MAGA's mediocre martyrs

The news, in brief …

• “Get out of the way”: Obama calls on “old folks” in power to trust young activists, lawmakers

  The former president said that it’s time to "turn the reins over" to a new generation of politicians. Read more.

• “Stupid or slow?”: White House attacks Carpenter after she objects to ICE video using her music

  The pop star pushed back against the White House using her song to soundtrack an ICE video. Read more.

• “Ridiculous”: Kelly compares Hegseth to a 12-year-old “playing Army”

  The senator and Navy veteran told reporters Pete Hegseth was play-acting as a tough guy. Read more.

Make me smarter …

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The grievance grift …

I’ve spent my entire adult life making a career in the crumbfight that is online journalism.

I’ve seen readers’ tastes turn from junky listicles to incredulous clickbait, all while audiences swore they wanted more of the in-depth, well-reported stories that died on the search traffic vine. I was there for the weird interregnum between Buzzfeed’s world-beating ascendance and the Second Great Advertising Collapse, a cursed period where people were sharing their darkest secrets in first-person essays for tens of dollars.

I’ve cranked out a dozen articles a day for SEO slopfarms and put my feet up at bigwigs’ vanity news nonprofits, dodging layoffs and avoiding milestone social media posts from college associates who majored in business or (heaven forbid) marketing. I did all that for the privilege of entertaining and informing people in half-minute-long bursts.

With all that experience, I’d like to think I know a news story when I see one. The controversy unfurling at the University of Oklahoma makes me wonder.

For the uninitiated, OU junior Samantha Fulnecky was tasked with responding to an article about gender expression for her developmental psychology class. Fulnecky’s essay cited her Christian beliefs and the Book of Genesis in arguing that gender is binary and painted any deviation from man and woman as “demonic.”

She was unsurprisingly given an F. The teaching assistant who graded her paper laid out their objections plainly, saying that Fulnecky’s response “does not answer the questions for this assignment.” Fulnecky appealed her grade and ran to conservative media outlets. The TA was put on administrative leave. Turning Point USA jumped into the fray, blowing up the non-story of a college student bombing an assignment into national news.

It should go without saying that college students being overly confident in their shoddy reasoning is not front-page material. Only the conservative media’s ability to turn any mediocrity who can fog a mirror into a cause célèbre could make it an A1 issue.

Outlets like Fox News and Newsmax need to fill airtime with stories that will keep their viewers constantly aggrieved. Because conservative beliefs largely align with the groups that have all the money, weaponry and power in the United States, it can be hard to find angles that get the blood pumping.

People who largely want things to stay the same don’t have their own Rosenbergs, saving the world and dying for it. They don’t have the romantic revolutionaries of the 1800s or the style icons of the pan-African socialists. They don’t even have a Zohran Mamdani, who threw the staleness of American conservatism into stark relief just by standing next to Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

The one actual martyr they’ve had in recent memory wasn’t killed by the state while heroically standing up for conservatism. He died while trying to publicly dunk on students whose frontal lobes haven’t fully developed, a victim of the same laissez-faire gun policies he championed.

With a bare cupboard of icons, conservative media is left to invent martyrs out of uninspiring whiners, turning their stories of loserdom into grave injustices against all red-blooded Americans.

Abigail Fisher made years of headlines by admitting she failed to get into a state school that accepted nearly half of all applicants. Riley Gaines is a conservative media celebrity because she tied for fifth in a swim meet. Fulnecky is setting off down the same path, turning her inability to put together an argument into everyone else’s problem. Unfortunately for all of us, the anti-participation trophy crowd is lining up to reward her for it.

What do you think? Are there any inspiring conservatives left? Why is MAGA so susceptible to whining? Sound off in the comments.

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