Prager Force's Olivia Jaber on Being a 'Closet Conservative' on Campus
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Olivia Jaber, it's a pleasure to speak to you.
Olivia, what exactly do you do at PragerForce?
Yeah, so I have been working here for a little over a month now, and I am a coordinator helping with all of our virtual networking events, onboarding new members.
I'm helping with a little bit of the marketing and social media just to engage young students, young conservatives across the country, and help them find a community which is so important right now.
Everything depends on kindred spirits.
That's exactly what I believe, and that gives me the strength that I have to fight.
How did you...
You were at Berkeley, correct?
Correct.
Yes.
What were you studying?
Gender studies?
Medieval, Belgian, misogyny?
What did you major in?
So I actually studied classics and political economics at Berkeley.
So classics was really...
Roman history and philosophy and that area wasn't really very politically tainted because we were just trying to decipher what people before us from Plato to Cicero had said and on the other side political economics was when I started to notice there was a lot of infiltration of very leftist ideology in my curriculum.
I got a little bit of both worlds, so to speak.
Right now, if it hasn't happened, it will happen.
They will simply declare classics as an example of white supremacy.
Absolutely.
I think that is where we're headed.
And it's a shame because...
Classics really taught me how to analytically think and critically think, and I think that's where I developed a lot of the foundation for being able to reason through things.
And it's funny, I came out as a conservative maybe six or seven months ago, and a lot of people who had also studied classics, even though it's a small major at Cal, had reached out to me and said that they, too, were closet conservatives.
Which I thought was very interesting that maybe that major is producing some people who can think for themselves.
Yeah, well, that's my old belief.
Study Cicero and think clearly.
Absolutely.
That's a major motto.
Can you say that in Latin?
Probably not.
You say you came out as a conservative six months ago.
Were you in the closet until then?
Yeah, so I have always been politically inclined, and I went to Berkeley really not knowing what I believed.
And I quickly started to realize that I was right-leaning because everything was just ridiculous.
At Berkeley.
And so I also realized that the social situation, the academic situation really didn't leave me much room to talk about my beliefs.
And I didn't really feel comfortable voicing them.
And that's honestly one of my biggest regrets.
And I felt by senior year I couldn't really take it anymore.
And two girlfriends and I decided to start a conservative publication.
And we worked on it and worked on it, and right when the BLM movement was first coming to fruition, we had actually launched our website that week, and I was really seeking out alternate resources.