Dan Proft continued a conversation about historical illiteracy among college students, citing a survey finding that roughly two-thirds of Middle East politics professors say their students cannot identify who attacked the United States on September 11 or why. For further discussion, Proft turned to Paul Kengor, editor of The American Spectator, a professor who has taught Middle East politics at Grove City College for many years, and author of “American Pontiff: Pope Leo XIV and His Plan to Heal the Church.”
Kengor said the finding did not surprise him, noting he began writing about the same phenomenon among his own students roughly a decade ago. He offered some context for the gap, pointing out that today’s incoming college freshmen were generally born around 2008, seven years after the attacks, making 9/11 outside their lived experience in the way Pearl Harbor was outside his own. Still, Kengor argued the deeper problem lies with K-12 education broadly, along with a general decline in reading among Americans, saying students increasingly encounter history in fragmented form through short content on their phones rather than through sustained reading, which he said contributes to a public that knows a topic exists without understanding its basic facts.
Proft cited data showing the share of nonfiction titles among the year’s twenty-five best-selling hardcover books has fallen sharply over the past decade, and both he and Kengor argued that even the fiction Americans do read skews toward less substantive commercial genres rather than classic literature. Proft also referenced newly released results from the Program for International Student Assessment showing American 15-year-olds’ reading scores near a 25-year low and math scores near their lowest point since the test began in 2000, alongside polling showing public satisfaction with K-12 education at a 30-year low. Kengor said the problem persists into higher education as well, arguing that grade inflation at many elite institutions means students face lighter workloads even in college, with Grove City College as something of an exception in how much reading it still requires of students.
The conversation shifted to “The Brink of War,” a new film from Angel Studios depicting the 1986 Reykjavik summit between Ronald Reagan, played by Jeff Daniels, and Mikhail Gorbachev, played by Jared Harris. Kengor, who reviewed the film for The American Spectator and has studied the original memoranda of conversation from the summit at the Reagan Library, praised the film for depicting the negotiations largely through dialogue between the two leaders rather than through action sequences, and said the exchanges closely track the historical record, including moments when Gorbachev grew heated, which Kengor said reflected his real temperament. He noted that Daniels does not physically resemble Reagan, unlike Dennis Quaid, who played Reagan in a 2024 film Kengor also reviewed, but said Daniels’ performance overcomes that within the first several minutes. He also praised the film’s supporting performances, including its depiction of Nancy Reagan and of Secretary of State George Shultz, whose account forms much of the film’s basis, and noted a scene depicting Nancy Reagan consulting an astrological chart, which Kengor said was plausible given her documented interest in astrology even though he could not confirm the specific scene’s accuracy.
Kengor connected the film’s Cold War backdrop to a broader argument about generational memory, suggesting that anyone younger than Generation X has little direct understanding of the ideological stakes of that era, which he linked to the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America within the Democratic Party today. He pointed to Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, noting Fetterman’s low lifetime rating from the Heritage Foundation despite facing a primary challenge for occasionally expressing sympathy toward Israel or making conciliatory remarks about President Trump, as evidence of how far left the party’s center of gravity has shifted. Proft raised the broader theory of a “red-green alliance” between hard-left and Islamist political currents, and Kengor said he has been struck by how many Muslim American elected officials, including Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, have aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America and taken strongly critical positions on Israel, a pattern he said runs counter to what he once expected from immigrant communities with more socially traditional backgrounds and one he expects to continue.