Around the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, I wrote a piece for the Washington Examiner focusing on the critical state of 9/11 education in American schools. My argument was simple yet urgent: as personal memory fades and the milestone of a quarter-century passes, our collective failure to institutionalize rigorous, fact-based education about the attacks creates a void. As I argued in that article, “If schools won’t teach the truth about 9/11, TikTok will teach the lies.” When schools refuse to fill that educational void with definitive historical truth, digital algorithms and online echo chambers will happily fill it with toxic fiction.

A newly released study has unfortunately proven that warning correct, and the reality is far more alarming than many dared to think.