It was at this exact desk, in this very studio, one year ago today that I learned a friend of mine had been shot and likely would not survive. That friend was Charlie Kirk.
I was not Charlie’s closest friend, but we knew each other on a first-name basis. We worked together at Real America’s Voice. We were colleagues.
He was good to me. He was good to my children. I respected his work, his convictions and his commitment to the causes he believed would make this country stronger. His death left an enormous void for his family, his friends and the movement he built.
Tomorrow marks the anniversary of another tragedy—the kind of event that fixes a time and place permanently in the mind. On September 11, 2001, I was picking up my mother from the dentist when I heard that the first tower in New York City had been struck. When I walked into my mother’s care facility, I watched the second plane hit the South Tower.
You probably remember where you were, too. It was the kind of horror that seared itself into the memory of a generation: nearly 3,000 people murdered in coordinated terrorist attacks, families shattered and a nation forever changed.
Remembering Charlie and remembering those lost on 9/11 brings to mind the people who form the backbone of a nation—not because they never disagree, but because they act when the moment demands it.
Think of the firefighters who ran toward the towers while thousands of others were trying to escape. Many knew the danger. They went in anyway. Three hundred forty-three members of the FDNY were killed that day.
You hear the sounds from that morning and understand what courage costs. Smoke choked the air. People were trapped above the flames. First responders climbed the stairs knowing the odds and refusing to turn away. Many never came home. That courage remains part of the American story.
One of those heroes still stands out a quarter-century later: Welles Crowther, the 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter remembered as the “Man in the Red Bandana.”
When United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower, Crowther could have concentrated only on his own escape. Instead, according to survivor accounts preserved by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, he covered his face with a red bandana, guided injured people from the 78th-floor sky lobby to the only usable stairway and returned to help others. He made repeated trips through the smoke before the tower collapsed. His remains were later recovered alongside firefighters in the South Tower lobby.
This week, President Donald Trump formally honored that sacrifice. At a Tunnel to Towers commemoration on the Ellipse, with Crowther’s mother, Alison, and sister, Paige, present, Trump posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. During the same ceremony, the president renewed the country’s promise never to forget the victims and heroes of September 11.
A nation’s commemorations reveal what it chooses to remember. Honoring Crowther places courage, service and sacrifice at the center of the story—not as empty words, but as standards against which Americans can measure their own conduct.
For Trump, a native New Yorker, the attack was tied to the city whose skyline had helped define his public life. In the days after September 11, he visited the area near Ground Zero and spoke about the destruction, the response and the enormous task of rebuilding.
The footage captures the rawness of that moment: a wounded city, exhausted rescue workers and an urgent focus on recovery. Rebuilding would take years. Remembering would become a permanent national obligation.
Charlie Kirk also built his public life around a call to action. He urged young Americans to participate in civic life, defend their constitutional rights and view character, faith and personal responsibility as foundations for citizenship.
“We the People” was central to his message. He believed political power ultimately rested with citizens willing to organize, speak and act.
He challenged identity-based politics and argued for a broader American identity rooted in shared citizenship, responsibility and opportunity.
Charlie repeatedly told young audiences that this larger identity was available to them and that they had both the freedom and the duty to shape the country they would inherit.
He also pointed to previous generations that endured war, depression and national upheaval yet continued to build institutions, families and communities.
Whatever one thought of Charlie’s politics, there was no mistaking his willingness to enter the arena. He organized, debated, built an institution and asked others to translate their beliefs into action.
That included sharp clashes with figures on the political left, among them commentator Hasan Piker, whose past remark that “America deserved 9/11” drew widespread condemnation and was later disavowed by Piker.
Their arguments reflected a larger divide in American political life: disputes over capitalism, national identity, foreign policy and whether the country’s history should be told primarily through its achievements, its failures or both.
Those disagreements also shape how public figures discuss September 11. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for example, wrote in a 2023 anniversary message that nearly 3,000 New Yorkers died on 9/11 and also mourned those killed, injured and displaced in the wars that followed. His wording placed the victims of the attacks and the consequences of the subsequent wars in the same remembrance.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed offered a similar argument in a 2021 episode of his former podcast, saying that while 9/11 scarred the United States, the American response scarred millions of people elsewhere. He argued that discussions of the post-9/11 era should include the global consequences of the wars that followed.
Those comments became part of the political debate because remembrance is never only about the past. It also shapes present arguments about responsibility, patriotism, national power and the lessons the country should carry forward.
The facts of September 11 remain unambiguous. Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes and murdered nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93. Firefighters, police officers, medical personnel and civilians responded with extraordinary courage. The wars and policies that followed remain subjects of legitimate and often fierce debate. Remembering one history does not require erasing the other, but it does require precision about who carried out the attacks and who bore their immediate cost.
That clarity was present at this week’s Tunnel to Towers ceremony. The message was simple: freedom has a price, families continue to bear that price and the country has an obligation to remember those who were killed and those who ran toward danger.
That is the enduring challenge before us. Charlie Kirk, Welles Crowther, the firefighters and the ordinary Americans who acted in moments of crisis each left different legacies. What connects them is action—the decision to step forward, accept responsibility and serve something larger than oneself.
The hatred that produced September 11 has not disappeared, nor has political violence. The answer begins with rejecting dehumanization, telling the truth about history and refusing to treat violence as an acceptable substitute for argument.
That is how a nation honors its dead and keeps its promises. We remember. We act. And we leave the country stronger than we found it.