Category Archives: Political Correctness

You know who's not canceled? The endless parade of conservative pundits and politicians complaining about "cancel culture." You know who is canceled? George Floyd is canceled. Breonna Taylor is canceled. Ma'Khia Bryant is canceled. Andrew Brown Jr. is canceled. They are the true victims in America's longest-running culture war. Anyone who tells you different is just gaslighting. You want "cancel culture"? America isplagued with cancel culture. And no one is more American than conservatives, as they never cease reminding you.

Despite earlier boutique appeal,the term "cancel culture" had only faintly registered with the broader public before the July Fourth holidaylast year (Google trends), when then-President Donald Trump gave a speech at MountRushmore, warning of "a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for," and saying that his opponents' "political weapons" included''cancel culture' driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees."

It was a ludicrous accusation coming from the man who's signature line "You're fired!" was the quintessential expression of actually-existing cancel culture. More recently, Trump had beenthe main driver of the cancellation of NFL Colin Kaepernick, demanding not just that the NFL quarterback befired, but driven fromthe country. Thatabsurdity prompted CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale to post a list of people or institutionsTrump had called out to cancel on Twitter over the years, ranging from corporations like AT&T, Appleand Macy's to newspapers like the Dallas Morning News and the Arizona Republicto liberal commentatorslike Paul Krugman and Tourand even conservatives like Karl Rove, Rich Lowry, Charles Krauthammerand Jonah Goldberg.

But now that Trump himself has been canceled by the votes of 81,268,924 Americans, "cancel culture" has become a go-to weapon of choice for Trumpian conservatives, fueled by a branded string of stories in conservative media, including the New York Post, Breitbart, the Daily Caller and the Daily Wire. With Trump himself no longer dominating news cycles 24/7, there's a huge void to fill. Conservative "cancel culture" panic helps fill that void by providing a shared cookie-cutter framework to both fuel and give shape to that panic which is in fact a genuine cultural panic about the white right's loss of power to impose itsworldview, and resulting judgments, on others. To hold onto power, conservatives arecommitted to building the "cancel culture" narrative, casting themselves as victims along the lines of my December Salon story on perceived victimhood.

A meaningfully meaningless term

As Media Matters editor Parker Malloy argues, regarding the terms "cancel culture,""woke"and "identity politics": "Whatever real definitions these words had before they were co-opted by the right have been diluted to the point of meaninglessness." For conservatives, thatmeaninglessness is a feature, not a bug. Those wordsmean whatever a right-wingaccuser needs them to mean in the moment. They are talismanic terms, representing the verycultural power the right feels itselflosing in today's rapidly changing world. "Cancel culture" in particular has a profound Orwellian or even Nietzschean power: a transvaluation of values, transforming a moment of existential loss into one of triumph, at least for as long as we let them get away with it.

There are, however, two modest constraints on meaning we can observe: the notions that cancel culture is something new, and that it comes exclusively from the left. The reality is exactly the opposite.For as long as culture has been changing, conservatives have tried to stop it bysuppressing or demonizinganything that challenges their worldview. Not all conservatives, of course, and not in all ways. But this has been a central thrust of conservative thought, not just in the modern political era, when the terms "liberal"and "conservative"emerged, but as far back as ancient Greece, as Eric Alfred Havelock showed in "The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics."

In American history we can see dramatic examples of conservative cancel culture in the Alien and Sedition Acts, in the 4,743 post-Civil War lynchings to terrorize and suppress black political power, in the post-World War I Palmer Raids, in which 10,000 were arrested and 556 deported, in the McCarthy era, during which hundreds were imprisoned and 10,000 to 12,000 Americans lost their jobs including the long-neglected anti-gayLavender Scareand in the FBI's COINTELPRO Program, which targeted the 1960s civil rights and anti-war movements, labelling Martin Luther King Jr.'s SCLC as a Black nationalist "hate group." Trump's obsession with canceling people he fears fits squarely within this historical tradition. After all, his political mentor and second father-figure was Joe McCarthy's lead investigator, Roy Cohn. We shouldn't be the least bit surprised or confused by the cancel culture hysteria being promoted today as a front for the same evils it pretends to be fighting against.

Still, the term itself is newcompared to this centuries-long history, so it warrants clarification. In early April, the Washington Post's Clyde McGrady provided an excellent guide, "The strange journey of 'cancel,' from a Black-culture punchline to a White-grievance watchword."McGrady offersa concise cultural history, from legendary songwriter/producer Nile Rodgers' experience with a bad date, rendered into the 1981 Chic song "Your Love Is Cancelled"to its appearance in"New Jack City" a decade laterto 2000s songs "Hustler's Ambition" by 50 Cent and "I'm Single" by Lil Wayneand finally to Black Twitter.

"Declaring someone or something 'canceled' on Twitter was not really an attempt to activate a boycott or run anyone from the public square," McGradyexplains. "Saying someone was 'canceled' was more like changing the channel and telling your friends and followers about it than demanding that the TV execs take the program off the air."

It's worth highlighting that Rodgers' bad-date experience at the root of all this sprang from his working-class common man rejection of tossing his cultural weight around:

[A]t heart, he was still a humble kid whose parents had struggled with drug addiction and who felt fortunate to have made it as far as he did. So, when his date asked the matre d' to remove people from a table so they could sit there instead, Rodgers bristled.

Her attempt to use his celebrity to push people around was a dealbreaker. "No, no, no, I don't do that," Rodgers remembered explaining. "I don't play that card."

In short, canceling everyday people in the way that conservatives portray "cancel culture" to work wasthe exact opposite of what motivated Rodgers to coin the term in the first place, as well as how it's been used on Twitter. Think aboutthat anytime you hear the term used.

You should also think of everything conservatives are doing or trying to do right now to cancel the views of those they disagree with. The following are just a few prominent examples. In each case, it's about those who wield power "canceling" or at least trying to cancel those who would challenge them. Their efforts to cancel democracy at the ballot box (with 361 bills in 47 states as of March 24) and in the streets (81 anti-protest bills in 34 states as of April 21) are deadly serious threats to American democracy.

But the right's most persistent, long-running cancel-culture attacks center on education. As Fairness and Accuracy In Reportingnoted on William F. Buckley's death, "Buckley's career began in 1951 with the publication of 'God and Man at Yale,' an attack on his alma mater that urged the firing of professors whom he felt were insufficiently hostile to socialism and atheism."

Cancel culture in education

In March, Boise State University abruptly suspended all 52 sections of a required general education course, "Foundations of Ethics & Diversity," citing "allegations that a student or students have been humiliated and degraded in class on our campus for their beliefs and values." Suspending 52 sections of a required course without investigation for perhaps a single student complaint is of course wildly out of bounds, as pointed out by John K. Wilson at the Academe blog:

Even if one instructor had done something terrible in one class, that would only justify (in the most extreme cases) suspending that instructor temporarily and finding a substitute to continue the class. It could not justify suspending all 52 classes in which there was no evidence of any misconduct.

Shedding light on the over-reaction, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reported, "The cancellation of the classes comes after more than a year of lawmakers' efforts to rein in classes at Idaho universities and colleges." But the legislature wasn't acting on its own, as Wilson made clear:

The Idaho legislators are being pressured by right-wing nonprofits who demand censorship of liberal ideas on campus. A December 2020reportfrom the right-wing Idaho Freedom Foundation and the Claremont Institute declared that "eliminating social justice initiatives at Idaho's universities is necessary for meaningful reform, as well as disrupting their ability to provide stable careers for social justice advocates." The report called for the state legislature to act by "penalizing universities that continue to emphasize social justice education." This report urged the state legislature to violate academic freedom and ban classes it deemed too liberal: "Direct the University to eliminate courses that are infused with social justice Ideology." Leading right-wing think tanks are actively demanding a ban on courses based on their ideology. This is an example of conservative cancel culture far more extreme than anything pushed by left-wing activists.

The report doesn't just call for eliminating individual courses, however. It calls for the elimination of five whole departments Gender Studies, Sociology, Global Studies, Social Work andHistory that it claims are infused with "social justice" ideology. (A sixth blacklisted department has since been added: Criminal Justice.) Eight other departments (later updated to nine) are on a watch list of sorts, judged to be "social justice in training." What conservatives want here is strikingly similar to what Viktor Orbn has done in Hungary, where he's just announced the privatization of 11 public universities, to be run by political allies.

