The Birth of a Conservative Victim

Samantha Fulnecky is the latest in a slew of untalented, privileged American conservatives that choose to victimize themselves instead of become any better than they truly are.

Dylan J Raskay 9 December, 2025

Samantha Fulneky, a junior at the University of Oklahoma recently submitted an essay that brought her into the limelight of conservative grievance politics.

Fulnecky and her peers were asked to, in 650 words, respond to a journal article entitled Relations among gender typicality, peer relations, and mental health during early adolescence by Jennifer A. Jewell and Christina Spears Brown.

The students were given the prompt (more precisely, eight different prompts they could’ve chosen from, no.1 stating “a discussion of why you feel the topic is important and worthy of study (or not)”) and a clear-as-day rubric from their grading professor. The prompt/ rubric document states “The best reaction papers illustrate that students have read the assigned materials and engaged in critical thinking about some aspects of the article”

A simple, straightforward assignment that anyone who has been to a four-year university (or a high school, for that matter) has received and completed adequately many a time: open-ended prompt, 650 words (basically one page, single-spaced), easy-peasy most would assume.

But not for Fulnecky, instead of complete the busy-work assignment as requested, she decided to use her less than stellar writing abilities for a political stunt. Following no rubric but her own, she wrote a terrible essay, complete with grammatical mistakes, no cited evidence as the assignment requested, resulting in a fully objectionable piece of writing complete with a tone of ‘pick-me’ and absolutely zero substance.

Did she read the piece she was responding to? Probably not. Did she at least respond to it critically and exhibit any kind of creative or critical thinking? Not at all. I guess that’s why we are talking about her.

Instead of write an essay reacting to the article’s claims regarding perception of people within societal gender-norms, analyzing and/ or critiquing that dynamic, Fulnecky went on a religious tirade, spouting nothing but her personal (often biggoted) beliefs. Her essay ends with a literal sermon: “My prayer for the world and specifically for American society and youth is that they would not believe the lies being spread from Satan that make them believe they are better off as another gender than what God made them. I pray that they feel God’s love and acceptance as who He originally created them to be.” (Fulnecky, 2025)

(Read her full essay, as well as commentary from the OU TPUSA chapter here)

This quote might make you think that the Jewell and Brown article is an all-out “transgender for everybody,” woke, propaganda piece, but it’s far from. In their article, Jewell and Brown study gender-typicality and it’s relation to popularity among students. They studied a group of middle school students, describing hypothetically popular and reject-able peers, along with the students completing self-reports on their own gender-typicality, popularity, and likeability. They conducted an experiment to highlight a correlation between gender normativity and perceived popularity and non-popularity. Not much relation to trans or nonbinary individuals can be found in the piece as it focuses on young individuals and their relationships to the genders they identify with, as well as their relationships to peers of their own gender.

This straightforward empirical study may be above Fulnecky’s understanding, and that’s OK. But she did sign up for a psychology class at a university, what was she expecting to learn and respond to? Theology and doctrine exclusively? Sciences, psychology being one of them, require us to think beyond ourselves and beyond our own experiences. Science in our modern understanding, if it weren’t for an emphasis put on empirical data over the objective beliefs of the individual- wouldn’t exist. I wonder how and why she hadn’t ran into such a road block into the first two years of her tenure as a psychology major at a public university. Was this the first time her brain was tickled in such a way that she instinctively regurgitated scripture and dogma?

Throughout her essay, she seems thoroughly #triggered, but her junky writing and grammar don’t lend her any outsized abilities, thank god. Though quite un-notable, she is just the latest in a long line of sub-par people with sub-par beliefs to get outsized media representation by only being inferior in relation to her peers.

Not the First ‘Victim‘

In 2022, while competing on behalf of the University of Kentucky in the NCAA Division 1 Championships for women’s swimming, Riley Gaines tied her opponent from the University of Pennsylvania, Lia Thomas, for fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle. Thomas, a trans woman, and the NCAA itself faced backlash from the conservative movement. In the aftermath, Gaines has become an anti-transgender activist, promoting an ideology of bigotry, and garnering a public reputation as a activist for “women’s rights.” She has prompted an outsized movement amongst conservatives against trans athletes. Since she tied for fifth, Gaines has been on a crusade against allowing trans women to compete in women’s sports. This has prompted support from all levels of conservative politics, including president Donald Trump. Who in the second month of his second term, signed an executive order, positing that allowing trans-women to compete in sports is “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.”

Gaines’ looser-ship has certainly affected the politics of the day, in her tenure as unremarkable, fifth-place-tying collegiate swimmer in chief, she has accumulated fame and prowess in conservative circles. She hosts a podcast produced by OutKick (owned by the Fox Corporation), Gaines for Girls, and is a frequent contributor to Fox News.

What brought her this fame? Is she really all that and more, a conservative wunderkind, and incredible athlete and so much more? Or is she a product of conservative media, one who’s narrative can be exploited in perpetuity as a political tool against a marginalized community?

In this polarizing, tense, atmosphere of American Politics, narrative is a clear way in which people may be able to address grievance and make sense of our broader political environment.

