By now most of you have heard about the Obama-hating 13 year old who carried away the hearts of America’s right wing media consumers.
“I got into politics when I was eight years old. Six years now. And I got involved because I started listening to talk radio. It goes back to one event. The Democrats filibustered something in the Senate when I was eight years old. I don’t remember what it was on and I didn’t honestly care when I was eight years old. I cared about the history and the Senate rules,” he told the Huffington Post. “I listened to Bill Bennett and tons of other talk show hosts who talked about that and other policies and started branching out and caring about other issues in regards to politics. Bill Bennett really became an idol for me. I listened to him every morning from 6 to 9 for, oh, years. And I started learning more and started to be able to think on my own, understanding politics on my own. I started to be able to use my mind to engage in political conversations under the conservative banner.”
He talks fast and with high-pitched emotion (no cracking of the voice), often banging his two fists against the table (each one holding a pen) for dramatic effect. His mother, naturally protective, reminds him at one point that he’s talking to a reporter from the Huffington Post.
“I know he is a liberal,” he replies. “But you are not the first liberal I talked to at CPAC.”
The topic on his mind – or at least mine – is how the Republican Party can resurrect itself. “Conservatism, conservatism, conservatism…” he replies. Whether these are talking points, I’m not sure. Either way, he has them down. “A lot of people say to me, ‘oh, you’re a Republican.’ And I say, ‘No, I’m a conservative.’ I’m a Republican when I support candidates. When I talk about the party I’m affiliated with I’m a Republican. But when it comes to what I am, I’m a conservative.”
No, I do not mean the black kid who yells at Obama on Twitter. The above was 13 year old Jonathan Krohn at CPAC in 2009. Conservatives sure seem to have a sentimental weakness for hearing their standard boilerplate read back at them by adolescents, don’t they? I would call it the Prussian Blue phenomenon, after those preteen neo-Nazi twins who made a similar sensation repeating right-wing messages at a slightly higher pitch. Why do conservatives go gaga for hearing movement orthodoxies read out loud by children? I could not tell you. It creeps me out a little. I discovered environmentalism at around that age, loudly, and nobody seemed all that impressed.
If I had to guess I would connect it with the conservative obsession about what right wingers are ‘allowed’ to say without getting criticized. As a whole conservatives always seem so extraordinarily sensitive about negative feedback. The GOP props up a woman candidate to ensure someone on stage can safely criticize Hillary. Wingnuts flock to any black man who will diss Obama or Black Lives Matter. I think that Milwaukee sherriff who hates BLM could be drawing a second salary from FOX by now. Kanye said n***er last week, can I say it NOW? Huh? Huh?? Surely nobody would attack a thirteen year old kid. So let’s put him on stage, hand the kid some cue cards and watch the liberals seethe with futile rage. It does not serve any policy or strategic purpose, but as Duncan Black would say pissing off liberals is pretty much the whole point of everything.
It seems worth noting both Krohn and the Prussian Blue twins repudiated everything once they grew up enough to understand that stuff their parents made them memorize. I think we can chart a similar path for the poor Twitter kid, whose parental stage managing is pretty obvious. In a few years he will probably appreciate the few blogs that did not attach his name to the dumb things ‘he’ wrote.