Boise State's recklessly illegal actions are just the tip of the iceberg. On April 15, Education Week reported that Republican lawmakers in eight states (including Idaho) have drafted bills restricting how teachers can discuss racism and sexism. "The bills use similar language as an executive order former President Donald Trump put in place to ban diversity trainings for federal workers," it reported.

Georgetown political scientist Donald Moynihan saw all this coming years ago. In a New York Times op-ed just before Trump took office,Moynihan then at the University of Wisconsin focused attention on what was really happening where he worked.

"At least three times in the past six months, state legislators have threatened to cut the budget of the University of Wisconsin at Madison for teaching about homosexuality, gender and race," his article began. All the discussions focused on the dangers of "political correctness" (the buzzword of choice before "cancel culture")bore no relation to his own experience teaching at public universities in three states over 14 years. "Students can protest on the campus mall, demanding that policies be changed; elected officials can pass laws or cut resources to reflect their beliefs about how a campus should operate," he wrote. "One group has much more power than the other."

I asked Moynihan about how he came to write that piece when he did. Here's what he said:

I was first engaged on speech issues when the then-governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, proposed to remove "the search for truth" from my university's missionstatement. (He would later claim it was a typo.) He thenreduced tenure protections for faculty and new policies that would have made it easier to bring guns on campus. Republican politicians would talk about free speech on campus, but seemed to be intent on eroding the conditions to protect such speech. Politicians were also willing to target faculty members. The chair of the Assembly Higher Education committee started monitoring faculty syllabi and calling for the firing of faculty whose courses he did not like.

That was when I spoke out. It seemed deeply unfair that state officials would so blatantly use their power to determine what was, and what was not, acceptable speech. ...

Soon after a Ben Shapiro talk was interrupted for about 10 minutes the legislature proposed and the conservative Board of Regents adopted a new set of policies that they said protected free speech but effectively forced campuses to punish students for protest. Our Board of Regents was almost uniformly conservative appointees who seemed to see it as their job to attack the institution they had been appointed to represent.

I'll have more to say about Shapiro's role below. But it's part of a broader campaign. "Conservatives have been successful at demonizing the people who work on campus faculty, staff and students as threats to free speech," Moynihan told me. "Attacking universities became a staple of the far right, propelled by an entire ecosystem of media funded by donors like the Koch or DeVos families, such as Campus Reform. [More on them below, too.] Tucker Carlson had a themed segment called 'Campus Craziness.'"

Worse than that, Moynihan said:

The mainstream media bought it. It wasn't just on the right. Journalists at the Atlantic or writers in the New York Times told us that students were becoming dangerously intolerant, and faculty were brainwashing them. My op-edin the Times was one of the few that pushed against that general narrative. The dominant narrative, even in places like the New York Times, was that conservative speech was being suppressed, and the students and faculty were the villains. Someone counted this! They found that over an 18-month stretch, there were 21 op-eds about the suppressionof conservative speech but just three, including mine, on conservative threats to speech.

Remember: Moynihan's op-ed ran just days before Trump took office, having made complaints about "political correctness" a recurrent campaign theme.

"Once the general narrative was established, even trivial examples students at Oberlin complaining about food names - were presented as serious and representative threats to speech," Moynihan continued."There were also a series of college tours by people like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter andBen Shapirowho said offensive things designed to enrage people, and then generated protests and interruptions thatembellished theirbrands asfearless free-speech champions."

In March 2018, Sanford Ungar reported on results from the Georgetown Free Speech Tracker:

[M]ost of the incidents where presumptively conservative speech has been interrupted or squelched in the last two or three years seem to involve the same few speakers: Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Ann Coulter. In some instances, they seem to invite, and delight in, disruption.

At Vox, Zack Beauchamp put a finer point on it:

What Ungar is suggesting here is that the "campus free speech" crisis is somewhat manufactured. Conservative student groups invite speakers famous for offensive and racially charged speech all of the above speakers fit that bill in a deliberate attempt to provoke the campus left. In other words, they're trolling.

Trolling takes other forms as well, as Alice Speri reported for the Interceptin early April. Her story carried the subhead, "Campus Reform and its publisher, the Leadership Institute, are siccing armies of trolls on professors across the country." Campus Reform purports to expose "liberal bias and abuse on the nation's college campuses," but regularly relies on misrepresentation, first to elicit faculty comments and then to mis-report them, making them seem as sinister as possible. "Over the last several years, Campus Reform has targeted hundreds of college professors," Speri reported, "leading to online harassment campaigns, doxxing, threats of violence, and calls on universities to fire their faculty."

A Trinity College assistant professor, Isaac Kamola, "has tracked more than 1,570 stories posted on Campus Reform since 2020 and surveyed the 338 individuals they targeted." He "found that at least 40 percent of respondents received 'threats of harm' following a Campus Reform article, mostly via email and social media." She goes on to say, "Less than half the people surveyed by Kamola reported receiving support from their universities' administrations, and more than 12 percent reported facing disciplinary action as a result of a Campus Reform story. Three people said they lost their jobs."

In short, they were canceled.And no one put them on national TV to talk about it. That's just one more way in which conservativegaslighting about cancel culture advances the very thing conservatives claimto beconcerned about.

"Having created the narrative of the intolerant liberal campus as a problem, conservative politicians could propose a solution," Moynihan continued. "They could make a case for why their policing of speech on campus was actually protecting free speech. They effectively persuaded many that politiciansshould be trusted to monitor speech on campus, more than the people who lived on campus and have historically done a pretty good job of protecting speech."

But none of this matched reality."Wisconsin has a long history of protest and counter-protest on campus, some of it quite violent. The idea that students had suddenly become aggressiveseemed clearly wrong to me," Moynihan recalled. "These terms I kept hearing just did not fit with my experiencewith the students I engaged with. The gap between my lived experience on campus and what was being portrayed in the media was large."

At the same time, "I looked around the world and saw a very disturbingtrend: Authoritarian governmentsin places like Hungary, Turkey and China were policing speech on campus as part of their effort to stifle dissent, using many of the same tools that U.S. state legislatures are adopting," Moynihan said. "For example, a bill in Florida encourages studentsto record and monitor their professors to expose their views. What could be more chilling to speech in the classroom? This is the same tool that China uses to control universities: Student informers report any dissent against the party."

Canceling democracy at the ballot box

Trump's refusal to accept his defeat in the 2020 election was the epitome of attempting to cancel democracy. But it was only an intensification of processes already underway. Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once in eight elections since 1988. They have not represented a majority of voters in the Senate since 1996. Their $30 million REDMAP project in 2010 created the most sweeping partisan redistricting of the House in US history, as former Salon editor in chief David Daley recounted in "Ratf**ked." Baseless claims of voter fraud have been repeatedly invoked in justifying and motivating voter suppression efforts. More broadly, a new study of state-level democratic backsliding since 2000 found that "Republican control of state government, however, consistently and profoundly reduces state democratic performance during this time period."

Still, what's happening now goes considerably further. A majority of Republicans refuse to believe Biden legitimately won the election, leading to an avalanche of new voter suppression bills 361 bills in 47 states as of March 24, according to the Brennan Center, which reported:

Most restrictive bills take aim at absentee voting, while nearly a quarter seek stricter voter ID requirements. State lawmakers also aim to make voter registration harder, expand voter roll purges or adopt flawed practices that would risk improper purges, and cut back on early voting.

Sharply underscoring the cancel culture motivations the conflict between established state power and shifting public opinion the report continued: "The states that have seen the largest number of restrictive bills introduced areTexas(49 bills),Georgia(25 bills), andArizona(23 bills). Bills are actively moving in the Texas and Arizona statehouses, and Georgia enacted an omnibus voter suppression bill last week."

The most infamous aspect of the Georgia law is its restriction ongiving waterto people waiting in long lines to vote. But as election law expert Rick Hasen explained in a New York Times op-ed, there's something even more sinister involved, a "new threat of election subversion" that "represent[s] a huge threat to American democracy itself." Specifically, "The Georgia law removesthe secretary of state from decision-making power on the state election board," which is aimed at Brad Raffensperger, who refused to "find" 11,780 votesto overturn Biden's victory. "But the changes will apply to Mr. Raffensperger's successor, too, giving the legislature a greater hand in who counts votes and how they are counted," Hasen explained.

