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Jeet Heer Profile picture
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20 Jun, 5 tweets, 2 min read
1. William Randolph Hearst is of course remembered as a pioneering press baron, a patron of the arts, the prototype of Charles Foster Kane, a failed politician etc. But his role in this history of the American right, has, I think been forgotten.
2. Hearst was the Rupert Murdoch of his time, but had a broader reach than Murdoch now has because it transcended narrow party differences and went beyond politics to culture (with his vast press empire having a hand in everything from cartoons to movies)
3. The interesting thing about Hearst is that he was a pioneer of both left & right populism, first using anti-systems politics to attack wealthy elites & then turning it against the New Deal. This was both a cultural & a political agenda.
4. The shift in Heast from left to right populism can be seen in comics he published & closely supervised. The early strips featured young upstarts disrupting the social order (Katzenjammer Kids), the later ones Cold War & Yellow Peril paranoia (Steve Canyon, Flash Gordon)
5. More thoughts here on the shift in Hearst politics & how it relates to his cultural legacy (an essay, podcast & a gallery show). jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-and-…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
21 Jun
1. This twitter thread from yesterday is already a classic, one of the all time greats. It also raises an interesting question: how do conservatives reconcile their exaltation of ancient Greece & Rome (where same-sex practices were accepted) with their homophobia?
2. One way to reconcile celebrations of ancients with homophobia is to recontextualize ancient relationships in way Peg does. Harmodius and Aristogeiton weren't gay, they were just close male friends, liked to do some camping & wrestling, oil each other up, nothing to see here.
3. Another form of recontextualizing is pseudo-history. I remember an evangelical Christian telling me once that all the gay stuff started only in the late, decadent period decline, that when Rome was a young Republic they were all as straight as a rod.
Read 12 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
18 Jun
Essential point!
Because of elite overproduction we have too many over-educated pundits trying to prove they know what CRT is and have a developed critique of it, when all these anti-CRT bills (or anti-"CRT") are not about CRT at all but messaging bills (the message being "ooga-booga").
If someone is saying "A bunch of Jews created CRT to stir up race war in America & kill white people" you don't respond by saying, "Well, I have a much more modulated criticism of Adorno & Horkheimer's's Dialectic of Enlightenment." You say "that's an anti-Semitic myth."
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
17 Jun
1. The anti-CRT thing is an obvious astroturf culture war propaganda operation (with the fingerprints of GOP dark money all over it). The fact that it's also designed to stifle speech deserves more attention.
2. I haven't done a full inventory but as far as I can tell, the only two signatories of the notorious Harper's letter to speak out against these anti-CRT bills are me & @thomaschattwill. And yet the bills clearly have a chilling effect on teaching USA history honestly.
3. The anti-CRT stuff is worrisome because it follows a pattern familiar in USA history of pushing schools to indoctrinate patriotic history -- going back to progressive era backlash against Beard & forward to McCarthyism. This stuff has been historically poisonous.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
12 Jun
1. Interesting conversation here between @sgw94m and @KevinMKruse about how to respond to CRT moral panic.
2. What I'd add to the conversation is that right-wing CRT discourse is a mythology of a familiar sort: the story of innocent (implicitly white) children children corrupted by alien forces. The same battle as over evolution, school prayer, sex ed, LGBTQ students & teachers etc.
3. In the current battle, liberals are pretty heavily invested in fact checking (i.e. CRT isn't really what it is accused of & isn't taught in public schools). This has some value to broader public but doesn't address the emotional core of the panic.
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
10 Jun
1. The discovery of a mass grave at Kamloops Residential School last month with as many as 215 remains was shocking but not surprising. The Canadian federal government has long known there are likely many such graves across the country but refused to investigate
2. The key thing about the residential school story is about Indigenous resistance in the face of both the government and its allies (most notably the churches) who didn't want to face the truth. This resistance continues.
3. Lots of outstanding questions still on the residential school, about the Vaticans refusal to apologize, about records still being kept hidden or destroyed, about the state and church playing the blame game against each other.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
8 Jun
1. Lab leak theory getting a new hearing is salutary (since the origins of covid are unsolved and it's a reasonable, although not likely, hypothesis). What's not salutary is how some contrarians are using the current moment to whitewash promoters of bioweapons theory.
2. It's important to understand that lab leak theory (accidental release of virus collected as part of normal research) is distinct from the far less plausible bioweapon theories (engineered virus, perhaps deliberately released).
3. Prominent Trumpist both outside the government (Bannon) and inside it (Navarro) used the legitimate lab leak theory as a stalking horse for the much more radical (and unsupported) bioweapon theories. That was the source of fact-checking reaction of 2020.
Read 6 tweets

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