California’s Political Osmosis: How Education, Policy, and Media Quietly Rewire Public Belief

I learned to read the world by watching patterns and noticing what people do when they think no one is watching. I first learned that as a soldier in the Middle East, where you survive by reading incentives and truth quickly. I learned it again as a father, where stability matters more than slogans. People rarely change overnight. They drift, but it’s the way more and more people re drifting into who they are through a form of identify-developing absorption. 

That drift is what I call political osmosis: the slow absorption of ideas, language, and assumptions through three chambers most people pass through without noticing: education, policy, and media. Politics is not only taught. It is absorbed. You walk in with questions. You walk out with conclusions you did not test.

Education is the first chamber. People ask why a conservative man in his late 30s would choose San Francisco State University for a political science degree. My answer is simple: if California’s education is losing substance, then observation becomes the education. I wanted to study the atmosphere that manufactures politics, and the way students react to what they absorb. You see radicalization of students, but even in some cases, more radicalization from university staff. In recent news, University of Washington researcher Mara Maughan, called for the assignation of conservative voice. These are people such as me and others.

On many campuses, “social justice” is treated like moral gravity. Political theory can orbit Karl Marx, not merely as history to critique, but as a lens students are urged to adopt. Professors can be brilliant, but when opinions are delivered as moral conclusions, students learn agreement faster than inquiry. Many professors have hardly stepped into the real world or out of the education system, delivering a form of education from the roots of the professor. This is an issue we face seen up front across multiple California institutions.

That climate does not stay on university lawns. In Placer County, school boards have taken public votes on Title IX and girls sports. Parents also describe ideological symbolism in spaces that once centered the American flag and academic basics. In Lincoln, students formed a Club America chapter to practice civic engagement and free speech, sparking debate precisely because young people are no longer expected to think out loud.

Policy is the second chamber, where language becomes law and incentives become outcomes. California’s policy machine runs on complexity: bills that get gutted and amended, promises that hide tradeoffs, and ballot language many voters cannot decode. This is how policy becomes osmosis. People do not choose outcomes. They inherit them, then get told the inheritance was “progress.”

Consider Proposition 50, approved by California voters in November 2025, which authorizes temporary changes to congressional district maps starting in 2026. You can support or oppose the move, but you should see the mechanism: major rules packaged for mass consumption, with consequences most people will only feel after the fact.

Media is the third chamber, and the strongest, because it sets the emotional temperature: what is “settled,” what is mocked, and what questions are allowed. On January 13, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in cases from Idaho and West Virginia about state laws restricting transgender girls and women from female school sports teams. Regardless of where you stand, the point is that elite institutions are now litigating definitions that used to be straightforward.

When institutions cannot speak plainly about basics, ordinary people stop trusting them. That is political osmosis at work: reality becomes negotiable, and authority replaces truth.

The cost is not abstract. California’s Department of Finance estimates net domestic migration losses of about 216,000 people from 2024 to 2025. Pew Research Center reported in late 2025 that 85 percent of U.S. adults believe politically motivated violence is increasing. PRRI polling in late 2025 found about 20 percent agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence” to save the country. It gets even worse with college students.

Political osmosis is real, and it is powerful. But it is not destiny. The antidote is what my life kept forcing me to practice: observe carefully, question boldly, and refuse to outsource your thinking. That is why reform voices are stepping forward, from education advocates like Sonja Shaw to leaders like Chad Bianco calling for safer communities and a better quality of life. Families should not have to leave California to find sanity again.