College grad received cult deprogramming after woke education, ‘diversity of opinion was never allowed’

American colleges have become so liberal that they require cult-like intervention to deprogram graduates from the destructive woke idealism that often alienates them from friends and family, according to two Mount Holyoke graduates.

Annabella Rockwell, heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, chose liberal Mount Holyoke for its “academic rigor and prestige,” despite growing up in a traditional, conservative household, according to reporting by the New York Post.

She graduated from the rural South Hadley, Mass., college in 2015 and spent several years estranged from her family after distancing herself from their “racist,” “patriarchal” and “oppressive” views.

“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.”

(Video: Fox News)

But, Rockwell soon found herself completely “indoctrinated” to the college’s far-left ideals.

“Rockwell 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,” the New York Post reported. “She was also taken aback by a serious drinking culture and freshman campus rituals that, she said, were designed to shrug off gender roles.”

Her indoctrination began on day one, Rockwell said.

“I was left a note in my mailbox saying, ‘He may be a she, she may be a he, don’t assume anyone’s gender.’ And I thought, like, `Okay, that’s new,'” the former competitive figure skater told Tucker Carlson on Monday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

“And then the last thing we had was the MoHo chop. It’s a ritualistic haircut that people did first semester where everyone would shave their head sort of as an act of rebellion,” she recounted.

A gender studies class hammered the final nail in her liberal coffin, convincing the woman who grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and spent summers vacationing in Newport Beach, Rhode Island, that she was a victim of the patriarchy.

“This professor tells me about the patriarchy,” Rockwell said. ” 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.”

Rockwell left school “brainwashed” into believing that she had a duty to fight the patriarchy and stand up for the oppressed: women, people of color and the LBGTQ community.

“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.”

Following graduation, Rockwell lashed out at her family, distancing herself from her mother Melinda who was her best friend before college. Still drinking heavily from her college party days, Rockwell wrote a “horrible manifesto,” accusing her mother of treating her like a “wind up toy” and never loving her.

“I felt I had to teach her how she was wrong and expose her and to do that with everyone who didn’t see things correctly,” Rockwell said. “The professors encouraged alienation [from parents] and even offered their homes to stay in. They’d say, like, don’t go see them, come stay with us for the holiday. Most of my classmates believed all this stuff, too. If you didn’t you were ostracized.”

Conservative activist Laura Loomer also entered Mount Holyoke in 2011 but stayed only one semester before escaping the cult, scarred by the treatment she received from students and faculty. At one point in that damaging semester the school’s anonymous chat board, “Holyoke Confessional,” had an entire thread called “I Hate Laura Loomer.”

“The entire culture there revolved around hating men and being a lesbian,” said the author of “Loomered: How I Became the Most Banned Woman in the World.”

“Mount Holyoke and all the Seven Sisters [schools, including historically women’s colleges Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Radcliffe, Vassar and Wellesley] were designed to be these elite institutions for women at a time when places like Harvard just took men. But they’re no longer places for ideas and debate and a well-rounded education. They’re centers for indoctrination,” she explained.

Students with conservative values were ostracized and bullied, Loomer and Rockwell said.

“Basically, the college says they’re all about progressivism and equality but there are a lot of mean girls of all ages there,” Loomer said. “If you send your kid there you’re signing them up to hate the patriarchy and white people and the founding stock of our country. It’s a bastardization of higher education for the sake of weaponizing naive young women for the sake of advancing a toxic agenda.”

Rockwell was so indoctrinated after four years of the college’s liberal programming that Melinda didn’t recognize her daughter anymore and was desperate for help.

“She was no longer the Annabella I’d known all her life,” Melinda said. “This girl was the most bubbly breath of fresh air to everyone. She lit up a room. But the light was stolen from her at that school. It was extinguished. It was no different than if she’d been taken away by the Moonies or the Children of God.”

To free Rockwell from the liberal cult of higher education, Melinda employed a $300/day cult interventionist.

“This person gave her devastating statistics that most people don’t make it out, but a glimmer of hope that it tends to be young women that do,” Rockwell said. “He made it clear to her, do not affirm your daughter’s newfound identity. You know her best. She’s your child. Don’t affirm her. She was taught how to communicate with me.”

Warned that it could take seven years to undo the damage caused by Mount Holyoke, Melinda was committed to helping her daughter.

“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.”

Believing she needed to fight for liberal causes, Rockwell joined Hillary Clinton’s campaign after graduation but moved to Palm Beach, Florida with her family after Clinton’s 2016 loss. In 2018 Rockwell started working on progressive campaigns and stopped drinking. The clarity that came with a sober mind led her to question the Black Lives Matter movement and other violent Democratic agendas.

“My social media feed was an echo chamber of everything I’d been taught at Mt. Holyoke,” Rockwell said. “Everyone had the black square and it was all ‘no justice, no peace.’ But I was starting to think to myself, ‘Why are we burning down businesses in the name of empowerment? How is this helping black people? It just doesn’t make sense.’ It just began to click in that moment about how hypocritical it was.”

A new job with PragerU, a conservative advocacy group that promotes conservative values through videos, and her mother’s “relentless” pursuit to free her daughter, led Rockwell to a place of freedom from the woke ideals she’d been fed at Mount Holyoke.

“If my mom had not kept harping at me and not given up I know where I would be right now,” Rockwell said. “Mount Holyoke met its match in my mother. If it wasn’t for her, I’d probably be living in Massachusetts, working for some super-progressive politician, hanging out with people I had nothing in common with except ideology and drinking all the time. And I’d be miserable. But I’d be too stubborn to look at myself in the mirror. I had to really humble myself to admit that I was wrong. And that everything I was told was so hypocritical.”

“I don’t want to smear [my peers],” she continued. “They were young and impressionable. It wasn’t fair to anyone that there was no space for discourse. While I was there the school preached all the time about how diverse it was. But diversity of opinion was never allowed.”

Comment

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.

Latest Articles