Monthly Archives: June 2021

On election night in 2016, the intellectual classes of Europe and North America were ready to turn out books and think pieces on the inexorable advance of transnational progressivism. Instead they were obliged to write about a reinvigorated nationalism, and they were ill-prepared for it. I dont know how many times over the past five years Ive read breezy discussions of post-16 politics that simply assumed racial bigotry and police-state thuggery to be necessary components of any sort of nationalism.

The subject was treated carefully and sympathetically from the right by Rich Lowry in The Case for Nationalism (2019). It was treated with similar care from the left by the journalist John B. Judis in The Nationalist Revival (2018). The latter work is now collected with two others by the same author in The Politics of Our Time: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism (Columbia Global Reports, 430 pages, $27.95). Mr. Judis begins with what should be, but among many allegedly smart commentators isnt, the obvious point that some nationalisms are healthy and some are pathological. Abraham Lincoln and Benito Mussolini were ardent nationalists is his terse summation.

Mr. Judis rejects the idea, tacitly accepted by many on todays left, that transnational elites can be trusted to manage a globalized economy for the benefit of all. Accordingly he wants to reclaim what is valid in nationalism . . . from both the cosmopolitan liberals who believe in a borderless world and from the rightwing populists who have coupled a concern for their nations workers with nativist screeds against outgroups and immigrants.

Mr. Judis writes, as usual, with clarity and wit, and his knowledge of modern politics in Europe and North America is vast. As in his volume on populism, also collected here, he makes a strong economic case for the nationalist impulse and all but ignores cultural conflicts leading sensible people to vote for nationalist candidates. Put otherwise, he favors trade protections not because they are economically rational (I'm not sure he cares if they are) but because they bolster organized labor and foster social cohesion; and he regrets untrammeled immigration not because it changes the culture but because it exhausts the welfare state.

I remain unconvinced, however, that the rise of Donald Trump had primarily to do with economic circumstances. His candidacy was helped by blue-collar workers angered by closing factories and unchecked immigration, to be sure. But we have had anti-immigration and protectionist presidential candidates before, and they made little progress. Mr. Trump himself was one of those candidates in 2012, and his campaign, such as it was, fizzled early. He would have fizzled again in 2016 without the insane aggressions of cultural leftism: campus riots, militant political correctness, overt anti-Americanism in the media, transgender-bathrooms directives and all the rest. Liberals who interpret the 2016 election as a protest against economic globalization, neoliberalism and post-industrial capitalism may have a point, but they minimize the importance of Obama-era cultural radicalismfor the simple reason that theyre partial to it.

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Politics: Nationalism, Then and Now - The Wall Street Journal

Nobody tells jokes anymore, like they did when I was younger. Instead, jokes and even humour, to a large extent have almost entirely been outsourced to cyberspace, from whence they are conveyed, facelessly, for momentary amusement and onward transmission, like numerous other contemporary aspects of our humdrum existence. Thats all.

And though fleetingly mirthful, these jokes remain impersonal essentially, a dehumanised utilitarian endeavour that excludes the tone, tenor, body language and drama that normally accompanies good (and at times, even the not-so-good) joke telling. Without doubt, it robs the intended boisterous outcome of the pitch, spectacle, warmth and human connection that personally narrated jokes invariably evoke.

Impersonally e-mailing jokes or disbursing them via social network platforms is, in a sense, simply opting for the easier, more practical and lazier amusement option. Even stand-up comedy is a poor substitute, a part of the subcontracting syndrome, in a world where at a personal level we are increasingly becoming more dour than droll, more worshipful than irreverential.

Its an indisputable fact that as a people most Indians tend to take themselves far too seriously, hobbled by caution; which is why gratification or enjoyment in any form, including jokes, remains sinful and iniquitous. And, then there is always that karmic caveat we all grow up with: if you laugh too much, providence will make you cry in equal measure.

Such inherent deterrence, combined with our increasingly overwrought, politically correct, uptight and self-obsessed milieu discounting for the moment the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has brought us to a juncture where most people have taken to wilfully gagging the gag.

Its almost as if jokes and humour in our drawing rooms, cafes and addas around the country, are rapidly and ironically morphing into a German joke, which, as Mark Twain said, was no laughing matter.

Besides, unimpeded laughter, from the belly upwards, too, is decidedly frowned upon in polite company, and from being the norm in yesteryears, such welcome jollity is fast becoming the exception. These days, many of us often ask, or are in turn asked: Heard any good ones lately? None, is the standard answer. But in an apologetic effort at deliverance and one-upmanship, many of us reach defensively for our cell phones to read out a joke or WhatsApp it to our inquisitor from what has undeniably emerged as the 21st centurys humour crutch.

Regrettably, this swelling robotic syndrome has put paid to those raucous, thigh slapping guffaw sessions, accompanied by shrieks and high fives, in which bawdy and lesser-rollicking jokes and irreverent tales surged freely, years earlier. As an ageing humourist put it, those extravagant reactions were akin to the explosive release of the contents of a pre-shaken soda water bottle. They were not only therapeutic and salutary, but, even years later, hugely memorable.

