Weekly Roundup: Cultural Crusades: From Hegseth's Boat Attacks to Oklahoma's Classrooms
Brad and Dan return with a packed Weekly Roundup that cuts through the noise of culture war headlines to get at what is really happening in American politics and religion this week. They start with the bizarre story dominating Congress: alleged Venezuelan narco boats, U.S. military strikes, and the growing scrutiny around Pete Hegseth’s involvement. Brad and Dan unpack the legal and ethical questions raised by the operation, the bipartisan concerns over potential war crimes, and the way Hegseth’s rhetoric is being weaponized in the larger project of authoritarian politics. As blame shifts within the administration, the hosts look at how these events fit into a longer pattern of circumventing democratic norms under the guise of national security.
From there, the episode moves into the latest culture war flashpoint out of Oklahoma. A University of Oklahoma student, Samantha Fulnecky, received a failing grade on a paper centered on conservative Christian claims, and the incident was quickly inflated into a statewide moral panic. Brad and Dan trace how a classroom disagreement became a coordinated spectacle, how politicians and media personalities seized on the moment, and what the uproar reveals about academic freedom and the pressure educators face in a polarized climate. They discuss the difference between expressing a viewpoint and meeting academic standards, and why higher education has become a convenient battleground for Christian nationalist narratives.
The hosts also break down the Supreme Court’s decision to keep Texas’s contested congressional maps in place for 2026. They examine the racial and partisan consequences of the ruling, what political leaders are saying in response, and how the decision fits into a broader assault on voting rights and democratic representation. Despite the heavy topics, Brad and Dan close with reasons for hope. They highlight ongoing pushback against authoritarian politics, communities organizing for justice, and signs that democratic accountability remains possible.
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I'm Brad O'Nishi, founder of Axis Mundy Media, author Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, here with my co-host, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
Good to be with you.
You too, it's December.
It's at least where I am.
The weather's murky, and we're going to make today even better by spending one hour on the Olivia Nuzzy memoir.
No, we're not.
Just kidding.
Don't worry.
Everyone stay here.
Don't hang up.
Don't friend.
That's what we're doing, man.
I'm out.
I'm out.
Yeah.
We're going to talk about what's going on with the congressional oversight of the Venezuelan narco boat assassinations and murders.
What's going on with Pete Hegseth and that whole mire and what might be next.
We'll then get to the controversy out of the University of Oklahoma where a student, a conservative Christian student, was given a failing grade on a paper and then went straight to the media, eventually to the Oklahoma state legislature and got the instructor put on leave because she asserted her opinion on gender and the Bible in the paper.
We'll dig into that, see what actually happened there.
We'll finish with a few minutes on the Supreme Court's ruling of the Texas Congressional District maps and what that means.
Lots to cover.
Lesko.
All right, Dan, I'm sure a lot of folks have been following what's going on here with the videos that Congress has been seeing, at least some congressional members have been seeing about attacks on the narco boats that the PTAC Seth has ordered.
Once again, I said it last week.
Christy Noam had the finger pointed at her by DOJ, and we're now getting the finger pointed at Pete Hegseth.
I said more would come, that there would be more cracks, there would be more fear that folks would be sent to The Hague, charged with war crimes, put in jail, and that is when you would start to see the blame game.
Pete Hegseth has done some of that.
He's tried to pin this on someone in the chain of command, Admiral Bradley.
We'll talk about that, but take us through what happened with this and your initial thoughts.
Yeah, so of course, it's part of the bigger issue of the targeting of the so-called Narco boats generally is this bigger issue about whether or not this targeting international waters violates, depending who you ask, everything from American national interests all the way over to articles of war and like war crimes and different kinds of things like this.
The specific issue, though, it was a story broken, I believe by the Washington Post, that basically said that Hegseth gave the order to kill everyone, kill them all on this one boat.
And it resulted in what people have been calling a double tap strike.
And so there was a special operation strike on one of these Narco boats, apparently with two missiles, capsized the boat, killed most of the crew.
And this is where you talk about it being murky.
This is where the accounts differ.
But the Washington Post account was that Hegseth said killed them all.
And so a second strike was ordered that destroyed the boat.
But there were survivors of the first strike who appeared to be clinging to the wreckage.
And so this is the issue that arises, as I have learned looking at this, as you've probably learned, as others who've looked at it have probably learned.
Under sort of U.S. rules of engagement, anybody who's they're considered shipwrecked at that point and non-combatants.
Same with like a fighter pilot who parachutes out of the plane.
They're in the parachute, they're considered to have been removed from the fray and they are protected as non-combatants.
And so the issue is about the legality, the ethics and the legality of this purported double tap strike.
This is where.
So the Trump administration initially said oh, nothing to see here, nothing happened.
Hegseth said it was fake news, etc etc etc.
And then the Trump administration said well, it did happen, but Pete Hegseth didn't know anything about it.
And Pete Hegseth has said that.
You know he, he saw the first strike on video and then he had other meetings to go to, so he left and, as you say, the finger pointing, trying to point the finger at admiral Bradley, who's the head of special operations and apparently authorized the strike, saying that it was his decision to do this, did the thing where he tried to.
You know, said he supported Bradley, but is also clearly pointing the finger by saying, you know, I don't know.
He made the command decisions.
He has my full support, but he made the command decisions.
I support him, but he made the command decisions trying to to take himself out of it.
Bradley briefed congressional leaders on apparently classified information, including these videos, has made the argument that they were not non-combatants in that role, that they were trying to continue the fight, or I i've heard from some accounts go P accounts, these meetings that they were trying to the boat.
This is not like a rowboat, it's not like a little two-person boat that two people are going to like uncapsize, but the idea being that they were still in the fight and so this was legal.
He apparently testified that Hegseth did not give an order to kill them all.
Not surprising.
It was interesting that there was a lot of bipartisan concern about this.
Members of both parties avowed oversight.
Members of both parties have said that if this double tap occurred as reported, it would be a war crime and it would be a violation.
You've had even the rare person in the GOP calling for Hegseth to resign or step down.
However, coming out of that briefing, not surprisingly, you had a lot of very different partisan views of this.
Democrats coming out of the briefing said that they, you know, were convinced that these, these people should have been protected, and so forth.
Republicans came out saying, well, it looks like, you know, admiral Bradley had good reasons for doing what he did and and so on.
