I find it baffling how western nations can't understand how they're now providing ideological justification to the same stances Russia and China are taking towards the internet.
Somewhat less glibly, it's compartmentalization, basically. Take an ordinary, not-especially-intelligent person who has basically authoritarian intuitions, teach them liberal principles, and you'll get a person who espouses the liberal way only in the particular examples you taught them. (Or in other examples that someone else explicitly connects to those principles.) Most people are just really terrible at applying things they notionally believe outside the specific contexts they associate them with.
People throughout history are the same as they are today. Subservient to authority, self-serving, lazy thinkers, and barely even able to think for themselves in the first place.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, are you saying that no well-educated person would have any conservative viewpoints? That seems patently nonsense.
This person self-identified as liberal. However, they only recognized liberal views within the contexts they had been pre-familiarized with. In fact, this person read, regurgitated, and lauded conservative views for years while beleiving them to be liberal views. This is a particularly hyper-educated person (though in a non-technical field completely removed from economics, politics).