I went through a phase of reading Ayn Rand and stuff at a similar age. After all – not that this was my reasoning at the time – you can’t know what you genuinely disagree with unless you’ve genuinely tried agreeing with it. In fact, it was Robert Anton Wilson that initially put me on to Ayn Rand, and he even explicitly makes that very point about her (in, I think, Schrodinger’s Cat).
A kid being fascinated with some political pose is not the same as a grown-up decision to adopt that pose. Kids are involuntarily open-minded (because their disks are unformatted), in a way that adults can’t be, and rarely even want to. They try stuff on because it interests them, and then they find out whether the interest is positive or negative.
Because this boy’s parents had faith that he hadn’t suddenly been replaced by some right-wing adult stranger, they were able to wait for him to figure out how to explain it. You would hope that is how most parents would approach teenage behavior, although evidence suggests it’s not.
