well know, Russia is reconstituting its forces and its defense industrial capacity. We must be prepared for a protracted conflict and for Ukraine's requirements to persist in the months and years ahead.

But there were possible signs on Tuesday of some progress toward ending the war.

USHAKOV: [Speaking Russian]

A spokesman for the Kremlin said President Trump spoke with Russian leader Vladimir Putin by phone yesterday. He said Trump told Putin he wanted a swift end to the war… and a complete restoration of relations between Washington and Moscow. The spokesman said both men agreed that such an outcome would have enormous trade and economic benefits for both countries

The White House did not immediately comment on the discussion.

Operation Meridian saving kids » The Marshals Service in Ohio just carried out what it calls the largest missing-child operation in state history. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: Federal marshals found 79 missing children across Ohio. The operation ran throughout August, in several cities.

Some of the children were as young as six. Authorities say they had gone missing for a variety of reasons … suspected sex trafficking, abuse, and running away.

Officers pulled a 13-year-old girl out of a crawlspace under a bedroom closet floor. They found her missing older sister later that day at a restaurant.

In Toledo, deputies found a 16-year-old girl with a grown man. Marshals say she was previously reported as a trafficking victim.

Officials say counselors and caseworkers are now working with the children.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Amazon plane crash probe » Investigators have been walking the runway at Miami International Airport … where a fatal crash occurred.

The airport does not have so-called arrestor beds, crushable pads meant to stop runaway planes from overshooting the runway … as a Boeing 767 cargo plane did on Sunday. Investigators are trying to figure out if that safety measure could have prevented five deaths when the jet struck a van. National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said that van ...

HOMENDY: … was owned by Professional Ocean Service Corporation, which is a contract cleaning company for the airlines. In the van were seven persons on board.

The pilot and copilot are out of the hospital. As of Tuesday, two other people were still in critical condition.

Investigators have both flight recorders, and are already reading the data. The safety board says two of Miami's four runways stay closed until investigators finish at the scene.

I'm Kent Covington.

Coming up… threats to free speech in the United Kingdom. Plus, one woman’s work to keep the memory of 9/11 victims alive.

This is The World and Everything in It.

I'm Kent Covington.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Wednesday, September 9. So glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

President Trump is scheduled to speak tonight at the 2026 Republican Convention in Dallas. Vice President Vance, members of the cabinet, Republican leadership, and candidates all slated to take the stage over the next two days.

REICHARD: Hunter Baker is standing by, but first we have WORLD’s Mary Muncy in Dallas with a preview. Mary.

MARY MUNCY: Good morning. The convention center is covered in red, white, and blue, and surrounded by barricades, in some places stretching almost a mile from the American Airlines Center.

Republican politicians and thousands of supporters are expected to be here later today. The GOP will take the opportunity to highlight tax relief and economic policy changes made so far during Trump’s second term. Other issues the party wants to highlight going into the midterms include efforts to root out fraud, healthcare affordability, border security, and trade policy.

About 100 leaders and candidates are expected to take the stage on Wednesday and Thursday. President Trump will make remarks both nights. Vice President Vance will give the Thursday night keynote address. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will also be here, as well as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Some Republican candidates have opted out of the convention, and four House Democrats will head to Dallas to offer counterprogramming.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy in Dallas, Texas.

REICHARD: All right, and joining us now is political scientist and WORLD Opinions contributor Hunter Baker. Hunter’s a senior fellow for civic renewal and religious liberty at First Liberty Institute. Hunter, good morning.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, issue one: Trump is not on the ballot, but Trump’s on the ballot. Now, as you heard, and as you know, Republicans are staging this presidential-style convention designed to make a midterm feel like a Trump election. Do you think that solves the turnout problem or just advertises that they have one?

BAKER: I think that people on the Republican side are of different minds on this issue. I’m sure that some of them think that holding this unusual midterm convention can help get Trump voters to the ballot. As he said in one runoff, “I need you to pretend like I’m on the ballot.” He is trying to get his voters out, who are viewed as lower-propensity midterm voters.

