KARA ZUPKUS, 23

I saw that the majority of young people said in a poll that socialism was our future,” she said. Her group finds young people who escaped communism and socialism and makes short videos about their experience, one of which, featuring a Cuban refugee, has been viewed 13 million times thus far. “He speaks of being beaten by police for having long hair and listening to the Beatles, and how his mother had to burn furniture to boil potatoes,” said Zegers. She’s releasing 10 more videos in the next two months, and next year she’s creating a curriculum she hopes will be adopted in schools. “Students today may learn that Stalin, Lenin, Castro and Mao were terrible dictators, but they don’t learn that they came to power by attacking businesses and promising free government services and free food. They used the same language the American left uses today, and it always ends in suffering,” she said. “It is so important to hear young people from Venezuela, for example, saying, ‘This politician excited me by promising social justice and calling himself a “democratic socialist,” and now I had to flee my country for America.’ That’s what gets me so excited. We walk among giants with these people, and I just want to do their stories justice.” who threatened to expose “pro-police” teachers at elementary schools in an effort to have them fired, was viewed 271,000 times in July, for example. Zupkus became interested in politics at age 11 during the 2008 presidential election, when John Mccain and Sarah Palin lost to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, then she watched her older sister head to Capitol Hill to work for California congressman Tom Mcclintock the following year. She chose YAF at GWU over College Republicans when she saw a picture of Ronald Reagan hanging in the office of the former. “He’s a hero of mine, and I feel that conservative principles transcend party politics,” she told Newsweek. At GWU, she would seek out opportunities to debate liberal professors and students. “Basically, I was called a ‘white supremacist’ or ‘racist’ on a weekly basis,” she recalled. “It gave me incentive to prove them wrong.” When her YAF chapter brought Ben Shapiro to speak on campus in her senior year, posters were defaced with an X through his face and the words “Get Security.” She said that for three years in a row, vandals ripped crosses out of the ground that were meant to honor aborted fetuses during her YAF chapter’s annual anti-abortion display. While at GWU, “we were vandalized 20 times and filed a dozen police reports,” she said. “Whenever we’d hang 100 posters for an event, they’d be gone the next day, so we’d hang 200 more. It’s definitely a hostile environment for conservatives.” Currently, there’s an effort to change the university’s nickname (Colonials) and mascot (“George 1,” a cartoonish version of George Washington). Zupkus has a prediction: “The left says it is ‘racist’ and ‘cultural appropriation,’ and I have no doubt they’ll succeed. It’s a very liberal school.”

The Washington Post