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      The drag show bans sweeping the US are a chilling attack on free speech | Suzanne Nossel

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      The drag show bans sweeping the US are a chilling attack on free speechSuzanne NosselThe breadth of these bills is staggering, and many go beyond their purported goals of protecting children from obscenityWhen Bill Lee donned a cheerleader uniform, fake pearls and a wig as part of high school senior year antics, he probably didn’t think the goofy costume would come back to bite him. But, more than 40 years later, the now governor of Tennessee is at the forefront of efforts to ban the innocent costumes he and his friends once wore, waging a battle that strikes at the heart of our first amendment freedoms.Since the beginning of this year, at least 32 bills have been filed in Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia targeting drag performances, with more on the way.A US state shelved my book – yet all I was doing was trying to help people live their lives | Fox FisherRead moreTennessee was the first to pass its bill into law last week, barring “adult cabaret performances” on public property or in places where they might be within view of children. The bill bans, among other things, “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest, or similar entertainers”. Violators may face misdemeanor or even felony charges.In Texas, at least four different bills would put venues that host drag performances in the same category as adult movie theaters and strip clubs.Driving support for these bills is discomfort and distaste for expression that defies conventional gender norms. The growth of library Drag Queen Story Hours – programs that feature drag performers as a way to provide “unabashedly queer role models” for kids – have led some to question whether young children should be exposed to those who defy traditional gender patterns.Participation in Drag Queen Story Hours is voluntary – libraries decide whether to program these events and families choose whether to attend them – but some critics seem to regard their very existence as deviant or dangerous. This reaction is part of a wider backlash against the increased visibility of transgender and non-binary identities. States and communities have banned books featuring transgender characters and prohibited teaching about transgender identities in school.Though the history and cultural role of drag goes well beyond current tensions over transgender issues, this form of performance and display has now come into the crosshairs. Drag performances have been targeted with violence and are now the subject of state laws to limit or even outlaw them.Anti-drag legislation varies from state to state, but tends to share some common provisions. Most bills define a drag performer as someone performing while using dress, makeup and mannerisms associated with a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth. A number of bills include lip-syncing within their definitions and many specify that the person must be performing for an audience.Some bills would designate any establishment that hosts drag performances as an “adult” or sexually oriented business, often making it illegal for such businesses to be located within a certain distance of schools or residential areas.While the details of the legislation may change from state to state, most of these bills represent a broad and dangerous chilling of Americans’ right to free speech. The US supreme court has repeatedly found that clothing choices are a constitutionally protected form of expression under the first amendment.The Tennessee law’s reference to “prurience” – defined as something intended to arouse sexual interest – should limit the sweep of the law so it doesn’t affect things like children’s story hours. But, inevitably, concerns over the intent and enforcement of the law will cast a chill over shows, jokes or comedy bits that might be anywhere close to the line. That chilling is intentional: by targeting drag performances, lawmakers intend to intimidate transgender and non-binary performers and shows into hiding.Drag queen storyteller says readings ‘help youngsters discover true selves’Read moreThe breadth of the bills is staggering, and many would risk chilling expression that goes well beyond the drafters’ purported goals of protecting children or limiting displays that may border on the obscene.Productions of Shakespeare plays like As You Like It or Twelfth Night – both of which feature cross-dressing characters – could run afoul of some of these bills, as might a singer performing the musical version of Mrs Doubtfire. Sandy Duncan’s performance as Peter Pan would be banned under several of these bills. Movies like White Christmas, Tootsie, Some Like It Hot, Bridge on the River Kwai and South Pacific – all of which feature comic performances by men wearing women’s clothes – could be off-limits for screenings in schools or libraries.Even Governor Bill Lee’s decades-old dress-up could lead to serious legal repercussions under the law he just signed, if it were to be interpreted and enforced broadly. If students wore similar costumes today on the grounds of a public high school, and then went on to make a sexual joke in front of a small group, their behavior might be criminalized.The legislation has even broader impacts for transgender people. Under some draft laws a string quartet with a transgender violinist might not be able to perform chamber music. A trans chef talking about their new cookbook could be restricted to venues designated as “adult businesses”.It’s perfectly fair for parents to want to decide how and when their young children engage with questions of gender identity. But the drive to protect children from witnessing people whose dress defies traditional gender binaries must not become the basis for draconian restrictions impinging upon the free expression rights of children and adults alike.Whether it’s youthful pranks, beloved plays, historical costumes or adult performances, the ability to dress up and play characters unlike yourself is core to artistic expression. In the name of curbing drag, legislatures across the country are dragging down first amendment freedoms for all.