But then there would be another side who would say, “Hey, Trump is the problem because his approval rating is low right now, 40% or lower,” and those folks might think that it would be better to let those midterm candidates make their own way.

So that’s really the question: Is this big Trump event going to actually drive turnout, or is it going to remind people of what they’re unhappy about?

REICHARD: I’m interested in this idea of nationalizing the midterms. Now, Democrats want that too because nobody motivates Democrats like President Trump does. But Hunter, do you think Republicans can nationalize the enthusiasm without nationalizing the blame? In other words, can they turn a referendum on their own record into a choice between two futures?

BAKER: I think that what Trump and the Republicans really need is progress with regard to Iran and the price of oil. As it stands right now, everybody in the country is well over $3 a gallon. And if you go out west, people are probably up around $7 a gallon. And discussions about what happens if the machines have to register something like $10 a gallon, so that’s what’s got to change.

The American public has consistently punished politicians when that price gets high, and so that’s the biggest thing that’s going to happen.

Now they’re going to have this convention. They’re going to talk about the things that have been done, and there are a lot of positives that can be discussed, such as with regard to immigration. Notwithstanding the ICE controversies, the simple truth is that they have gotten control of the border, and they are doing a much better job with that issue.

But the simple fact is, voters are always more interested in the future than they are in the past, and that’s the case that Trump and the Republicans have to make.

EICHER: All right. Well, issue two, Hunter: the Vance Doctrine. Thursday night, that belongs to Vice President Vance. That may give this a feel of a more traditional convention, with a sort of changing of the guard at the end. Do you see it that way? That the Vance speech is the first major foray into 2028?

BAKER: I would say, don’t let Donald Trump hear you say that.

EICHER: I don’t think he listens.

BAKER: He is not ready. He is not ready to turn over the reins to JD Vance. And if I understand correctly, Trump was originally going to speak on one night of this midterm convention, and now is going to headline both nights, completely unwilling to be upstaged or even possibly upstaged by anyone.

REICHARD: Well, we’ve also seen the beginning of what a Vance agenda might look like. One policy draft would let some income-qualified married couples receive childcare aid when one parent works outside the home for money, and the other stays home. We heard some about this last week.

Now, separately, Vance is asking Congress for tougher verification and fraud controls in Medicaid and food stamps. So it’s this idea of using federal money aimed at strengthening families, but also policing public aid aggressively. Now, does that add up to a governing philosophy, or just a coalition shopping list, or maybe it’s something in between?

BAKER: I think that these two things actually can go together. I want to take that second issue first—the issue of fraud. I think that people can all agree that if you’re going to have entitlements, then you want to protect the use of that money. So it should be an 80-20 issue for somebody like Vance to say that what I really want to make sure is that the people who receive the money are actually entitled to get it, specifically that they’re American citizens, or that they meet other eligibility requirements.

Now, this other thing about the married couples receiving childcare aid to incentivize one parent to stay home. I know that they’re probably thinking in many cases about women, but obviously both could apply. This is something that intuitively sounds like it would work. That maybe you get a better situation where people can stay home with their child and raise them, and then maybe people have more babies, and maybe that takes us away from some of the population decline problem that we’re having.

But what I have to say is that so far similar programs in other countries have not been very successful. It turns out that people pretty much do what they want to do, and they don’t respond terribly well to financial incentives when it comes to family formation.

EICHER: All right, we’ll move out of the convention mode here for issue three. Hunter, what 9/11 left behind. Friday marks 25 years since the attacks of September 11th. We will have more on the 9/11 remembrance later in this program, as well as tomorrow. And of course, I’ll talk to John Stonestreet on Friday, day-of.

But there is a political dimension I’d like to talk about, and Gerry Seib of The Wall Street Journal made a counterintuitive argument. His was that the extraordinary unity we saw after 9/11 also helped to sow the seeds of America’s present political division. Do you think he’s right, and why or why not?

