About
At age 16, Alex and Brett started a blog called "The Rebelution." Since then, the Rebelution movement has grown to include a website and international speaking tour. Since its launch in August 2005, the website has received over 32 million hits, with members around the world.
Expanding on the topic of the blog, the Harris brothers have published two books for Christian teenagers, Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations (2008) and Start Here: Doing Hard Things Right Where You Are (2010) with WaterBrook Multnomah, a division of Random House. One of the examples in their second book is the film The Widow's Might, by teenaged director John Moore. The Rebelution Tour, a series of one-day conferences for teens and parents, took place every summer from 2007 to 2011.
On June 15, 2009, the cover story of ESPN The Magazine was titled "Do Hard Things", focusing on "rebelutionary" Zac Sunderland, who at 17 became the youngest person to ever complete a solo boat journey around the world.
Articles from The World is Flat Series posted on the The Rebelution's blog and written by Brett Harris expose strong xenophobic tones towards Asians (mostly toward Chinese people, but other races like India have not been unscathed)in particular due to their education and workstyle. One example of Brett's view that shows his disdain toward educated Chinese and Indian students would be:“I cannot stress enough that young Chinese and Indians are racing us to the top. They don’t want to work for us. Heck, they don’t even want to be like us. They want to dominate us.” In another article of the same series, he clearly states, "If I had to sum up my feelings regarding the growing threat China poses to American young people I would most likely end up saying something like: Ready or not! Here China comes!" In his last article, where he decides to interpret previous posts of this series, he reaffirms his dislike of losing American superiority to "less privileged nations". He ends the series with these last three paragraphs:
The shortage of tech workers in America is significant and will have serious consequences if it isn’t reversed. However, I didn’t share about it for the purpose of motivating you to consider engineering as a career option. Rather, I wanted to make the broader point that any young person who grows up believing America has an inherent “right” to preeminence is dead wrong. The battle for superiority must be fought every single generation.
We have a wonderful heritage. The freedom America offers gives us an inherent advantage over our peers in any less privileged nation (which includes China and India at this point). But we must continue to write our legacy. You can’t run a car on last week’s gas. We can’t run America on our forefather’s motivation. At some point the diligence, the vision, and the perseverance must carry over.
I want you to join me in throwing off the lie that America has a vice grip on greatness; and then apply yourself. By God’s grace and in His strength let us ensure that the greatness of our past will fuel the actions of today for the greatness of tomorrow.
Read more about this topic: The Rebelution