Last summer, I worked with a woman from New York City who had never met a pro-life person before me. She was 21 years old, and lived her whole life in a bubble, never interacting with conservatives. She said to me, “I mean, I kinda just figured those people,” meaning pro-life individuals, “didn’t exist anymore.”
We conservatives are quick to point out our silencing by the media, universities, and liberals in general. We sit in classes where we are verbally attacked by our leftist peers, and we become quiet.
We drop the Women’s Gender Studies courses when the professor tells us to discuss abortion’s liberating qualities for women. We purse our lips in denial and silence when these professors encourage students to “manifest the deaths” of Democrat senators who refuse to bend to the will of the most extreme leftist opinions.
We say speaking up is not worth the hassle, the heckling, the attacks that would follow. And with our silence, we tell the left that they are the majority, we are the minority.
We tell the left that we are not ready or willing to stand by what we believe.
We tell the left that we are weak.
Our weary concessions inform leftists that we do not exist at the university level. We allow for a perpetuation of the lie that conservatives are uneducated and uncultured. We enable our own extinction from college classes with every silent sigh, every pursed lip, every held-back comment, because our silence makes us invisible.
But here’s the thing: the more silently we sit and the more we avoid confrontation, the further into a corner we are pushed.
At some point, it’s no longer time to bend our necks in submission, but time to stand tall and fight this culture war we’ve lost for far too long.
This is why I suggest, today, that we end our exodus from leftist classes and our well-behaved silence. I propose that we take Social Justice Studies, become experts in CRT, and be well-versed in Women’s Gender Studies. We must understand the left’s perspective and expose the weaknesses of leftist thought in the place of its introduction. In addition to remaining in the classroom, we must speak. We must work to be heard above the echo chamber, above the noise that previously drove us from its door.
These classes are the environments of indoctrination where students look and assume that the professor speaks absolute truth because not one conservative dares to question the status quo aloud.
We are the only ones who can demand fair representation, the only ones who can fight this growing silence, the leftist propaganda shoved down the throats of students inside classrooms. But in order to do so, we must take leftist classes. And more than that, we must speak, because our silence is more than a held-back thought or a small concession. Our silence is more than the comfort garnered by an avoided confrontation.
Our silence is our submission and our voice is our strength.