The Patriot Post® · The Bizarre Beliefs of Our Young People

“Their curiosity seems stunted, their reason undeveloped, their values uninformed, their knowledge lacking, and most worrying of all, their humanity diminished.”

Undeveloped. Uninformed. Lacking. Diminished.

So goes the blurb in Jeremy S. Adams’s Hollowed Out: A Warning About America’s Next Generation, a book by a teacher of both high school and college that seems eerily prescient in light of a recent poll about the attitudes of our young people.

That poll, from Harvard-Harris, was conducted from December 13-14 among 2,034 registered voters, and some of its findings are so stunning as to seem downright fake. For example, the poll found that 51% of Americans aged 18-24 said they believed the long-term solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.”

Fifty-one percent.

Only 32% said they thought a two-state solution was the answer, and just 17% said the other Arab states in the region should absorb the displaced Palestinians, whose plight has been such an animating cause for the Arab world since the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948.

That 51% number is alarming not only on its face but also in light of how other age groups answered the question. Only 31% of those age 25-34 were rooting for Israel to be wiped off the map, and the number kept dropping as the age cohort went up: 24% of those age 35-44; 15% of those age 45-54; 13% of those age 55-64; and just 4% of Americans age 65 and up.

What does it say about our young people, our college-age people, that their views about Israel are so twisted, so perverse? It says that they’re being brainwashed by the dirty leftists who populate our colleges and universities, and whose tuition costs have saddled the American people with a whopping $1.75 trillion in student loan debt. Here, we’re reminded of the Kevin Bacon character in “Animal House” — the pledge who drops his drawers, bends over, takes a paddling, and keeps saying through clenched teeth, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

As Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall put it, “These individuals siding with evil over democracy should be a wake-up call. Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America.”

Perhaps even more shocking, though, is young Americans’ views on white people and, to a slightly lesser extent, Jews. According to the poll, they’re “oppressors.” When asked about their views on “an ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed,” nearly 80% of Americans age 18-24 agreed, and they further believe that Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colorblind society should be abandoned in favor of racial preferences in college admissions and employment opportunities.

Thankfully, again, older Americans reject this racist ideology out of hand, with three-fourths of Americans age 55-64 and more than four-fifths of those age 65 and up opposing it.

It should surprise no one that our colleges and universities are promoting this rot. And it appears that they’re being funded to do so. As The Washington Times reports, “The same U.S. universities that increasingly are seen as breeding grounds for anti-Semitism have taken billions of dollars in previously undisclosed donations from the Middle East — and their critics don’t believe in coincidences.”

What kinds of coincidences? Try this: Since 2021, Carnegie Mellon has taken in a half-billion dollars from the wealthy Arab state and Hamas hangout of Qatar, and the university is being sued by the Lawfare Project for “pervasive anti-Jewish discrimination.” Again, it’s hard to believe that the former is unrelated to the latter.

“Carnegie Mellon happens to be one of the largest recipients of Qatari money,” said the Lawfare Project, which works with the online movement End Jew Hatred. “The question one must ask is, what is the money being used for?” Indeed, the nation’s list of foreign donors to our universities from 2014-19 was topped by — you guessed it — Qatar at $2.7 billion, followed by England at $1.4 billion, China at $1.2 billion, and Saudi Arabia at $947 million.

So the views of our nation’s young people have been shaped against Jews and especially against whites, and we have the Marxist indoctrination of our leftist colleges and universities to thank for it.

As Jeremy Adams rightly notes: “Something has gone terribly wrong. Something essential is missing in our young people.”