It's hardly an isolated case, he noted:"According to a new reportbyProtect Democracy,Law Forwardand theStates United Democracy Center, Republican legislators have proposed at least 148 bills in 36 states that could increase the chances of cooking the electoral books." More precisely, the press release says:

Many of the bills would make elections more difficult to administer or even unworkable; make it more difficult to finalize election results; allow for election interference and manipulation by hyper-partisan actors; and, in the worst cases, allow state legislatures to overturn the will of the voters and precipitate a democracy crisis. If these bills had been in place in 2020, they would have significantly added to the turmoil of the post-election period, and raised the prospect that the outcome of the election would have been contrary to the popular vote.

This is what a real cancel culture crisis looks like. And it's 100% conservative from top to bottom. There are of course some individual conservatives who strongly object but nowhere near enough.

Canceling democracy in the streets

But democracy doesn't begin and end at the polls. The First Amendment protects basic freedoms that make meaningful democracy possible, including "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Republicans have been busy trying to cancel our democracy on this front as well, with81 anti-protest bills introduced in 34 states during the 2021 legislative session, "more than twice as many proposals as in any other year, according to Elly Page, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law," the New York Times reported on April 21. (Those laws are tracked here.)

"Republican legislators inOklahomaand Iowa have passed bills granting immunity to drivers whose vehicles strike and injure protesters in public streets," the Times reported. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. "We've seen at least 15 bills introduced that would create new immunity for drivers who hit protesters with their cars," Page's colleague Nick Robinson told Democracy Now! on April 26. Thatjust one of many objectionable features in a recently-passed Florida bill that Gov.Ron DeSantis signed while claiming it wasas "anti-rioting." The ACLU of Florida characterized it instead as "anti-protest."Just three people would be enough to constitute a "riot" and 26 wouldconstitute an "aggravated riot," potentially facinglong prison sentences.

"Under this new bill, let's say you just go to a protest, and a handful of people kick over a trash can. Just by being part of that crowd, you can be arrested and prosecuted for rioting and face a felony," Robinson explained. "Actually, under the law, no one actually has to commit any violence at all. If there's just a danger to property, then people can be arrested for rioting."

In short, thisa naked governmental power grab, meant to squelch popular protest, and aimed specificallyat Black Lives Matter protesters. How do we know? Florida lawmakers said as much, and they included a provision blocking any Florida city or county from cutting police budgetswithout explicit permission from the state.

Conservative anti-protest cancel culture is nothing new, of course. The Palmer Raids were supposed to headoff a Russian Revolution-style violent uprising, but only turned up a total of four pistols from thousands of arrests. More recently, Republican state lawmakers have focused on criminalizing climate activism, as the Brennan Center reported in March:

Since 2016,13 stateshave quietly enacted laws that increase criminal penalties for trespassing, damage, and interference with infrastructure sites such as oil refineries and pipelines. At leastfive more stateshave already introduced similar legislation this year.

The laws are based on post-9/11 national security legislationto protect vital physical infrastructure, "but moststate critical infrastructure lawsfocus more narrowly on oil and gas pipelines," the Center noted. "While protecting critical infrastructure is a legitimate government function, these laws clearly target environmental and Indigenous activists by significantly raising the penalties for participating in or even tangentially supporting pipeline trespassing and property damage, crimes that are already illegal."

And there's one final conservative cancel culture twist: the question of who's calling the shots:

Many laws are modeled ondraft legislationprepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council, also known as ALEC, a powerful lobbying group funded by fossil fuel companies likeExxonMobil and Shell.

Cancel culture In Congress

Those are three broad areas where conservative cancel culture is both widespread and deeply dangerous to democracy. But that's hardly the whole story. Consider what's happened with two key Biden appointments, Vanita Gupta, for Associate Attorney General, and Kristen Clarke to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division. Both were subject to dishonest, racistright-wing smear campaigns, as CNN reported, and Gupta was confirmed 51-49, with just one Republicanvote(Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska)on April 21. Both were relentlessly portrayed as dangerous extremists, when they've actually been leaders of mainstream civil rights organizations the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (Gupta) and Lawyers' Committee on Civil Rights Under Law (Clarke). Both were attacked for supposedly being anti-police (no racial stereotyping there, right?) even though both had been endorsed by police organizations, including the Fraternal Order of Police (Gupta) and the Major Cities Chiefs Association (Clarke).

The attacks on them were part of a broader pattern of attacks on nominees who are women and/or people of color, including Xavier Becerra (Health and Human Services), Deb Haaland (Department of Interior)and Neera Tanden (Office of Management and Budget). Becerra was confirmed 50-49 with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine as his only GOP vote while Tanden's nomination was withdrawn.

All this is simply accepted as normal now, but it's prima facie evidence of a concerted conservative cancel-culture effort to stifle the voices of key Democraticconstituencies. It's visible in the broad reach of voter suppression efforts, of protest suppression efforts and curriculum suppression efforts as well. They've all but given up on advancing anything like a governing agenda. At the Atlantic, Ron Brownstein observed:

With their opposition to President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan, Republicans are doubling down on a core bet they've made for his presidency: that the GOP can maintain support among its key constituencies while fighting programs that would provide those voters with tangible economic assistance.

To accomplishthat, they have to cancelreality itself. No problem Republicanshavebeen doing that for decades. The only difference now is that they've stopped doing anything else.

Link:

Conservatives claim to hate "cancel culture" but it's the heart of the right-wing agenda - Salon

Could we trace a direct line from Rush Limbaugh, Americas most popular talk radio host until his death in February, to Donald Trump, the worlds least qualified leader since Kaiser Wilhelm II and Americas most destructive president?

We could start this circuitous but plausible journey in 1988, when Limbaughs flagship talk show for WABC in New York made its debut, and end in 2020 with Trumps final State of the Union address, in which he awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the day after the right-wing shock jock revealed that he had lung cancer. Along the way there have been many imitators, including Mike Pencewho before being Trumps vice president hosted a radio show that he dubbed Rush Limbaugh on decaf for WRCR-FM in Indiana. Limbaugh has also served as inspiration for Fox newscasters like Tucker Carlson and the hard-right website Breitbart News, which from 2012 was led by Steve Bannon, who went on to become Trumps chief strategist.

The first thing to note is that if your plan is to change the radio discourse, migrate that change onto TV, render the unsayable sayable in public, influence a major political party, anoint your chosen leader and finally take charge, its going to take a very long time. But it is also eminently possible. Like many US cultural trends, right-wing shock jocks have already arrived on these shores and the fear is that, unless were very careful, they could push our politics towards ever- greater polarisation, and a barren sourness in which compromise cannot grow. This is the environment in which GB News hoves onto the horizon, headed by former Sunday Times editor and Spectator chairman Andrew Neil, respected as a BBC interviewer but never short of a strident conservative opinion. He promises an altogether different kind of rolling TV news commentarymore exciting, robust. Ofcom would once have prevented this unfurling into a homegrown Fox News. But will it still?

Some of the conditions that created shock-jockery and amplified its power were distinctively American. None of it would have been possible without President Reagans cancellation of the fairness doctrine governing radio output in 1987, whereas herefor the momentwe still have Ofcom to cover radio and television and a BBC that maintains strict impartiality rules. (Podcasts, though, are growing and are an unregulated wild west.) To attract listeners and therefore advertising revenue, US radio stations needed a lot of people to be driving long distancesnot just for the share-of-ear but also because many of those calling in to vent their spleen were reluctant to do so in front of their families. The rise of the mobile phone was key to Limbaughs early success: his network did a deal with the phone companies to make it free to call. Contrast Britain, where taxi drivers still have disproportionate representation on call-ins; nobody else spends enough time in the car.

Yet the UK copycattery was almost immediate: by 1988, James Whale of the now defunct Radio Aire hadinfluenced by Howard Stern, a loudmouth of the New York airwaves who regularly hosted Trumpchanged his radio-schtick to become much more controversial. That year Whale also got his radio show simulcast on Yorkshire TV, and before long his mix of rage, blokey humour and climate change scepticism were familiar nationwide.