So a big mess in a lot of ways, but it highlights a number of things about, I think, the Hegseth Department OF WAR, the Hegseth view of the military, the Hegseth, you know, kill them, all kind of thing.
He's always.
He's kind of weird this way.
He's always talking about lethality.
Every time he's talking about the military, he's talking about lethality and killing and warriors and this notion.
So yeah, it's been a real mess.
Number of people have pointed out any other administration, Hegseth would be gone period, as soon as you're to the point.
I read one article that said it this way, when the president has to come out and say that you have his full support, that's usually like three days before you step down and resign.
But Hegseth is still there.
It's not clear how this plays out, but that's.
That's the story that has been playing out for the last several days.
Well, let me play you a clip of representative Himes from Connecticut, who is a Democrat uh, talking about what he saw when he he came out of the room where he he watched the video in question.
Here's what he said, what I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things i've seen in my time in In public service.
Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors.
He is a Democrat, but there is also a Representative Mike Turner from Ohio, who is a Republican, who said he made the rounds on the news shows, and here's what he said in one interview about what he saw.
What's also so concerning here is as you know and as you guys have reported, you know, this activity that's happening in the Caribbean where they're hitting these boats, these individuals, if they were captured and tried and convicted, they would be guilty if they were found guilty of criminal activity for which they're not subject to capital punishment.
They would be put in jail.
They wouldn't be subject to capital punishment.
These people are being killed, not held and put in prison.
So the concerning of whether or not the intelligence is accurate, whether we actually know what's happening, who these people are, is very, very concerning when you have the highest bar of that capital punishment is being executed here.
So at least, you know, from Turner, and there are a few other Republicans who I think are kind of taking this position, there is a sense that there is deep concern about this, that this is a situation where you have people who have been attacked in a boat.
They are wounded.
Their boat is incapacitated.
They are floating in open water.
So the idea that they would, according to Admiral Bradley, be preparing to pick up the fight seems blatantly ridiculous.
And I think that's part of what's at question here.
I want to offer one analytical point about Hegseth and the Trump administration in general.
And then I'm sure you have a bunch of more to say on this.
I just did a great interview with Rachel Wagner of Ithaca College and her new book, Cowboy Apocalypse.
And I'll be posting that here in the next couple of weeks.
But Rachel and I talked about in that interview the idea that in gun culture and the just overwhelming proliferation of guns in the United States, that a bullet is not democratic in the sense that it's a discussion or a dialogue.
Like a bullet is basically a, I'm not talking about this.
I'm ending you.
You know, the idea of a bullet as the antithesis of dialogue and debate and negotiation.
And Dan, I think you as a social theorist and a political theorist know better than me that democracy is based on negotiation, dialogue, ongoing tussles and fights, but those fights being ones in which we share power and we recognize a majority and we accommodate and we recognize and we have to make room for other opinions and other kinds of people, all that.
Why am I talking about that?
I think since Pete Hegseth has been sworn in and confirmed, he has talked about lethality, as you've said.
And to me, if you study Pete Hegseth's statements, if somebody wanted to do a nice master's thesis on Pete Hegseth and his rhetoric, you would come away with the idea that he really is disgusted by democracy in the sense that democracy affords everybody the same power.
Black people, immigrants, women, trans people, and so on.
And he's always saying, he's always talking about standards and lethality.
And to me, when you think about these boats and just the attack on people who, and it's not clear, like, is there actual, where is the, is the drug somewhere?
Do we have pictures of that?
Do we know for sure?
Moreover, if you are running drugs and you are incapacitated, those are crimes for which you should be put in jail and tried and punished.
They are not crimes that deserve the death penalty under U.S. law or other, like most countries in the world and so on.
What's the point?
Hegseth is really to me the emblem of the Trump administration saying, we don't have time to follow the rule of law.
We are the rule of law.
And as the rule of law, we don't want to discuss or debate or dialogue.
We don't want to negotiate.
We don't want to listen.
We will either end you or you will abide by what we say.
I've used the metaphor before.
I'll use it again.
You know, you're the parent who's trying to work with their kid.
In my case, my kids are young.
They're in preschool.
Your kids are older, teenagers, and so on.
It doesn't matter what age they are.
You are the kind of parent who's going to work with your kid, talk to them, listen to what they want, but also be authoritative and, you know, the person who ultimately makes decisions and looks out for their best interest.
Or you can be the authoritarian parent who simply says, it's my way or the highway.
You listen to me or not.
And this is how it goes.
There's no sense of like listening or dialogue or understanding.
Okay.
Well, Trump as the big daddy of the, you know, the strongman GOP has his knight in shining armor, Pete Hegseth, basically saying, if you, if you do something we don't like, we will kill you.
And there's a disturbing tweet that he had yesterday where Andrew Colvett, who's like a podcaster, TPUSA spokesman, and is one of the producers of the Charlie Kirk show, says, every new attack aimed at Pete Hegseth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean, which is sort of like the American right in a nutshell right now.
Like every time you say we can't do something because it's murderous and barbarous and cruel, it makes me want to be more murderous and barbarous and cruel, as if that is somehow a healthy response.
But what does Pete Hegseth say to Andrew when he tweets this?
Your wishes are command, Andrew.
Just sunk another narco boat.
Like the Secretary of Defense slash war is now somebody who quote tweets podcasters saying, you asked for it.
We did it.
We killed more people who were speeding along in a boat.
We're not in a war.
We've not declared war.
Congress has not approved a war, but we're just killing people willy-nilly despite the rule of law, international rules of engagement, etc.
It doesn't matter.
I want to say more about Hegseth as a kind of Christian crusader, but I'll throw it to you.
What are your thoughts on any of this stuff or more?
I think I agree with everything that you're saying.
I think even more than like, like there's the rule of law, but also the rule of due process, which is part of the rule of law.
But you look at everything the Trump administration does, it's about denying due process because due process is annoying.
So is my camera.
Due process is annoying.
Due process is a problem.
Due process is slow.
Due process is inefficient.
Due process makes it so the people we knew were guilty the whole time got to drag things out, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We see this in immigration.
What are they going to do?
We're just going to get everybody out and we're not going to do due process.
Why the executive orders?
To bypass all the messy business of having to go through a whole legal process and a due political process to pass legislation and to bring things into being.
We're just going to do executive orders instead.
These military attacks are the same thing.
As you're saying, there's no interdiction of these people.
