AND ABOUT THAT CLOSING SPEECH FROM BRIAHNA JOY ON THE HILL’S RISING: On Wednesday I was on the Hill’s Rising with Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave.

Briahna claimed that colleges may graduate many people who think of themselves as “liberal” but are actually economically conservative. That doesn’t strike me as accurate.  According to a study by Nate Honeycutt (discussed here) about 40% of professors identified themselves as either Marxist, socialist, activist, or radical, and about 56% of graduate students self-described that way. If Briahna has noticed that fewer older people in the real world lean to the left economically, that is likely because many of us — even those like me who think of themselves as left of center — grew up when Marxist-Leninist countries were collapsing (like the Soviet Union) or had to at least partially embrace free markets (like China). My own experience was made even more vivid by living in Eastern Europe in the ‘90s and getting to talk directly to people who survived the Soviet system. If Briahna has noticed that many elite college grads are more economically “conservative,” which generally means more libertarian, that might be because there is evidence that higher IQ people tend to be more libertarian/classically liberal.