Also read: As Modis Stock Plummets, Cartoonists Have a Field Day

The art of effective joke-telling

A plethora of hilarious jokes from innumerable get-togethers in my youth, especially in Punjabi a robust language that effortlessly lends itself to this purpose still remain iconic and incredibly amusing. Most were embellished by generations of irreverent and wicked Punjabis, each one adding quirky, kinky and delectable twists. A large proportion of these jokes had imaginative plots, complete with shades of perceptive social commentary, making them both a delight to recount and to listen to.

However, then and now, the joke tellers narration skills is critical to this jocular enterprise.

A proficient narrator will casually, but calculatedly, induce his or her audience into suspending disbelief as they picturise the unfolding maze of action, before delivering the coup de grace, either with quiet finesse, or a dramatic, action-packed flourish.

Innocently ensnaring audiences into a labyrinth of seeming mundanity before delivering the clincher is the endeavour of all accomplished joke narrators. But for this to work, timing remains essential, and the greater the narrators mastery over it, the more effective the outcome.

In this context, its apposite to recall The Kings Speech, the delightful British historical film from 2010 about Prince Albert later King George VI who has an embarrassing stutter and hires Lionel Logue, an Australian speech therapist, to overcome it.

In the course of trying to make the prince feel at ease, before he gets down to eventually working on ridding the British royal of his impediment, Logue ask him if at all he tells jokes to his friends. NNNNot rrreallly, stammers the prospective king, MMMMY ttttiming is a bbbit ooofff, only re-affirming that execution and performance in effective joke-telling is imperative. Too little and it falls flat; too much and it overshoots. The secret, and not an easy one to crack, is to get it just right, which needless to state, is an art.

This dirge for jokes, and nostalgia for the halcyon days of jocularity, assuredly demands the telling of some old favourites. However, The Wire being a family website, precludes some classic lusty Punjabi tales, which for want of a better definition have universally been prudishly labelled non-vegetarian.

However, one of the perennial vegetarian favourites that I remember and there are numerous versions of it involves the moon-landing by Neil Armstrong. After taking a small step for man and a giant one for mankind onto the pitted moon surface, the American astronaut comes upon a Sardarji tying his turban.

TheastoundedArmstrong, understandably miffed at being pipped to the moon by a sardar, asks how long ago had he arrived.

Partition de baad (After the Partition of India and Pakistan), came the matter-of-fact reply.

Though decades old, this joke has not lost its capacity to amuse, or at least prompt a smile from both the teller and listener. To somewhat intellectualise the point, the joke encapsulates the history of millions of Sikhs who fled Pakistan after Partition for the remotest of placesin their entrepreneurial quest for a new life in which, over seven decades later, they succeeded beyond belief.

Without doubt, Sikhs are to be found everywhere; so why not the moon? Its simple, self-effacing and fanciful logic, but above all its unquestioningly hilarious and compelling.

The other story is set in the 1970s.

It features two Punjabis who own Volkswagen Beetlesl which at the time were the trendiest set of wheels all swingers owned. One of them lived in Delhi and the other in Amritsar, and not having seen their respective Beetles, or each other, they decided to meet halfway one Sunday at Puran Singhs dhaba in Ambala, for lunch.

Simultaneously they set off early in the morning from their individual towns, and a few hours later the one driving in from Delhi arrives outside the Ambala dhaba, but suddenly his Beetle dies on him.

Irritated and desperate, he tries frantically to gun the engine, but to no avail. He gets out and opens the Beetles front, only to find it empty.

Gobsmacked, he is looking into this void when his friend from Amritsar drives up, and with a flourish, parks his Beetle and hops out. The customary jhappis follow, after which the Beetle owner from Amritsar asks his visibly upset friend what the problem is with his Bug.

Problem, he says, its a vada syapa (big disaster). Ive been driving my Beetle for six months and now I discover it does not even have an engine, he fulminates.

Bhape, his friend consolingly tells him, tenu patta nahi German gaddi reputation te chall de hai (Dont you know, German cars run on reputation.)

Pur tu fikar na kaar (But dont you worry,) he comfortingly adds in the clincher to the yarn; I have a spare engine in my Beetles boot which you can have.

Once again, the tale incorporates innumerable strands centered round the classic Beetle that was without doubt, the 20th centurys most popular car, identified with an entire generation of trendies through the 1960s and 70s. The joke ingeniously uses the rear-engined car with its trunk in front, with a ludicrousness that is ingenious.

But then again, this tale too has numerous embellishments, many of which have become victim to political correctness which, over the past few decades, has dealt a death blow to humour from which it is unlikely to ever recover.

The rustic and risqu jokes of that era fostered a certain kind of human bonding, allowing us to process and reflect on our changing world and values. They also helped alleviate the obstacle-ridden grind of daily living, confirming the adage that life is so much easier with a sense of humour. Its simply not funny, not having one.