BAKER: I do think that he’s right. I remember after 9/11 happened, and George W. Bush just flourished in that moment of challenge. He suddenly became significantly more capable of connecting with voters and projecting a spirit of unity and national confidence, and that lasted for a while.

And it was pretty great to see, not just for political reasons, but I can just remember that community spirit that I saw building, and it seemed like people were really coming together after a deeply partisan period, after that very tightly fought election of 2000.

But what happened is that in the 2002 midterms, the Republicans defied all of those usual expectations of the president’s party losing seats, and they gained seats and they gain strength. And I think that the Democrats decided, okay, it’s time not to play nice. We’ve got to oppose this guy. And I’m not attacking anyone. This is the logic of politics. You don’t want the other team to win, and unity was the price that was paid.

REICHARD: Okay, time for the lightning round. Brutal exclusive in The Wall Street Journal, based on leaks out of Senator John Fetterman’s office. The story portrays Fetterman as resisting some of the most basic work of his office. Former aides are furious. The editorial page argues that the knives are really out because of his support for Israel. Can both things be true?

BAKER: Yeah, it’s easy for both things to be true. There are many senators and other officeholders where their staff are unhappy with them, or they think that they’re lazy, or they don’t like some of their habits. But typically, they stay quiet about that because that’s understood to be the role.

But what’s happening is that he’s being attacked, especially because of his support for Israel, which stands out like a sore thumb in today’s Democratic Party.

EICHER: All right, Iran’s oil dollars are starting to dry up under the American blockade. Do you think that President Trump finally found the pressure point he should have been using all along?

BAKER: I think all the indicators are that they finally have found the pressure point. Iran is getting much, much less revenue from the oil, and the problem is that he relented back in June when he thought that a deal might be made, and I think it’s cost him time that he really needed.

REICHARD: Here’s another Journal story: “Coffee with Comrades.” So this one says young socialists are recruiting through coffee gatherings, softball, potlucks, karaoke, and a promise of belonging. What do you say to that? Is the right winning the argument but losing the clubhouse?

BAKER: I need to be emphatic about this. The right has won the argument. It’s that nobody understands that they’ve won the argument. Socialism is dead!

Socialism as socialism is dead. They do not any longer want to own the means of production and be responsible for all that stuff. What they want to do is they want to be parasitic upon a capitalistic economy and redistribute accordingly.

So socialism lost, but yes, the word is being used in a different way now, and a lot of young people are excited, and they’re finding meaning in new political possibilities involved with heavier redistribution.

EICHER: Socialism is dead, so those are zombies? Is that what you’re saying?

BAKER: (Laughs) Karl Marx is a zombie.

EICHER: Okay, Hunter Baker is a senior fellow for civic renewal and religious liberty at the First Liberty Institute. Thank you, Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour.

This week, a free speech organization in the U.K. called Big Brother Watch released chilling statistics: tens of thousands have been arrested in the U.K. for speech-related violations. Critics are calling it a crisis of censorship as the U.K. attempts to control speech even outside the country.

WORLD’s Emma Eicher has the story.

EMMA EICHER: Over the last five years, more than 62,000 people were arrested for online speech offenses in the U.K.

About 12,000 of those have been convicted. And it’s a growing trend:

SHAW: We've seen a tenfold increase of cases of people being penalized for expressing their views about immigration, and we've seen a fourfold increase in people being penalized for expressing their opinions about Islam.

That’s Connie Shaw, the external affairs officer for the U.K’s Free Speech Union or FSU. The group campaigns for free speech in society and government, and has closely followed related lawsuits since 2020.

Shaw says FSU has often represented people in court. People like Jamie Michael, who posted a video in response to a 2024 stabbing spree in Southport:

MICHAEL: With the current situation I would say that we need security in schools now at the moment …

SHAW: Jamie made a 12-minute video on Facebook saying, we should go through the democratic and peaceful routes to lobby our politicians to take our concerns about immigration seriously.

