Woke Students: A Conservative Fever Dream

When I was a young man, conservative talk radio was complaining about college students and their liberal attitudes. Indeed, this has been a complaint since the Vietnam era. Any time a college stood up for “traditional values” and “against the liberal mob.” Then they were highlighted by the conservative media machine of the early Aughts. When I went to college, I fully intended to be one of those students who spoke out. I did that somewhat. When I arrived at college, I didn’t agree with gay marriage and I didn’t like abortion. I didn’t have an opinion on racial politics yet. And my liberal shift wouldn’t come for another few years. I remained active in GOP politics until 2012. This canard about “not all college students” has retuned again in this video from Stossel. Students don’t get radicalized in college. What changes, and what changed for me, was meeting people from different backgrounds. I was a litany reader for Holocaust Remembrance Day. I was a reader for banned books week and I talked about censorship in pornography as part of media literacy. My views expanded and that’s what happens to many students. You see a different cross-section of humanity and it changes how you see the world. I saw the sheltered upbringing I had for what it was and I saw the world differently, in time. This fever dream of a magical group of young people who go to college and come out without ever changing their views is vital to the conservative movement because Academia is one area that they don’t control, much like the rest of culture: hence the vitriolic outrage. To learn more, let’s watch this video.