Never Forget Is Not Enough. We Have to Fight for What They Died For.

September 6, 2026

Never Forget Is Not Enough. We Have to Fight for What They Died For.

I have been scrolling through my feed this week and I can barely look at the photos.

Not because I want to look away. Because twenty-five years later, the images still make me physically sick. The towers. The smoke. The people. The choices those people had to make in their final moments. To burn alive or to jump. To jump. Out of a window a hundred floors up. And choose that over the alternative.

People actually had to make that choice. Real people. Americans. In our city. On a Tuesday morning.

And what kills me, what absolutely kills me, is scrolling past young Americans who treat those images like history. Like something that happened a long time ago to other people. Almost like it was not real. Almost like it was something they saw in a movie once.

It was real. I know because I lived it.

I Was in Milwaukee When the World Ended.

I was on a business trip for Northwestern Mutual. We were in a meeting, one of those completely secluded from the outside world situations, when someone came in and told us what had happened.

I did not understand it. My brain genuinely could not process it. I was a thousand miles from home and I think my mind was protecting me from something it could not hold yet.

Then we watched the second plane hit on television. And the room just broke. People screaming. People crying. People freaking out. Some of them started making plans to drive home. Pennsylvania. Illinois. Wherever they lived. Thousands of miles away.

Most of us stayed in Milwaukee for a couple of days. There were no flights. The world had stopped and nobody knew what came next. When we finally got the option to go home, I got on a plane.

When we landed, everybody clapped. And everybody was crying. I do not think I fully understood why I was clapping. We just all needed to do something together in that moment.

And then I walked off the plane and into the airport.

And that is when it hit me.

Everything I had been holding in since that morning in the meeting room came out all at once. I sat down on the floor of that airport and I cried. I could not stop. I did not try to stop.

I was home. And home was broken.

My Family Was There.

I have family members who are FDNY. I have an uncle who was NYPD. He walked through the rubble at Ground Zero.

I have an aunt who worked in World Trade Center 7. She got out. I found that out after the fact and the relief was something I still cannot fully describe.

Northwestern Mutual, the company I worked for, had clients at Cantor Fitzgerald. I did not know that at the time. I found out after. And when I did find out, it hit me in a way that I was not prepared for.

After.

That word took on a different meaning after September 11th. Everything was either before or after. The world had a line running through it now and nobody had asked for it.

New York Stopped. And Then the World Stopped.

I remember the days that followed feeling like everything was in slow motion.

We were all glued to the television. The scenes at Ground Zero playing over and over. The stories of bodies being recovered. The missing persons posters, hundreds of them, thousands, taped to walls and fences and bus stops all over the city. Faces of people someone was still hoping to find.

Family members told me stories of leaving downtown Manhattan that day. Walking toward the edges of the city to find a way out, to get picked up, to get home some other way. Nobody knew if the subways were safe. Nobody knew if another plane was coming. You just moved and you kept moving.

All of it felt surreal. Like you were standing inside a movie that could not possibly be real. But it was. And the weight of it was everywhere.

And then something else happened.

The flags went up.

Not because someone told people to. Not because there was a campaign or a movement or a hashtag. Because Americans, New Yorkers, reached for the one thing that meant we were still here. Still standing. Still us.

I remember the feeling of vulnerability. This country had never felt that way before. We thought we were untouchable. We were not. And in that vulnerability, something unexpected happened. We found each other. Nobody asked what party you were. Nobody asked where you were from. You were an American and that was enough.

I want that feeling back. And I am going to tell you why we have to fight for it.

Twenty-Five Years Ago We Were Attacked by Planes. Today the Attack Looks Different.

On September 11, 2001, our enemies came at us from the sky. We could see it happening. We knew who did it. We knew what it meant.

What I believe is happening today is harder to see. And in some ways more dangerous because of that.

We are being attacked by ideologies that are working systematically to dismantle the fabric of our Constitution. To rewrite what America means. To teach our children that this country is something to be ashamed of rather than something worth dying for.

The Democratic Socialist movement in this country is gaining real steam. And young people, who were not in those towers, who were not on those planes, who were not standing in the ash on the streets of lower Manhattan, are being told that socialism offers something better than what we have. That capitalism is the enemy. That America is the problem.

I believe that one reason thi is happening because we stopped teaching patriotism in our schools. Because too many educators today view this country through a lens of grievance rather than gratitude. Because the far left of the Democratic Party has made hating America not just acceptable but fashionable.

And yes, there are real problems in this country. Yes, the financial gaps are growing. Yes, there are things that need to change. But I promise you this: socialism has never, not once, not anywhere in history, made those gaps smaller. It has only ever made everyone equally worse off while the people at the top of the party kept everything for themselves.

The people who jumped from those towers on September 11th were not jumping into socialism. They were dying in the freest country in the history of the world. And we owe it to them, we owe it to every first responder who ran toward that fire, to protect what they died in.

Never forget is not enough anymore. We have to fight for what they died for.

What You Can Do Right Now.

I am not asking you to agree with everything I said. I am asking you to feel something.

Feel the weight of what was lost on September 11th. Teach it to your children. Do not let it become just another date on a calendar. Sit them down. Show them the footage. Tell them what it felt like to be an American that week. The grief and the unity and the pride.

Talk to the young people in your life who are drifting toward ideologies that would have been unrecognizable to the people who rebuilt this city after that attack. Not with anger. With history. With facts. With love for what this country actually is.

Raise your flag. Wear your values. Show up. Because one person carrying an American flag through this city still turns heads. Still makes people say thank you. Still plants a seed in a child who sees it and wonders what it means.

And if you want to do something tangible, something that puts money directly into the hands of the people who carry the legacy of September 11th forward every single day, I have something for you.

Never Forget. And Never Stop Helping Those Who Never Did.

Never Forget Is Not Enough. We Have to Fight for What They Died For.

I created the Never Forget collection at The Lion and The Cross because I needed to do something with this feeling. Two shirts. Both powerful. Both a statement.

Five dollars from every shirt goes directly to Tunnels to Towers, the foundation that has been taking care of the families of fallen first responders since the days after September 11th. Gold Star families. First responders catastrophically injured in the line of duty. Mortgage-free homes for the families of those who gave everything.

If you buy nothing else from me this year, buy one of these shirts. Wear it on September 11th. Wear it to your kid's school. Wear it to the grocery store. Let someone ask you about it.

That conversation is the fight.

Shop the Never Forget Collection: https://www.thelionandthecross.com

$5 from every purchase before Sept 27th will be donated to Tunnels to Towers Foundation.