      Suzanne Nossel is the CEO of Pen America and the author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All
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      It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders review – straight talking from the socialist senator

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      ReviewIt’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders review – straight talking from the socialist senatorSanders tackles the grim facts about the economic order that the political establishment wilfully ignores“When we talk about uber-capitalism in its rawest form – about greed that knows no limit, about corporations that viciously oppose the right of workers to organize, about the abuses of wealth and power that tear apart our society – we’re talking about Amazon,” writes Bernie Sanders in his new book. “And when we’re talking about Amazon, we’re talking about Jeff Bezos.”These are typical lines in what comprises an attack on the status quo from every conceivable direction. Sanders addresses his own two ultimately thwarted campaigns to lead the Democratic party; the crisis in American healthcare and the chasms of health inequality shown up by Covid; the declining union movement and stagnation of wages; the burgeoning billionaire class and its impact on democracy; and the looming environmental crisis. Nothing he says will come as any surprise to his supporters, who are legion. Everything he says is quite unfashionable, from the macro – greed is bad, actually – to the micro, still using “uber” to mean “ultra”, as if Uber itself didn’t exist. He has no compunction about his reference points, which go from the obvious (F Scott Fitzgerald observing that thing about the rich) to the niche (a union organiser and folk singer named Florence Reece, who wrote a song in the 1930s called Which Side Are You On?). If his ideas were a band, they’d be the Ink Spots, with songs written a long, long time ago, and all the intros the same.These aren’t complex propositions. Of course it’s wrong to profit from other people’s illness; of course when access to healthcare is tied to work, that puts citizens in a state of semi-bonded servitude. Of course corporations are actively anti-social, of course they have driven down wages over 50 years and immiserated the workforce. Of course when three firms – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – control assets equivalent to the GDP of the entire United States, we’re into the rotting phase of late-stage capitalism.Sanders’ popularity and his immense value to the political ecosystem stems from his willingness to say all this out loud, defying the credo which has defined mainstream discourse since at least the Clinton era: that the class war is over, that capitalism is as inevitable as the weather, and that markets don’t need morals, because they have their own separate schematics, drawn by an invisible hand.In other words, his book is easily as frustrating and depressing as it is galvanising and uplifting; reading one story or statistic after another, about growing inequality, child poverty, financial insecurity – 77% of Americans are now anxious about their financial situation – one’s very lack of surprise reinforces a sense of hopelessness.Yet, particularly in the early chapters, which cover the intricacies of both Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and his (also often thwarted) work as the chairman of Congress’s Budget Committee since the election of Joe Biden, you cannot ignore the fact that the wind has changed. Precisely because Sanders is such a straightforward thinker and writer, he insists on some facts that the political establishment – on both sides – wilfully ignores. It is objectively better, more democratic, more plural, when a campaign is funded by grassroots donations than when a candidate has to go cap in hand to Peter Thiel. The Democrats do better in the polls when they allow in their left flank, rather than try to erase it in the name of electability. And at the level of the principle, to let the man himself take over, “wars and excessive military budgets are not good”; “carbon emissions are not good”; “racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia are not good”; “exploiting workers is not good”. This isn’t the book to come to for new ideas, in other words. But it’s a capitalist fallacy that everything has to be new, in any case.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTopicsBooksUS politicsBernie SandersDemocratsreviewsReuse this content More

