One of the cultural trends that make conservatives like myself aghast is social liberals’ belief that children are capable of charting major courses in their life, like obtaining birth control, an abortion, or choosing their own gender, as if it’s all a page in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. Teens are far too often allowed to drastically change the course of their lives without their parents’ knowledge or consent. Conservatives (rightly, might I add) decry these “treatments” and call them what they are: child abuse. Children are not emotionally or intellectually capable of permanent decisions like these, and many others.

At the same age that conservatives have declared children too immature for these choices, we elevate wunderkinds in our midst. Despite our experience with Krohn (which wasn’t that a kid can turn from conservative to liberal, but instead that a kid can simply change his developing mind), we have promoted teens to conservative stardom.

One such kid, who has turned into an abject disaster, is former conservative YouTube star C.J. Pearson. He delivered a few incisive tirades via webcam and famously lied about the fact that the White House had blocked him on Twitter. That’s apparently all it takes to be named a teen “advisor” to your favorite presidential candidate, who, at the time, was Ted Cruz.

The ink wasn’t even dry on his TedCruz.org email address before the 13-year-old Pearson decided to denounce conservatism, and then, after the latest Democratic debate, embrace the Democratic Party. He announced he was joining the Democratic Party and began tweeting with the preferred hashtag of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’s fans, #FeelTheBern.