The Conservative Teen

Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski selects the 9 best headlines from The Conservative Teen, a magazine for youngsters that will foster conservative values and counter liberal bias.

When I moved to the U.S., one of the first things I ever heard on the radio here was someone talking at length about how he hates bisexual people because they spread disease. He said it over and over again, emphasizing the word "hate" to ensure the listener understood him. Startled by it, I tuned in long enough to find out exactly whose show it was, thinking it must be a monologue or some other fiction. In honor of my introduction to American conservatism, here's the headline from his contribution to The Conservative Teen.

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Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

http://twitter.com/kpkpkp Kevin Pierce

That’s the funny thing about our American Conservatives – they’re so damned liberal with their hate.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

Finally, the younger generation has the magazine equivalent of Reefer Madness.

I suspect the camp value alone will make this a bestseller.
fuzzyfuzzyfungus

Is there any problem that cannot be solved by genuflecting to St. Ronnie’s ghost?
PhosPhorious

“Reagan: Our First Black President?”

Did conservatives call him “uppity?” Then no.
- Brainspore
  
  But he was so clean and well spoken…
  - http://twitter.com/kpkpkp Kevin Pierce
    
    …a real credit to his race…
    - benher
      
      You know… one of the GOOD ones!
lknope

Well, shit. Who was our first woman president then? George W. Bush?
- http://twitter.com/kpkpkp Kevin Pierce
  
  Washington.
mikedt

Not sure. Is Conservative Teen a real magazine or an Onion-like parody.
- SomeGuyNamedMark
  
  It looks like something Steve Colbert made
- dtysen
  
  Yeah it’s like Christwire, I couldn’t tell for ages.
Brainspore

Just in case anyone is fuzzy enough on Reagan’s legacy to understand exactly how ridiculous that headline is, here are a few highlights:

* Opposed Civil Rights Act of 1964
* Opposed Voting Rights Act of 1965
* Opposed Rumford Fair Housing Act in California
* Supported South Africa’s Apartheid Government
* Opposed Martin Luther King holiday
* Vetoed Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988

And, last but not least:

* Referred to Confederate President Jefferson Davis as “a personal hero of mine” during a campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi—a town best known for being the site where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  You and your liberal bias.
  - http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher
    
    It’s not his liberal bias. It’s those damn liberal facts. They can’t be trusted. As Homer Simpson once said, “You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.”
- Navin_Johnson
  
  And his use of Southern Strategy (barely) coded racism to appeal to Southern whites.
- grimc
  
  Just to add, Philadelphia, MS wasn’t just a campaign stop; it was where he chose to kick the whole shebang off, and the theme of the speech was “states’ rights”.
- SomeGuyNamedMark
  
  Why do you hate America so much?
  - PTBartman
    
    I love my country always, and my government when it desrves it. ~Mark Twain~
petertrepan

Old news. These stories already appeared in “Suffer the Children: The Magazine for Parents of Conservative Christian Three- to Five-Year-Olds”
- http://twitter.com/kpkpkp Kevin Pierce
  
  If there’s one thing the little ones want to hear about, it’s polito-economics. They come arunnin’ little kittehs to an operating can opener.
- AnthonyC
  
  That saddens me. Richard Dawkins got this one right: There is no such thing as a christian child. Nor a conservative child, or an atheist child, nor a muslim child.
  - http://boingboing.net/ The Life Of Bryan
    
    Actually, there are plenty of atheist children. All of them start out that way.
    - willyboy
      
      I would say agnostic….Most, if not all, don’t know.
    - AnthonyC
      
      I’m not sure about that. Postulating agents behind events of unknown cause is very natural even for young children- it takes work and training to teach people that natural events just happen.
http://twitter.com/stevepan1 Steve Pan

Yeah, but he gutted federal funding to cities proper, called those people “welfare queens,” and slashed social spending, thusly lifting millions of African Americans out of Democrat-induced socialist poverty into the middle class single handedly
- Wreckrob8
  
  The downwardly mobile middle class?
- Navin_Johnson
  
  “Welfare Queens”
  
  A legacy of Reagan’s racism that still is damaging, and falsely believed to this day.
http://shadowfirebird.tumblr.com shadowfirebird

Could anyone with two brain cells to rub together actually consider this magazine an impartial source of information? If not, then why on earth would they read it?