The murderer, Axel Rudakubana, stabbed three girls and wounded ten others at a dance class.

In the aftermath, authorities warned against posting on social media to prevent disinformation. Early rumors suggested Rudakubana was an immigrant. Instead, his parents emigrated to the U.K. from Rwanda before he was born.

Here’s Michael:

MICHAEL: I was concerned … I have two young girls, I was concerned for their safety at schools and at the parks.

A Welsh politician reported Michael’s Facebook video to the police.

They went to his workplace in August, 2024.

MICHAEL: They went on to tell me that I’d published a video online that was being looked at as indecent racial hatred. I was confused, I didn’t know what video that would’ve been because in my video I didn’t think I said anything racial at all. And from there they said I was under arrest.

Police held Michael in custody for 17 days. He faced up to seven years in prison for “intent to stir up racial hatred.” FSU represented him in court. Here’s Shaw again:

SHAW: He pleaded not guilty, and he was acquitted by a jury in 17 minutes.

Shaw says America’s speech laws are fairly specific:

SHAW: The Brandenburg test in America means that the only speech that should be criminalized is speech that is intended and likely to cause imminent lawless action.

But in the UK, the 1986 Public Order Act criminalizes using threatening, abusive or insulting words with intent to stir up racial, religious, or sexual orientation based hatred.

SHAW: Many of our laws are so broad that they are being interpreted to justify arresting people for their speech. So we'd quite like to see something similar to the First Amendment in the UK.

But Shaw admits future reform is unlikely. Recently, the U.K. extended its control of social media beyond its borders through the 2023 Online Safety Act.

SHAW: It was branded as essential to protect children online. The issue was from the beginning, and we warned, that the scope of the Online Safety Act meant that it could easily be misinterpreted to justify censoring things that adults have every right to see.

The U.K. regulator, Ofcom, issued multiple fines against the imageboard 4chan for its lack of various safeguards including not using age-verification checks to block children from viewing pornography.

4chan has refused to pay the fines on grounds that it is U.S. based and therefore has First Amendment rights.

Ofcom has also launched an investigation into X, based in Texas, and its Grok AI chatbot.

U.S. officials recently responded to the disputes. In August, Ohio Representative Michael Rulli introduced the GRANITE Act in Congress. It keeps U.S. courts from recognizing any foreign judgement that might enforce censorship.

Shaw says those in the U.K. lack those same protections and fears the erosion of freedom of speech throughout Europe:

SHAW: I think that the best response to ideas that one might consider harmful is more speech, not less speech. As Charlie Kirk would say, when you stop people from talking, that's when violence begins. So I think people need to understand how important it is to protect the rights of those who you disagree with, and I think across the Western world we've forgotten how important that is.

Ofcom invoked sovereign immunity to block U.S. legal action against British regulations. And it maintains that foreign countries are legally bound by the Online Safety Act regardless of First Amendment protections.

The GRANITE Act was referred to the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives.

That’s this week’s World Tour. I’m Emma Eicher.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A bear walks into a fire station ...

Actually this is not a joke: Security video from Colorado Springs Fire Station 16 shows a black bear wandering in.

Nobody seems to be around.

So the bear takes his time ...

the video shows him looking around the station ...

wandering past the equipment ...

and eventually finding something he apparently wants.

A firefighter’s gear bag.

Video shows the bear picking it up in his mouth, turning around, and casually walking right back out.

Why a gear bag, though? What would a bear want with firefighting equipment?

After considering the evidence, the guys at the station suspect the suspect’s identity.

AUDIO: Only you can prevent forest fires.

Recognize the old voice? They gave him the name Smokey Bear.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It—15 years, and then some. Today is Wednesday, September 9th. Thank you for starting your day with us.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Honoring the lives lost on 9/11. This week marks 25 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11th.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. For the nation, it was a shared outrage, one seared into the memories of those old enough to remember.

