School turned him liberal. His mom loves Fox News. Will their bond survive? (2024)

ITHACA, N.Y. — Two nights before he was supposed to graduate from college, Mike Lindgren called his mother with a warning.

Jennifer Lindgren, 53, was packing her pink suitcase for an early-morning flight from her home outside Chicago to Ithaca College in Upstate New York. In her son’s four years at the liberal arts school, she had never visited.

“Mom, this is the heart of liberal America,” Mike said into his iPhone, urging her to tread cautiously as she navigated his deep-blue college town. “You gotta be careful.”

Mike was half-joking, but only half. He and his conservative mother agree on almost nothing. She is a fervent Donald Trump supporter; he plans to vote for independent presidential candidate Cornel West this fall. She believes the events of Jan. 6, 2021, were staged by the government; he calls that day a violent insurrection. She is a former police officer, protective of law enforcement; he believes much of American policing is systemically racist.

It wasn’t always this way.

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.

Both Mike and his mother saw his education as the culprit — in different ways. Jennifer, a former patrol officer, came to believe the teachers and classmates at Mike’s private school influenced him to adopt viewpoints at odds with her own.

“He was indoctrinated,” she said.

But Mike decided the “indoctrination” he underwent actually took place at home, fueled by his family’s diet of Fox News, Trump speeches and Alex Jones. What his boarding school did, Mike said, was “counter-indoctrination”: It showed him there was more than one way to see things, leaving him the power to choose.

Mike’s education took place amid a swelling national debate over what and how schools should teach about race, history, sex, gender and faith. Between his senior years of high school and college, legislators in red states passed nearly 80 laws restricting what educators can say about race, sexual orientation and gender identity, a Washington Post analysis found. And the summer of Mike’s college graduation, Oklahoma started requiring that all schools teach the Bible. At the same time, conservative politicians, pundits and parents began alleging teachers were pushing left-wing beliefs about LGBTQ+ people, policing, race and history onto students.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump reportedly railed against the “liberal indoctrination of America’s youth” and promised to end federal funding for schools teaching “transgender insanity” or “other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.” South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson penned an op-ed declaring “defeating anti-American indoctrination” in schools the “biggest cultural challenge of our lifetime.”

As political charges of school indoctrination surged, Jennifer worried its effects were fracturing her family.

She fought more with Mike after he went away to college, and they spoke less. When they did talk, in minutes-long phone calls, they skirted an expanding list of topics too hot to touch: from the coronavirus vaccine, to the Black Lives Matter protests, to transgender rights, to presidential politics.

By his junior year of college, Mike noticed he wasn’t talking or laughing freely with his mother like he remembered doing when he was little. It felt like he couldn’t discuss anything that mattered with Jennifer. Like he had to hide parts of himself from his mother.

Jennifer, meanwhile, resented the way Mike questioned her beliefs, treating her as if she was stupid. And she watched as political disagreements ripped apart her town and threatened other relationships in her family: A stranger yelled at her for her Trump bumper sticker. A cousin stopped speaking to her after she posted “All Lives Matter” on Facebook.

A few months before Ithaca College’s graduation, she called Mike and told him they had to fix this. They had to stop fighting all the time. She didn’t want to lose her son, not over politics.

On the Saturday morning in late May when Jennifer arrived at the Syracuse airport with Mike’s grandfather and sister, Mike was standing at the base of an escalator waiting, shifting foot to foot.

“Hi,” he said, moving in to hug his mom.

“Did you get taller?” Jennifer asked, stepping back to look at him. “When was the last time I saw you, Christmas?”

It was her first time seeing Mike in months. Her first time visiting the state of New York: a liberal slice of the country foreign to her, but where her son had found a home. It was his first real chance to show her, up close, what he was making of his life.

And it was their first real test since Jennifer called demanding a solution. Could they accept each other, even if they didn’t understand each other anymore?

“Yeah,” Mike answered his mother. Turning toward the baggage claim, he warned, “I don’t really have a good plan” for the trip.

Gripping the handle of her pink rolling suitcase, Jennifer followed her son into the weekend.

***

Jennifer realized Mike was in trouble when she saw his ninth-grade report card: a slew of C’s, D’s and F’s. She knew Mike was smart, and she was sure he could do better. Her distractible son just needed a different way to learn. More one-on-one attention. Lessons that required him to use his whole body, not just his brain.

She and Mike’s father — who are divorced — sought help from a Chicago-based education consultant, who evaluated Mike and recommended the Leelanau School, which offers “kinesthetic, visual, and verbal learning” that engages “all your senses,” per the school website. At the tiny boarding school in Northern Michigan, where tuition and board cost up to $72,000 per year, teachers give lessons targeted as much to students’ “sight, sound and smell” as their brains. During a typical class day, students might wade into the river to learn about “aquatic life cycles,” or shoot slingshots to understand parabolic motion. The Leelanau website promises to celebrate “everyone’s unique learning styles in a culture of acceptance.”

