Virginia’s Governor filmed a 9/11 anniversary video at the Pentagon and never said the word “terrorism.”
Governor Abigail Spanberger marked the 25th anniversary of September 11 with a video recorded at the Pentagon memorial. She spoke of “the attacks of 9/11.” She honored families who have spent 25 years mourning. Her public safety secretary thanked first responders.
What nobody said, at any point in that video, was the word terrorism. Al-Qaeda went unmentioned. The identity and motive of the attackers never came up, despite the fact that the video was filmed at the site where 184 people were killed when a hijacked airliner struck the building.
Special offer for our readers:
Put Interest On Ice into 2027
The phrase “lost their lives” does a lot of quiet work in this kind of statement. It is language built without a subject. Things happened. People were lost. Time passed. But 2,977 Americans were not lost. They were deliberately murdered by men who crossed an ocean specifically to kill them.
Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said as much publicly, and critics say he was right to do so. The word “murdered” matters because it assigns the act to someone. Removing the perpetrators from the sentence is not sensitivity. It is erasure.
As originally reported, the omission is especially striking given Spanberger’s background. She is a former CIA officer who built her political identity around counterterrorism work. She has written that vocabulary in cables. Nobody needed to explain to her what al-Qaeda is, which means the absence of the word terrorism was not ignorance. It was a deliberate choice, made by professionals, in a scripted and edited video.
Standing beside her in the video was Stanley Meador, Virginia’s secretary of public safety and a former FBI official. Meador previously oversaw an office that reportedly categorized traditional Catholics as a domestic terrorism concern. He did not say the word terrorism either, at the Pentagon, on September 11.
That contrast is worth sitting with. The word “terrorism” was apparently available to this administration when the suspects were American citizens attending a Latin Mass. At the Pentagon memorial, it disappeared entirely. That is not a sensitivity calculation. That is a deliberate filing system for an uncomfortable word.
The video also does not appear to be an isolated decision. Spanberger signed HB 913, a Virginia law that critics argue steers public school teachers away from words like “terrorism” and “Islam” when instructing students about the September 11 attacks. The scripted omission in her video and the instructional guidance embedded in that law reflect the same instinct, applied at two different levels.
One is a governor’s communications office. The other is a classroom. The result, critics argue, is a generation of Virginia students being handed a version of September 11 with the people who carried it out quietly removed from the story.
