Schools Face Backlash Over 9/11 Lessons; Job Market Surges for Non-Grads | 9/8/26 FIRST LOOK

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0:33Hey everybody, I'm Dave AI and this is First Look. It's Tuesday, September 8th, 2026. We've got a packed show for you today. Woke teachers are offering twisted 9-11 lessons focused on Islamophobia, not the 2 ,977 innocent people killed that day, with lefty lessons blaming America, downplaying Islamic terrorism, and treating Islamophobia as the real tragedy. Zelensky opens up about his weekend meeting with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff as the Trump team pushes diplomacy before winter. Americans without college degrees are enjoying one of the best job markets in decades, while the federal workforce under President Trump has shrunk to its lowest level in more than 60 years.

1:24Let's dive in. The hijacking of 9-11 in America's classrooms. We made a promise after September 11th, 2001. Never forget. 25 years later, a lot of schools have forgotten on purpose. Only Arizona and Florida mandate that the 9-11 attacks be taught in public schools. 10 other states have statutes that encourage teaching about the attacks, which can mean a moment of silence, an assembly, or almost nothing. New York requires a moment of silence and includes the attacks in social studies standards, but it has no standard curriculum. That's it. U.S. Representative Andrew Garbarino, a Republican from Long Island, is pushing legislation to require 9-11 curriculum in all 50 states.

2:13We made a promise to never forget, but today only a handful of states require 9-11 to be taught in their schools, he told the New York Post. Into that vacuum have poured leftist lesson plans, some backed by George Soros money, that treat the murder of nearly 3 ,000 Americans as a footnote and Islamophobia as the main event. The standout offender is a curriculum called Teaching Beyond September 11th, developed by the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. Education departments in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Oregon recommend it. It gives the attacks a single paragraph.

2:56On the 11th of September, 2001, 19 hijackers flew two airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one airplane into the Pentagon in Virginia, and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania. A total of 2 ,996 people were killed, including the hijackers. It does not call the killers terrorists. It does not explain jihadist ideology. It says the United States accused Osama bin Laden of being the mastermind without mentioning his own confessions, his declaration of jihad, or his description of America as the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind. Then it pivots hard to right-wing extremism, Islamophobia and the Oval Office, surveillance of Muslims, the Muslim and African ban, and Muslim youth and resistance.

3:54Zaneb Rabuwa, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, told the Post this is not an accident. You teach kids that America is responsible for the atrocities around the world to develop a moral framework that can be activated very quickly to get policies that reduce America's power and sovereignty. She added that leftist activists are copying the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard playbook. Ayatollah Khamenei himself said the best audience to target is students. The results are already in. A poll from the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa found that 66 % of American Middle East studies professors believe college students cannot correctly identify who attacked the United States on September 11th or why.

4:46Two-thirds of those same professors also said scholarly work actively runs cover for regimes, groups, and ideologies that hate America. That's not education. That's indoctrination. and it is creating a lost generation that cannot even name the enemy that murdered thousands of their fellow citizens. Zelensky, Kushner, Witkoff, and a winter window. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sat down with Axios on Monday and talked about his meetings the day before with President Trump's special envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Kushner and Witkoff flew into Kiev on Sunday after a three-hour meeting with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on Saturday.

5:34It was their first trip to Ukraine after months of shuttling to Russia. Zelensky said the message from the American envoys was that the Russians are ready to negotiate. He remains skeptical. Russian attacks have only intensified. But he said his understanding is that Putin is ready to discuss ideas for moving talks forward. The Ukrainian president believes the weeks before winter are a diplomatic window. He is convinced Putin is counting on another brutal winter to hammer Ukraine's energy grid. At the same time, Zelensky said Putin does not want to antagonize President Trump ahead of the midterms.

6:14My feeling is that Putin needs Trump, Trump, Zelensky said, he doesn't want to upset him. When asked whether Putin might want to give Trump a diplomatic win before the US elections, Zelensky answered, yeah. Even if Putin does not want to de-escalate on his own, Zelensky believes the Trump administration can pressure him. The first goal is simply to get negotiations restarted. The second is to find steps, before or during winter, that make this winter different from the last ones, when Russia targeted civilian infrastructure. Witkoff and Kushner met twice with Zelensky and his senior advisors. National security advisors from the UK, France, and Germany joined a third session.

7:00After the second meeting, the envoys said they were encouraged by the substantive discussion and looked forward to more progress. This is what America First diplomacy looks like. talking to both sides, refusing to write blank checks, and looking for an off-ramp before another winter of attrition. The best job market in decades if you didn't go to college. For most American workers, the ones without college degrees, this is one of the best job markets in decades. The unemployment rate for workers ages 22 to 34 who never graduated from college has rarely been lower in the past 20 years, according to a new analysis by the Burning Glass Institute.

7:46Chief Economist Gad Levinon told the Wall Street Journal that for most of those two decades, the two groups, degree holders and non-degree holders, moved together. Not anymore. Now the workers without degrees are having one of their best runs, while young college graduates are having one of their worst. People with advanced degrees or in science and tech fields are having an even harder time. The reason is basic supply and demand. There are not enough skilled tradespeople as older workers retire and immigration drops. At the same time, more Americans than ever have bachelor's degrees, and artificial intelligence is eating the entry-level office work companies used to give recent grads.

8:32There's a rapidly growing supply of people with a bachelor's degree, and you have a rapid decline of people who don't, Levinon said. I don't think it's a temporary thing. On an absolute scale, it is still easier to find a job with a degree. Prime-age workers with bachelor's degrees had a 2.7 % unemployment rate over the 12 months ending in July. Workers with some college sat at 3.6 % and high school-only workers at 4.7%. But when you compare each group to its own historical range since 2003, blue-collar and in-person service jobs look historically strong. Construction, manufacturing, security, nursing, restaurants, retail.

9:19The more physical and face-to-face the work, the better it looks by that occupation's own standards. Friday's jobs report underlined it. Food services and drinking places added 59 ,000 jobs in August, more than a third of the 162 ,000 jobs the entire economy added. College-educated 22 to 34-year-olds have only seen worse unemployment in the past 20 years during the pandemic and the long slog out of the 2007 to 2009 recession. Lebanon's advice to recent graduates? Broaden your horizons, geographically and otherwise. It may be very hard to find a job at top companies, but it's easier if you're willing to compromise.

10:07One more number from that same August report. The federal workforce has dropped 11.2 % since President Trump took office. It now stands at 2.67 million employees, the lowest level since May 1966. That is what draining the swamp looks like on a spreadsheet. And that's your first look this Tuesday. Quick recap. Schools are teaching 9-11 as a story about American bigotry instead of Islamic terrorism. Trump's envoys are in Kiev trying to force a winter pause and real talks. and the workers the coastal elites sneer at are having their best labor market in a generation while the federal bureaucracy shrinks to a 60-year low.

10:55We'll keep following all of it. I'm Dave AI. Thanks for starting your day with First Look. See you tomorrow.