I don’t get the whole “conservative kid” thing:
The only male teacher I had might as well have been castrated. His voice was soft, his gestures were feminine, he didn’t know how to run a class and he had to rely on female assistant teachers to control the children. And, of course, the female teachers treated the girls ten times better than the boys and constantly reminded us of our alleged inferiority. One of the assistant teachers even put down our rhyme, “Boys go to college to get more knowledge, girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider,” by reminding us that more girls than boys go to college because girls are smarter. And this only encouraged the girls to hijack our rhyme and switch the sexes around.
[…..]It wasn’t until the Democratic primaries ended in 2008 that things started getting really bad. Liberals everywhere — but especially at school — seemed empowered by the prospect of a black man becoming president, if for no other reason than the color of his skin. One day, during a game of dodgeball, the old, assistant P.E. teacher yelled to the other students to “Get the Republican, Get the Republican!” meaning me.
This is not an isolated phenomenon of course. Matt Yglesias asked:
What’s the message it’s supposed to send? That the conservative message is childish? That the right’s talking points can be easily mastered by a 14 year-old?
Seriously, what is up with this?
Update. And, yes, as Lolis put it, OMG with the comment section.
Chyron HR
“Girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider”
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the GOP 2012 presidential frontrunner.
Kryptik
They start persecution complexes early these days, don’t they?
This irritates me more than it should, honestly, especially since it could end up politicizing honest-to-god bullying, and I am absolutely no fan of the kind of cruelty kids are capable of toward other kids.
John Cole
It kinda reminds me of those beauty pageants for the Jon Bonet types.
Chad S
There is no way that an 11 year old kid is that politically self aware and can write at a near college level like that. Its hard to expect that much political/social awareness in every day life from college students and some 5th grader is looking for that(even assuming anything listed in it is true)? Even just implying that his teacher is gay like that is just ridiculous impossible. No way.
This is a total fabrication.
debit
“…get more stupider”? I don’t know how that could be.
Spaghetti Lee
An attempt to look hip and cool? Too bad it comes off looking like exploiting a minor for financial gain, probably because that’s exactly what it is.
I, too, came from a school where most of the teachers were liberals. I suspect conservatism may have fallen out of favor after the brashly Republican driver’s ed teacher was caught egging on a fight between two Down’s syndrome kids.
Keith
Good grief, the pity parties are getting more surreal by the month. Now Obama is at the root of them getting called names on the friggin’ playground?! W…T…F.
Message for this kid: if you think this is hard, the rude awakening called “adulthood” will warp your mind. PS: grow a pair.
EIGRP
So… 14 and already in search of a strong male figure. Must be true!
Lolis
OMG … Read the comments section.
MattR
@John Cole: Or my favorite, prenatal beauty pageants
Zeke
Behold, the stupidest thing you will ever read.
c u n d gulag
Uhm, AIN’T no way that an 11 year-old wrote that.
I was a pretty polica;y astute 11 year old in 1969. No way I could have written anything about MLK or JFK that would have come close to that.
But then, we didn’t have a FOX News back in the day, so where would I have come up with those TALKING POINTS!!!!
Boudica
And, of course, there’s no teasing and harassment of liberal-thinking teens here in the South…oh, wait, my kids have both seen it and been subjected to it.
MattR
@Chad S: Are we sure this wasn’t written by Stephen Colbert’s son? With a closing like this, how can it not be snark?
MBL
They’re… God, they’re just buying it hook, line, and sinker over there, aren’t they?
I’ve got to start making money exploiting these people. It’s at the point where it’s practically immoral not to.
Mike E
From the comments:
The “boy’s” reaction to his effeminate male teacher was the giveaway. This ghostwriter is clearly a queer-curious Republican adult man, with possibly a wide stance.
Dave
All I can say to Sam is… suck it up, sunshine.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
So the wingnuts are now enlisting child soldiers into their neverending war on intelligence.
QuaintIrene
Oy. Only a neo-con could believe this was written by an eleven year old child.
TR
You know, there’s a reason the logo at American Thinker looks like Uncle Sam taking a giant shit.
jeff
These sorts of folks are insanely credulous, and fall for shit every week. I get forwarded their emails all the time. (“Remains of Old Testament Giants Found by Archeologists in Israel”; “Scientists: Noah’s Anchors Found off Turkey–Photos”; and on and on and on and on.) No stretch that they fall for this. The amazing thing is how resilient their trust is in sources that have fucked them over and over again and left them looking like imbeciles.
Grendel72
Kids are too young to know better. What excuse do grown Republicans have for acting even more childish than the child in this fabrication?
Ash Can
Whoever wrote this has far, far more serious issues than he discusses here.
BrianD
“Once I even felt like going into the bathroom and trying to pull off my penis.”
Um, I think there’s more going on here than this kid feeling overwhelmed by liberal bias in the classroom. Or maybe this feeling is typical among conservatives.
Annie
This is a total fabrication. What 11 year old uses “castrated” in his everyday language. If he does, I would seriously question the parenting skills of his parents. This is the type of child who would need help before he returns to class packing several shotguns to assert his “boyness.”
American Thinker is trash. What kind of insanity would print this?
As a teacher of teachers, I find this article highly offensive.
wonkie
How could ayone possible imagine that that was written by an eleven year old? There are plenty of high school students who couldn’t put together an essay of that length.
BTW one of my elementary school memories is of a big crowd of kids chanting “Nixon!Nixon! Nixon!”. My family was for Kennedy. Of course none of us had a clue about the issues.
Unabogie
I’m with whoever says this is BS. I too was a pretty good writer for an eleven year old, but clearly this essay was written by an adult. Even still, this isn’t much different from those child preachers (or even more aptly, circus performers), where the parents put them up to it and then cash in.
I think the scientific term for this is KA-CHING!
Chad S
@MattR: And if any of that was going on in a public school, there was be holy hell over it, no matter where the school was.
This is just wingnut talking points madlibs. Just write down “effeminate”+”gay”+”Soros”+”Global warming”+”liberal oppression”+”minorities” and fill in the sentence structure.
