The America that existed at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is fast being forgotten, at least by our elite classes. A little lesson in some of its contours might be useful for us on the anniversary of that date——specifically, in how it illustrated the importance of certain categories of personhood that our elite culture spares no expense today to slander.

Like accurate historical memory, whiteness and maleness have been under more or less constant assault over the last two decades. At the Democratic National Committee in Chicago recently, a mainstream media commentator straightforwardly admitted that “the demographic reality” is that white males are “the past” and nonwhite non-males will be permanently taking their places going forward. The Great Replacement is a baseless conspiracy, we are constantly told by these same people, and yet here they are essentially heartily cheering something that sounds quite like it on national television.

Whiteness is everywhere smothering those outside the category with hateful repression. Even the mispronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name, the experts in such matters have warned us, is a racist act with disturbingly harmful effects. Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R-N.C.) was vigorously chastised on air by two progressive racial activists for, they claimed, perpetuating “the history and legacy of white disregard for the humanity of Black people” in the act of emphasizing the second rather than the first syllable in the vice president’s first name.

Of course, what they are endeavoring to distract us from with such shenanigans is the fact that the name “Kamala” is objectively an odd one in this society, and the percentage of Americans who had never seen or heard it before she came on the national political stage is certainly very high. Nearly 99 of every 100 people in the US are not of Indian origin and do not have Indian names such as hers. Given that the number of people with such names in this country is tiny, most people here have no experience pronouncing such names. It is a bizarre move to insinuate that someone failing to produce the desired pronunciation of a name they have never seen before in their lives, even after being told the correct pronunciation, is somehow a reflection of a group-based animus rather than just the understandable consequence of unfamiliarity.

My  own last name is constantly mispronounced when I visit societies where it is  uncommon, but I refrains from accusing people in foreign countries of vicious anti-American prejudice because I know this is not the likely explanation. Likewise, it would be absurd to accuse Americans of hatred of the French simply because they have difficulty correctly pronouncing French names.

It is perhaps, on this anniversary, not inappropriate to notice a few things about whiteness and maleness that those caterwauling on television, like Michael Eric Dyson and Keith Boykin, about the pronunciation of Kamala Harris’s name never seem to notice. Did you know that white males took on a huge percentage of the mortal burden of that awful day? Probably not, because this is something elite culture can be relied on to avoid ever observing. But it is true. The overwhelming majority of the victims of 9/11—very nearly 2/3—were white men. More, white people of both sexes made up a full 80 percent of victims. I cannot recall any of the constant critics of white maleness in contemporary America ever acknowledging this remarkable fact.

The outsized role of white men on that day does not end there. The one light of encouragement on Sept. 11, 2001, was the successful effort by the passengers of United Flight 93 to prevent the terrorist hijackers from fulfilling their mission, and instead forcing the plane down to crash into a rural field near Pittsburgh. We know that the passengers acted collectively to take down the hijackers, but we also know that there were leaders in the effort who shouldered an extraordinary portion of the responsibility for getting the job done. Twenty years ago, the press could still be counted on to accurately report on this. One wonders though if, had such a thing happened in our time, the media would instead find reasons to avoid the multiculturally inconvenient facts about the events on that plane.

Four people formed the front of the fighting squad the passengers assembled to confront the terrorists and take back the cockpit. Their names were Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, and Jeremy Glick. Note those first names, first of all. The average American would have no trouble correctly pronouncing them, as they are perfectly traditional American names.

In 2001, it was perfectly possible to guess too, from the names, and without fear of arousing complaints of gender stereotyping, that all four were men, as indeed they were. And not only were they all men; they were stereotypically masculine men. Rick Reilly, writing on ESPN.com on the 10^th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11 in a piece he titled “Let’s Keep Rolling,” identified the four men this way:  “It was four athletes [who led the attack], pushing a food cart.” Beamer’s wife described Todd as the kind of guy “everybody picked … first for their team … he kept his head in the game, no matter how great the pressure.” Burnett’s wife Deena called him “from birth, a fighter.” Glick was a black belt in judo, and Bingham a serious rugby player who, according to his biographer, once barehandedly disarmed a would-be robber in a street encounter. These four guys were macho, alpha males, and this is precisely why they were the ones who took the lead in this mission.

Now, let’s get even more inconvenient. All four men were also white. To be precise, Glick was Jewish, and there are of course long and often truly mindbogglingly stupid debates about whether Jews are white people or not, but since the contemporary pro-Hamas progressive left labor so tirelessly to argue that Jews ought to be considered not an ostracized nonwhite minority group but an identity of racist oppressors of brown people, we acquiesce here to their categorization of Jews as whites. After all, they cannot be allowed to count Jews one way—oppressive white powermongers keeping the Palestinians down—when it suits their purposes and then to flip flop—Jews as nonwhites in order to keep the Flight 93 heroes from being universally white dudes—when reading things the other way is in their strategic interests.

No one, in 2001, saw this as a lack of representation in the ranks of American leadership. Instead, we were all grateful that such individuals existed, and in sufficiently significant numbers to make it likely that the people needed would be on a random plane and would be able to do what they typically do once the difficult task unveiled itself.

The despisers of white “patriarchy” would perhaps do well to think a bit more and a bit harder before they unleash their tired tirades. Twenty-three years ago, we all of us owed a great debt to the actions of four white guys doing the kind of heroic stuff that white guys in this country have been doing for a long time.