In the upscale enclave of Highland Park, New Jersey—just a short drive from Manhattan’s skyline—students at the local high school kicked off a new club this week dedicated to exploring socialism. The group’s debut meeting took place over lunch on Thursday, drawing a crowd of curious teens to discuss ideas that challenge the free-market foundations many of their families rely on for their comfortable lives.
Highland Park isn’t your average working-class town. With median household incomes topping $100,000—well above the national figure of around $83,000—it’s a place where parents commute to high-paying jobs in finance and tech, and kids grow up eyeing Ivy League acceptances. Yet here, amid the manicured lawns and brick colonials, a flyer for the Highland Park High School Socialist Club has been making the rounds.
Obtained by Fox News Digital, the poster mimics the iconic World War I recruitment ad, but swaps Uncle Sam for Karl Marx himself, stern finger extended toward the viewer under the banner “WE WANT YOU.”
The text is an insult to anyone who understands freedom and the lack thereof. “Learn ways to solve social problems that don’t involve exploiting the working class,” it declares. Other lines urge participants to “Learn what socialism is—not just what they tell you,” pick up “media and literacy skills along the way,” and join efforts “To help us build a better world!” It closes with the classic rallying cry: “Workers of the world unite!”
Advising the club is a teacher named Mr. Girvan, whose role keeps things running smoothly under the district’s guidelines. When pressed for comment, Superintendent Kristina Susca pointed to federal rules, explaining, “All high school clubs are subject to the Equal Access Act requiring that school districts permit extracurricular clubs, regardless of their political content.”
Fair enough—schools can’t play favorites. But in a building full of kids from families that embody the capitalist success story, one has to wonder if this setup is priming the next generation to bite the hand that feeds them.
This isn’t some isolated stunt. A Cato Institute survey from earlier this year found that 62% of Americans aged 18 to 29 look favorably on socialism, with 14% even warming to outright communism. That’s a stark reminder of how ideas once confined to dusty manifestos are seeping into everyday conversations, especially among the young.
Just last month, New York City voters—particularly those under 30—handed a win to Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old self-proclaimed socialist now set to take the mayor’s office in January. Three-quarters of that youth bloc backed him, signaling a trend that’s hard to ignore. Critics, including a former Trump administration official, have called it a potential “Marxist shift” for the nation’s biggest city, where Mamdani’s playbook echoes the very rhetoric popping up in this New Jersey hallway.
What’s driving this? Some point to classrooms where history gets reframed through lenses of class struggle, turning figures like Marx into misunderstood heroes rather than architects of regimes that left trails of economic ruin and human suffering. Others see it as the fruit of an entitlement culture, where kids raised in plenty still feel the pull of promises about “fairness” without grasping the costs. A 2025 Fox News analysis tied it to broader educational shifts, noting how neo-Marxist views of oppressors versus oppressed have woven into curricula from elementary school up, fostering a worldview that dismisses America’s exceptional story.
Parents in Highland Park are starting to take notice. Whispers in PTA chats and local Facebook groups question whether a club like this belongs in a public school funded by tax dollars from entrepreneurs and small-business owners.
One mom, speaking anonymously to a local outlet, called the flyer “tone-deaf” in a town built on the very system the club critiques. No formal backlash has erupted yet—no petitions or school board showdowns—but the air feels charged, like the calm before a community reckoning.
It’s easy to dismiss as teenage rebellion, the kind that fades with the first real paycheck. But patterns like this raise bigger questions: Who decides what gets a platform in our schools? And when does “equal access” tip into endorsement of ideologies that have failed spectacularly elsewhere?
As 2026 looms with its own batch of elections, from school boards to statehouses, Highland Park’s little club serves as a microcosm. In places where prosperity should breed gratitude for individual liberty, the allure of collectivism lingers like an uninvited guest. For now, the teens are uniting over lunch. But the real test comes when those ideas face the light of adult choices—and the hard lessons of history.
