The headline at the Post Millennial was heartening: “12th-grade American boys trend conservative.” However, I’m not ready to get excited. I saw that same trend when my kids came of age, but college shook that conservativism right out of the boys. I suspect a lot of it has to do with the fact that high school girls are shrewish leftists while college girls are shrewish leftists who will sleep with them. And of course, the professors are more open about their politics.

Here’s the story:

General knowledge may say that more and more young people are identifying as liberal. According to new data, 12th-grade high school boys are twice as likely to identify as conservative as compared to liberal. 

In annual surveys over the last few years, data pulled from Monitoring the Future has shown that about a quarter of high school seniors identify as conservative or very conservative. Only 13 percent of the 12th grade boys identify as liberal. 

My first response was a happy little fist pump. Yay. They’re finally wising up. And then reality kicked in. I witnessed my own children and their many friends go through high school and college, and there was a distinct trajectory.

Image: High school students by freepik.

In 9th and 10th grade, the kids were mostly apolitical (although that may have changed since my kids graduated half a decade ago). By 11th grade, though, many of the girls were budding feminists, and—oh, my gosh!—they were nasty. The boys were constantly harangued about being evil, toxic members of the patriarchy.

The boys responded by retreating to video games and YouTube videos that talked about how mean feminists are. Those videos included people like Steve Crowder and Ben Shapiro. By graduation, the boys were trending conservative, while the feminist girls remained on the left.

Then, most of the boys in the neighborhood went to college. The girls there were just as awful. Indeed, they were more awful, for they got increasingly neurotic as their leftism increased throughout college. But those also did something they really couldn’t do living at home while in high school: They started having sex.

The boys, in turn, decided that they’d rather have sex with a feminist harridan than not have sex at all. It turns out that when you’re young and spending lots of time with a feminist and want something from her, you’ll start echoing her opinions.

In addition, of course, there’s the constant leftist haranguing from professors. In public high schools, the teachers must be a bit subtle about their politics. In college, they use their classrooms as bully pulpits from which to preach the gospel of leftism. Students can’t avoid it and, unless they’re hardcore conservatives when they enter college, they’re going to come out as leftists.

And that’s why, if your conservative 12th-grade son goes to college, don’t expect him to be a conservative when he comes home.