Given his age when he first came to the world's attention and assuming continued good health in the intervening decade and change, Marine Todd would be in his late 30s today. That would be if he was a real person, though, and Marine Todd was the invented hero in a classic bit of dippy Obama-era conservative memecraft. In the original story, Marine Todd knocks out a cocky atheist college professor in front of his classmates to prove the existence of God. There are many other versions of this fable; the evangelical God's Not Dead franchise, now at five films, should probably give it an onscreen story credit.
It's more accurate to say that Marine Todd, as a conservative figure of fantasy and the beefy personification of a foundational urge that runs through that movement, is both very old and very current. That fantasy is about violence, but it is also about impunity—"God was busy protecting America’s military," Todd tells his professor, once he comes to, "who are out protecting your right to say stupid shit like that, so he sent me to fill in." Righteously smashing whoever and whatever offends or just inconveniences you is something like the essential reactionary fantasy; the great work of the conservative movement, then and now, is creating the circumstances and structures that make it possible for the right type of smasher to get away with doing that.
Samantha Fulnecky, a junior at the University of Oklahoma, is currently trying this out. In November, Fulnecky submitted an assignment for a psychology class at OU and received zero of a possible 25 points. The assignment was to write an essay on perceptions of gender in society; Fulnecky wrote 742 words of online-evangelical lorem-ipsum claptrap in which she gestures at but never actually cites the Bible, uses the word "demonic," and barely mentions the text to which she is supposed to be responding beyond noting that it was "very thought provoking" and that she did "not necessarily" agree with that essay's understanding of gendered bullying as "a problem." Both the teaching assistant and the professor in charge of the class agreed that Fulnecky's work did not fulfill the assignment, and that it was weird besides. (Fulnecky, who plays tennis at OU, made SEC Academic Honor Roll last year, alongside 1,902 other student athletes who maintained a 3.0 GPA.)
Fulnecky asked the instructors to reconsider her grade and was rebuked. Within hours, per reporting in The Oklahoman, she had "emailed the governor Nov. 17, along with OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. and the Teacher Freedom Alliance, led by former state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, asking for help." Sometime later, Fulnecky initiated an official discrimination grievance with the university. If you would like an up-to-date record of which conservative media eminences have rallied to Fulnecky's cause, it is available on the luridly toxic Twitter account of her mother, Kristi, a lawyer, podcaster, and former city councilmember in Springfield, Mo., who later went on to unsuccessfully defend several January 6 rioters in court. On Sunday, as part of an official investigation into Fulnecky's claim that she had been discriminated against for her religious beliefs, the school placed the TA that graded Fulnecky's paper on administrative leave.
Fulnecky's essay, which you can read here, really is quite bad, although that seems almost incidental to the broader gambit here. It is bad enough, in fact, that even the New York Post felt compelled to acknowledge its shoddiness in a story headlined "Oklahoma U Student Files Discrimination Report After Flunking Gender Essay For Psych Class With Trans Instructor." And while we might as well allow for the possibility that Fulnecky actually is upset with her grade—"It can't be allowed for me to get a zero on this because my opinion is somehow offensive," she told The Oklahoman—the broader gambit is right there in that Post headline, and in the posts that Fulnecky's proud mother keeps amplifying. That support comes from OU's Turning Point USA chapter and influential bomb-threat incubator Libs Of TikTok and a freelance anti-trans activist named Billboard Chris and also Oklahoma's governor; it sometimes (but not always) applauds Fulnecky for her brave complaint before turning to what plainly interests all of the aforementioned more, which is seizing an opportunity to get a TA who uses she/them pronouns fired from a public university.
In doing all this—in claiming that her civil rights were violated because someone noticed that she did a shitty job on her homework—Samantha Fulnecky might be making a bid for the sort of gnarled public life that can grow from this type of seed, provided it is kept sufficiently well-fed and socked in with fertilizer by the big concerns that work in that space. Fulnecky might also just be a small-minded kid seeing what she can get away with. Neither is very interesting. But she wouldn't be the first person to launch a career in conservative politics by getting upset and staying upset.
