Reported by:
Cherry Meigh Timbol
News Content Editor
Published November 12, 2026
The finding
Twenty-five years after the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, a national survey from Yale’s Buckley Institute found that 21.8% of undergraduates agreed with the statement “America deserved September 11th.” That includes 11.0% who strongly agreed and 10.8% who somewhat agreed. 71.7% disagreed and 6.5% were unsure.
The survey was conducted by Inquire LLC among 803 full-time, four-year undergraduates aged 18 to 24, from September 5 to 14, 2026. It was the first year the institute asked the question, so there is no trend line yet.
What else the poll found
- Violence and speech: 44.6% said physical violence can be justified to stop “hate speech.” Among them, 41% also agreed America deserved 9/11. Among students who rejected that view, it was 7%.
- Iran: Among students with a favorable view of Iran, 49% agreed America deserved 9/11, more than double the overall rate.
- Ideology: 28% of liberal students agreed with the statement, according to reports on the poll. Students who preferred socialism were also more likely to agree.
- Socialism vs. capitalism: 42% preferred a socialist system, 28% preferred capitalism, and 30% had no opinion. Reports describe the 14-point gap as the largest in the five years the question has been asked. 47% agreed that socialist countries “like Cuba and the Soviet Union” offer a better economic model than the United States.
- Censorship: 40% agreed that “offensive speech” should be subject to criminal prosecution; 52% disagreed. Liberal students were the only group in which a plurality (47%) agreed.
- National outlook: Reports on the poll say 50% of students agreed America is forever linked to white supremacy, while 39% said the country is moving toward equality for more people.
Read it carefully
- One poll, one year. With no prior data, the poll cannot show that this belief is growing. It shows where one sample stood in September 2026.
- Who ran it. The Buckley Institute is widely described as conservative-leaning. That does not make the numbers wrong, but readers should check the published survey memo (prepared by Rob Schmidt of Inquire LLC, dated September 18, 2026) rather than rely on headlines. The coverage reviewed did not state a margin of error; a simple random sample of 803 would carry roughly +/-3.5 points, though online panels differ.
- The word “deserved.” It is loaded, and the poll does not tell us what respondents meant by agreeing. Some may be expressing anger at U.S. foreign policy; others may mean exactly what the words say. Both deserve scrutiny, but they are not the same claim.
- It is a minority. Roughly 72% of students rejected the statement. Subgroup figures above come largely from secondary reporting on the poll.
- The comparison to Hasan Piker that appears in several write-ups is the outlets’ framing; the poll did not ask about him.
- Not just a student problem. An Emerson College Polling/Nexstar survey of 1,000 adults (August 20-23, 2026) found 25% think the statement “The US Government helped plan the attacks of 9/11” is true, and 27% of Americans under 30 said they do not know who was responsible.
Opinion: what this says about America
Start with the moral baseline, because it should not be controversial. The people killed on September 11 were office workers, firefighters, flight attendants, passengers and children. No policy dispute, however sharp, makes them deserving of death. Criticizing American foreign policy, whether the Iraq war, Middle East alliances or the surveillance state that followed, is a legitimate argument that people on the left and right have made for two decades. Saying that civilians “deserved” to be murdered is a different claim, and a country that cannot tell the two apart has a civic education problem.
That is the real story beneath the headline. A generation born between 2002 and 2008 has no memory of the day, and the poll suggests that for a meaningful minority, the memory they have been handed is stripped of its victims and filled with grievance. The overlap in the data is the warning sign: the students most comfortable with violence against speech they dislike were the most likely to say America deserved the attacks. That points to a broader illiberal streak, one that treats moral outrage as permission, and it is not confined to any one party. Add the Emerson finding that a quarter of adults believe the government helped plan the attacks, and the picture is a country with eroding shared facts and thinning trust in its own institutions.
But the honest reading is not that a generation has collapsed. Seven in ten rejected the statement. The better response than panic is to do the work the poll implies: teach 9/11 with survivor accounts and primary sources; teach the policy debates that followed alongside it, without letting criticism of policy slide into contempt for victims; and press universities to protect real viewpoint diversity so these questions get argued, not just absorbed. And someone should repeat this survey, with transparent methodology and a margin of error, before anyone declares a trend.
The other side
Skeptics make fair points: advocacy-group polls can frame questions to maximize shock; a single agree/disagree item on a loaded word can overstate real conviction; young people have long polled more radically than they later behave; and preference for “socialism” often means Nordic-style social programs, not Cuba. Defenders of the poll answer that the wording was plain, the sample reasonable, and that 22% is too large to wave away. Both can be true, and only repeat surveys will settle it.