Also, coming from the UK, I can never get over the idea that the libertarians are RIGHT-wing. Just doesn’t make sense to me.
- Brainspore
  
  Also, coming from the UK, I can never get over the idea that the libertarians are RIGHT-wing. Just doesn’t make sense to me.
  
  On paper they’re neither left or right-wing. In practice American libertarians almost always align themselves with the Republicans since that’s the party that claims to be in favor of small government. (This is, of course, horseshit—they are the party responsible for most of the largest increases in government spending, just not for programs which promote social welfare.)
  - http://twitter.com/kpkpkp Kevin Pierce
    
    Libertarian::Populist is a different axis from Conservative::Liberal (or Destructive::Constructive as Jobs mentioned to Murdoch - http://lemme.posterous.com/steve-jobs-the-axis-today-is-constructive-des )
  - http://twitter.com/stevepan1 Steve Pan
    
    left libertarians are a bigger tradition in europe than here, where libertarianism and paleoconservatism are often caught in bed together under scandalous circumstances.
    - teapot
      
      True.. I used to consider myself somewhat of a libertarian until some Americans sullied the word and muddied the water by being douche baggers while calling themselves libertarians.
      - PTBartman
        
        One of the main reasons I stopped referring to myself as human. I feel I can do better.
  - hypersomniac
    
    Well said.
- http://twitter.com/strugglngwriter strugglngwriter
  
  Some people don’t want an impartial source. They are quite happy with a source that simply reinforces what they already “know”. Hence Fox News exists.
- Jack Majewski
  
  Most Libertarians in the US are Republicans who don’t want to pay taxes for anything.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    As opposed to Republicans who want to pay taxes?
    
    I was under the impression that the Libertarians were the ones who wanted to be left alone, with no gun control whatsoever, no mandate to buy health insurance, and legalization of all sorts of “victimless” vices such as prostitution and recreational drug use. They’re apt to shoot trespassers, busybodies, and census takers. (Many of the same people, they’d say.) And they generally don’t embrace getting involved in foreign wars. They’re the ones who embody a bit of the “every man for himself” philosophy when it comes to infrastructure, the social safety net, and pretty much any scrap of civilization which is funded largely through taxation.
    
    Whereas Republicans in general used to be the ones who like strong national defense and tough law-and-order and making sure nobody’s getting laid or getting high or reading books that they don’t want you to read. They’re very nice to you if you look like them, sound like them, love like them, and worship like them. Otherwise they’re threatened by you, and are apt to consolidate their considerable power and exercise it at your expense. And though they grudgingly admit that their police forces and military-industrial complex won’t pay for themselves without tax dollars, they get incredibly bent out of shape when fifty-four cents of their annual tax bill is used to pay for the National Endowment for the Arts.
    
    Their priorities often overlap, especially when it comes to property rights and the profit motive. But when it comes to social issues, real Libertarians want to leave you alone just as they want to be left alone. Non-Libertarian Republicans are much more likely to criminalize your favorite hobby or lifestyle or theology or ethnicity.
    