Perfect, Jennifer decided, for her son. Mike’s grandparents got on board, too, agreeing to help pay tuition.

So, at the start of Mike’s sophom*ore year in 2017, Jennifer drove from Illinois to Glen Arbor to settle him into the wooded, 40-acre campus fronting Lake Michigan. She recalled him as angry and tearful throughout the six-hour car ride; Mike said in an interview that it felt like he was being sent away as punishment.

At first, he disliked the new school. He struggled to adjust to the super-small, unusual classes, which could involve anything from a fishing trip to looking at rocks. It was weird, Mike said, to take exams based on conversations rather than written questions.

And Mike felt out of place among his peers. Early on, he remembered, he tried making comments popular with his friend circle back home: Dinging Hillary Clinton for her private email server, for example, or calling Trump the GOAT, short for “Greatest of All Time.” Such opinions stemmed partly from his mother, he said, but also from “alt-right” corners of the internet and the irregular drip of Daily Wire articles he read at the time.

But, where kids at his old school had laughed or agreed, Leelanau students didn’t seem to like what Mike was saying. They told Mike his comments weren’t “okay,” Mike recalled. Especially one student, Jack Simermeyer, who lived in Mike’s suite and who happened to be gay — something Mike made fun of at the time, he said.

Jack, now 23, said in an interview that he remembers Mike using an anti-gay slur a lot: slinging it like a nickname, greeting him at night with, “’Sup, f-----?” Other times, Mike asked rude questions about sex acts or found ways to make “my gayness the butt of the joke,” Jack said. But Jack never complained to adults at the school. He didn’t find Mike’s behavior threatening, he said, just ignorant. He judged that Mike was hunting for reactions: He wanted to “trigger the libs,” Jack said.

“He wasn’t my favorite person,” Jack said, “but the way I viewed him — he just didn’t know. He wasn’t aware. He hadn’t had the exposure to other people where you can build tolerance.”

Instead of reporting Mike, Jack decided to teach him. He explained the f-word was hurtful. He argued with Mike about politics and other current events, once pushing back, for example, when he heard Mike satirizing queer identities by claiming he identified as “an attack helicopter.”

Eventually, Mike started listening — out of simple curiosity.

“The discourse that was happening, I wanted to stop rejecting it,” he said in an interview. “I wanted to ask more questions. Why were things the way they were?”

By Mike’s junior year, Jennifer started to notice changes in her son, too. When she called to tell him she was planning a visit to Leelanau, he paused on the line before blurting out a warning: Do not wear your Trump sweatshirt.

“And don’t ever say ‘former president Trump’ while you’re here,” Jennifer recalls Mike saying. “I don’t want you to say anything about Trump.”

Jennifer was shocked. A little hurt. She hadn’t been planning to bring the Trump gear anyway — why would she? Her political views had nothing to do with visiting her son at school. Mike should have known that.

When she arrived on campus a few days later, making sure to leave the sweatshirt at home, she was further startled by how casually the teachers and students dressed and behaved toward one another: Some wore jeans, she said, and used first names. It was all so different from the conservative Catholic school she grew up attending. One day, Mike told her, school leaders let students out of class to protest for more gun control.

Both Mike and Jack said they guessed most Leelanau teachers were liberal based on the ways they decorated their classrooms or occasional comments they dropped in casual conversations. Still, both emphasized, they never received explicitly political education at Leelanau. Instead, educators canvassed left- and right-wing arguments in class, making sure students understood both sides.

The Leelanau School did not respond to requests for comment.

Driving home, Jennifer wondered if most of Mike’s classmates and teachers at Leelanau leaned left.

But she dismissed the thought before she finished the drive. The school seemed so good for Mike in other ways: His grades were up. He was more articulate. He spent less time playing video games. And she really liked his teachers: They clearly cared about her son and were able to work with him in one-on-one ways his public school hadn’t.

What, Jennifer thought, did politics really matter?

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Soon it was Mike’s senior year, and time for him to choose a subject to investigate for his thesis project. Intrigued by swirling rumors of a mysterious disease just beginning to inflict fatalities on Wuhan, China, Mike chose to research the coronavirus.

He set out in January 2020 to assess just how far the illness might spread. Through hours of painstaking research online, he learned with his chemistry teacher’s help to distinguish between scientific reports, reliable news sources and social media-fueled rumors.

He came away convinced that covid had the potential to disrupt the entire globe — and that Americans should listen closely to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony S. Fauci. By contrast, Mike became increasingly alarmed by conservative politicians’ skepticism around the virus, especially Trump’s. When Trump insisted the virus would “miraculously [go] away,” compared covid favorably to the flu or called the risk to the American people “very low,” Mike bristled. Such commentary, he was beginning to fear, would cost millions of lives.

