It appears that Hasan Piker is not alone in saying that the United States deserved the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. As the New York Post reported, a new poll shows that one in five college students say the U.S. deserved the attack that killed nearly 3000 fellow Americans. Forty-two percent said they would prefer to live under socialism, while only 28 percent favor capitalism.
Roughly half of the students — 47 percent — agreed with this extraordinary statement, “While socialist countries like Cuba and the Soviet Union have not been perfect, they offer a better economic model than capitalist countries like the United States.”
These students have been educated in an ideological echo chamber of higher education where conservative and libertarian professors have been gradually eliminated from faculties. They have been taught by faculty who run from the left to the far left. This is the entirety of what they know of socialism. They have no memory or experience with the collapse of such systems in the last century. They hear figures such as Zohran Mamdani offering the “warmth of collectivism” and believe that socialism offers free stuff that the wealthy will have to pay for.
They see Piker prancing around in his Mao suit and have no association with a Cultural Revolution that killed millions.
In “Rage and the Republic, I discuss how this year we are celebrating not just our 250th anniversary as a Republic but the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The book was not a great success in Great Britain. In addition to its foundational support for capitalism, it challenged the mercantilist policies of the British Empire and supported the claims of the colonies in seeking greater economic freedoms.
Smith, however, was immediately embraced by the founders, who saw his work as the perfect economic theory to advance their political theory. Ours was the first Enlightenment Revolution based on a belief in natural rights that came from God, not governments.
Yet, the founders knew that true individual liberty could not be achieved without economic freedom. Smith’s idea of the “invisible hand” offered a model of individual economic freedom in which the individual tastes and choices of citizens drove whole economies.
The combination would prove transformative, as the U.S. became not only the world’s oldest large-scale democracy but also history’s greatest economy. We will need that combination in the years to come to maintain what I call a “liberty-enhancing economy.”
These students have little exposure to the economic concepts that made this Republic the most prosperous in history. More people have been raised out of poverty by capitalism than socialism.
However, socialists like Mamdani can promise free stuff, and these students believe that they are entitled to it.
When socialist François Mitterrand came to power in France in 1981, promising a “rupture with capitalism,” he quickly destroyed the country’s economy. However, he continued to dazzle French citizens with promises of free money, even appointing Andre Henry as the Minister of Free Time to assist citizens in their new socialist leisure.
Notably, this poll shows lower support than the Democratic Party as a whole. Sixty-five percent of Democratic voters have a favorable view of socialism. An even greater percentage of young Britons want to live under socialism, and 72 percent favor nationalization of industries.
The poll again shows that we must first address the ideological echo chamber of higher education if we want to protect this unique Republic.
As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities that hold the line on free speech, orthodoxy at private universities remains a barrier for many conservative and independent thinkers.
Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates. However, even those universities show the same hiring bias. The difference is that they are more sensitive to public pressure to restore balance.
Legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to treat citizens like a captive audience. They expect to continue funding their departments while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.
If faculty members want to maintain echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.
Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining an intellectually diverse faculty in determining the level of continued support from citizens.
When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in The Indispensable Right.
The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring, but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.
This poll is disturbing, but not surprising. The greatest trick ever played by the activists in academia was to indoctrinate, rather than educate, young people while getting their parents to pay for it.
“Forty-two percent said they would prefer to live under socialism . . .”
Unable to refute JT’s arguments, the Left resorts to attacking the poll — its methodology, its source . . .
Yet the Left never asks an obvious question: Is there any other evidence consistent with that poll’s results?
Yes there is: That poll is perfectly consistent with countless others, e.g., Axios (look up the others yourself). And it is perfectly consistent with that age group’s voting and policy preferences (for free stuff).
JT is not arguing, he’s analyzing. And why should “the Left” ask any questions? Rightists don’t. Consistent? Consistent is, that you are full of shite; have no idea what you’re spewing.
“You are full of shite; have no idea what you’re spewing.” Fits you perfectly Anon!!!
