Reimagining the Conservative Movement: A Trip to our Nation's Capital

I snapped a picture of the sign that adorned the highway with the words “Welcome to Washington D.C.” After the hours-long road trip, my legs longed to stretch and my eyes strained to see, for the first time, the sights of our Capital city.

I had made it.

To me, the National High School Leadership Conference run by Young America’s Foundation was not just my first official political conference. It was the culmination of all my hard work in the political arena heretofore. It was what all my efforts I had managed to lodge way back in Long Island, New York had built up to. 

I was here. I was recognized.

A doorman greeted me with a genial smile, and brought my luggage up to the room. My YAF name tag showed me that every word I had written, every book, column, and law I had studied had paid off. The gilded Art-Deco embellishments that adorned the four-star Mayflower Hotel reminded me that every time I had turned on a podcast despite my desire to just sit back and watch something mindless, mattered. 

Now, I had a seat at the table. My voice was invited into the conversation. 

I have been a Conservative for quite a while at this point. Although five years may sound like a mere sliver of an average political nerd’s life, it is substantially more when my life has only been 17 years.

I had come with no one so, in order to have an enjoyable time, I would need to make friends with at least a few of the almost 150 like-minded teenagers I was about to be in the presence of for the next three days. 

It was a national conference, meaning I was not confined to a group of people who all hailed from the same region, and all grew up with apt small-talk experience. Essentially, our universal way of entering into conversation with another attendee consisted of about three questions: 1) Where are you from? 2) Public or private school? and 3) How did you get into politics? 

I got asked all of these questions multiple times. Other than needing to clarify that being from New York didn’t always mean hailing from the busiest street in Manhattan, and declaring my public school attendance, I found myself reflecting on how exactly I did “get into” politics. 

I was a bored 12-year-old when I fell down the rabbit hole of politics. At the very beginning of the COVID lockdowns, I was lying on my bedroom floor, scrolling through my YouTube “Recommended” page, when I was presented with a new genre of content, the title resembling something to the extent of “Michael Knowles Reviews WOKE Commercials!” At that point, aside from a faint sense of who Donald Trump was, and that my father was a huge supporter of him, I didn’t even know as much as what the word “woke” meant. Nevertheless, the video provoked some chuckles and an escape from the newly isolated world, so I clicked on the channel to look for more. 

Within weeks, I was watching full 50-minute long episodes of the Michael Knowles show, and exploring more names I had heard about.

I had always, by default, attributed the colorful thumbnail and selective capitalization to my initial clicking on the video, yet now I believe it to have been an act of providence that introduced me to my calling. 

I remember that what first struck me was the comments section containing proper English, notably different from the comments under the Eastern European DIY channels I had been enthralled by just weeks prior. I also found a few comments that began with something similar to: “I’m (12-15) years old…” to be the most exciting. Although they gave me the feeling of a distant community, it never resonated with me that there were actually other kids watching Michael Knowles deconstruct the mainstream narrative. 

Even through the early stages of my political obsession, I had been an adherent to the Liberal narrative that the Republicans consisted of fat old white men living on umpteenth-acre farms in Oklahoma. In my community, there was no concentration of passionate Conservatives ready to share their beliefs with the world (which, tangentially, makes the accusation that I only surround myself with one side of the narrative only more ridiculous). Just 5 years ago, politics was still a cultural taboo. Before my political revelation, the only time I had heard anything about it was from the mouths of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly on my father’s bedroom TV, other than being surrounded by Liberal bias in the culture all around me.

Despite my age and the dismal representation of like-minded people in my area, I still pushed on. 

I began to notice things that my teachers would say that didn’t quite sound right. I regretfully remembered a time in the first grade when I congratulated a peer of mine on his new beautiful flowing hair after my mother informed me that he, in fact, was now a she. I realized that the Liberal culture Michael Knowles would incessantly critique, wasn’t just a figment of his imagination. I was very aware that I was the only one willing to research the claims of my teachers instead of blindly accepting them out of fear of castigation.

From the beginning, I felt a hunger for discussion, my first comment section debates always sent my heartbeat through the roof. I didn’t know where any of this came from. I had no history of notable retaliation in my childhood, and knew no notorious detractors that could have possibly influenced me into my contrarian ways. 

Although I believed my only outlet from here on out was the grammatically correct comments section under right-wing YouTube videos, still I pushed on. 

