There are so many awful commentators on the right.  Tucker Carlson is one of the worst and one of the most popular, with over 2 million viewers of his smarmy daily Fox “News” show.  I hate watching him but feel the need to report on it, especially for those of you who sensibly avoid listening to his diatribes.

Last week Carlson spent a lot of time spouting racist tropes about Afghan immigrants.  He started one show (Aug. 18) by making fun of clips by CNN and MSNBC commentators calling such sentiments racist because Afghans often are white in skin color.  It’s still racist, Tucker, and anti-refugee and xenophobic, which you didn’t deny.  Carlson’s first point was that an Afghan refugee raped and murdered a girl in Austria and gave another such example in Germany.  How outrageous and irrelevant as an argument!  He then extended this by claiming that crime increased in Germany in 2015 after a wave of immigration from Afghanistan and Syria.  Even if that were true, there is no reason to believe immigration was the cause.  Then comes his clinching argument:  he claims “90% of new crimes in Germany were committee by asylum seekers.”  Fact check: There is nothing on the internet that even remotely supports this LIE.  Carlson then goes on to claim that Afghan refugees are destabilizing European countries.

Carlson’s show is so often just one lie after another. In this post-Trumpian era that denies facts and truth, any claim is fair game. And generalizing from one or two examples is OK.  Later in that same show, he had Sean Parnell on, a Senate candidate in Pennsylvania.  Parnell led a platoon in Afghanistan and said that they worked with an Afghan interpreter for a year who turned out to be a spy for the Iranians, implying that we shouldn’t give special visa status to those Afghans who helped the U.S. in the war effort.

Carlson continues with Fox’s anti-immigrant tirade reporting on housing prices and shortage in the U.S. and arguing it is caused by all those immigrants coming into the country.  He intimates that Biden will allow millions of Afghans, who come from a very different cultures, to flood our country with Ilhan Omars (Democratic Representative from Minnesota) who hate America.  What nonsense!  There won’t be millions, our country was built by immigrants who came from very different cultures, and we’re back to an “America – Love it or Leave it” mentality that doesn’t allow criticism.

In another show last week (Aug. 20), Carlson starts by declaring Biden is “senile,” “dazed and confused,” “can’t think clearly,” and his family and friends knew this when he ran for the office.  He then goes after CNN, saying it is a political organization, not a news organization (talk about projection!), and its head tells all commentators what they may say and not say.  His guest, a journalist, Glenn Greenwald, says CNN is “controlled by the CIA.”  Later in the show, Carlson goes back to his repeated point that the FBI was involved in fomenting the Jan 6 insurrection, again with no basis in fact.  But Tucker stares into the camera and says something like “this is true, everyone knows it.”

Toward the end of the show, he has Chris Rufo on, from the right-wing Manhattan Institute.  Rufo single-handedly has made critical race theory (CRT) a national focus in schools with his extremist characterizations (see my blog, June 24).  Now Rufo is going after “woke” corporations (see my blog on wokeness, June 15) that are doing anti-racist training.  The Fox banner is that “toddlers can be white supremacists” because Rufo reports that somewhere in the Bank of America’s training program it mentions that racial biases can develop as early as in 3-5 year-old children (which I am sure is true).  If you don’t watch Carlson, I hope all this gives you a sense of how his show is just filled with one hate- or fear-fueled lie, mischaracterization, and distortion after another.  I feel the need for a bath just writing about it.

A Note on Bill Maher

I don’t like juxtaposing Bill and Tucker.  Carlson is simply awful.  As I’ve said in earlier blogs (June 15 and 24), I do like Bill in many ways, but he really gets a lot of things wrong (in my view, of course).  His show last week (Aug. 20) is no exception.  One unfortunate parallel between the two is about race.  For both of them, claims of racism are too pervasive.  Carlson said (Aug. 18) that “fighting racism is the universal justification for every bad idea” the Democrats have.  On Bill’s show writer, Andrew Sullivan complained that too often “racial oppression is the single meaning of America.” While Bill didn’t say this, his comments, then and before, signal his agreement that racism is too often seen in every issue.  Sullivan goes on to comment that “yes, America is about racism, but it’s also about other things like free speech and freedom of religion.”  Bill approvingly chimes in that “things have changed a lot” – his usual point of how anti-racists don’t recognize the progress we’ve made.