New Yorker
I’m sorry, but I can’t believe Yglesias actually wrote the following:
Earth to Matthew: THIS IS THE PARTY OF SARAH PALIN! All she does is repeat ritual beats and flaunt disdain for knowledge and expertise. I’d also like to think that there are a number of smart, sophisticated 8th-graders out there that have more of a clue about anything than Caribou Barbie does.
TR
In all seriousness, the reason for the “conservative kid” phenomenon is clear:
Conservatism is a philosophy increasingly held only by the elderly (check out the skewed demographics of the GOP, the Tea Party, etc.), and they badly want to believe that the younger generation is going to carry on their dementia after they’re dead and gone.
Davis X. Machina
Is it the FTC that’s interested when in a product that advertises itself as X, and turns out to be not-X, or the-opposite-of-X?
Look out americanthinker.com
rnoble
Well, now that someone claiming to be 11 on the internet has told me about how bad the liberals are, I guess I have to vote Republican.
Keith
@Lolis:
Yikes! I don’t know which is worse: the guy who wants this kid to be PRESIDENT in 24 years or the myriad of posts that sound like Rush Limbaugh gushing over Sarah Palin’s use of footnotes.
Doctor Science
TR:
It’s supposed to be something else? Coulda fooled me.
WereBear (itouch)
A liberal is a conservative who had a happy childhood.
mad the swine
Damn, three years old and he already knows that bitches ain’t shit.
My favorite part was where this conservative child prodigy was able to recognize and characterize ‘moral relativism’ as ‘moral regression’ – while in second grade. And while surrounded by bleeding-heart second grade liberals, no less.
I can just barely convince myself that a 11-year-old prodigy, raised in a household where right-wing politics were a constant topic of discussion, could write a paper of that sort, with just a little help from his parents (ie, “my teacher was gay” became “my teacher was castrated and effeminate”). What I cannot believe, even giving the writer the greatest possible benefit of the doubt, is that the other kids in his age group were equally precocious in the cause of liberalism. Fifth graders taunting someone by telling them ‘Global warming is real’? Um, no.
Ed Marshall
I had a speech class last semester and this guy chose abortion as his contract topic. It didn’t matter what the speech assignment was: etymology, persuasion, you were supposed to use a certain form of persuasion, he just got up and made the same really, nasty, rant about everyone was a bunch of murderers.
He would cite sources like abort73.com and the like and when he would get done, the professor would ask him “Who is abort73.com? Are they academic? “, sort of trying to get him to understand how to source something and what he was doing wrong.
So the guy tells me he is failing the class because the professor is a liberal but he’s got a plan! He switches his contract topic to global warming….and doesn’t follow any of the rules and uses shitty sources. When he finally did fail the class it was because the professor didn’t like him.
demo woman
After reading Conservative Kid’s essay, it has changed my opinion of our educational system. Wow, no longer will a President have to utter the words “Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?”
rnoble
@30 Also, this is a perfect example of the conservative tendency towards anti-intellectualism in politics. Would the people in the comments section take their advise about which car to drive from this “kid”? Probably not, but its no problem for them to take advice about how to run the country from him because politicians shouldn’t really be educated anyway.
Mike E
@WereBear (itouch): A conservative is that dickish kid that never grew up.
mad the swine
BTW, you can apparently hear Sam Besserman talk about the discrimination against him here: Eyeblast TV. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the child shown on that video could have written the essay linked above, but it does seem like he’s an actual 6th grader.
New Yorker
@mad the swine:
Ah yes, the lil’ 4-year-old recalls the political bias of his preschool teacher. Not only did he have the ability to discern the political preferences of his teacher, but he remembers it all so well. Funny how I don’t recall much of anything about preschool except that I played one of the Three Kings in the Christmas pageant and the time a violent thunderstorm hit and the basement where we had our class flooded. I guess this young man is simply an astonishing genius….or the whole essay is bullshit.
eric
There is no book used in any school that teaches that dad’s are inferior. that book does not exist! that is a flat out lie
Svensker
@Chad S:
What you said. If an 11-year-old wrote that, his problem is not likely to be anti-male teachers, but classrooms not geared to students who are about 10 years above grade level.
Pasquinade
Ross Hershberger
He may have a point about no male teachers. I just spent a month at a 450 student public elementary school. I assumed that there were no male teachers because every teacher I saw was female. I asked around and found that they had just hired a third male teacher. Three out of 25 – 30 teachers, total? It’s an overwhelmingly female profession at that level. The last elementary school I visited had 2 male teachers out of 20. High schools seem to have more men. Somebody’s gotta coach…
Upper West
I blame Alex P. Keaton. I love Michael J. Fox, but his Keaton character provided a role model for the Fuck You I Got Mine generation of Reagan worshippers.
Adam Collyer
This is the money quote….
The white, middle-class male persecution complex starts early these days. I don’t care whoever wrote this is 11, 14, or 26. Get yourself together and have some dignity, man.
For the record – 26 year old male from an upper-middle class income. My father (college educated) and mother (no college) were both white collar executives who grew up in Brooklyn and made something of themselves. People like me need to stop their whining about how everyone is out to get them. Not only is it unattractive, it’s flat out wrong and ludicrous.
Listen kid, more girls go to college than boys. More women enroll in law school now than men. Despite that, the number of female partners are dramatically lower than their male counterparts. We haven’t elected a female president. Female politicians are (relatively speaking) few and far between.
Even in “kids,” the conservative motto here seems to be to whine about unfair treatment while taking advantage of actual.favorable.treatment. Stop crying and make something of yourself.
joeyess
You have got to be fucking kidding. Right?
First: An 11 yr old can’t write like that.
Second: This proves that American Thinker shouldn’t be a frequent stop for anyone that aspires to think.
Third: If this is real, then they sure are raising their self-martyrs early.
Fourth: And if this is real…….. Hey kid? There’s an old saying and it goes something like this:
Mayken
@Annie: I think the real tip-off was the writer’s use of the word misandrist. No friggin’ 11 year old knows that word!
What a crock!
