Republican Speaker Mocked For Claiming Colleges Indoctrinate Students To Become Democrats

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said during a conversation with Congressman Dan Crenshaw that the reason college graduates tend to be more liberal is because colleges are indoctrinating them to be Democrats. Johnson was then widely mocked in interviews and on social media, but everyone misses the bigger point about why his statement isn't backed up by facts. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains why this talking point is easily debunked.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Far right Republican House speaker this past week, Mike Johnson in an interview for some reason with Republican lawmaker, Dan Crenshaw, talked about the fact that polls show obviously and have for many, many years now, that college educated individuals tend to skew to the left while non-college educated individuals tend to skew to the right. Now, Johnson told Crenshaw that this is because obviously these colleges out there are indoctrinating people to become Democrats. Johnson said, quote, the reasons that the Republican party is attracting less and less, more highly educated voters is because they spent so much time in the academy. And the universities are run usually by liberals almost entirely, and sometimes by radical liberals, socialists, and others. And so these students are being indoctrinated instead of educated. Now, folks on social media were very quick to come out, you know, a lot of them conservative saying, listen, I'm a conservative.

I went to college, graduated years ago, only recently gave up on the Republican party because y'all are nuts. You know, you're horrible with policy. You don't actually do anything. You're horrible to human beings. I finally said, I've had enough. Did the indoctrination just take a while to kick in with me? They asked, but here's the thing. This colleges are indoctrinating people into liberalism, uh, has been around for decades, and it's because Republicans like Donald Trump once famously said, love the poorly educated. They like people who do not get new life experiences. They like people who never leave the hometown in which they were born. Because when people do those things and they go out and meet new people, have new experiences, finally maybe meet a gay person, maybe meet a person of a different race, and you think I'm making that up, but a lot of people in these small conservative hometowns never done that.

Or at least, you know, 20 years ago, never had they go to college, they meet people, they see other struggles, they learn new things, their worldview is opened. That's not indoctrination. That is education. Both, you know, education in the classroom and life experience that so many small town conservatives never get. So they get stuck in their tiny little worldview while they're kids who go off to college say, oh my God, these people are human beings too. And my parents taught me I should hate these people, but I'm not going to because I see them. I know them now. My parents are wrong. Life experiences have taught me otherwise. That is why a lot of these people end up broadening their horizons and moving a little to the left. But here's one thing I wanna bring up. I've never seen anybody talk about this in all the years that Republicans have been saying that colleges are indoctrinating college students to be more liberal, right?

So obviously that has to be done in the classroom. Let me ask you this. It's the year 2023 right now. You see this, it's a phone. You see what's on the back here. It's a camera. Video recorder also can record audio. So cameras in everybody's pockets have been around for at least 15 years, and I'm willing to bet 99.9% of people on college campuses when they walk into that classroom every day, they got one of these right there on 'em. And you would think, because there are plenty of conservative college students out there.