Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
Conservatives have spent the last week grousing about the academic merits of an obscure college essay, a topic that right-wingers historically show little interest in. But in this case, the story isn’t really about college or academia or essays but is instead about yet another front in the right’s never-ending culture wars and an attempt to bully another minority group.
University of Oklahoma junior Samantha Fulnecky has alleged that her First Amendment right to religious freedom is being infringed after her psychology professor gave her an “F” for a paper on the gender norms of middle school students.
“The college admissions office in action” by Jeff Danziger
Fulnecky, a conservative Christian, used her essay to attack transgender existence. She cited the Bible and said that “eliminating gender in our society would be detrimental, as it pulls us farther from God’s original plan for humans.” Fulnecky argued that “society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic.”
Mel Curth, the graduate teaching assistant who graded Fulnecky’s paper, gave the student a failing grade. Curth, who is a trans woman, wrote that the problem was not with the student’s personal views but because her essay “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.” A second instructor agreed with Curth’s findings.
After Fulnecky filed a complaint with the school, the right-wing grievance industry went to work.
Turning Point USA is a college-based pressure group created by deceased racist and conservative activist Charlie Kirk to push right-wing ideology on college campuses. The group, which itself has a long history of hiring bigots, attacked Curth in a social media post.
“We should not be letting mentally ill professors around students,” the group wrote, supporting Fulnecky’s bigoted worldview.
The school launched a review of Curth and removed her from her position in response to the controversy.
One of the major promoters of the campaign against Curth was Fox News, who featured the story in multiple segments and hosted Fulnecky for an interview. On the network the interview was advertised as “Trans Instructor Fails Student Over Gender Essay.”
The framing of the interview gives up the tactic at play.
Fulnecky is the sort of telegenic conservative figure that the right-wing outrage machine loves to amplify. Conservatism is at a period of extreme strength at the moment—with Republican control of the White House, Congress, and Supreme Court, along with state governorships and legislatures. But the right loves to play victim.
The college student purportedly standing up for “Christian values” against academia, even in very conservative Oklahoma, is too good to resist.
The story dovetails almost perfectly with the Trump administration’s assault on institutes of higher learning, defunding important research and shaking down colleges for money in exchange for suppressing speech and admissions.
Related | Trump administration steps up its heinous war on trans people
The academic merits of Fulnecky’s essay are immaterial to the battle at hand. Instead she has been portrayed as an innocent under attack for holding conservative beliefs, which the right has asserted are fundamental American values—even if that means relegating transgender people to second-class citizenship.
The conservative machine is constantly searching for stories like that that tick all of the right’s preferred boxes. They are a way of keeping conservative activists and voters at a fever pitch, ready to turn out to vote—even when leaders they elect like Trump are failing on an array of issues.
The right would much rather have these voters intensely obsessing over a purported victim of “liberal” academia than investigating why food prices are up or why their neighbors are being abducted and harmed.
Focusing on the instructor’s gender identity adds to the right’s strategy of villainizing practically everyone who isn’t a straight white man. This allows the focus to be shifted from individuals and institutions negatively affecting their day-to-day living, be that Republicans in Congress or business leaders, and toward the “other” that they have demonized.
This type of campaign is a major contributing factor to the far-too-pervasive callousness that conservatives have for minorities, which can lead to death and neglect.
Conservatives and their allies in right-wing media like Fox don’t actually care about academic freedom or free expression at colleges and universities. They don’t care about academic merit, and they certainly don’t care about psychology essays.
What they intensely care about is creating another firestorm that can get them votes and allow them to retain and grow their power. It is a strategy that has worked for decades and continues to operate like a well-oiled machine.
