The Patriot Post® · Educating Youth on the Dangers of Socialism
Socialism’s growing popularity among young people in this country should be a major concern for Liberty-loving Americans. President Donald Trump loudly promises that America will never be a socialist country. Many conservative politicians and media pundits are inclined to agree with him. But ridiculing socialist ideas and simply counting on America to always remain a federal republic just because it always has been one will not defeat socialism in the United States.
Socialism is popular because the Left is adept at controlling the narrative. This may be a hard fact to face, but face it we must. The Left controls public education, the news media, and the entertainment industry. For the last couple of generations, leftists in these venues have altered the perceptions of what America is to millions of young people. Now that they have reached a point of critical mass, they are looking to convince these same young people to cast aside our great republic in favor of a socialist regime.
A new organization has stepped into the fray to challenge this assault. Young Americans Against Socialism set up shop just last week with the goal of spreading the truth about socialism, in part by sharing true stories of the young people who have lived it.
YAAS was founded by Morgan Zegers, the 22-year-old daughter of an Iraq War vet who ran for the New York State Assembly in 2018 to help stop the downward economic spiral of her home state. Zegers gained a great deal of media attention for her ultimately unsuccessful effort and was named a Rising Star of the New York GOP and the New York Young Republicans.
Zegers’s strategy is to use two of the Left’s powerful tools against them: emotion and social media. Social media is the most obvious place to have this conversation because that is where Zegers will find her target audience. The Left relies on emotion because it produces quick and powerful responses and because it clouds reason and judgment, two concepts that are Kryptonite to any socialist idea. The videos YAAS will post on social media recount emotional stories of young people who have directly suffered under socialism and have blessedly escaped its clutches.
Zegers will also use social media to set the record straight about socialism. Among the myths to be dispelled are the so-called heroism of the prolific murderer Che Guevara, why the Left insists on incorrectly categorizing Scandinavian countries as socialist, what really happened to oil-rich Venezuela, and how capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in world history.
Given her youth and her dedicated social-media strategy, Zegers is in a better position to change the narrative than a news pundit that young people probably won’t even watch. It’s exciting to see another group dedicated to pushing back against socialism’s appeal to America’s youth. It’s been a long time coming, and as Zegers argues, we must push back because Liberty is worth fighting for.