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      The Independent review – Jodie Turner-Smith and Brian Cox chase political scandal

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      ReviewThe Independent review – Jodie Turner-Smith and Brian Cox chase political scandalTurner-Smith and Cox team up as journalists investigating a presidential candidate. But there is none of the insider authenticity of director Amy Rice’s earlier Obama documentaryFilm-maker Amy Rice spent two years on the campaign trail with Barack Obama to make a 2009 fly-on-the wall documentary. So it’s massively disappointing that her new fictional political thriller is so insipid and unsatisfying, and completely lacks any kind of authentic insider knowledge of Machiavellian political skullduggery. It’s as generic as they come, though British actor Jodie Turner-Smith is brilliant as a rookie reporter for the fictional Washington Chronicle who uncovers a scandal with the potential to blow open the presidential race.Turner-Smith’s character, Eli James, is increasingly frustrated at having to write clickbait lifestyle articles such as “college dorm must-haves”. But when she uncovers a lottery scandal, she teams up with the paper’s Pulitzer-winning columnist Nicholas Booker (Brian Cox, giving a lefty-intelligentsia version of his alpha-ego male in Succession). Their relationship is nicely played, especially by Turner-Smith, who makes Eli a satisfyingly complicated woman: super smart and competitive, a bit reckless and most of all determined – as she’s had to be as a woman of colour in a largely male, mostly white world.The lottery scandal is linked to political funding and seems to lead right to the Republican presidential candidate Patricia Turnbull (Ann Dowd, channelling Matilda’s Mrs Trunchbull). She’s neck and neck with the Democratic incumbent; then an independent enters the fray. This is mega-celebrity Olympic gold medallist Nate Sterling (ex-WWE wrestler John Cena): he’s promising to take action on climate change, and has the right kind of lantern-jawed all-American jock appeal for rightwingers. Eli’s boyfriend Lucas (Luke Kirby) is a speechwriter for Sterling – who may be too good to be true.There’s a twist at the end that is anticlimactic and uninteresting, and the script is unforgivably clumsy in places. Twice, characters obtain vital information illicitly from computers left unlocked by individuals with a lot to hide. Cox’s veteran journalist is famous for eating his steaks cooked bloody – not just rare. But really this film could be juicier.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTopicsFilmThrillersUS politicsNewspapersBrian CoxreviewsReuse this content More

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      People vs Donald Trump review: Mark Pomerantz pummels Manhattan DA

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      ReviewPeople vs Donald Trump review: Mark Pomerantz pummels Manhattan DAProsecutor who helped convict John Gotti thinks Alvin Bragg let Trump slip from the hook. His memoir proves controversial Mark Pomerantz is a well-credentialed former federal prosecutor. As a younger man he clerked for a supreme court justice and helped send the mob boss John Gotti to prison. He did stints in corporate law. In 2021, he left retirement to join the investigation of Donald Trump by the Manhattan district attorney. Pomerantz’s time with the DA was substantive but controversial.Trump porn star payment a ‘zombie case’ that wouldn’t die, ex-prosecutor says in bookRead moreIn summer 2021, he helped deliver an indictment for tax fraud against the Trump Organization and Alan Weisselberg, its chief financial officer. At the time, Cy Vance Jr, the son of Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, was Manhattan DA. Pomerantz also interviewed Michael Cohen, Trump fanboy turned convicted nemesis, pored over documents and clamored for the indictment of the former president on racketeering charges.For Pomerantz, nailing Trump for his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who claims an affair Trump denies, didn’t pass muster. But that avenue of prosecution was a “zombie case” that wouldn’t die. It still hasn’t: a Manhattan grand jury again hears evidence.Pomerantz saw Trump as a criminal mastermind aided by flunkies and enforcers. He believed charges ought to align with the gravity of the crimes. But as Pomerantz now repeatedly writes in his memoir, Alvin Bragg, elected district attorney in November 2021, did not want to move against Trump. In early 2022, Bragg balked. In March, Pomerantz quit – and leaked his resignation letter.