Conservative wonderboy grows up, is now a dirty liberal

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Conservative wonderboy grows up, is now a dirty liberal

Many people did things at 13 they regretted. But for Jonathan Krohn, when he was 13 in 2009, he had written a book called ‘Defining Conservatism’ and was a speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he was hailed as the future of conservatism. Now just three years later, Krohn winces when he thinks about 2009. Now at 16, he’s embraced Obama and liberalism.

“I think it was naive… It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time…

“One of the first things that changed was that I stopped being a social conservative… 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.”

You have to feel for the kid a little bit. Not only were his ideas as a 13-year-old recorded permanently, but now his rejection of those ideas — pretentious in the way that bright college freshman can be — is also on the record, and Googleable, forever:

“I started getting into philosophy — Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Kant and lots of other German philosophers. And then into present philosophers — Saul Kripke, David Chalmers. It was really reading philosophy that didn’t have anything to do with politics that gave me a breather and made me realize that a lot of what I said was ideological blather that really wasn’t meaningful.”