Bill says, “We are giving up on a color-blind society, that should be our goal.”  To me, perhaps that should be a long-term goal, but not for the foreseeable future.  Given the extent of racism, we need a very race-conscious society, as exemplified in CRT and the type of anti-racism corporate training that both Bill and Carlson criticize.  A passage from my book, The Conscience of a Progressive, makes that clear:

“Another example [of how racism is built into government] is the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action policies in favor of “color blindness.”  Chief Justice John Roberts spoke for conservatives (and some liberals) when he said: ‘the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.’  Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in defense of affirmative action, counters: ‘the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination'” [p. 107].

Two closing comments on Bill’s show.  First, he said that Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan couldn’t have been worse if Trump were President.  While it was and is bad, it certainly could have been worse with a bellicose Trump leading to considerable violence on withdrawal.  Second, Bill really is bad on the virus.  He starts the show by setting a bad example by shaking hands and hugging Sullivan.  Sullivan (who initiated it) has been on the show 27 times and is another example of Bill’s frequent middle, muddled conservatives who, according to Bill, spout common sense.  Back to the virus:  Later in the show, Bill says he doesn’t want a booster.  He says he didn’t want the vaccine, which he took “for the team.”  But a booster, he says, is for the immune compromised and elderly, not for him (he’s over 60).  What nonsense!  The vaccine’s efficacy attenuates over time and a booster becomes necessary – “for the team, Bill,” where the team is the public health of our country and planet!  Of course, the U.S. and other countries getting their third shot when much of the rest of the world hasn’t had any is quite problematic.

For the present, I am using this blog to comment on politics and public affairs, especially reacting to television news shows.  I feel a special obligation to critique the far right so I have been watching Fox “News” much more than I’d like to.  However, I started this blog commenting on Bill Maher’s show Real Time, whose sometimes somewhat progressive views are too often problematic.  His show last Friday (Aug. 6) has a lot to comment on – saving me from a weekend of bothering with Fox News!

Bill’s top-of-the-show guest was Donna de Varona, a 1960s Olympic swimming medalist and presently an activist challenging, among other things, Biden’s executive order allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports that correspond to their gender identity.  De Varona is a spokesperson for a lobbying group that includes no trans members and is criticized as transphobic.  Bill squarely put himself on de Varona’s side.  While I do understand why some people question the fairness in some sports of a former man competing with women (such as a recent Olympic weightlifting medalist), I don’t think there is a good practical way to exclude this from happening.  And I would hope that Bill in a future show has a trans activist on to dispute his one-sided coverage.

Too often, Bill invites guests who are too far to the right for my taste – or are in some muddled middle position – like a basically anti-vaxxer he had on not that long ago.  Or Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor.  Bill himself has become more right wing over the years, despite still having what I consider good politics on a number of issues as I laid out in a previous blog.  One of the two guests on last Friday’s show reflects Bill’s pandering to the right.  That guest was Ben Shapiro who is the author of an imbecilic-sounding book called The Authoritarian Moment.  Fortunately, on this show, Bill also invited Malcom Nance, a very thoughtful progressive and MSNBC commentator.

As Bill commented, one would think by its title that Shapiro’s book was about Trump and Trumpism, but it was not at all.  The book’s subtitle is “How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent.”  For Shapiro, the left are the dangerous authoritarians.  His examples were the push for mandates for masks and vaccinations and Biden having the CDC extend the moratorium on evictions when the courts could declare it unconstitutional.  Giving such a right-wing argument a platform is why so many progressives have stopped watching Bill Maher (he also called Shapiro a friend).  Bill did counter Shapiro by saying how can you compare that with a guy who wants to steal votes and overturn the election.  Nance went further and talked about the authoritarian fascist global threat from Trump and his ilk in other countries.  Shapiro had no counter except to say that sometimes Trump was a jerk and that “I will comfort myself by sleeping on my bed made of money.” Much of the right’s rhetoric seems to be about ensuring their wealth.