EICHER: But for the families who lost loved ones, the grief is deeply personal. And the passage of time can bring fears that their stories will fade. WORLD’s Grace Snell met with one woman determined to keep those stories from being forgotten.

SOUND: [Rushing water]

GRACE SNELL: At the September 11 memorial, rushing water cascades into two identical reflecting pools. Their retaining walls frame the footprints of the twin towers.

TAMUCCIO: There’s 2,983 names on both walls. That is all of the people on 9/11 who died, not just New York.

Dana Tamuccio lost her brother, Mike, in the attack on the World Trade Center.

Tamuccio leads tours of the memorial site to keep Mike’s memory alive—and to help people understand the significance of this place.

TAMUCCIO: When I walk that wall, I see a lot of names. Like I remember having a drink with that guy. I remember her answering Mike’s phone or whatever it was. So for us, it’s not random. For you guys, it might look random.

The names are arranged by “meaningful adjacency.” People who knew each other in life are listed near each other.

TAMUCCIO: The families of the first responders said, “No, we want them together. These were brotherhoods. We spent Christmases together. We raised our kids together.”

Tamuccio’s brother worked on the 93rd floor of the north tower. He was a vice president for equities trading at Fred Alger Management. Back in 2001, Dana was driving to work when a newscast crackled over the airwaves.

TAMUCCIO: Halfway through my commute, I hear on the radio that a commuter plane had hit the World Trade Center, and I remember it taking my breath away…

At work, a coworker silently ushered her to the television.

TAMUCCIO: I look at the TV, and my knees buckle, because now I see that is not a commuter plane, that is Mike’s tower.

A second plane hit the south tower a few minutes later. It collapsed at 9:59 a.m. That was when Dana knew. Mike was gone.

Michael Andrew Tamuccio was one of about 1,100 people whose remains were never recovered.

SOUND: [Sirens wailing]

The wreckage of the twin towers burned for 99 days. Cleanup efforts officially ended in 2002. But ground zero remained under construction. Tamuccio returned there once in 2003. After that, she didn’t come back for nearly two decades.

SOUND: [Distant voices and traffic]

Not even when the Sept. 11 memorial opened in 2011.

TAMUCCIO: I would see people on the trains coming down to World Trade Center, and there would be like, there’s like this weird circus of excitement to be there, and I was like, “If I’m next to somebody like that on the memorial, I don’t know what I’ll do, I could explode.”

Then, the pandemic hit. The city was quiet, and it gave Tamuccio the courage to return.

TAMUCCIO: I was expecting to hate it, because I just didn’t think you could get this thing right, but it was just perfect. I just remember feeling it was almost like a release. You just kind of, like, released all this energy, and I was like, “They’re honoring our people the right way.”

The design is called Reflecting Absence.

TAMUCCIO: There’s two waterfalls that go into it—it’s a 30 foot waterfall into a 20 foot. The second one, you can’t see the bottom of it by design, it’s meant to denote infinite loss, infinite memory.

Tamuccio does her best to make sure those memories live on. In 2024, she launched her tour company, Vibe NYC Tours. She wanted to help people understand the meaning of the site for those who lost loved ones here.

TAMUCCIO: There’s a lot of people that come here and don’t consider that they might be standing next to a family member or another colleague, right? A lot of the first responder colleagues are down here all the time, and you can usually tell right away.

Tamuccio’s tour ends just up the street at St. Paul’s Chapel.

SOUND: [Distant traffic and birds]

In front, there’s a shady cemetery. Tamuccio says many people don’t realize that’s exactly what the Sept. 11 memorial is for many families.

TAMUCCIO: Eleven-hundred people did not come home at all that day. This is their final resting place…

Tamuccio didn’t know if she’d be able to talk about Mike during tours.

