Dispatches From the Culture Wars – November 19, 2024
- Making Sense
- The Free Speech Challenge
- Shawn Fain on the Election
- Walking Away From Trans Rights
- Empty Quads and Busy Counselling Centers
- Why Dystopian Fiction is Hot
- Native American Solutions to Tyranny
- Hatred Comes Out in Columbus OH
- Target: Educational Speech
- Diddy Case Sparks a New #MeToo
By Frieda Afary
New Politics
To mainstream pundits, it was rising inflation, economic hardships and Democrats being too “woke”, and not closing the border to undocumented immigrants. For leftists and left liberal pundits, it was abandoning the working class and paying too much attention to gender, identity and wokeness. Both views have some glaring contradictions.
By Nan Levinson
TomDispatch
Efforts to stifle expression of all sorts keep popping up like Whac-A-Mole on steroids. It can be hard to tell if Trump means what he says or can even say what he means, but you can bet that, with an enemies list that makes Nixon look like a piker, he intends to try to hobble the press in multiple ways.
By Julia Conley
Common Dreams
Fain urged union members to get involved in “political action on every level of government, in every state, in every sector has an impact on every contract, every organizing drive, and every standard we win as a union,” while Bernie Sanders implored the Democratic Party to urgently “determine which side it is on in the great economic struggle of our times.”
Walking Away From Trans Rights
Democratic Party leaders and their donors bear responsibility for the increasingly widespread view of trans rights as incompatible with a politics that benefits the many, not the few.
Empty Quads and Busy Counselling Centers
By Bea Oyster and Allegra Kirkland
Teen Vogue
Teen Vogue dispatched student photojournalists in the swing states of Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania — all of which ultimately went to Trump — to document how their peers were responding to the 2024 election results. What struck them most was the lack of protests.
By Erika Tulfo
CNN
Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a novel set in a totalitarian society, has shot to the top of Amazon’s bestselling books list following Donald Trump’s reelection. It saw a whopping 6,866% surge in sales, according to Amazon figures, skyrocketing in just one day to third place from its previous ranking at 209.
Native American Solutions to Tyranny
By Kathleen DuVal
The Conversation
When the founders of the United States designed the Constitution, they designed checks and balances to guard against the accumulation of power they had found when studying ancient Greece and Rome. But there were others in North America who had also seen the dangers of certain types of government and had designed their own checks and balances: the Native Americans.
Hatred Comes Out in Columbus OH
The Week
The people of the United States were shocked on Sunday when users from Columbus released videos of a neo-Nazi march in the city. Men dressed in black and wearing masks took out a parade in broad daylight, using a microphone to chant and shout abuses at people of colour. Social media users saw the men proudly carrying black flags with red swastika symbols.
By Eleanor J. Bader
The Progressive
A recently released report from PEN America, titled America’s Censored Classrooms 2024, tells a grim story about the right’s ongoing legislative attacks on inclusive public education. The steep rise in the number of book bans during the 2023-2024 academic year, and educational gag orders to limit what topics K-12 teachers can teach has now spread to public colleges and universities.
Diddy Case Sparks a New #MeToo
By Njera Perkins and Taiyler S. Mitchell
Huffpost
Conceived in 2018, The Female Composer Safety League is an organization that advocates against the sexual abuse and harassment of women in the music industry. A report from FCSL — along with survivor-led advocacy collectives like Lift Our Voices, Representation Project and Punk Rock Therapist — detailed decades of sexual abuse accusations leveled against artists and executives.