Here's Paul Ryan Getting Righteously Owned by Some Patriotic Teens

If Paul Ryan's health care reform bill, a proposal that only "reforms" health care in that it "takes it away from millions of poor people so that rich people can enjoy marginal tax savings," has you feeling glum these days, here is a story that will restore your faint, flickering hope in humanity that Donald Trump and company are working so hard to extinguish. The intrepid eighth-graders at South Orange (NJ) Middle School recently took their obligatory class trip to Washington, D.C. for a week of history, adventure, and blithely clogging up Metro escalators while commuters fumed silently. When presented with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity during their Capitol tour to take a picture with Paul Ryan, though, a whole lot of these patriotic youngsters responded by basically telling the sitting Speaker of the House to shove it. From South Orange's Village Green:

About half the students in a group of South Orange Middle School 8th graders touring the Capitol in D.C. this past week refused a photo with House Speaker Paul Ryan, according to students on the field trip.

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"I am so proud of my son and 1/2 the 8th grade at South Orange Middle School," [a parent] wrote on Facebook. "They went to D.C. on a field trip and toured the Capitol building. The kids had a chance to have their picture taken with Paul Ryan and over half the class choose not to, including my son! What a powerful statement."

This would be delightful enough by itself, but it's the absolutely devastating explanatory quotes offered by the kids in question that make the story as heartwarming as it is. Here is one Wendy Weeks, who officially deserves her own primetime show on MSNBC:

I think that taking the picture represents that you agree with the same political views and I don't agree with his political views so I chose not to be in it.

Here is Louisa Maynard-Parisi, whose words should be cast in bronze and displayed in the Capitol Rotunda on a permanent basis:

I didn't want to be in [the picture] because he believes in most of what Trump believes in.

And here is Matthew Malespina, who in his comments to the Village Green and in a subsequent interview with The Washington Post all but declared his intent to run for Congress in 2028, once he's finally eligible to do so:

I can't take a picture with someone who supports a budget that would destroy public education and would leave 23 million people without healthcare.

Drag him, Matthew.

'I don’t like to take a picture with somebody that I can't associate with," Matthew, 13, told The Washington Post. "Let’s say somebody is not nice to me at school, for example. I wouldn't take a picture with them, probably."

Meanwhile, Ryan, who is no stranger to getting publicly and righteously owned by teens, posted an innocuous-looking picture of the encounter to Instagram. But as sagely noted by the Daily Mail, the kids at SOMS had no intention of letting him get away this charade and promptly jumped in the comments to expose him as the fraud that he is.

The future of this country is suddenly looking bright.