From the ubiquitous campus shout-downs to the recent string of Palestine protests, college students are not only increasingly intolerant but also easily deployable weapons of wokeness. I know, because I used to be one of them: my high school brainwashed me into being a hardcore woke socialist.
Thankfully, with the help of my own inquisitiveness and conservative internet content, I came to realize just how indoctrinated I was—and I have dedicated myself to helping other young people avoid a similar fate. A clip of me thanking Charlie Kirk for “waking me up” from being a socialist even went viral, garnering more than two million views on TPUSA’s Instagram page.
My story is bizarre, especially to those who recognize me from my Charlie Kirk clip, because I did not even grow up in America. I spent my childhood attending American-style private international schools in Taiwan. In my sophomore year of high school, my British literature teacher, a staunch atheist, talked more about his hatred of former president Donald Trump and Christianity than Beowulf.
In my junior year, my U.S. history teacher told us that Antifa was simply “an idea,” not a paramilitary terrorist group that had been tearing down cities and terrorizing conservative students on college campuses. Since it was the election year, our class spent many hours watching the DNC’s campaign videos for Joe Biden, balanced out with mainstream networks trashing Trump for good measure.
The actual learning of American history and election mechanics took a back seat. Though come to think of it, we did learn about the Electoral College: it was the unfair system that Republicans used to win the 2000 and 2016 elections. How dare they!
Joe Biden campaign videos and Antifa apologetics were not even my weirdest high school moments. In my environmental science class, our teacher showed us a vegan propaganda documentary that claimed that the only solution to climate change was making the whole world go vegan.
In my senior year, my history teacher continued his anti-Trump in-class activism when he told us that he was in total support of Biden’s devastating withdrawal from Afghanistan but blamed Trump for the problems that followed. My English teacher claimed that critical race theory (CRT) was a right-wing hoax, but proceeded to tell the class that the New York Times’ “1619 Project” should be incorporated into the school’s history curriculum to educate us about race.
The worst part is that we all believed it. Our in-class seminars proceeded like Maoist struggle sessions; instead of actually discussing issues, we merely parroted left-wing talking points about socialism, systemic racism, COVID restrictions, and vaccine mandates. In fact, we did not even know what we were talking about. For instance, we all full-throatedly endorsed Bernie Sanders-style wealth taxes despite being wealthy private school students. When one student asked why a flat tax was a bad idea, nobody could answer him. In hindsight, that was a precious moment; I realized we knew not the substance of the views we were taught to espouse.
Only after high school did I realize how bizarre and misanthropic my teachers really were. After graduation, I followed some of them on Instagram. Of course, I expected that the accounts my teachers personally followed would be left-leaning, but I was taken aback by just how strange they were: some of them followed advocates for child sex change surgery, others explicit anti-white racists, and others truly unhinged figures. Some even posted about the drag shows they attended.
Although I respect their personal freedom, those teachers’ inability to separate their radical beliefs from their in-class instruction is a major reason why, in my view, America is at a difficult point today. Upon reflection, my teachers may have been exceptionally bad: some of them apparently came overseas because they hated the U.S. They enjoyed teaching international students because they knew their parents would be particularly naïve.
Growing up with teachers like this set me up to become a socialist who believes that America is fundamentally racist. However, I was lucky to come across conservative internet content such as Charlie Kirk’s videos on the free market that upended my worldview and showed a new way forward. Despite suffering through years of fringe partisan politics masquerading as education and attacks from peers I used to call friends, I am overwhelmingly grateful that I was willing to ask questions and give different perspectives a chance.
Today, I am not only an ex-socialist, but also proudly championing the very beliefs I was programmed to resent—patriotism, Judeo-Christian family values, and the free market. I now serve as a Turning Point USA Chapter President, Leadership Institute Campus ambassador, and Campus Reform’s very own correspondent at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This is my story of how I “woke up” from woke ideology.
* The views expressed in this article solely represent the views of the author, not the views of the Chicago Thinker.