- Would conservatives fight for student papers defending creationism, as if religious myths are equivalent to the modern worldview based on reason and science?
- More about Trump’s white supremacist policies;
- Brief items about Russia, Masculine public hangings, Trump’s “library,” and AI sermons.
More about that student paper.
NY Times, opinion by Jessica Grose, 6 Dec 2025: How One Student’s Failing Grade Became a Cause Célèbre on the Right
In November, a University of Oklahoma student named Samantha Fulnecky received a zero for a psychology paper. The assignment was a 650-word response to a study of middle school students, which found that students that were “high in gender typicality” — think, athletic boys and well-dressed, attractive girls — were described as more popular by their peers, and that this effect was particularly pronounced for boys. Students, the study revealed, who were less gender typical tended to be teased and bullied more.
…
The original study assigned to Fulnecky is not specifically about transgender youth, but a sample passage of her paper reads: “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.”
What’s new here is this:
But what makes this example different is the way Fulnecky went directly to the media and conservative organizations to publicize her case. When Ryan Walters, one of the people she emailed, was Oklahoma’s state schools superintendent, he demanded that all schools teach the Bible, and that teachers not from Oklahoma pass a screening test to ward off “woke indoctrination.” He told Fox News earlier this year, about his new job at the conservative Teacher Freedom Alliance, “We’re going to destroy the teachers’ unions.”
And the trend…
Students think they are customers who deserve to be catered to, rather than curious humans who might have something to learn.
But a larger point still isn’t addressed here. Do religious conservatives really think a thesis based solely on the Bible has any educational merit at all (outside of religious studies)? Don’t they have the slightest concern with how the real world actually works? Based on this example, presumably a geology student could write a paper citing the Bible as evidence that the Earth is 6000 years old, and flat, and be expected to be taken seriously and get a passing grade. How would conservatives feel if their doctor succeeded in getting through medical school by insisting that Bible-based medicine (whatever that might be) was valid, ignoring the entirety of modern evidence-based medicine? The way they talk, apparently many in the MAGA crowd would be fine with that, given their embrace of RFK Jr. and his ilk. Further retreat.
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And another piece about this topic.
Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, 7 Dec 2025: Trump’s foreign policy vision: Make Europe white again, subtitled “Trump’s global ‘strategy’ is grandiose, racist, and alarmingly dumb: Tyranny is cool, bro! But democracy sucks”
To say that Donald Trump’s political movement is built on contradiction is an understatement. Trump’s entire movement is a contradiction: The promise to make America “great again” has always referred simultaneously to an imaginary past that never existed and an imaginary future that can never be achieved, not even under the totalitarian dictatorship of Stephen Miller’s late-night fantasies.
Am I offering false hope if I say that the unsustainable contradictions within the Trump regime are beginning to pull it apart? Maybe, but I’m not promising that will happen tomorrow, or that it will be painless. We’ve finally reached the point when even most mainstream American liberals understand that there’s no going back to the arc-of-progress upward narrative of the Obama era, which was itself imaginary and damaging, largely because the massive hubris of those years is what brought us here.
It’s a side point, perhaps, that the writer blames the (to him) unreasonably optimistic Obama era narrative of progress for the backlash by Trump voters. It’s the same “human struggle” I’ve been referring to, from a different angle.
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Briefly noted.
- Reuters, 7 Dec 2025 (via): Kremlin says new US security strategy accords largely with Russia’s view
- Not a surprise, given America’s new isolationism.
- JMG, 6 Dec 2025: Palantir Co-Founder Joe Lonsdale Calls For Return To Public Hangings: “Bring Back Masculine Leadership” (from The Nerd Reich: Joe Lonsdale Calls For Public Hangings)
- This is caveman conservative’s ideas of masculinity. And this kind of thing is exactly what Steven Pinker, in the book I just summarized, thinks human civilization has overcome. But pockets of such thinking will never go away. And Pinker is still right, statistically.
- JMG, 7 Dec 2025: Trump’s “Presidential Library” To Be 47-Story Tower (via Politico
- “Library”? Neither piece mentions books. Trump doesn’t read books.
- JMG, 7 Dec 2025: SURVEY: Most Pastors Now Use AI To Write Sermons (from Christian Post)
- Remember how AI works. There are multiple ironies in this story.
