New York City kids raised in a progressive bubble often assume that the South is full of backward bigots. But some are discovering firsthand that these strangers are, in fact, people just like them.

The American Tributaries program sends kids from NYC and suburban New Jersey to South Carolina — where President Trump won 58.2% of the vote last year — to open their minds up to how the rest of the country lives.

Leo Mullin, an 18-year-old from Brooklyn, recalled meeting farmer George Albers, who was wearing his “God, guns and Trump” hat during his trip in the summer of 2024.

“That was very different from what I was used to,” Mullin, now a freshman studying Political Economy at Tulane, admitted. “But I was able to have a really strong conversation with him, and we ended up talking about baseball, and we definitely were able to bond, despite having fairly different views.”

The program was founded by Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, dad Michael Whidden, who was frustrated when, after pandemic lockdowns lifted, his daughter’s Manhattan high school started sending kids on immersive trips abroad again.

“All of the trips were overseas,” Whidden, a 54-year-old Navy veteran and wine distributor who lives in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, told The Post. “It got me thinking, after the pandemic, and in such polarized times, shouldn’t we be putting a higher priority on getting to know fellow Americans and visiting other parts of the country that are different than ours?”

By 2022, he was bringing his first group of students from Brooklyn and Cranford, New Jersey, down to South Carolina.

Mila Melikian joined American Tributaries in the summer of 2024 after hearing about it in her AP government class at Cranford High School.

“Honestly, at first it sounded great because it was a trip with one of my friends at a very affordable price, but then I realized, wow, this is a very important message,” the 18-year-old told The Post. “This trip was an opportunity for me to be a tourist in my own country … I didn’t realize what a cultural experience you could have in the United States.”

The 12-day itinerary includes visiting the Cypress Gardens swamp preserve where “The Notebook” was filmed, spending time in Charleston and meeting local farmers.

They also stop at the McLeod Plantation to understand more about the realities of slavery and spend a day at Fort Jackson military base, where they learn about military life and shot guns.

“It’s not like a trip to the Eiffel Tower and Paris,” Whidden said. “You’re going to see a plantation, you’re going to go to an agricultural school and eat in a Waffle House or a Cracker Barrel with six local kids.”

Melikian, who immigrated from Lebanon with her parents in first grade, recalls speaking to a farmer in South Carolina believes that we need to make entering the country easier for migrant laborers.

“That conversation really stuck with me because my parents are working immigrants who came to this country for a better life,” she said. “Because we were in the South, I didn’t expect that someone who was a farmer would share the same opinion as me honestly.”

Moments like these, Whidden says, are the goal: “The program isn’t about politics. It’s about something more important. It’s really about civic health.”

Still, the group of eight students also make a pit stop in Washington, DC, where they visit the offices of Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Tim Scott (R-SC), Cory Booker (D-NJ) and John Cornyn (R-TX).

The experience inspired Melikian to register as an Independent when she turned 18 and “weigh both sides and where people are coming from, apart from what my parents think or what my school thinks or what my friends think.”

It also made the teen, who is taking a gap year between high school and college, consider how Gen Z “will really mix their politics with their personal identity.” The people she met in the South, she found, did that less — something she admired.

“Even though there was a divide politically, their personal identity was coming out instead of their political identity,” Melikian explained.

Every year, students visit George and Celeste Albers’ farm on Wadmalaw Island, where they grow organic vegetables and produce eggs and beef. Celeste describes her family as “very conservative,” and she’s noticed kids eyeing her husband’s Trump hat during their visits.

“I can see sometimes they look at [the hat] and are like, ‘Oh,’” she told The Post. “I feel that there is something of a negative viewpoint of both the south and rural people. I think they sometimes think that we must all be a bunch of racists.”

It’s important to the couple that they prove stereotypes wrong. “We talk, and they find we’re not scary. We’re not extreme. We just have different ideas about politics,” she said. “One thing I find that is heartwarming is how surprised they are that we’re just like them.”

George and Celeste also educate the kids about agriculture.

“We just talk about what we do, what farming is all about, what the life is like — the good parts, the bad parts, the pretty, the ugly,” Celeste, 62, told The Post.

“They usually have a lot of questions, especially about livestock, about raising livestock and basically killing animals, too,” she said. “It’s amazing how little the average person, especially because most of these kids are city dwellers, knows about farms.”

Whidden sees the program as “a way to serve my country again” as a veteran. His daughter was his “first recruit” and helped make the trip “a lot more fun” and “less nerdy,” he says.

“I helped him make that itinerary something that a teenager would still enjoy,” Miranda Whidden, 19, told The Post. She joined the first trip in 2022 and went along again in 2025.

“My school was taking kids to Europe, and everyone was familiar with that, but they weren’t really ever familiar with the idea of just traveling within the United States,” said Miranda, now a sophomore at the University of Maryland studying public policy. “I think it’s really important to understand your country first.”

She said that most kids are “hesitant” at first but leave with a better understanding of American people they’d only otherwise encountered online. “It’s so important to have these experiences firsthand, and not necessarily just form opinions about people through social media,” Miranda explained.

Parents of Gen Z students who grew up with the internet and came of age during the pandemic see the experience as critical. For David Callahan, father of 16-year-old Emma, sending her on an American Tributaries trip this summer was a “no brainer.”

“My daughter grew up in this tiny little bubble her whole life,” Callahan, a business owner in Cranford, told The Post. “I wanted her to meet people from different subcultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds, to learn that we’re all pretty much alike.”

Rob Coon also reports that his daughter, rising junior Kasey, has a much more sophisticated understanding of American politics since returning from her trip this summer.

“I think everything that [Gen Zers] see online is so hyper-polarized,” Coon, also from Cranford, said. “It’s so noisy, and it’s hard for someone growing up who’s really trying to get their thoughts together to get a balanced perspective on what’s going on in the country.”

Ultimately, Whidden would like to expand the number of annual trips and student attendees and potentially bring kids from the South up to New York, too.

Melikian believes this is exactly the sort of civics education her generation desperately needs: “We’re the next generation of voters and leaders and community members, and learning about civic engagement in a nonjudgmental, nonpartisan environment can help us approach controversial issues more thoughtfully.”