In the wake of two shooting massacres, with China threatening the world economy and Iran threatening nuclear war, are the offenderati really losing their minds over a photograph of schoolboys fooling around with a cardboard cutout?

Seems so, because the cardboard cutout depicts Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and she never passes up the chance to play the victim.

These are harmless kids engaged in harmless skylarking. So harmless, they even tagged AOC in their initial posts. But they underestimated AOC’s mirthless self-importance and the punitive nature of her followers.

Because the boys happened to be wearing “Team Mitch” T-shirts, she grabbed the opportunity to roast Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. As a result, the photos went viral and these Kentucky high-schoolers have been doxxed online, their names and school widely publicized.

You know what that means. Now there is a target on their backs. Unhinged trolls are doing their best to make their young lives a misery, to blacken the reputation of their school, and destroy their future prospects.

In reality, the boys’ crime is not that they were fooling around with a cardboard cutout. It’s that they dared to support a Republican politician. It’s that they dare to attend a Christian school. In the identitarian left’s corrosive hierarchy of victimhood, young, white, conservative Christian males are public enemy number one and must be destroyed.

The boys have removed their posts and apologized “for our insensitive actions.” But it’s never enough. How can you expect young men to take seriously admonitions against sexism and misogyny when they are crucified for such harmless hijinks? Where do they go from here?

Our teenagers are growing up in a world so dour and pitiless that it’s a wonder their spirits aren’t crushed.