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Nobody Tells Jokes Anymore, like They Did When I Was Younger - The Wire

It is probably fair to say that GB News, the UKs new conservative TV channel, has launched to a somewhat mixed reception.

The Telegraph derided the content as unutterably awful; boring, repetitive and cheapskate. Others criticised its claims of being anti-woke and unbiased as simply bias in another direction.

Still more have pointed to the age of the presenters, wondered aloud why any young person would tune in, and predicted its swift demise. After all, Britain is not ready for a rightwing TV channel.

But those looking in from afar specifically Australia are warning not to underestimate it and its leader.

And they predict that ultimately the channel will blossom like the rightwing, Murdoch-run Sky News Australia, where the GB News chief executive, Angelos Frangopoulos, made his name.

Sky is very successful here, particularly when you also take account of the online numbers, says Paul Barry, the presenter of the ABCs Media Watch program and one of Sky News Australias fiercest critics. I am sure it will work in the UK.

They are underestimating him, says Janine Perrett, a veteran business journalist who worked with Frangopoulos for a decade at Sky.

Dr Denis Muller, a senior researcher at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, also doesnt hesitate to predict success for GB News.

I think so, absolutely, he says. This is part of redtop populist journalism. There is a big appetite for that in the UK.

Media watchers in Australia already see product parallels between the nascent GB News, which began broadcasting on 13 June, and Sky in Australia.

The new channel has borrowed heavily from Australias Sky News in its focus and formats, although unlike the Australian version, which reverts to a breaking news format during the day, GB News is going down the path of 24-hour commentary and discussions.

Frangopoulos, who spent two decades at Sky News Australia, is credited with having honed the art of cheap but compelling panel-style conservative television.

Sky News in Australia began life as a 24-hour news channel in 1996, owned by the commercial TV networks, News Corp and the telecommunications company Telstra. But it soon added a night-time panel format, known as Sky After Dark.

Since Rupert Murdochs News Corp took full ownership in 2016, the After Dark lineup has morphed into a steady diet of strident rightwing conservative opinion, more aligned with Fox News. It doesnt mind a controversy or three.

GB News has gone straight for the part of Sky that rates best: panel shows heavy on opinion and commentary.

If Frangopoulos continues to follow his previous playbook, one can expect GB News will take aim at the same hot-button issues that are daily fodder in Australia: the national broadcaster, climate change, immigration, Muslims, Covid lockdowns, government spending, the opposition, environmentalists and political correctness in schools.

The first ratings for GB News have been promising.

According to the UK TV industry magazine Broadcast, GB News peaked in its opening minutes with 336,000 viewers and averaged 262,000 viewers, meaning it outperformed the 100,000 who watched BBC News across the hour and the 46,000 who watched the British Sky News.

Frangopoulos comes with a long pedigree in commercial TV news and nearly two decades in 24-hour news. Former colleagues in Australia describe him as a real newsman.

Hes one of the best I have worked with, says Perrett.

She says he was particularly good at spotting and managing the talent and convincing them to stay at a network that paid them very little.

He certainly has TV news in his blood, says David Speers, who served as Sky News Australias political editor for over a decade until 2020, when he moved to the ABC, Australias public broadcaster. He began as a television journalist and he has extraordinary drive and vision about what he wants.

Both point to Frangopouloss willingness to try new things and innovate.

Sky in Australia began as a smell of an oily rag news channel where presenters did their own makeup and appeared in front of automated cameras. But soon it was winning awards.

Its election coverage was praised. The channel revived a peoples town hall for staging election debates. Its in-depth political interviews were rewarded with Walkleys, Australian journalisms highest honour.

But over the years its night-time lineup of provocative panel-style discussions crept deeper into the schedule and has steered solidly to the right.

In those early days, these panels often featured journalists from other media groups because they would appear for free and were polished talent. But under Frangopoulos the channel began recruiting provocateurs, mainly from the right but sometimes from the left as well.

Frangopoulos was happy to have a contest of ideas and didnt mind having journalists from non-News Corp publications on Sky, Perrett says.

But that changed when News Corp bought out the other shareholders in 2016 and took full control of Sky in Australia. Frangopoulos quickly sniffed what the new management wanted and Sky lurched further to the right.

The extent to which Frangopoulos is responsible for the Foxification of Sky News in Australia is a matter of hot debate.

Anti-immigration voices like Pauline Hanson, the leader of the Australias One Nation party, and Mark Latham, a maverick former Labor leader who has now joined One Nation as a state MP, were given airtime by Frangopoulos.

There were some ugly incidents under his watch. Former Liberal MP Ross Cameron was sacked from the Outsiders program the channels most over-the-top panel show after he described Chinese people as black-haired, slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned. Latham was sacked from the same show over his response to a video about feminism made by students at Sydney Boys high school. Latham called the teenagers dickheads and said: I thought the first guy was gay.

After the full takeover by News Corp, a number of its high-profile rightwing columnists were given prime-time slots the likes of Andrew Bolt and Miranda Devine.

