Governor Abigail Spanberger marked the 25th anniversary of September 11 with a video shot at the Pentagon memorial. In it, she refers to “the attacks of 9/11.” She speaks of people who “lost their lives.” She honors families who have spent a quarter century mourning. Her public safety secretary thanks the first responders.
What nobody says, at any point, in a video filmed at the site where 184 people were incinerated by a hijacked airliner, is the word terrorism. Al-Qaeda goes unmentioned. So does the small matter of who did it and why.
“Lost their lives” is the language you use for a mudslide. It is grammar built to have no subject — things happened, people were lost, time passed. Two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven Americans did not misplace their lives. They were murdered, deliberately, by men who crossed an ocean to do it because of the country those people belonged to.
Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said as much, and he was right to. There is a reason we say murdered. It assigns the act to someone:
The 3,000 who died weren’t Americans who “lost their lives” to some random natural disaster. They were MURDERED simply for the “crime” of being American. Murdered by members of Al-Qaeda, a radical Islamic terrorist group. Say their name. Never forget.
Now consider who was delivering this particular lesson in careful phrasing. Spanberger is a former CIA officer who has built a political identity on having worked counterterrorism. She knows the vocabulary. She has written it in cables. Nobody has to teach this woman what al-Qaeda is, which means the omission was not ignorance. It was a choice, made by professionals, in a scripted video, after edits.
And standing beside her was Stanley Meador, Virginia’s secretary of public safety — the former FBI official who oversaw the office that treated traditional Catholics as a domestic terrorism concern. He didn’t say the word either.
Sit with that arrangement for a second. The word “terrorism” was perfectly available to this administration when the suspects were Americans attending a Latin Mass. It became unsayable at the Pentagon. That’s not sensitivity. That’s a filing system.
The video also isn’t an isolated slip. Spanberger signed HB 913, a Virginia measure that critics say steers public school teachers away from words like “terrorism” and “Islam” when teaching the attacks — the instructional version of the same instinct. A generation of Virginia kids is being handed a version of September 11 with the perpetrators sanded out of it, and then we act surprised when college sophomores can’t explain why the buildings fell down.
Her defenders will say a memorial video is meant to honor the dead, not relitigate foreign policy, and that naming the killers risks tarring innocent Muslims. Take that seriously for one sentence, then notice the problem: precision protects the innocent. “Al-Qaeda, a radical Islamist terror network, murdered these people” is a narrow, accurate claim about nineteen hijackers and the organization that sent them. Vagueness is what lets suspicion spread to everyone, because a threat you refuse to name has no edges.
This is why it matters beyond Richmond. Spanberger is being floated as a Democrat presidential savior for 2028, and a party that spends every other week insisting that words matter chose the 25th anniversary of the worst attack on American soil to discover the virtues of the passive voice.
Never forget was a promise about memory. Memory includes the part where somebody did it.