There's no arrest or detainment of these people.
There's no trial of these people.
Partly, I'm assuming, because they're in international waters and, you know, the U.S. doesn't have jurisdiction there.
So we'll just blow them up instead.
But I think that's the theme.
And it's to your point of due process, it is.
It's messy and it's inefficient and it is intended to be slow and to make sure that miscarriages of justice are less likely to happen.
And we know that that's not what the Trump administration sees or wants to do.
That's not what a model of a unitary executive does.
That's not what Hegseth believes in.
And so we see this over and over and over.
And I also like the analogy you have of the parenting analogy of the parent who tries to work with the kids or be somewhat collaborative.
People can think of work relationships.
Like you've got a boss and at the end of the day, they're going to make the call, but you've got bosses that are collaborative.
You've got bosses that can be responsive and you got the authoritarian bosses.
And Hegseth, you know, with that, you know, your wishes are a command.
It's like, it's kind of the, you know, the old model of the parent is like, you stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about.
You're being barbarous and terrible.
Yeah.
Well, you just watch how barbarous and terrible we can be.
We'll show you.
Or, and I think the final piece of this that is probably not surprising either, given Donald Trump and who he is, it's the reality show feel of all of this.
It's like, what does the audience want?
The audience wants more drug boats blown up.
Like, you know, your wishes are a command.
That kind of notion, the irreality of it all is chilling to me.
I think that's exactly right.
I think there is a deep sense here that the United States federal government, at least the executive branch, has been sucked into a reality show worldview and that nothing is real.
And I think that's a point that we could stay on for a number of minutes.
I want to make just like two or three more points here.
One is Holsley, who's the U.S. Southern Command head, is going to retire here in a couple of days, but he's the one who has gone into battle with Hegseth himself and said, I'm not going to do the stuff you want to do.
It's not legal.
This is not what the U.S. military does.
And Hegseth has said, if you're not on the team, then you need to leave.
And that's what's happening.
It's pretty clear why Alvin Holsley doesn't want to be part of the Southern Command anymore.
So I think that's something that has to be said.
I think in addition, we have to mention here that there's all of this rhetoric from Hegseth from the Trump administration about we won't let fentanyl into the country.
We won't let narco-terrorists come in here.
There's these ridiculous statistics thrown around by Christy Noam and Pete Hegseth about how this many pounds of fentanyl was captured before it could enter the country, meaning you saved 100 million lives.
And it's like, there's only what, how many Americans are there?
Okay.
What is going on?
A third of all Americans would have died if this boat had hit the shores.
Yeah.
I just also want to point out, Kira Butler at Mother Jones, but a lot of other people have covered this, that a U.S. district court sentenced Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking.
He was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in bribes and importing 500 tons of cocaine into the United States, where he was extradited after completing his second presidential term in 2022.
Biden and his administration considered this conviction a huge victory.
But guess who just pardoned him?
Donald Trump.
And so there's this sense here of like, we're going to obliterate and murder people in a boat, people who there's many, many reports were fishermen and not drug runners, at least in certain, some of the cases.
And then when it comes to somebody who's at the very top of the system, who was really, really influential in allowing like hundreds of tons of cocaine into our country, he is pardoned.
Now, there's a lot of rabbit holes we could go down as to why he was pardoned.
There are Peter Thiel and Tech Bro interests in Honduras at a network state called Prospera.
I've studied that because of the book I'm writing.
There is just the simple fact that Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut, has suggested that Trump has pardoned high-level people because there are kickbacks to him in the form of his business interests and other things.
Trump has pardoned 1,500 people in this term, including the J6 writers and other criminals, including, well, I could go down the list.
That is in comparison to about like 100 from previous presidents at this point.
So we have to mention that rank hypocrisy.
I want to mention one more thing, though, about Hegseth, and then I'll throw it to you and we can move on.
I'm starting to see the Trump administration, Dan, as like people who are in on it and people who are not in on it.
And by it, I mean the con.
So hear me out.
This could be a crackpot theory, and people out there may or may not buy it.
But I think the financial guys in the Trump administration, so I'm thinking of like Scott Besant and Howard Luttnick.
I think what they know what they're in is a con.
I think they know they're going to make billions of dollars through everything that is happening from the anti-regulation laws, the crypto stuff, the destruction of federal lands.
Like you name it.
I think like Lutnik and Besant are like, this is like you can see the dollar signs in those guys' eyes when they talk, especially Besant.
Okay.
And when I look at those two, I think of the two advisors from succession, the guys that were with the Roy family from the start.
Okay.
And they're like, yes men.
They have no spine.
They have no like actual character.
And even at the very end, when like the handoff takes place in succession, and I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it, but the person who's going to take over the corporation takes over, they're still there.
And they go for one more ride and they make more money.
While the kids in succession, vying to be the successors to the throne, eat each other, battle each other.
And eventually, I'll try not to spoil it, but eventually none of them really gets what they want.
I think the financial guys in the Trump administration are here to like make billions.
Now, they could go down for something.
For the most part, though, I think they know what they're doing.
Christy Noam and Pete Hegseth, and I think to some extent RFK, I think they think they're fighting some sort of fight, especially Noam and Hegseth, where they think they're going to come out and win in the end.
And I don't know if I'm making any sense.
I don't think they realize they're part of a sham.
Like Pete Hegseth thinks of himself as a Christian crusader, a knight who is serving the king.
And when he got in here to this post, he was wholly unqualified for.
He starts calling for these orders of killing these narco, you know, the people on these narco boats, these or fishermen boats.
I don't even want to call them narco boats, people who are on boats.
They're just killing them.
Christy Noam is getting the finger pointed at her at DOJ of like, oh, yeah, she's the one who said don't turn the plane around.
Noam and Hegseth are Christian culture warriors who think they're going to win in the end of this.
The financial guys are like, I don't know if I'm going to win or not.
I just know I'm going to get a lot richer.
That's why I'm here.
And I think that's why Noam and Hegseth are more likely to go down for war crimes and for other like, you know, breaches of justice at the end of all of this, because they're actually ideologically committed to what's happening in some sense, in some way or another.
And like, I don't think Pete Hegseth knows that he's part of a sham.
I think he thinks he's actually a serious person who's fighting a serious crusade with serious ideological bona fides.
And he doesn't understand that as soon as it's time for him to be sacrificed on the altar, he will be.
