Dori: Local teen talks about backlash she gets for her politics
Jun 13, 2022, 3:19 PM | Updated: 6:20 pm
Photo by Spencer Platt
Being called racist and homophobic is nothing new to 14-year-old KellyAnna Brooking.
The Kitsap County teen told weekend attendees at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner in Bremerton that it’s the price she pays for being a conservative Christian in a public school.
She told Monday’s Dori Monson Show listeners, that classmates “look at me as an opinion. They don’t get to know the real me.”
As a youth ambassador for Turning Point USA, KellyAnna writes and speaks about the group’s mission: to “promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.” Her viewpoints often rub those with more liberal perspectives the wrong way.
What kind of criticism is thrown at you? Dori asked.
Strangers, she said, have “made hate pages about me,” she told Dori. “I was physically harassed on the second day of school and got called a racist in front of the whole school at a basketball game.”
Some classmates call her a homophobe, KellyAnna said, but she pushes back: “I don’t have any issue if an individual wants to be gay or identify as LGBTQ or as a character in a book; I’m completely fine with that. But if there is something to do with the way that people want to describe their sexuality in a sexual, creepy, groomer way that’s absolutely not okay.”
When she first started getting hate messages about her political positions, KellyAnna told Dori, she soon realized “people who are saying these things about me don’t really know me.” Instead, she says, she relies on friends and family when she feels pressure.
And even in the face of what she calls “hatefulness,” she has advice for her peers:
“Definitely go to school board meetings and get involved,” the teen encouraged. “It can feel very overwhelming. . . Eventually, they will have to listen to you. Sometimes those conversations will be really scary, but you have to have the courage to be this way.”
Listen to Dori’s entire interview with conservative Christian Kitsap-area teen about politics
Listen to Dori Monson weekday afternoons from noon – 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.