MikeJ
@eric:
Dad’s what?
hilzoy
Meh. When I was in school, we said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, and I very pointedly shut my mouth during the “under God” part, being an atheist. It wasn’t so easy to get out of Bible class, though. We had to memorize psalms, and though I managed to get away with reading them through a crack in my desk a lot of the time, the teacher caught on eventually.
Later, when I had become a Christian, I found myself at college, and turned out to be the only Christian most of my friends had ever met who wasn’t wildly anti-intellectual. Also, the only person anyone had ever met, period, who was opposed to divestment in South Africa. (Long story.)
I did not write articles about this at the time.
More importantly, I’ve always thought that the college experiences, especially, taught me an enormous amount. There is truly nothing like holding views that literally everyone around you thinks are completely retrograde (Christianity) or morally indefensible (divestment) to teach you tolerance. I wouldn’t give this experience up for anything. Even though, at the time, I didn’t like it when (e.g.) my freshman roommate (who I liked a lot) stormed out of our room after screaming: You just don’t care about the children of Soweto, do you?!
Bubblegum Tate
I like the comment that says Sarah Palin is the only man left in America.
Zach
@mad the swine: This is awesome. I’m pretty sure I could’ve penned a more complex essay than this at 11, and I wouldn’t have relied on my parents’ stories of what happened to me at 3… that is if my parents had trained me to repeat this stuff over and over. Oh well; remember Graham Frost and let this kid and his editors have their say.
I think his bullies are on the right track. A little bit more yelling that “global warming is real” and calling people stupid would be more effective than pursuing a doomed path of trying to publish unassailable science. Even if the IPCC report were perfect, folks would just make shit up.
I will admit to pumping “My President is Black” full blast while driving around down; he’s got my number there.
SpotWeld
This is something that was written for an audience that thinks that the “Donna Reed Show” depicts the idyllic life that used to be the 1950s
i.e. Morons
Jon H
@mad the swine: “Fifth graders taunting someone by telling them ‘Global warming is real’? Um, no.”
I could see it if the kid is a first class bore who constantly harangues his classmates with right-wing memes like “global warming is fake”, when the classmates don’t want to hear it.
In that case, I could totally see his classmates shoving it down his throat after it came up in class.
LindaH
@Ross Hershberger: I’m fairly sure this is a leftover from the days when teaching was a woman’s job, especially for elementary school kids. Add to that the phobia that a man who wants to interact with young children may be doing so for unacceptable reasons and males are not encouraged to teach elementary school. If they are at an elementary school, they are usually in an administrative position, Prinicipal, Vice Principal.
Actually, you see the same thing in libraries, most librarians are women, but when you hit the director level there is a large percentage of men who are the actual directors, and most men who become librarians rise rapidly to administrative positions.
Zam
Oh man this makes me yearn for the old days of school when all we did was pick on people for not believing in global warming and having a cock. I especially like this one class I had in my sophomore year about Unions and how great they were. We separated into to groups the Union heroes and the selfish evil conservatives. Us Union heroes got to beat the other children senseless until they gave into our demands, really helped prepare me for real life.
Chyron HR
On the next Arrested Development, George Michael gets in over his head: “Everybody was throwing dodgeballs at me. I… I think it was Obama’s fault.”
Beej
@Jon H: You’ve hit it exactly. Nobody’s going to taunt you with the phrase “Global warming is real” unless you have already taunted them with the cry that it’s all a liberal lie. Or you’ve tried to “educate” the pleebs by explaining in scrupulous detail why all the scientists who say it is real are really liberal dupes with a political agenda, using an oh-so-superior tone of course. This kid, if he is a kid, is the I’m-way-smarter-than-you dweeb that everybody loved to hate back in grade school or junior high.
Zam
@Jon H: That’s been my experience, conservatives come to class parroting right wing conspiracies and talking points. When others tell them to shut the hell up because no one wants to hear about global warming at 7 in the morning they take that as persecution. Fuck to them any debate or criticism of whatever random shit they say is persecution.
thejoz
Complete and total bullshit.
This was probably written by a liberal who was paid by a stark raving mad teabagging lunatic who thought it was a good idea to make it seem like a kid wrote this.
It’s pathetic that someone would stoop that low but it laughably funny that the morons who read on American “Thinker” think this is true.
Morans. Go USA!
Jon H
Judging by the video he lives in Beverly Hills, possibly with only his mother. Didn’t seem especially affluent.
I suspect a divorce is responsible in some way. Ultra-wingnut father inculcating son to somehow annoy less-extreme ex-wife? Son taking after absentee ultra-wingnut father, perhaps thus explaining his anti-woman bent (overcompensation, denial, defending fathers because own father is indefensible, etc).
DW
A few silly questions –
Take your daughters to work day became take your daughters and sons to work day in 2003 – when this kid was about 4 and the year he would have entered kindergarten. So that part doesn’t make sense.
The “boys go to jupiter” rhyme was in a John Leo column back in 1998. Seems kind of a weird coincidence for it to come up several years later.
Do schools still do dodgeball? I thought conservatives argued that liberals were wusses who wouldn’t allow dodgeball,
Also, most of what he’s describing sounds like lawsuit bait, at least when aimed at middle and upper class kids.
fucen tarmal
if adolescence is the struggle to simultaneously conform and rebel, isn’t it more surprising that all conservative ideology isn’t hatched by teenagers?
Jon H
When I was growing up there was the weird kid on the block. Once when I was playing with a friend in the friend’s yard, the weird kid turns up. Pulls out a moist ziploc bag. Tells us it’s sterile.
We’re like “uh, that’s nice”. And returned to what we were doing, ignoring him. Note that I, at least was a bit of a science nerd, so not inherently hostile to such ideas. But presentation is important.
I see this kid as similar, except that instead of whipping out a moist but sterile ziploc bag, he comes out with “Global warming is a scam”. “The census is a scam”. etc.
Elly
This is hilarious! Seriously… PRESCHOOL???
I didn’t have kids in the CA schools, but I did in Corvallis, OR, which was was about as liberal as you could get. I also volunteered in the library, worked as a classroom volunteer, and generally was about as close as it’s possible for a parent to get for my kids’ pre-K-5 education.
