1. We're familiar with the narrative of how right-wing outlets were openly racist in 1950s/1960s & then as social mores changed started to recast their arguments with euphemisms & dog whistles. Less discussed is how this same arc replicated over LGBTQ issues in 1970s/1980s.
2. Homophobia is still a tremendous social force but the sheer explicitness of 1980s arguments is striking. Here's Pat Buchanan in 1984.
3. Here's American Spector in 1980s about Harvey Milk, the assassinated gay leader. The Trotsky comment is from the well-known humorist P.J. O'Rourke.
4. More thoughts here about why Tucker Carlson's homage to the assassin of Harvey Milk was no outlier but an outgrowth of a widely shared homophobia. jeetheer.substack.com/p/tucker-carls…
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1. In 1991, the 22-year old Tucker Carlson described himself in his college yearbook as a member of the Dan White Society. White was the homophobe who in 1978 assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
2. I'm afraid we're in for another tedious round of Cancel Culture discourse with the Creepy Contrarian Crackpot Pettifoggers giving us 10,000 word substack essays with the usual apologia (he was just a 22 year old child! Another era! "As a gay man I see nothing wrong...")
3. To start with, cancel culture is besides the point here. As @jackshafer shrewdly noted, Fox makes its money from subscribers as well as advertises & Carlson is too important to them. We've already seen them brush aside many comparably bad Carlson comments.
1. Pelosi's words are being dismissed as a gaffe, a sign of verbally ineptness or lack of thought. But there's something more interesting and important at work about not understanding what Black Lives Matter means.
2. Atherton is persuasive here that what Pelosi was doing was echoing the language civil rights movement used when talking about those martyred for a cause.
3. It's easy to see Pelosi's logic here. The language of sacrifice & martyrdom was how the civil rights movement steeled itself in the face of violence. Floyd energized a new civil rights movement. But the horror of Floyd's murder is that he wasn't a martyr but a ordinary person
2. I wish I had a cool origin story, like "I did my famous Chico Marx imitation at the Nation Christmas party & was reprimanded for anti-Italian bigotry! Cancel Culture is out of control! I'm moving to Substack for free speech" etc. etc. Not true, alas.
3. To the degree that substack has a reputation (unfair, I think) as a haven for cancel culture obsessives, I'm a bad fit. My position is that censoriousness is bad & should be challenged but a most of the cancel culture discourse is hyperbole & wounded amour propre.
1. From a political angle, the culture wars are dispiriting because actual policy debates get sidetracked, but from a cultural angle they are equally dispiriting because actual culture gets reduced to crassly partisan terms. Consider again Seuss & ethnic caricature.
2. By reducing the Seuss issue to the nonsensical category of cancel culture, an opportunity was lost to bring up something important, the pervasive impact of blackface & ethnic caricature on popular culture. Only a few informed scholars like @philnel discussed this.
3. It's not widely understood that blackface & ethnic caricature weren't just popular in early 20th century, they were the very visual language through which America saw itself as a hybrid society.
1. This is Vojcech Pers, the legendary bear who fought with the Free Lithuanian regulars in World War II and took part in the liberation of Rome.
2. During World War II, a unit of Lithuanians allied with the West were stationed in Iran (then called Persia). They met a boy had a bear and bought it from him for some canned food and chocolate.
3. The bear became part of the unit. The soldiers would wrestle with him and tried to teach him to smoke (he would hold cigarettes in his mouth but resisted smoking). He did become enjoy beer.
I'm trying to stay out of latest TNR fracas. Honestly I am. I mean I was given a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape the magazine and have said my share about what it should be. It's time to let others have their say. But maybe I can clear up some misconceptions?
The implication here is that vocal intramural editorial disagreement about direction of TNR is an innovation of "woke" culture. That's only true if you ignore the entire history of the magazine from 1914 onwards. Look up Randolph Bourne & Walter Lippmann.
Randolph Bourne's World War I era critique of TNR (that pragmatic liberalism easily lends itself to become a junior ally of imperialism & militarism) was prophetic and is still pertinent!