“I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the penal law,” Pomerantz fumed. “I fear that your decision means that Mr Trump will not be held fully accountable for his crimes.”Now comes the memoir, People vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account. It is a 300-page exercise in score-settling and scorn. Pomerantz loathes Trump and holds Bragg in less than high regard. He equates the former president with Gotti and all but dismisses the DA as a progressive politician, not an actual crime-fighter.In a city forever plagued by crime and political fights about it, Bragg’s time as DA has proved controversial: over guns, trespassing, turnstile jumping, marijuana and, yes, the squeegee men.Bragg is African American. This week, a group of high-ranking Black officials protested against Pomerantz’s attacks. In response, Pomerantz called Bragg “respected, courageous, ethical and thoughtful” but said: “I disagreed with him about the decision he made in the Trump case.”In his resignation letter, Pomerantz wrote: “I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice.”Trump, he now writes, “seemed always to stay one step ahead of the law”. That may conjure up images of Road Runner and Wile E Coyote but Pomerantz is serious. “In my career as a lawyer, I had encountered only one other person who touched all of these bases: John Gotti, the head of the Gambino organised crime family.”The Goodfellas vibe is integral to Trumpworld. In The Devil’s Bargain, way back in 2017, Joshua Green narrated how Trump tore into Paul Manafort, his then campaign manager, shouting: “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?” It was if Trump was channeling Joe Pesci.With the benefit of hindsight, Pomerantz concludes that the US justice department is better suited to handle a wholesale financial investigation of Trump than the Manhattan DA. Then again, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, has a lot on his plate. An insurrection is plenty.Pomerantz’s book has evoked strong reactions. Trump is enraged, of course. On Truth Social, he wrote: “Crooked Hillary Clinton’s lawyer [Pomerantz says he has never met her], radically deranged Mark Pomerantz, led the fake investigation into me and my business at the Manhattan DA’s Office and quit because DA Bragg, rightfully, wanted to drop the ‘weak’ and ‘fatally flawed’ case. This is disgraceful conduct by Pomerantz, especially since, as always, I’ve done nothing wrong!”Really?In December, a Manhattan jury convicted the Trump Organization on 17 counts of tax fraud and the judge imposed a $1.6m fine. Alan Weisselberg pleaded guilty and testified against his employer. Trump and three of his children – Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric – are defendants in a $250m civil lawsuit brought by Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on fraud-related charges. That case comes to trial in October 2023, months before the presidential primary. Sooner than that will be the E Jean Carroll trial, over alleged defamation and a rape claim Trump denies.Significantly, state prosecutors say Pomerantz may have crossed an ethical line.“By writing and releasing a book in the midst of an ongoing case, the author is upending the norms and ethics of prosecutorial conduct and is potentially in violation of New York criminal law,” J Anthony Jordan, president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, announced.Never Give an Inch review: Mike Pompeo as ‘heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass’Read moreBragg accused Pomerantz of violating a confidentiality agreement. Pomerantz is unbowed. “I am comfortable that this book will not prejudice any investigation or prosecution of Donald Trump,” he states on the page. No formal ethics complaint has appeared.Pomerantz also offers a window on personalities that crossed his path. Cohen receives ample attention. Pomerantz lauds Trump’s former fixer for his cooperation but reiterates that Cohen pleaded guilty to perjury.His conduct left Pomerantz shaking his head. Cohen’s liking for publicity could be unsettling. So was his Oval Office tête-a-tête with Trump over the payment to Daniels. Pomerantz was disgusted. Trump and Cohen, he writes, defiled America’s Holy of Holies, its “sanctum sanctorum”.No harm, no foul. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, announced: “Mr Cohen will continue to cooperate with DA Bragg and his team, speaking truth to power – as he has always done.” On Wednesday, Cohen met the Manhattan DA for the 15th time. Pomerantz is gone. The show goes on.
