Kryptik - June 27, 2010 | 8:20 pm · Link

They start persecution complexes early these days, don’t they?

This irritates me more than it should, honestly, especially since it could end up politicizing honest-to-god bullying, and I am absolutely no fan of the kind of cruelty kids are capable of toward other kids.

Chad S - June 27, 2010 | 8:24 pm · Link

There is no way that an 11 year old kid is that politically self aware and can write at a near college level like that. Its hard to expect that much political/social awareness in every day life from college students and some 5th grader is looking for that(even assuming anything listed in it is true)? Even just implying that his teacher is gay like that is just ridiculous impossible. No way.

This is a total fabrication.

Spaghetti Lee - June 27, 2010 | 8:26 pm · Link

An attempt to look hip and cool? Too bad it comes off looking like exploiting a minor for financial gain, probably because that’s exactly what it is.

I, too, came from a school where most of the teachers were liberals. I suspect conservatism may have fallen out of favor after the brashly Republican driver’s ed teacher was caught egging on a fight between two Down’s syndrome kids.

EIGRP - June 27, 2010 | 8:28 pm · Link

So… 14 and already in search of a strong male figure. Must be true!

MattR - June 27, 2010 | 8:29 pm · Link

@John Cole: Or my favorite, prenatal beauty pageants

c u n d gulag - June 27, 2010 | 8:32 pm · Link

Uhm, AIN’T no way that an 11 year-old wrote that.
I was a pretty polica;y astute 11 year old in 1969. No way I could have written anything about MLK or JFK that would have come close to that.
But then, we didn’t have a FOX News back in the day, so where would I have come up with those TALKING POINTS!

MattR - June 27, 2010 | 8:33 pm · Link

@Chad S: Are we sure this wasn’t written by Stephen Colbert’s son? With a closing like this, how can it not be snark?

Meanwhile, my science teacher taught us—for the umpteenth time—that man was responsible for global warming which encouraged a number of students to taunt me by shouting, “Global warming is real!”

After all these years you’d think I’d have given up. My country is undermining itself in its schools. It’s teaching boys that they can’t even compete with girls. It’s teaching those of us who have pride in our country that it is misplaced. It’s teaching nonsense and claiming that it’s science. But, possibly, even more usefully, I think I have struck comedy gold.

Mike E - June 27, 2010 | 8:33 pm · Link

From the comments:

I call shenanigans. No way was this essay written by an eleven year-old. No. Way. The vocabulary, syntax, and coordination of clauses, not to mention the trenchant observations, belie a sophistication that I see rarely among college student. Someone’s done been had.

The “boy’s” reaction to his effeminate male teacher was the giveaway. This ghostwriter is clearly a queer-curious Republican adult man, with possibly a wide stance.

General Egali Tarian Stuck - June 27, 2010 | 8:35 pm · Link

So the wingnuts are now enlisting child soldiers into their neverending war on intelligence.

TR - June 27, 2010 | 8:38 pm · Link

You know, there’s a reason the logo at American Thinker looks like Uncle Sam taking a giant shit.

Grendel72 - June 27, 2010 | 8:40 pm · Link

Kids are too young to know better. What excuse do grown Republicans have for acting even more childish than the child in this fabrication?

BrianD - June 27, 2010 | 8:41 pm · Link

“Once I even felt like going into the bathroom and trying to pull off my penis.”

Um, I think there’s more going on here than this kid feeling overwhelmed by liberal bias in the classroom. Or maybe this feeling is typical among conservatives.

wonkie - June 27, 2010 | 8:45 pm · Link

How could ayone possible imagine that that was written by an eleven year old? There are plenty of high school students who couldn’t put together an essay of that length.

BTW one of my elementary school memories is of a big crowd of kids chanting “Nixon Nixon!”. My family was for Kennedy. Of course none of us had a clue about the issues.

Chad S - June 27, 2010 | 8:47 pm · Link

@MattR: And if any of that was going on in a public school, there was be holy hell over it, no matter where the school was.

