In 1991 I was teaching at the International School in Jakarta, Indonesia. A group of American parents who were about to send their kids to college in the US asked me to do a session (as a recent college grad) about the "scourge of Political Correctness" in the US.
They'd read about it in that Newsweek or somewhere else & were terrified that their children were going to be put in a gulag or brainwashed when they went to college. Those "kids" are now in their mid-40s and, you're not going to believe this, but they're fine. They're all fine.
Don't remember what exactly I said at that session 29 years ago, but it was basically this. "The fact that students of color on historically white campuses don't want to have racial epithets yelled at them while they're trying to get an education is not the end of civilization."
I suspect this is why many people of my age (early 50s) are so bored by this most recent go around of the "free speech vs. PC" foolishness. There's just nothing new under the sun, just some new faces making old arguments.
Or I should say, those people of my generation who are on the side of the "free speech is under assault from the campus left like never before" pearl clutchers don't seem to me to have a very historically nuanced understanding of the times through which they've lived.
As I experienced it in the late 80s and early 90s, the anti-PC hysteria was mostly about entitled white people being pissed off that they had to decenter themselves now and then to take into serious consideration the experiences and perspectives of people who differed from them.
In the late 80s and early 90s this wasn't just about race, it was also about sexuality. The activism around the AIDS crisis definitely impacted how straight students were starting to think about what it meant to live as a queer person in the US.
And also the activism around apartheid in South Africa also began to raise people's awareness of the global history of racialized colonialism, and the US's connection to and distinctive iteration of it.
When people decried "PC-culture" in general terms, I always understood them to be minimizing or ridiculing all of that activism of that era...activism which most people today look back upon as being on the right side of history.
And just to prove that everything old is new again. One of the major voices in the anti-PC camp in 1991 was none other than DD himself. google.com/books/edition/…
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Whenever conservatives complain about "woke-ism," it's always useful to see what exactly they are trying to protect from its supposed abuses. In this case, the "brave, free thinking" being defended here is eugenics/scientific racism, which has been debunked repeatedly.
What most conservatives call "woke-ism," non-reactionary academics would call "having and enforcing a basic level of professional standards for evidence and argumentation." It's not "woke" for a biology department to refuse to host a talk by a creationist.
Just like the "Plandemic" hoaxers claimed to be speaking "truths that THEY don't want you to hear," our modern day eugenicists and climate deniers and creationists and [fill in the blanks] try to claim public space for their discredited buffoonery in the same way.
Listening to some Father Coughlin radio shows from the late 1930s, as one does on a Sunday night, and was reminded that his general line on Nazism was "it's the consequence of Communism, and Communism was the fault of the Jews." archive.org/details/Father…
Coughlin, like most US fascists, was putatively "against" the Nazis. He claimed to dislike the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. But then he would turn around to say "but I totally understand why Germans would want to destroy those godless Communists who are mostly Jews."
This excerpt from the show entitled "Jews Support Communism" pretty much sums it up. Anti-semites like Coughlin ALWAYS say they are not against "all Jews," just the "bad ones who are Communists." And by "communists" these antisemites just mean "to my left."
During the Dec 21 siege on the Oregon Capitol (which was a precursor to the Jan 6 siege on the US Capitol) the person who is now the head of the Oregon GOP said this.
Here's the speech he gave at a Jan 6 "stop the steal" rally in Salem. This was occurring at about the same time as the violence was ramping up in DC that day.
Just yesterday I realized it had been almost two months since I’d seen far right groups out in the streets. Looks like some of the usual suspects just poked their heads out yesterday.
This smiling fellow seems harmless enough in this pic, bu here are some photos of him from a rally in the summer of 2018. RWDS on is sleeve stands for "Right Wing Death Squads." The guy is a proud, violent fascist.
This is another important thread to follow moving forward. TPUSA is Charlie Kirk's outfit that seeks to bring clean cut, smiley young folks like these into "the conservative movement." At this event, they are partnering with violent fascists.
At risk of filing a dispatch from the department of "you're totally overthinking this, my dude," I want to talk about why I woke up this morning thinking about the intro music for Rush Limbaugh's show--this very non-conservative song from the Reagan era.
These are the lyrics to this 1982 song about deindustrialization. That song spoke to me in the 80s, because I was a teenager in Cambria County PA where the unemployment rate was around 20% because the coal mines and steel mills had shut down. Times were tough.
Rush, of course, chose the song, in part, to own the libs who wrote it. He would poke fun at Chrissie Hynde for her animal rights and environmental activism if anyone pointed out that he'd chosen a "libtard's" song for his theme music. But Rush's choice has meaning beyond that.