But what was most objectionable was Bill defending Shapiro saying it is not a one-sided debate.  When Nance said the right has been killing people with its anti-mask, anti-vaxx stance, Bill responded that the left has as well with it “defund the police” rhetoric.  What nonsense!  And despite Bill’s long-term mockery of that slogan, he has yet to have a guest to defend the very sensible views that promote it (it doesn’t mean shutting down the police!).  Bill brought up critical race theory (see my previous blogs), another topic on which Bill has basically had critics only on past shows.  He let Shapiro define it first who did a slanted but reasonable job.  I was disappointed that Nance just agreed with Shapiro’s definition instead of elaborating.  Bill has done a poor job of educating himself about CRT and repeated myths of it teaching children about the “toxicity of being born white.”

Bill also went on about one of his main hobby horses – that the woke left is a huge danger, that the “woke twitter crowd” is responsible for an attack on freedom in causing a “chill in this country about what you can say or do.”  I’ve written about the problems with cancel culture, but this is such a minor problem compared to what the left has every right to be “woke” about such as the raging pandemic and its deniers (Bill contributed to this saying on this show we don’t need to go crazy over new variants – I say, Watch out for the lamdas).  Being woke is about paying attention to climate change and other environmental destruction, galloping inequality and poverty, virulent racism and sexism, militarism and war, conspiracy theories, the Big Lie, and more.  Bill’s worries about the left twitter crowd pale in comparison, and I wish he could see that.

Miscellaneous other thoughts while watching this Bill Maher show:

His pairing of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “The Real Housereps of DC” may have gotten a cheap laugh, but the two are not at all comparable – one is a dangerous nutcase and the other is a true hero of everything that is good about being woke.

How many people stormed the Capitol?  Nance said 40,000, Shapiro said 1000.  Maybe only 1000 got inside but how many were out there supporting them?  I’ve seen no reliable estimates.

This is related to some of the scariest statistics I’ve heard.  Bill reported that 55% of Republicans say that the American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it, and 42% say it may be time to take the law into our own hands.  Talk about dangerous!

Finally, Nance pointed out how Russia backed Trump and fascism in other countries such as Austria and Serbia.  I’ve read that Russia has been putting out money and social media lies to further right-wing causes all over – including France, Germany, and Brexit in the UK.  I believe there is a good chance that Putin has been blackmailing Trump over past transgressions.  Putin may be single-handedly responsible for destabilizing democracy around the world.  Now that is both awful and scary!

The right is so crazy about the pandemic.  Fox News Prime Time host Brian Kilmeade started a segment complaining about Biden’s criticism of Facebook misinformation and his urging everyone to get vaccinated (July 19).  Kilmeade says Biden isn’t a public health expert and then goes on to excoriate those who are like Fauci and the Surgeon-General.  Kilmeade shows a half-a-dozen misstatements in the past about the pandemic and goes on to say that “lies” keep popping up and scientific advice has been “useless.”  How absurd!  Scientific views about the pandemic change over time, and 6 honest errors are balanced by hundreds of accurate statements.  The right is so crazy about all this that at the CPAC meeting (of conservatives) the week before, the crowd was chanting about Dr. Fauci, “Lock him up!”

It is interesting to note that last week, the right seemed to have a change of heart when major Republican voices like McConnell, DeSantis, Hannity, and others came out with calls for people to get vaccinated (although Hannity walked back his comments some).  The left has been speculating on why now, all of a sudden, when they have all been silent or hostile to vaccines for so long?  I haven’t heard a convincing reason, but perhaps it is because they are losing voters to Covid?!  I am sure a lot more Republicans are dying of Covid than Democrats.  I can’t believe no one is reporting on this either!

The other big pandemic bugaboo for the right are masks.  Fox headline: “Blue state cities reinstate face covering mandates.”  Interviewed on Fox, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) is typical of Republicans who view mask mandates as an attack on their “freedom” to “live their life fully.”  What nonsense!  What about my freedom not to be infected by your germs?  Do these people wear seat belts?  What about dealing with much more important freedoms like freedom from hunger, eviction, climate disaster, roads and bridges collapsing, etc.?  Anti-maskers need to get a grip on reality!

Tucker Carlson

Carlson has the most watched cable TV news show (2 million viewers), and he is one of the most extreme Fox voices.  On a recent show (July 22), he continued his misinformation campaign against vaccination by arguing for the need for investigation into deaths actually due to taking the Covid vaccine.  More nonsense!