Three words: No. Effing. Way. I bought tons of books for my kids, and flipped through at least 5 times as many as I bought, and I cannot recall ever seeing a children’s book stressing “the importance of mothers and the inferiority of fathers.” And there is simply no way a teacher (feminist or otherwise) would have taught such a thing – it’s absurd.
Girls did not have more privileges or receive more attention than boys; there were no goofy-a** rhymes about going to college or Jupiter; no singling kids out for political beliefs (in fact, when the kids “voted” in elections, it was done by secret ballot).
The poor kid is simply parroting what he’s been told to say – which is pretty damn sad. His parents must be total a**wipes – how could they do this to their child?
JBerardi
This is absolutely classic. “They started doing the same thing to me that I was doing to them– it’s not fair!”. Very concise summation of the conservative mindset, really…
tomvox1
@Mayken:
Agree. Had to look “misandrist” up and I’m a shade over 13, for chrissakes. Who knew man-hating schooling was so efficacious?
srv
I wish that kid who wrote for the World Net Daily and one day went off the rails and thrown under the Xtian bus would come back an write a blog/book. He must be in college now.
*damn, can’t remember that kids name. Would love to link to that at the thinker
Jon H
I would also bet that this kid makes a huge deal of his being a Republican at his school. Like a manic Green Bay fan who wears Green Bay clothes every day. But with politics.
I’m guessing that if a gym teacher suggested that students throw at “the Republican”, it’s similar to how a gym teacher might suggest that students throw at “Favre”, a kid known for ostentatiously adopting Green Bay as the entirety of his identity. Hell a teacher might say that as good-natured acknowledgement of the student’s presented identity.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the gym teacher refers to him as “Republican” under other circumstances. “Hey, Republican, where’s your uniform?”, “Hey, Republican, you’re up”, but the twerp neglected to mention those uses.
JGabriel
Is this a “conservative” kid? I’d like to think (and I may be wrong) that a conservate isn’t automatically a chauvinist bigot.
This “kid”, or whoever wrote that essay, isn’t looking for a conservative education – he’s looking for a white, male, supremacist education.
I suspect the author is a satirist ratfucking The American Thinker and its commenters.
.
Martin
@joeyess:
Um, a liberal 11 yr old, product of our liberal education system can’t write like that. But sure as hell a full-throated, also-home-schooled, I-keep-a-copy-of-
StrunkJesus-and-White-under-my-pillow conservative can write like this.Why, fuck y’all, if every Bubba went to a real conservative school, we’d be wondering why these retards Jefferson and Madison were writing our founding documents rather than a modern, patriotic, conservative 11 year old.
srv
Ah, Kyle Williams!
someguy
Assuming the truth of these allegations – which is a pretty big leap to begin with… if kids are being encouraged to play “get the Republican” so much the better. We should play some “pin the tail on the Republican” and maybe rhyme, “catch a Republican by the tail” and play “smear the Republican” on the playground.
It’s about time these arrogant fuckers feel some of the abuse they’ve been using against others for generations. Waaaaaah for them but turnabout is fair play. And no, I don’t feel bad if it’s their kids catching grief; their kids have been giving grief to minority kids for years now. Smell the glove, bitchz.
rnoble
I suppose its good that produced an actual child to represent this essay. Still, it seems unlikely that he wrote the thing on his own. At a minimum its heavily edited. He actually sort of reminds me of myself at that age, except for the persecution complex. I too was convinced that the school system was out to turn all of us into little liberals. Of course, my school was an hour south of Colorado Springs and, in retrospect, very conservative.
Ella in New Mexico
Totally agree with all the previous “No 11 year-old could have produced this essay” opinions. Without parents editing, of course.
This whole thing just reinforces the “Conservatives are Victims” meme for the choir. Really, is there a single idea posited in this “kid’s” piece that hasn’t already been beaten to death by LImbaugh, et. al.? “White Conservative (Men) are the TRUE minorities in America”…Blah, blah, blah….
I’d like this adorable little curmudgeon to chat with my son and daughter who were in 6th and 8th grade during the Obama election. They got chased across the football field by kids calling them “Baby Killers!!!” and “Muslims!!!” because they had Obama for President buttons on their back packs. Granted, most kids in their middle chool were either a-political or pro-Obama, but the only ones who dared to try and intimidate others were the little “Conservative Victims”—-
All because our side respects the rights of others to hold stupid opinions.
Spaghetti Lee
@JGabriel:
Is it even ratfucking if you don’t know you’re being ratfucked?
Zam
@Jon H: Personally I would bet the teacher didn’t say shit about him being a republican, he just got picked on by the other kids and it was attributed to his being a republican. His ghostwriter has the preconceived notion that school is for liberal indoctrination so this one child coming from a conservative background must be the target of “special attention” from the teachers.
rnoble
@JBerardi: Also, how dare the teacher correct his grammatically incorrect taunt with facts. I mean, its obvious to anyone who pays attention that girls all spend four years on Jupiter after high school.
Bostondreams
@Ross Hershberger:
I’m a grad assistant at a college of education, and one of the things I have learned is that if you want to be popular, be a male elementary education major. Crude, but true, at least here at UF.
And why so few men? Because of stereotypes and images of male elementary education teachers as seen in this piece of tripe.
Kyle
@QuaintIrene:
Perhaps right-wingers/teabaggers are like Benjamin Button, where they start out articulate and literate as children and as they get older regress to “Get the government out of my Medicare”, “tax cuts always increase revenues”, “Drill baby drill” and any unscripted utterance from George W. Bush.
low-tech cyclist
I bet this kid isn’t real. His rant says:
He says he’s 11 now. That means he would have been 4 years old when “Take Our Daughters To Work Day” became “Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day” in 2003. He should barely be able to remember the last “Take Our Daughters To Work Day” in 2002, when he would have been 3.
OTOH, “Take Our Daughters To Work Day” would have made more of an impression on a conservative guy with a few more years under his belt, maybe one who was ~8 years old in 1993 when the program started, and who might have been in college and grad school during the years that it’s been “Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day,” resulting in his having been unaware of the change either as a schoolkid or as someone who works in an office where “Take Your Rugrats To Work Day” is observed annually.
