It Begins: College Student "Deprogrammed" From Woke Indoctrination Received at School

Via Bob Hoge at RedState, an heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune has been "deprogrammed" from the ideological indoctrination she received at Mount Holyoke college.

Annabella Rockwell led a life of privilege even before she entered posh Mount Holyoke College in rural South Hadley, Mass. in 2011. The heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, she grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, summered in Newport, RI, and later moved with her family to Palm Beach, Fla.

A competitive figure skater who lived abroad for a time in Germany as well as Hong Kong, Rockwell chose Mount Holyoke for its academic rigor and prestige. At the time, she said, she'd grown up in a home with "traditional" values but considered herself open-minded.

"I was so excited about going to this renowned, respected school in Massachusetts," she said. "I literally arrived there bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I was just so happy."

But she told The Post she wound up "totally indoctrinated" into viewing the world as a toxic patriarchy and herself as an oppressed victim -- and eventually had to be deprogrammed.

Rockwell, now 29, said she was initially shocked by how aggressively anti-male the students and professors were when she settled in at the women-only school, founded in 1837. She was also taken aback by a serious drinking culture and freshman campus rituals that, she said, were designed to shrug off gender roles -- such as cutting your hair into what is called the "MoHo chop." (Rockwell did not do this.)

But it wasn't until her junior year, when she took a Gender Studies class, that she said she was turned upside down.

"This professor tells me about the patriarchy," Rockwell told The Post. " I barely knew what the word meant. I didn't know what she was talking about. I wasn't someone that into feminism. I just knew that I felt I had always been free to do what I wanted. I never experienced sexism. But I was told there's the patriarchy and you don't even understand it's been working against you your whole life. You've been oppressed and you didn't even know it. Now you have to fight it. And I just went down this deep rabbit hole."

But the time she graduated from the school, which charges $60,000 a year in tuition, in 2015, Rockwell said, she'd been "brainwashed" into believing she had been a lifelong victim of patriarchal oppression and had a duty to fight on behalf of other victims: women, people of color and LBGTQ folks.

"I left school very anxious, very nervous, very depressed and sad," Rockwell said. "I saw everything through the lens of oppression and bias and victimhood. I came to the school as someone who saw everyone equally. I left looking for injustice wherever I could and automatically assuming that all white men were sexist. My thoughts were no longer my own."

Conservative activist Laura Loomer also entered Mount Holyoke in 2011 -- but dropped out after a semester.

"The entire culture there revolved around hating men and being a lesbian," Loomer, author of "Loomered: How I Became the Most Banned Woman in the World," told The Post.

Annabelle's mother, Melinda, paid a deprogrammer $300 a day to reverse the brainwashing.

"It was like walking a tightrope," Melinda Rockwell said. "I couldn't push too hard or I'd lose her, but if I let go I felt I might not see her again. It was as bad as trying to get a child off the streets who's on heroin. Everyone is so sure it won't happen to their child. But it will. [Professors and older students] tell the students they are special -- it's like they are anointed -- then they tell them how oppressed they are and what victims they are and how they have to go out in the world and be activists to stop the oppression."

Mount Holyoke did not respond to a request for comment.

More at Mount Holyoke at RedState.

posted by Ace at 03:04 PM

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