Hey, I don’t blame the conservakids for cashing in on the spotlight. If I was 24 and someone offered me a gig and a boatload of cash, game on. But as it happens, when I was 24, I was a platoon leader in Germany during the last years of the Cold War leading other young people. That’s not like when you’re a TV star, where everyone tells you how awesome you are – and that lack of pushback against your bad ideas is hardly conducive to developing anything except a personal ideology that makes your thoughts and feelz the foundation of your ideological paradigm. Hence, Lahren’s John McCainian maverick approach that treats conservative tenets like just another entrée at the all-you-can-eat Cafeteria of Principles: “I have moderate, conservative, and libertarian views. I’m human. I will never apologize, to anyone, for being an independent thinker.”

Take that, all you monsters out there demanding that Tomi Lahren apologize for being an independent thinker!

That deserves several more “like, whatevs.” See, being an “independent thinker” is the absolute opposite of being someone who has learned, tested and embraced an ideology over time. You’re either conservative, or you’re something else. And if you identify as something else this week, own it.

Sorry – conservakids who can merely rant a good rant cannot be the voice of the conservative movement and still have it be conservative. We aren’t Rousseauian liberals suffering under the delusion that children have some sort of shortcut to wisdom denied to those with actual life experience and the knowledge gained over time.