Forty-three percent of likely voters between the ages of 18 and 24 view Islamic Sharia law positively. Not "have heard of it." Not "could locate it on a map." View it positively.
These are the same young Americans who, according to Pew Research, believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases at a rate of 66%. The same cohort where 80% support laws protecting LGBTQ Americans from discrimination. Sharia law has a different view on both of those issues.
The numbers come from a new Rasmussen Reports survey that landed like a grenade this week. Among all likely voters, 21% view Sharia law positively while 57% view it negatively — not great, but at least the country as a whole can still do basic math on theocratic legal codes. The problem is the age brackets.
Voters aged 25-29 came in at 39% favorable. Voters over 40 dropped to 16%. The trendline isn't subtle. The younger the voter, the more likely they are to think a legal system that prescribes lashings for alcohol consumption and death for apostasy sounds like a reasonable framework for American life.
It gets better. Twenty-seven percent of voters under 30 said they would allow an American community to adopt Sharia as its legal code if a majority of residents approved. More than one in four young Americans looked at a question about replacing the Constitution with religious law and said sure, why not, democracy.
Outgoing Rep. Chip Roy of Texas didn't mince — didn't hold back. "Sharia law is incompatible with our Constitution and has no place in America," Roy said. "But it's on the rise."
He's reading the same poll we are.
The reflexive response from the academic establishment will be that young people are simply more "tolerant" and "open-minded" than their parents. That framing requires you to ignore what Sharia law actually contains. This is a legal code that criminalizes homosexuality, subordinates women's testimony in court, and treats leaving Islam as a capital offense. The 80% of young Americans who support LGBTQ protections apparently didn't Google what happens to gay men under the system 43% of their peers just endorsed.
That's not tolerance. That's ignorance dressed up in a graduation cap.
The Gallup data on the same age group tells the rest of the story. Fifty-three percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis. The Harvard Youth Poll found 45% of young Americans are struggling financially. They're broke, disillusioned with the country they were taught to distrust, and increasingly sympathetic to civilizations their professors romanticized for four years while cashing $60,000-a-year tuition checks.
This is what a decade of "decolonize the curriculum" produces. Not critical thinkers — cultural tourists who collected enough buzzwords to confuse theocracy with diversity. The universities didn't fail to educate these kids. They educated them exactly the way they intended.
And 43% of them are heading to the polls next month.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reports that 47% of Americans aged 18-25 consumed alcohol in the previous month. Under Sharia, that's a criminal act punishable by flogging.
Nearly half of young voters who view Sharia favorably would be criminals under it.