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Helen Andrews Profile picture
Helen Andrews
@herandrews
@commonplc, formerly @amconmag, author @SentinelBooks, site https://t.co/MCWPKMEbtF
9 subscribers
Aug 8 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Amazing used bookstore find: an oral history of the U.S.S. Indianapolis disaster (made famous by the Jaws monologue) as told by survivors. Image “On the fourth day, a boy from Oklahoma saw the sharks eat his best friend, and I suppose that was more than his brain could stand. He took his knife, which was about 12 inches long, placed it in his mouth (like Tarzan in the movies), and started chasing sharks. They would stay just far enough ahead of him that he couldn’t touch them. He would go under for long periods at a time, making us wonder whether he would come up. I don’t know how long this went on, but sooner or later, I noticed that he wasn’t around.” —Sherman C. BoothImage
Jan 20 • 20 tweets • 10 min read
Interesting piece on the lawyer for the Scottsboro Boys, who, apparently, in his earlier career as a New York defense attorney, won acquittals for many clearly guilty people including Al Capone. But the article repeats some common misconceptions about the Scottsboro case itself. It is usually said the Alabama jury convicted the nine solely on the word of Victoria Price, who claimed she was hoboing on a freight train with Ruby Bates when a dozen black boys climbed in from another train car, threw some white boys out of the moving gondola, and raped them.


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Jan 16 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Not many people know that if Congress had not passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chief Justice Earl Warren was prepared to step in with a Supreme Court decision that would have accomplished much the same thing. A thread from Boomers. 1/7Image
Image The cases Bell v. Maryland and Barr v. City of Columbia involved sit-in protests at private lunch counters and hinged on whether the owners’ actions in removing the protesters were unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment as they would have been if it had been gov't property./2
Dec 26, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Hilarious account of a Western-sponsored training seminar for NGO workers in Serbia. The trainers really did not like it when one man stepped up during the team-building exercise to coordinate the tasks. They kept badgering the group to feel bad about not being more egalitarian.
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Image “Was there someone that felt … suppressed? Somebody that did not feel like an individual?”

“No, we did not feel like that.” Image
Dec 19, 2023 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
We had an amazing 2023 at @amconmag. As an editor, I'm always looking for pieces that couldn't be published anywhere else. TAC has a unique mission and a special contribution to make. Lots of articles this year hit the mark—here are a few examples: /THREAD


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Image 10. @JuliusKrein's review of Sam Gregg genuinely advanced the debate over “market fundamentalism” and the New Right. The last third of the piece is a sweeping retelling of a century of economic history, which made a lot of pieces fall into place for me: theamericanconservative.com/the-last-gasp-…
Dec 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
My takeaway from this book, Animal Welfare in China, is that the stereotype ("If it has four legs and is not a chair…") is basically true, and Americans who oppose animal cruelty should realize what a big cultural gulf exists here. amazon.com/Animal-Welfare… "Dogs and cats are often victimised out of sheer malice. A college student microwaved a live puppy following an argument with his girlfriend. A man in Weihai, Shandong drove for miles dragging his dog behind his car… A Changsha policeman beat a golden retriever to death in broad daylight on the last day of 2017."Image
Dec 14, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
In her piece on surrogacy, @carmel_writes notes that international adoption has practically disappeared. My first thought was: oh, Third World babies are languishing unchosen because American parents are opting for designer surrogate babies instead. But that's actually wrong./1 What really happened is that international adoptions became a racket, so sending countries banned it. Scandals involving "child laundering," kidnapping, baby selling, etc., in Guatemala, Cambodia, Liberia, Nepal, and elsewhere led to crackdowns. /2


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Nov 14, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
The Army retroactively pardons the black Houston mutineers of 1917, who rampaged through the city shooting white civilians at random, including a teenager who was just sitting on his porch—what part of their actions are we rehabilitating exactly? wsj.com/us-news/army-o… Thread with details on the Houston Mutinty of 1917, including the murder of civilians. "Each shot seemed to be followed with a sickening thud as if they were pounding him with clubs."
Nov 9, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
My proposal for how to fix cancel culture is not a return to liberalism/free speech, but a revival of professional standards. Everyone doesn't have to be neutral on everything, but a doctor has a duty to treat patients neutrally; a professor to teach; a lawyer to represent. /1 Professional standards are much older than liberalism—think of the Hippocratic Oath! They exist to compensate for the power that professionals have over their clients. Wokeness has attacked professional codes in every sphere: banking, medicine, law. /2
Oct 24, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Three tweets from the past week, plus a comment. Each tweet is about immigration. I don't mean to single out these people, their tweets just happen to be representative.

1. "I think we need a conversation about cultural compatibility and immigration."
2. "We can build a just, decent immigration system that acknowledges tradeoffs."


