Remember that conservative kid CPAC hero who wrote a book?...he's liberal now

[Dusty Bake Activate]

Jonathan Krohn: CPAC's boy wonder swings left - POLITICO.com

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.”

Krohn won’t go so far as to say he’s liberal, in part because his move away from conservatism was a move away from ideological boxes in general.

“I want to be Jonathan Krohn,” he said, “and I’m tired of being an ideology, and it’s not fun and it gets boring and it’s not who we are as individuals.”

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.”

Krohn is bucking the received wisdom that people become more conservative as they get older, a shift he attributes partly to philosophy.

“I started reflecting on a lot of what I wrote, just thinking about what I had said and what I had done and started reading a lot of other stuff, and not just political stuff,” Krohn said. “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. It wasn’t me thinking. It was just me saying things I had heard so long from people I thought were interesting and just came to believe for some reason, without really understanding it. I understood it enough to talk about it but not really enough to have a conversation about it.”

“I think I’ve just matured overall,” he added.

The problem, for Krohn, is that he’s still that 13-year-old kid in the eyes of many. And that, he says, makes him “absolutely annoyed.”

“It really has gotten cumbersome having to go through the process of telling people what I’ve done over the past few years,” said Krohn. “I’ve tried to tell people, but it’s not as interesting, apparently. People don’t want to listen to me tell them I’ve changed.”

Those old memories sometimes come back to haunt Krohn, as when HBO’s Bill Maher recently included Krohn in a biting bit about young conservatives.

“I have no problem with what Bill Maher said,” said Krohn. “He’s funny. But all these people took it seriously instead of a joke.… It hurt me in the sense that I was compared to some kid who said that Obama is turning kids gay. And that kind of stuff is what happens. I have to explain to people over and over and over again that I’m not a conservative and I have my own ideas and I’m not just agreeing to everything that every conservative said. It’s very hard to break a stereotype like that of yourself.”

“I’ve been trying to tell people,” he added, “but it’s a lot harder to get stuff out there when your mind changes on things because a lot of people who supported you when you’re on one side of the issue aren’t really going to help you get your changing ideas out there when people still think I’m that conservative kid. … People don’t realize I was 14 when I wrote that book. I’m 17 now. In terms of my life, three years is a long time in a 17-year-old’s life.”

Krohn’s move away from conservatism posed two risks: First, the wrath of his conservative parents. (That was quickly and pleasantly overcome: “Neither of them were overjoyed, but it didn’t really make a difference in their respect and love for me.”) Second, the discarding of a surefire path to success within the conservative movement.

Krohn said that family and friends noted “all of the opportunities” available to him in the world of politics, but giving that up “didn’t faze me because I really didn’t want to do anything that would compromise my beliefs as an individual.”

As for what’s next, Krohn says he can’t help but remain a bit of a political geek, but he’ll never write a political nonfiction book again. Instead, he’s hoping to spend his time at NYU studying philosophy and filmmaking, while occasionally writing political satire.

And that’s what Krohn seems most eager to focus on: What’s next. Not what’s in the past.

“Come on, I was thirteen,” he said. “I was thirteen.”

 

[The Real]

Reading philosophy saves another child from the clutches of political stupidity and ignorance. It did the same for me, honestly, though I wasn't Conservative like this kid.

@ him sonning them. The fact that they hailed a 13-year-old who spouted talking points as a hero and a genius says a lot.

 

[Dusty Bake Activate]

Reading philosophy saves another child from the clutches of political stupidity and ignorance. It did the same for me, honestly, though I wasn't Conservative like this kid.

@ him sonning them. The fact that they hailed a 13-year-old who spouted talking points as a hero and a genius says a lot.

Yeah, he was too smart to not eventually see the holes in that ****. What's sad is I think a bunch of adults who he trusted put him up to it in the first place. He said he lived in a conservative part of Georgia. His parents, neighbors, aunts, and uncles, etc. probably saw he was exceptionally smart and they started filling his head with that Republican nonsense when he was still in elementary school. It's funny how when one starts reading and thinking independently, they usually reject almost everything the modern right in this country stands for.

They're turned on him now. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-news-the-five-takes-on-former-conservative-whiz-kid-jonathan-krohn/

 

[The Real]

Yeah, he was too smart to not eventually see the holes in that ****. What's sad is I think a bunch of adults who he trusted put him up to it in the first place. He said he lived in a conservative part of Georgia. His parents, neighbors, aunts, and uncles, etc. probably saw he was exceptionally smart and they started filling his head with that Republican nonsense when he was still in elementary school. It's funny how when one starts reading and thinking independently, they usually reject almost everything the modern right in this country stands for.

They're turned on him now. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-news-the-five-takes-on-former-conservative-whiz-kid-jonathan-krohn/

Wow, so now they've taken to personally attacking the kid and calling him dishonest just because he distanced himself from their camp? He didn't go out of his way to trash them, nor did he say he was a Liberal and dedicating himself to bashing them. Dude just wants to step back out of that game for a while and soak up some knowledge to develop his own views. Their reaction is just further proof that they're morons. A bunch of adults sitting around a table making personal attacks on a little kid they've never met is just pathetic.

 

[Dusty Bake Activate]

Wow...right-wingers showing their vile nature again.

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/jonathan-krohn-interview.php?ref=fpa

Jonathan Krohn, the teen conservative idol turned liberal heretic, is on the receiving end of a world of abuse from right wing pundits this week. Fine by him. But please folks, lay off his mom.

“My mother had a friend today who said she can’t be friends anymore because of me,” said Krohn, who described her as close to tears. “She texted her and said ‘Have a nice life.’ It’s a friend she’s known since before I was born!” Krohn told TPM Tuesday.

