1. So, the CIA intersectional ad has been getting some polarizing reactions (Left: look at this shit, the right: oh, no, the CIA is woke, some liberals: actually it's good CIA is anti-racist).
2. It's all too telling that Glenn Greenwald takes the right wing position (see, the woke left is running the show). This seems to be a pretty naive understanding of how intelligence agencies use ideology.
3. We actually have a great historical precedence on this since the original CIA of 1947-1968 was heavily invested in shoring up what was called the non-communist left (liberals in USA, social democrats in rest of world). That was NOT because CIA was progressive.
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.
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.