What American Campuses Are Actually Teaching, in Their Own Words

From “Death to America” chants to AOC’s viral capitalism gaffe, the ideological rot showing up on campus isn’t hidden anymore. It’s on video.

Zohran Mamdani isn’t the only symptom of where a generation of campus-educated activists has landed. Look at Columbia University this year, where the student group CUAD posted “Marg bar Amrika,” Persian for “Death to America,” directly to social media. When the platform forced the post down, the group didn’t apologize. They doubled down, stating plainly that “the sentiment still stands.”

Become a paid subscriber for the full archive and early releases.

That’s not a fringe incident happening in some dark corner of the internet. That’s a university-recognized student organization, operating on one of America’s most prestigious campuses, openly declaring hostility toward the country funding the very institution educating them. Scholars for Peace in the Middle East director Asaf Romirowsky put it plainly, arguing that students on visas who actively support terrorism and chant for America’s destruction should face real consequences, including deportation.

Why does it take outside advocacy groups to say what university administrations refuse to say themselves?

The Economic Illiteracy Runs Just as Deep

A resurfaced clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now going viral again seven years after it first aired, shows exactly how this ideological environment produces confident graduates who can’t explain basic economics. In the same Firing Line interview where she famously claimed unemployment was low “because everyone has two jobs,” a claim that doesn’t hold up against how the unemployment rate is actually calculated, AOC also declared flatly that “capitalism has not always existed in the world and it will not always exist in the world.”

That clip resurfacing years later isn’t nostalgia. It’s a reminder that the confusion wasn’t a one-time slip from a nervous freshman congresswoman. It’s the predictable output of an educational pipeline that rewards ideological confidence over actual economic literacy, then hands graduates a national platform to repeat it.

Here’s the sharp point worth sitting with. AOC holds a bachelor’s degree in economics. That degree didn’t stop her from making a claim about unemployment statistics that economists across the political spectrum, including plenty on the left, immediately flagged as simply wrong.

The Ideological Bubble Doesn’t Stop at Politics

This same campus culture has produced an entire generation of young women fluent in a specific vocabulary of grievance, one that treats basic biological and social realities as oppressive constructs to be dismantled rather than facts to work with. It’s the same environment that raised a generation of young men without a coherent framework for masculinity, and left plenty of young women just as confused about what they actually want from relationships and family life.

That’s exactly the gap Pearl Davis, better known online as JustPearlyThings, has built a massive following addressing. Davis doesn’t pretend the modern dating and family landscape is working the way campus feminism promised it would. She’s argued directly that career-first messaging left a generation of women isolated and disillusioned, telling audiences plainly that women are happier prioritizing family and children over career in the long run. Whatever people think of her more provocative positions, Davis is one of the few major voices willing to tell young women honestly that the promises they were sold in a gender studies seminar didn’t match what actually makes people fulfilled.

Isn’t it telling that a self-taught YouTube commentator with no university funding behind her has built a bigger, more engaged audience among young women than most official campus feminist organizations, simply by saying things that match lived experience instead of theory?

A System Producing Confident Graduates Who Can’t Explain the Basics

Put these threads together and a pattern emerges. Students chanting for America’s destruction while attending American universities. A sitting congresswoman with an economics degree who can’t correctly explain what drives unemployment. An entire ideological framework around gender and family that left so many young people disillusioned that outside voices like Davis had to build platforms specifically to fill the gap official institutions left empty.

None of this happened by accident. It’s the output of an education system that prioritizes ideological conformity over rigorous, fact-based instruction, producing graduates who can recite the correct grievances fluently while getting the actual facts, whether about economics, history, or basic biology, embarrassingly wrong.

How many more viral clips of confident misinformation does it take before parents start asking what exactly their tuition dollars are actually buying?