Oct 13, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
This is hardly the worst thing about this statement, but I can't get over the fact that the president of Harvard sounds like a 6th grade teacher. To give a sense of the decline, here is a speech from a Harvard president in 1961 saying roughly the same thing about free speech: Nathan Pusey, president of Harvard 1953–71, opens the speech with this letter from an alumnus worried about subversives on the faculty: “When a whole Harvard department is so strongly promoting measures leading to totalitarianism, it seems I would be weak-minded to support it.”
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Oct 13, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The way rifts in the left coalition have always worked before is that groups are allowed to disagree privately—Muslims not liking the trans stuff, Asians resenting college admissions or crime—as long as they line up with the rest of the coalition when it matters. “Lining up with the coalition” means the diverse masses outside the elite keep pulling the lever for Dems and the diverse people who make it inside the elite shed their dissent (like the Muslims of the Squad going all in on LGBT stuff).
Sep 30, 2023 • 6 tweets • 6 min read
This book about the successful struggle to integrate amusement parks ends with a discordantly sad final chapter, in which “the majority of traditional urban amusement parks closed by the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Some stories from the book: amazon.com/Race-Riots-Rol…


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Image Olympic Park, Irvington, New Jersey (1903-1965): “Olympic Park remained segregated until the mid-1950s and Newark’s black community felt unwelcome even when they gained access to the park. By 1965, however, young blacks began to take buses to the park to enjoy daylong excursions. On opening day of 1965 a large group of Newark teenagers, numbering perhaps one thousand, arrived at the park. They expected to pay only ten cents per ride, a tradition on opening day that the park owner had eliminated that year. By the evening many had run out of money as a result. Fearing trouble, park officials tried to close early. Guards ushered the angry teenagers from the park, but there were no buses to take them back to Newark because of the early closing time. The crowds then descended on downtown Irvington, shattering some shop windows and frightening pedestrians…

Two weeks after the riot the town council met to discuss denying the park’s license renewal… By the end of the season the owners had sold Olympic Park to land developers, and Newark youth no longer had access to any major amusement parks.”



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Sep 12, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
BBC documentarian David Harrison interviewed a black man in Soweto, Solly Madlala, in 1978 and again in 1980. In the first interview Solly was miserable ("There is actually no life worth living in Soweto"). "Two years later Solly Madlala was a changed man." What happened? 1/4
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Image First, the government abolished many forms of petty apartheid like separate queues at post offices. "We had to wait hours on end… All that has been eliminated. What I used to do in two hours, today I do in 45 minutes. Without any commotion everybody is served, like a person." Image
Aug 12, 2023 • 7 tweets • 5 min read
The question I get asked most often, believe it or not, is for my reading list on South Africa. You should probably ask an actual South African, but in the meantime here are some suggestions. If you read only one book, make it R.W. Johnson’s South Africa's Brave New World.Image 1. Getting your bearings


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Jul 11, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Interesting piece by Timothy Garton Ash on the fall of the Berlin Wall, emphasizing the heroic over the many aspects that were contingent or accidental. The opening of the Hungarian-Austrian border, which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, was due to budget cuts. Fence repair was too costly. "Today it would be tempting to say he made the decision thinking in European dimensions, but Németh admits it was all about cost savings."

Jun 27, 2023 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
The so-called "Battle of Bamber Bridge" is the latest in a long line of military race riots that have been recast as heartwarming morality tales decades later. But rewriting history isn't harmless, even when it's well intentioned. theamericanconservative.com/how-fake-histo… The 2020 movie "The 24th" depicts the Houston Mutiny of 1917 as a heroic act of resistance against racist police. "If death is the price for a night of justice, I'm ready to pay it," one character says. What happened on this "night of justice"? Let's see.
Jun 23, 2023 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
NPR has a big feature on the "Battle of Bamber Bridge," a race riot in the UK during WWII. They depict it as a brave protest against Jim Crow and urge the Army to exonerate the men. Do they have their story straight? npr.org/2023/06/21/118… On the left, NPR says military police saw Pvt. Eugene Nunn in the wrong uniform and started hassling him. On the right, the official record says the MPs were directed to the pub by officers who said there was trouble there. https://t.co/NZyGQv2wyNtile.loc.gov/storage-servic…
Jun 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
The lack of original reporting on the right is definitely a problem. You should support any magazine trying to do more of it. At TAC, we have big, splashy reporting in every issue. Some examples you might have missed . . . [THREAD] In the current issue, this dispatch from the Texas border featuring a guy who posted photos from his ranch on Facebook until he started receiving anonymous phone calls and texts threatening his children. https://t.co/9XWCexRGOjtheamericanconservative.com/a-texas-border…
May 10, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
The best thing written about James Baldwin is the essay "Jimmy" by Otto Friedrich (1929-1995), a German-American journalist who knew Baldwin in Paris. Baldwin was the best man at his wedding. The piece is brutal. amazon.com/Grave-Alice-B-… Apparently the young James Baldwin spent a lot of time talking about his novel but not producing much. He never paid for anything and casually appropriated other people's possessions—like this girl's typewriter. Image
May 9, 2023 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
The book came out today. 🧵 amazon.com/Lost-Sons-Omah… Image When James Scurlock was shot by Jake Gardner, he had just gotten out of jail for assaulting the 19-year-old mother of his baby. He kicked her in the stomach, punched her in the face, and broke her windshield. amazon.com/Lost-Sons-Omah… Image