TAMUCCIO: And then slowly but surely I started talking about my brother, and it was cathartic, it was healthy, it was like releasing stuff.

People responded by telling Tamuccio their own stories, too.

TAMUCCIO: and I realized at that moment, “This is what I’ve needed for the last 25 years to actually talk about this.”

Moments like that, Tamuccio says, start to feel like healing.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Grace Snell, in New York City.

REICHARD: Grace has much more of Dana and Mike’s story in the September issue of WORLD Magazine: including who Mike was before he became one of the names at the memorial. And why Dana now spends so much time helping a generation born after 9/11 understand what really happened.

We have a link for you in the show notes.

NICK EICHER, HOST: WORLD commentator Cal Thomas remembers that day from another vantage point. He was near the Pentagon—and twenty-five years later, he’s looking back not only at what happened, but at what it meant.

CAL THOMAS: On September 11th, I was sitting in my home office, not far from the Pentagon.

The television behind me was turned down. Something caught my attention, so I reached for the remote and turned up the sound.

One of the World Trade Center towers was burning. Then a second plane struck the other tower.

It was clear America was under attack.

Not long after, I saw smoke rising from the Pentagon. I went up on the roof for a better look.

My son was a firefighter. He later told me he pulled bodies from the wreckage. Even now, he doesn’t like to talk about it.

In the days that followed, I wrote six columns in succession—and many more in the months and years afterward.

On the day of the attacks, I wrote: “It brings into clear focus the state of war that has existed for some time between America and those who oppose our values and way of life.”

I called for the expulsion of people and organizations with ties to radical terrorist groups. That did not happen. I believe the threat from within remains.

The argument over what the attacks meant began almost immediately.

Six days after 9/11, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington.

BUSH: The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.

I disagreed with that, as I did other political and media figures vouching for the peaceful nature of Islam.

I pointed to what was being taught in some Muslim schools. One seventh-grade Palestinian textbook said Islam “will defeat all other religions” and would be spread through Muslim jihad fighters.

And the anti-Semitism behind much of this has not disappeared. In fact, we have seen it grow more open.

It didn’t take long after 9/11 for the “blame America first” crowd to make itself heard, either. That instinct is still with us—the tendency to look first for what America supposedly did to provoke those who hate us.

That gets to another thing I wrote in those days.

Something besides human lives died on September 11th—or so I hoped.

It was the doctrine of moral equivalency: the idea that people everywhere are basically like us, or can be made so if we accommodate enough of their demands.

Twenty-five years later, that way of thinking is still alive.

There are times when moral clarity requires distinctions: between aggressor and victim, freedom and tyranny, good and evil.

I also argued then that America needed to reduce its strategic dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Energy policy has changed enormously since 2001, but the larger lesson remains: a nation should think carefully about the vulnerabilities on which its enemies can capitalize.

Later, I was fortunate enough to visit Ground Zero while access was still restricted. A friend knew the fire chief, who let us into a roped-off area.

Three images have never left me.

Blocks of store windows covered with pictures of the missing—and pleas for help finding them.

Parked cars filled inside with dust from the collapsing towers.

And an unopened soft-drink bottle lying in the debris.

They made us wear hard hats. I kept mine. On it I wrote: “NYC 9/11/2001.”

It is easy to say “never forget.”

But every generation must be taught what there is to remember.

An entire generation has now been born since September 11th. Others were too young at the time to understand it.

And that means it matters who teaches the history—whether the story is grounded in facts, or filtered through whatever political biases happen to be fashionable.

Twenty-five years later, remembering September 11th should mean more than remembering where we were.

It should mean remembering what happened, who did it, what they believed—and what history ought to have taught us.

For WORLD, I’m Cal Thomas.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Tomorrow: A reading revival. How Mississippi’s reading improvement scores went from near the bottom to the top. And, how volunteers offered care to relief workers in the aftermath of 9/11. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says, “But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.” —1 Timothy 6:11, 12

Go now in grace and peace.

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