Brainwashing is real, it’s not just a pejorative term we use to describe someone else who can’t think for themselves. You’ve been brainwashed. I’ve been brainwashed. Only when it happens to us, we don’t call it “brainwashing.” We call it conditioning.
Think of a time you changed your mind on an important topic. Let’s say vaccines. You likely weren’t brainwashed into changing your mind, as your friends and family may have told you. It was likely the process of changing your mind that took you out of the cycle of conditioning. So when your friends and family criticized you for being brainwashed into changing your mind, it was they who had yet to break free from the cycle.
We’re all conditioned to think a certain way about things. Our patriotism is a response to our nationalist conditioning that more than likely traces back to our youth. Still, it serves an important purpose. Without it, you would not have people willing to defend and protect the country’s sovereignty.
If you’re a baptized Christian or a Jew, you’ve likely been conditioned since birth to believe in God. This has served a larger purpose, too. It’s the foundation for a society that strives to be moral and ethical through its laws, its customs, and its credos.
Humans are most susceptible to conditioning at the youngest of ages when they’re more impressionable. This is why the left is so focused on separating children from their parents at the youngest of possible ages and putting them in institutional settings, from daycares, to preschools, to after-school and before-school programs. It’s why the left is so intent on funding breakfast, lunch and dinner for students. The state replaces the family. The state’s ideology and “values” replace religion.
This also explains why the left has introduced the rainbow flag to children at the youngest of ages. It does so for the very same reasons Christians baptize their kids, teach the Ten Commandments, hang crosses in churches and homes. It’s why the left wants religion out of schools. It’s competition for the mindshare of the children.
Once the left has built up a certain level of institutional trust between children and their educators, it has laid the foundation for integrating a broad range of its issues, its causes, and its movements into generations.
Look no further than the current anti-ICE protests, where high school kids are walking out in protest.
High school students walked out this morning in Knoxville, Tennessee to oppose ICE terror.
— World Socialist Web Site (@WSWS_Updates) January 30, 2026
"I don't think this should happen at all. I hate it. So I came here today to be a part of this amazing protest with people that believe in the same thing I do."https://t.co/fbQX4Plmyk pic.twitter.com/bGAr85KMRJ
These types of interviews and comments are illuminating, in that because these are high school kids, you can see in their most raw form just what messages are filtering down to children who are otherwise clueless about the world around them. One student talks about how you can’t trust the government, a refrain young people have been saying since the 1960s. But there have been huge chunks of time where if a student had said you can’t trust the Clinton administration, or the Obama or Biden administrations, they’d have been ostracized from their teenage society. These students don’t realize that.
This is the left’s conditioning at work. When it comes to teenagers, other dynamics are at work as well. Boys and girls want to be a part of whatever the latest “big thing” is, so they don’t feel left out. Right now, it’s not Taylor Swift, it’s protesting ICE.
Getting mobs of kids to walk out of school in protest is easy. The kids want attention, they want any excuse not to sit in a classroom, and many of the boys are doing it just to impress the girls.
This all gets more sophisticated when the kids get into college. They find “their people,” and formally or informally join identity groups. Protest culture again gives them a sense of belonging, it gives them a tribe to call their own, and thanks to the Democrat billion-dollar slush fund system, it gives some of them extra spending money.
Students at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities staged a walkout and held a rally to protest the presence of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and what they described as growing fear in their community https://t.co/YdqYgag6QQ pic.twitter.com/gZH8XSSb1Y
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 27, 2026
What’s impossible to ignore on the conditioning front is how the left has used raw emotions as levers to manipulate the college mind. The first white American female in that clip mentions she has a lot of friends who are “scared to go outside right now, regardless of their citizenship status.” That makes no sense, but brainwashing doesn’t have to. Your feelings and emotions drive and justify your beliefs. A white American male follows her; he, for some reason, says, “A lot of folks just like me don’t feel safe going outside right now, which is absolutely abhorrent.”
