Progressive media would have you believe that students form grassroots movements, all by themselves, to address the “climate crisis” in mass because they deeply care about the issue.
Reality reflects this as both true and untrue.
There has been a coordinated effort made by university faculty, at the behest of well-funded climate alarmist organizations, over decades to brainwash and indoctrinate student bodies into carrying out activism beneficial to leftist socio-political objectives. This is their extremely effective method of an “introduction of ideas.” By inserting their narrative of doom and gloom into curriculum, they invite themselves to shape young people’s minds to serve their corrupt interests.
Climate change is chief among their issues of emphasis due to its ability to, as Saul Alinsky would put it, “agitate” or cause anxiety. If they can control students’ emotions, they can control their beliefs and actions.
Arizona State University in Tempe mandates that students take a “sustainability” course to graduate. Qualifying classes oddly include “History of Black Women in America” and “Race, Gender, and Media.”
Columbia University’s Teachers College hosted a program this summer called the “Summer Climate Institute,” instructing prospective teachers on how to foster the next generation of “scientists and activists.”
Even seminaries aren’t safe from the brainwashing onslaught.
In North Carolina, Duke Divinity School partnered with a group called “Faith for our Planet” to combine religious faith with environmental activism. Their goal? To “incorporate climate narratives in religious sermons.”
In April 2024 Kalamazoo College in Michigan encouraged their student body to participate in “Worldwide Climate and Justice Education Week.” As cringy as it sounds, students nonetheless took part in events like:
- Meatless Monday, in which students were encouraged to explore “promising alternatives to traditional meat products.”
- Fight climate anxiety, in which participants “discover(ed) how to channel anxiety into positive action and contribute to a more sustainable future.”
- View a film screening of “Inhabitants: Indigenous Perspectives on Restoring our World.”
Notice how in the case of the second event, they quite literally encourage students to express anxiety about the climate. Why? To “channel anxiety into positive action.” This is the “get them to sign up” portion of Alinsky’s instruction. Sign up to do what you might ask.
To become foot soldiers for the progressive left, that’s what.
In January of this year, Ohio State University president Ted Carter Jr.’s speech at a campus event was shouted down for over a minute by students representing the “Ohio Youth for Climate Justice” group. Later, in an open letter the student group wrote that they were protesting “OSU’s investments in fossil fuels” among other grievances.
In February, the University of Florida student senate unanimously voted in favor of a “Green New Deal” package of campus-wide initiatives. Their aims included mandatory climate change-related course requirements, a ban on receiving research funding from the fossil fuel industry, and to discriminate against “single occupancy commuter vehicles.”
Hence these examples are why the nature of student climate activism is both real and phony. It is both grassroots and astroturf. Students are forming grassroots “climate action” movements because they are deeply anxious about the supposed “climate crisis,” but only because they have been programmed to do so. They exist in an academic bubble, an astroturfed environment, that lacks alternative viewpoints, and the students are left with no other moral options than to try and address the fictitious crisis.
The scary part? Years of climate alarmism indoctrination, spanning multiple generations of Americans, are starting to have major implications on national politics. When the students become full-fledged adults, they continue to act on their programming throughout their lives as academic indoctrination hardens into full-fledged worldviews.
According to the Center for Civic Research at Tufts University, “Young people who chose addressing climate change as one of their top concerns were 20 points more likely to vote in 2024 and more likely to engage in various forms of political action. Climate is a winning issue for Democrats…”
If conservatives are to have any chance of winning the debate on climate science or any issues, we must reclaim our educational institutions from the grip of academic Marxists. The fate of the country may very well be at stake if we do not.