    No doubt plenty of Republicans and Libertarians will rush to correct my wrongheadedness, but as I grew up and really started to wonder why so many American friends and family of mine were leaning (or rushing headlong) to the right, I started to get the distinct impression it was due to the influence of greed and fear. It’s not because they were generally assholes or idiots. But they wanted to keep what they felt they had earned, and they were terrified of being taken advantage of, and of being outnumbered by people of a different culture with a different language. They don’t like being labeled as greedy or fearful, but their generosity and self-sacrifice is difficult to discern these days.
    - http://twitter.com/stevepan1 Steve Pan
      
      American libertarians have a hard on for closing off the US to immigration, repeal of civil rights laws, and other coercive measures that pretty much scream “freedom for me, but not for you, asshole”
    - travtastic
      
      The problem is that the two groups mentioned above (Nice Libertarians and Traditional Conservatives) no longer exist.
      
      The vast majority of (vocal, at least) Libertarians are Paulites, and Conservatism has been supplanted by the Neocons and Neoliberals.
      
      It’s probably best to just group them both under Corporatism and get it over with.
- onepieceman
  
  This whole left-right political spectrum thing has long since lost its meaning. For example, I’m continuously amazed at how many people consider the Nazi party was right wing. I know this is an old one, but it’s still the prevailing view.
  Anyway, why is it surprising that something as complex as your political belief system should require more than one dimension to characterise it?
  - OgilvyTheAstronomer
    
    “I’m continuously amazed at how many people consider the Nazi party was right wing.”
    
    Yeah, it’s bizarre, isn’t it; what with Hitler’s views on race, women’s rights and sexual freedom being soooo stereotypically liberal…
    - benher
      
      Liberal and left-wing are not mutually exclusive terms… not that graphing ideologies on a simple “left” and “right” line is a good idea from the start. It wasn’t called the “National Socialist” party just to spin it to the hippies of the time.
      - OgilvyTheAstronomer
        
        Liberal and left-wing are not mutually exclusive terms…
        
        I’ll agree to that much, at least.
      - Navin_Johnson
        
        Leftism ≠ classical liberalism. They hated Marxists and pretty much everybody who’d be considered “liberal” or progressive, in the modern American sense today.
      - travtastic
        
        I’m sure that explains how the Communists in the region were some of the first hunted down and executed.
      - Atresica
        
        Oh FFS
        
        Read Mein Kamph and then we’ll talk. Hitler explicitly mentions in this book that he calls the movement National Socialism because it’s social towards the German people and no one else.
        
        That’s it. Nothing else socialistic about it.
        
        Now stop quoting rightwing fuckwits and do some research yourself.
    - onepieceman
      
      So I guess you’re not familiar with “left wing” (e.g. Fabian) views on eugenics in the 30s?
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        Everybody supported eugenics in the 30s.
  - Navin_Johnson
    
    It’s considered that because it’s akin to far right fascism more than anything else. If you want to be generous you could say that they shared some views of the left, of course those are none of the views that they’re *famous for*.
    - http://shadowfirebird.tumblr.com shadowfirebird
      
      Um, really? Are you sure you don’t want to wrap that in a “in my opinion”?
      
      Personally I don’t see any connection at all between libertarians and fascists. Perhaps the word “fascist” doesn’t mean what you think it means…
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        Fascism usually takes over because one group becomes convinced that everybody else is stealing their stuff. That seems pretty consistent with libertarianism as preached and practiced in the US.
  - http://shadowfirebird.tumblr.com shadowfirebird
    
    I’d certainly agree that the right-left thing is a massive oversimplification.
    
    But on the other hand, can you think of ANOTHER line that you could easily place all the political entities in the UK and US on, that isn’t a single issue?
    
    People still use left/right, not because it’s a good measure, but for lack of a better one…
    - http://boingboing.net/ The Life Of Bryan
      
      I’m overly fond of saying that nothing more nuanced than temperature can be accurately expressed along a single axis.
  - http://twitter.com/InnerPartisan Sebastian Spinczyk
    
    “I’m continuously amazed at how many people consider the Nazi party was right wing.”
    