He's right, it is abhorrent. Who planted that fear in people who are at zero risk of ever getting arrested and deported? It’s also interesting that two white kids have internalized the “safe outside right now” messaging.
While this is a generational observation, Gen Z is different from previous generations, in that it bases most of its beliefs on feelings — “I feel, therefore I’m right.” For example, “I’m afraid that ICE may deport me or my friends, therefore we must abolish ICE.” No rational thinking involved.
John Kenneth Galbraith, the famed Canadian-American economist, once wrote a book called The Anatomy of Power, where he breaks down all of the dynamics and factors that give some people power over others. He says that there are three “instruments” of power, and they are condign, compensatory, and conditioned power.
“Condign power,” he wrote, “wins submission by the ability to impose an alternative to the preferences of the individual or group that is sufficiently unpleasant or painful so that these preferences are abandoned.” In other words, the threat of punishment gives someone power over another.
Compensatory power, Galbraith said, wins submission through the “offer of an affirmative reward.” This could come in the form of money, pay, a gift, some material piece of property, or even a job or a promotion. Compensatory power is transactional. Quid pro quo. You get something in return for submission. Thousands and thousands of paid protesters are subject to compensatory power by leftist organizers. The organizers’ power only lasts until the money runs out.
When condign and compensatory power are employed, the subject of that power is aware of it. The scenario is much different when it comes to conditioned power. Conditioned power is the nuclear bomb of power. Once it takes hold, there’s no telling how scalable it can be, and how long it can last.
“Conditioned power…is exercised by changing belief. Persuasion, education, or the social commitment to what seems natural, proper, or right causes the individual to submit to the will of another of or others,” wrote Galbraith. “The submission reflects the preferred course; the fact of submission is not recognized.”
Conditioned power convinces you to see the world the way someone else wants you to see it. They prey upon your existing values and beliefs, your insecurities, your desire to be accepted, popular, respected, or even loved. Sometimes they prey upon a certain amount of self-loathing you may have for feeling more “privileged” than others, or that you didn’t earn it. That’s why both rich, pampered kids, and kids from broken homes are equally vulnerable to conditioned power propaganda.
How to Break the Cycle
To break the cycle of conditioned power, parents need to discourage children from doing things for acceptance and popularity, but rather to do things for the values those parents are trying to instill in their kids. Strengthen the family unit by valuing family unity through togetherness. These days, that starts with screen time.
When mom or dad or son or daughter are on their screens, they are not together. They are in the same room, but they are not in the same place. This is a recipe for conditioning vulnerability like none other. There’s a reason for family time. It’s to instill in your children a sense of who they are in relation to the family and society. They need this as a sort of force field against conditioning from outside influences.
Don’t just play an active role in your children’s education, play an activist role. Get involved and send a message to schools that you’re present. Schools and their leftist teachers and administrators are less likely to test families of children they already know are strong.
Watch their friends. Nothing can undermine everything you’ve tried to do in raising your children like peer pressure. Pay attention to who your child is spending time with in and out of school. If your gut is telling you something’s off, do to your child what the left is already trying to do to you and your child – separate them. Find some other way to occupy your child’s time, so they are not constantly exposed to negative influences. Don't put the onus on your child to remove himself or herself from the group. That puts undue stress on your child, and it's not likely to work.
The best approach is fairly logistical. Sign them up for activities, classes and groups that present time conflicts with the negative influences. Yes, this may cut into parental schedules more than you like, but having been there myself, I can say this. All of the sacrifices you made for your kids will come rushing back to you as you sit in the crowd watching your child graduate from college or get married. And you'll tell yourself it was worth it.
Just like you, your children will be conditioned. The only question is, which influences do you want to shape them as people? Patriotic or religious influences that make for a better person? Or, negative, anti-American, anti-religious influences designed only to give someone else power over them?
Parents have tough job today. It takes day-to-day diligence to counter the constant onslaught from the left. The battlefield is the mind of a child. Someone will condition that child. Better it be the ones who believe in God and family and country.
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