By Robert Knight
When I was 18, I thought I knew plenty about life and politics. I was wrong.
My views had not yet been honed by the experience of trying to live on a paycheck that the government seized in order to hand much of it over to someone else.
I also believed that people who created the monstrous federal bureaucracy really cared about the poor, even as their wrong-headed policies destroyed marriage and families and plunged urban centers into unimaginable violence.
In short, I was easily manipulated by the welfare state’s emotional appeals, just the sort of sucker that Rock the Vote (RTV) is looking for today.
Before you accuse me of waging a “war on young people,” I readily admit that not everyone my age at the time was naïve, nor are some young people as naïve today — just whole bunches of them.
Facing astronomically high unemployment or under-employment, with the world blowing up around them, the majority of 18- to 29-year-olds still identify as liberals in survey after survey. I’d say “mug them again,” but you can mug people and suffer disappointment only so many times.
Instead, I remain cautiously optimistic that time and reality will steer them toward more conservative views, as it did me and many other former useful idiots. Getting a job and getting married boosts the whole process. Having kids is another huge reality check.
Rock the Vote is gearing up for a repeat of 2008, when millions of teens and twenty-somethings were recruited as shock troops for the Obama campaign. By 2012, RTV claimed that it had registered 5 million new voters under 30.
Founded in 1992 as a “non-partisan” creation, with funding from George Soros and other lefty sugar daddies, RTV has fresh-faced new leadership, such as its president, Ashley Spillane, a veteran of the Atlas Project, whose mission is “to arm the progressive community with historical elections data, sophisticated analysis and real time updates for all 50 states.”
RTV also sports a lengthy roster of celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Sheryl Crow.