So I fully expect that this kid, if he exists and is 11 years old, will not turn out to be the author of this piece.
And conservatives who believe it should have their too-good-to-be-true-ometers checked. Somebody’s just feeding them a line of bull that they’re eager to believe because it confirms all the bad stuff they’ve been telling each other about libruls for all these years.
joe from Lowell
From the comments:
Too funny.
Michael G
I’m always fascinated by the whole “girls were mean to me” subtext in this kind of essays. Way to go– you’re whining about being beaten up by a chick. Did you want to sound like a wuss?
This essay goes a step further, though, with this:
> Once I even felt like going into the bathroom and trying to pull off my penis.
Sweet zombie Jesus that’s too much information.
ellid
There is no way in hell that was written by a child, and there’s no way in hell it accurately describes a school classroom.
Chris
I’m just waiting for someone to say this … maybe I should put it in as a comment over there:
“As a conservative, I just don’t get it. Here we have been beating up teachers for DECADES, those lazy, good-for-nothing people … and somehow, they don’t like us! Obviously we need to beat them up even more.”
Corner Stone
@Ella in New Mexico:
But could they have sailed round the world by themselves?
JGabriel
@Spaghetti Lee:
Um, yeah, that’s kind of the definition of ratfucking: it’s someone from a one party pretending to be a member of another party (or distributing documents under its name) to make it look bad.
Preventing, as long as possible, members of that party, and/or independents, from knowing they’re being, or have been, ratfucked, is part of the secret of success.
.
rnoble
@low-tech cyclist: There you go again with your DFH logic.
brad
I think Sarah Palin has a new name on her shortlist of potential veeps.
I like the heavily edited video where a few “like”s still slip through while he squirms in the seat. My guess is his father is behind the camera and writing the script.
Ruckus
@fucen tarmal:
isn’t it more surprising that all conservative ideology isn’t hatched by teenagers?
I thought it was. Oh you were talking age not maturity.
Mike G
@rnoble:
The fact that the teacher contradicted his assertion that little girls are made of snitches and snails and puppy dog tails is the most bald-faced political persecution since Stalin’s gulags. The ACLU should take up this case immediately.
kay
@Boudica:
EXACTLY. My daughter was one of two liberals in her high school civics class. The other was a boy from Minnesota who stuck around less than the year. The teacher, who was also the high school football coach, had a screensaver of George W. Bush.
This whole theme doesn’t make any sense, and I’m amazed they’ve been getting away with it for so long.
There are VAST sections of the country where conservatives control every local elected office and every school board. The teachers are LOCALS, and CONSERVATIVES. This is why this whole public education meme they’ve adopted is complete and utter bullshit. I got news for them: conservatives run plenty of public schools. if they want to point to “failing” public schools, they are going to be pointing at each other.
As a liberal in a conservative dominated area, I have never imagined that conservatives were plotting against me, or trying to “brainwash” my children. Not when they were insisting on exclusionary and mean-spirited “circles of prayer” prior to school play practice, or tut-tutting my daughter’s “belief” in evolution.
They cannot stand being in a minority.
Either they run the whole national show, or they whine incessantly.
They’re going to whine until they get it all. One liberal is one too many.
Michael
Put me in the “its fake” camp. I work at a top conservative university and this is more coherently written than anything I’ve ever read from the 18-22 year old conservatives I deal with every day.
Oh, and, the girls really are smarter these days, or, at least harder working. All the guys want to do is party and get laid while at college. Go into the library on a Friday night and the gender ratio is no where near 50/50. My female students are much more likely to have tutors, meet with TA’s and professors, be involved with extracuricular clubs, and land great internships. They really work their butts off. Despite the recent pop culture love of “nerdy guys,” most young men put their machismo and their fear of being a dork ahead of their academics. Somehow even the most superficial of the sorority girl types don’t seem to face this social stigma and seem to have no problem passing up a kegger for school work.
When the the females come see me, they’re usually asking, “what else can I do?” while most males come in saying, “this is my excuse for why I didn’t.”
This wasn’t always the case, but every passing year, it becomes more and more like this.
Josh
Hilzoy, I’ve long been wrestling with the fact that Chandler Davis finds that, while unemployable during the Red Scare, he experienced a “broadening time. The experience of marginality is good for the soul and better for the intellect”. ‘Cause, to be perfectly honest with ya, not everyone experiences marginality that way. I think you and Chan must be pretty distinctive not to have turned your marginality into an occasion for the kind of bitterness and self-starting martyrdom we see in this guy, or in his fans.
Jules
I wonder what his family’s counter tops look like….
Violet
@Boudica:
It’s been going on for a long time. I know someone whose school had a mock election when Carter was running against Reagan. She voted for Carter and was the only person in her class to do so. Instead of votes being kept secret, they singled her out, belittled her in front of the class and made her write an essay explaining why she voted that way. Her parents complained, and the school backed the teacher.
I wish I were making this up but I am not.
Ross Hershberger
If a teenager HAD written this he would owe candy and flowers to every one of the Liberal English teachers who taught him how to write. Because he’s 99th %ile in Composition.
srv
Comedy gold indeed. Here’s WND’s wunder-theo-kid in 2005, as he started to go off message:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=32506
The Truffle
I wonder about the veracity of these stories. How many eleven-year-olds are really that concerned about political bias? Unless this kid’s parents are putting him up to this.
I call bullshit.
Ella in New Mexico
@Corner Stone:
At eleven? Not likely.
That truly exceptional 16 year-old young woman in the news recently? Based on what I’ve garnered about her, fuck yeah!
MBL
The “boys go to Jupiter” thing is legit; I’ve heard my fifth-graders chanting it once in a while.
The usual retort involves going to Venus…
kay
@Violet:
We have a mock high school election. 2008 was the first year in my memory the Democrat won.
Ya know, all those years I never suspected some national conservative brainwashing PLOT, but maybe I’m not insane and faux-victimized enough.
I just figured I live in a conservative area. Hoofbeats = horses, not ZEBRAS.
