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Young Conservative Pundits in Three Easy Traits

By Ezra Klein, Campus Progress. Posted May 16, 2005.


The ranks of conservative pundits are swelling with young advocates of odd upbringing and unlikely prominence. But their youthful looks and throwback sensibilities allow them to advocate and oppose where older, stodgier Republicans dare not tread.
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“I’m proud I’m a virgin. I’m glad I’m a virgin. I don’t even mind talking about it. So maybe you wonder: Why am I a virgin? It’s actually very simple. I am a virgin because I choose to wait until I get married.”

Ben Ferguson, the proud virgin in the above quote, is “America’s Youngest Talk Radio Host” and author of the plaintively, pleadingly titled It’s My America, Too. An unnaturally cherubic 22-year-old with little regard for liberals and lots of airtime in which to tell you about it, Ferguson has been riding the airwaves in some capacity or another since the ripe young age of 13, when right-wing radio host Ken Hamblin gave the kid a weekly call-in slot on his Denver-based program and made him one of the country’s best heard young voices. It’s now nine years later, and Ferguson has his own guests, not to mention his own show. Impressive kid, but who is he?

A proud product of home schooling, Ferguson is a charmingly parochial 20-something who attributes his success to time spent in Mom’s minivan. “[W]hile other kids were stuck in boring classrooms, staring at the walls or ripping apart their paper, piece by piece,” Ferguson was firmly planted in the passenger’s seat, listening to Limbaugh in the family Windstar. Ferguson is, further, deeply religious, disgusted by popular culture, in favor of family, in favor of school prayer, and would generally do a great job at dinner with your grandparents (unless they’re America-hating commies).

The funny thing is, Ferguson’s background isn’t unique. In the rarified world of young conservative punditry, it’s no less than archetypal. Joining him in prodigy-hood is Kyle Williams, a home-schooled, deeply religious 14-year-old columnist/author with a stunning mastery of conservative talking points and an unending storehouse of cultural disgust, and Ben Shapiro, a home-schooled orthodox Jew who found UCLA so packed with hardship and adversity that he wrote a column on it for the school paper, a syndicated column on it for conservative papers, and the just-published Brainwashed, a book on all the lefty academicians trying to trick students into tattooing Mao onto their buttocks.

A quick round on Nexis shows that these three boast numerous appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, which, for two writers and a radio broadcaster, marks the multimedia ubiquity that transforms a political savant into a true pundit. And they, just like your retired generals and legal consultants, are called in when their expertise is applicable. From reading the transcripts, typical subjects are being young (Ben, Ben and Kyle), being really young (Kyle), being offended by popular culture (Ben, Ben, and Kyle), being offended by college (Ben S.), being offended by liberals (Ben, Ben and Kyle) and why liberals offend other people their age, too (Ben, Ben, and Kyle).

But having these three represent their generation is like learning about international diplomacy from Don Rumsfeld; the gurus know not of what they speak. The young folk the conservative message machine trots out to speak for Generation Y are not exactly representative members. In 2003, 2.2% of students were home-schooled. Religion, though judged important by 34% of high-schoolers, has less to do with piety for them and more to do with youth groups (read: snowboarding and roller-hockey weekends). As Dale Buss wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “The hard numbers say … that, while they may profess the faith and indeed love Jesus, the vast majority of Christian teenagers in this country actually hold beliefs fundamentally antithetical to the creed.” And the demographic driving Jay-Z and Ashlee Simpson (and downloading, watching, and re-watching Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction”) lacks the monstrous disdain Ben, Ben and Kyle hold for pop culture.

So why are these the personalities trotted out whenever the conversation turns youthful? And how did these three get the permanent slots, while they face off against an ever-rotating cast of young lefties, culled from wherever a desperate producer can find them? (I was once invited on to CNN/FN to talk about the youth vote. The invitation came in a frantic e-mail the morning of the show; the car, dispatched as soon as I responded to the e-mail, arrived 10 minutes before the segment, and I breathlessly entered the argument just as it ended.) It’s possible, I guess, that they are true prodigies whose remarkable talents have earned them premature success. But doesn’t it seem just a wee bit unlikely that all three members of this successful trio would be conservative, home-schooled, deeply religious and disdainful of pop culture? In fact, the repetition of this rare combination of traits suggests that they, in fact, are the reasons for the unlikely prominence of Ben, Ben and Kyle.


