By Gus Pirlot | City of Salomon, Mitchell County

On Wednesday afternoon, during recreational time, Ripon College president Zach Messitte held a discussion about President Donald Trump’s first year as President of the United States. I went into the discussion expecting a chaotic debate between far-leaning conservatives and liberal Badger Boys State citizens.

What occurred was much different.

Messitte first asked us to predict what the general opinion of the room would be. The general prediction was that most citizens would be on the left side of political spectrum, as is the norm with many young people.

We then listed positive, negative and neutral adjectives to describe Trump. Surprisingly, the lists were relatively equal in length.

Despite the seemingly even split between the citizens, I still believe most of the room was liberal.

My hypothesis is that most citizens with strong political opinions tried to give more mellow lists of adjectives, as to not incite anger among the other oppositely opinioned citizens.

This made the discussion a little boring and generally unsatisfying. I was left with almost no political read on the room.

All I knew was based on speculation and what I knew about general political demographics among young people. Besides, among my close friends, most I talk to don’t care or are unwilling to discuss politics.

Social media and popular news targeted toward young people are almost always saturated with left-wing bias. For example, Facebook has been revealed to deliberately hide stories from conservative-leaning sources, while promoting those from liberal-leaning sources.

I have always wondered how widespread the effect of this is, and I hoped to find out for sure in yesterday’s discussion. Unfortunately, I left only a little more enlightened than when I came, still wondering and worrying about the state of my peers in the world around me.