This is the same cra_p you spent all day yesterday posting and rewriting others mindless comments. Get a brain. Better still, get lost.
Once again Turley comes across as the baffled retiree. A small town 82 year old. Reading polls about youths he can’t understand.
In reality Turley teaches at a prominent university in downtown Washington. So Turley should be ‘telling us’ why youths think the way they do. If he can’t explain it, Turley isn’t listening. Or he isn’t making the effort to find out what students think.
In other words Turley is lazy and lacking curiosity. One sees that in these columns. Turley sticks to familiar, well-worn topics. He merely pulls up the last column he wrote on an issue and changes a few sentences. How unmotivated!
This could be the reason universities avoid conservative academics. Conservatives might be known for lack of curiosity. They might be notorious for lack of motivation. And an inability to understand the students they presume to teach.
When you really think about it, Turley is scarcely a model of intellectual integrity. Quite the opposite. Turley is set in his old ways to a shocking extent.
Get lost Anon.
You do not have to be a brilliant person to view the end result of these policies in Britain and France. Both of whom are socialist enclaves allowed to spiral downward under the protective umbrella of the US military against tyrants from abroad while they rot from within, victims of their own nihilistic flirtation with Marxism.
Written by “Anonymous.” Figures. I would be embarrassed to write that response also.
“Once again . . .”
Yours is a vacuous filled with nothing but ad hominem smears.
I assume you work for the DNC.
Vacuous you say? I assume your the spawn of a worm and a ball of dung.
Perhaps.
But at least I know how to spell “you’re.”
In any organization (our nation being one), you can divide people up into 2 categories: complainers and problem-solvers. Complainers frame a problem primarily through shaming and blaming — it’s always someone else’s fault. Strip away the self-righteous indignation, dredging up the inglorious past, and other rhetorical ploys, deep down the complainer is telegraphing “I’m refusing to take any responsibility for solving this”.
The problem-solvers start with the opposite framing and disposition: The assumption is that by taking a measure of responsibility, one begins to scope out possible ways to solve the problem.
They have confidence in themselves and others to persist, to research, to communicate productively, to experiment, to model and apply previous successt….and to not be sidetracked or demoralized by the complaint gallery.
Your suggestion is that Prof. Turley could be more curious and intellectually stimulating, as opposed to whinging daily about the same themes. OK, progressive solutions are lame, tried and failed, old and tiresome. No argument here. But, mere complaining is preformative.
I’d also like him to take up a problem-solving mindset. I know he is capable of it. And, the commenters could be drawn in that direction, too.
I assume he’s trying to maintain the demeanor of an analyst and not an activist, which is why I think JT is usually lacking in presenting practical solutions, but today he actually offered one up – boycotting Universities that unequally suppress conservative speech and speakers.
So, take up a militant tactic? It’s politically immature and aloof. Winners co-opt their opposition through creative proposals that divide and conquer, that dilute the opposition’s unity on the issue. Losers “fight”, which usually strengthens the unity and resolve of the opposition.
Prof. Turley, like Ann Althouse, Megan McArdle, and some other observers of the passing scene, is not someone who is politically aligned. He’s a conventional professor of a certain vintage who is dismayed at what has happened to both faculty life and public discourse since he entered the academy in 1987. The Media Matters recruits show up here and lob accusations at him while complaining about his choice of topics. A**holes gotta a**hole.
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What dismays the professor are phenomena for which their are no obtrusive solutions which can be applied in institutional life, though there are measures which may have an indirect effect.
Anon: Next time try making a valid argument instead of just name calling.
I’m guessing Turley flunked you. And for good reason.
OT: “The Death of France – The Secret Report Macron Is Hiding”
A brilliant article on the death of France and possibly America.