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Ezra Klein is a junior at UCLA. He has a blog at http://ezraklein.typepad.com.

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what is the reason for home schooling?
Posted by: Farbanti on May 17, 2005 3:27 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Are the parents trying to isolate and shelter their kids from the world? Its a no-brainer why they don't idenify with pop culture. They are outsiders in their own generation of youth that makes up pop culture. I have trouble believing that homeshooled kids are better educated when they believe that the academic community is trying to trick and brainwash students. It almost seems like they are being taught only to listen to the teachings of their church. Maybe that is the point behind the school vouchers. Parents can take their kids out of the liberal public schools that teach horrible things like science and instead put their kids in a nice religious school that teaches the bible. Japan and Europe are already passing us in education, science, and technology. The current leaders of this country seem to want a religious state with a holy war on Islam(aka terrorism) and a general disregard for science and reason. History must not be on the curriculum either. I am in college and studying science... so maybe I am just brainwashed.

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Youth experience
Posted by: lamar on May 17, 2005 6:58 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
These kids comment on the youth experience when they've never really had the youth experience. Its very rare that a home schooled child isn't a weirdo.

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home schooling
Posted by: texas_dre on May 17, 2005 12:11 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
speaking of home schooling I've run into home schooled kids from the extreme left side in Vermont and that bunch is pretty weird, however way more innocuous then this neocon bunch...these neocons (we got 'em in Texas) have a agenda the home-schooled lefties have hemp pants..
Texas_dre

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Unfair
Posted by: Hughster on May 17, 2005 12:55 PM   
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You can't paint home-schoolers with a broad brush. I know plenty of home-schoolers, some are nuts and others are well-adjusted. Just like public school.

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Extremists come in all flavors
Posted by: mizj on May 22, 2005 7:03 AM   
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The three young men and the political pundits described in this article are further proof that the mainstream media is not at all interested in reasoned debate or independent thinking. Rather they seem always to be on the hunt for the wackiest, most extreme viewpoints they can find. And, sadly, because we see and hear these people over and over and over again, their POV becomes normalized, so much so that it makes the rest of us who do dare to think independently or moderately look as if we are the ones with the minority viewpoint, the ones who are out of touch, and the ones who are unbalanced in our beliefs.

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Other Issues
Posted by: Bethany Grace on May 24, 2005 11:19 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I'd like to see how these boys, never having had any experience with real, thinking women feel about birth control, women's rights, reproductive rights, or other issues that have no affect on them whatsoever. They seem to specialize in that already.

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a "homeschooled liberal" perspective
Posted by: rceline77 on May 26, 2005 7:19 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
As a homeschooled "liberal" in uber-conservative Colorado Springs, I'd like to offer my 2 cents. I was homeschooled in Colorado Springs by liberal parents and then attended public school from 4th grade on. As a homeschooled child in the mid-80s, I saw the conservative movement blossom and was surrounded by children like Ben, Ben, and Kyle. I remember my mom trying to help me understand those kids and their families, and why we were different from them. Those families weren't evil, they were just afraid -- like many progressives are -- of the moral decay of our society. The difference is, they were focused on their private lives, and progressives tend to focus on society as a whole.

Although I may incite the ire of many progressives with this comment, I think it's important to keep searching for ways to learn to communicate with conservatives such as these, since they are being, in a way, co-opted by right-of-center mainstream media and conservative politicians, who don't represent their interests in any way (apart from the anti-homosexual and anti-abortion hot button issues). By focusing on those sensational issues repeatedly, leaders of these conservative movements have drawn in masses of people who would not otherwise agree with their politics. If progressives are to make real progress, I believe we will have to succeed in broadening the set of values our society considers important (i.e. education, community service, working wages, healthy children, clean water and air) instead of constantly bashing the right.

Going back to the bit on why people homeschool -- I find it important to point out that some parents homeschool because they believe that public schools don't stimulate kids' minds or bodies enough, or because they believe that public schools don't teach their kids to think critically, or perhaps they simply can't afford private school.

As long as progressives fail to reach people through media outlets, I believe we will only see these problems grow more severe. Already, many people who might agree with progressive values have been brainwashed by the mainstream media and corporate America. It's time to wake them up! We must organize and form a strategic plan to make real, honest news about what’s going on in our country, and the world, more accessible to average Americans.

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