Coming into my freshman
year at Yale, I was already very strongly rooted in my conservative beliefs.
Oddly enough, a lot of my high school friends swore I would come home at
Christmas Break a liberal. Of course, I didn’t, but that was not for lack of
the entire campus trying. From the day I
stepped onto campus, attempts at indoctrination into liberalism were
everywhere. I thought, for some reason,
that doing a pre-orientation program called Cultural Connections would be a
good idea. I’m from a small town in Kentucky, so I thought this program would
be a great chance for me to explore different cultures. I imagined learning
about different cultures through movies and speeches, but I was very
wrong.
Culture Connections was more of a
Liberal Indoctrination Camp than anything else.
From the beginning of the first session, we were taught that being white
and conservative was equivalent to being Satan, if not worse. If you spoke out against Obama or their revered
Al Sharpton, you were immediately accused of being a racist. Everything you did
could be called cultural appropriation if it didn’t suit their delicate
sensitivities. As one of very few
Caucasian students there, and probably the only conservative there, it was a
nightmare. School hadn’t even officially started and I was sure that I had made
the wrong choice with schools. Yale had always been my dream school, but I was
beginning to think it was just a liberal nightmare.
Then, classes actually started
and the parade of leftist speakers began.
We had big names come through, but never any big conservative names, of
course. We had Jimmy Carter come, and
Joe Biden was the class day speaker my freshman year. The biggest shock to me
was probably when “Reverend” Al Sharpton came in September. I was still
wide-eyed and bushy-tailed with eagerness to learn, but his speech provided a
rude awakening for me. A huge auditorium
was filled, and I was abhorred that people were actually clapping at what he
had to say. Myself and my fellow conservatives in the political union were
hissing as loud as we could (a tradition in the Yale political union) but we
were extremely outnumbered by the Sharpton supporters in the room. That was
when I finally realized that I was at Yale for a reason, and that God had put
me there to add from Lux et Veritas, light and truth, to a school that
desperately needed it.
When I found the Buckley Program, it was like seeing the
conservative light at the end of a long, dark, liberal tunnel. The William F
Buckley Jr Program at Yale allowed me to grow and explore my conservativism,
but also gave me a chance to experience the liberal bias on campus firsthand.
Through the Buckley Program, we brought several conservative speakers to our school,
and experienced various levels of backlash from fellow student groups during
the process. We brought speakers like
Jason Riley, who received harsh criticism from the Black Men’s Union for his
book titled “Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to
Succeed”.
Buckley also brought Christina Hoff
Sommers to talk about freedom feminism. As you can imagine, any mention of the
word feminism can incite a riot by itself.
Ms. Sommer’s speech was ridiculed and chastised by the campus women’s center,
who later held an open discussion to talk about how offensive her speech had
been. Being the strong Conservative I am, I decided to crash their little
discussion, which was open to the public. At the event, which I attended
directly after having dinner with Ms. Sommers, I found that the majority of
these people who were so offended by Ms. Sommer’s speech had not even been
present at the speaking event, but were eager to criticize Ms. Sommers at every
turn.
This incident only inspired
me to become more involved in conservatism at school. The Buckley Program brought more and more
conservative speakers to school in hopes of expanding intellectual diversity on
campus. They brought speakers such as
Jim DeMint and Andrew McCarthy, but the biggest event, the event that garnered
national attention, was the protests that the Ayaan Hirsi Ali event drew in the
Fall of my Freshman year. I had never
seen student groups come out in such forces. There were petitions from the
Muslim Students Association and the Women’s Center saying that if the Buckley
Program did not disinvite Ms. Ali they would stage protests until the event was
shut down. As you can imagine, these protests only led to inspiration. The day of the event went off without a
hitch. There were no active protests on site, and nearly every seat was filled.
The event was a huge success for
the Buckley program, and the insistence by other groups that Buckley should
disinvite Ms. Ali only inspired the Buckley Program to host a Disinvitation
Dinner in New York City this past April. The keynote speaker was George Will, and the
event garnered national attention. The event was written about in Breitbart and
the Wall Street Journal multiple times. The success of that dinner, which
served as a fundraiser so we could continue to bring great conservative
speakers to our very liberal school, showed me that there are still good,
conservative people out there, even if they are few and far between on my
campus.
Since coming to Yale, and likely
much to the surprise of my friends back home, I have actually grown more
strongly conservative. Being forced to constantly defend myself and my beliefs
has made me love myself and those beliefs even more than I did before. Aside from my activism at Yale with the
Buckley Program and my internship this summer, I also write for a conservative website called
Future First Lady.
I love Future First Lady because it gives me a
chance to reach thousands of young conservatives around the country and show
them that the best parts of being a conservative, especially a conservative
woman. My work with Future First Lady also allows me to grow as a writer and
thinker, as I am constantly coming up with new, innovative ways to spread the
conservative message in a fun and light-hearted manner to make it digestible
and enjoyable.
My internship this summer has truly been a godsend. I have been able to work on
developing resources for young Conservative women as well as sharpening my own
skills to combat the illogic attempts at indoctrination by the left. I have also gotten the opportunity to meet
and work with amazing women in the Conservative movement, including Marji Ross,
Cleta Mitchell, Katie Pavlich, Bay Buchanan, and Senator Joni Ernst. I am so
grateful for this internship and know it will be a life-saver when I go back to
fight the left on campus.
Looking
back at my first year of school, I honestly believe that going to one of the
most liberal schools in the country was the best thing for my conservatism. I
cannot imagine the path that my life would have taken if I had not been given
the opportunity to strongly defend my beliefs like I’ve had to this past year.
Yale had always been my dream school, and I like to think that God knew all
along that was the right place for me to be, not just academically, but also as
a conservative.