This is just wingnut talking points madlibs. Just write down “effeminate”+”gay”+”Soros”+”Global warming”+”liberal oppression”+”minorities” and fill in the sentence structure.

TR - June 27, 2010 | 8:48 pm · Link

In all seriousness, the reason for the “conservative kid” phenomenon is clear:

Conservatism is a philosophy increasingly held only by the elderly (check out the skewed demographics of the GOP, the Tea Party, etc.), and they badly want to believe that the younger generation is going to carry on their dementia after they’re dead and gone.

rnoble - June 27, 2010 | 8:51 pm · Link

Well, now that someone claiming to be 11 on the internet has told me about how bad the liberals are, I guess I have to vote Republican.

Doctor Science - June 27, 2010 | 8:51 pm · Link

TR:

It’s supposed to be something else? Coulda fooled me.

mad the swine - June 27, 2010 | 8:57 pm · Link

The first time I noticed the bias was actually in preschool where the teacher was reading a book about the importance of mothers and the inferiority of fathers. I tried to tell the teacher that dads might be just as important. The teacher responded in a sing-song, “No, listen to me, I’m the teacher.”

Damn, three years old and he already knows that bitches ain’t shit.

My favorite part was where this conservative child prodigy was able to recognize and characterize ‘moral relativism’ as ‘moral regression’ – while in second grade. And while surrounded by bleeding-heart second grade liberals, no less.

I can just barely convince myself that a 11-year-old prodigy, raised in a household where right-wing politics were a constant topic of discussion, could write a paper of that sort, with just a little help from his parents (ie, “my teacher was gay” became “my teacher was castrated and effeminate”). What I cannot believe, even giving the writer the greatest possible benefit of the doubt, is that the other kids in his age group were equally precocious in the cause of liberalism. Fifth graders taunting someone by telling them ‘Global warming is real’? Um, no.

demo woman - June 27, 2010 | 8:57 pm · Link

After reading Conservative Kid’s essay, it has changed my opinion of our educational system. Wow, no longer will a President have to utter the words “Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?”

Mike E - June 27, 2010 | 9:01 pm · Link

@WereBear (itouch): A conservative is that dickish kid that never grew up.

New Yorker - June 27, 2010 | 9:07 pm · Link

@mad the swine:

Ah yes, the lil’ 4-year-old recalls the political bias of his preschool teacher. Not only did he have the ability to discern the political preferences of his teacher, but he remembers it all so well. Funny how I don’t recall much of anything about preschool except that I played one of the Three Kings in the Christmas pageant and the time a violent thunderstorm hit and the basement where we had our class flooded. I guess this young man is simply an astonishing genius….or the whole essay is bullshit.

Svensker - June 27, 2010 | 9:11 pm · Link

@Chad S:

What you said. If an 11-year-old wrote that, his problem is not likely to be anti-male teachers, but classrooms not geared to students who are about 10 years above grade level.

Ross Hershberger - June 27, 2010 | 9:12 pm · Link

He may have a point about no male teachers. I just spent a month at a 450 student public elementary school. I assumed that there were no male teachers because every teacher I saw was female. I asked around and found that they had just hired a third male teacher. Three out of 25 – 30 teachers, total? It’s an overwhelmingly female profession at that level. The last elementary school I visited had 2 male teachers out of 20. High schools seem to have more men. Somebody’s gotta coach…

Adam Collyer - June 27, 2010 | 9:13 pm · Link

This is the money quote….

The only male teacher I had might as well have been castrated. His voice was soft, his gestures were feminine, he didn’t know how to run a class and he had to rely on female assistant teachers to control the children. And, of course, the female teachers treated the girls ten times better than the boys and constantly reminded us of our alleged inferiority. One of the assistant teachers even put down our rhyme, “Boys go to college to get more knowledge, girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider,” by reminding us that more girls than boys go to college because girls are smarter

The white, middle-class male persecution complex starts early these days. I don’t care whoever wrote this is 11, 14, or 26. Get yourself together and have some dignity, man.

