You may remember Jonathan Krohn, who made a big splash in 2009 when, at 13 years old, he wrote a book defending conservatism and gave a talk at CPAC. The right wing thought they had found a boy wonder who would lead them into the future. Apparently not.
Jonathan Krohn took the political world by storm at 2009’s Conservative Political Action Conference when, at just 13 years old, he delivered an impromptu rallying cry for conservatism that became a viral hit and had some pegging him as a future star of the Republican Party.
Now 17, Krohn — who went on to write a book, “Defining Conservatism,” that was blurbed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennett — still watches that speech from time to time, but it mostly makes him cringe because, well, he’s not a conservative anymore.
“I think it was naive,” Krohn now says of the speech. “It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough.”…
But a quick rundown of his current political stances suggests a serious pendulum swing away from the right.
Gay marriage? In favor. Obamacare? “It’s a good idea.” Who would he vote for (if he could) in November? “Probably Barack Obama.” His favorite TV shows? “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” His favorite magazine? The New Yorker. And, perhaps telling of all, Krohn is enrolling this fall at a college not exactly known for its conservatism: New York University.“One of the first things that changed was that I stopped being a social conservative,” said Krohn. “It just didn’t seem right to me anymore. From there, it branched into other issues, everything from health care to economic issues.… I think I’ve changed a lot, and it’s not because I’ve become a liberal from being a conservative — it’s just that I thought about it more. The issues are so complex, you can’t just go with some ideological mantra for each substantive issue.”
I made a similar transition myself, a couple years after he did. Welcome to reality, young man.
Here’s the video of his CPAC speech:
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Brett McCoy
July 7, 2012 at 9:37 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
How amusing. He starts to think for himself and realize the BS he’s been brainwashed with. Like those Prussian Blue girls!
jamessweet
July 7, 2012 at 9:40 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yep, its funny how there’s that saying about how “if you aren’t a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart; if you aren’t a conservative by the time you’re 50, you have no brain.” I very much feel that conservatism is the naive, idealistic position. I’d love to live in a world where everybody was able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, where everything was fair and the nice supply and demand curves you learn about in Econ 101 always intersected in the optimal places. I used to think the world was something like that… then I grew up and realized, holy shit, it’s a lot messier than that, and sometimes we need solutions that work even if they aren’t ideologically pure.
And that led me straight to being a liberal.
slc1
July 7, 2012 at 9:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re jamessweet @ @#2
I always liked it put this way. A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has been indited.
abb3w
July 7, 2012 at 9:58 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
slc1 @3, I’ve usually heard it as “arrested” rather than “indicted”.
Joey Maloney
July 7, 2012 at 9:59 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Compare Mr. Krohn with Grover Fucking Norquist who came up with his “no tax increases ever” pledge when he was in seventh grade.
Reginald Selkirk
July 7, 2012 at 10:01 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
They’ve got a monopoly on bootstraps, and the prices are exorbitant – if you can even get them to sell you a pair.
Reginald Selkirk
July 7, 2012 at 10:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
In his speech, he said conservatism was about protecting people’s rights. I guess he realized conservatives won’t stand for that. He mentions gay marriage; there’s a perfect example where the conservative position is against individual rights. And as soon as they start losing, they start whining about states’ rights, not individual rights.
tommykey
July 7, 2012 at 10:35 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Krohn reminded me of that kid Horowitz in the Sean Penn movie Bad Boys.
Modusoperandi
July 7, 2012 at 10:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
2011?
Setár, self-appointed Elf-Sheriff of the FreethoughtBlogs Star Chamber
July 7, 2012 at 10:50 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
jamessweet #2:
Oh, that’s because you’re just a mean tribalistic
New Atheistliberal who doesn’t understand the subtlety and complexity of sophisticatedtheologyconservatism.anteprepro
July 7, 2012 at 11:07 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This is good news. He seemed like a smart kid who had just drunk an unfortunate amount of Konservative Kool-Aid. Glad to hear he got better. And hey, he used the conservatives willingness to get a smart 13 year old supporting them in order to get a book deal at a very young age. That’s a sweet resume builder! I know I’m jealous. Maybe I should pretend that I am a newborn Rethug for a while and publish a right-wing screed or two. Need to get me some of that Wingnut Welfare!
neonsequitur
July 7, 2012 at 12:16 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yeah, it’s like that: getting away from the 24/7 echo chamber and learning to think for myself led me away from conservatism at a young age. Good riddance.
Fast forward 25 years: a couple of years the “great recession” forced me to move back home to find work, and now I’m apparently the only liberal in this whole damned county. My financial situation is such that I’ll probably be “toughing it out” in tea party country for the duration. Interesting times….
neonsequitur
July 7, 2012 at 12:18 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
the above should read “a couple of years AGO…”
Cliff Hendroval
July 7, 2012 at 12:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
My transition out of teenage Randroid-hood roughly coincided with my transition out of virginity. Correlation or causation?