      People vs Donald Trump: An Inside Account is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      The Aftermath review: a younger, more liberal America? OK, Boomer

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      ReviewThe Aftermath review: a younger, more liberal America? OK, BoomerPhilip Bump of the Washington Post has produced a fascinating account of demographic change and future possibilities Younger Americans are decidedly more liberal than their parents. On election day 2022 they thwarted a ballyhooed “red wave”, saved the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock from defeat and deflated Kari Lake’s bid for Arizona governor. Nationally, voters under 30 went Democratic 63-35.Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nationRead moreMillennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, and members of Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are also less than proud of living in the US, according to survey data. Suffice to say, “Maga” sloganeering leaves them less than reassured.Those generations grew up in the shadows of 9/11, the Iraq war, the great recession and Covid. Their school lunch menus featured shooter lockdown drills. They are ethnically diverse. Millennials have defied political expectations. They did not shift right with age. Instead, they make Republicans sweat.Along with race, gender and culture, inter-generational rivalry can be tossed into that long-simmering pile of resentments known as America’s cold civil war. Enter Philip Bump and his first book, aptly subtitled The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America. Bump is a national columnist for the Washington Post. Demographics, culture and economics are part of his remit. Through that prism, The Aftermath delivers.Bump attempts to explain how the US reached its present inflection point and offers a glimpse of what may come next. His tone is methodical, not alarmist.Gently, he introduces the reader to the term “pig in the python”, coined by Landon Jones, once managing editor of People magazine, to describe the demographic bulge created by GIs who returned from the second world war. Bump pays respect to Jones’s book, Great Expectations, which stands among the “first serious examinations of the baby boom”. Hence the label Baby Boomers, for people born in those fertile post-war years.Boomer politicians include Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich. They may not have made the world a better place but they definitely left their mark. Their appetites frequently eclipsed their judgment. Clinton and Trump were impeached. Both faced lawsuits alleging sexual assault. Gingrich was forced out as House speaker.“They are a generational tyranny,” Bump quotes Jones.“OK Boomer” is a catchphrase and retort, not a compliment.More than three decades ago, Lee Atwater, the manager of George HW Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, believed the boomer experience provided a more cohesive political glue than income, political tradition or religion.“This group has dominated American culture in one form or another since it came into being,” he observed.Stratocaster in hand, Atwater played with Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones at Bush’s inauguration. The new president jammed along on air guitar. Atwater recorded an album with BB King and others. Now, Atwater, Bush, King and Charlie Watts are gone. Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards play on. There’s always time for one more tour, until there isn’t.Bump also addresses tensions within the Democrats’ diverse, upstairs-downstairs coalition, observing that race and ethnicity are not necessarily destiny. Among minority voters without college degrees, the party of FDR and JFK has ceded ground to the GOP. The much-vaunted “coalition of the ascendant” has not lived up to its hype.Bump notes divides between Black and Latino voters. In the 2020 primaries, Black Democrats sided with Joe Biden, Latinos with Bernie Sanders. Among Latinos, Trump ran three points better against Biden than against Hillary Clinton. Among Black voters, he was five points better.As with working-class whites, cultural issues retained their salience for those without a degree. Before the supreme court gutted a woman’s right to choose, Republicans possessed the luxury of watching the Democrats trip over themselves as they grappled with the latest leftwing orthodoxy, turning off wide swaths of the electorate, including Boomers, as they did so.Now it’s the Republicans’ turn to squirm. Voters in red Kansas and Kentucky rejected abortion bans. In the midterms, inflation and abortion were the two most important issues. Inflation may be receding but abortion is not going away.As Bump observes, women older than 60 frequently emerged as both faces of the resistance to Trump and a moderating force. More than three in five Americans are angry or dissatisfied with the supreme court decision on abortion, yet the GOP faithful demands self-immolation.Affirmative action provides another example of ethnic fluidity. In 1996, California adopted Proposition 196 and scrapped race-based preferences, despite overwhelming Latino opposition. As Bump describes it, the Latino share of the electorate was smaller than its proportion of the population. If results were weighted to reflect that larger figure, Proposition 196 would been defeated.Priorities of ethnic blocs can change. By 2020, support for affirmative action among Californian Latinos appeared lukewarm at best. At the same time Californians were sending Biden to the White House they resoundingly rejected Proposition 16, an attempt to undo Proposition 196.By the numbers, backers of Proposition 16 spent more than $31m for around 44% support. Opponents of the measure raised a meager $1.6m yet took 56%.Bump posits that in the future, the US will look more like Florida: older and less white. Florida has moved right in recent years – whether ageing millennials and Gen Z-ers push it back towards the center remains, of course, to be seen. Bump also poses a series of “what ifs”, unanswered: “What happens if changes in the state reduce the motivation for Americans or immigrants to move there? What if the federal government further constrains international migration?”“Florida’s future is dependent on decisions made in the present,” he writes. “The long term depends on the short term.”