A political movement that dreams of a world that is smaller, simpler, dumber, more servile and less curious and much narrower than the one that currently exists would naturally fixate upon college campuses and the individual and collective acts of becoming that happen there; people in that movement would want, so intensely that it would come to crowd out any other wish or purpose, the opportunity to make that all stop. They would, as always, want to smash whatever they want to smash and enjoy the security of knowing not just that they would face no repercussions, but be the hero of the story for having done so. It is reductive to say that the central fantasy of contemporary conservatism is Punching The Teacher, but it is not really wrong. In a sense, Donald Trump telling a (probably fake) story about giving his second grade music teacher a black eye and "almost [getting] expelled" in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal is something like his movement's equivalent of George Washington admitting to having chopped down that cherry tree.
But that leaves out some crucial stuff. If Trumpism is a collection of contradictory fantasies—the righteous and all-powerful boss who is forever victimized and in peril; an oppressed elite that is constantly scamming and mugging and jailing everyone else; traditionalist patriots waging total war against both the state and the people that live in it; what the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat called "a permanent counterrevolution"—it is also, always, a hustle. A life in conservative politics is a shabby, grifting thing; that movement is a sweaty and stupid scrum of influencers and opportunists and true-blue sociopaths scrabbling for monetizable attention or one of the lucrative public-facing sinecures funded by reactionary billionaires.
The cost to one's immortal soul aside, that work is demeaning. It demands from those doing it the sort of always-on workload and rolling state of pericrashout inherent to video game streamers, but with much more onerous hair and makeup requirements. The work itself is very easy, and amounts for most of those in the industry to honking away on their specific instrument of grievance in a way that's roughly in time with the sounds being made across the rest of the conservative media space. There is no way to create a symphony out of clammy self-interested buskers who (correctly) understand their job as being louder than everyone else, but the goal here is not the creation of anything beautiful or even coherent so much as it is the making of constant, obliterating noise.
There's nothing to that, really. The only thing that Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer who leveraged her own dubious tale of personal woe into a full-time job thanks to the wonder-working power of transphobia and conservative media, could do to put herself out of work would be to deviate even a little bit from her movement's message; put another way, the only thing that could spoil her payday would be evincing the faintest interest in fixing her heart and doing something with her life. Gaines is like a lot of conservative media types in that regard—a barely replacement-level talent whose job is to endlessly rehash an increasingly distant experience of having been wronged by their movement's designated cultural enemies. Charlie Kirk didn't get into the college that he wanted to go to after high school and stayed furious about it in public until the moment he was killed, on a different college campus, at the age of 32; that was his job. Bari Weiss, who has never felt as respected by or comfortable among her peers as she believed she deserved to be, has made a successful career in media that is entirely dependent upon her never, ever getting over that.
A person can make a lot of money this way, but the cost—or one of the costs, anyway—is that they must never move on from anything; the audience wants only the increasingly rough stuff that it wants, and is more loyal to that demand than to any individual provider or brand. This is an easy market to serve, and an impossible one to serve in a remotely dignified way. Imagine a child actor, bashing away for decades at the weak material that made them famous as they age from moppetry into bleak middle age; imagine, too, that the material in question all militates towards making it impossible for various classes of vulnerable people to exist in public. There is a living to be made doing this, but it seems very much a living hell. Still, sometimes you can catch a ride on a rich person's private plane en route to some conference or ceremony, and sometimes a mean old car dealer will hand you a trophy or a weird sword at some shitty banquet before you make a little speech about the bad thing that happened to you. That is the brass ring Samantha Fulnecky might yet grasp.
Much more important than whether this particular mediocre young person succeeds, and considerably more worrying, is how easy it all is, and how smooth and efficient the process is through which all this noise and damage is manufactured—how simple the culture has made it for someone with nothing but themselves on their mind to hurt someone they think they might benefit from hurting, and how eagerly and unquestioningly this daisy chain of apparatchiks and opportunists and independent operators and actual elected officials will apply themselves to that work. It doesn't much matter whether Samantha Fulnecky was volunteering to join the movement to remove trans people from public life because she thought this oafish provocation might someday pay her bills, or is just a spoiled kid seizing an opportunity to walk to the front of the classroom and try her luck, Marine Todd-style. What matters is that it all ends up in the same place, and that this choice is so easily and cheaply made, and that there is a machine—well-funded, well-insulated, and much clearer about the terrible things it wants than anyone charged with describing it can quite bring themselves to acknowledge—that exists to send anyone desperate, cruel, or careless enough to enlist off to war.