It may not be this time, but he will go down.
And I don't know if he sees that coming.
Anyway, tell me if I make sense.
Other thoughts, and then we'll take a break.
That does make sense.
I mean, I'll stick with that analogy for a minute.
It's like, you know, a different analogy is like all the movies people have ever seen where you have like the teen cool group and you got that kid who wants to be part of it.
And I don't know, maybe it's a kid who lives, waits all summer and joins the football team and now the football players will hang out with him.
Or maybe it's the woman who wants to be on the cheer squad and she finally, you know, whatever.
They finally cross that threshold and they're part of it.
But like, as it goes, it's pretty clear that they're not really part of the in-group.
And yeah, when somebody has to be, you know, cut loose or they need to have a scapegoat or whatever, like that's the person who it's going to be.
And so I think it's real.
I mean, the one thing that you look at Trump historically is consistent.
He wants power and he wants money.
Like those are the two things he wants.
That's why he is where he is.
He is also making a fortune as president.
And I think he very much has been pulling the strings of culture war for a long time for the sake of getting what?
Money, power, influence.
That's what he wants.
Go all the way back to the Central Park V, go to birtherism, go to, you know, a long history with Trump.
That's what he's about.
And so I think that's, that's his in-group.
So those financial guys that you're talking about who are playing those roles, I think, I think they're in.
I think you're right.
The real culture war people, the Stephen Millers, the Christy Noams, the Pete Hegseths who believe in these causes, they're there as long as Trump thinks there's an advantage to having them there.
But they're those kids who think they're part of the cool group.
They think they're part of the in-group and they're not.
And he'll cut them loose.
And the world is littered with Trump loyalists who discovered too late, and in some cases, still never discovered after it happened, never could come to terms with it, that Trump cut them loose because they weren't part of the cool in crowd and whatever.
And I think we'll see that.
So if the heat really gets high, I don't think there'll be any hesitation on the part of Trump to throw people like Hegseth under the bus.
Just as for Hegseth, there's no hesitation in throwing Admiral Bradley under the proverbial bus.
Same with Christy Noams.
I think there's a lot to commend that, that there's Trump and then there's a kind of inner circle.
And there are those who think that they're in that inner circle who really aren't.
And don't get me wrong.
I think Trump is racist to his core.
I think he's xenophobic to his core.
I think what he said about Somalian Americans in Minnesota was despicable this week.
And if you haven't heard that, you should look it up if you want to.
It will not help your mental health.
So don't get me wrong.
I think Trump is racist and xenophobic to his core.
But I guess like, Dan, just if you go back with me to those early days of 2016 when Trump was elected, we could all see clearly then that this was a businessman reality TV star playing a bunch of white Christians to get their votes while he did not share their ideological culture war beliefs.
10 years later, Pete Hegseth is like this born-again Christian crusader in the image of Doug Wilson, and he's out here destroying fishermen boats and claiming that he's somehow like this, you know, second coming of General MacArthur.
All the while Trump is pardoning an ex-Honduran president who allowed 400 tons of cocaine into our country.
And you can, is it, is that not the perfect like reminder that Trump is just doing things for money and power while playing a bunch of white Christians along with their xenophobic racist games to make sure they still support him?
And this is not me saying Trump is not racist or xenophobic to his core.
He is.
I just think if you break this down, though, here's Hegseth thinking he's fighting some noble battle, rescuing Jerusalem from the infidels.
And Trump is like, oh, yeah, I just pardoned everybody at the top of the pyramid in the war you're fighting.
I don't know.
I just don't think Hegseth knows that he's, he just doesn't seem like he's in on the joke.
You know what I'm saying?
And we'll see what happens.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and go to Oklahoma.
And the culture wars there, which are apparently raging.
Be right back.
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All right, Dan, here we go.
You ready?
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Samantha Fulnecki, age 20, filed a complaint with the administration at the University of Oklahoma after she wrote a paper for a developmental psychology course.
The psychology, excuse me, the assignment in the course was about lifespan development, and students were asked to write a 650-word response to an academic study that examined whether conformity with gender norms was associated with popularity or bullying among middle school students.
So I want to stop for a minute and I want to try to frame this, Dan, in the best way I can.
Here's a student who gets a zero out of 25 on a paper that is worth 3% of her grade.
So she can still do well in the class.
Ostensibly, she could still get an A in the class.
This is not a failing grade for the entire course, nothing like that.
Nonetheless, she complains.
The instructor who is a transgender person and is a graduate student, does not have the protections of tenure or anything else, is put on leave.
So that all happens.
Okay.
Just yesterday, I saw that Samantha was welcomed at the Oklahoma legislature, the Oklahoma House of Representatives, I should say, and given a citation of recognition from District 98 of that legislative body for her steadfast convictions, her commitment to speaking from a foundation of truth, and her courage in shining light on serious concerns within Oklahoma's higher education system.
That is where we are.
She got a participation trophy, it seems, for her zero out of 25 grade.
This seems to me like DEI for white kids who fail college, but nonetheless, we can talk about that later.
Let me set up the assignment, though, and then you and I can get into what she wrote and what the ins and outs of this are.
This is one of those deals where you're a student and you have to read an article.
And the article is like, here is how we measured the ways that students in middle school are bullied according to gender standards and norms.
And that bullying is designed to keep gender standards and norms in line in the middle school social economy.
In other words, what they're looking at is kids who, you know, don't fit into certain gender stereotypes.
Other kids make fun of them and it brings them back in line.
Kids tend to try to conform to gender norms because people tease them and bully them if they don't.
That's what it's trying to sort of quantitatively and qualitatively look at among middle schoolers.
You're a 13-year-old girl, you wear boy clothes, that's what the kids at school say.
You're a 14-year-old boy, and you paint your fingernails, and you're getting made fun of.
And now all of a sudden, you don't do those things.
You ask for new clothes from your parents.
You start to blah, Okay.
So that is the assignment.
I'm going to read a little bit, Dan, of the paper, and then I'll just let you jump in because I know you're going to have like a million things to say.
Here we go.
It is frustrating to me when I read articles like this and discussion posts from my classmates of so many people trying to conform to the same mundane opinion so they do not step on people's toes.
I think that is a cowardly and insincere way to live.
Freedom!
Brave heart.
Okay, sorry.
William Wallace.
Okay.
It is important to use the freedom. of speech we have been given in this country.
