Rebels turn right: Questioning leftist ideas is 'dangerous, alluring'

"The real political energy" on campuses is "on the right," writes Julia Steinberg, a recent Stanford graduate, in The Atlantic. She started college as a progressive, but was frustrated by classrooms where "everyone was afraid of offending everyone else." It wasn't socially acceptable to disagree about idea

She ended up with other ex-liberals on the Stanford Review, where the staff "included MAGA diehards, traditional Catholics, anti-Trump neoconservatives, isolationists, anti-identity-politics liberals, Luddites, and (in my case) techno-capitalists, all challenging one another’s ideas."

When Steinberg talked to students who wanted to write for the Review, they talked about Covid lockdowns, cancel culture and the "stifling" progressivism of their high schools. "Questioning ideas seemed dangerous — and alluring," she writes. "Preachy, judgmental authority has never sat well with young people. The young people of today see that authority in the establishment left, not the right."

"Stanford overall is still very liberal," she writes. But the conservative culture is "vibrant" and growing, while the left is "lackluster."

When the Marriage Pact, a questionnaire-based matchmaking service started in 2017 by two Stanford students, asked students about their politics last year, freshman males trended conservative, and freshman females were more conservative than women in older cohorts, she notes.

Nationwide, "younger members of Gen Z are more conservative than older Gen Zs, and voters ages 18 to 29 drifted toward Trump in the election last year," Steinberg writes.

On other campuses, young conservatives are learning how to defend their ideas. "For now, the marketplace of ideas has been abandoned by the left and turned into a thriving black market on the right," she concludes. "And the thing about black markets is that they are very difficult to shut down."