Appearances by media identities from other organisations were phased out, Labor presenters mostly dropped, and figures like Peta Credlin, former conservative prime minister Tony Abbotts chief of staff, were promoted as stars and cross-promoted through columns in Murdoch-owned newspapers.

Barry says the After Dark lineup is now regularly getting peaks of 85,000 viewers and an average viewership of 60,000.

Its three to four times the audience they get throughout the day for the news channel, he says.

And when its in its panel mode, it regularly outguns the ABCs 24-hour news channel.

People who watch Sky here love it, says Barry. The Australian [Murdochs national daily newspaper] also has strong appeal to its audiences. Stories on climate change or political correctness attract hundreds of comments.

While that partisan popularity is evident observers say Sky has also been a contributing factor in the coarsening of the political debate in Australia. Its commentators often rail against against what they see as leftwing abuse of politicians they admire and attack journalists who take Sky to task on accuracy.

In recent weeks the channel has been forced to apologise to a former Greens leader after falsely accusing him of inciting criminal behaviour by anti-logging protests and to former prime minister Kevin Rudd after Credlin claimed his petition calling for a royal commission into the Murdoch media was a data-harvesting exercise.

Another commentator, Alan Jones, was also forced this year to publish a correction to a 2020 editorial railing against Covid restrictions in Victoria after a watchdog ruling that he had misrepresented the research on the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns.

Most who discount Skys influence in Australia point to its relatively small audience on pay TV compared with, say, the main ABC channel, which regularly attracts 700,000-plus viewers to its prime-time news bulletin, and the millions who listen to the ABC radio news.

But Muller says Skys influence is much greater than its ratings.

Its influence on Australian politics is amplified by being part of the bigger News Corp commentariat, he says.

News Corp has also employed deliberate strategies to get Sky in front of decision-makers. Federal politicians receive free Foxtel pay TV subscriptions in their offices, giving them access to Sky News. Sky News is also ubiquitous in all the executive lounges at airports.

Sky has also sought to extend its reach into regional Australia through deals with television operators to carry its After Dark programs on free-to-air TV. This could see it reach 7 million people in some of the more conservative areas.

Muller says Sky has also extended its reach with an aggressive strategy to disseminate its content via the internet and social media to international audiences.

The After Dark shows are cut into bite-sized videos that are then uploaded on to Skys YouTube channel so they can be readily shared via social media.

Barry agrees with Muller: Some of those videos get over a million views. Its a central part of News Corps strategy to appeal to rightwing audiences internationally.

Popular Sky News Australia videos include reports on an alleged coverup by China on the activities of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of Covid-19; commentary on Joe Bidens alleged cognitive decline; Hunter Biden and allegations of corrupt dealings; the stolen US election.

This in turn has seen Sky After Dark commentators venture ever deeper into US politics and topics that might be more at home on a QAnon website, such as the Great Reset, which according to Skys Rowan Dean is an evil agenda by woke billionaires to dismantle capitalism that is being pushed via the next Davos economic summit and promoted by Prince Charles.

Whether GB News will elect to actively pursue an online audience through social media remains to be seen, but Frangopoulos will be familiar with all the strategies to make his mouse roar.

Among Frangopouloss former colleagues in Australia theres speculation that GB News could be a stalking horse for News Corps ambitions to launch a Fox News-style channel in the UK, or at the least a testing ground to see if a right-aligned news product can work.

News Corp had talked about starting its own Fox News-style channel in the UK but in April announced it was no longer pursuing a traditional cable channel and would instead focus on online video rather than linear TV.

Few leave the bosom of News Corp and remain within the fold. But Frangopoulos appears to still enjoy good standing, despite departing from Sky News Australia in 2018 for a job at Sky News Arabia, which is not owned by News.

Frangopoulos surprised many by appearing at Lachlan Murdochs 2019 Christmas drinks at his harbourside mansion in Sydney and was seen chatting cordially with Newss executives.

GB News has so far received benign coverage in the News Corp-owned UK papers, which are not shy about attacking media rivals.

The question many in Australia are asking is: if GB News succeeds will Murdoch be willing to cede the territory of rightwing television to another? And is there room for two?

The Guardian approached Frangopoulos for an interview, but he was not available during the launch week.

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GB News will flourish if the success of partisan, rightwing TV in Australia is any guide - The Guardian

Remote work turned out to be advantageous for people looking to leak information to reporters. Instructions that once might have been given in conversation now often had to be written down and beamed from one home office to another. Holding a large meeting on Zoom often required e-mailing supporting notes and materialsmore documents to leak. Before the pandemic, if you thought that an anti-racism seminar at your workplace had gone awry, you had to be both brave and sneaky to record it. At home, it was so much easier. Zoom allowed you to record and take screenshots, and if you were worried that such actions could be traced you could use your cell phone, or your spouses cell phone, or your friends. Institutions that had previously seemed impenetrable have been pried open: Amazon, the I.R.S., the U.S. Treasury. But some less obviously tectonic leaks have had a more direct political effect, as was the case in July, 2020, when an employee of the city of Seattle documented an anti-bias training session and sent the evidence to a journalist named Christopher F. Rufo, who read it and recognized a political opportunity.