Silly me.
Conservative ideologues in the schools have brainwashed those children! I have proof!
I don’t know what’s worse, the paranoia or the incredible self-regard that tells them everyone is spending a good part of every day worrying about “converting” them.
Comrade Kevin
American Thinker? American Halfwit is more like it.
rnoble
I had a friend in third grade who told me that he preferred hockey because it was still a white man’s sport. When I mentioned it to my parents they supposed that maybe my friend had some racist parents. I imagine this is the same sort of thing.
SLKRR
What a dumbass… everybody knows that boys go to Mars to get more candy bars. Duh!
As for:
Isn’t this what every 11-year-old boy feels like doing? Oh wait, “pull off” … never mind.
Kered (formerly Derek)
@Adam Collyer:
That’s just because those positions haven’t caught up to the times yet, basically. It takes a long time to become a senator, or a partner at a law firm. But with women enrolling and graduating at such larger numbers than men, in the next few decades those numbers will probably catch up.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
This is a good article.
Uloborus
Alright. As someone who knows entirely too much about having your work sent back home because the school won’t believe you wrote it yourself… this document is a hoax.
The writing style itself is tremendously difficult to believe. The writer of this already has a grasp of sentence cadence. It’s not merely that he has a large vocabulary – some children do – but he’s learned which obscure words will have precisely the emotional and political impact he wants. As others have pointed out, the likelihood of any child having recognized the political implications of issues in pre-school, or facing taunting on political issues in their school, is also tiny.
I would be disinclined to believe this article was real just because all of those things together are so freakishly unlikely, but the important thing is that it’s not consistent. Any literary prodigy somehow able to do all of those things is not going to be reciting nursery rhymes to express his misogyny. He doesn’t HAVE to. If he were capable of communicating like this in real life, none of this would have happened this way.
At best, they found some kid who’s smart enough to seem kinda like he could write this, then massively rewrote something he actually did write and got him to claim it was his.
MattR
This essay is the perfect substitute for the Dawson’s Creek drinking game my friends and I used to play. The only rule was “drink whenever a character uses a word or phrase that no high school student would ever use in casual conversation”
The Truffle
@Comrade Kevin: The name of the site is kind of an oxymoron, isn’t it?
ashkha
Maybe this is for real. Or very high-concept satire. Found this video on Youtube with Sam speaking against global warming. Apparently part of a campaign to show a global warming denial documentary Not Evil Just Wrong at schools
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgyzHDpt6p4
tkogrumpy
@JGabriel: This. Is in fact the most likely, and believable explanation, although it beggars the imagination that any adult would believe this juvenile collection of talking points is reality. The comments make me weep. As an aside, I have been banned from commenting there since before they had comments.
Southwest of Heaven
Here’s a video of this little tyke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgyzHDpt6p4
robertdsc
Count me in with those who don’t buy the author being 11.
kay
I don’t know that it’s all that complicated. They have to convince the faithful that someone somewhere is targeting their children.
Like all of their appeals it’s fear-based. It’s less subtle then those ads for alarm systems where the enraged spurned boyfriend busts in the door, but it’s probably effective.
ChrisB
Man up, little wingnut. What, you don’t like getting hit in dodgeball? Pussy.
This is obviously a fabrication: no liberal P.E. teachers let their kids play dodgeball.
Adam Collyer
@Kered (formerly Derek):
I agree with you. My point really was that there are institutional advantages that inherent in being male, white, and middle class. Institutions change over time, but this “kid” (again, using the term loosely) isn’t being persecuted because all of these institutions are inevitably catered to him.
monkeyboy
@New Yorker: “Ah yes, the lil’ 4-year-old recalls the political bias of his preschool teacher.”
About the only thing I remember from kindergarten was that daily we would have nap time where all the kids would lie down on mats on the floor and maybe nap or at least keep still and quite. During this time I could look up the skirts of the little girls in front of me and see their underwear which gave me a boner.
Andre
I am twelve years old and what is this?
mai naem
Watch the video. Perhaps, he speaks better than the average 11 yr old but he would be speaking a whole lot better with more vocabulary if this essay was his. I have some extremely bright family members/friends’ kids and even they didn’t write this well(top 1% HS grad class/Oxford/Princeton/Wellesley grads.) Don’t want to go Michelle Malkin over this but the video shows the mom doing typical stay at home mom stuff(laundry.) My guess is that it’s a typical right wing nutcase traditional family who think they are better than other families. Let me say, if this was turned around and it was a liberal kid complaining about right wing bias, Malkin would have already released his address and the kid would be getting death threats.
JBerardi
@Ross Hershberger:
Damn liberal public schools, teaching our children to be exceptional writers!
One of you masochists who actually read this thing, does the kid present an excuse for this massive contradiction?
Svensker
@monkeyboy:
OMG you were that guy?
Malovich
Has this kid got an interview with Fox News yet?
Should be anytime now.
300baud
That uncomprehending shock that people could be excited we have a black president gets me every time. Do they really have no ability to appreciate, even in the abstract, that people could be excited over a major success in a 50-year push for civil rights? Or are they just overwhelmed with shock that there are white people who don’t automatically side with other white people?
Southwest of Heaven
How long before he starts wearing suits and ties to school, guaranteeing a lifetime of wedgies and wet willies?
Innocent Bystander
/lurk mode off
(1) Either Sam is his parent’s sockpuppet or
(2) It’s some liberal with a great skill for pushing conservative hot button issues.
Either way, the comments at American Thinker reflect a bunch of desperate conservative rubes who really, really want to believe this story is true. The story is funny, the responses are downright pathetic.
/lurk mode on
Tonal Crow
I love how cons claim at once to constitute a vast majority of the population (“America is a center-right nation!”) and also to be a small minority subject to enormous oppression by numerous liberal overlords.
What a joke. But it has emotional consistency, so the con masses are more than ready to down a super-sized triple-cone helping with extra shit sauce.
