Photo by Emma Quirk '26. Rockwell graduated from Mount Holyoke in 2015, having received a degree in history and politics; she currently works for PragerU as a fundraiser.
By Tara Monastesse ’25 & Anoushka Singh Kuswaha ’24
News Editors
“It is a cult, its aim is to separate you from the people who love you most,” Tucker Carlson concluded when describing Mount Holyoke College on his Fox News segment, Tucker Carlson Tonight. The guest of the night was Annabella Rockwell ’15, who was invited to the show after being featured in a widely circulated New York Post article that was published on Nov. 26. The article described Rockwell’s experience at Mount Holyoke College, where she described herself as becoming “totally indoctrinated” into a viewpoint wherein the world is dominated by a toxic patriarchal system and that women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people are oppressed victims.
Rockwell, described by the New York Post as an “heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune,” grew up in an Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan. She chose Mount Holyoke for “its academic rigor and prestige.” A different segment featuring Rockwell, this time on Fox & Friends, claims that she was then “brainwashed” into “woke culture” while on campus.
In an interview with Dennis Prager, co-founder of PragerU — the company which currently employs Rockwell as a fundraiser — Rockwell stated that she studied “history and politics at Mount Holyoke … [but] every class was history, but history with race, history with gender.”
In the interview, Rockwell went on to state that because of this type of education, she began viewing herself as part of a system in which everyone was oppressed and she saw herself as a victim. Rockwell cites these views as arising after electing to take a gender studies course in her junior year at Mount Holyoke, where she was first exposed to the ideas of systemic oppression and patriarchal bias.
In her New York Post interview, Rockwell described her experience in this class: “This professor tells me about the patriarchy, I barely knew what the word meant. I didn’t know what [the professor] was talking about. I wasn’t someone that [was] into feminism. I just knew that I felt I had always been free to do what I wanted. I never experienced sexism. But I was told there’s the patriarchy and you don’t even understand it’s been working against you your whole life. You’ve been oppressed and you didn’t even know it. Now you have to fight it. And I just went down this deep rabbit hole.”
Adding onto her list of grievances, in an article by the Daily Mail, Rockwell claimed that campus culture at Mount Holyoke drove her to drink and become estranged from her mother. Rockwell alleges in the New York Post article that this type of estrangement was encouraged by faculty at Mount Holyoke, to the point where professors allegedly offered students, like herself, their homes to stay in during the holiday periods.
Rockwell went on to state that there is a culture of ostracization on the Mount Holyoke campus, a sentiment which is viewed by Georgia Rose ’25 as proof of “how much of a straw man [Rockwell’s] argument was.” Rose went on to state Rockwell’s allegations have “[woven] small truths about a small percent of the population.” To some extent, Rose echoes Rockwell’s statement, but largely finds them an exercise in hyperbole, stating that, “Is it true that some [MHC students engage in exclusionary behaviors]? Yes. But it’s not everyone.” Rose further expressed that she, too, felt similar sentiments upon her arrival at Mount Holyoke, feeling as though she was “stifled” because she “wasn’t leftist or radical enough.” However, Rose emphasized that in her experience, “A lot of [students at Mount Holyoke] are down to earth [and] are so willing to have difficult conversations with you.”
Other students have become interested in understanding the circumstances that led Rockwell to engage with the New York Post on this topic, such as a student who will graduate in 2023, who stated, “When I first saw the article I actually laughed. My friends and the alums that I know were definitely joking about it. I feel like almost every year we have one of these situations where a conservative student or alum publishes some exposé where they reveal all the horrible leftist Marxist propaganda they are learning at Mount Holyoke and how they are being silenced for their views or whatever, and we roll our eyes, get a little attention on social media and move on.”
They went on to state that their opinion is that “most people don’t take it seriously.” They continued, “A lot of it is very clearly made up.” What concerned this student more than the claims that Rockwell made was what they found out “from reading between the lines in that article and talking to the alums that I know.”
Citing a photographical project conducted by Howard Schatz in which Rockwell and other participants documented their lives from childhood to adulthood, the student drew the conclusion that Rockwell had painted a different picture of herself and made some pertinent observations about her life. Through this project, the student explained, “[Rockwell] comes off as a smart and independent young woman, not at all the way she comes off in the Post article.”
In her interview with Carlson, Rockwell also discussed the “MoHo chop,” an unofficial campus tradition in which some students choose to cut their hair.
“When I first saw the article I actually laughed. My friends and the alums that I know were definitely joking about it. I feel like almost every year we have one of these situations where a conservative student or alum publishes some exposé where they reveal all the horrible leftist Marxist propaganda they are learning at Mount Holyoke and how they are being silenced for their views or whatever, and we roll our eyes, get a little attention on social media and move on.”
“[The] ‘Moho Chop’ is not an enforced tradition as they might like you to believe,” an anonymous student from the class of 2025 said. “In fact, my experience with it was just three individuals brought out onto the stage during an orientation event where they spontaneously got their hair cut off by their fellow classmates. This little ritual is beloved and voluntary and those individuals felt compelled to cut their hair short.”
“Even though we might not all agree with each other’s views and opinions, we will still respect one another and give each other the space to share their opinions,” the student said of their experience at the College. “I haven’t felt any need to conform.”
The larger and more headline-grabbing conclusion gained from Rockwell’s description of her four years at Mount Holyoke, is that she felt so indoctrinated to the point where she had to be, according to her interview with the New York Post, “deprogrammed” with the help of her mother, who hired a $300-a-day deprogrammer. Rockwell, in her appearance on Carlson’s show, enthusiastically explained that her mother Melinda Rockwell, had, after being estranged from her daughter and facing increasingly intense arguments, consulted what Rockwell describes as a “cult-specialist.”
Rockwell went on to explain in the same interview that the cult-specialist presented her mother with very grim statistics about the chances of Rockwell “mak[ing] it out” of the mindset she had adopted while being on campus at Mount Holyoke. These statistics said, according to the New York Post, that it can take more than seven years to remove oneself out of what Melinda Rockwell considered a “brainwashed” mindset.
After graduating, Rockwell worked on left-leaning political campaigns, including that of Hilary Clinton, according to the New York Post. Rockwell moved to where her family resided in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2018 and elected to stop drinking. Rockwell reflected upon this decision as a turning point in her life that led, along with what she referred to as the “more violent and destructive” parts of Black Lives Matter protests, her to become disillusioned with the Democratic Party and recently register as Republican, as she stated to the New York Post.
Rockwell also placed emphasis in both of her appearances on Fox News, that she would not have made it without of the persistence of her mother and the education she gained from watching videos made by her current employer, PragerU, a conservative advocacy group which aims to “promote American values” to young people through media content, like YouTube and so forth, according to their website.
While no formal statement has been made by the College regarding Rockwell’s comments, an issue of “MHC This Week” sent to students in November included instructions on what to do if they are confronted with unwanted attention from the press. The Nov. 30 issue stated that “[m]embers of the campus community who receive outreach that includes either threatening or menacing language or discusses a community member’s personal information should contact Public Safety and Service. Please also utilize the College’s bias and Title IX reporting procedures when appropriate.”