Rufo, thirty-six, was at once an unconventional and a savvy choice for the leaker to select. Raised by Italian immigrants in Sacramento and educated at Georgetown, Rufo had spent his twenties and early thirties working as a documentary filmmaker, largely overseas, making touristic projects such as Roughing It: Mongolia, and Diamond in the Dunes, about a joint Uyghur-Han baseball team in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. In 2015, Rufo began work on a film for PBS that traced the experience of poverty in three American cities, and in the course of filming Rufo became convinced that poverty was not something that could be alleviated with a policy lever but was deeply embedded in social, familial, even psychological dynamics, and his politics became more explicitly conservative. Returning home to Seattle, where his wife worked for Microsoft, Rufo got a small grant from a regional, conservative think tank to report on homelessness, and then ran an unsuccessful campaign for city council, in 2018. His work so outraged Seattles homelessness activists that, during his election campaign, someone plastered his photo and home address on utility poles around his neighborhood. When Rufo received the anti-bias documents from the city of Seattle, he knew how to spot political kindling. These days, Im a brawler, Rufo told me cheerfully.

Through FOIA requests, Rufo turned up slideshows and curricula for the Seattle anti-racism seminars. Under the auspices of the citys Office for Civil Rights, employees across many departments were being divided up by race for implicit-bias training. (Welcome: Internalized Racial Superiority for White People, read one introductory slide, over an image of the Seattle skyline.) What do we do in white people space? read a second slide. One bullet point suggested that the attendees would be working through emotions that often come up for white people like sadness, shame, paralysis, confusion, denial. Another bullet point emphasized retraining, learning new ways of seeing that are hidden from us in white supremacy. A different slide listed supposed expressions of internalized white supremacy, including perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism. Rufo summarized his findings in an article for the Web site of City Journal, the magazine of the center-right Manhattan Institute: Under the banner of antiracism, Seattles Office of Civil Rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialismugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago.

The story was a phenomenon and helped to generate more leaks from across the country. Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. Reading through these documents, and others, Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books, by authors such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberl Crenshaw and Derrick Bell. These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present. As Crenshaw recently explained, critical race theory found that the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.

This inquiry, into the footnotes and citations in the documents hed been sent, formed the basis for an idea that has organized cultural politics this spring: that the anti-racism seminars did not just represent a progressive view on race but that they were expressions of a distinct ideologycritical race theorywith radical roots. If people were upset about the seminars, Rufo wanted them also to notice critical race theory operating behind the curtain. Following the trail back through the citations in the legal scholars texts, Rufo thought that he could detect the seed of their ideas in radical, often explicitly Marxist, critical-theory texts from the generation of 1968. (Crenshaw said that this was a selective, red-baiting account of critical race theorys origins, which overlooked less divisive influences such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) But Rufo believed that he could detect a single lineage, and that the same concepts and terms that organized discussions among white employees of the city of Seattle, or the anti-racism seminars at Sandia National Laboratories, were present a half century ago. Look at Angela Davisyou see all of the key terms, Rufo said. Davis had been Herbert Marcuses doctoral student, and Rufo had been reading her writing from the late sixties to the mid-seventies. He felt as if he had begun with a branch and discovered the root. If financial regulators in Washington were attending seminars in which they read Kendis writing that anti-racism was not possible without anti-capitalism, then maybe that was more than casual talk.

As Rufo eventually came to see it, conservatives engaged in the culture war had been fighting against the same progressive racial ideology since late in the Obama years, without ever being able to describe it effectively. Weve needed new language for these issues, Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. Political correctness is a dated term and, more importantly, doesnt apply anymore. Its not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, theyre seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, Its much more invasive than mere correctness, which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of whats happening. The other frames are wrong, too: cancel culture is a vacuous term and doesnt translate into a political program; woke is a good epithet, but its too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. Critical race theory is the perfect villain, Rufo wrote.

He thought that the phrase was a better description of what conservatives were opposing, but it also seemed like a promising political weapon. Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as creative rather than critical, individual rather than racial, practical rather than theoretical. Strung together, the phrase critical race theory connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American. Most perfect of all, Rufo continued, critical race theory is not an externally applied pejorative. Instead, its the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.

Last summer, Rufo published several more pieces for City Journal, and, on September 2nd, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Rufo had prepared a three-minute monologue, to be uploaded to a teleprompter at a Seattle studio, and he had practiced carefully enough that when a teleprompter wasnt available he still remembered what to say. On air, set against the deep-blue background of Fox News, he told Carlson, Its absolutely astonishing how critical race theoryhe said those three words slowly, for emphasishas pervaded every aspect of the federal government. Carlsons face retracted into a familiar pinched squint while Rufo recounted several of his articles. Then he said what hed come to say: Conservatives need to wake up. This is an existential threat to the United States. And the bureaucracy, even under Trump, is being weaponized against core American values. And Id like to make it explicit: The President and the White Houseits within their authority to immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical-race-theory training from the federal government. And I call on the President to immediately issue this executive orderto stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology.

