Conservatives Are Stunting This Child's Growth

If you watched the gathering of the tribes at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, you might’ve caught 14-year-old Jonathan Krohn’s speech. It seems odd, blogs Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic, to flaunt the idea that conservative talking points are simple enough for an adolescent to master. Worse, though, conservatives are revealing their preference for exploiting teenage self-assurance, instead of helping Krohn mature into a serious conservative intellectual.

“If you’re a conservative and you care about this kid, you don’t give him a public forum. You give him your card, and you take his emails. You give him a list of books that he needs to read. Then when you see him, you quiz him,” Coates writes. “Of course if you did all that, you’d risk turning him into liberal.” (More Jonathan Krohn stories.)