Let’s understand polarization more broadly before we continue. There are two types of affective polarization, positive and negative: positive referring to one’s ability to derive dividends from their identity with their in-group, and the negative referring to a dislike or loathing for the out-group, often coupled with a focus on defeat of said out-group. (Mayer, A., & Parks, P. (2025) Here, the negative is what is worth focusing on, in Gaines case, it being her affective negative polarization against trans-women in sports.

In their journal article, Victimhood, partisan identities, and media consumption in the US., authors Adam Mayer and Perry Parks outline that narrative can be an exceptional tool for reifying partisan polarization through common understanding and quasi-shared experience through media.

They state, “Social groups develop a sense of their collective experiences through an interactive, story-telling process that shares common themes (Prins et al. Citation2013; Salzer Citation1998). These collective narratives are then internalized and become part of a person’s sense of identity.” (Mayer, A., & Parks, P. (2025)

Gaines and her cohort, victims to conservative movement’s own culture war, add their tales to a pantheon of victim-hood narratives that serve to strengthen and give identity to a movement more concerned with grievance than free-thinking or rationality. It is clear that in order to understand conservative grievance, one must first be spoon-fed the narrative of a swimmer who was not at all overpowered by a trans swimmer in 2022 in a 200-freestyle but merely tied with her for fifth place. (Not first, fifth! Why should anybody care? When’s the last time your average Fox News viewer cared at all about collegiate women’s swimming?)

But still, this narrative of a loosing swimmer came to define rhetoric on the right when it comes to trans people’s civil rights.

“It is not as if all Republicans (or all Democrats) have endured some historical trauma and created a shared in-group narrative for this event – there is no famine, genocide, diaspora, or other collective experience that could undergird the sense of shared identity that motivates partisans.” (Mayer, A., & Parks, P. (2025) Consumers of conservative media have been forced to take on the plight of a sub-par swimmer in order to make sense and manufacture consent for the wave of anti-trans and largely, anti-LGBTQ hate this country has seen post 2020.

The reality we accept is often one prescribed to us by the groups we conform to and not that we perceive intimately by ourselves. Hegemonic social groups, conservatives being one of them, are able to craft identity around narratives of selectively performed grievance and take it on as their own collectively, morphing their perceived realities, they take on a partisan narrative based on events that never happened to them as individuals. Parks and Mayer state: “people don’t need to experience objective trauma to identify as a traumatized group, if that discourse is central to their identity formation. Mediated discourse can help shape a collective memory of perceived trauma or abuse.” (Mayer, A., & Parks, P. (2025)

With the help of the conservative media apparatus, Gaines’ frustration with trans-athletes, her supposed ‘victimization,’ and her persona all became commodities of culture within the conservative ecosystem. She became a martyr for them, symbolizing all that is wrong with classic liberal society, a person only fighting on behalf of themselves, a cis woman representing only the rights of cis women: intersectionalism and decency be dammed.

Where we’re at now

Hear Ye’! Hear Ye’! A new victimized conservative white woman is born! Here for ye’ all to see!

Fulnecky ascends the role as a new conservative martyr alongside Gaines. She who cannot fulfill a simple undergrad essay prompt and instead hides in the corner of victim-hood and martyrdom joins the ranks of Kyle Rittenhouse, Bari Weiss, and Riley Gaines. Instead of simply reading something she disagreed with and responding to it as a mindful student should; perhaps citing alternate sources along with the article itself to make an educated argument that performs critical thinking and dissonance while also proving she is capable of understand views other than her own, she instead resorted to a safe space: A blank box filled with nothing but her own grievance and evangelical fanaticism that our relatives and loved ones must now also confine themselves to. As they have done, retreating into Riley Gaines’ bespoke reconstruction of Plato’s Cave, the shadows of scary trans professors and swimmers will dance on it’s walls!

As it stands now, the OU lecturer, a transgender person, in charge of Fulnecky’s class has now been put on leave over the debacle. A professor has been ousted for implementing and enforcing a rubric they held for all of their students. Speaking to KOCO, Dec. 5, in her new found fame, Fulnecky said “I gave my opinion, and, not just my opinion, but that’s like the Bible says that God created male and female, and anything that’s not from God, is glorifying to God, is glorifying to the enemy.” She doesn’t say that she answered the prompt, she focuses on her feeling that she was spited by her professor and riefys her fundamentalist position.

In response, the chairman of the Oklahoma Federation of College Republicans, Conner Tranquill stated that he agrees with the professor: “The academic quality of the essay written by Samantha Fulnecky is indefensible, and the professor’s failing grade is demonstrably correct. For TPUSA’s OU chapter to elevate this poorly written paper suggests a serious lapse in judgment. The essay not only fails to meet basic college requirements—such as citing its primary source, the Bible—but fundamentally misses the assignment’s objective.” (Tranquill, OFCR, 2025)

Clearly people on her own side of this matter (fellow republicans) see her essay as poorly written and inflammatory, as she did not follow the prompt nor demonstrate any intellect.

