Stanford University conservative leader John Rice-Cameron slammed ObamaCare and political censorship at a conference for conservative high school students on Monday evening.
His comments were particularly notable given his mother was a top Obama White House official, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
“Just look at the past a hundred years and we’ve seen the size of government expand, and this has coincided with a loss of liberty, from the income tax, the New Deal, the so-called Great Society — and ObamaCare.”
After the audience began booing, he added, “That’s right.”
“Americans seem to be valuing liberty less and less. A majority of Americans now support ObamaCare. They’re fine with the government taking over one-sixth of our economy,” he added.
Rice-Cameron also slammed college campuses as “liberal echo chambers,” and urged students to invite conservative speakers to their campuses and to raise conservative views in the classroom.
“We need to pull our nation back from an edge of a cliff. If students go their entire time in college without hearing conservative ideas, then is it really a surprise that many come out of college solidly on the left?” he said.
“As conservatives interested in promoting liberty, your goal should be to build a true marketplace of ideas. And many of our campuses are failing that role to be a marketplace of ideas, they’ve become his sort of liberal echo chambers,” he said.
He spoke about his own experience being protested against at Stanford and encouraged students not to give up.
“We’re fighting for a marketplace of ideas. Getting there is the hard part. You have to put up with all those people who are shouting their lungs out at speakers, but once you get past that, and they will get tired at some point,” he said.
“If you’re persistent, you will eventually tire out the forces on your campus who are trying to silence you,” he added.
He said the next step was to change people’s minds by having better arguments.
“Conservative ideas have withstood the test of history and of basic logic. So as long as we know what we’re talking about, of course we’re going to win the argument,” he said.
He called fighting for the right-to-life the “highest moral imperative” conservatives need to fight for.
“Without individual liberty, America will cease to be America. There quite literally needs to be a turning point in the direction of our country,” he said.