The next morning, Rufo was home with his wife and two sons when he got a phone call from a 202 area code. The man on the other end, Rufo recalled, said, Chris, this is Mark Meadows, chief of staff, reaching out on behalf of the President. He saw your segment on Tucker last night, and hes instructed me to take action. Soon after, Rufo flew to Washington, D.C., to assist in drafting an executive order, issued by the White House in late September, that limited how contractors providing federal diversity seminars could talk about race. This entire movement came from nothing, Rufo wrote to me recently, as the conservative campaign against critical race theory consumed Twitter each morning and Fox News each night. But the truth is more specific than that. Really, it came from him.

Last Thursday, I travelled to visit Rufo at home in Gig Harbor, Washington, a small city on the Puget Sound with the faint but ineradicable atmosphere of early retirementof pier-side low-exertion midmorning yoga classes. Rufo has a thin, brown beard and an inquisitive, outdoorsy manner, and when we met for lunch on a local cafs veranda he spoke about his political commitments (to conservatism against critical race theory) loudly enough for those around us to hear. Rufo and his wife, Suphatra, a computer programmer at Amazon Web Services who emigrated from Thailand in elementary school, moved to Gig Harbor last year, in part to get away from the intense political climate that had coalesced around him in Seattle. The move had coincided with his increasing prominence, and so Gig Harbor had not been as professionally isolating as he had at first feared. Wearing a gray flannel shirt and dark jeans, Rufo showed me the soundproofed home studio hed recently built, with a hookup to send a broadcast-quality signal to Fox News.

Since his appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight last fall, Rufos rise had matched that of the movement against critical race theory. Hed become a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, for which he had written more than two dozen document-based articlesmostly about anti-bias training in the government, schools, and corporationswhich, he told me, had together accrued more than two hundred and fifty million impressions online. (Thats a lot, he said.) Carlson has been an especially effective ally; he relied on Rufos reporting for an hour-long episode this spring on woke education, and invited Rufo to join as a segment guest. Conservatives in state legislatures across the country have proposed (and, in some cases, passed) legislation banning or restricting critical-race-theory instruction or seminars; Rufo has advised on the language for more than ten bills. When Ron DeSantis and Tom Cotton have tweeted about critical race theory, they have borrowed Rufos phrases. He has travelled to Washington, D.C., to speak to an audience of two dozen members of Congress, and mentioned in passing that earlier in May hed had drinks with Ted Cruz. In the 2016 Presidential election, Rufo had cast a dissenters vote for Gary Johnson. In 2020, he voted to relect Trump. Rufo said, I mean, how can you not? It would have seemed rude and ungrateful.

Rufos new position did not give him just a view up, into the world of Republican power, but down, into the mounting outrage at anti-racism programs across the country. Rufo set up a tip line last October, and has so far received thousands of tips, many of which he thought were substantive. (An assistant does the culling.) From among this pile, hed discovered that third graders in Cupertino, California, were being asked to rank themselves and their classmates according to their privilege; he also learned about a three-day whiteness retreat for white male executives at Lockheed Martin and an initiative at Disney urging executives to decolonize their bookshelves. Some of the outrage appeared to have been ginned up by local political actorsa particularly combative and high-profile anti-C.R.T. parents group in Loudoun County was organized by a former Trump Justice Department officialbut it was nonetheless deeply felt. In Loudoun, one parent had said, If you spend millions to call people in our community racist, you better be able to prove it.

Read more:

How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory - The New Yorker

While bullets flew and people fell all around Hartford, some within sight of the state Capitol dome, the General Assembly deliberated its state budget legislation and then, as part of the budget, voted to remove from the Capitol's faade the statue of Maj. John Mason, without whom Connecticut and the rest of New England might not have survived and developed as an English colony.

The idea is to relocate the statue to the grounds of the Old State House a few blocks away and attach a plaque that will note, among other things, Mason's involvement in the battle that ended in the massacre of most of the Pequot tribe in Mystic in 1637.

Since many noncombatants were killed, that massacre is probably the worst thing ever to have happened in Connecticut. But relations between the English and some Indian tribes already had become genocidal on both sides. Indeed, the English in the Boston area were invited to settle in Connecticut by tribes looking for allies against the Pequots, who were oppressing them and whose very name meant "destroyers." To a great extent the Pequots brought destruction on themselves.

But political correctness wants to magnify the offenses of the prevailing culture's antecedents, taking them out of the context of their time. So Mason's statue must be relocated, just as another statue of him is to be relocated from the town green to the historical society in Windsor, the town he helped found.

