NEW YORK CITY — At the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, the sound is strangely quiet, as water pours continuously into the reflecting pools at the footprints of where the Twin Towers once stood.
“Louis Jimenez Jr.,” is one of the names called from the almost 8,000 victims lost since the September attacks 25 years ago.
Jimmy Jimenez’s younger brother Luis is one of the souls on the list.
“He worked for Marsh McLennan on the 98th floor,” Jimenez said while looking at a photograph of his brother. “He was 25 years old when this happened.”
The thought that 25 years have passed since his brother died is heavy.
“It means 25 years of pretty much surviving,” Jimenez said.
Just across the street, the anniversary took on a very different tone.
Far-right activist Jake Lang and roughly 100 followers gathered nearby for an Islamophobic march, carrying flags defaced with an X over the symbol of the Muslim faith.
Others challenged the official account of the attacks.
One man speculated the whereabouts of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani before the buildings collapsed.
“Why did they take Giuliani out and tell him the buildings were going to collapse?” a protestor hollered over the crowd along Church Street.
The contrast was stark.
At the memorial, families were reading the names of people they lost. Across the street, others were debating competing explanations for how those people died.
Like a mother breaking up a siblings’ spat, a hymnal draws visitors’ attention to a benevolent message nearby.
The St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine hosts a group of religious leaders from across New York City gathering for an interfaith memorial service. On his way to the service, New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani ignored the hecklers shouting islamophobic cliches. He never took the bait, choosing to stay focused on what’s important.
"Those who attacked our city, they did so because they thought they could break us at the fractures," Mamdani said. "They thought they could frighten us, they could make us feel alone. How wrong they were."
He eulogized the victims, and longed for the unity of humankind.
“Love, my friends, is but another word for resilience,” he reminded the small crowd. “And it was love that guided us as we helped one another to our feet.”
Knowing the pressure the city’s first Muslim mayor faced in the wake of attending the 9/11 memorial service, Catholic Archbishop Ronald Hicks is inspired by Mamdani’s message of peace.
“What I'm most touched by is that we can come together as people, united in a common bond to love," Hicks continued, "to love each other as brother and sister.”
That brotherly love is broken, 16 stops uptown on the No. 6 subway line, where the conversation shape shifts into another form of conspiracies.
The 9/11 "truth" conference is pitched as a broader network of citizens theorizing the September Attacks may have been an “inside job,” or at the very least, a government collusion to help the world’s wealthiest.
It’s a relatively small crowd of about 100 people holding a candlelight vigil. Some warn visitors about perceived dangers in vaccines, others about “mind controlling” fluoride in toothpaste, then there are the anti-semites on a stage casting doubt on an entire faith.
“The Rothschilds also had a very interesting relationship with the East India Company,” one speaker was overheard trying to connect the 18th century family to the 9/11 attacks. He loosely tried to explain, “They're an international banking family... Follow the capital. Follow the money.”
Britt Tevis, a Syracuse University American history professor, said using the Rothschild’s family name is a known dog whistle.
“It certainly is an anti-Semitic trope,” Tevis explained that it’s a long used one. “Contemporary anti-Semites have pointed to the singular Jewish family as evidence of global conspiracy."
Nevertheless, the name has frequently appeared in conspiracy narratives over the last 200 years wherever anti-semites can claim a link between Jews, money and political power. Tevis said connecting the family's Jewish identity and financial history to a global conspiracy creates a false association.
While the Rothschild family was a banking giant around the turn of the century, their worth, estimated by Forbes Magazine, pales by comparison to current political figures today.
The irony is on full display as multi-millionaire and rock legend, Roger Waters, latches onto the Rothschild trope.
“Free to send our sons to war, our sons of course, not theirs,” Waters recites from a poem he’s penned. “‘Free to burn and pillage to fill the family vault.’ That's getting back to the Rothschilds,” he adds, as the enraptured crowd applauded.
When a reporter and his cameraman followed Waters to ask why he is spreading false claims, Waters said nothing, then gave a half hearted laugh before hopping into his awaiting limousine.
Tevis warns that rhetoric centered on hidden power and world domination is often an antisemitic trap.
Back at the memorial, the people who experienced September 11 firsthand were focused on something else.
Joe DeJesus was a paramedic when he heard on the radio that the second tower was collapsing.
“I grabbed my stethoscope, my ParaShears, I just flagged an ambulance and he threw me in the back” DeJesus recalled. “And I landed up here in Ground Zero.”
Asked about people who spread falsehoods about the attacks, DeJesus said Ground Zero should remain a place of remembrance.
“This is a place of sanctity,” he said. “What (we) should have in this area is cohesiveness, bonding, compassion, understanding.”
David Cameron, traveled from the United Kingdom to visit the memorial for the first time since losing his girlfriend, Elisa Ferraina, on September 11. He sees a chasm widening between those who remember and those who don’t.
“41% of the world's population weren't born when that happened, 3.8 billion people” Cameron said. “And I think it's just important for people to realize what happened.”
Off in the distance, the screamers are now a din in the background, while Sam Rosenbaum stood at the reflecting pools wearing a blue-and-silver ribbon in honor of his mother, Cheryl, who also died that day.
“You can't listen to the noise. Obviously, we know what happened,“ Rosenbaum continued, “You can't let it affect you. You gotta ignore it. That's also why I say never forget.”
As night fell over Lower Manhattan, dissension and despair disappeared beneath the sound of the memorial's water.
Two beams of light rose from the footprints of the Twin Towers, illuminating the sky above the site, climbing past the shouting, past the flags, past the theories, until all that was left above Lower Manhattan was the light.
