Watch out liberalism; after a long hiatus, the Young Cons are back.

Take good rap music. Now remove its lyrical virtuosity, high production values, swaggering badassery, renegade ethos, and just-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. Now add two awkward white guys in suits and sideways caps. Sprinkle in some Dartmouth and cheesy iMovie effects; oh, and don’t forget a remixed Ronald Reagan.

Congratulations; you’ve got the Young Cons, the dorky Dartmouth “rap” duo that sends the right-wing into rapture and Notorious B.I.G. spinning his grave, spitting earnest rhymes in a totally badass quest to spread their Christian Conservative beliefs. Now, Josh “Stiltz” Riddle and David “Serious C” Ruffle’s heavily exploitative videos were never great. (It’s okay though, because the video starts with an obligatory black person.) However, we think you’ll agree that this one takes the cake. The young men practically grind up on a cardboard cutout of Ronald Reagan, delivering devastating lyrics like:

Let’s set the record straight, I’m no Mr. Mathers / I rap about politics and stuff that matters.

No disagreement there. And:

To all the young cons there’s no time to retreat / Conservatives are hungry, let’s eat the rhino meat.

These guys are about as awkwardly incongruous as Michael Steele. But ideology aside, only one word springs to mind: lame. Gut-wrenchingly lame. Even for the Ivy League, these guys are white bread.

What we can only assume to be the Young Cons’ next video:

Thank God for Columbia. Every year that campus blesses us with a major scandal — but this early in the year? Twice? It’s like Christmas before Halloween!

In the latest development of the Minuteman fallout, two Columbia students crossed swords on The O’Reilly Factor tonight. In one corner: Chris Kulawik ‘08, Columbia Conservative Club president, Spectator columnist, right-wing firebrand with boy-band good looks. In the other: Avi Zenilman ‘07, Blue and White editor, brainy ubermensch with, uh, David Brooks good looks.

Kulawik won the coin toss (which on O’Reilly’s show tends to land dickheads up) and got the first question. O’Reilly asked him if he felt personally threatened since the event. Kulawik, to his credit, was pretty level-headed in noting that threats “were out there” but had received none personally.

Zenilman tried to frame the protest as “an isolated incident in terms of a breakdown in the conversation.” O’Reilly shot back that on a “Kool-Aid campus” like Columbia, this kind of stuff is expected. He is “convinced there’s a left-wing jihad” afoot — that nothing like this would ever happen with a liberal speaker.

The biggest slam of the night went to Columbia president Lee Bollinger, who O’Reilly called a punk for not showing up to defend the university’s free speech climate himself. At least he’s consistent. On the Oct. 5 edition of the Factor, O’Reilly said Bollinger was “hiding under his desk, as he always does” — and then noted 25 words later that he himself, who once gave a talk at Columbia, didn’t have the “courage” to return there.

(Full disclosure: We know Avi, and worked with him at one point. We may still have a turtleneck of his we borrowed once.)

UPDATE 10:53 p.m.: President Bollinger sent out a school-wide e-mail today, calling the Minuteman disruption “one of the most serious breaches of academic faith that can occur in a university such as ours.” Finally, Bollinger and O’Reilly can agree on something. Read his e-mail in full after the jump.

UPDATE 11:52 a.m. Saturday: Here’s the video. Having watched again, we thought we should toughen this up a bit. Avi definitely got floored on a couple questions — notably the one where O’Reilly asked him if he knew the J-school was 100 percent liberal, and Avi just said nothing. He joins the ranks of the 99 percent of other not-conservative guests on the show who mostly get bulldozed.

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