A new op-ed by The Advocate’s Ryan Adamczeski draws a sharp line between accountability and the conservative movement’s growing tendency to turn personal failures into national controversy, especially when transgender people can be blamed. Adamczeski begins with a memory many viewers may share: growing up with parents who valued education.
As she writes, her monther told her “It’s the one thing that can’t be taken from you.” And when Adamczeski failed a class assignment, she says, her mother didn’t file a complaint with the school, she told her to do better. That personal-responsibility standard, Adamczeski argues, is at odds with today’s conservative influencers — people who have built entire careers not on achievement, but on losing.
Take former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines, who, as Adamczeski notes, tied for fifth place in a 2022 NCAA event and has since risen to fame by attacking the transgender athlete she tied with, Lia Thomas. Adamczeski writes, “Never before has someone become so famous for coming in fifth place.” Now, University of Oklahoma student Samantha Fulnecky is attempting a similar path.
After receiving a failing grade on an essay labeling trans people demonic and claiming gender roles are Biblically ordained, she filed a religious-discrimination complaint. The instructor, Mel Curth, who is trans, told her the work failed because “the paper does not answer the questions for this assignment… heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence… and is at times offensive.”
Despite this, the university sided with Fulnecky and placed Curth on leave. And like Gaines, Fulnecky is now appearing across conservative media. Adamczeski concludes that this pattern reflects a politics of entitlement — one that blames others rather than confronting failure.
