1. 60 years ago, in April 1961, a group of French military officers led a failed coup against Charles de Gaulle, with the goal of stoping the decolonization of Algeria. Now a group of retired French officers have picked the anniversary of the coup to threaten French democracy.
2. The open letter was written by the former head of the French Foreign Legion and signed by 19 other retired general, 80 officers & 1000 lower ranks. It warns that anti-racism is destroying France & the military might need to restore order.
3. The letter is having repercussions in France and the USA. Marine Le Pen praised it. The Claremont Institute (the leading Trumpist think tank) translated it and suggested it carries a message for America.
4. Readers of my feed will note that I was always insisted in 2020 and early 2021 that any Trumpist coup would fail because the military was not on board. Well, it seems the Trumpists have drawn that lesson & its logical corollary.
5. Will the American right be able to follow the French example and organize a mutinous cadre in the officer class? Remains to be seen. But it's clearly the goal going forward. More here: jeetheer.substack.com/p/the-reaction…
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1. This is a shattering memoir by Eve Crawford Peyton of predatory male mentorship & assault. It has to be front and center of discussions of the Blake Bailey scandal. slate.com/human-interest…
2. Bailey's biography of Roth is now in limbo as abandoned by the publisher. I hope this status doesn't stop introspection about how only a very few of the early reviews (most notably @lmlauramarsh's) grappled with the misogyny of the book.
3. Stuff that was unsettling in Bailey's book now looks even worse in light of Peyton and other women coming out with their stories: the idealization of what Bailey calls "Pygmalion" relationships between Roth & much younger, poorer women he mentored & slept with.
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.
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.