The American Dream, Rewritten in Marxist Ink

David Friedberg’s recent All-In podcast argument sounds convincing: student debt creates desperate graduates, financial stress drives political radicalism, and young Americans embrace socialism because capitalism failed them economically. The analysis captures real and understandable pain but overlooks the underlying mechanisms.

Zohran Mamdani reportedly owes at least $200,000 from his college years. He studied African Studies and graduated without a job, but now he’s winning elections as a socialist candidate in New York City. Friedberg connects the financial dots, but the ideological picture remains invisible.

In 1990s Uganda, a young boy and his family fled tyranny. They came to the United States seeking a new beginning. What was out-of-reach back home suddenly felt possible here: they finally had freedom, safety, and the chance to build a life of their own. Yet within a few years on campus, Mamdani begins speaking the language of American oppression. The immigrant who once found refuge and opportunity now wages a campaign against the very system that gave him both. His transformation, from grateful newcomer to political radical began in the classroom. The student loan crisis may deepen the resentment, but the machinery of conversion is ideological. The debt crisis provides cover for something systematic.

Universities didn’t accidentally produce socialists while teaching legitimate scholarship. They built ideological assembly lines disguised as academic departments. This subversion began many years ago, long before university education became largely unaffordable. This was a time when students were grounded in math, science, English, history, civics, and geography. These were real disciplines — tools for building knowledge, not dismantling it, in the pursuance of truth.

Today, we don’t have disciplines; we have “studies”. The curriculum itself serves as indoctrination infrastructure. Walk through any Gender Studies classroom and count the minutes before “oppression” becomes the central theme. Track how many lectures end without a condemnation of the patriarchy, white supremacy, or Western norms. The readings are curated for grievance, the discussions are steered toward activism, and critical thinking is welcomed only if it critiques the approved targets.

The same structure exists across Ethnic Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Queer Theory, and, of course, African studies. Mamdani’s plan to target “whiter neighborhoods” with higher taxes stems from an ideology shaped by grievance-based programming. Lectures trace a line from colonialism to capitalism to modern inequality. So when Mamdani proposes tax hikes based on racial geography, he’s performing a worldview in which demographics are destiny, guilt is inherited, and wealth redistribution is rebranded as liberation. It’s not economic theory, but ideology made actionable as the classroom spills into City Hall.

Today, many professors are former activists, granted tenure and power not for their ideas, but for their politics. The hiring process doesn’t reward intellectual rigor as much as it rewards ideological loyalty, with dissenting voices filtered out early as radical professors hire in their own image, building echo chambers propped up by credentials and public funding.

Six-figure loans for degrees create the perfect breeding ground for resentment. When broke graduates need someone to blame, they remember the answer proffered by the professors: the system failed them. The result is political militancy. Trust-fund students arrive at the same conclusions, with graduates of elite prep schools chanting the same slogans. Wealth doesn’t shield against indoctrination because the belief system is deeper than economic frustration; the programming transcends class.

Friedberg sees part of the picture. He’s right about the debt, but misdiagnoses the disease. The primary crisis isn’t financial; it’s intellectual. This is brazen betrayal on a national scale. America gave its universities a vital responsibility: to shape young minds at their most impressionable stage. In return, those institutions turned those minds against the very civilization that made their education possible. Mamdani’s victory is not an anomaly. If anything, it proves the system is working exactly as intended. Only now is the country waking up to what it set in motion long ago: ruin, born of trading reason for radicalism.