      The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America is published in the US by Penguin Random House
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      Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nation

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      ReviewMyth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nation Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse marshal a fine array of historians for a bestselling assault on rightwing nonsenseThis collection of essays by 21 exceptional historians has an ambitious mission: the re-education of Americans assaulted by lies more systematically than any previous generation.‘We may have lost the south’: what LBJ really said about Democrats in 1964Read moreThe editors are two Princeton history professors, Kevin M Kruse and Julian E Zelizer. They begin with a concise history of how we reached this zenith of misinformation.The assault on truth by a right-wing “media ecosystem” began with Rupert Murdoch’s invention of Fox News, augmented in recent years by even more fantasy-based cable networks like Newsmax and One America News.The shamelessness of these sham journalists was best summarized by lawyers defending the most successful one, Tucker Carlson, in a suit accusing him of slander. The preppy anchor’s statements “cannot reasonably be interpreted as facts”, they said, because he so obviously engages in “non-literal commentary”.Another foundation of the disinformation crisis was the deregulation of broadcast by the Reagan administration, which eliminated the fairness doctrine in 1987. That simple change insured the pollution of the radio airwaves by Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, creating the first echo chamber.Of course, the internet allowed these waves of lies to reach warp speed, more destructive than anything humanity has experienced. In the understated description of this volume, “the conservative media ecosystem was augmented by … Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, where the tendency to find like-minded partisans and the freedom from fact-checkers took disinformation to new depths.”These venues have given “far-right lies unprecedented access to significant numbers of Americans” and allowed “ordinary Americans to spread lies to one another”, instantly. “As a result, misinformation and disinformation have infused our debates about almost every pertinent political problem.”The vastness of the problem is underscored by the fact that Fox News Digital ended 2022 as “the top-performing news brand” with more than 18bn multi-platform views and an average of 82.7m monthly multi-platform unique visitors. Not to mention 3.4bn Fox News views on YouTube. It was the first time Fox had surpassed CNN in these categories since 2019.The essays in Myth America attack right-wing myths about everything from immigration to Reagan. The authors were chosen in part because they are already “actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media”.In one of the very best chapters, Ari Kelman, a professor at the University of California Davis, tackles the foundational American myth: “Vanishing Indians.” He begins with the former Republican senator Rick Santorum’s assertion in 2021 that colonists arrived with a “blank slate” because there was “nothing here”. (Santorum said he had been misunderstood but was booted off CNN nonetheless.)Kelman documents how such remarks can be traced back to myths started by the New England colonists, who “systematically erased evidence of long-standing Indigenous cultures … as a way of legitimating Euro-American land claims”. Portraying native Americans as hopelessly primitive, they “turned imperial violence into innocent virtue”.The alliance of some native tribes with the British during the War of 1812 made it even easier to marginalize them. “That Indigenous peoples might disappear” began to “look like just desserts.”A counter-narrative began in the 1880s, when Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, which described “robbery” and “cruelty … done under the cloak” of 100 years “of treaty-making and treaty breaking”. Hunt described the culpability of white settlers in what we now realize was genocide: “This history of the United States government’s repeated violations of faith with the Indians … convicts us, as a nation” of “having outraged the principles of justice, which are the basis of international law.”Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the 1970 book by Dee Brown which sold millions, did more than any other modern work to explain how the conquering of the west was only possible because Americans assumed “treaties could be shredded” and the slaughter of Native Americans was just part of the natural order of things.The book described a vanished Native American culture, at a moment when Native Americans had experienced enough of a resurgence to become “the nation’s fastest growing minority”. As a result, “a book written to debunk one pernicious myth unwittingly reifies another, hammering home the message that by the start of the 20th century, Indians had vanished”.Another compelling chapter, The Southern Strategy, dismantles the assertion of the conservative political scientist Carol Swain “that this story of the two parties switching identities is a myth … fabricated by left-leaning academic elites and journalists”.Written by Kruse, the chapter traces the Republican party’s decision to embrace racism to a cross-country tour in 1951 by a South Dakota senator, Karl Mundt, who was the first to propose a merger of Republicans and southern “Dixiecrat” Democrats committed to segregation. In 1952, the Republican platform endorsed every state’s right “to order and control its own domestic institutions”.The election of the Republican John Tower to fill Lyndon Johnson’s Senate seat in 1961 made him the first