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.
Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. You have to be taught history and then retaught it as you grow and your experiences expand. Teaching alone is not enough but retention long term is even more important. In medicine and law we have requirements for continuing education in order to stay abreast of advances but it serves to remind us that science or law which is older but retains validity is also retaught.
There seems to be little actual thinking and seeking of information outside one’s own silo. Other specialties or disciplines are packed with knowledge that can be explored so easily in our electronic world and can apply to your own discipline if you simply study and look. There seems to be real reluctance to actually look afield and outside the didactic of the classroom to the freer flow of thought and information that is not constrained by the classroom or the teacher.
It seems that with all the information available now, views on some campuses seem so narrow. There seems to be a dearth of real curiosity. Which is really unfortunate for our younger people and maybe our nation. Older people are not exempt from this failing either.
Some people believe man never landed on the moon. Some believed the world is flat. Some believe climate change will cause the world to end in a few years. Some believe Americans got what they deserved when the World Trade Center came down, and Jews got what they deserved on October 7th. Some believe the seventy or eighty million Americans who voted for President Trump are “deplorable”. Some believe “above us only sky”. Some believed Thomas Malthus. Some believed Galileo was a heretic. Some believed the “axiomatic” Law Of Conservation Of Energy and the “axiomatic” Law Of Conservation Of Mass. Some believed that Obama would keep his promise “to regain America’s moral stature in the world” by closing Guantanamo.
And so it goes.
Be not afraid. Truth is forever.
It’s funny how so many here don’t realize how out of context their views are compared to those students. Really. Think about it for a second.
None of the 803 undergraduate respondents were alive on September 11, 2001. Polling analysts note that for Gen Z students who learned about 9/11 strictly through history textbooks alongside the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the word “deserved” is often interpreted through the lens of blowback from U.S. foreign intervention rather than celebrating the murder of civilians. It means they also have the benefit of knowing all the reasons including our dirty history of intervening in other countries. After all we did make a mess in the Middle East and continue to do so. THEY understand that. We still see history as if it happened yesterday and literally watched those planes hit the towers in real time. Us older folks are still stuck in the ignorant perspectives of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Some have learned. Others (hint-hint) like in a blog, have not. Is there a saying about those who don’t learn are doomed to…repeat history….right?
Those students are not being “indoctrinated” they learned with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and a fuller historical context. Not just ‘in-the-moment’ manner we did. What they learn is not through “indoctrination” it’s through a wider perspective. That’s a good thing.
As a domestically born eighty-two year old lay American male I wouldn’t go so far as to say America “deserved” 9/11 but I am willing to state with complete confidence that extremist capitalism precipitated it. It was never a ‘terrorist’ attack but rather an act of retaliation by a group of Middle East guerrilla warriors attacking the home bases of the US money, power and war mongers as hard as they could at the time. A terrorist attack would strike at the soul of America (e.g., the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and/or a fully packed Super Bowl football game stadium) not just economic and military symbols. The professor appears to ignore how much and many times our ‘government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich’ has unconstitutionally intervened in the internal affairs of those nations, mostly exploiting them for their oil early-on as I recall, setting a precedent that Trump has equally stupidly followed in Venezuela with the ‘effect’ of his ’cause’ yet to be known. 9/11 was just a more tragic way that the insanely greedy rich (who never pay their fair share of taxes for all of the harm they do) can harm us all, with the engineered collapse of the economy in 2008 and the phony “Covid-19 pandemic” being two less-tragic others. CGS
I am willing to state with complete confidence that extremist capitalism precipitated it
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Your self confidence is unwarranted and your explanation nonsense.
^^^There it is^^^
A perfect example of a someone who learned from the flawed perspective of those early years and someone willing to acknowledge a reality many want to willfully deny.
“One in five college students believe we deserve 9/11 and half view socialism favorably”, not to mention the majority of them know anything about American history, can read and comprehend what they’ve read and if they were required to take and pass a college entrance exam 75% of them would fail.