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.