I once pestered LBC to audition me for a phone-in slot of my own. I didnt get the gig

But while priding themselves on pricking liberal pieties, neither Stern nor his English imitator were movement conservatives like Limbaugh. Nor was Whale quite a slam dunk commercial success. He didnt have an army of disciples and inevitably fell foul of Ofcommost expensively when he told listeners to vote for Boris Johnson in the run-up to the 2008 London mayoral election, costing talkSPORT 20,000 in fines. It was not until the run-up to Brexit that controversialists started to proliferate on our airwaves.

Former Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins was given her first regular show on LBC in 2016. A year later she was swiftly removed after calling for a final solution on Twitter following the Manchester Arena bombing. Prior to that, her suite of interests was strikingly similar to that of the American right: antipathy towards Islam, a drumbeat of she-asked-for-it misogyny and sideswipes at the obese. It is interesting to read her quotes in cold print; theyre so extreme that in a liberal (like me) they stimulate a visceral but excited disgust, like hearing an intruder. Presumably, for those who agree with her, shes provoking a similar reaction except without the disgust. Such thrilling reactions make sense of what is otherwise puzzling: at its beginning, ultra-conservative speech radio in the US was almost equally popular with Democrats as Republicans. Crucially, though, Hopkins skated too close to literal fascism; a signature of successful shock jocks, both in the US and the UK, is that under the cover of straight-from-the-hip authenticity, theyre always careful not to sound like Hitler.

In the past five years, however, voices who used to be more emollient or at least more veiledNigel Farage, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Mark Dolanhave become more strident, while counter-shocks from the left arrived. Actually, that shouldnt be in the plural: its basically just LBCs James OBrien.

Inspired by OBrienit was exhilarating to hear his dramatic style deployed in the service of decency rather than divisionI once pestered LBC to audition me for a phone-in slot of my own. I did a role-play with a producershe pretending to be Helen, a Southampton nativist who wanted to know why immigrants were allowed to come over here and exist. I cannot begin to describe how difficult this conversation was: never mind landing a point, it was hard keeping my voice level enough so that I didnt sound like a smurf. Helen was taking a very recognisable stance, taken straight from the columns of the Daily Mail; but the conversation was also fragile. Like many callers, she didnt have the rhetorical clout of the average Oxbridge-trained debater. So the presenter has to treat the caller decently, while stoutly rebutting their point of viewall without laughing or swearing. Needless to say, I didnt get the gig.

OBrien, who has been doing an LBC show since 2003, shot to prominence by handling these conversations flawlessly, but also with his pithy, impassioned monologues against Brexit. He notes to me neutrally: I was the first in the country to use the tactics of the shock jock in the service of the opposite agenda.

What used to check campaigning broadcasting from the right or the left were strict impartiality rules, but technology is breaking down the old certainties. When the majority of under 25s are getting their news from either social media or YouTube, the idea that one regulator can ensure balance is fanciful. In February 2020, it was announced that Ofcom would be put in charge of regulating the internet in the UK. All the discussion was around harmful contentinciting violence and self-harm, child pornography and so onrather than disinformation and fake news, let alone political balance. The internets problem is that it sprawls around the world, and theres so much of it. Ofcom enforcing a fairness doctrine would be like trying to turn the ocean vegan. Plus, with former Mail editor Paul Dacre poised to become the bodys next chair, can the organisation really be relied on to fight its corner as it used to, and cleave to the old principles?

he appeal of shock jocks has increased at the same time as both the US and UK have become more diverse and their mass media more sensitive to accusations of prejudice. A functioning and inclusive civil sphere requires that certain opinions can no longer be aired out loud. From views on stop-and-search rules to women wearing miniskirts, the lines of taboo are drawn and redrawn. The list of unsayables necessarily has to be exhaustive if it is to be universal. There are always going to be people who think its gone a bit far; its salutary to note that when Limbaugh first started out, 62 per cent of Republicans but also 48 per cent of Democrats thought the mainstream media had too much liberal bias. So there was definitely a gap in the market. As one radio executive, David Hall, said of Limbaugh, he was always looking to turn somebodys sacred cow into some delicious hamburgers and a couple of steaks.

We havent just imported this trend from America: there is a native tradition of railing against political correctness as it was once called, or woke culture as it has come to be known. OBrien is insistent on this point: We were already much further down the road to Fox News than I thinkanybody realised because the process was so incremental. Ever since Murdoch bought the Sun in 1969, that tabloid sensibility has been very dominant I came from a middlebrow tabloid background: I had an ability to use those tactics but I cared what was true. So I could get a big emotional response without lying to people about a refugee who was going to steal their sausages.

In other words, the radio shock jock was less shocking to a UK audience than youd expect because the red tops had been fulminating against various groups for years: it was often migrants, as well as single mothers and other demonised figures. The first week that I started work at the Evening Standard in 1996, one splash was about a refugee from sub-Saharan Africa getting free HIV treatment on the NHS.

Claiming it couldnt happen here is unsustainable when it already has. Indeed, the Great British media has already crowned a king, only he came from print rather than broadcast: a columnist who never cared much about the truth of what he wrote has become our prime minister.

Successful media personalities quickly realise there is little to gain from complexity, no incentive to compromise, no requirement to be consistent and nothing to be held accountable for. For the tabloid columnist craving eyeballs or the shock jock needing callers, simple solutions are attractive. When you transfer that sensibility into politics, you might end up promising to make Mexicans pay for a wall to keep Mexicans out of America, or float the idea of building a bridge over the Irish Sea to sort out Brexit.

The snare, however, on which shock-jockery as governance will unravel, remains the truth. When those unkeepable promises fail to come off, the people who were angry to start with become angrier. Many will stick with their shocker-in-chief but, as Trump learned to his cost last year, many others may be motivated to vote against him. And it is not only in politics, but also in the broadcast market where there could be limits to jockery. While we perceive ourselves to be more and more polarised, the talk radio we listen toand the expectations and relationships we have with ittells a different story.

Commercial radio has its largest audience share ever, but in terms of speech output, LBC outstrips talkRADIO by some margin (respective reach is 2.8m against less than 500,000). Most of those who fit the shock jock criteria are now at talkRADIOHartley-Brewer, Dolan, Whale, James Max. (Nigel Farage was ditched by LBC last year for comparing Black Lives Matter to the Taliban and so far hasnt been picked up elsewhere.) And talkRADIO was briefly taken off YouTube last year for spreading coronavirus disinformation.

LBC, meanwhile, has become much more podcast-like, with intense, intimate conversations. People imagine that if youre on speech radio you have to be a zealot or an ideologue to get the numbers, says Iain Dale, a Conservative who has turned out to be a pluralist behind the mic, but that is simply not the case. When I was on Drive, I trebled the numbers in three years. If people trust you as a presenter, if you havent got a threatening voice, if you dont shout at people, you will get them to open up in a way that they havent done to their own best friends. If youre doing a phone-in thats quite delicate, you dont need a full switchboard. All you need is four or five people who you give time to breathe.

Call-ins are like Victorian fairgrounds: people throw themselves into a boxing ring with a pro. The amateur never winsand no ones rooting for them

Phone-ins are a co-produced drama: the caller arrives with a clear sense of what the host wants. You may not realise how fine that attunement is until the host changes and the callers take a while to catch up. Shelagh Fogarty, who situates her politics thusIm not particularly a leftie or a rightie. I was probably the perfect BBC presenterjoined LBC from Radio 5 Live in 2014, feeling that as she approached 50 she wanted to express her own opinions more freely. She remembers that in the first months, some of the callers would be really coming at me. You know that sense of going quite red with shock in a conversation? Theyd be ringing to accuse me. OBrien calls this a gladiatorial format: the callers I wanted put through were the ones that were convinced that theyd get the better of me.

More than gladiators, it reminds me of the Victorian fairground, where people would throw themselves into the ring with a professional boxer. The amateur never winsand no ones rooting for them. But theres also a moral dimension: listeners come to witness hubris being bested and strength celebrated. Like the fervent monologues that have always been a signature of conservative radio but have taken on a new energy and reach since theyve been filmed, clipped and shared on social media, such moments create communities. People use the phrase echo chamber pejoratively despite the fact that it is a deeply human urge to be among people who have the same values and laugh at the same things.

