Girl Goes to College Normal — Then Has to Be “Deprogrammed”
Kenneth C. Zirkel/Wikimedia Commons
Mary Lyon Hall at Mount Holyoke College
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

“Girls go to college to get more knowledge. Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider,” went the normalized anti-male grade-school rhyme. Half this spirit has permeated “higher” education, too: College today can be aggressively misandrist.

But the girls getting more knowledge part? Well, not so much.

Just ask Annabella Rockwell. She arrived at college “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” as she put it, only to emerge as an unhappy, anti-male social-justice warrior bent on reforming her mother and fighting the “patriarchy,” all while wallowing in victimhood and battling a campus-acquired alcohol problem. In fact, the brainwashing was so severe that her mom paid $300 a day to have her “deprogrammed.”

The Daily Mail reports on the story:

Rockwell, 29, graduated from Mount Holyoke in Western Massachusetts in 2015….

Prior to attending the elite school to study history, which charges $60,000 a year, Rockwell said she grew up in a “traditional” household and had considered herself to be open-minded. However, the politics minor claimed the all-women’s school “totally indoctrinated” her into thinking she was an oppressed victim of the patriarchy.

“This professor tells me about the patriarchy. I barely knew what the word meant. I didn’t know what she was talking about,” she told the New York Post. “I wasn’t someone that into feminism. I just knew that I felt I had always been free to do what I wanted. I never experienced sexism.

“But I was told there’s the patriarchy and you don’t even understand it’s been working against you your whole life. You’ve been oppressed and you didn’t even know it. Now you have to fight it.

“And I just went down this deep rabbit hole.”

“I saw everything through the lens of oppression and bias and victimhood. I came to the school as someone who saw everyone equally. I left looking for injustice wherever I could and automatically assuming that all white men were sexist.”

Raised in convention and comfort — Rockwell is heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune — she was initially taken aback by how unabashedly anti-male the Mt. Holyoke professors and students were and by the school’s “drinking culture.” She also describes rituals geared toward eliminating “gender roles,” such as students getting a “MoHo chop” haircut. (One undergraduate said it made her look like “a 14-year-old Justin Bieber”; it’s basically the lesbian look.)

Emerging from this indoctrination mill “anxious,” “nervous,” “depressed,” and with an alcohol problem, Rockwell said, she turned on her mother, Melinda, even though the two had once been bosom companions; she wrote a manifesto indicting her mom for allegedly being unloving and reducing her to a “wind-up toy.”

Rockwell felt it was her role to “teach” her mother, and all others deviating from her orthodoxy, the error of their ways. She states that Holyoke professors actually encouraged “alienation” from parents (the brutal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia did this, too), going so far as telling students not to spend holidays with their parents but, rather, to “come stay with us.” Rockwell further said that most students embraced this orthodoxy and that rejecting it meant ostracism.

Also attesting to this intolerant atmosphere is former congressional candidate Laura Loomer, who spent one semester at Mt. Holyoke. Explaining that she was bullied for her conservative beliefs by both students and staff, she mentioned that a school chat board had a whole thread titled “I Hate Laura Loomer,” reports the New York Post. “The entire culture there revolved around hating men and being a lesbian,” she said.

If this sounds like “a cult,” well, that’s exactly how Fox News host Tucker Carlson described such higher education while interviewing Rockwell Monday (video below). In fact, after months of estrangement from her daughter, mother Melinda “enlisted the help of a deprogrammer who charged $300 a day as well as Annabella’s old tennis coach,” writes the Post, to restore the young woman’s sanity.

While the deprogramming was successful in Rockwell’s case — perhaps because her early-years upbringing inculcated an emotional attachment to virtue — many other young people aren’t so blessed. Thus should parents realize that “higher” education today is a morally deadly farce: The schools get by on reputations earned a century ago, but are actually now left-wing propaganda mills akin to communist re-education camps.

Also important is understanding what makes a student particularly easy prey for this indoctrination: falling victim to our time’s characteristic philoso-spiritual disorder, moral relativism.

As I’ve warned of for decades and as Barna Group research has found, few people today believe in Truth (absolute by definition), in objective morality. And without Truth to reference when making moral decisions, they generally fall back on the most compelling, seductive yardstick they have left: emotion — feelings.

But feelings change with the wind, and can be changed by an ill wind. With these young people being rooted to nothing permanent, having no sound moral foundation, all social engineers need then do is manipulate their feelings to completely alter their worldview.

This is done, in large part at least, by using a few different methods in concert: indoctrination with seductive ideology (“You’re a victim!”), application of social pressure (e.g., ostracism threat) to enforce it, and seduction into sin (e.g., sex, drugs, alcohol) to ease its acceptance. The latter is effective because, to state the obvious, those first corrupted morally are more likely to accept immoral ideology. The rule: A person’s moral and intellectual orientations will tend to correlate.

Note, this is no doubt why cults often use sex to manipulate their victims.

The bottom line is, the powers-that-be today love warning about “misinformation.” But there are no greater purveyors of mis- and disinformation than today’s colleges. A plague is less to be feared.