For the record – 26 year old male from an upper-middle class income. My father (college educated) and mother (no college) were both white collar executives who grew up in Brooklyn and made something of themselves. People like me need to stop their whining about how everyone is out to get them. Not only is it unattractive, it’s flat out wrong and ludicrous.

Listen kid, more girls go to college than boys. More women enroll in law school now than men. Despite that, the number of female partners are dramatically lower than their male counterparts. We haven’t elected a female president. Female politicians are (relatively speaking) few and far between.

Even in “kids,” the conservative motto here seems to be to whine about unfair treatment while taking advantage of actual.favorable.treatment. Stop crying and make something of yourself.

Mayken - June 27, 2010 | 9:14 pm · Link

@Annie: I think the real tip-off was the writer’s use of the word misandrist. No friggin’ 11 year old knows that word!
What a crock!

hilzoy - June 27, 2010 | 9:21 pm · Link

Meh. When I was in school, we said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, and I very pointedly shut my mouth during the “under God” part, being an atheist. It wasn’t so easy to get out of Bible class, though. We had to memorize psalms, and though I managed to get away with reading them through a crack in my desk a lot of the time, the teacher caught on eventually.

Later, when I had become a Christian, I found myself at college, and turned out to be the only Christian most of my friends had ever met who wasn’t wildly anti-intellectual. Also, the only person anyone had ever met, period, who was opposed to divestment in South Africa. (Long story.)

I did not write articles about this at the time.

More importantly, I’ve always thought that the college experiences, especially, taught me an enormous amount. There is truly nothing like holding views that literally everyone around you thinks are completely retrograde (Christianity) or morally indefensible (divestment) to teach you tolerance. I wouldn’t give this experience up for anything. Even though, at the time, I didn’t like it when (e.g.) my freshman roommate (who I liked a lot) stormed out of our room after screaming: You just don’t care about the children of Soweto, do you?!

Zach - June 27, 2010 | 9:22 pm · Link

@mad the swine: This is awesome. I’m pretty sure I could’ve penned a more complex essay than this at 11, and I wouldn’t have relied on my parents’ stories of what happened to me at 3… that is if my parents had trained me to repeat this stuff over and over. Oh well; remember Graham Frost and let this kid and his editors have their say.

I think his bullies are on the right track. A little bit more yelling that “global warming is real” and calling people stupid would be more effective than pursuing a doomed path of trying to publish unassailable science. Even if the IPCC report were perfect, folks would just make shit up.

I will admit to pumping “My President is Black” full blast while driving around down; he’s got my number there.

Jon H - June 27, 2010 | 9:24 pm · Link

@mad the swine: “Fifth graders taunting someone by telling them ‘Global warming is real’? Um, no.”

I could see it if the kid is a first class bore who constantly harangues his classmates with right-wing memes like “global warming is fake”, when the classmates don’t want to hear it.

In that case, I could totally see his classmates shoving it down his throat after it came up in class.

Zam - June 27, 2010 | 9:29 pm · Link

Oh man this makes me yearn for the old days of school when all we did was pick on people for not believing in global warming and having a cock. I especially like this one class I had in my sophomore year about Unions and how great they were. We separated into to groups the Union heroes and the selfish evil conservatives. Us Union heroes got to beat the other children senseless until they gave into our demands, really helped prepare me for real life.

Beej - June 27, 2010 | 9:31 pm · Link

@Jon H: You’ve hit it exactly. Nobody’s going to taunt you with the phrase “Global warming is real” unless you have already taunted them with the cry that it’s all a liberal lie. Or you’ve tried to “educate” the pleebs by explaining in scrupulous detail why all the scientists who say it is real are really liberal dupes with a political agenda, using an oh-so-superior tone of course. This kid, if he is a kid, is the I’m-way-smarter-than-you dweeb that everybody loved to hate back in grade school or junior high.

thejoz - June 27, 2010 | 9:33 pm · Link

Complete and total bullshit.

This was probably written by a liberal who was paid by a stark raving mad teabagging lunatic who thought it was a good idea to make it seem like a kid wrote this.

It’s pathetic that someone would stoop that low but it laughably funny that the morons who read on American “Thinker” think this is true.

