At 9:11 p.m. on September 11, 2026, with Yankee Stadium packed for a Subway Series game built around the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a man sprinted out of the left-field seats waving a Palestinian flag. The clock was not a coincidence. Security chased him into center field and tackled him on the grass. Fans above the Mets bullpen pelted him with beer cans. Then the stadium did what New York used to do without being told: it erupted in “USA” chants.
Police identified him as Kelly Marcucci, 38, of Long Island. He was wearing a “No Kings” jersey and described himself as a “revisionist Marxist.” He was charged with trespass and interfering with a professional sporting event.
It is unsurprising that the mainstream Democratic rallying cry of “No Kings,” the ideology of Marxism, and the adoration of Palestine are all present in this incident. For a large swath of the political left, America is the evil force in the world and must be demolished for a new world order to take place. The “No Kings” cry is a resistance to the current administration, while Marxism is seen as a counter to America’s free-market economy, and the Palestinian flag has become an anti-Western rallying cry.
Twenty-five years earlier, that same flag was waved in celebration of the attacks on the United States. On September 11, 2001, Palestinians poured into the streets of Nablus, East Jerusalem, and other West Bank and Gaza locations. They chanted “Allahu Akbar.” They flashed V-for-victory signs. They handed out candy—a traditional gesture of celebration. Contemporary reports put the Nablus crowd in the thousands. A woman in a black dress threw sweets in the air and said she was happy because “America is the head of the snake” and “always stands by Israel in its war against us.” Her daughter hoped Tel Aviv would be next.
That movement has traveled all the way to New York City in a mere generation. A pro-Palestinian rally was staged outside the 9/11 memorial. We are so used to these demonstrations that it would have been unnewsworthy if a video had not gone viral. A man in firefighter gear confronted one of the protesters, who was wearing an Elmo costume and waving a Palestinian flag, on camera, calling him an anti-American and telling him to go back to Palestine—and to take Barack Obama, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with him. As the firefighter walked off, someone in the scrum shouted that “the Jews are committing a genocide.” The FDNY later said the man in the uniform was not one of theirs.
Mamdani and AOC have earned the ire coming their way from those who still actually honor the fallen on 9/11. During the memorial (which Mamdani attended despite being asked by the families of the victims to stay away), cameras cut from a young man weeping as names were read to the two of them smiling, talking, and appearing to laugh. It was a grotesque image, befitting two of the most prominent defenders of the Palestinian cause in American politics.
The other pro-Palestinian members of Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, did not even bother with the performance. On the 25th anniversary, neither issued a public statement or social-media remembrance of the attacks. Unsurprising from Omar, who once classified 9/11 as “some people did some thing.”
If these politicians were just unknown members of Congress or a city mayor whom no one paid attention to, this would be largely irrelevant. Unfortunately, these are the most prominent and well-regarded leaders in the Democratic Party among young voters. The polling data clearly points to these being the people who have the greatest future among national Democrats.
An August 2026 Siena poll of New Yorkers found Mamdani at 72 percent favorable and 21 percent unfavorable with voters 18 to 34—a net of plus-51, up from plus-35 in January. A Strength in Numbers/Verasight survey the same month put young Democrats at 76 on a 0–100 feeling thermometer for Mamdani, far warmer than they rated Chuck Schumer (34) or Hakeem Jeffries (44). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remains the national face of that cohort: YouGov and Economist/YouGov surveys in 2026 have shown roughly seven in ten Democrats viewing her favorably, and younger Democrats have repeatedly put her first or near first in early 2028 primary horse races. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are less often broken out by age in national polls—they are less famous than AOC and Mamdani—but the pattern is the same.
Gallup’s 2026 numbers are the clearest warning yet. Among Americans 18 to 34, 53 percent now say they sympathize more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. Only 23 percent side more with the Israelis—a record low for that age group. Pew’s spring 2026 survey found 18-to-29-year-olds viewing the Palestinian people favorably at 58 percent and the Israeli people at 32 percent. Other youth polls in the last two years have shown large shares of the youngest voters willing to side with Hamas over Israel, to treat Israel as the villain of the American story, and to treat “Palestine” as a moral brand rather than a political movement with a documented habit of celebrating American corpses.
That is not an organic discovery. It is a curriculum. For a generation, elite schools, activist nonprofits, and social-media feeds have turned suicide bombs and planes flying into buildings into a children’s story about colonizer and colonized. September 11 is taught (when it even is taught) as blowback against U.S. “aggression.” Young Americans agreeing with Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” is the direct result of the media ignoring Obama’s red flags in 2008, particularly his sitting in a church for 20 years under a reverend who claimed that 9/11 was America’s “chickens coming home to roost.”
So now we have two Americas. We have one embodied by the Fairfax County School District, the largest district in Virginia, which specifically instructed teachers not to tell students that Islam was the driving ideology behind 9/11, and another embodied by Texas, which required its curriculum on 9/11 to include radical Islamic terror. On-the-street videos in New York, where the attacks happened, show that college students do not know which organization or ideology committed the attacks, but know that it has “something to do with Israel.”
A country cannot survive a rising generation that has more instinctive sympathy for the political culture that cheered 9/11 than for the country that was attacked. Osama Bin Laden thought he was striking a crippling blow against America when the planes hit the towers that fateful day. He would have done far more damage if he had donated to universities and then moved to Dearborn, Michigan, and run for Congress. Twenty-five years after his greatest triumph, his ideological successors are carrying out his mission. The question is: Are Americans strong enough to fight it?
Moshe Hill is a political analyst and columnist. His work can be found at www.aHillwithaView.com and on X at @HillWithView.