I pushed on enough to raise my hand and question my seventh grade science teachers’ declamations about the dangers of gas stoves, and the risk that future generations would never get to see a tree (seriously). I pushed on enough to read Ben Shapiro’s book How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps in front of my seventh grade history teacher, who just months prior denounced Trump for his “incendiary” actions on January sixth 2021, he stared at the cover and asked me what it was about, to which I offered a no-holds-barred response).

I was the only one in any class to say anything about the pride flags and sexuality sharing that my eighth grade English teacher had us participate in with random Canadian pen pals. I was the only one who went home and researched the narratives behind the endless Liberal claims I would hear in the halls. 

Even though I had no clear idea of what I was pushing towards, I still pushed on. 

I began to spend all my waking hours listening, reading, consuming, learning. I put off my other interests because I knew that my conversation with my friend about why I was pro-life was more important than the popsicle-stick hut I was building. 

Slowly, I grew into the role of the token Conservative in my school, representing the Conservative movement (albeit, imperfectly) to the entire student body (and faculty, at times). 

Yet at that official conference in that official hotel in that official city, I told my story differently. Instead of detailing my struggles, I was detailing our struggles. Kids nodded along when I told a story of a peer labeling me a “bootlicker” after he discovered my philosophy, just as I sympathized with a friend when she detailed her feelings of isolation in her very liberal Maryland public school.

As I walked the streets of Washington D.C. among my new friends in professional attire, with the sun beating down on us on our way to tour the White House, I realized that I was not the only one who had walked that treacherous path back home. I was not an anomaly who had developed in a vacuum. I thought back to the juvenile commenters under Michael Knowles’ videos. I realized that they were not only accounts, but that there were people behind them. They were the people I was with in our nation’s capital. 

My friends and I connected over the fact that people often tell us that even at such a young age, we “have already gotten so much right!” We were “mature.” 

This is often what kids are told when they are interested in a subject that is not normally tailored to them. Yet when we were speaking to each other, I realized that I had misunderstood something central to my identity. I saw myself as only fitting in with the adults. At family functions, I was more interested in being present for the conversations they had as the culture went from believing politics was a taboo to treating it as a common conversation starter. I seldom played a game with my friends without considering the underlying political nature of the communality of a team versus the individualism of a 1-on-1. I never consented to learning a Tik Tok dance due to the geopolitical tensions that had arisen around the app. I found ways to have fun, and I regret nothing from those years, yet in the midst of it all, the notification from CNN or Fox News still caught my eye. Because I had only seen adults so obsessed with Trump’s impeachment trial, or the conversation over abortion, I ended up buying into one of the lies that Liberalism had always forced. 

Conservatives consisted of fat old white men living on umpteenth-acre farms in Oklahoma. I still knew Conservatism could be for everyone, yet I didn’t know that anyone other than me and an Oklahoman farmer was aware of that. 

Yet, when me and another attendant shared at the same time that we had both just watched Nick Freitas’ game of Yes or No with Michael Knowles, or when a new friend and I had both rolled our eyes when some girl won an award for her painting depicting a gender neutral passport at a conference we both happened to be at  months prior, or when someone told a story of a friend dropping them for their beliefs, I realized that the lie was just that. A lie. 

The Conservative movement is only seeing the beginning. I would not be making this bold proclamation if I still believed I was the only kid who managed two and a half hours of sleep on election night, or the only student prepping for spontaneous debates with their peers, or watching YAF lectures instead of mindless YouTube vloggers flaunting their excessive piles of meaningless crap.

In our nation’s capital, a fellow attendee and I were discussing the nature of Liberalism. We both agreed that it was an interesting paradox that Liberalism is communal for the sake of radical individualism, yet Conservatism is individualistic for the sake of a common identity. A core pillar of Liberalism is to atomize the individual. The elitists accomplished this during COVID, when, for the sake of our eventual freedom, we needed to all submit to the regulations. They accomplish this still today by dissuading people of any natural inclinations to raise a family, hailing the individual as the pillar of a free society. 

In the midst of this all, it’s important, as Conservatives, to remember where the rest of the audience is. We may not always be sitting next to each other, but we are still with each other. My friends are with me when I am being unjustly interrogated by my principal, just like I am with my friends when they face castigation in their Liberal environments. 

As I left the Capital Beltway at the end of the Conference, I remembered all of the people I met and experiences I made. I realized that I am not alone in the fight. I was exhausted from the events and the interactions, yet I turned on a podcast (after all, I had missed many major developments during the conference), and I still pushed on.