Instead of Fulnecky “taking the L” after bullshitting her assignment she clearly didn’t want to do, (as all college students have done once or twice,) or Gaines saying to herself “I could’ve swam a bit faster,” these women chose the conservative victim-hood route: A route much more auspicious than simply receiving a passing grade and remaining a nobody or winning fourth in a swim meet ever would be.

One bad essay, one bad swim and next you’re getting interviewed at some AstroTurfed conservative event. Fulnecky was recently interviewed at a luncheon hosted by the “Original Constitutional Principles Affecting Culture (OCPAC)” just days after she rose to fame for her shitty essay.

If she were to follow Gaines path of manufactured grievance, she could become your estranged uncle’s next favorite Fox News contributor.

Let us recognize that these women are nothing special. The only reason that we speak their names and that the broader public knows a single thing about them is because they are failures. Failures to write simple essays, failures to harbor sportsmanship or conduct themselves in a way that most of us do daily. Unlike most of us, they do not harbor any sort of shame, they do not care about the broader public, they live in worlds of their own creation where their failures can also be attributes .

Let us not feed them what they want, attention or admiration. They have both achieved nothing but the glamor that comes with failing upwards. Let’s recognize that it takes hard work to be able to write and get your point across. And in all respect to Gaines, it takes much work to get to fifth place of the NCAA championships, I truly wish she could just be proud of herself for getting that far instead of scapegoating other women for her supposed shortcoming. Fulnecky is, relatively, still a child. She deserves some grace, but not that much considering she doesn’t have much compassion for people that deviate in any way, from her fundamentalist understanding of society. Let’s remember that our world and theirs are not the same, theirs is one you can choose to live in at the low, low cost of 8.99$ per-month subscription to Fox Nation as well as the price of your sanity and moral well-being. I should remind you, it costs nothing morally or monetarily to think freely, to live in a world beyond boxes and objective reality.

Let us also, importantly, recognize that the point of an activity such as collegiate swimming and earning a BA degree is not to shit on other people, not your professors nor your competition. Those entities exist solely to push you into a further realm. Your professor is there to instruct and help you improve your intellectual skills, whatever they may be. Your competitor in a race, swimming or running, is the same as a fake rabbit on a string would be to a greyhound in a dog race. Swimming is also often regarded as an individual sport, one in which you are competing first and foremost against your own best times, improving yourself against yourself- as a former swimmer myself, I know that you are your own toughest competition, until you get to a very high level, the only objective is constant improvement. Academics largely work the same way: unless you really want to be valedictorian, the goal is always to improve upon yourself, not necessarily showing-up others, it is a teacher’s job to push their students in the right direction by challenging them to be their best.

When I was a student in middle school and high school, learning to write, I wanted badly to put my thoughts out on paper or screen in a way that was meaningful and original, a way that would resonate with audiences. I learned how to do so only through thoughtful comments and criticisms by my teachers and professors. When I was a swimmer, I only got better through my coaches and fellow swimmers pushing me, training me harder and giving me improved techniques that would make me faster against myself. Never by a coach or teacher saying such things as “you should write like John, you should race like Jack.”

(Speaking of the nuances of swimming, especially at large meets like a NCAA championship, you are competing in heats based on personal record, there are 10 lanes in a pool and many more than 10 swimmers competing for one given event, say, 200-yard freestyle. You simply aren’t able to see all the competition you’re up against. More often than not a swimmer knows their time and they are competing against that first and foremost. That is, to ignore the fact that you aren’t staring your competition in the face, you are staring at the bottom of a pool going as fast as you possibly can and hoping for the best.)

Gaines either simply does not understand the dynamic of the sport she chose to compete in or perhaps should’ve had a different coach, a more rigorous training regimen, a hyper-calculated diet, etc. to push her over the edge of Lia Thomas, who we know, also got fifth place. (Fifth not being a position I’ve ever seen anyone fight for until Gaines made her presence known, fourth maybe, but fifth? I personally wouldn’t be feeling slighted by anyone if I tied for fifth, nor would I make a scene about my hatred of trans people when the first four finishers above me and my sworn enemy were cisgender women.) Gaines could’ve easily beat Thomas, though acting like she was bullied into getting tied with her has been lucrative to say the least.

Perhaps Fulnecky could’ve talked one-on-one with her professor on how she could’ve written an essay that expressed her beliefs but also cited evidence in order to write a thoughtful essay, maybe she could’ve payed attention to grammar lessons in the fifth grade, or she could have chose a different major in which the scientific consensus aligns more with her fundamental beliefs, alas, they will both always be known as losers (the kind that capitalize on their faults) as well as idiots. Apparently that is how they wish for us to know them and view them for the rest of time. To each their own.

I personally choose to subscribe to athletes and academics, that even when they loose or come up short, show humility and are able to shake the water off them, (literally and metaphorically) and retain their composure, let’s remember it’s not all that serious – whoever you are, dear reader, give yourself and others some grace. The sore-looser seems to be en vogue this season but let us not forget that trends are temporary.

Dylan J Raskay