Lexington, KY

when Sandmann was a 16-year-old student at Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School on a field trip to Washington, D.C., for an anti-abortion rally, he was maligned by the media for staring nervously at a Native American beating a drum in his face. Though he wore a MAGA cap at the time, in subsequent interviews he called it a souvenir and declined to support Trump. At the recent Republican National Convention, however, he outed himself as a conservative by delivering a speech excoriating cancel culture and a liberally biased media, emphasizing his newfound partisanship by putting on his MAGA hat before finishing his brief remarks. “I’m the teenager who was defamed by the media,” Sandmann, 18, said in his speech. “How could I possibly imagine that the

Thinker,

People’s History of the United States,

Hunting.

“Basically, I was called a ‘white supremacist’ or ‘racist’ on a weekly basis,” Zegers recalled. “It gave me incentive to prove them wrong.”