There might be a fair discussion here, but the affectation of morality about statues at the Capitol when the adjacent city and Connecticut's other two major cities, New Haven and Bridgeport, are exploding in mayhem is too exquisite. The legislature's recent session seems not even once to have taken note of this mayhem. While the legislature rushed toward its midnight adjournment last Wednesday two people were murdered in separate incidents in Hartford, one of them a beloved grandmother killed by bullets tearing through the walls of her apartment as she was making dinner inside.

To distract from the city's social disintegration, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin blamed the latest atrocity on the "assault weapon" from which the fatal shots were fired. But the city's social disintegration is not so easily concealed. Lately it also has included raucous and unauthorized street parties disrupting the city's south side and overwhelming the police, as well as the Police Department's difficulty in keeping up with the turnover caused by the demoralization of its officers.

The shots also keep flying and people keep falling in New Haven and Bridgeport, which nevertheless are deliberating how to replace their own recently removed statues of Columbus.

Meanwhile Democratic leaders at the Capitol are calling the new state budget "transformational." Relocating a statue while ignoring the mayhem, the budget might better be called oblivious.

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LAMONT'S EMPTY POSE: On balance the recent legislative session seems to have gone well for Governor Lamont, but advocates of freedom of information and the rights of crime victims may not be favorably impressed by his handling of the legislation that will erase thousands of criminal records, including some serious felonies.

The governor signed the bill but then sent a letter to the legislature urging it to amend the new law to prevent some of those felonies from being erased. Of course the normal procedure for a governor who has objections to legislation is to negotiate them [ITALICS] before [END ITALICS] a bill is passed or to veto the bill and explain his objections, thereby preserving his leverage.

With other issues Lamont has not hesitated to suggest he would use his veto. His expressing his objections to the conviction erasure bill [ITALICS] after [END ITALICS] he signed it into law rather than before is not likely to persuade legislators to make changes, nor provide much consolation to those who rights are erased along with the convictions.

* * *

LET THE PUBLIC BACK IN: Just as the governor admits he has enjoyed ruling by emergency decree for 15 months during the virus epidemic, most members of the General Assembly seem to have enjoyed excluding the public from the legislative halls during their recent session.

With the epidemic fading fast, the Capitol should be reopened to the public. If concern continues, the unvaccinated can be asked to wear masks.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.

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At the state Capitol, an old statue is offensive but not mayhem on nearby streets - Journal Inquirer

Flix Lefebvre and Benjamin Voisin in Summer of 85.(Music Box Films)

He goes back, ebulliently, to the future of love.

The challenge of Franois Ozons Summer of 85 is stated outright when heartbroken teenager Alexis (Flix Lefebvre) is told, The only thing that matters is to somehow escape your history. Those words are the key to Ozons latest sexual and moral provocation. Looking back to the era of the AIDS crisis, Ozon tests its recent political distortion (the history that is used to further activist discontent) by simultaneously reminding us of the thrill of romance, sexual pursuit, and death.

Ozons ebullient imagery in Summer of 85 is the opposite of morbid. It immediately contrasts the preoccupation with death that brainy 16-year-old Alexis specifies as Death with a capital D. His voice-over narrates a court-ordered writing assignment, explaining how he met the now-deceased 18-year-old David (Benjamin Voisin), and Ozon uses the same imaginative daring to visualize flashbacks of their adventure.

The queerness of Alexis and Davids love story is seen in how Ozon re-creates 1985 reviving the urgent synth-pulse of the periods pop music (primarily The Cures Inbetween Days) to portray the reckless vivacity of adolescence. The boys meet when David saves Alexis after his skiff capsizes during a riptide; their friendship and gradual intimacy develop out of their opposing backgrounds. Alexis is initiated into sex while David is introduced to affection. The clash of innocence and experience is not simple nostalgia as in Summer of 42. Ozon, in his own peculiar way, avoids sentimental education to tell a story that is also an abstract portrayal of the longing and grief that defines the AIDS tragedy.

It is through irony bright exteriors, blue sky, and ecstatic sunbathing (shot by Hichame Alaouie) that Ozon is able to confront AIDS without ever naming it, while depicting the impending crisis in a radiant world of nearly tactile sensuality. His aesthetic conceit offers a moral proposition: Will the legacy of AIDS be political or personal?

At first this seems outrageous, an indifferent point of view afforded to Millennials generations later. But that challenge gives Summer of 85 suspense; its what makes 53-year-old Ozon heir to Luis Buuels surrealist daring. Ozon (who was 18 in 1985) is unabashed about critiquing human folly because, ultimately, his films are compassionate and forthright.

Alexis struggles with the personal aspect of Davids license and promiscuity the essential question of homosexual fidelity thats been swept away by political correctness. The 2017 hit Call Me by Your Name was offensively superficial about the kind of emotional and family complication that Alexis and David meet head-on. When David says, I wont be owned by anyone, Alexis responds by breaking the mirror that shows their bad reflection.