The Secret Report
In the summer of 2024, a classified seventy-three-page report, commissioned at Macron’s own request, landed in the hands of the French state with a single purpose: to answer the question French politicians had been dodging for twenty years: what is really happening to this country, and who is behind it. And for the next ten months, that answer stayed locked away, while the streets of Saint-Denis emptied of French faces, the mosques of Marseille filled, and the call to prayer drowned out French in neighborhoods that were still, on every map, France. The president of the Republic knew the answer, and he chose to keep it to himself.
https://behindthenarrative7.substack.com/p/the-death-of-france-the-secret-report
To the lanterne
And “Crazy Abe” Lincoln started it all by dumping 4 million illegal aliens—non-Americans who could not be admitted to become citizens by law—into America on January 1, 1863.
S. Meyer,
Thanks for that report. The situation is much worse than I thought and I already thought it was very bad.
Meyer, French women aren’t having children at replacement levels. It’s happening all over the developed world. Educated women aren’t interested in being moms.
For that reason, illegal immigration was keeping the U.S. younger than it would’ve been without immigration. So deporting all the illegals isn’t really helping us. We’re just breaking up families while getting rid of skilled and unskilled workers.
So deporting all the illegals isn’t really helping us. We’re just breaking up families while getting rid of skilled and unskilled workers.
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Yes, it is helping us, by removing people who came here in defiance of law and have no commitment to the common life here. No, we’re not ‘breaking up families’. The judiciary has insisted, very inappropriately, that the children of people here illegally be regarded as citizens. They are properly removed along with their parents. No, illegal aliens are not (on average) people with much skill, nor do the unskilled workers provide services which could not be supplied by the domestic population. Again, George Borjas in his scholarly work demonstrated that the extant population experiences almost no welfare benefit from immigration of any kind and the benefit experienced is sensitive to the eligibility terms of welfare programs. He also demonstrated that what benefits from immigration appear repair to more affluent people.
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The Democratic Party, of course, sees immigrants of all types as a vote farm. That’s why they want it and that’s why they want legal and illegal immigrants on various doles.
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Please note, the agricultural population of the United States began to decline in raw terms around 1920. In Canada, that decline set in around 1940. North America was fully settled at that time and immigration mainly added to the urban population of the country. Low flow immigration, with screens set up to turn away people particularly unsuited for the common life, should have been the order of the day. That means people of a certain age with a known criminal record, people who are peculiarly infirm, and people of a certain age who lack proficiency in the country’s language get turned away. Otherwise, you admit in the order in which the subject applied, with families given a common place in the queue which is the average of the various individual places they were given on entry to the queue.
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Note also, that refugees should be cared for in camps proximate to their country of origin, with a view to their eventual repatriation. Resettlement should be a last resort and should be undertaken in culturally proximate countries or countries which had an ongoing patron-client relationship with the destination country. The displaced persons camps in Europe closed in 1959 and the states of Eastern Europe definitively ceased to be Capitve Nations by 1992. The only refugee admissions to the United States since the war should have come from the displaced persons camps, from the Slavic and Hungarian populations of Europe, from Indo-China, and retail from among people who were here for other reasons when their situation at home changed.
Haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I plan to. Wanted to comment on the first excerpted part that begins, “There was a time when Paris was the most romantic city in the world.”
There was a time when Beirut was known as “the Paris of the Middle East”: Cosmopolitan, clean, peaceful, beautiful architecture, prosperous, romantic, vibrant night life; high end hotels and restaurants that attracted the world’s rich and intellectuals.
Then came civil war. They got the politics wrong. And politics, of course, is everything. As a result, a once beautiful and prosperous gem of a country destroyed itself via internal “tribal” (religious) conflict.