Yet radio is a versatile medium: there are ways besides combat to create communities. Recently the unguarded personal encounter has become a signature of political discussion. Theres a world of difference between frankness and picking fights for their own sake, and even LBC breakfast host Nick Ferrari now sounds mellower, more curious. Meanwhile, OBrien says: Ive had a ton of therapy over the last few years, and Im very different now to how I was even in 2015. I was a very combative individual, I spent my life with my fists up, thinking that was normal. Then I stopped asking what people think and I started asking why they think it What I try to provide now is common ground and solace. Its still going to boil the piss of your average racist, but its not going to boil the piss of your average Brexit voter. Theyre just going to have to admit that Im right.

The dominant mood of commercial radionot to mention the much more regulated BBCis moving on from the controversialists. In the US, shock jocks (Limbaugh until his death and Sean Hannity) occupied spots one and three on the most listened-to formats in the country, with around 13m weekly listeners each; public news was at spots two and four. But in the UK, BBC audiences tower over their rivals. Radio 4s weekly reach was nearly 11m by the period after the 2019 election, and its not even as popular as Radio 2.

So while commercial radio has enjoyed spikes in growth, its unsurprising that Mohit Bakaya, controller of Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra, sounds sanguine. We dont tend to do as well on social media [as commercial] but its a mistake to think we have to emulate it, or chase its audience on those terms. Wed lose something that, once wed lost, wed never get back. Even so, this idea that every programme within itself has to be 100 per cent balanced, thats just not true, Bakaya says. Rather, the mission is to create a public square for civilised, decent conversation, in which the highest value is whats true and whats meaningful.

Frankly, you could argue the finer points of what the BBC deems meaningful. Not to mention how it arrives at its editorial priorities, including the extent to which it follows the lead of a mostly right-wing print media andsince former Tory council candidate Tim Davie became director-general with major Tory donor Richard Sharp as chairwhether or not it accepts an agenda laid down by the government.

Yet what you couldnt do is discern much influence from more controversial speech radio: barring the odd 5 Live presenter such as Stephen Nolan, the BBC hasnt tried to mimic controversy-seekers. Listener habits and the ecosystem of British speech radio tell a complicated story, one that challenges the assumption that theres a geyser of unheard rage and division just waiting for its political explosion. Regulation may no longer be able to save us, but empathy is playing bigger at the box office. The shock jocks moment may have come and gone.

See the article here:

Rise of the British shock jock - Prospect

As a schoolboy, Britains prime minister Boris Johnson appeared to be convinced that the normal rules did not apply to him.

I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else, wrote Johnsons Eton College house master, Martin Hammond, in 1982, as quoted in Andrew Gimsons biography of the premier.

The approach seems to have stayed with Johnson throughout his career, repeatedly landing him in hot water. For weeks, the government has been fending off allegations of sleaze -- British shorthand for scandals of corruption, questionable sexual behavior, or other shady dealings. Adding to the impression of disarray, it emerged that Johnsons cellphone number is still available on the Internet, from a press release published 15 years ago.

U.K. Parliamentary Sleaze Watchdog May Investigate Boris Johnson

The political donations watchdog has now opened an official inquiry after concluding there were reasonable grounds to believe the law had been broken in the way refurbishments to Johnsons apartment were paid for.

Potential penalties include fines or criminal charges, depending on which rules may have been breached. On the face of it, just a week away from crucial local elections on May 6, the political price could be high.

Johnson insists he broke no laws and is complying fully with the rules on political funding and the investigations into what happened. I dont think theres anything to see here, he said on Thursday, describing the row as a farrago of nonsense.

While most Conservatives believe their leader will ride out the storm, few are happy about it. One senior Tory figure attributes the premiers difficulties to his casual approach, which has become worse since the pandemic suspended or compromised the usual procedures for holding ministers to account.

In the words of one of Johnsons own ministers, this ridiculous row about expensive wallpaper in the Downing Street flat is typical of the premiers carelessness and shows he probably didnt think through the implications of his actions.

Yet overall, Johnson seems to have been right. So far in his career, his disregard for the normal rules of engagement has not held him back for long. In fact, it has been a large factor in his appeal as a politician who isnt part of the mainstream.

For Gimson, author of Boris: The Making of the Prime Minister, one reason why Johnson is so popular and has won over people who voted Labour all their lives is because he deliberately shuns political correctness, speaking out controversially and obviously flouting normal rules.

Boris makes things interesting, sometimes by things going wrong, Gimson said. He has never really been at all conscientious about following rules and he is obviously more tolerant of chaos and strife around him than other people.

Johnson plays up the performance, too. When he is getting ready to be photographed or to appear on television, the prime minister does the exact opposite of a slickly-styled politician. Instead of tidying himself up for the cameras, he runs a meaty hand through his blond hair to make it messy.

He shrugged off allegations of an affair with American businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri, who was given taxpayer funding while Johnson was Mayor of London. None of this mattered much in 2019, when he led the Tories to a historic 80-seat majority at the general election.

Tory MP James Sunderland said voters are very supportive of Johnson and want a prime minister who is visual and outspoken. Boris Johnson is a personality.

He said voters are not bothered by the row over the apartment because this is just another attempt to find sleaze and scandal when its just not there.

One senior party official said the premier would be fine as long as next weeks elections in local English districts go well. Johnson and the Conservatives are ahead of the Labour opposition in opinion polls, with a YouGov survey for the Times giving the Tories an 11-point lead on Thursday.

But the sheer weight of allegations piling up against Johnson and his Conservatives remains a risk. For one thing, regulators may be less tolerant than voters. In 2018, parliamentary authorities rapped him for repeatedly being late in disclosing payments hed received.

In another report in 2019, the authorities were even less impressed that he had failed to register his ownership of a share of a house in the countryside. Parliaments Committee on Standards concluded with concern that these two investigations demonstrated a pattern of behavior by Johnson.

While he wasnt trying to hide anything, Johnson displayed an over-casual attitude toward obeying the rules along with a lack of effective organization within his office, the panel said. Further breaches could lead to more serious sanctions in future, it warned.

The big danger for the premier is that the investigations into the Downing Street flat take months or longer to conclude, while the drip-drip of allegations continues. Johnson has made an enemy of his former aide, Dominic Cummings, who is now on the warpath and ready to give evidence under oath.

If this episode hurts him, it will be because it bolsters an impression of untrustworthiness and of casualness that the Lex Greensill lobbying affair and other recent disclosures have fanned, said Bronwen Maddox, director of the Institute for Government. After a year when many people have lost relatives and friends to the virus or lost their jobs and struggled to support themselves, revelations that the prime ministers girlfriend has recruited a designer to overhaul the flat, spending tens of thousands of pounds, will seem graceless.

In the end, even with a forgiving public, the most popular prime ministers run out of road, according to Gimson. Every sort of charm wears off eventually.

With assistance by Kitty Donaldson, and Alex Morales

(Updates with PMs phone number online, latest poll numbers from third paragraph)

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.

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Chaotic Johnson Always Struggled With Rules, and U.K. Voters Love It - Bloomberg

Former President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the political correctness and lack of a host at the Oscars are reasons why the ratings for the awards ceremony plummeted.

"What used to be called The Academy Awards, and is now called the 'Oscars' - a far less important and elegant name - had the lowest Television Ratings in recorded history, even much lower than last year, which set another record low," Trump wrote in a statement. "Go back 15 years, look at the formula they then used, change the name back to THE ACADEMY AWARDS, don't be so political correct and boring, and do it right."

Trump's statement continued, "ALSO, BRING BACK A GREAT HOST. These television people spend all their time thinking about how to promote the Democrat Party, which is destroying our Country and cancel Conservatives and Republicans. That formula certainly hasn't worked very well for The Academy."

Trump's statement criticizing the Oscars comes shortly after the telecast received a record low number of viewers. According to Nielsen Live+Same Day preliminary national numbers, an average number of 9.85 million viewers tuned into the Oscars on Sunday which was a 58.3 percent decrease or 13.75 million viewer decrease from last year.