As Mike raced to finalize his senior project, the virus began proving his worst projections true. Covid surged into the United States with a vengeance, forcing schools nationwide to shut their doors. Including Leelanau.

Come late spring, Mike headed home to finish his senior year by Zoom — and to find his mother repeating every right-wing theory he’d come to detest.

***

A couple of months before the 2020 presidential election, Jennifer was parking at the grocery store when a stranger stopped his car, jumped out and started screaming at her. It was a few seconds before Jennifer realized what he was yelling about: the Trump sticker on her bumper.

Around the same time, scrolling on Facebook, Jennifer noticed a cousin had posted to complain about police treatment of Black Americans, writing, “Black Lives Matter.” Stung by what she saw as a harsh reflection on her own career in law enforcement, Jennifer replied in the comments that, the way she saw it, “All Lives Matter.”

The ensuing torrent of abuse from the cousin and her friends drove Jennifer to quit Facebook, she said. The next time she saw the cousin at a family function, they stayed on opposite sides of the room, not speaking. Jennifer couldn’t help recalling how she used to change the cousin’s diapers.

But suddenly, ties like that didn’t seem to matter. America — like her town, like her extended family — was more split over politics than Jennifer had ever known it.

When Mike came home, so did the division.

One evening after dinner, Mike wandered into Jennifer’s bedroom and sat down on a large beige couch, a favorite childhood haunt for both Mike and sister Grace. Jennifer turned to face him, looking away from a television screen playing Fox News.

Mike began talking through what happened that day: inevitably, about covid. Jennifer told her son about a video she’d seen online showing military tanks taking over cities in lockdown. The person who posted the video, she told him, feared the government might use the virus as an excuse to enforce martial law.

“That s---’s crap,” Mike recalled responding, alarmed. He suggested she look at the resources he’d relied on for his covid presentation instead: the World Health Organization, for example, or bulletins from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Jennifer felt a burr of alarm. She didn’t agree with what her son was saying. And she didn’t appreciate the implication she was being duped. Just when had Mike become so confident his information was right, and hers wrong?

“Let’s just go to bed,” she said, after several silent minutes.

Soon, the meetings became a nightly ritual. It was a way to process a world that seemed to be spinning into chaos — and, increasingly, a measure of just how differently mother and son viewed that world.

At first, their evening discussions centered on covid. But when George Floyd was killed by police and demonstrations erupted across dozens of major cities, their conversations veered in a new direction. Jennifer cited theories — since debunked — positing Floyd died of a drug overdose, not because of a policeman’s knee on his neck. Pointing to fires and looting in some places, she argued the protesters were destroying cities. She objected to the way she felt Black activists were painting all cops as evil and racist. She knew police officers, she had worked nearly two decades in the force — and she wasn’t evil, or racist.

To Mike, though, Floyd’s death was undeniable proof of the racism baked into American structures and institutions. He deemed the protests, even those that turned violent, a long-overdue reckoning.

Neither budged. They both clung close to their opinions, convinced the other was wrong.

Mike had never argued like this with his mother. He was worried for her health, dismayed by her opposition to pandemic safety measures such as masking. He felt like she wasn’t listening to him; like suddenly, she didn’t believe him anymore.

Jennifer, meanwhile, was wondering when her son stopped respecting her. She never remembered behaving so rudely to her own parents, Reagan devotees who raised her with a Republican flag in the front yard and Fox News on the television. Her whole life, she had retained their views without question.

In the spring of 2020, Mike learned he’d been admitted to Ithaca College with a scholarship. Teachers told him it was a great school. He thought Upstate New York looked beautiful. And anything that took him away from Chicago and the nightly bickering, Mike felt, was a good option.

He decided to go, with Jennifer’s full support. Although she knew little about Ithaca, she was thrilled by the prospect of a college degree. She also hoped that, with a little distance, the fights might stop.

Instead, they changed subjects.

In almost weekly phone calls, Mike and Jennifer kept clashing over politics: First, Mike unsuccessfully tried to persuade his mother to support Joe Biden. Then they disagreed over the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — then over the coronavirus vaccine, which Mike signed up for as soon as he finished his first semester of college. But what he viewed as lifesaving, Jennifer deemed life-threatening. She refused Mike’s demands she get the shot, pointing to reports from Tucker Carlson that the vaccine might cause health problems, even death.

His in-person visits to see his mother dwindled to twice, then once a year.

During one call a few months into Mike’s senior year of college, he told Jennifer he didn’t like law enforcement. The sentence knocked the air from her diaphragm. She finished the call blinking through tears, fighting to keep tremors from her voice. She had always believed her children were proud of the way she’d served her state. The minute Mike disconnected, she turned to her second husband, Dave.