Lebanon in 1966 was a middle income country with a per capita product about 30% that of the United States; it was about 70% that of Israel, about 1.35x that of Syria, 1.35x that of Jordan, and 3.5x that of Egypt. It’s per capita product as we speak is in real terms half-again what it was in 1966, but 17% of that of the United States, 29% of that of Israel, 1.16x that of Jordan, 80% that of Egypt, and 4x that of Syria. The situation in Syria is another item in the file marked “The worst thing that can happen to an Arab country is the ascendancy of the Ba’ath Party. “
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Other Arab states in 1967 buffalo’d the Lebanese government into allowing its territory to be used as a staging area for paramilitaries associated with the P.L.O. Over the next several years, you had exchanges of brickbats in which the P.L.O. forces would launch and attack on Israel and Israel would retaliate. The Lebanese government attempted to restrict the P.L.O’s activities. This got pushback from the P.L.O but also exacerbated conflict between Lebanese political factions. Lebanese politics was conducted by competing patron-client formations active in each of the country’s confessions. The Sunni Muslim organizations engaged in a certain amount of Nasserist tub thumping as part of their political mobilization (something favored also by the boss of the Jumblatti faction of the Druze population. They accused the government of ‘refusing to defend the country’ by restricting the activities of the P.L.O rather than firing back at Israel. (NB., the P.L.O was a bad guest in Jordan as well, and the Jordanian government eventually expelled them from the country in September 1970).
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Different Lebanese political organizations had their own militias, so there was quite a bit of tinder lying about in 1975. The P.L.O was a participant alongside the Muslim factions at the beginning of the war, followed by Syria’s intervention in 1976, which lasted until 2005. This was supplemented by Israel’s interventions in 1978 and from 1982-85. Israel managed to arrange for the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982. Both Syria and Israel had clients among the Lebanese factions and Iran began developing them in 1982. As Israel has decapitated the Hezbollah and some efforts by the Lebanese government have been made to disarm the residue, Lebanon may be approaching a state where the influence of paramilitaries and foreign governments is contained to a level it hasn’t seen in 60 years.
Let’s all meet at the Green Dragon Tavern at 2 AM.
This “fundamental transformation” must be struck down with extreme prejudice.
These views are the ultimate luxury, held mostly by young people who have never had to pay their own way, and, for many, never will have to pay their own way. The biggest beneficiaries of capitalism can be the biggest fools about socialism. It’s ironic.
The word “effete” turns up in the SAT prep courses that grease the skids for wealthy-student socialists who are being groomed for the Ivies.
I counsel them to say it 5 times while looking in a mirror.
And notice it’s always the wealthy snobs that leave America when the person they voted for doesn’t win. Like Rosie O’Donnell. Their wealth does not bring them wisdom, it makes them spoiled little toddlers. The rest of the world, meanwhile, is clamoring to get into America because of the life that free market capitalism makes possible.
Does this mean that you have surrendered to communism?
Roughly half of the students — 47 percent — agreed with this extraordinary statement, “While socialist countries like Cuba and the Soviet Union have not been perfect, they offer a better economic model than capitalist countries like the United States.”
Young leftist students live in opposite world. “Better” means poorer and more oppressed, no civil rights, totalitarian government, political prisoners, no freedom, bread lines. Students who say that are privileged, wealthy, entitled little brats who have never known a day of hunger in their lives. They know zero about history, geography, or economics. They are TikTok-diseased mindless drones whose brains have been fried by social media. They are the product of a failed educational system.
Cuba is 90 miles away from America. They can go there and live. Good luck, and good riddance.
Does this mean that you have surrendered to communism?
^ That question makes no sense ^
As you say opposite world or upside-down world is perversion, vice. It isn’t that they want something. It’s that they want to punish those who do have something. It’s the cruelty they’re after. imho
It’s in Christian writings as a prophecy but isn’t read correctly because Christian commentary has been added. imho
Is it time to defund the congress? lol, they think they can defund the people. rofl. hahahaha…
Happy holidays, omfk
Maybe the pollsters were trolling low ranked colleges, such as Oberlin and Smith, where sameness and thought-policing are widespread.
They might have got a different result had they canvassed high ranking institutions, where there is class diversity, such the University of Florida or Arizona State.
https://nypost.com/2026/11/14/opinion/manhattan-institute-places-public-universities-not-ivies-on-top-in-new-rankings/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&preferred_app=nypost&utm_source=message_app
“Piker is not alone in saying that the United States deserved the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack…”
I guess that means they also agree with throwing gays off roofs and making women into second-class citizens.