Like so many teenagers, Jonathan Krohn says he cringes when he thinks of some of the deeply uncool things he said when he was 13. Unlike most teenagers, Krohn said those things on camera in a speech at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, making him a YouTube sensation. Now? Krohn tells Politico's Patrick Gavin he's not a conservative anymore. He likes gay marriage and Obamacare. He's going to New York University in the fall. He name drops German philosophers. But his old fans can't accept that he's changed. "Come on, I was thirteen," he told Politico. "I was thirteen."  

Krohn explains his evolution to Gavin:

"I think it was naive... It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time...

"One of the first things that changed was that I stopped being a social conservative... 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."

You have to feel for the kid a little bit. Not only were his ideas as a 13-year-old recorded permanently, but now his rejection of those ideas -- pretentious in the way that bright college freshman can be -- is also on the record, and Googleable, forever:

"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."

Read more of Krohn's interview at Politico.

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Elspeth Reeve