Americans Recall Where They Were on 9/11
Left 67%
Center 0%
Right 33%
2 left · 0 center · 1 right
What happened
On September 11, 2001, hijackers seized four U.S. passenger jets. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, killing thousands; a third struck the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C.; the fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Around the 25th anniversary, news outlets asked Americans to describe where they were that morning and what they remember. The published accounts ranged from people in and around New York who saw or smelled the aftermath, to students and travelers elsewhere who learned of the attacks on television or radio, to first responders and medical workers who treated the wounded.
Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
Left-leaning coverage of 9/11 remembrance is a chorus of ordinary whereabouts, while right-leaning coverage uses the same where-were-you question to argue that secularism could not explain the day. Personal accounts gathered by NBC News stay with smoke, classrooms, a hospital floor, and cars left in station lots, and nothing in those memories mentions church or scripture. After a teenage memory of a drive to a surgeon in Illinois, the Daily Wire essay concludes that "they chose Psalm 23 instead."
A loaded contrast sits in the names for the attackers of that morning. The BBC recap calls them "hijackers." Right-leaning coverage calls them "Islamist barbarians."
Did the people who still recite where they stood that morning also return to churches in the weeks that followed, as right-leaning coverage says the country did?
Bottom line
A reader of NBC News never hears that Americans chose Psalm 23 after 9/11, and a reader of the Daily Wire never hears the classroom and hospital memories the other side ran.
The receipts — 5 facts one side's coverage lacks
- Claim that Americans returned to churches after 9/11 and chose Psalm 23 rather than secular philosophy
- Fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back, thought aimed at the Capitol
- Then-President Joe Biden withdrew U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2021
- Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs in 2011
- Survivor of Tower Two's collapse sutured patients at Beekman Hospital that morning
The Left View
Left-leaning coverage treats the anniversary as a civic act of memory under the refrain “Never Forget,” gathering first-person stories rather than a geopolitical or religious argument. The BBC aired video of Americans in Washington recounting what they were doing that day and how the attacks “changed the country.” NBC News collected social-media recollections of a “harrowing morning” and the aftermath: a New Jersey resident who wrote that after watching the towers “tumble like dominos,” “we could smell death”; a Brooklyn account of FDNY firefighter Dave Fontana, who stayed with his unit instead of celebrating an anniversary and did not survive; an 11-year-old in Guilderland, N.Y., whose class watched “buildings on fire, people jumping and the towers eventually falling”; a physician who, after surviving the collapse of Tower Two, sutured patients at Beekman Hospital; and evening images of cars left in Long Island train-station lots as “the first hint at those who would not be coming home.” Other memories stressed mutual support—strangers hugging, a Connecticut book club that met that night, a Maryland parent who bought and hung an American flag. The framing locates meaning in ordinary shock, grief, first-responder sacrifice, and community rather than in ideology.
The Right View
The Daily Wire published an essay by theologian Andrew T. Walker that uses a personal memory—he was 16, en route to a surgical follow-up, when radio reported a plane striking the World Trade Center—to argue that the day revealed “the impotence of secularism.” After a second plane hit, he recalls “the felt, audible silence” of a waiting room processing that “the invincible fortress that is, and was, the United States, was under attack.” He calls 9/11 “a display of Islamist barbarians drunk on the power of false religion” and, equally, of “American altruism at its best,” citing firefighters, blood-bank lines, and President George W. Bush on the rubble. On the 25th anniversary he writes that when the towers fell, “no one went looking to an atheist manifesto” or to Nietzsche; people “chose Psalm 23 instead,” returned to churches, and found that “Christopher Hitchens’ worldview could not satisfy the longings for justice, but Billy Graham’s could.” He treats the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden as “Biblical justice,” notes friends who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and concludes that the attacks testify to “the reality of evil, the valor of fallen heroes, and the promise that no matter how secular the modern West may think itself to be, God has placed not only eternity on our hearts, but the cry for justice, too.”
Our Take (balanced)
Left-leaning outlets’ strongest argument is that the anniversary is properly a record of lived experience: NBC’s collected memories of Fontana staying with his FDNY brothers, a doctor suturing the wounded after surviving Tower Two’s collapse, schoolchildren watching people jump, and train-station cars that marked who would not come home, together with BBC interviews on how the day “changed the country.” Walker’s strongest argument is that those same hours showed Americans reaching for objective moral and religious categories secularism could not supply, citing that people “chose Psalm 23 instead” of “an atheist manifesto,” returned to churches, and found Billy Graham more adequate to “the longings for justice” than Christopher Hitchens. The central unresolved tension is whether remembering where one was that morning is complete as civic testimony of grief, heroism, and national change, or whether, as Walker claims, the memories themselves reveal “the impotence of secularism” and require an account of Islamist evil and divine justice.
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