School turned him liberal. His mom loves Fox News.

After a mother sent her son to a new school, his views shifted left — bringing the nation’s political division home.

For much of his childhood, Mike said, he parroted his mother’s right-wing opinions without question, in line with the rest of their immediate family, which mostly leaned right. But after Mike failed several classes as a freshman in public high school, Jennifer sent him to the Leelanau School, a private boarding school in Michigan that promised a hands-on, “inclusive” approach to learning. There, surrounded by teachers and classmates he described as liberal, Mike said he grew more curious about his peers’ worldviews — and correspondingly less sure of his own. By the time he matriculated at Ithaca College, he was leaning left, he said. Living on campus solidified the shift. He would graduate college feeling closest, politically, to the Democratic Socialists of America, which aims to abolish capitalism in the United States.

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