Morans. Go USA!

DW - June 27, 2010 | 9:35 pm · Link

A few silly questions –
Take your daughters to work day became take your daughters and sons to work day in 2003 – when this kid was about 4 and the year he would have entered kindergarten. So that part doesn’t make sense.

The “boys go to jupiter” rhyme was in a John Leo column back in 1998. Seems kind of a weird coincidence for it to come up several years later.

Do schools still do dodgeball? I thought conservatives argued that liberals were wusses who wouldn’t allow dodgeball,

Also, most of what he’s describing sounds like lawsuit bait, at least when aimed at middle and upper class kids.

Jon H - June 27, 2010 | 9:38 pm · Link

When I was growing up there was the weird kid on the block. Once when I was playing with a friend in the friend’s yard, the weird kid turns up. Pulls out a moist ziploc bag. Tells us it’s sterile.

We’re like “uh, that’s nice”. And returned to what we were doing, ignoring him. Note that I, at least was a bit of a science nerd, so not inherently hostile to such ideas. But presentation is important.

I see this kid as similar, except that instead of whipping out a moist but sterile ziploc bag, he comes out with “Global warming is a scam”. “The census is a scam”. etc.

JBerardi - June 27, 2010 | 9:40 pm · Link

One of the assistant teachers even put down our rhyme, “Boys go to college to get more knowledge, girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider,” by reminding us that more girls than boys go to college because girls are smarter. And this only encouraged the girls to hijack our rhyme and switch the sexes around.

This is absolutely classic. “They started doing the same thing to me that I was doing to them—it’s not fair!”. Very concise summation of the conservative mindset, really…

srv - June 27, 2010 | 9:42 pm · Link

I wish that kid who wrote for the World Net Daily and one day went off the rails and thrown under the Xtian bus would come back an write a blog/book. He must be in college now.

*damn, can’t remember that kids name. Would love to link to that at the thinker

JGabriel - June 27, 2010 | 9:45 pm · Link

I don’t get the whole “conservative kid” thing

Is this a “conservative” kid? I’d like to think (and I may be wrong) that a conservate isn’t automatically a chauvinist bigot.

This “kid”, or whoever wrote that essay, isn’t looking for a conservative education – he’s looking for a white, male, supremacist education.

I suspect the author is a satirist ratfucking The American Thinker and its commenters.

.

srv - June 27, 2010 | 9:48 pm · Link

Ah, Kyle Williams!

rnoble - June 27, 2010 | 9:50 pm · Link

I suppose its good that produced an actual child to represent this essay. Still, it seems unlikely that he wrote the thing on his own. At a minimum its heavily edited. He actually sort of reminds me of myself at that age, except for the persecution complex. I too was convinced that the school system was out to turn all of us into little liberals. Of course, my school was an hour south of Colorado Springs and, in retrospect, very conservative.

Spaghetti Lee - June 27, 2010 | 9:52 pm · Link

@JGabriel:

Is it even ratfucking if you don’t know you’re being ratfucked?

rnoble - June 27, 2010 | 9:53 pm · Link

@JBerardi: Also, how dare the teacher correct his grammatically incorrect taunt with facts. I mean, its obvious to anyone who pays attention that girls all spend four years on Jupiter after high school.

Kyle - June 27, 2010 | 9:55 pm · Link

@QuaintIrene:

Only a neo-con could believe this was written by an eleven year old child.

Perhaps right-wingers/teabaggers are like Benjamin Button, where they start out articulate and literate as children and as they get older regress to “Get the government out of my Medicare”, “tax cuts always increase revenues”, “Drill baby drill” and any unscripted utterance from George W. Bush.

joe from Lowell - June 27, 2010 | 9:55 pm · Link

From the comments:

Posted by: blueyedinfidel
Jun 27, 11:35 AM
This article is parody. That dosen’t mean its not true.

Too funny.

ellid - June 27, 2010 | 9:58 pm · Link

There is no way in hell that was written by a child, and there’s no way in hell it accurately describes a school classroom.

