Post by benson on Feb 15, 2022 9:28:36 GMT
The Right Has Mastered Cancel Culture
Once rumored to be a moderate, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has revealed his true sympathies. The Republican wasted little time after taking office this month: He swiftly banned the teaching of critical race theory in schools, even though the subject wasn’t being taught in Virginia classrooms. Yet that wasn’t enough. He’s also set up an email tip line that allows parents to report “inherently divisive practices” in schools, including any attempts to enforce mask mandates and, of course, the teaching of what he terms CRT. “We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations that they have that will help us be aware of things like privilege bingo, be aware of their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia. And we’re going to make sure we catalogue it all,” he said on a right-wing radio show.
Youngkin’s snitch line might not work as well as he’d hoped. A few celebrities and Twitter personalities have already urged fans and followers to flood the email address with bogus complaints. This is mildly humorous — what else did Youngkin think would happen? — but it doesn’t entirely negate the harm posed by the idea behind the tip line. Youngkin has deputized his most rabid followers against the state’s teachers, a group he seems eager to sacrifice to the mob. Not only must teachers contend with the tip line, the governor is also trying to deprive them of a means of protection against COVID in public schools. Parents can report them for so many sins.
The tip line in Virginia follows closely on other, conservative-led efforts to ban the alleged teaching of CRT and to remove certain books from school curriculums and libraries over various examples of wrongthink. The right is not new to book banning or to censorship writ large. The Christian Right, for example, has long agitated against books with LGBT or feminist themes in libraries and classrooms. As Ryan Cooper recently observed in The Week, right-wing parents have been trying to ban books for decades, and almost no classic is safe. Parents “challenged The Grapes of Wrath in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1991 because it invoked God and Jesus in a ‘vain and profane manner,’” Cooper noted. The right’s censorious impulses are undiminished by time. In Tennessee, the McMinn County school board just voted to remove Maus — Art Spiegelman’s acclaimed graphic novel of the Holocaust — from an eighth-grade curriculum over its depictions of violence, nudity, and profanity.
Despite the right’s uncompromising grip on censorship, it’s the left, often, that bears the public blame for cancel culture. Not only is that the preferred narrative of the right itself, which portrays even modest attempts at social accountability or the rectification of historical wrongs, such as systematic racism, as threats to its liberties, but public commentary can often blur necessary distinctions between the right and the left. In the New York Times, opinion writer John McWhorter recently conceded that some illiberalism does emanate from the right. “Making sense of things requires synthesis, identifying what explains a lot rather than perceiving a buzzing chaos of people suddenly crazed, which is an implausible and even effort-light approach to things,” he claimed, before adding, “In that vein, our problem today is illiberalism on both sides.”
nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/glenn-youngkin-maus-ban-show-mastery-of-cancel-culture.html
Once rumored to be a moderate, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has revealed his true sympathies. The Republican wasted little time after taking office this month: He swiftly banned the teaching of critical race theory in schools, even though the subject wasn’t being taught in Virginia classrooms. Yet that wasn’t enough. He’s also set up an email tip line that allows parents to report “inherently divisive practices” in schools, including any attempts to enforce mask mandates and, of course, the teaching of what he terms CRT. “We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations that they have that will help us be aware of things like privilege bingo, be aware of their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia. And we’re going to make sure we catalogue it all,” he said on a right-wing radio show.
Youngkin’s snitch line might not work as well as he’d hoped. A few celebrities and Twitter personalities have already urged fans and followers to flood the email address with bogus complaints. This is mildly humorous — what else did Youngkin think would happen? — but it doesn’t entirely negate the harm posed by the idea behind the tip line. Youngkin has deputized his most rabid followers against the state’s teachers, a group he seems eager to sacrifice to the mob. Not only must teachers contend with the tip line, the governor is also trying to deprive them of a means of protection against COVID in public schools. Parents can report them for so many sins.
The tip line in Virginia follows closely on other, conservative-led efforts to ban the alleged teaching of CRT and to remove certain books from school curriculums and libraries over various examples of wrongthink. The right is not new to book banning or to censorship writ large. The Christian Right, for example, has long agitated against books with LGBT or feminist themes in libraries and classrooms. As Ryan Cooper recently observed in The Week, right-wing parents have been trying to ban books for decades, and almost no classic is safe. Parents “challenged The Grapes of Wrath in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1991 because it invoked God and Jesus in a ‘vain and profane manner,’” Cooper noted. The right’s censorious impulses are undiminished by time. In Tennessee, the McMinn County school board just voted to remove Maus — Art Spiegelman’s acclaimed graphic novel of the Holocaust — from an eighth-grade curriculum over its depictions of violence, nudity, and profanity.
Despite the right’s uncompromising grip on censorship, it’s the left, often, that bears the public blame for cancel culture. Not only is that the preferred narrative of the right itself, which portrays even modest attempts at social accountability or the rectification of historical wrongs, such as systematic racism, as threats to its liberties, but public commentary can often blur necessary distinctions between the right and the left. In the New York Times, opinion writer John McWhorter recently conceded that some illiberalism does emanate from the right. “Making sense of things requires synthesis, identifying what explains a lot rather than perceiving a buzzing chaos of people suddenly crazed, which is an implausible and even effort-light approach to things,” he claimed, before adding, “In that vein, our problem today is illiberalism on both sides.”
nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/glenn-youngkin-maus-ban-show-mastery-of-cancel-culture.html