I have enjoyed watching how young Jonathan Krohn, former wunderkind of the CPAC conservative set, has handled himself in his new role as an apostate pariah to the Right.

It would seem like the recent chronology went something like this: Bill Maher did a bit about that idiot kid in West Virginia spouting off on his YouTube channel about how Obama was making high school kids gay, and in the same segment, ran a little of the famous viral video of a then 13-year-old Krohn at CPAC giving his obnoxious kiddie conservative take on America’s problems and being applauded wildly by the barking seals Republican activist attendees.

I hadn’t thought of Krohn since that video made the rounds, but I did make a mental note to Google him the next day to see what he was up to, maybe for a post about him here on Dangerous Minds. Well, Politico’s Patrick Gavin must’ve had that same idea (and better follow-thru than yours truly) because he contacted Jonathan to see what he was up to. The resulting article, which saw Krohn renouncing his former conservative beliefs saw him caught in a crossfire of childishness unleashed by the frat boys of Tucker Carlson’s lowbrow wanna-be Breitbart Daily Caller blog.

And then it just ballooned from there, as Jonathan Krohn explains in an article he penned for Salon (I wanted to invite Jonathan to write something like this for Dangerous Minds, but, yeah, my follow-thru is terrible these days):

Four years ago, at the age of 13, I gave a speech at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference). To be honest, I had no idea how big a deal it was to make a two-minute appearance on a B-list panel. But the speech blew up, and I became the child star of the right wing — like the conservative Macauley Culkin, except I’ve never had a drug problem or dated Mila Kunis, unfortunately.

My involvement at such a young age happened for manifold reasons: I always enjoyed writing (I had gotten my first paid writing gig when I was 9), I enjoyed politics (or at least the theory of politics), and I grew up in Georgia, where conservative ideologues dominated the radio and the populace. Mix those things with the naïveté of a kid and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a fresh, right-wing pundit. My star role worked out well for a while. I didn’t have to question any of the talking points I’d made in my speech, and I got to drone on and on about them at numerous Tea Parties and other conservative gatherings. I felt justified in my beliefs if for no other reason than no one actually told me I was wrong. Instead, men like Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich hailed me as the voice for my generation and a hope for America.

But then, earlier this week, Politico released an interview in which I announced I wasn’t a conservative anymore — and the proverbial crap hit the fan. Since then, I have been treated by the political right with all the maturity of schoolyard bullies. The Daily Caller, for instance, wrote three articles about my shift, topping it off with an opinion piece in which they stated that I deserved criticism because I wear “thick-rimmed glasses” and I like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Why don’t they just call me “four-eyes”? These are not adults leveling serious criticism; these are scorned right-wingers showing all the maturity of a little boy. No wonder I fit in so well when I was 13.

No wonder, indeed! One commentator said he would have left the boy in the woods to die as a baby. (Never considering the possibility that he might be raised by wolves to become the American Lenin? Why not kill him with your bare hands for the sake of future)

I can totally relate to Jonathan Krohn and appreciate how he handles these silly attacks with grace and perspective. As I have admitted (confessed?) here in the past, I was a massive, huge, crazy Ayn Rand nut when I was a kid (to this day, I have a virtually encyclopedic knowledge of her work). I owned every book, cassettes of her Ford Hall Forum lectures and two huge binders of all of her magazines and newsletters. To gather that kind of completest Ayn Rand library at that time (late 70s/early80s) was expensive and I mowed lawns and did unpleasant gardening work to afford it. I devoured her writing at that age. I thought it was the most important thing I’d ever read, as idiotic as that seems to me now.

Ironically, it was during the course of my teenaged Ayn Rand phase that I discovered the work of philosopher Herbert Marcuse (quoting myself here):

“It was via an article published in her magazine The Objectivist (“Herbert Marcuse, Philosopher of the New Left” by George Walsh) that I first came across the ideas of the New Left. Not all that long afterwards, I became much more interested in the types of philosophers that Rand and her disciples decried as “academic barbarians,” “dangerous irrationalists” and “mutilators of student’s minds,” than I was in Rand herself.

Not only did I find that the ideas of the New Left resonated more with my own innately experienced view of the world around me, it also seemed clear that if the ideas of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School terrified the Ayn Rand brigade as much as they obviously did, then they must also be much more authentic ideas, too.

Yep. Although it might come as a surprise to less intellectually agile types on the Right who tend to make up their minds at a young age and keep it that way, smart kids don’t always stick with the same worldview they have at 13 as they mature. My discovery of the work of Herbert Marcuse (which led to Marx, Hegel, Sartre and the Situationist International) saw me make a much sharper left turn than young Mr. Krohn, who sees himself as a left-leaning independent, has, but, like I say, I can easily relate to the guy, admire his intelligence and understand fully why he’s so eager to leave Georgia for NYU (I wanted out of West Virginia like a bat out of hell when I was his age). I wish Jonathan Krohn the best of luck in his future endeavors and I expect that this won’t be the last time we hear from him.