Much of that show was raising questions about the Jan. 6 insurrection (the term in a Fox banner in quotation marks).  He was complaining that Nancy Pelosi rejected Reps. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) as members of the Jan. 6 investigation committee the House is putting together.  Carlson argued that Pelosi doesn’t want them because they will ask tough questions about Jan. 6.

Carlson then goes on to delineate what those questions should be.  Why was the Capitol police request for more security even before Jan 6 repeatedly turned down?  Who shot Ashli Babbitt?  Is it OK to shoot unarmed protesters who are trespassing?  Shouldn’t this apply to BLM protests?  Don’t the lives of those who voted for Donald Trump count?  What role did the FBI play on Jan. 6?  Carlson goes on to say: “We know for certain that there were FBI informants in the crowd at the Capitol and that many of them made it inside the Capitol and encouraged others to break the law.”  Unbelievable!  Carlson’s lies and mis-directions are many.  He implied that Pelosi knows the answers to all these and is hiding them and we need people like Banks and Jordan to get at the truth when their presence would really just turn the hearing into a circus.

Miscellany

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) in an interview on Fox (July 13) acknowledged that Biden is legitimately President.  It wasn’t the first time.  On May 17, he said: “I don’t think anyone is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.”  What about Trump and 60% of Republican voters?  Why isn’t this plastered all over the press and Fox news to counter the Big Lie that is threatening our democracy?

I and many other Democrats think Trump and his ilk are truly nuts, to use a technical term.  But the reverse is true too.  Rep Lindsay Graham on Fox (July 21) said: “The people in charge of your government right now are crazy.”  The U.S. is in a very dangerous, precarious situation, and there is no clear way out.

When I started this blog, I didn’t realize it would impel me to spend several hours each week watching Fox News.  I find it distasteful, it is so unbelievable, such an alternate reality – but I find it worth commenting on.  Before doing so, let me say a few additional words about a prime Fox bête noire:

Critical Race Theory

I had a letter to the editor of the Washington Post published (July 10) in which I argued that we should reformulate the debate about CRT.  Instead of focusing on CRT, the question should be whether our public schools teach about racism?  And, of course, they should, even most conservatives could not deny that.  Just like schools need to teach about sexism, ableism, inequality, poverty, climate change, and other controversial topics.  The questions then become how? what? and who decides?

These are not easy questions to answer, but, to my mind, politicians need to butt out.  Current legislation on race and CRT proscribes any curricular activities that give rise to “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”  This is absurd.  Good education often does and should cause discomfort.  As Timothy Snyder, Yale University historian points out in a New York Times article (June 29) titled “The War on History is a War on Democracy:” “history is not therapy.”

Back to Fox

So this past weekend I watched Fox news commentators Tucker Carlson (July 9), Sean Hannity (July 9), Lauran Ingraham (July 9), and Maria Bartilomo (July 11).  One ever-present feature is how often the right’s argument is projection.  Last week, I commented on how their claims of indoctrination by the left are a guise for their banning examination of topics like slavery and Jim Crow.  Hannity similarly claimed the left wants to eliminate American history when this is really the terrain of the right.  Carlson talked of the threat of mass riots by the left when the reality is the insurrection of Jan 6 and the continued threat of the right.  Hannity says the Democrats are “Party First, Country Second,” when this so fits the Republicans.  He also says that the Democrats only believe in elections when they win.  Need I say more?

Hannity’s show was devoted to Mark Levin and his book American Marxism about whom I commented some last week.  But this fearmongering, trash-the-left deserves some additional commentary.  The book will be released July 13.  Hannity calls it the “most important book in a generation.”  For Levin and Hannity, everything on the left is Marxism – the New Green Deal, dealing with climate change, redistribution, democratic socialism, CRT, Black Lives Matter, corporations who decry voting law restrictions.  For Levin and Hannity, Marxists are running academia, media, big tech companies, and the whole Democratic Party.  For Levin and Hannity, all these American Marxists don’t believe in free speech or debate (talk about projection!).  Levin says about them: “when [these] fanatics are confronted with facts, history, experience, truth, it’s of no consequence, they have found their calling and won’t be dissuaded from it” (more projection!).  “All of them think alike or are ostracized” (tell that to Liz Cheney!).