The Oscars also scored a 1.9 rating among adults between the ages of 18 and 49, which was a 64.2 percent decrease from 2020.

The award show rebranded itself as the Oscars in 2013 and during an interview with The Wrap at the time, Oscar show co-producer Neil Meron said, "We're not calling it 'the 85th annual Academy Awards,' which keeps it mired somewhat in a musty way. It's called 'the Oscars.'"

As Trump's statement noted, there was no host for this years Oscars and there has not been one since 2018 when the award show was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. Actor Kevin Hart was set to host the 2019 Oscars but stepped down amid controversy over his past jokes.

This is not the first time Trump has been critical of the Oscars as he made similar remarks in 2018 and 2019.

"Lowest rated Oscars in HISTORY," Trump wrote in a 2018 tweet. "Problem is, we don't have Stars anymore except your President (just kidding, of course)!"

Trump also spoke about the Oscars during a 2019 speech in Pittsburgh, where he said, "You know the Academy Awards is on hard times now, you know that right? Nobody wants to watch it. You know why? Because they started taking us on, everyone got tired of it."

"That used to be second after the Super Bowl, and then all of a sudden now it's just another show because people got tired of people getting up and making fools of themselves and disrespecting the people in this room and the people that won the election in 2016," Trump said during his speech.

Newsweek was directed to Trump's statement after reaching out to the former president for comment.

Newsweek reached out to former host Kimmel for comment through ABC but did not hear back in time for publication.

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Donald Trump Says Political Correctness, Lack of Oscars Host Are Reason Why Ratings Tanked - Newsweek

Former Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten took aim at woke politics this week, claiming that activists view themselves as special, but are actually selfish" and "divisive". He asked where this moral majority nonsense came from when theyre the ones doing all the wrong for being so bloody judgemental and vicious against anybody that doesnt go with the current popular opinion? And last year journalist Helen Lewis tried to answer that exact question, during a BBC Radio 4 special on The Roots of Woke Culture.

She spoke to American mathematician, author, and cultural critic James Lindsay who said: I am no fan of the right, in fact, Im very unhappy about the right.

But the reason I direct so much criticism at the left is because until the left gets its house in order the right will keep winning.

The attitudes which are downright snobbish in many cases, the browbeating that used to just be political correctness is now the woke movement that is driving people to the right.

It is driving particularly modest voters to vote for the right and stop it from spreading.

During the debate, Ms Lewis turned to Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford Selina Todd to dissect the origins of wokeness.

She stated: I think it comes out of post-modern ideas about the power of language.

I should say that the way post-modern ideas have been communicated and disseminated, including in universities, has been sometimes quite inaccurate.

Ms Lewis built on the comments.

She added: Selina believes some students, and some academics, are using these ideas to support modern forms of activism - such as no platform demanding that allegedly harmful speakers dont appear at events.

READ MORE:Barack Obamas blunt declaration of war on woke: Youre not going to get far!

It exists because various forces in society, and intellectuals, have made it exist.

There is very little interest in what is really going on at universities.

The discussion came after Dr Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose submitted numerous bogus papers to academic journals on subjects of social injustice between 2017 and 2018.

It formed the grievance studies affair a project to highlight what was seen as poor scholarship and eroding criteria in several academic fields.

They did so to determine if they would pass their papers through peer review and be accepted for publication.

Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention, but they also received widespread criticism for allegedly exploiting the system.

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BBC woke war erupted over origins of political correctness: Its driving voters right - Express

Posted on Apr 29, 2021

A poll carried out by leading training provider RightTrack Learning has revealed that 51% of people associate the term Equality, Diversity and Inclusion with political correctness.

Out of the 1,242 people surveyed, only 49% believe the term holds positive associations and feel it represents an opportunity for change. In the context of the workplace, this data shows that in every team of ten, as many as half have not yet bought into the diversity and inclusion conversation.

As a training provider specialising in the EDI arena, RightTrack Learning believes this survey shows there is still a long way to go to drive positive, long-lasting change.

Claudia Cooney, Lead Director at the company, comments: When people do or say the right thing to be politically correct, the outward behaviour may look good, but the motivation behind the words and actions can be less than desirable. The results imply that more than half of people display inclusive behaviour in the interests of toeing the line, rather than a true desire to contribute to an inclusive society.

The poll revealed another surprising statistic: 55% of people are too scared to talk about Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace for fear of saying the wrong thing.

When asked about the new data, Claudia says: It shows we are instilling the message that discriminatory behaviour is not ok and there will be consequences. But, we must be mindful of how we are driving change. To change stereotypes and broaden perspectives, open conversations are imperative. Fear of saying the wrong thing is a barrier we must dissolve. Its no good staying in our own bubbles and being too afraid to delve into uncomfortable topics; we must instead nurture a culture of curiosity.

Despite the results, they present valuable insight and a learning opportunity. Realising that some of the language around Equality, Diversity and Inclusion training triggers negative associations, RightTrack Learning has started to introduce new language such as Conscious Inclusion Training, which sounds fresh and engaging.

Claudia adds: There are so many ways we can change the conversation and encourage people more to be at ease with Diversity and Inclusion from taking advantage of national awareness days, to facilitating informal activities in team meetings, or investing in experiential training solutions that encourage open dialogue between peers.

The key to changing the narrative is consistency in our messages, in role modelling behaviours, and in keeping the conversation going.

You can find out more about RightTrack Learning here.

Continued here:

More than half of people still think Diversity and Inclusion is just political correctness - HR News

Prosecutors

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 28, 2021, 11:45 am CDT

In this 2018 file photo, guests mill around in front of Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. (Kyodo via AP Images)

The chief deputy district attorney in Clark County, Nevada, has been labeled a Disney Karen after he wrote a newspaper commentary criticizing Disney World for political correctness.

In a guest column for the Orlando Sentinel, Jonathan VanBoskerck said he loved Disney World, but he is strongly rethinking his commitment to the amusement park because of wokeness. The New York Times and the Las Vegas Review-Journal have coverage.

VanBoskerck was responding to changes made at Disney parks to be more inclusive. One change is a reimagining of Splash Mountain to eliminate references to Song of the South, a film that was panned by the NAACP for perpetuating a glorified picture of slavery. The new theme is based on The Princess and the Frog.

In another change, Disney removed a scene from its Pirates of the Caribbean ride that depicts women being sold by pirates at auction. Disney also removed Trader Sam, who sells shrunken heads, from its Jungle Cruise ride.

Disney World is also giving park employees more flexibility to reflect their cultures and individuality while working, including imposing fewer restrictions on haircuts and tattoos.

VanBoskerck complained that Disney cares more about politics than happy guests.

The next time I ride Jungle Cruise I will not be thinking about the gloriously entertaining puns of the skippers, VanBoskerck wrote. I will be thinking about Disneys political agenda. Thats a mood killer.

The parks are less fun because immersion and thus the joy is taking a back seat to politics, he said. Immersion should not be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and appeasing the Twitter mob.

Above the Law posted some tweets criticizing VanBoskercks column and praising Disney.

I have the privilege of having Disney World in my district along with other world-class attractions, wrote Democratic U.S. Rep. Val Demings of Florida. I am proud to represent a community that is welcoming, tolerant and always evolving to offer the best possible experience.

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Chief deputy DA in Vegas writes column criticizing Disney wokeness and spurs Twitter backlash - ABA Journal

If youre a member of Generation X, or just a big fan of all things rad and 1980s, then the new Atlanta-based newsletter, The Fast Times, is right up your alley. Co-founded by Mark Putnam and Steve Denker, The Fast Times aims to connect the past and present with a shared love of nostalgia, music, and film along with reasserting Gen-X influence. Putnam, who works in brand marketing and social media for WarnerMedia, talked to us about about his tubular new project and shared a mega-playlist.

Q. The Fast Times newsletter is targeted toward Gen-Xers with all kinds of 80s and 90s references, throwbacks, and memories, but there also seems to be a clever way of incorporating new technology and more modern content into the mix to keep us older kids in the know. How do you select and curate the topics for each newsletter?A. Every issue of The Fast Times boasts a central theme based on historical precedents set by Xers, which we then compare to interesting parallels unfolding today: #CancelCulture and Political Correctness, livestream shopping and QVC, Twitch heroes and mall arcade legends. To boil it all down, we compare the life experiences and societal happenings of the 80s and 90s to todays trends. Turns out, theyre not so different.