Ozon goes back to 1985 the year of Back to the Future as a cineastes jest (Lefebvre resembles Ozon crossed with Michael J. Fox) to reclaim the profundity that other current gay filmmakers lack. Summer of 85 references cinemas finest moments of romantic expression: The amusement-park flirtation in Lionel Baiers Garon Stupide; the quiet bedroom tryst from Julin Hernndezs Broken Sky; the movie-balcony scene from Terence Daviess The Long Day Closes; and, best of all, the classic motorcycle ride in Andr Tchins Wild Reeds (Lean into the motion, David advises). These mementos give Summer of 85 moral substance, as does the poem Il faut, voyez-vous, nous pardonner les choses (It is necessary, you see, to forgive things) that Paul Verlaine wrote for Arthur Rimbaud, which Alexis reads to David.

Between Summer of 85s cultural references, love story, gender satire, private confessional, and an incomplete subplot (featuring Melvil Poupaud as a bookish professor also smitten by sex-bomb David), Ozon switches several tenses too many. Yet, Ozons historical-political concept needs authentic pop-culture connections more Erasure, New Order, The Associates, Scritti Politti rather than the blandly sentimental Rod Stewart track Sailing, which Alexis listens to in a moment of sublime earphone isolation at a disco. Frances Olivier Assayas might have better musical taste, but Ozons previous meditations By the Grace of God, Young and Beautiful, Ricky, and Frantz are the work of a more fascinating and culturally relevant filmmaker. Summer of 85 is among Ozons most impressive movies. Tony Kushners overwrought Angels in America gratuitously politicized the AIDS crisis and is considered definitive, but Summer of 85, double-billed with Robin Campillos epic BPM, would provide the perfect correction and counterpoint.

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In Summer of 85, Franois Ozon Transcends the Politics of AIDS - National Review

History is contested because the telling of history is powerful.

President Joe Biden brought eloquent leadership to a national commemoration of the 100th anniversary of a massacre in Tulsa, Okla., this month. In 1921, hundreds of Black men, women, and children were murdered, and a thriving community was destroyed in a singular racialized mass murder.

These murders took place as the Ku Klux Klan was resurgent, energized by the vehemently racist 1915 filmBirth of a Nation, which promoted the false pro-Confederacy Lost Cause version of the history of slavery and the Civil War.

The truth was systematically covered up, deliberately erased from our collective memory, by public officials, news media, and textbooks.

It would be tempting to think that a cover-up of this magnitude could never happen today. But we may be on the verge of an even greater historical cover-up. Republican legislators instateslikeTexas,Iowa, andOhio, egged on by right-wing cable TV and social media personalities, are trying to outlaw honest teaching about the racial violence in our history and the structural racism that harms Black people and other people of color today. Republicans in Congress aremovingto restrict discussions of racism in military and federal government training.

Right-wing alarmism about openly addressing racism is this election cycles version of the war on political correctness waged by right-wing media and former president Donald Trump. It is a rhetorical strategy with a partisan purpose. It is meant to convince a segment of white voters that they should fear and fight our emerging multiracial and multiethnic democratic society. It is meant to help far-right politicians take and hold power, no matter the cost to our democracy.

Throughout American history, political operatives like the promoters of pro-Confederacy revisionism to countless boards of education have understood that controlling the narrative about the past was a key to shaping the future. That is why right-wing forces have fought so hard to dictate the content of textbooks, purging progressive leaders and whitewashing history in order to promote a certain kind of politically advantageous patriotism among students. And it is why Republican senators blocked the creation of a commission to examine the truth about the deadly Capitol insurrection, which many right-wing politicians and pundits are now pretending was no big deal.

The online publicationThe Rootrecently undertook a fascinatinginvestigation. It tracked down the educational standards and history textbooks that would have been in place when politicians who are now fighting schools use ofThe New York Times 1619 Projecta deep inquiry into the role of racism and slavery in US historywere in school themselves. The results are as revealing as they are repugnant. Materials used in public schools across the South for decades taught that slave masters were a kindly lot, that the war for Southern independence was not about slavery but resisting Northern tyranny, and that the KKK was formed to keep the peace by keeping Black people in their place.

It is no coincidence that the right-wing war against history and truth is being waged at the same time that new voter suppression laws are being justified by false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump by Black and brown voters casting fraudulent ballots.

Todays manipulators of history are pursuing a dangerous strategy. They want to weaponize fear and anger to help them win elections in 2022 and 2024. But once fomented, hatred is difficult to control.

Witness the rise of overt white nationalism and hate crimes that accompanied Trumps intentionally inflammatory rhetoric.

America is on the cusp of something new. We are becoming a democratic society in which no one ethnic or religious group makes up a majority of the country. Some see that as a threat. I see it as an opportunity to fulfill Frederick Douglasss vision of the destiny of the United States to be the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family.

We can only get there through honesty about our past, openness about the challenges of the present, and commitment to a future in which we, the people means all the people.

Ben Jealous is currently president of People For the American Way and the former national president and CEO of the NAACP.

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There is a cover-up underway in America - St. Louis American