I was in 5th grade on September 11, 2001. I was in Mrs. Machiano’s class, and I remember teachers crying in the hallway and parents coming to pick up their kids. My dad was supposed to fly that day but came back and picked up my sister and me, because all the airports closed.
One of the main reasons I got politically involved was because of what happened on 9/11, when Islamic terrorists attacked the United States and killed almost 3,000 Americans.
This is the same Islamic terrorism that we still fight today, that now has been justified by Democratic politicians and excused by their Twitch steamer influencers. This isn’t a fringe view on the left anymore. They think we deserved it.
There was a world before 9/11 and a world after. Our country changed forever.
Fast forward 25 years later, and I found myself working at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), an agency created because of the failures and communications gaps between intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
I worked with incredible patriots who love this country and with many Global War on Terror veterans, intelligence officers and soldiers, Tulsi Gabbard was the DNI — a GWOT veteran herself.
It shouldn’t have shocked me, but it did — the lobby of ODNI under the Biden administration had nothing to commemorate 9/11, nothing to remind those who entered that building why they were there, what mission they serve, and why it was created.
Instead, it had DEI propaganda. In the lobby of the agency that sits atop all 18 intelligence agencies.
We also learned that 9/11 remembrance under Biden’s DNI was lackluster. Again, to no one’s surprise.
We decided to change all of that and do something different, remind those who walk through the doors every day why we are there. We worked with the 9/11 Memorial Museum in NYC to get steel beam from the towers, on loan, that would sit in the front of ODNI.
We worked with the National Archives to get a copy of the bills that created ODNI to display in the lobby. We also obtained an artifact from the Twin Towers from another intel agency to display in the lobby.
We did all of this because if you don’t remember history, you risk repeating it. If you don’t call out the ideology of radical Islamic terrorism, you risk becoming a casualty of it.
Liberals and Democrats want to erase and justify what terrorists did to Americans on 9/11. We have to fight to make sure that doesn’t happen, that the heroes of that day are remembered, that the heroes of the wars we fought after aren’t forgotten.
We have to tell stories like the Man in the Red Bandana — Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader, who saved at least a dozen lives that day. Recognizing people trapped in the 78th floor lobby, he used a red bandana, give to him by his father when he was six, to cover his nose and mouth from the smoke. His family didn’t know about his heroic actions that day — they found out through the press and stories of survivors that a “man in a red bandana” helped them out of the towers.
And stories like the heroes of United Flight 93, led by Todd Beamer, who famously said “let’s roll” before passengers stormed the cockpit and forced the plane down into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Twenty five years later, the lesson of September 11 remains clear, a free nation cannot defeat an enemy it refuses to name, understand, or remember. We must honor the nearly 3,000 Americans murdered that day, the heroes who ran toward danger, the passengers of Flight 93 who fought back and the service members who carried the burden of the War on Terror.
But remembrance requires more than ceremonies or artifacts in a lobby. It requires moral clarity, institutional memory, and the courage to defend the truth, even when it’s attacked.
We have to teach every generation that America is good, that freedom is worth defending, and that the spirit of September 12 must never be forgotten.
Alexa Henning was the Chief of Staff for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Tulsi Gabbard, where she oversaw operations, strategy, and coordination of the DNI’s priorities throughout the Intelligence Community.