And I personally believe that eliminating gender in our society would be detrimental as it pulls us farther from God's original plan for humans.
It is perfectly normal for kids to follow gender stereotypes because that is how God made us.
The reason so many girls want to feel womanly and care for others in a motherly way is not because they feel pressured to fit into social norms.
It is because God created and chose them to reflect his beauty and his compassion in that way.
In Genesis, God says that it is not good for man to be alone.
So he created a helper for man, which is a woman.
Many people assume the word helper in this context to be condescending and offensive to women.
However, the original word in Hebrew and blah, Take it away.
Just go ahead.
I'm going to just go ahead.
There's a lot about this.
And so the first thing I want to talk about is how this was designed.
This followed a script and was intended to be a spectacle.
I don't know the full neck when she wrote this essay was intending it to go where it did, but she was ready when it did.
So she gets a response.
The TA comments said, among other things, and so I'm reading the comments as they've been reported in various places.
So again, as you said, she received a zero out of 25 on this essay.
I don't know.
I don't know if you've seen, I haven't seen, but having taught for a long time.
I don't know if she had the opportunity to even redo the essay or turn it in for partial credit or something.
And it's, again, it's a small portion of the total points, et cetera, et cetera.
Anyway, the comments said, please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs, but instead I am deducting points for you posting a reaction paper that does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.
While you're entitled to your own personal beliefs, there's an appropriate time or place to implement them in your reflections.
I encourage all students to question or challenge the course material with other empirical findings or testable hypotheses, but using your own personal beliefs to argue against the findings of not only this article, but the findings of countless articles across psychology, biology, sociology, et cetera, is not best practice.
She also goes on to say, additionally, to call an entire group of people demonic, as she does, she says that it's a demonic teaching to affirm that there's not fixed genders and so forth, is highly offensive, especially a minoritized population.
I can't help but feel that it's also, I think, relevant here that the TA is a transgender person in sort of feeling this.
So she receives a zero.
And what does she do, Brad?
Like, who does she contact?
She doesn't start by going to the university office.
And if people don't know this, I want them to know this.
Every institution I know of has policies about this kind of thing.
If you are a student and you think that you received an unfair grade, and I have students who approach me sometimes, they're like, I don't feel like this grade was fair.
I'm happy to meet with them.
And I will tell them, if you still have concerns about this, I invite you first, go talk to my chair.
Raise the concerns of my chair.
My chair will approach, like, you know, whatever.
There's a policy for that.
If you don't like that, you can go to the dean.
You know, there's, there are, are procedures and policies for this.
There is an office at OU that eventually got involved where students can lodge a complaint.
She eventually did, saying that her First Amendment rights had been violated and that she was discriminated against because of her Christian views, as is her right to make that claim and file that complaint and so forth.
But she didn't start there.
She contacted the governor of Oklahoma.
She contacted the president of the University of Oklahoma.
She contacted, you know, the local sort of like right-wing professor watchdog group.
TPUSA got involved.
All of this happened.
And then it goes through those formal channels after Governor Stitt in Oklahoma is posting on X about, you know, the violation of free speech and so forth.
So when I say it follows a script, that's where it was.
We're looking for another Texas A ⁇ M.
And she sees her moment.
And she seeks it and like we're going to go to the governor and we're going to go to the president of the university and we're going to target this faculty member.
For for this we're not, we're not going to, we're not just going to go file a complaint which, had the complaint been filed, it's entirely possible that it's standard pro forma exercise to place the faculty member on leave while it's investigated and so forth.
I don't know the ins and outs of the University OF Oklahoma, but that's, that's possible, that that's the policy.
But that's not what happened.
Her mom has been all over social media on this.
Her mom is an attorney who, among other things, defends January 6th conspirators.
That's who this is.
So this was this was highly orchestrated, it was designed to be a spectacle.
I think it feeds into lots of issues of identity.
We've been talking about our friend Sarah Mosliner a lot and her book and the stuff that she does about white uh, purity and specifically white women appealing to this notion of innocence and purity as like a kind of defense about things.
And this student looks like she's out of central casting for the poor white innocent, you know, college student who's being targeted for her Christian beliefs, like all of those dynamics are there.
So this is well scripted, this is well choreographed, this is a playbook that was ready to be picked up, and so that that's my first set of thoughts.
I have another set of thoughts about the ta in this, that it gets kind of wonky and professory and whatever.
But this was all very clearly designed to have this outcome as soon as it happened.
And if you don't think it does, I just want people to think about if something happened to you and you needed to contact the governor of your state.
Do you know how to do that?
I don't know how to do that.
Would they respond to it and they were watching for it?
Would they respond?
I mean, I could send yeah, whatever we can talk about it.
You could put social media posts to the governor of whatever state and doesn't mean that they're going to respond to you, but this was all.
They were ready for it, okay.
So I think this will take us into territory that you're discussing, with the kind of aspects of the, the assignment.
The assignment does allow for reflection on personal experience and your, your worldview, your opinion.
People on social media have been noticing and commenting.
People in our profession have been saying, look, this really feels like the kind of assignment that is, read the article, comment for a page and a half or two, two pages on what you read, and as long as I think that you read the article and had some sort of human engagement with it, I will give you credit.
Were you conscious and breathing, and you strung some sentences together.
It's a low bar, oftentimes like in the old days, and now I sound, just sound as old as me breath I. You know.
I imagine myself as a student.
You have the, the physical paper, not the pdf.
PDF, not on your computer, not on your phone.
And I'm like underlining, I'm writing a few notes.
I write a reflection on this and I turn it in.
Is it a masterpiece of nonfiction writing?
Nope.
Is it going to cite other sources?
No.
And that was not part of the assignment.
You did not have to do research and that's fine.
That's not.
She does not quote the Bible.
She says, oh, I've quoted the Bible.
She doesn't.
She references the Bible, does not quote the Bible.
There's a difference between that.
The thing, though, that I think is really the problem here is the article was about one thing, and she talked about something else altogether.
So the question was: can we determine through social scientific measurement whether or not students in middle school are bullied according to their gender nonconformity?
And can we take away why they are bullied?
Is it because they are not sufficiently iterating or manifesting or performing standard conceptions of being a girl and being a boy who are 12 and 13 and 14 years old?
So if I ask you that question, I say, Dan, please read this paper and tell me what you think about whether or not the authors, the researchers were able to determine that.