DW
@Kered (formerly Derek): Rosin’s article is pretty crappy. She skims over that the biggest gender gap is found among poor and minority kids. Middle and upper class white boys really aren’t doing significantly worse than their female peers. What you’re looking at is a scenario where the working/lower middle class jobs are female dominated, but not the elite jobs. On top of that, under Rosin’s scenario, marriageable – i.e., steadily employed – men will be relatively scarce and thus have the advantage in bargaining over marriage. Remember, the guys failing to acquire formal education aren’t acquiring useful domestic skills either. So most women will wind up having to choose between marriages where the man has the upper hand and most likely the woman does the bulk of child care, having kids on their own with all the handicaps that implies, or staying single and childless. That’s not a scenario for a matriarchal future.
monkeyboy
@Svensker: “OMG you were that guy?
Nah. At that point I had already become, I thought, pretty circumspect and just enjoyed lying on it rather than humping the floor mat.
But then again in around 1st grade one day I was wearing short pants with enormous pockets and I thought I was being circumspect with one hand inside my pocket until a female classmate came up to me and asked if she could have a feel and I was so caught off guard that I let her stick her hand in my pocket.
Svensker, were you that girl?
burnspbesq
@MattR:
“This essay is the perfect substitute for the Dawson’s Creek drinking game my friends and I used to play. The only rule was ‘drink whenever a character uses a word or phrase that no high school student would ever use in casual conversation.'”
If those were the rules, it’s a miracle that you or any of your friends are still alive.
Bubblegum Tate
@JGabriel:
It reminds me of one of the funniest parts of The Great Derangement in which Matt Taibbi has infiltrated John Hagee’s church and goes off on a crazy-ass indoctrination weekend. Attendees are split into groups and told to share stories of childhood trauma. Taibbi concocts a story about how his father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat young Matt with an oversized clown shoe. Hilarious stuff, but apparently nobody in his group even batted an eye.
GeoX
@SLKRR:
I believe you’ll find that the boys go to Mars to get cool cars. Or, in the somewhat unfortunate alternative, go to Uranus to get more famous. Note that we were all four-five years old.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Ash Can:
> Whoever wrote this has far, far more serious
> issues than he discusses here.
Hey, homosexuality is not a disease, dammit!
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@MattR:
A toast to “umpteenth”!
scav
I’m just enjoying the thought that apparently the only articulate repub “leaders” are 11, because, well, La Palinista. More evidence supporting some form of early onset mental decay. Although I’ve not quite figured out how they can manage to admire in the jejune what they despise in the adult.
Fcb
Only thing sadder than an old socialist is a young conservative.
Wonder how many California schools the poor kid has attended? Going by the title and tone of the piece, you’d think it was all of them.
Anne Laurie
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
WIN!
Actually, I think this is the wingnut-blogger equivalent of phone sex. They want a “brilliant young conservative” to read a script which will provide them with a brief burst of pleasure, or at least schaudenfreude. Just as the people who give their credit card info to 900-line operators don’t want to be told that the individual reading the script to which they self-pleasure is not actually a young hot chick/stud (possibly not even of the appropriate gender for their phantasies), the readers of American Thinker don’t want to be told that the “11 year old conservative” delivering this impassioned screed is actually a 40-year-old contract employee, and possibly a liberal.
Also, I thought someone would’ve mentioned Marjoe Gortner before now, but I may be the only one here old enough to remember the ‘scandal’ of his 1972 film.
Fledermaus
GeoX wins the thread.
asiangrrlMN
Nope. Not a chance. Mom or dad wrote it or gussied it up for him. It’s pure bullshit, along with his persecution complex. But then again, it’s the way of the conservatives, isn’t it? Throw all this shit out there and then whine if it comes back and hits them in the face.
roshan
Many times it’s just disconcerting to know that the right is willing to accept policy input from kids which it doesn’t want and trust to fuck around.
d. b. cooper
I believe an eleven-year-old wrote that.* A lying, delusional eleven-year-old with a victimization complex who probably has a bright future in Conservative politics. I’m pretty sure the kid is a sociopath.
*Some here are underestimating the writing skills of a small, but not insignificant, chunk of eleven-year-olds.
Hiram Taine
@kay:
That’s not true, El Rushbo himself has said:
jon
An eleven-year-old can write well, an eleven-year-old with a good editor can write better, but an eleven-year-old with help from a global-warming denialist organization like “balanced-ed.org” can write some amazing stuff.
If this is the best such an organization can do, it’s obviously a shitty organization. Using a two-minute video to display the horror of being the kid who doesn’t believe in climate change but not showing any counterarguments but instead showing Tourist and Visitors Bureau of Beverly Hills compilation footage outtakes makes that organization look like a bunch of dimwits. It’s as if the video editors said to themselves, “Fuck this kid, where’s the Versace store?” And that’s conservatism in a nutshell, especially the climate denialist wing.
Bulworth
This has gotta be total snark.
DPirate
Kleine Sam ist ein besser mann!
What a load of hogwash.
Paris
So I should have filed a lawsuit when my daughter was not allowed to select Ralph Nader as president in 2000 in a classroom mock election?
bjacques
Of course it’s real. And so was that fetus that wrote the essay ending with “and then my mother killed me.”
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Lets assume for a second that this kid is 11, did write this himself, and really does have these points of view:
This kid needs a psychologist, and soon. Some of the things he writes in this essay are boarderline sociopathic and there are times when he verges dangerously close to things you hear from places like that nutter who shot up a woman’s health club a few months back.
Also, studies show that violence against woman (physical and otherwise) is more prevalent in communities with strong gender roles. This kid seems to think that teachers telling kids that women are equal to men is somthing that should be shunned and openly questioned. About every example of “bias” he gives is so unbelievably laid out that it makes me wonder about his mental state. Note to Young 11-year old Sam: Promotion of mothers does not mean the demotion of fathers. There is no book out there that denegrates fathers, and if so, i’d love to see which school is using said book.
I’m not joking about getting this kid help, or trying to make a political point here. I am worried about allowing this kid to hurt any of his classmates, especially any of the girls in his class. Either that or make sure this kid becomes a fox news contributor (HA!) and get him a full time job spewing this nonsense. As long as he has a spotlight, he’ll be dissuaded from doing anything untorrid.
