This isn’t the first time a minor story involving teenagers flared up into a morality play. The most well known is probably the January 2019 incident in Washington, D.C. involving teenagers from Covington Catholic high school and a Native American elder who was drumming in a small protest at the Lincoln Memorial.
The incident is remarkable because nothing important happened. No one was killed or physically injured, no one committed a crime, no famous person or public official was involved. And yet it became a national story because adults projected all sorts of things onto teenagers.
To the extent the students were jerks, they were jerks in a very high school way, obnoxiously mocking behavior that was unfamiliar to them. Some may have genuinely wanted to join in, but did so awkwardly, in a manner that could’ve come across as insulting. Or maybe they were confused and didn’t know what to do, which is also very high school.
But left and right decided to make them culture war avatars, especially one boy named Nick, captured in a now-famous photo. He was wearing a red MAGA hat, and some on the left, including media professionals, projected onto him everything they hate about Donald Trump, recently confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the MAGA movement more broadly. Nick was no longer a high school kid, but the living embodiment of racism and privilege.
Then the right made him a cause célèbre. Attorney L. Lin Wood, currently embarrassing himself with conspiracy theories and failed lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election, sued CNN and The Washington Post on Nick’s behalf. (They settled for an undisclosed, but likely small amount). Later, Nick was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention. Once again, he wasn’t a teenager, but a culture war avatar, this time embodying the sense of victimization and grievance at the core of Trumpism.
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