I just escaped from a CPAC panel featuring activists who have achieved "conservative victories" at the grassroots. Most of them were college students who beat back all those terrible autocratic liberal policies at their universities that "silence" conservatives. "Liberals are successful at making people who are marginalized hurt," sniffed one presenter, referring to conservatives as the marginalized. Their two-minute speeches were apparently supposed to inspire activists in the audience to sue their university, form clubs on campus to combat "suicidally liberal" policies, form an anti-feminist book club, or fight back against an unspecified "Orwellian political re-education program" like at the University of Delaware. If conservatives whined about being marginalized when they were in power, imagine how how ramped-up the bitterness is going to be now. The star of the show was Jonathan Krohn, the 13-year-old author of a book, Define Conservatism. His charm, if you can call it that, lay in his spittle-flecked enthusiasm, rather than his originality. The audience was so wowed by this wunderkind's paean to conservatism that they barely noticed Joe the Plumber saunter in for his Fox News interview in the back of the ballroom. --Sarah Posner