    Yeah, right. Those crazy historians – what do *they* know?
- http://twitter.com/chrisjimson chris jimson
  
  I think “impartial” is not something that they ever consider. They have so thoroughly bought into the “liberal media bias” idea that they believe only the conservative interpretation of anything is the “real truth”; liberals lie, conservatives tell the truth, and that’s all you need to know. It’s starting to seem like anything liberals are in favor of, conservatives will automatically be opposed to to, on principle alone.
  - AnthonyC
    
    Starting?
http://twitter.com/malcolmjackson ♡ Malcolm Jackson

OMG Michael Reagan, did you really write that?? !*#? #@^( * &#!!!
- BBNinja
  
  Wow, I thought the headline was a joke but no apparently it’s an overtly racist rant that doesn’t even attempt to disguise itself.
oldtaku

How can Reagan be the first black president when Clinton was the first black president?

Now I see he mentions that in the ‘article’, but makes the case anyhow – motion denied!
- Navin_Johnson
  
  Clinton shouldn’t be called that either fwiw.
  - oldtaku
    
    Totally agree. It’s ridiculous and condescending from either side.
    - Brainspore
      
      To his credit Michael Reagan does come to the conclusion that “no, Barack Obama is our first black President.” But it was insulting even to pose the question and outright delusional to pretend that his father’s policies were in the best interests of most black Americans.
    - http://twitter.com/stevepan1 Steve Pan
      
      which side, liberal side or conservative side? because it doesn’t matter. race is a black and white (and sometimes “other”) issue, not a political issue. black folks could identify with clinton’s “i didn’t come from much” background more readily than they could with our previous waspy presidents
      - Navin_Johnson
        
        And he rewarded the poor and working poor with “welfare reform”.
      - oldtaku
        
        Not liberal or conservative, Democrat and Republican (which are not the same at all). Each trying to expand the territorial claims of their head great white apes. I’d say it was slightly less ridiculous for Clinton, but still ridiculous.
  - teapot
    
    depends… he can play a pretty mean sax.
wizardru

I can forgive the Reagan piece since it’s written by his son…if anyone is entitled to want to think the best of his him, I would assume it would be his son. But most of that stuff reads like your typical advocacy magazine, like you’d pick up at the church or AA or the like. Written by adults who don’t know how to talk to youth of any age and who are more concerned about being ‘on point’ than actual communication.

I half expected someone to be holding a video game controller backwards while wildly jumping around like the cast of Glee and wearing some horribly dated fashion.
- Brainspore
  
  I can forgive the Reagan piece since it’s written by his son…
  
  I love my dad too but I don’t think it would ever occur to me to write something that obviously stupid about him in an effort to shore up his minority cred.
- http://twitter.com/wi_ngo wingo shackleford
  
  I think it’s even creepier that his son wrote it. And it’s one of the most insanely racist things I’ve ever read, too. Just the choice of topic in itself is bizarre.
- Petzl
  
  The guy apparently knows very little about his father. His whole life is this psychodrama put into motion by the isolation he experienced at being adopted.
- AnthonyC
  
  I’m pretty liberal in my views. I think Barack Obama is the first president in my lifetime who I would consider both intelligent and trustworthy.
  
  When I look at what happened in the Reagan years, I can’t help but notice a lot of things he actually did well, things I like. Unfortunately, those are the things the current republican party a) denies ever happened, and b) would never approve of today. And because of the absurd ways that current republicans twist and distort Reagan’s actions, I could never talk about the particular things I liked without being completely misunderstood.
petertrepan

Let’s petition Al Gore to make a movie about how you shouldn’t take a bath with a toaster. Come next cycle, the political landscape would look very different.
- travtastic
  
  A growing number of scientists now believe that electricity is not responsible for electrocution. GFCI electrical outlets are a socialist conspiracy.
OldBrownSquirrel

I think the anti-bisexual argument of the 80′s boiled down to this:

“If bi dudes with HIV hadn’t slept with any chicks, I wouldn’t need to wear a condom. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. Bi chicks, OTOH, are hot.”