Q. What led to the creation of The Fast Times in the first place and its unique target market?A. Essentially, TFT came from a desire to create something truly awesome for Gen-X that wasnt just another AARP mailer. Heres where this gets weird: Im a core millennial by birthright, hence the & wannabes in our tagline. Be that as it may, Im a serious lover of Gen-X culture. And when friend, former colleague, real Xer, and TFT cofounder, Steve Denker, approached me with an idea to make something cool for Gen-X, I couldnt resist. We immediately dove into content films, TV series, music, commercials, everything, and dragged our families along for the ride as well. From there, I began developing the voice, tone, and visual identity and Steve hit his Rolodex hard to generate some interest. Gen-X is the first truly global demographic. As the pioneers of early internet, video games, telephones without cords, untethered music, MTV (the real thing), and so much more, its members also dealt with divisive political rhetoric, challenges to civil rights, the AIDS epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, economic boom, bust, and boom again all similar aspects to what were collectively dealing with today. So drawing parallels, honestly, is the easy part. The bigger challenge is narrowing the focus since were a very small team with big aspirations but isnt that the name of the game?

Q. Youre obviously a big music and movie fan. How do you select the films and playlists to share each week?A. As an integral part of Atlanta-based TCMs [now-defunct] arthouse film streaming service, FilmStruck, I had the distinct pleasure of spending my former 9 to 5 immersed in indie cinephile culture. By employing a content strategy that showcased the more whimsical, deep-cut film offering, I got a firsthand deep-dive into films, filmmakers, and talent from over 50 countries throughout 100 years of cinema a joy we hope to share with the masses as streaming burnout becomes a bigger deal. Each issue, we curate a thematic watchlist to inspire readers to expand their cinematic palettes and, more importantly, to relive the joys of video store browsing theyre still around, people! The real music aficionado is my wife, Nicki. Not only is she the creative force behind much of The Mixtape, she curates The Fast Times weekly Spotify playlists by again focusing on diversity and the many genres of music that came from the period. Steves wife, Karen, is also intrinsically involved in the project, sourcing topics, leading social media outreach, acting as our Gen-X north-star.

Q. If youre a Gen-Xer, where are must visit places in Atlanta?A. Lets do one of those 24-hour whirlwind tours, shall we? Start the day with a comfy biscuit from Home Grown GA, because who can say aw, hell nah to a fried chicken biscuit smothered in sausage gravy? Then swing by Videodrome to grab a stack of DVDs to get you through the weekend . Then head over to Criminal Records to cop some rad vinyl. When youre done, peep the marquee at The Plaza Theatre to see what retrospective they have lined up either at the main hub, or at the pandemic drive-in in collaboration with Dads Garage. Be sure to stop for a drink at The Righteous Room next door after snagging your tickets. Next, hit up Richards Variety Store for some throwback swag, hilarious gags, and timeless treats. By now, that belly is probably rumblin, so be sure to stop by Glide Pizza for a giant, NY style slice the best in town, (dont skip the house-made ranch & peppers, either). Bonus: owner Rob always has dope beats bumpin from the kitchen. From there, you have a couple of options: do some late-night bowling at the retro-chic Midtown Bowl, find your inner arcade hero at Joystick Gamebar; or grab a nightcap and an unforgettable show at the iconic Clermont Lounge.

Q. If you could jump in a time machine and go back to the 80s, where would your destination be?A. David Hasselhoff live at the Berlin Wall? The Miracle on Ice? The early days of hip-hop in New York City? The MTV control room during the networks maiden broadcast? Probably not Chernobyl, the eruption of Mount St. Helens or Cape Canaveral during the Challenger crisis. The premiere of E.T.? The Cabbage Patch craze of 83? A random den with a TV dinner, a NES, and a case of New Coke? The Beijing student protests? Unlikely, but still interesting. Charles and Dianas star-studded wedding? So many society-defining events, innovations, successes, and flops to choose from, so little time.

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In the Mix: Mark Putnam takes Gen-Xers back to the future with The Fast Times newsletter - Atlanta Intown

Both the Biden administration and the European Union have announced unprecedented spending programs, $1.9 trillion and 1.8 trillion euros respectively, to fight Covid-19 and kickstart the green economy. There is no clear concept on how these funds will be spent or financed. But this kind of spending could serve as a pretext for a sharp tax increase in Washington. It appears that on both sides of the Atlantic, governments see the pandemic and the green economy as ideal excuses to keep overspending and increasing the role of the state and the administration.

This is alarming, given what took place in past societies and states that resorted to overspending and degrading the worth of their currency.

In ancient Rome, during the late years of the empire, internal turmoil had disturbed trade flows and the government had become bloated and inefficient. Rulers had to find ways to appease rising discontent. So they tried to buy off the population with gifts. To find the necessary funds, they increased taxes, implemented aggressive tax controls and began debasing silver coins by adding copper (a method strikingly reminiscent of todays quantitative easing).

Likewise, Spain was once the dominating power in Europe. In the 16th century, its European territories included not only the Iberian peninsula, but also large parts of Italy and the Netherlands. Its overseas lands stretched from the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego up to modern-day Colorado and California in the Americas, and also included the Philippines in Asia and territories in Africa. But the Spanish state expanded so much that it required higher taxes, which in turn led to inflation. The defeat of the Armada around the British Isles was not the cause of this decline, but a symptom.

There are several such instances in history, as the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and the ebb of British power in the late 19th and 20th centuries. And we could soon witness yet another example.

In the last 20 years, Western democracies have entered a similar phase of decay. So-called liberal democracies have become crippled by huge debts. Tax systems have become byzantine, opaque and contradictory, allowing arbitrary decision-making. Tax collection is increasingly aggressive. The right to personal privacy is undermined under the pretext of tax justice. The productive spheres of the economy decline while the administration and auditing sectors grow.

Under the pretext of political correctness, public debate is being narrowly restricted. Established politicians and NGOs, for the sake of redressing inequalities some of which are inevitable have created new forms of discrimination. It has become customary to ban words, rename streets, remove monuments, curb traditions and marginalize the role of the family, all for fear of offending. This results in heightened polarization, making citizens more vulnerable to propaganda and manipulation.

The best way to fight fraud would be to drastically simplify tax systems and limit the size of public administration. But there will always be those who answer that this is not realistic.

Lately, the spending spree to fight Covid-19 and climate change has gone into overdrive. All limitations on spending were removed. Quantitative easing, i.e. money printing, has reached unprecedented levels much like when Romans mixed copper with silver to keep the people happy. And like in ancient Rome and other empires, the liabilities resulting from this strategy will burden future generations.

Fighting Covid-19 and environmental damage are worthy causes. But there is no transparent plan to use the money that is now earmarked for these purposes. The only certainty is that the influence of the state and the size of the administration will grow. The quest for sustainability needs to include not only ecological concerns, but also economic and social ones.

The United States is in a situation similar to that of Europe. In order to allow additional spending, Washington is now sharply raising taxes and, like European countries, has joined the OECDs campaign for minimum tax rates worldwide. This would allow the creation of a global cartel that could impose excessive taxation at will. Within the G20, democratic countries are in agreement with authoritarian ones on this matter. Like in the Roman empire, the wrong incentives are applied and taxes are being used as a way to pursue equality. The real winner here is the privileged bureaucracy.

The control that parliaments exert over budgetary matters is being eroded even in liberal democracies. Most MPs are dependent on the state for employment, and loyally follow their party leaders who sit in government a vicious circle.

Looking at history and the present fiasco, we can conclude that real democracies are in danger. They are threatened not by the so-called populist movements, but rather by overspending and the disproportionate power given to administrations.

Liberal democracy is legitimized by individual freedom. And now the only way to restore it would be to radically reduce the size of the administration, simplify systems and return to a reasonable, pragmatic and equitable taxation by focusing on common sense and the long-term public good. In a functioning state, taxes are meant to cover the necessary expenses of the administration and are never used as a political tool.

If we believe that reducing the size of public administration and therefore expenses is impossible, then we also implicitly accept the end of true liberal democracies based on freedom and the rule of law.

