Republicans are finally getting proactive about courting the young vote.
Democrats have been targeting the youth vote for decades, and while young voters often didn’t turn out at the polls, they did — in droves — for the 2008 election. But after eight years of Barack Obama — when a lot of those Millennials ended up living in their parents’ basements again — the time is ripe for Republicans to put on their own full-court press to win over young voters.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday dropped by the Turning Point USA’s High School Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., and delivered an inspiring speech to conservative high school students, saying colleges today are doing nothing more than creating a generation of “supercilious snowflakes.”
“Rather than molding a generation of mature, well-informed adults, some schools are doing everything they can to create a generation of sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes,” Sessions said in his speech.
Colleges today suppress free speech — what with their endless “trigger” alarms and “crying rooms” and “safe spaces,” where precious snowflakes can be safe from differing opinions — and are openly hostile to conservatives, Sessions said.
“Too many schools are coddling students,” Sessions said. “There was a ‘cry-in’ at Cornell after the 2016 election, therapy dogs at the University of Kansas. … I hope they had plenty of tissues,” he said to raucous laughter.
Sessions recounted his own college days at Huntingdon College in Alabama. “The hostility was not as great then as it is today on college campuses,” he said. But he encouraged the students to “Stand strong for what you believe in.”
Sessions’ speech follows another from U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who told the students gathered at the summit that they need to stop trying to “own the libs.”
“Raise your hand if you’ve ever posted anything online to quote-unquote ‘own the libs.’” A lot of hands went up, along with cheers. But Haley had a warning.
“I know that it’s fun and that it can feel good, but step back and think about what you’re accomplishing when you do this — are you persuading anyone? Who are you persuading? We’ve all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn’t leadership — it’s the exact opposite.
“Real leadership is about persuasion, it’s about movement, it’s bringing people around to your point of view. Not by shouting them down, but by showing them how it is in their best interest to see things the way you do,” Heley said.