What are some things that they found out?
What are some things that you thought were actually worth noticing there?
What are some things you might think need to be studied further or were not conclusive or were there holes here?
Were there problems?
That's what we're doing.
We're not asking you if you think transgender people exist.
We're not asking you if you think that it is biblical or theologically orthodox to recognize that there are more than two genders.
No one is talking about that.
We are saying we studied this.
We want to know if people were bullied for this reason.
We want to know if that bullying worked to make them conform to gender stereotypes.
I'm going to give you a very silly example that I've shared on this podcast before.
I'll share it again.
I had like two years of Spanish when I would go down to do mission trips with my mega church, my evangelical megachurch.
And I eventually got fairly good at Spanish, but like two years into Spanish, I was the kind of person who could like talk to you as long as I didn't get out of a certain thing.
Now, at the time, as a sophomore in high school, I have, to this day, you know, we've talked about this, Dan, I have a lot of hair still, which is nice for me.
I'm, you know, unreasonably short.
You are not.
You're Dan Miller.
You're built like a professional wrestler.
We've talked about this.
So you and I have our good and bad attributes.
Okay, great.
As a sophomore in high school, I had even more hair.
I had what appeared to be this like huge, massive surfer kind of fro thing going on.
And the kid, I really did.
I really did.
The pictures are pretty, they're pretty cringy.
But the kids in Mexico love this.
And so I was in charge of all the like sports equipment for my little outfit.
So kids would come ask me for like basketballs and soccer balls and stuff.
And for some reason, I didn't know the word for ball.
I don't know why.
The word is pelota.
But the word for hair, the word for hair is pelo.
So all these kids in the village all week would be like touching me and be like, pelo, pelo loco, like crazy hair.
And I'd be like, yeah, you're right.
So this little dude walks up to me and he's like, you know, like he asked me for like a ball.
He's like, you know, he's like, tienen pelota.
Like, do you have a ball for me?
And I responded, see, me pelo es loco.
Like, está loco.
Like, I have, yes, I do have crazy.
Like this little poor guy, eight years old is like, hey, you're like, I have crazy hair.
And I'm like, yes, I do have crazy hair.
And he just looked at me and he went and like got a teenager and the teenager came back and in like broken English was like, yo, this dude just wants a ball.
I was like, oh, yeah, no problem.
Here's your ball.
And everyone at this point is like, you know, Brad's lost it.
It's Friday.
He needs a break.
This woman was asked a question.
Do you think these folks are bullied for this reason?
And she responded, in the book of Genesis, God created woman to be beautiful and to have a feminine essence.
And you're like, okay, great.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm asking you a different question.
That's why you got zero out of 25.
But then all of a sudden she's at the Oklahoma House of Representatives and they're saying she's a beacon of truth and courage because when somebody said, hey, do you think in this scientific study this actually happened?
She said, according to Genesis, God made men to be manly.
And it's like, all right, bro, you got zero out of 25.
I don't know how else to say it.
Now, tell us why the TA got themselves in a little bit of hot water in the way that they like framed the essay.
So I agree with everything you're saying.
So I want to be clear about this.
What I'm about to say is not a criticism of the subject matter.
It's not a criticism of this.
I had this realization recently.
And this is going to sound maybe obvious, but I am mid-career, Brad.
I had the sense of like you're always starting out.
And I'm like, I'm walking around AAR, that conference we go to.
I'm looking around like, oh, my God, like I'm, I'm like a mid-career person now.
So I've been doing this for a while.
So what I also know, both as an instructor and as having been chair for a period of time is sometimes you have to be clear in your guidelines about what you're looking for and what you're not.
And if you aren't, it can bite you.
And I think this is what is also happening here.
So one of the things, part of the guidelines said this, they said that you had to write a 650-word reaction paper, just so you're describing, quote, demonstrating that you read the assigned article and including a thoughtful reaction to the material presented in the article.
Went on to say that possible approaches to reaction papers include, one, a discussion of why you feel the topic is important and worthy of study or not.
And two, an application of the result or studies to your own experiences.
If I'm looking at this, and this is how this could have gone.
If you're a student and you don't want to set the person up and create a spectacle and go to the Oklahoma legislature and everything else, what you could say is, I actually think I fulfill the guidelines of the assignment.
I talked about why I think it's important or not.
And I related it to my experiences.
I don't think that you were very clear that that's not what I should have done or whatever.
And you have a discussion.
Okay.
People have quibbled online, other faculty members who are supportive of the grad student in question who've also said, was it really a zero out of 25?
It does seem that the student read the article.
They were responding to it, et cetera, whatever.
That's all.
Yeah.
Maybe, maybe they read the title.
Maybe they read it.
They read part of it, but they knew enough about the whole like teasing and whatever that, you know, there's some content from the article in their response, whatever.
Here's my point or my concern when it comes to the grad student is when the grad student writes and says that you didn't question or challenge the course material with other empirical findings or testable hypotheses.
Didn't say in the assignment that you need to have testable hypotheses.
The grad student also waded into the fraught territory of saying, while you're entitled to your own personal beliefs, dot, dot, dot, or I'm not deducting points because you have certain beliefs, dot, dot, dot.
All that does is foreground for somebody who is setting a trap for you.
You just walked into it.
You just said, I'm going to take your beliefs and place them front and center.
It's just the cautionary tale in a higher ed landscape where we are targeted.
There are these traps and they are laid out to say, if you want a critical analysis that says, you say things like, based on other psychological studies, how does this relate to this?
Or based on other course materials we have discussed, how does it relate to this?
Or please relate the findings of this article to article X, Y, or Z that we've looked at earlier in the semester.
You do those kinds of things because what it does is it lets you stay on the territory of fact and method.
This is a junior level psychology course.
You are a psychology major.
How this person is a psych major, I don't know, but you are a psychology major.
Here's what you're expected to do.
People could reasonably say, well, hey, as an upper division psychology major, shouldn't you know that you're expected to talk about empirical findings and so forth?
Yep, absolutely should.
And after all these years in higher ed working with undergrads and in the current climate where we're at, cover your ass by having guidelines that clearly say that so that when somebody comes to you and says, I was discriminated against because of my religious beliefs, you can say, nope, the guidelines said that you needed to reference empirical studies and you didn't.
Or the guidelines said that you needed to relate this to other course materials and you didn't.
