Alternate Headline: Jeremy Lott, Vindicated

A friend suggested the above headline when he passed along this Politico piece on Jonathan Krohn’s political transformation from 13-year-old conservative boy wonder to 17-year-old Nietzsche-reading, Obama-supporting NYU film student.

My critical American Spectator review of Krohn’s first book about conservatism is probably the most infamous thing I ever wrote. It’s the only controversy currently fleshed out on my Wikipedia entry, for instance. (Though feel free to add others, folks.)

The review drew scores of angry comments and denunciations and earned for me the reputation as that guy who beats up child authors. I argued that was unfair because the reputation I really deserved was as the guy who beats up on their parents.

The review started out by talking about the obligations parents have to their children. It quoted Rush Limbaugh, another speaker at CPAC, the event that made Krohn famous, saying, “Don’t be afraid to tell children that they’re wrong. They don’t know what you do. They simply haven’t lived long enough.”

It expressed “anger” at Krohn’s mother and father “for allowing this book to be published at all,” and argued that “good parents” ought to keep their children “from embarrassing themselves this badly.” After citing one egregious example from the book, it drew out the moral: “[That’s] the sort of unrefined thought that we expect young people to throw out there for adults to respond, ‘Isn’t he cute?’ or ‘Well that’s not quite right, son. See…'”

In the Politico piece, Krohn almost agrees with me. He calls much of what he had to say as a kid pundit “ideological blather.” He explains: “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.”

And it dogs him still. Krohn declares himself “absolutely annoyed” that people think of him as a sort of cub scout conservative pundit: “It’s very hard to break a stereotype like that of yourself.” The piece concludes with Krohn protesting, “Come on, I was thirteen. I was thirteen.”

That’s great but, why do I have the feeling he’s going to look back to this Politico piece in the future and protest, “Come on, I was seventeen.”