Journalist Elizabeth Vargas was hosting an excellent NewsNation town hall-style conversation with fellow journalist and noted libertarian advocate John Stossel on socialism earlier this week when a young woman in the audience launched a revealing harangue that dumbfounded the hosts and the audience.

“I am a communist, and I am also an economist, and what I want to talk about is economics because you made the claim that a lot of people that support socialism or communism simply aren’t educated. I am actually about to have my PhD in economics, and I can say that a lot of the theories that you based your conception of the free market on have actually been disproven, both empirically, theoretically, and mathematically,” declared New Jersey resident Stephanie Attar.

At that point, the camera panned to Vargas and Stossel, with the former’s eyes widening and the latter holding both hands outstretched by his side, with a look of bewilderment on his face.

Attar was reacting to Stossel’s familiar defense of free market capitalism as the economic system that has produced the most widely spread prosperity, reduced poverty more than any other system, and liberated billions of men and women, especially in the United States and Europe, to enjoy the highest standards of living in human history.

Vargas challenged Attar, asking her, “Are you saying having a communist country is the solution?” She replied, “Let me tell you something. So, what I believe is based on the facts. The two countries in human history that have reduced poverty by the greatest amount and in the fastest amount of time were not capitalist countries, they were China and the Soviet Union.”

Attar then recited a lengthy list of things she believes “the state must provide to all citizens, the things they need for a dignified life as a matter of human rights. Free housing, free education, we have enough homes in this country right now to provide every single man, woman, and child with a roof over their head. If we wanted to, we could end homelessness overnight, but the reason we don’t do it is because things are not in a capitalist system distributed according to human need, but according to what makes capitalists the most amount of profits. We need free health care. We need free food and water. There is no reason why anybody should die from hunger and hunger-related illnesses on a planet that already makes more food to feed 10 billion people.”

Clearly, Attar either knew nothing or discounted the historical facts about the oppressive, grinding poverty and murderous tyranny epitomized by the Soviet and Chinese communist regimes. Focusing just on the economics, however, demonstrates the reality of communist regime poverty vs. free enterprise prosperity in America:

World Bank figures are not available for the Soviet Union, but comparison of historical gross domestic product per person for China and America is especially revealing. In 1965, the figure was $99 for China and $3,818 for the U.S. Two decades later, the respective figures were $295 and $18,237. In 1991, the year the Soviet Union fell apart, the figures were $334 and $24,342. And in 2010, $4,629 and $48,643.

It would be easy to dismiss this young woman as offering only the typical idealistic extreme thinking of youth, but in fact her ranting is a disturbingly accurate illustration of what Insider Advantage pollster Matt Towery calls “the mirage of ‘elite higher education.’” That mirage is one of seven Towery describes in his just-published book entitled “The Honoring of Ignorance: The 7 Mirages Destroying America.”

American higher education, especially in the elite private universities, has been dominated for decades by faculties and administrations upholding and enforcing thinking that is almost entirely based on liberal and left-wing assumptions and perspectives. With that dominance came a precipitous decline in educational achievement standards, the elimination of virtually all of the core of Western Civilization’s classical writing on philosophy, politics, and religion, and the suffocating envelopment of every aspect of campus life by what Towery calls “the Toxic DEI Bureaucracy” enforcing standards and programs to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion” at all levels of American society.

“At the same time academic standards weakened, progressive activism expanded across the humanities and social sciences. Great works of literature, foundational political philosophy and the serious study of Western Civilization were pushed aside or reframed through Critical Theory, post-colonialism, race, gender and identity,” Towery explains.

“The growth of DEI administration accelerated the changes in higher education. What began as an effort to welcome students from different backgrounds became a sprawling bureaucracy with influence over hiring, promotion, curriculum, discipline and campus speech,” Towery adds.

“At many institutions, faculty applicants, including candidates in mathematics, physics, medicine and engineering, were required to submit diversity statements. They had to demonstrate not just that they would treat students fairly, but that they embraced a particular ideological approach. An applicant who defended colorblind merit, questioned identity politics, or declined to use the approved terminology could be screened out before the academic department seriously evaluated the applicant’s research,” he continued.

The accuracy of Towery’s assessment has been documented by survey after survey in recent years. A 2024 report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) “surveyed 6,269 faculty members at 55 major colleges and universities over a three-month period for ‘Silence in the Classroom: The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report,’ and discovered a fraught campus atmosphere in which wide swaths of those surveyed admitted to hiding their political views to avoid censure.”

Among the major FIRE findings were these:

• 87% of faculty reported finding it difficult to have an open and honest conversation on campus about at least one hot-button political topic.
• About one in seven faculty members (14%) reported being disciplined or threatened with discipline for their teaching, research, academic discussions, or off-campus speech.
• 35% reported toning down their written work to avoid controversy. Shockingly, this is nearly four times the 9% of faculty who said this when the same question was asked of social scientists in the 1950s.

No wonder then that Nathan Honeycutt, FIRE’s manager of Polling and Analysis, concluded that “the McCarthy era is considered a low point in the history of American academic freedom with witch-hunts, loyalty tests, and blacklisting in universities across the country. That today’s scholars feel less free to speak their minds than in the 1950s is a blistering indictment of the current state of academic freedom and discourse.” And the leftist views of the professors and administrators are reflected in the views of graduating seniors, especially at elite schools like Harvard and Dartmouth.

The data also shows that the views of their professors and administrators are adopted by most of their students. According to the Harvard Crimson campus newspaper, 66% of the class of 2026 graduating seniors describe themselves as “somewhat or very progressive,” while only 10% put themselves on the conservative side of political views. The same situation is reflected at Dartmouth, where 70% of the 2025 graduating seniors identified themselves as liberal or very liberal, according to The Dartmouth.

No wonder then that Towery is correct in observing that “a young voter does not need to understand central planning to decide that socialism sounds kind. He only needs to believe that kind, educated, modern people favor it and that selfish, ignorant people oppose it. The political choice then becomes another statement of identity.”

“This is the thread connecting elementary education, suburban mothers, elite universities, and the larger attack on Trump voters,” Towery observes. “From the first years of school through college graduation, young Americans encounter a largely one-sided account of politics and culture. Their parents face pressure to validate it. Their class-mates enforce it. Their professors intellectualize it. Most of the mainstream media then repeats it back to the public as expert consensus. Anyone who breaks that chain becomes a threat.”