Twenty-two percent of American undergraduates told pollsters that the United States deserved the September 11 attacks. Not that the attacks were blowback. Not that foreign policy played a role. That we deserved it — the planes, the towers, the 2,977 dead.
That was one finding in the Buckley Institute's annual survey of college students, released this week during the 250th anniversary of America's founding. The rest of the numbers weren't much better.
Forty-two percent of undergraduates said they prefer socialism to capitalism — the widest gap favoring socialism the Buckley Institute has recorded in five years of polling. Forty-seven percent went further, telling pollsters that Cuba and the Soviet Union offer a better economic model than the United States. The Soviet Union, which hasn't existed since 1991 and killed roughly 100 million people across the twentieth century trying to prove that exact theory.
Forty-five percent said physical violence can be justified to stop "hate speech" — a new record in the survey's history. Forty percent believe offensive speech should be a criminal offense. Nearly half said they'd refuse to sit in a classroom with a professor who holds different political views, and 48 percent reported they couldn't be close friends with someone from the opposing political party.
So we're producing a generation that can't tolerate a dissenting opinion in a lecture hall but is confident it can redesign the entire American economy.
The numbers land differently when you remember who's filling out these surveys. These aren't fringe activists at a rally. They're 18-to-21-year-olds at American universities — the people who'll be managing companies, writing legislation, and treating patients inside of a decade. When 50 percent of them tell you America is "inextricably linked to white supremacy," that's not a campus curiosity. That's a hiring pipeline.
The ideological infrastructure behind these numbers isn't hard to trace. Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has built a political brand on socialist economics. Far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who commands millions of young viewers, has made dismissing American institutions a content genre. The pipeline from campus poll to political movement is shorter than it used to be.
The Buckley Institute, a Yale-affiliated organization, has been tracking these trends long enough to spot the trajectory. The socialism preference isn't new — it's been climbing. The 9/11 finding is new. Five years ago, that question wouldn't have cracked double digits. Now one in five students will say it to a pollster with their name attached.
One number buried in the data complicates the narrative the usual suspects want to build. Sixty-five percent of these same students say they're proud to be American. That means a significant chunk of undergraduates simultaneously told pollsters they're proud of a country that deserved to have its civilians massacred. They don't see the contradiction because nobody in their academic life has ever asked them to reconcile it.
That's the real finding. Not that young people have bad politics — every generation starts out thinking it invented justice. The finding is that the institutions we're paying $40,000 to $80,000 a year to educate them can't teach them to hold two ideas in their head long enough to notice when one cancels the other out.
The same cohort that prefers socialism has never lived under it. The same students who'd criminalize offensive speech can't define where offense begins. The same undergraduates who say America deserved 9/11 still want American degrees, American salaries, and American passports.
The Buckley Institute will run the survey again next year. The socialism number will probably climb. The speech-suppression number will probably climb. Whether the 9/11 number climbs depends on something the poll can't measure — whether anyone on these campuses still has the standing to tell a 19-year-old that 2,977 people didn't deserve to die, and make it stick.
Sixty-five percent proud. Twenty-two percent glad it happened. The survey doesn't say how much overlap there is.
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