It goes on and on.  Ingraham talks about how the Democrats don’t want the pandemic to be over and how having a child in school wear a mask is “shaming them.”  Bartiromo lists what she calls the big lies of the left: “the Russia hoax, the Steele dossier, impeachment with no crime, Hunter Biden’s laptop and business deals, origin and treatment of COVID, voter laws as Jim Crow, and armed insurrection without arms.”  She had Trump on who is still claiming the election was “corrupt, rigged, stolen – we won in a landslide.”  He said “the Supreme Court didn’t have the courage to take it up and they should be ashamed” – yet it was a Court that he and the Republicans had packed.

In such a world, it is hard to be optimistic about the future of the U.S. A majority of Republicans believe Trump’s election lie, a significant proportion think the January 6 insurrection was justified.  Many won’t get vaccinated or wear masks.  It’s good that the courts rejected the election lie, it’s good that we are prosecuting the insurrectionists, and the unvaccinated, masks-are-an-assault-on-our-freedom crowd are most directly harming themselves (although it fosters more variants).  But a rapprochement is a long ways away.  In the U.S., labelling those who disagree with you as socialists, communists, or Marxists generally prevents any conversation about our differences.  I will still repeat my offer last week to Levin and include Hannity – in your eyes, as a left-leaning university professor, I am clearly one of the American Marxists who frighten you so – read my book, The Conscience of a Progressive, and I’ll read yours and we can talk!

As I was about to post this, I started watching Trump’s speech to CPAC (July 11).  Practically his opening sentence was: “We will defeat the radical left, the socialists, Marxists, and critical race theorists.”  Shades of Hannity, Levin, Carlson, and the rest of the Fox gang!

Trump’s talk went on and on.  I may watch the rest and report on it next time.

As usual, there is a lot of recent news and views to comment on.  Let’s start with

My Bill Maher Report

I didn’t have any comments on Bill’s last show (June 26) before his July break.  But I thought I would share MSNBC commentator Tiffany Cross’s 3-minute critique of Bill’s show, starting with Bill’s reaction to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s apology, which I featured in my previous blog.

Republican Thought Police

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new law that will require the more than 3 dozen Florida colleges and universities to survey annually students and faculty in order to assess “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity.”  Calling colleges and universities “hotbeds for stale ideology,” DeSantis said they could lose funding if they are found to be “indoctrinating” students.

Of course, a key question is who decides what ideologies are “stale” and what “viewpoint diversity” and “indoctrinating” means?  The governor?  The legislature?  At the moment, in most colleges and universities in the U.S., it is faculty and, to some extent, lower-level administrators like department chairs, who decide on faculty hiring.  A recent notable exception was the University of North Carolina’s Board of Trustees decision not to grant a tenured faculty position to Nikole Hannah-Jones, despite the recommendation of faculty and administrators, because she. was associated with the 1619 Project and critical race theory.  The Trustees were pressured to reverse their position and they did.

I don’t mean to imply that normal university hiring decisions are objective or politically neutral.  I remember the case of Florida State University where I used to teach.  Their Department of Economics accepted substantial money from the Koch Brothers Foundation which many argued was used to hire right-wing faculty.  The Koch Brothers have funded many colleges and universities to this end.  But ideology can enter into university decision with more subtlety.  When I started teaching in the mid-1970s, I saw faculty committees not grant tenure to a lot of left-wing candidates who had been hired in the late 1960s, despite their objectively high performance.  I remember a magazine article of that era, titled “Could Karl Marx Teach Economics in America?,” about similar conservative biases at Harvard University and elsewhere.

Of course, now, the Right is concerned that the university is too liberal.  Their bottom line perhaps is that too many college-educated people vote Democratic, which is something they want to change.  There is no correct or perfect way to safeguard academic freedom, but having State governments decide what is indoctrination and what diversity of thought means is frightening and will have a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

DeSantis, in his bid to become a contender for President or Vice-President, also recently signed a bill promoting a public school patriotic civics education to teach the evils of communism.  People forget, but in the early 1960s, Florida initiated a required high school course on Americanism vs. Communism that wasn’t eliminated until the mid-1980s.  Joy Reid, MSNBC commentator, likens the current effort in Florida and elsewhere to China’s “patriotic education” campaign instituted after the Tiananmen Square revolt.