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History shows the risks of burdening economies with high taxes GIS Reports - Geopolitical Intelligence Services AG

(Dreamstime/Leo Malsam)

The day after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Mike Boyle decided he was ready to become an Episcopalian.

A practicing Catholic all his life, Boyle was serious enough about his faith that he had spent three years as a member of a Dominican community, in the priestly formation track. But even prior to 2016, he was growing frustrated with the behavior of lay Catholics and clergy. With the initiation of the Fortnight for Freedom during the Obama administration, he began to be uncomfortable with the church leaders' obvious promotion of right-wing political ideologies.

Then Pope Francis was elected. Boyle initially hoped the new pope would bring about much-needed reform, but after a few years started to doubt whether Francis could really change things. He began to be drawn toward an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish.

"But I still held on," Boyle said. "With Trump, it was basically like watching a car crash in slow motion. Deep down, I knew that the hierarchy and all theusual suspects were going to jump on board the Trump train, but I still hoped that I was wrong, that I was being too cynical. But, of course, I wasn't being too cynical."

Mike Boyle (Courtesy of Mike Boyle)

According to Boyle, "it was not so much that MAGA Catholics (whether lay or clergy) pushed me out the door, so much as the embrace of MAGA cut the last strings that I was holding onto."

Boyle's departure from the Catholic Church is part of a broader trend, as church membership among Catholics has declined sharply in recent decades, especially over the past 10 years. Many who have left, like Boyle, cite their coreligionists' alliance with the MAGA "Make America Great Again" movement as a key factor in their decision.

H.L. Vogl came from a conservative background and converted enthusiastically to Catholicism as an adult. But in 2016, Vogl was dismayed to see their pastor becoming far more political and it got worse after Donald Trump was elected president. According to Vogl, their pastor was "explicitly citing Fox News in homilies, preaching on the obligation to respect those in authority in the government, and stoking fear of 'political correctness.' "

Vogl began fact-checking the pastor's homilies, and in the process also discovered falsehoods and misrepresentations that had previously been accepted without question, such as the misrepresentation of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute.

Vogl was also appalled by the church's lack of accountability, and the harshness with which the authorities silence anyone working for gender equality.

"I could no longer see the hierarchy's claims of God-given authority as anything more than an abusive power-grab," Vogl said. "In short, the political abuses destroyed my trust in the clergy and prompted me to rip my pious blinders off. Having taken in this broader perspective, I can never see the Catholic Church the same way again."

Others have been dismayed by the spectacle of prominent Catholics they once respected embracing Donald Trump's far-right nationalist ideology and substituting it for the traditional teachings of the church. This has been especially distressing for converts to witness, as they watch those who once influenced their conversion veer sharply to the right.

J.M. Jensen grew up evangelical, but his attraction to classicism in art and philosophy drew him to Catholicism. He converted in 2008.

J.M. Jensen (Courtesy of J.M. Jensen)

Then, in 2015, Trump announced his candidacy. Jensen was sure Christians and Catholics would reject him, but the opposite happened. Leaders and apologists whom he had trusted began not only to make excuses for Trump, but to enthuse over him even following the release of the "Access Hollywood" tapes that recorded Trump boasting about assaulting women.

"Over the course of the next four years, I saw almost every single Catholic leader who had been a voice for me in my formative years turn to Trump," Jensen said. Though other Catholic voices were outspoken against the MAGA movement, nevertheless Jensen found it depressing to see the change in those he had admired.

"People who once had decried 'cafeteria Catholics' and said that you must give your consent to the church's sexual teachings now said you had to ignore the pope when he talks about the environment or social justice. People who decried the moral relativism of the left now used the same tools when it suited them. All of the principle and character that they demanded of [Bill] Clinton were left at the wayside when a truly foul person came along. All for political power," he said.

Jensen is considering exploring other Christian faith communities once the pandemic has passed, and has been reading Buddhist and Taoist thought.

A recent Gallup report revealed that the United States is becoming less religious in general. The number of citizens who are members of a house of worship has dropped to below 50% for the first time in the 80 years since Gallup started keeping track. And people are not only leaving their church communities; they are cutting ties with institutional religion itself. It is noteworthy that the decline in the past three years has been especially steep.

While generational change is a factor, church membership is waning among older adults as well as millennials and Generation Z. The Gallup report notes that some of the numbers from 2020 may be due to the pandemic, and likely temporary, but this doesn't erase the reality that many are taking leave of their religious traditions permanently.

Adam Gabbatt, in a recent piece in The Guardian, cites studies indicating that a rise in extremism from the religious right is driving people away from religion itself. Gabbatt quotes David Campbell, chair of the department of political science at the University of Notre Dame:

"Many Americans especially young people see religion as bound up with political conservatism, and the Republican party specifically," Campbell said.

"Since that is not their party, or their politics, they do not want to identify as being religious. Young people are especially allergic to the perception that many but by no means all American religions are hostile to LGBTQ rights."

Writing for Business Insider, Kelsey Vlamis reported in November 2020 that young people were leaving their churches because of Trump. Vlamis spoke with Michael Wear, once a faith adviser to President Barack Obama, who had talked with many young Christians on college campuses. According to Wear, the "Access Hollywood" tape was a factor for many Christians re-assessing their place in their religious communities.

"Having been young during Clinton and seen the way evangelical leaders responded to him, and then to see these same leaders make excuses for Trump," he told Business Insider. "It just led them to think, some of these voices aren't trustworthy."

He also predicted Trump's impact could last long after his presidency, as many Christians who dislike the president will not forget the way so many churches embraced him.

Wear reported that Christians of all ages told him they could no longer enjoy some of the most basic aspects of their religious communities, like coffee after church and small-group discussions, because of the new divisions.

Kaya Oakes is the author of The Nones Are Alright: A New Generation of Believers, Seekers, and Those in Between (Orbis Books, 2015). While researching for the book, she encountered a number of former Catholics who reported having a "last straw" moment.

Kaya Oakes (CNS/Fordham University)

"Most often, it was some culture war issue that they finally had had enough of," Oakes said. "So while I don't have hard data on this, we have certainly heard plenty of anecdotal stories of this worsening under Trump," she said. "And then with the recent flare-up of QAnon Catholics, Catholics refusing to take the vaccine, bishops telling Catholics not to take the vaccineagainst the teaching of the pope,and so on, it's easy to imagine a person whose ties to the church were already fraying in the pandemic hitting that tipping point and deciding they have had enough."

Even for those who still identify as Catholic, their fellow Catholics' embrace of MAGA ideology has been disconcerting. One interviewee, who prefers to be anonymous because of his work with the public, shared how the 2016 election was a factor in his changed relationship with the church. Influential Catholics who had initially talked about how terrible Trump was began halfheartedly defending him, and finally enthusiastically promoting him and everything the MAGA movement represents.

"As their support for Trump grew, so did my disgust," he said. "To understand how this impacted me, remember these are the Catholics who influenced my conversion, Catholics I admired and trusted for information on faith. To find out their principles really just masked a loyalty to the Republican Party was devastating."

For this convert, the way some Catholics responded to the pandemic did not help. Neither did their response to racial justice issues.

"During the Black Lives Matter protests, the church sided against racial justice and were more worried about statues of saints than real people whose lives are not valued by our society. They refused to stand with the marginalized. The hierarchy seems incapable of looking beyond their self-interest," he said.

"The Bible says you'll know Jesus' followers by their fruits, and the fruits I'm seeing are so rotten I wouldn't touch them with a thousand-foot pole, let alone consume them," he said.

While he has not opted to leave the church, nevertheless he is tired. "I want a church that stands for justice. I did not sign up to join a GOP SuperPAC."

Where are they going, these tired and angry Catholics who are leaving? Are they giving up on religion itself? Not necessarily. According to Oakes, many of these people are "creating a more DIY, mix-and-match kind of faith practice."

And social media plays a significant role in this change, Oakes said. "What's interesting is that a lot of that individualized combining of religious practices ends up in people finding smaller communities of like-minded people via social media which in turn become more supportive, oftentimes, than anything they'd find at a Catholic parish."

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Support of Trump within church has driven some Catholics to the exits - National Catholic Reporter