Corner Stone - June 27, 2010 | 9:59 pm · Link

@Ella in New Mexico:

Totally agree with all the previous “No 11 year-old could have produced this essay” opinions.

But could they have sailed round the world by themselves?

rnoble - June 27, 2010 | 10:03 pm · Link

@low-tech cyclist: There you go again with your DFH logic.

Ruckus - June 27, 2010 | 10:08 pm · Link

@fucen tarmal:
isn’t it more surprising that all conservative ideology isn’t hatched by teenagers?

I thought it was. Oh you were talking age not maturity.

kay - June 27, 2010 | 10:11 pm · Link

@Boudica:

And, of course, there’s no teasing and harassment of liberal-thinking teens here in the South…oh, wait, my kids have both seen it and been subjected to it.

EXACTLY. My daughter was one of two liberals in her high school civics class. The other was a boy from Minnesota who stuck around less than the year. The teacher, who was also the high school football coach, had a screensaver of George W. Bush.
This whole theme doesn’t make any sense, and I’m amazed they’ve been getting away with it for so long.
There are VAST sections of the country where conservatives control every local elected office and every school board. The teachers are LOCALS, and CONSERVATIVES. This is why this whole public education meme they’ve adopted is complete and utter bullshit. I got news for them: conservatives run plenty of public schools. if they want to point to “failing” public schools, they are going to be pointing at each other.
As a liberal in a conservative dominated area, I have never imagined that conservatives were plotting against me, or trying to “brainwash” my children. Not when they were insisting on exclusionary and mean-spirited “circles of prayer” prior to school play practice, or tut-tutting my daughter’s “belief” in evolution.
They cannot stand being in a minority.
Either they run the whole national show, or they whine incessantly.
They’re going to whine until they get it all. One liberal is one too many.

Josh - June 27, 2010 | 10:15 pm · Link

Hilzoy, I’ve long been wrestling with the fact that Chandler Davis finds that, while unemployable during the Red Scare, he experienced a “broadening time. The experience of marginality is good for the soul and better for the intellect”. ‘Cause, to be perfectly honest with ya, not everyone experiences marginality that way. I think you and Chan must be pretty distinctive not to have turned your marginality into an occasion for the kind of bitterness and self-starting martyrdom we see in this guy, or in his fans.

Violet - June 27, 2010 | 10:19 pm · Link

@Boudica:

And, of course, there’s no teasing and harassment of liberal-thinking teens here in the South…oh, wait, my kids have both seen it and been subjected to it.

It’s been going on for a long time. I know someone whose school had a mock election when Carter was running against Reagan. She voted for Carter and was the only person in her class to do so. Instead of votes being kept secret, they singled her out, belittled her in front of the class and made her write an essay explaining why she voted that way. Her parents complained, and the school backed the teacher.

I wish I were making this up but I am not.

srv - June 27, 2010 | 10:20 pm · Link

Comedy gold indeed. Here’s WND’s wunder-theo-kid in 2005, as he started to go off message:

I remember when I was a young child, my brother and sister and I would gather on the bed with my parents and every night my dad would read us stories like “The Chronicles of Narnia” or “The Hobbit.” When we were younger, he would read “Dr. Seuss” stories or “Winnie the Pooh.”
Unfortunately, being born in 1988 had its own share of disappointments. Paramount of these would be not being exposed the great literary accomplishment of Karen DeBrecht and her new children’s book, “Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!” Looking back on it, I can see I could easily have become a partisan hack by the time I was 5. Apparently, Rush Limbaugh has given her book a rave review and the book has shot up the Amazon.com charts, but I have to ask: Is this a joke or are parents really going to teach their children liberals are monsters?

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=32506

Ella in New Mexico - June 27, 2010 | 10:25 pm · Link

@Corner Stone:

At eleven? Not likely.

