Indoctrinated ignorance is crippling young minds and incapacitating the next generation’s ability to lead the nation, according to conservative college students from around the country.
Persistent use of social media, a lack of financial literacy, and a reliance on leftist university professors and those in Washington, D.C., are destroying the critical thinking of people in their 20s, said Generation Z attendees of the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida.
“It’s ignorance. Ignorance brought on by the Left, the indoctrination from the schools, to the media, to the culture of Hollywood, I think that’s the biggest issue,” said Juan Rubio, a 23-year-old student at Miami Dade College.
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“The more I started waking up, the more I started reading and getting around different outlets in different environments, I realized I was indoctrinated. I was taught to only think a certain way. I was taught to only look at the Left, think of the Left, and reject everything from the Right.”
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It wasn’t until he turned 18 that Rubio said he “woke up,” the West Palm Beach, Florida, native said.
Teenagers and young professionals today don’t know how to think for themselves, and they are more than happy to let others tell them what to think at the expense of their physical and mental health, according to 24-year-old Austin Paolino.
“People are not socializing, and they are just repeating opinions they hear online,” the Colorado native said. “People are wearing masks. People are on their phones too much, on social media too much, and they’re using that mindset when it comes to their physical health.”
“They are constantly eating out, eating processed foods, and if you look at the rates of obesity for children and mental health issues, it’s gone through the roof. They say politics is downstream culture. I think politics is downstream of culture, which is downstream from health.”
Allegra Maloney, a 24-year-old who came to CPAC from Bryant University, echoed Paolino’s sentiment and argued that a constant pressure to adapt to leftist preaching is destroying the “health-conscious” lifestyle enjoyed by previous generations.
“I think that’s what really sustains people and supports people to think for themselves,” she said. “Especially in education, when a lot of times in higher education, you have professors indoctrinating students who don’t know any better than to passively agree for that degree. We need critical thoughts to be at the core. We need to have debate and discourse again. You don’t see many people our age standing up for what they believe in in the classroom and getting into a productive debate.”
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Reliance on others to tell them what to do, think, and feel is also threatening the lives of the youth beyond the boundaries of college campuses, one attendee noted.
Brooks Elson, a 19-year-old student at Florida State University, said his generation’s lack of financial literacy could be its downfall.
“I think it is our lack of financial literacy. I think it’s our lack of understanding when it comes to how we manage our money. It’s really setting a precedent for what people feel that they can do in their own lives. I’m not saying that we should be looking to people in Washington for everything in life, that’s not the case at all, but I definitely think that people make a lot of really bad decisions with finances, and I think it really needs to be emphasized more in our education system.”
“How we understand personal finance and money, beyond what you hear in school or see on TikTok, is a really big issue that goes very unnoticed.”
The next generation of America’s leaders must educate themselves, because relying on others to teach them has only made them worse, said Anastasia Budrick, a 19-year-old who intends to run for school board in North Carolina and attends Liberty University Online.
“We’re not aware enough. I feel like we’re not educating ourselves, and we can see this across the board. Young people are just not knowing what’s going on in our country, which is causing more turmoil because this generation is completely numb to what’s going on,” she said.
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“I think TikTok, I think social media has just kind of dumbed us down and distracted us from the true issues going on. I also think that spending four years at a liberal university, in a bubble, can also do that.”
Recognizing the systemic ignorance weighing their generation down, the young conservatives at CPAC agreed it is their role to educate their peers on the dangers of the Left’s indoctrination and fight back.
“Our role is to mobilize fellow students, leaders, and the community to teach ourselves how to vote with our dollars and our time,” Maloney said.
Too often, her peers and young conservatives are afraid to speak against the machine of leftist thinking, she said, but the risk of doing nothing is far too great to stand aside and do nothing.
It is that fear driving Budrick to run for office.
“We need to be dedicated towards educating people,” she said. “Young conservatives need to understand that if they don’t agree with a person, they can do research.”
Every young conservative is not required to perform some esoteric action, Paolino and Elson agreed. Instead, it is the small, day-to-day steps that will most effectively chip away at the “chains of indoctrination” holding their generation back.
“The most important thing is to step away from the institutions like Big Left corporations,” Paolino noted. “Don’t apply to work there or buy their products. Use your minds to be more wholesome, make better decisions, and just spend on the stuff that’s actually important.”
Elson said he tries to make changes every day without being “preachy.”
“It just boils down to holding each other accountable,” he said. “Perfect example: Ask your friend, ‘Why in the world did you buy those Yeezy sneakers? You could literally buy a pair of shoes for $440 cheaper than that, and use that money to weigh more lucrative opportunities.'”
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The battle of fighting his way out of “brainwashing liberalism that teaches, ‘Orange man bad,'” has given him the ability to bring his friends and neighbors into the light of conservatism, Rubio said.
“I started going out. I started speaking my mind and being rejected, being fought, being debated, being called a racist even though I’m Latino, called all these names. But, now, I know the facts, and I’m not afraid to stand up,” he said. “When I get to talking with them, a lot of leftists are apolitical people who are starting to come around to DeSantis because of his ideas.”
“We just got to latch on and show what he and Trump stand for and what they are against. We can use that to reach out to people and say, ‘Hey, man, I know what you mean, but I thought the same way as you did, but I changed because I started looking into this,'” he continued.
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“‘Tell me why you feel that way. What makes your thoughts? What makes you think that you are right? In reality, if you’d step back, things are different.’ The society makes our generation think one way, but what’s going on in the real world is totally different than the little show the society has us in.”