Or the guidelines said that you needed to do things like, you know, if you're going to bring personal experience in, how do the contemporary findings of psychology challenge or, you know, or align with personal views that you had before taking this course or whatever.
You create the space for students to say these things.
But in asking for, you know, how do you feel about the topic, relating it to your own experiences, whether this was intentional or not, you are soliciting opinion and you're soliciting experience.
And then when you turn around and you can then be perceived as giving a bad grade for people sharing their experiences, I think the grad student kind of walked into the trap.
And that's not intended.
I want to be clear about this.
I am not saying that what this student did was fair or justified.
I'm not saying this was a bad assignment, but I am saying that it shows in a fraught higher ed landscape, there are traps that are laid for precisely this kind of issue.
And this shows how much people in higher ed have to be aware of those and have to kind of structure what they do in ways to be able to avoid those traps and let them respond in ways and say, this wasn't about free speech.
This wasn't about religious articulation.
This was about a really clear-cut example of in a psych course, these are the theory, theoretical and methodological things we're looking at.
That wasn't addressed in this essay.
Therefore, you lost points.
And I don't know if that makes sense to folks, but it's a cautionary tale, I think, for anybody in higher ed.
And I don't think either of us, and I'll just say, I don't.
I don't think that this instructor should have been punished.
I don't think this instructor should have been put on administrative leave.
I don't think, I think the right course of action here would have been a full-throated defense of this instructor that said, look, they gave their, you know, and there could have been a review, as you said, by the professor of the course, by the chair of the department, by the dean, but none of that happened.
It was just, you know, what did you say earlier about Pete Hags of Donald Trump?
It's just a reality show now.
Everything is just a reality show.
How many likes, how many views, how many eyeballs?
That's what determines what is good.
And we've completely abandoned what is right.
Yeah.
And to your point, the way that this normally plays out and the normal thing, a student gets upset about this.
Maybe they talk to the chair or something.
A chair or somebody says it's at the instructor's discretion, blah, whatever.
And then they probably have a meeting with that instructor, say, look, let them rewrite the essay.
Be clearer on the guidelines.
Be clearer on the expectations.
Learning in the future, if you want that kind of information in an essay, be sure to put that in the object.
This is a person who's learning how to teach.
Exactly.
You do that.
You don't have to be put on administrative leave.
You don't have your course taken away from you.
You don't become a national story.
It's a learning experience.
They usually provide a way for the student to both save face and to raise valid points, get the points if they want the points.
You find a way for basically everybody to win and move on and carry forward.
And this was clearly, everything about this was calculated to ensure that that didn't happen and that it blew up from a disgruntled student who didn't like the grade they got.
There's no indication, by the way, that this student ever asked to meet with the instructor.
Can we talk about the grade that I got?
Can we talk about the essay?
I didn't understand this, whatever.
It just went nuclear.
But that wasn't the point.
Exactly.
That wasn't the point.
That wasn't the aim.
The character assassination is the aim and to defend Christian America and the notion that Christians are protected to say anything that they want in any context, even if it shows an utter lack of knowledge of the subject matter they're being examined on.
Let's take a break, be right back with some stuff out of the Supreme Court in Texas and then Reasons for Hope.
All right, Dan.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court once again overruled district court judges and said that the Texas congressional map for 2026 will stand.
A district court had said that the map was unconstitutional because it was based on a racial gerrymander.
We don't have a ton of time here.
We're not lawyers and legal experts, so this is not territory where we're going to dig into the absolute details of this.
But I did want to make one point about it.
Sherilyn Eiffel, who I think is wonderfully insightful on these matters, pointed out on Blue Sky that Samuel Alito said that he finds decisive the idea that Texas adopted these maps, the Texas Republicans who are in control of the legislature for the adoption of the Texas map was partisan advantage, plain and simple.
So Alito's like, look, this was just about Republicans getting basically every congressional district to their advantage.
That's all this was.
And it speaks to our fucked up country, Dan, that that's okay.
That is constitutional.
Hey, draw the maps in the weirdest ways so you can have every district to go how you want it.
One of two parties, whether that's Texas or California, I have said on this show, that is not good.
It is not healthy.
That does not speak to any kind of like long-term sustainability for something like democracy.
However, Justice Kagan says, well, let me put it this way.
Justice Kagan asked a different question.
Did Texas accomplish its partisan objective by means of a racial gerrymander?
Meaning, did Texas achieve the advantage it wants electorally when it comes to congressional districts?
Did it achieve that by gerrymandering according to race?
In essence, putting the black and brown and other non-minority, excuse me, the other minority voters in certain electoral districts such that their votes would not matter, would not make a difference, and thus the maps would go the way that the Texas Republicans wanted.
It's a really important point.
Alito is like, well, this was just about advantage.
Now, what is Alito saying?
Colorblind.
Colorblind.
They just wanted to win.
So they cheated by doing it this way.
They're not going to cheat that way.
By contrast, if they had cheated another way, that wouldn't be allowed.
But I don't see race.
So that surely they don't either.
And Justice Kagan is like, the way they gerrymandered this was by looking at where all of the non-white people were and making sure their votes didn't add up in a way that could threaten any of the GOP congressional candidates in the 2026 midterms.
That's the difference.
Now, Jasmine Crockett had a pretty good response to this.
I'll read that, Dan.
I'll get your thoughts and then we can go to Reasons for Hope.
Today's decision from the Supreme Court is disappointing.
It's not shocking coming from a MAGA-influenced court.
Here's the bottom line.
Texans are now being told to vote under maps that a panel of three federal judges right here in Texas said were drawn to weaken the voices of black, Latino, and minority communities.
Those findings still stand.
The Supreme Court simply pressed pause, allowing these maps to be used for the 2026 election cycle.
The Supreme Court did not say these maps are fair.
They did not say these maps are constitutional.
They did not undo what the lower court found.
All they did was allow maps that the lower court flagged as discriminatory to stay in place for now.
To every politician celebrating this decision, let me offer a word of caution.
Don't get too comfortable.
These maps were drawn like political Russian roulette, slicing districts, tightening margins, and assuming voters wouldn't fight back.
When you push district lines this far, you risk losing the very seats you thought you locked in.
It's a really great response.
It's full of hope.
It's full of warning.
It is full of a recognition that what the Supreme Court did is not final.
Things are on pause.
Nonetheless, that is what happened.
Any thoughts there?