That truly exceptional 16 year-old young woman in the news recently? Based on what I’ve garnered about her, fuck yeah!

kay - June 27, 2010 | 10:29 pm · Link

@Violet:

We have a mock high school election. 2008 was the first year in my memory the Democrat won.
Ya know, all those years I never suspected some national conservative brainwashing PLOT, but maybe I’m not insane and faux-victimized enough.
I just figured I live in a conservative area. Hoofbeats = horses, not ZEBRAS.
Silly me.
Conservative ideologues in the schools have brainwashed those children! I have proof!
I don’t know what’s worse, the paranoia or the incredible self-regard that tells them everyone is spending a good part of every day worrying about “converting” them.

rnoble - June 27, 2010 | 10:30 pm · Link

I had a friend in third grade who told me that he preferred hockey because it was still a white man’s sport. When I mentioned it to my parents they supposed that maybe my friend had some racist parents. I imagine this is the same sort of thing.

Kered (formerly Derek) - June 27, 2010 | 10:32 pm · Link

@Adam Collyer:

Listen kid, more girls go to college than boys. More women enroll in law school now than men. Despite that, the number of female partners are dramatically lower than their male counterparts. We haven’t elected a female president. Female politicians are (relatively speaking) few and far between.

That’s just because those positions haven’t caught up to the times yet, basically. It takes a long time to become a senator, or a partner at a law firm. But with women enrolling and graduating at such larger numbers than men, in the next few decades those numbers will probably catch up.

http://www.theatlantic.com/mag.....-men/8135/

This is a good article.

MattR - June 27, 2010 | 10:40 pm · Link

This essay is the perfect substitute for the Dawson’s Creek drinking game my friends and I used to play. The only rule was “drink whenever a character uses a word or phrase that no high school student would ever use in casual conversation”

ashkha - June 27, 2010 | 10:54 pm · Link

Maybe this is for real. Or very high-concept satire. Found this video on Youtube with Sam speaking against global warming. Apparently part of a campaign to show a global warming denial documentary Not Evil Just Wrong at schools
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgyzHDpt6p4

Southwest of Heaven - June 27, 2010 | 10:59 pm · Link

Here’s a video of this little tyke.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgyzHDpt6p4

kay - June 27, 2010 | 11:01 pm · Link

I don’t know that it’s all that complicated. They have to convince the faithful that someone somewhere is targeting their children.

Like all of their appeals it’s fear-based. It’s less subtle then those ads for alarm systems where the enraged spurned boyfriend busts in the door, but it’s probably effective.

Adam Collyer - June 27, 2010 | 11:06 pm · Link

@Kered (formerly Derek):

I agree with you. My point really was that there are institutional advantages that inherent in being male, white, and middle class. Institutions change over time, but this “kid” (again, using the term loosely) isn’t being persecuted because all of these institutions are inevitably catered to him.

Andre - June 27, 2010 | 11:10 pm · Link

I am twelve years old and what is this?

JBerardi - June 27, 2010 | 11:11 pm · Link

@Ross Hershberger:

...he’s 99th %ile in Composition.

Damn liberal public schools, teaching our children to be exceptional writers!

One of you masochists who actually read this thing, does the kid present an excuse for this massive contradiction?

Malovich - June 27, 2010 | 11:26 pm · Link

Has this kid got an interview with Fox News yet?

Should be anytime now.

Southwest of Heaven - June 27, 2010 | 11:33 pm · Link

How long before he starts wearing suits and ties to school, guaranteeing a lifetime of wedgies and wet willies?

Tonal Crow - June 27, 2010 | 11:43 pm · Link

I love how cons claim at once to constitute a vast majority of the population (“America is a center-right nation!”) and also to be a small minority subject to enormous oppression by numerous liberal overlords.

What a joke. But it has emotional consistency, so the con masses are more than ready to down a super-sized triple-cone helping with extra shit sauce.

monkeyboy - June 27, 2010 | 11:50 pm · Link

@Svensker: “OMG you were that guy?

Nah. At that point I had already become, I thought, pretty circumspect and just enjoyed lying on it rather than humping the floor mat.

But then again in around 1st grade one day I was wearing short pants with enormous pockets and I thought I was being circumspect with one hand inside my pocket until a female classmate came up to me and asked if she could have a feel and I was so caught off guard that I let her stick her hand in my pocket.

