She recalled the personal slights she had received from this type. But the type wasn’t just something that reminded her of unpleasantness, it was archetypical of entire structures of oppression. The smirking MAGA boy is the boy who insulted me: He is every misbehaving boy, and every misbehaving man, and every form of historical oppression too.

Just as every sin, no matter how slight, makes the sinner a participant in the Crucifixion of Christ, so too is every smirking boy the patriarchy, the one that has personally crucified the culture writer for BuzzFeed.

Our culture has lost its faith in Christ. It has lost a Bible. But it still does a deep exegesis. Our clerical class does its daily devotional reading, it chants its moralizing passages, it experiences incredible transfigurations. The newsfeed makes up the liturgical calendar. The stories are all deeper iterations of stories we know before. The culture writers can mark their middle-aged years by the appearance of the prep-school villain, the one with whom they are so intimately familiar.