A new survey conducted on recent high school graduates by researchers Zach Goldberg and Eric Kaufmann and published by the Manhattan Institute has turned up troubling data on the impact of leftist indoctrination on America’s youth. The report, titled “School Choice Is Not Enough: The Impact of Critical Social Justice Ideology in American Education,” found that young Americans age 18 to 20 who were exposed to critical race theory teaching and radical gender ideology in their school curriculum embraced those radical views at a high rate.

The survey of 1,500 young Americans found that 93% of them had been exposed to “at least one of eight [Critical Social Justice] concepts from a teacher or other adult at school, including ‘white privilege,’ ‘systemic racism,’ ‘patriarchy,’ or the idea that gender is a choice unrelated to biological sex.” Furthermore, 74% of those surveyed had been exposed to “at least one radical gender concept.”

The impact of this woke indoctrination on young Americans’ political views was both significant and sobering. The study found that of those not exposed to woke ideology, their political views broke “27% to 20% for the Republican Party, while those who have been taught the maximum of eight CSJ concepts lean a whopping 53% to 7% toward the Democratic Party.” This was true irrespective of whether they lived in predominately Republican counties or their parents were conservative.

The authors insightfully noted that it’s not enough for Republicans to be simply arguing for school choice policy options. Instead, more focused and direct action on education is needed. They recommended that “state governments must seek to intervene in the public-school curriculum, such as banning the teaching of CRT and radical gender theory as truth, clamping down on political indoctrination, and requiring teaching materials to be made available upon request.”

The problem can be boiled down to an old adage: garbage in, garbage out. The Left may pay lip service to the classical liberal educational ideal of an equal playing field wherein ideas are allowed to be freely expressed and challenged with the trust that in so doing the truth will ultimately prevail. Yet conservatives need to wake up to the reality that this principle is far from being practiced, and in fact is being actively suppressed in the name of “justice” and replaced with a woke ideology that rejects objective truth in favor of social justice narratives.

This culture war is effectively a battle for the minds and hearts of young Americans, who are actively being intellectually poisoned with a deceptive ideology that attacks the very core principles that brought about flourishing through individual liberty.