Svensker, were you that girl?

Bubblegum Tate - June 28, 2010 | 12:03 am · Link

@JGabriel:

I suspect the author is a satirist ratfucking The American Thinker and its commenters.

It reminds me of one of the funniest parts of The Great Derangement in which Matt Taibbi has infiltrated John Hagee’s church and goes off on a crazy-ass indoctrination weekend. Attendees are split into groups and told to share stories of childhood trauma. Taibbi concocts a story about how his father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat young Matt with an oversized clown shoe. Hilarious stuff, but apparently nobody in his group even batted an eye.

Uncle Clarence Thomas - June 28, 2010 | 12:44 am · Link

@Ash Can:

> Whoever wrote this has far, far more serious
> issues than he discusses here.

Hey, homosexuality is not a disease, dammit!

scav - June 28, 2010 | 1:54 am · Link

I’m just enjoying the thought that apparently the only articulate repub “leaders” are 11, because, well, La Palinista. More evidence supporting some form of early onset mental decay. Although I’ve not quite figured out how they can manage to admire in the jejune what they despise in the adult.

Anne Laurie - June 28, 2010 | 2:39 am · Link

@General Egali Tarian Stuck:

So the wingnuts are now enlisting child soldiers into their neverending war on intelligence.

WIN!

Actually, I think this is the wingnut-blogger equivalent of phone sex. They want a “brilliant young conservative” to read a script which will provide them with a brief burst of pleasure, or at least schaudenfreude. Just as the people who give their credit card info to 900-line operators don’t want to be told that the individual reading the script to which they self-pleasure is not actually a young hot chick/stud (possibly not even of the appropriate gender for their phantasies), the readers of American Thinker don’t want to be told that the “11 year old conservative” delivering this impassioned screed is actually a 40-year-old contract employee, and possibly a liberal.

Also, I thought someone would’ve mentioned Marjoe Gortner before now, but I may be the only one here old enough to remember the ‘scandal’ of his 1972 film.

asiangrrlMN - June 28, 2010 | 4:42 am · Link

Nope. Not a chance. Mom or dad wrote it or gussied it up for him. It’s pure bullshit, along with his persecution complex. But then again, it’s the way of the conservatives, isn’t it? Throw all this shit out there and then whine if it comes back and hits them in the face.

d. b. cooper - June 28, 2010 | 5:57 am · Link

I believe an eleven-year-old wrote that.* A lying, delusional eleven-year-old with a victimization complex who probably has a bright future in Conservative politics. I’m pretty sure the kid is a sociopath.

*Some here are underestimating the writing skills of a small, but not insignificant, chunk of eleven-year-olds.

jon - June 28, 2010 | 7:22 am · Link

An eleven-year-old can write well, an eleven-year-old with a good editor can write better, but an eleven-year-old with help from a global-warming denialist organization like “balanced-ed.org” can write some amazing stuff.

If this is the best such an organization can do, it’s obviously a shitty organization. Using a two-minute video to display the horror of being the kid who doesn’t believe in climate change but not showing any counterarguments but instead showing Tourist and Visitors Bureau of Beverly Hills compilation footage outtakes makes that organization look like a bunch of dimwits. It’s as if the video editors said to themselves, “Fuck this kid, where’s the Versace store?” And that’s conservatism in a nutshell, especially the climate denialist wing.

DPirate - June 28, 2010 | 8:37 am · Link

Kleine Sam ist ein besser mann!

What a load of hogwash.

bjacques - June 28, 2010 | 10:32 am · Link

Of course it’s real. And so was that fetus that wrote the essay ending with “and then my mother killed me.”

drindl - June 28, 2010 | 11:00 am · Link

I have no doubt that spoiled overpriviliged rightwing white boys start whining early and never grow up, but I can’t believe anyone really thinks this was written by a kid. Sounds more like that little shit Tucker Carlson to me.

mds - June 28, 2010 | 11:07 am · Link

Yup, this essay from a supposed Voodoo Child wunderkind goes up at American Thinker, and the commentariat there swarms it like Musca domestica on feces. Here come the dumbs, here come the dumbs.

