New York City pharmaceutical heiress Annabella Rockwell is claiming that her mother paid a $300-a-day "deprogrammer" after discovering that her daughter had been "brainwashed" by attending an all-female elite liberal college that left the young woman "totally indoctrinated" and estranged from the parents who raised her.
"I left school very anxious, very nervous, very depressed and sad," Rockwell, now 29, recently told the New York Post. "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."
By her junior year, Rockwell told the Post that she noticed a shift in herself after taking a gender studies class. "This professor tells me about patriarchy," Rockwell said,
"I barely knew what the word meant. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I wasn’t someone that was 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."
That’s when she said her relationship with her mother, whom she once considered a best friend, changed.
"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."
"It was like walking a tightrope," mother Melinda Rockwell said. "I couldn’t push too hard or I’d lose her [the daughter], 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."
Another former Mount Holyoke College student, Laura Loomer, spoke to the Post about the campus culture, saying that she left after just one semester freshman year due to bullying.
"The entire culture there revolved around hating men and being a lesbian," Loomer told the Post. "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."
"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," she added. "It’s a bastardization of higher education for the sake of weaponizing naive young women for the sake of advancing a toxic agenda."
Annabell Rockwell said that her views began to change during the 2020 George Floyd riots.
"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."
Rockwell, who now fundraises for PragerU, said her intention is not to smear other classmates, recognizing how they were all "young and impressionable" in a campus environment where "diversity of opinion was never allowed."
My Commentary:
Like every cult, the modern campus claims to serve an educational purpose, helping students find meaning and purpose, but insisting that they must first be cured of the subconscious evils such as white privilege and toxic masculinity that are holding them back through a process that deconstructs their barriers, encourages confession, expressions of trauma, shame and guilt, to create new identities.
This isn’t education. It’s not even dogmatic lecturing. It’s the same basic set of techniques used by any major cult. Once colleges began trying to cure their students of subconscious evils at closed sessions, under the guidance of unlicensed therapists associated with a movement, there was no longer any difference between them and that of any cult, except billions in taxpayer dollars.
The sessions at which white privilege or toxic masculinity can be cured, or at which students are put in touch with the trauma of their oppression as minorities, duplicate cult indoctrination in every regard.
The victim does not understand the process by which they are being taken apart and put back together until much later. And if the process works as intended, he or she may never realize it happened at all. Brainwashing’s cruelest trick lies in using the intelligence of its victim as its greatest ally in building a trap for its own ego and its consciousness that it cannot escape from without a great deal of determination. And young white women are the most coveted target of this indoctrination—they are the shock troops of cultural Marxism and wokeness.
As matters now stand, most colleges and universities (including Andrews University (which sits on stolen land)) and Southern University are partially to wholly in thrall to DIE (Diversity Inclusion & Equity). It is divisive and destructive, and has swept through most schools with little opposition since those who don’t like it fear being “canceled” by DIE zealots.
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“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).