Back to Critical Race Theory

DeSantis and Florida joined 21 other states in passing laws to stop critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools.  Never mind the fact that, in general, it isn’t being taught anywhere.  The Right seems very frightened of CRT.  Tucker Carlson, Fox news commentator, calls it “scary” and “creepy.”  Carlson went after General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who defended paying attention to CRT at West Point with Tucker saying ”he’s not just a pig, he’s stupid.”  Laura Ingraham, another Fox commentator, wants to defund the military for this and many on the right want Milley fired.  Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz calls CRT a “bigoted lie, every bit as racist as Klansmen in white sheets.”  The Wall Street Journal calls it “indoctrination.”

My daughter is a psychologist, and she points out to me how much of the Right’s critique is always projection.  It is really they who want to indoctrinate students — with a “patriotic” education, with a white-washing of history that downplays the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, or Jim Crow.  While CRT cannot be summarized here, its perspective that racism is systemic and that American society is racist – indeed, as is too true around the world – frightens and is abhorrent to the Right.  While people can and do disagree with these fundamental views, they clearly offer a valid perspective that should be taught and discussed in public school classrooms.

American Marxism

Fear-mongering is brought to new heights by Fox commentator Mark Levin on his weekly show “Life, Liberty, and Levin.”  I’ve caught pieces of his show before, but last week was the first time I watched a whole show (June 27).  Levin sits there surrounded by a poster and a copy of his about-to-be-released book titled American Marxism with a hammer and sickle on the cover in the colors of the American flag.  Levin says the book already has 150,000 pre-orders.

What is American Marxism?  Levin starts his show by calling CRT, LatCrit, and critical gender theory Marxist movements. (LatCrit is a respectable academic theory applying CRT to Latinx populations.  I’ve never heard of critical gender theory, but it seems to relate to Levin’s fear of non-binary views.)  The Marxism comes in, according to Levin, because these theories were founded by or based on the works of supposed Marxists like Derrick Bell (the noted civil rights advocate) and Herbert Marcuse (the well-known philosopher of what is known as the Frankfurt school of critical theory, which Levin calls the Franklin School of Berlin).

Levin objects to the history of the U.S. being portrayed as imperialism and colonialism leading to its founding by White Protestant Europeans – which I think is a fair depiction.  Levin adds the Green New Deal to the Marxist takeover.  Critique of capitalism as embodied in Bernie Sander’s democratic socialism is also anathema.  For Levin, it sounds like the entire Democratic Party is now run by what he is calling American Marxists.  Marxism and communism have been scare words in the U.S. since the McCarthy era.  Levin paints this as a new Revolutionary War where people have to be galvanized and mobilized to “Save our republic, our society” (peacefully he adds).

In the past, I generally avoided Fox news except for short stints to see how incredible they are – presenting this alternate reality to millions of viewers.  For my blog, I now am paying more attention, but it is not pleasant.  As for Levin, I really don’t want to read his new book, but I offer him this challenge.  Read my book, The Conscience of a Progressive, and I will read American Marxism, and we can have a debate, or perhaps even a conversation.

Today, for my second blog, I want to briefly comment again on Bill Maher’s show Real Time and then look at some media moments and stories that have been circulating this past week.

My Bill Maher Report

Bill is good on many issues – conspiracy theories like QAnon, the Big Election Lie, the border wall, women’s reproductive rights, and more – but should be called out when he is off-base.  My problem with last Friday’s show (June 18) centered again on how Bill deals with racial issues, wokeness, and the twitter crowd. Bill spent a lot of time on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s apology for the casting of his new film, In the Heights, a very well-reviewed musical look at life in a Latinx neighborhood in Manhattan.  Miranda had been criticized for colorism, with most of the actors light-skinned when many in that neighborhood are dark-skinned Afro-Latinos.  Bill was outraged that Miranda had been critiqued for this and that he felt the need to apologize, pointing out that in creating the play, Hamilton, Miranda had taken a very progressive stance by representing our founding fathers as Black and Latino.  Bill asked, “Is nothing ever good enough for these people?” and saying, “This is why people hate Democrats.”