Republican to enter the Senate from the south since the end of Reconstruction – and showed “the segregationist vote was up for grabs”.Republican strategy shifted so quickly that by the time the party gathered in 1964 to nominate Barry Goldwater for president, for the first time in 50 years there were no Black delegates in any southern delegation. One of the few Black delegates who did attend “had his suit set on fire”. The Black baseball star Jackie Robinson, a longtime Republican, declared that he knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany”.Goldwater was crushed by Johnson but as well as his native Arizona, he carried South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.There is a great deal more surprising, fact-based history in these 390 pages. In an era notorious for an attention span demolished by the internet, it is buoying indeed that a volume of this seriousness has spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
      Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past is published in the US by Basic Books
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      Why are M&M’s caving to rightwing anti-woke pressure? | Tayo Bero

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      Corporate cowardice: M&M cave to the right with pause on their ‘woke’ spokescandiesTayo BeroThe brand made a vague symbolic gesture – and rightwing pundits twisted it into a devious agenda. Now they’re retreating They were inciting a communist takeover. They were promoting radical wokeness. Worst of all, they weren’t hot any more.A year after it first began, one of the most ridiculous back-and-forths between a large corporation and the media I’ve witnessed in my lifetime is finally over. The M&M’s have pulled their beloved spokescandies.It all started early last year when Mars Wrigley, the company that owns M&M’s, began making a number of changes to their colorful signature characters. In January, the green M&M traded in her signature go-go boots for more comfortable-looking pumps with lower, block heels, as did the brown one.Unfortunately for Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson, this new version of the lady M&M’s without heels simply weren’t hot enough. The woke mob wouldn’t be satisfied until all cartoon characters were completely unattractive, he moaned to an audience of millions of other adults.“When you’re totally turned off, we’ve achieved equity,” Carlson said. And, as if picturing yourself on a date with a button-shaped chocolate isn’t bad enough, the pundit Kat Timpf added that Ms Green was “an opportunistic, evil bitch” and warned that people “run from women like the green M&M”.And so it continued. M&M’s made some kind of symbolic stand on a pressing social issue, and conservative pundits twisted it into a devious agenda.In December, the company released a new all-female packaging to commemorate International Women’s Day. In response, Fox News personality Martha MacCallum suggested that the all-girl packaging was a distraction that left the US vulnerable to its communist enemies.No, actually. Here’s the quote if you don’t believe me: “I think this is the kind of thing that makes China say, ‘Oh good, keep focusing on that, keep focusing on giving people their own color M&M’s while we take over all the mineral deposits in the entire world.’”You can probably imagine what happened next – M&M’s completely ignored the naysayers, doubled down on their efforts and will now be releasing a new line of genderfluid spokescandies who reject societal convention and actually don’t wear shoes at all.Just kidding. That would require creativity and some actual guts.In reality, after months of this very legitimate, completely serious, totally-needed-a-response pressure from the right, M&M’s announced this week that the brand has decided to take “an indefinite pause from the spokescandies”.If you think this kind of outrage over anthropomorphized sweets is an aberration, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention. The M&M’s debacle is both a clear sign of our political times, and an elaborate distraction.Conservatives are carefully picking away at seemingly irrelevant parts of our everyday culture while they wreak havoc on the civil liberties of marginalized people. Teachers in Florida’s Manatee county are being forced to remove or cover up books in their classrooms unless approved by a librarian or “certified media specialist”. Mass shootings continue unabated, and drag queen book readings across the country are now regularly besieged by gun-toting bigots.Why M&M’s, in the midst of real problems in America, conceded to this conservative foolishness we’ll probably never know. And the brand’s statement doesn’t clarify matters much, either.“In [the spokescandies’] place,” the statement said, “we are proud to introduce a spokesperson America can agree on: the beloved Maya Rudolph. We are confident Ms Rudolph will champion the power of fun to create a world where everyone feels they belong.”Give me a break. Are we still talking about candy here? And what is it about a woman in sneakers, or campaigning for women’s rights, that is hard to relate to? Why are we giving legitimacy to this nonsensical posturing?Don’t get me wrong, Ms Green, Ms Blue and Ms Purple were never the answer to female oppression. And in the grand scheme of things, gestures like this can feel flat and meaningless.But still: so what if M&M’s was engaging in mindless corporate virtue signalling? Their unnecessary reaction to the pushback has shown that even their meaningless show of “inclusivity” apparently wasn’t worth fighting for – even when the fight is simply ignoring conservative trolls who are worried about losing their attraction to a sassy chocolate.
      Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist
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