Four years ago, young people–particularly college students–were swept up in a vortex of leftism, intensely embracing a cloaked collectivist ideology.
The Left tailored their message perfectly for young people, appealing to their sense of fairness (“Everybody benefits when you spread the wealth around“) and idealism (“Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for too long“).
Any conservative opposition, particularly on campuses, was shouted down instantly as the product of racism rather than logical thought. We were witnessing the successful, complete implementation of political correctness in academia through the silencing of young conservative activists and thinkers.
Quickly, young people saw how that idealism turned into divisiveness, rancor, and authoritarianism on the part of the Obama administration. They also witnessed and experienced the results of those leftist ideas. Nearly 53 percent of young Americans are unemployed or underemployed; 85% of 2011 college grads had to move home to live with their parents; health care premiums are skyrocketing for young people or the parents able to keep them on their health insurance plans.
It’s no wonder that, for the first time, a majority of Americans think they will be less well off than their parents. The American Dream–the class warfare rhetoric tells us–is beyond our reach without government help. The Obama administration is mocking and railing against our nation’s job creators. Young people are the most susceptible to these attacks, as they echo what their professors and teachers have been spewing at them for years. And conservatives have lacked the tools and support to challenge them.
Enter Young America’s Foundation. We have teamed up again with award-winning director Stephen K. Bannon to release our newest film, The Conservatives. The goal: to inspire young Americans to stand up for freedom against their leftist professors and many of our leaders who want nothing more than to deprive them of their individual liberty.
Yesterday, Young America’s Foundation released an explosive trailer, and clearly, conservative students are starving for help on campus. Since the release, we’ve received three to four student orders for the movie PER MINUTE!
President Obama’s hackneyed line, “Everyone gets a fair shot when everyone does their fair share,” opens the movie–but he isn’t the first liberal to champion redistributive policies and more government control. Bill Clinton’s moderate masquerade is blown away with his liberal creed: “When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.” And finally, Teddy Kennedy’s lament that, “We have a higher calling than greed or bravado.” Students might think they are back in their classroom, hearing the standard leftist drivel.
But Young America’s Foundation, Bannon, and the stars of the Conservative Movement who pulled together for this film are giving students the help they need to take on the Left with ideas, and in the process, expose their intellectual bankruptcy.
Mark Levin, the irreverent champion of freedom to young people all across the country, headlines the film, and he doesn’t hold back, telling students he heard the same things when he was on campus and thought: “This can’t be right… Everything I was hearing was wrong. Dead wrong.”
He says the free market “is the only system that creates wealth for the most people. No other system will.”
Fox News contributor and author Monica Crowley, Ph.D., says, “The free market is the only thing that allows the individual to be who he or she is meant to be.”
Striking back as if directly to the Obama administration’s inflammatory anti-business rants, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore says, “The whole American dream has been based on the idea that if you do work hard, play by the rules, you do get ahead.”
And Michelle Malkin contributes: “The American individual entrepreneur, those free market job creators, and wealth creators… give us the future that we have. [They] are the bedrock of economic success in this country.” The Obama administration and their accomplices in higher education beg to differ, finding them the purveyors of greed and malfeasance of all kinds.
Along with Levin, Malkin, Crowley, and Moore, the movie showcases other great current conservative stars: Dr. Walter Williams, Jonah Goldberg, and Peter Schweizer. Goldberg urges students on in a fight in which they will be clearly outmanned, but intellectually and morally triumphant: “You are the 300 at Thermopolaye! That’s a great fight, and you get to have that fight!”
Conservative defenders of freedom must rally to the call on college campuses and boldly champion their positive, winning ideas. The Conservatives will help them to do just that.
The Conservatives will debut August 1 at Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference in Washington, D.C. The film, which is free for students, seeks to help young Americans start and build conservative groups, including YAF chapters, on campus this fall. Young America’s Foundation will be working with students across the country to show the film.
To pre-order the DVD (free for students), visit TheConservativesMovie.com.
Kate Obenshain is a vice president for Young America’s Foundation and executive producer of the forthcoming film, The Conservatives. Kate is regular guest on Fox News and the Sean Hannity Radio Show, and frequently speaks on college campuses and at conferences across the nation.
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