And then give us your reason for hope.
Just the, we talk about the myth of the colorblind myth all the time.
Partisanship is racial and racial identity is partisan.
Just the demographics are there.
People of color who vote tend very disproportionately to vote for Democrats.
So yes, even if one says, yeah, it was for partisan.
Of course it was for partisan purposes.
Like the purpose was to win the GOP more seats.
But again, to Kagan's point, it was done by essentially diluting the populations of color within different districts.
So if you have a district that's heavily minoritarian, you carve it up into three so it's balanced out by more white voters in that district, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's just, it's intentionally simplistic.
Alito knows what this is.
Clarence Thomas knows what this is.
The conservative branch does.
Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas in particular and Justice John Roberts in the same way, I think they have this notion that like, unless there's somebody who said like from the floor in Texas, I'm a racist and want black people's votes not to count.
So let's adopt this map.
They're going to say it's not about race.
And that's just, that's where we are.
And it's incredibly frustrating.
But I think, I think those, those hopeful points are there.
And I think we have seen that sometimes these, as they say, they become stretched so far and provoke so much pushback that they don't always work the way that they're intended.
Let me just make one more point before Reason for Hope is that there was a special election in Tennessee this week.
And, you know, it was, I believe that district Tennessee 7 went like plus 42, if I'm not wrong, for Trump.
And there was a 25-point swing.
So the Democrat did not win, but only lost by nine points.
Yeah.
So, and you're like, well, great, we lost by nine points.
It's like, well, we lost by 50 last time.
We're doing better here.
What does that mean?
It means that Jasmine Crockett, Representative Jasmine Crockett, has a point.
Those districts that they drew that they're like, well, we're plus four here, so we'll be safe.
There's backlash coming.
And this may not be nearly as safe as they think.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I've been the guy for six months saying your vote may not count how you think in 2026.
And we need to be ready for that.
But I'll leave that for another day because it's time for hope.
So, Dan, go for it.
Our reason for hope was the Tennessee special election, Brad.
So there we go.
Planned it.
It's like.
Yeah.
So this is the thing.
Everybody, observers on all sides of the political aisle said if this was decided by, like most people did not think that there was much chance that the Democrat was going to win, the Democratic candidate, but that if it was a single digit win, that this was a real warning that sort of piles on to what we saw in other special elections and other elections in November.
And that's exactly what happened.
It continues the sort of flashing red warning light for the GOP.
So I took hope from that.
And as you're saying, it's a hopeful piece of news for other things like this Supreme Court ruling with the Texas gerrymander map.
My reason for hope comes from Kasim Rashid, who many of you will know on social media, is a lawyer, is somebody who's on the radio, is somebody who's quite popular.
But Rashid was on the Piers Morgan program where you have like two liberals and two conservatives ostensibly yelling at each other.
And I usually hate this because once again, it's turned into like, what is the point of this?
You know, Dan, the call-in show format these days, whether it's like the young guys on the left, Dean Withers and others who take calls or this format.
I know it's sometimes gratifying because like you own the MAGA person who doesn't know anything.
It really just reminds me.
And, you know, I know this is a tangent.
Doesn't it remind you, Dan, of like 2008 Facebook?
Where like you'd post something and then like four people from high school would be like, you're wrong.
And like little like smartmouth Brad, you know, 18 years ago would have been like, well, here's all the Bible verses.
You're wrong, Larry.
And, you know, I remember when you got a C minus an econ in high school, you haven't got much better.
You know, like I would do this kind of stuff on Facebook.
And did Larry ever change his mind?
No.
So I don't usually love this kind of show.
But this, this guy who was talking about how immigrants who come to this country are takers and they mooch and that that's not what this country is about.
It used to be that you came to this country and you worked and you built and that's what our ancestors did and the founding fathers and the Puritans.
Let me play the clip for you because I think this was one of those moments that some of you out there can really use what Rashad was giving in this clip.
So let me play it.
I just love how he points out like the Homestead Act, people were given land and I'm not against that.
The government should do things like this.
We can have a whole debate.
But then he's like, and there's also this enslaved labor that also really helped everybody kind of get ahead there.
And it's just such a clear, concise like reminder of the ways that the economic system was built.
And in addition, he's like, and you know all those enslaved African folks?
A third of them were Muslim.
So the next time you're like, oh, Islam is new to the U.S., look at what's happening in Dearborn, Michigan.
Look at what's happening in Minnesota.
There's like Muslims from Africa everywhere.
This is not America.
And it's like, it is.
The United States has always been a place where there have been Muslims.
I can give you the history of how there have been Buddhists.
Like this is a place where religious pluralism and diversity has been on display for centuries.
But if you don't know that, you can be easily convinced that it's always just been a white Protestant Christian nation, where as long as the Catholics behave, they could participate too.
And it's just not true.
And I really loved this clip for that.
All right, people, Monday, December 8th, we will be doing our next live recording of our bonus episode.
If you're a subscriber, look out for the link.
I'll be sending it out.
Come join us.
Come ask questions.
Come make fun of Dan and I for the ways that we talk about our hair and our lack of hair, whatever you want to do.
Just come hang out.
It's our last one before the end of the year.
Also just want to thank a bunch of you who supported us.
Some of your subscribers, some of you have just sent in like one-time support and you can do that.
Venmo, PayPal, find us at StraightWhiteJC.
We do this three times a week.
We do bonus content.
We do everything we can to provide the most insight possible as an indie network and as an indie show.
So if you don't want to subscribe for every month, you're just tired of signing up for subscriptions, but you want to support us, you can do that through PayPal, through Venmo, through other ways.
And if you're confused on that, send me an email, straightwhiteamericanjesus at gmail.com.
I want to thank those who have done that.
And just want to say we are floored by your support.
One of the things I've been seeing, Dan, is the Spotify wrapped for the year.
So people like show the podcast they've been listening to.
And anytime Straight White American Jesus shows up on there and people send it to me, I like immediately start crying because I'm just like, oh my God, like I can't believe you would spend this much time with us this year.
It's just, it's amazing how thankful we are that you would hang with us.
So if you have that and you want to make my day, send more of that because it really does help.
All right, y'all.
We will see you on Monday.
We'll see some of you on Monday twice because you'll be at our live recording.
Next week, we'll have the weekly roundup.
We'll have it's in the code.
All of that.
We got some special episodes dropping from friends of ours.