Ramiah Ariya - June 28, 2010 | 12:06 pm · Link

When I was 12, in 8th grade in India, I read an article in a newspaper which commented on the unlikeliness of “re-birth”. It mentioned that the stories of people recalling their previous births were mostly bogus and so on.
I was incensed. My family had ties with a Hindu nationalist organization called the RSS (one of RSS’s breakaway “lone-wolf” guys shot Gandhi dead in 1948). I was nationalistic and thought that most tenets of Hinduism were based in modern day science.
Anyway, I wrote a long reply to that article, claiming that re-birth was real.
My first argument was that if people died and were not re-born, their souls would keep accumulating somewhere. We just cannot have that, can we?
Second, I pointed to the Bhagvad Gita, in which Krishna says that the soul neither dies nor is born. Taking this as true, I claimed that Krishna had stumbled on to the “Law of conservation of souls” (I kid you not). Among other corollaries, this law showed that there were alien worlds, some of which had declining population (because the earth’s own number of souls was increasing). And so on.
It was a 10 page tract which was solely read by my father, and then thrown away.
I can totally believe that a 11 year old kid wrote that.

Hob - June 28, 2010 | 1:06 pm · Link

@Ramiah Ariya: Thanks for that story. I too was a precocious kid inclined toward manifestos. The thing about trying to imitate older ideologues at that age is that you can’t help being creative and pushing too far in some direction that you don’t realize isn’t quite right—like your wonderful detail about Krishna “stumbling onto” a cosmic law. I imagine if your piece had been more widely read, you would’ve gotten a few embarrassed lectures about how gods already know these things.

That’s why you story still doesn’t convince me that this current thing is the real deal, because this guy is entirely lacking in that kind of kid-logic; everything in the article is predictable, pretty much word-for-word standard right-wing anti-liberal rants (including things he couldn’t possibly have experienced firsthand, like “Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” which was changed to include boys when he was barely verbal.) At best, I can believe that the kid complained that his teachers were gay liberals who were against boys, and the parents reworked it into something they thought would push all the right buttons for their Bircher peers.

DFH no.6 - June 28, 2010 | 2:50 pm · Link

Very late to the thread, but let me re-iterate that there is no way 11 year-old Sam Besserman wrote this. Neither he nor any other 11 year-old. I don’t care how precocious, or how much of a genius or child prodigy. No way, no how.

Nor, as others have said, did the absurd events claimed in the article happen to him or any other kid, anywhere. PE teachers yelling “get the Republican” in dodgeball? Remembering a teacher in Pre-school preaching from a book about the “inferiority of fathers”? Bullshit, all of it.

This doesn’t pass the smell test at any level. Even a few of the wingnut commenters at American Thinker are sentient enough to recognize the incredible unlikelihood of an 11 year-old penning this, though—in proper cognitively dissonant wingnut fashion—they then look right past the obvious plagiarism to commend the “larger truth” of liberal indoctrination and conservative oppression in schools.

I don’t know what else to say about this except, fuck all these privileged conservative assholes who’ve deluded themselves into believing that they are somehow victims and martyrs. Fuck ‘em every one.

ricky - June 28, 2010 | 3:31 pm · Link

@MBL:

All my gym teachers were so mean that even if you told them you had been bitten by a rattlesnake on the playground they wouldn’t give you the anecdote.

Janus Daniels - June 28, 2010 | 6:38 pm · Link

The article tells on the last line:
“... But possibly, even more usefully, I think I have struck comedy gold.”
Then, the comments…
Any satire that leads its objects to satirize themselves ranks among the great achievements of literature.
I hope to meet the genius who wrote this.

Janus Daniels - July 2, 2010 | 10:58 pm · Link

Thanks BirthdayPrincess.
Sam B.’s Fox News appearance:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/426.....ia-school/
Sam on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/results.....&aq=f
This family may someday rival Colbert… and Colter?
For now, we can only guess.
Hmmm… Sam B… Samantha Bee… a hint?