Ace of Sevens
July 7, 2012 at 1:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m heard lots of talk about how liberals are just young and naive and will be conservative when they grow up and learn better. I know of no cases where this actually happened, but plenty the other direction.
magistramarla
July 7, 2012 at 3:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This is exactly why the rethugs are against public education and against teaching young people critical thinking skills. In Texas, they are claiming that they “don’t want to challenge the students’ beliefs”. Actually, they fully realize that by applying those critical thinking skills to those beliefs, those young people would reject them, just as this young man did, as well as so many of us here at FTB.
I think that it is great that this young man plans to attend NYU. That will probably complete his conversion to liberalism!
MikeMa
July 7, 2012 at 3:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@magistramarla,
While this is generally true, the GOP in Texass is a monument to critical thinking failure.
tacitus
July 7, 2012 at 5:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I guess I was fortunate to grow up in a liberal household so I’ve never gone through a change of heart like Krohns.
Ironically, since coming to the US 20 years ago, if anything I’ve move slightly to the right on some issues although I really only notice it when I’m talking politics with my parents.
Of course, that still puts me just to the left of Karl Marx from the American conservative’s vantage point on the political spectrum, especially when it comes to universal healthcare and the criminal justice system.
tacitus
July 7, 2012 at 5:51 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’ve seen a lot of comments from conservatives claiming that Krohn’s defection from their cause is only temporary and that he will be back with them by the time he gets a job and settles down.
Wishful thinking, methinks.
janeymack
July 7, 2012 at 7:35 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
He would indeed lead them into the future…if they only had the sense to follow.
Gretchen
July 7, 2012 at 8:18 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
When I was 13, I conducted a poll in my social group, tabulated the results, and found that they were mostly creationists. I then wrote a piece for a church newsletter congratulating these people for resisting the pressure to embrace an “evolutionary outlook.”
At 17 I can’t say that I had a full understanding of evolution, but I definitely wasn’t a creationist any longer and was an adamant support of gay rights.
Kids can change fast. People can rationalize belief in pretty much anything they’ve been previously indoctrinated to believe.
Area Man
July 7, 2012 at 10:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What amazes me is that CPAC thought that a 13 year-old kid parroting right-wing talking points was a good use of their time to begin with. How do they plan to top that one? A 9 year-old? Maybe an actual, literal parrot? Good grief, even his clothing screams “tool”.
While I suppose there may be rare exceptions, virtually no one has a sense of political awareness before the age of 15, and most people’s political views don’t solidify until their late teens to early 20s. It should have been bleeding obvious that he wouldn’t necessarily stick to the beliefs he had been force-fed, and that no one outside of their own delusional mutual admiration society would find this shit convincing. But hey, conservatism is so simple even a child can understand it! Who needs to think?
JeffreyD
July 8, 2012 at 7:22 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
He was 13 when he was a conservative? Seems about right.
carolineborduin
July 8, 2012 at 4:18 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sam Seder interviewed him on Majority Report Friday.
http://majority.fm/2012/07/06/76-cliff-schecter-news-former-conservative-wunderkind-jonathan-krohn/
bananacat
July 9, 2012 at 10:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think there is actually some correlation. I was always pro-choice, but when I was 14, I was that “it should be legal but I’d never do it because it’s kinda wrong” type. Then one time I was having sex as a 17 year-old. The boy couldn’t maintain an erection with the condom on, so we tried the Pull & Pray method. I realized immediately after that it was a mistake. I also realized that if I had ended up pregnant, being forced to have a baby would be a pretty harsh punishment for such a mistake. I realized from my own experience that unwanted pregnancies aren’t just for the stupid sluts who are too dumb or lazy to bother with protection. Sometimes it could be the result of not wanting to make your partner feel bad, or not feeling empowered enough to demand the best prevention. The boy was actually from a local Catholic school and we talked about it later and he did a complete 180 on the issue of abortion (from anti- to pro-). I don’t know whether he continued to get more progressive after high school, but I certainly did. That one experience really drove home the point that nothing is black-and-white. I realized that there were a million more circumstances that were much more nuanced than I had ever guessed. It made me look deeper at every issue, which made me more and more progressive.
I think sex is a big one for turning points for several reasons. First, it usually happens around the time that we are re-thinking everything anyway. But more than that, sex is something that is presented as very black-and-white in our society. We’re told from a young age that sex WILL make you pregnant and it will make you emotionally attached and then you’ll be heartbroken, and then you’ll die of AIDS and your family and classmates will shun you forever. But more subtly, we’re told that women/girls will instantly bond to any man they have sex with and only think about marriage and babies. But then we have sex and none of things turn out to be true. And if this one BFD is more complex than we’ve been led to believe, then maybe other aspects of life are too.
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July 10, 2012 at 3:47 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
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