Not so much conservative as dickish, really.
http://www.facebook.com/HyperionToASatyr Jack Holmes

I think that the magazine can be best summed up in the article on Glee where they have to stop and explain to their readership what a cameo is.

Stupid little fucks.
robertdee

http://oi43.tinypic.com/33tqna0.jpg
Petzl

You know, when you write

a magazine for youngsters that will foster conservative values and counter liberal bias.

you really shouldn’t neglect the quotation marks

a magazine for youngsters that “will foster conservative values and counter liberal bias”.

It’s scary when copy from boingboing.net mimicks that of conservapedia.com

(That’s one of the signs of the Apocalypse, btw.)
http://www.facebook.com/stephen.l.grow Steve Grow

The dead, “I’d rather be anywhere but here” look in the eyes of every “teen” in the magazine pretty well sums it up. Nice to have a magazine for teens written by adults who know how teens SHOULD be rather than one written by adults and/or teens who know how teens ARE. Admittedly, any teen magazine written with a purely political bias (liberal, conservative, or otherwise) is probably going to be a similar train wreck, just of a different ideological flavor…
http://twitter.com/wi_ngo wingo shackleford

How awesome is it that global warming is a liberal media-concocted hoax but also science has proven that abstinence ‘works’?

Just like our founding fathers said, guys! Go teens!
- Ito Kagehisa
  
  Abstinence certainly does work. Don’t believe those stories about storks and cabbage patches! Humans aren’t naturally parthenogenic.
  
  It’s just that your typical libidinous teenager isn’t actually capable of sexual abstinence.
  
  Hey.. wait a minit… if they are claiming abstinence works how do they explain the Virgin Birth of Jesus?
  - Brainspore
    
    Abstinence does indeed work. Abstinence-only education is worse than useless.
- Donald Petersen
  
  They need “science” to prove that abstinence “works”?
  
  I can think of a certain 13-year-old Virgin from Nazareth who might disagree, but without much science at all I can see how actual, genuine, foolproof abstinence would work perfectly.
  
  Unfortunately, it involves cumbersome chastity belts, very tall and secure castle keeps, crocodile-stocked moats, eunuch guards, electric eye beams, machine-gun turrets, sturdy religious indoctrination, a dozen donuts daily, the abolition of soap, a couple of Louvin Brothers records, and a dash of saltpeter.
h4x0r

Reagan somewhat resembles Freddy Krueger in that pic. True story.
Kristofer Peterson

This made me feel much better. From
http://www.theconservativeteen.com/subscriptions

“Regrettably, we were unable to reach the minimum number of subscribers required to mass print the first issue of The Conservative Teen magazine. ”

Ha Ha.
http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty

Reading those made me angry, and I have no articulate response. I can only say, “Oh fuuuuuuuuuuuck oooooooooffffffff”
sohail sidique

Wow…

Need to explain what a cameo is, but talks about abstinence???
willibro

Getting the Apache 2 Test Page whenever I click on the links. Would that it were that way 24/7.
timquinn

He means black in the sense of evil.
666beast1

You know, a lot of you young people aren’t aware of all the great things conservatism has done for you. Reagan and his congress changed laws so you would no longer be an employee but an independent consultant that can be fired at will and you now have a choice of low paying benefit-less jobs with no security. You’re welcome.
Un-tethering the financial markets from regulatory oversight caused the greatest financial meltdown since the great depression and probably left you feeling pretty sorry for yourself but look on the bright side: The job creators are getting richer than ever and they might hire you to build their house!
Unfortunately the general trend of outsourcing jobs to foreign countries has meant a lot less manufacturing jobs. Hate factory work?, thank a conservative!
I know all you young people are “down” with abstinence because you all remember how hot the sex was when you knew you shouldn’t be doing it and used no birth control. And remember, conservatives aren’t perfect! We send our abstinent daughters out of town for a “vacation” when things don’t work out because God means never having to say you’re sorry in public.