“I just want to pull my hair out,” she remembers saying. Why, she wanted to know. Why was Mike saying things that hurt so bad?

Dave looked at her. “Oh,” she recalls him saying, “it must be that school.”

And for the first time, Jennifer asked herself the question: Was Mike’s education the reason he had turned out so differently?

Had the teachers and students at Leelanau exposed her son to left-leaning viewpoints he never would have encountered otherwise? Yes, she decided. Had Mike become an unrecognizable version of the little boy she could still remember carrying in her arms, the kid she once saw as her devoted sidekick? Yes.

Still, hadn’t Mike also grown from a collector of D’s and F’s into a straight-A student? Hadn’t Mike’s teachers and classmates spurred his confidence and curiosity, developing him into a brave young man whose openness to new opinions she admired, despite everything? Wasn’t he at college now because of what he learned at Leelanau?

She tried to remind herself of all this whenever calls with Mike grew tense. To stay patient with her son, even when it felt like he was making fun of her. Mostly, she tried to avoid broaching topics she suspected might spark disagreement.

Then in a phone call late last year, mother and son somehow started chatting about drag queen story hours: events where drag performers read books aloud to children at school or public libraries. Jennifer was horrified. She couldn’t understand why anyone would think it was appropriate to confuse fragile young children by introducing them to the concept of cross-dressing before they were ready.

But Mike laughed at her, she recalled. “Well, what’s wrong with that?” he kept asking over the phone.

In another first for Jennifer, she hung up on her son.

***

Early this year, Jennifer phoned Mike yet again. This time, with a message.

“You,” she told him, “don’t understand where I’m coming from.”

She wasn’t some brainwashed idiot, repeating Republican rhetoric like a robot, she said. She didn’t believe conservatives were perfect or that they made all the right decisions — and he shouldn’t think Democrats were perfect, either. What Jennifer tried to do, she said, was “look for good people doing the right thing.”

What they couldn’t do, she added, was let politics come between them. Their relationship was more important than their disagreements, she said.

Mike told her he hadn’t understood how she picked candidates to support. He promised he’d try to be less dismissive of her views.

He’d been thinking lately about the nature of indoctrination. He still believed he’d been indoctrinated into right-wing views growing up. But so, he said, was his mother. And she wasn’t to blame: There was an entire ecosystem of conservative politicians and pundits ready and eager to influence public opinion, Mike thought. His family was just one of many caught in the cogs of a large, well-organized machine.

On the phone, he told his mother he had a favor to ask. Would she please, just once, try reading the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post or the New York Times?

“Have you ever considered,” he said, “that media in general sometimes put out there what they want you to believe, not what is really going on?”

Jennifer said she never thought about it that way. Recalling some of the more vitriolic Infowars segments she had watched, she conceded: Perhaps Mike had a point. She promised her son she would try.

Three months later, Mike stood pointing at a red-awninged building on the Ithaca Commons, a slice of downtown near his campus crammed with cafes, bookstores and boutique clothing shops. It was the day before graduation, and he was a few minutes into giving his mother, grandfather and sister a tour.

“So this,” Mike said, pointing, “is the weed shop.”

Jennifer, wearing diamond earrings and a turquoise cardigan, nodded. Mike was testing her, she thought. She called this behavior “poking the bear” or “picking the scab”: little moments when Mike would lob ostensibly left-leaning viewpoints or activities, knowing it might set her off.

But now, she knew how to respond.

She swept an arm out, pointing out chattering crowds, people queued in front of packed restaurants, a vendor handing out free pizza, a street performer in a three-piece suit barking into a microphone. “Is it like this every weekend?” she asked.

“In the summer, yeah,” Mike said, grinning.

“So eclectic around here, isn’t it?” She smiled back, hugging herself and rising to her tiptoes. “Mish-mashy.”

It was their new approach. The tolerance they’d reached. Maybe they were going to disagree sometimes. Maybe even most of the time. But Jennifer wanted to know about Mike’s world — if he would let her in. And Mike could see Jennifer was open to learning — provided he made the effort to understand her, too.

He was her son, and she was his mother, and that mattered more than politics.

The next day, Mike approached the stage in a billowing blue graduation gown to collect a degree in journalism. His mother bounced on her toes, hands intertwined at her waist.

Onstage, part of Mike couldn’t really believe what was happening.

Ever since he’d flunked classes his freshman year of high school, higher education had felt out of reach: something for people who were good at school, not for him. He looked toward where he thought his mother and family were sitting amid the vast crowd. If his mother hadn’t supported him, Mike thought — hadn’t picked out Leelanau, driven him there despite his opposition, worked with his grandparents to pay for the school — he wouldn’t be where he was, crossing the stage.

If she had to do it over, Jennifer was asking herself as she watched from the crowd as her son’s small blue figure accepted a tiny diploma, would she send Mike to Leelanau again?

Yes, she realized, she would.