Of course, this is all assuming these are his views, and not the views of his parents, much like how I was hoping George HW Bush would win the presidency because he’s who my parents voted for, and was sad when Clinton won, even though I had no idea why.
drindl
I have no doubt that spoiled overpriviliged rightwing white boys start whining early and never grow up, but I can’t believe anyone really thinks this was written by a kid. Sounds more like that little shit Tucker Carlson to me.
twiffer
@d. b. cooper: er, no. fuck, harlan ellison couldn’t write that well at eleven.
mds
Yup, this essay from a supposed Voodoo Child wunderkind goes up at American Thinker, and the commentariat there swarms it like Musca domestica on feces. Here come the dumbs, here come the dumbs.
ricky
If that “kid” had been in my public school in Texas back in the
good old days he would have walked around with a jock strap for a hat all day. And the coaches would have let the guys who did it skip laps for a week.
Ramiah Ariya
When I was 12, in 8th grade in India, I read an article in a newspaper which commented on the unlikeliness of “re-birth”. It mentioned that the stories of people recalling their previous births were mostly bogus and so on.
I was incensed. My family had ties with a Hindu nationalist organization called the RSS (one of RSS’s breakaway “lone-wolf” guys shot Gandhi dead in 1948). I was nationalistic and thought that most tenets of Hinduism were based in modern day science.
Anyway, I wrote a long reply to that article, claiming that re-birth was real.
My first argument was that if people died and were not re-born, their souls would keep accumulating somewhere. We just cannot have that, can we?
Second, I pointed to the Bhagvad Gita, in which Krishna says that the soul neither dies nor is born. Taking this as true, I claimed that Krishna had stumbled on to the “Law of conservation of souls” (I kid you not). Among other corollaries, this law showed that there were alien worlds, some of which had declining population (because the earth’s own number of souls was increasing). And so on.
It was a 10 page tract which was solely read by my father, and then thrown away.
I can totally believe that a 11 year old kid wrote that.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
What kind of counter-tops do these conservative Wunderkinds’ families have.
Enquiring minds need to know.
Hob
@Ramiah Ariya: Thanks for that story. I too was a precocious kid inclined toward manifestos. The thing about trying to imitate older ideologues at that age is that you can’t help being creative and pushing too far in some direction that you don’t realize isn’t quite right– like your wonderful detail about Krishna “stumbling onto” a cosmic law. I imagine if your piece had been more widely read, you would’ve gotten a few embarrassed lectures about how gods already know these things.
That’s why you story still doesn’t convince me that this current thing is the real deal, because this guy is entirely lacking in that kind of kid-logic; everything in the article is predictable, pretty much word-for-word standard right-wing anti-liberal rants (including things he couldn’t possibly have experienced firsthand, like “Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” which was changed to include boys when he was barely verbal.) At best, I can believe that the kid complained that his teachers were gay liberals who were against boys, and the parents reworked it into something they thought would push all the right buttons for their Bircher peers.
brantl
@JBerardi: FTW, exactly.
DFH no.6
Very late to the thread, but let me re-iterate that there is no way 11 year-old Sam Besserman wrote this. Neither he nor any other 11 year-old. I don’t care how precocious, or how much of a genius or child prodigy. No way, no how.
Nor, as others have said, did the absurd events claimed in the article happen to him or any other kid, anywhere. PE teachers yelling “get the Republican” in dodgeball? Remembering a teacher in Pre-school preaching from a book about the “inferiority of fathers”? Bullshit, all of it.
This doesn’t pass the smell test at any level. Even a few of the wingnut commenters at American Thinker are sentient enough to recognize the incredible unlikelihood of an 11 year-old penning this, though — in proper cognitively dissonant wingnut fashion — they then look right past the obvious plagiarism to commend the “larger truth” of liberal indoctrination and conservative oppression in schools.
I don’t know what else to say about this except, fuck all these privileged conservative assholes who’ve deluded themselves into believing that they are somehow victims and martyrs. Fuck ’em every one.
MBL
The GYM TEACHER yelling “get the Republican” is one of my favorite bits, though. In my experience (and I’ve been working in schools for 12 years), the gym teacher is the faculty member most likely to be a Republican. Anecdote isn’t data and all that, but…
ricky
@MBL:
All my gym teachers were so mean that even if you told them you had been bitten by a rattlesnake on the playground they wouldn’t give you the anecdote.
Al Swearengen
I’m only surprised that there wasn’t a honest, plain-spoken, ethnic cab driver somewhere in that fabrication so they could work the soothing “elitist” lotion even further into their aching, over-used martyr muscles.
The length of the comments at American Duh! amaze me. These people must sit around and rehearse manifestos for every single political situation. “Oh goody, time for my perfect 700-word dissertation on how everything bad is public schooling’s fault! Blar, blar, blar, blah, blah, blah, fart.”
Janus Daniels
The article tells on the last line:
“… But possibly, even more usefully, I think I have struck comedy gold.”
Then, the comments…
Any satire that leads its objects to satirize themselves ranks among the great achievements of literature.
I hope to meet the genius who wrote this.
TheBirthdayPrincess
@Janus Daniels:
That final line had me thinking parody too. A Dogpile search of the article’s supposed author “Sam Besserman” got me videos of both a boy discussing the problems at school like in the article (http://eyeblast.tv/public/video.aspx?v=XdqGqG2G6U) and a profile of what appears to be the same child but younger on the comedy site funnyordie (http://www.funnyordie.com/seasonsofanguish).
I think a creative, intelligent eleven year old child could have written the article if he had deliberately researched what kinds of arguments are currently being made. Since the comedy videos appear written and directed by Sam as a young child I think it is entirely possible he wrote the article with some parental support. I can picture Sam wondering why people don’t listen to reasoned arguments and deciding to use comedy to educate people.
Janus Daniels
Thanks BirthdayPrincess.
Sam B.’s Fox News appearance:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4264775/conservative-kid-tries-to-survive-california-school/
Sam on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sam+besserman&aq=f
This family may someday rival Colbert… and Colter?
For now, we can only guess.
Hmmm… Sam B… Samantha Bee… a hint?