Republicans had largely forgotten about Krohn since turning him into a star speaker and author in 2009 at the tender age of 13. But that didn’t mean they were happy to let him go, reacting to a Politico interview in which he said he now supported President Obama with a torrent of unrestrained rage.

The Daily Caller led the charge. Gregg Re started things offwith a profanity-filled screed from a spurned conservative who attended Krohn’s big CPAC speech in 2009 and apparently demanded anonymity to tell Re the 17-year-old was a “douche.”

Re then took to Twitter to snipe at Krohn for expressing his views while denying his article — “Tired Of Being Typecast As Conservative, ‘Douche’ Actor and CPAC speaker Jonathan Krohn Turns to Liberalism — was meant as an attack.

“If I’d given a speech as devoid of thought as [Krohn] (and made money from it), I’d call myself a douche,” another Daily Caller writer, Justin Green, chimed in.

Another Daily Caller editor, Peter Tucci, got into an extended angry sparring match with Krohn, dropping repeated references to his “hipster glasses” and throwing out such witty barbs as “Oops, I overestimated you. You’re not mature after all. I take back my praise.”

Krohn told TPM he takes the attacks in stride. He spent much of Tuesday engaging with critics and supporters alike on Twitter, in between a stop at his grandmother’s 80th birthday and a haircut ahead of his appearance on Hardball that evening.

“Nothing’s really stung me, all of its just so absurd,” he said. “My favorite was someone who tweeted at me ‘You betrayed God and William Bennett, you little *******!’ Because apparently they’re on the same plateau in this person’s mind.”

He laughed off charges from conservative critics that he had cashed in by deceiving them, saying the money he earned was modest at best. The only significant cash generator was his book and the money went entirely to his college savings. Even with a generous scholarship, he said the funds will only cover only a portion of his tuition at NYU next year.

“Conservative teen pundit is not as lucrative a job as it sounds, you should probably look into getting a degree in something else,” he said.

Krohn hoped his recent re-emergence would mark a clean break from his mini-conservative days, allowing him to craft a new identity as a budding philosophy student and filmmaker. He’s currently hard at work at a screenplay for a feature, “Broke in New York,” which he says has gotten rave reviews from friends who’ve seen early drafts.

“It’s really a postmodern satire, kind of a dark satire of modern American life,” he said. “It’s 9 different vignettes revolving around 9 different people in New York, some are very absurd characters.”

As for another running attack online — that he’s only changing his political views to get the girls — Krohn says life hasn’t changed much in that department.

“There weren’t any ladies in the conservative pundit phase, there are not much now,” he said. “I’m still a white Jewish nerd, I mean come on.”

He is looking forward to trying out the party scene at NYU. “All within moderation, of course,” he added.

 

[88m3]

Sigh

 

[Type Username Here]

This is how far our level of discourse in the matters of governance have fallen.

Talking about children without one single ounce of relevancy to anything resembling our legal code, policy or government.

 

[ExodusNirvana]

Another one saved...plus once he gets to NYU, he's gonna be knee deep in left thinking, pro choice p*ssy.

Huge win. Huge.

 

[Slystallion]

This is like an episode of south park lol he's a kid why should he worry about politics. I honestly don't remember him. Who was that other kid who sounded like O Reilly and was going in on liberals?

 

[Slystallion]

Another one saved...plus once he gets to NYU, he's gonna be knee deep in left thinking, pro choice p*ssy.

Huge win. Huge.

p*ssy doesnt care what your politics are bro bro. Liberal college girls are easy any way ; ) less morals easier access. Liberal girls don't want a p*ssy liberal guy who agrees with everything they say any way they like alpha conservative men who can take care of them deep down.

 

[Brown_Pride]

it's getting to the point where I simply don't have the strength to comment on crap like this. I'm becoming numb to the absurdity of it all.
(this applies to sly's comments as well as the OP subject)

 

[Hiphoplives4eva]

Its hilarious that simply because he is no longer a conservative, he has somehow been saved! There are plenty or left wing groups that are just as damaging on the psyche as the extreme right wing groups.

As long as the kid continues to read and understand history, he'll be alright. The simple fact he was able to write a book at 13 has earned him my immense respect. Im in the infant stages of writing my own book now and the shyt is no easy feat.

 

[Robbie3000]

That was a hell of a heel turn. Hollywood Hogan would be proud.

at the conservatives acting like hurt wrestling fans spewing hate towards a minor.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwVEEX2h740&feature=player_detailpage"]Hollywood Hogan Turns Heel (longer version) - YouTube[/ame]

 

[The Real]

Its hilarious that simply because he is no longer a conservative, he has somehow been saved! There are plenty or left wing groups that are just as damaging on the psyche as the extreme right wing groups.

As long as the kid continues to read and understand history, he'll be alright. The simple fact he was able to write a book at 13 has earned him my immense respect. Im in the infant stages of writing my own book now and the shyt is no easy feat.

He has been saved. He's not spouting any textbook talking points for either side, though he does clearly agree with more liberal positions now than he did before. He's just doing his own thing.

 

[Dusty Bake Activate]

He has been saved. He's not spouting any textbook talking points for either side, though he does clearly agree with more liberal positions now than he did before. He's just doing his own thing.

Yeah, that's what I was saying. He was just spouting talking points and regurgitating shyt that he had memorized during that CPAC speech. It was obvious this kid was exceptionally smart, and a group of adults just forcefed him that shyt since before he was old enough to think independently. It seems now he's reading from a variety of sources of thought and beginning to develop his own opinions. He's only 17, so he'll change his opinions more. Who knows, he may go full circle and be a conservative again. But it was pretty pathetic on the part of the adults who took a gifted little kid and turned him into a Rush Limbaugh ventriloquist dummy.