Bill is just wrong on many levels.  First, this is a valid criticism.  Colorism, prejudice and discrimination against darker-skin people, is a general feature of racism that is present everywhere, even in Black and Latinx communities.  Reading some of the criticisms of In the Heights, you can tell they were heart-felt, they highlight an important aspect of racism, and have long been applicable to Hollywood.  Bill opined that Miranda probably apologized to avoid the hassle but reading his and other responses from the film’s associates, it was clear to me that they took the criticisms seriously.

Bill said, “At some point, we need to stand up to these bullies,” but the critics I read were not bullies.  All social media criticism is not cancel culture, even if Bill is right that some or maybe much of it goes too far.  Critique turns into cancel culture when it turns nasty.  Miranda was not being cancelled.  Critics still said they thought the film was good.  And maybe the answer to Bill’s question above is that nothing is ever good enough. There is always room for improvement.

The Crime Wave

Bill’s show and most media outlets have been talking a lot about the rise in gun violence.  All the coverage has probably contributed to making this a hot issue for the public.  I wonder how much homicides have really risen and why.  To some extent, the yearly rise statistics must be misleading, since a year ago, withs so many places on lockdown and fears of contagion high, homicide rates may have been much lower than usual.  With pandemic fear waning and the explosion of activity, maybe there is sort of a backlog of homicides as, for example, street gangs become more active?  I doubt the violence is caused by the concerns with policing, as argued on Fox news, and it certainly is not a result of immigration, also as Fox news likes to infer.  And, at bottom, gun violence is caused in this country – at rates way higher than all other industrialized countries – by the ubiquitous presence of guns and the ease of getting one.

Housing Prices

With fears of inflation, there has been a lot of attention to housing prices, with people trying to explain the crazy market (where, for example, many houses are selling for much higher that they are listed for).  But I think the explanation is pretty simple.  The pandemic postponed a lot of people’s plans to purchase a new home, and so there is a huge pent-up demand.  Add to that, the pandemic stopped a lot of businesses from hiring people and a lot of people from moving to new locations, so this is a source of another huge pent-up demand for new housing too.

Other Media Moments

Fox news remains the bastion of the far right.  This week, it has been pushing the astonishing accusation that the FBI may have been behind the January 6 insurrection.  Since the FBI has been known to infiltrate right-wing extremist groups, perhaps they instigated these groups to attack the Capitol?  There is not a shred of evidence that this happened, but that doesn’t stop Fox commentator Tucker Carlson from whining something like, “How do we know this FBI scenario is not true?”  Of course, this absurd question can never be answered.

Tucker also interviewed a “scientist” who says there is no evidence of appreciable global warming.  An ever-present Fox news story this week has been the almost daily showings of migrants crossing our border with Mexico.   But perhaps most ubiquitous is the continued attack on critical race theory.  A recent study reported that Fox news referred to critical race theory about 1300 times since March!

Controversy over Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory has become a hot button issue.  Twenty-two states have passed or are considering legislation banning the teaching of CRT in public schools.  There is a lot that can and should and is being said about how awful this is.  Today, I only want to highlight two things.  First, while not wanting to be too simplistic about the origins of this controversy, one right-wing former documentary filmmaker, Christopher Rufo, has had enormous influence in bringing this about, as detailed in The New Yorker.  He got ahold of some bias training documents used in some Seattle city government departments that referenced CRT, and he started writing about it for a publication of the right-wing Manhattan Institute.  Tucker Carlson had Rufo on his show last September, Trump saw it and that led to an Executive Order limiting how race could be talked about in Federal training programs.  Rufo went on to prominence, talking to Congress and others about how he saw CRT and its evil doings.

Yesterday (June 23), Joy Reid, one of my favorite MSNBC commentators, had Rufo on her show and showed a series of 3 tweets Rufo sent last March.  It is worth reading them.

“The activists are realizing that their ideas, once put into practice, are generating discontent.  Their racial coalition is also breaking apart – Asian-Americans in particular, are revolting against CRT, which punishes them more than any other group.  We have successfully frozen their brand – critical race theory – not the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.  We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.  The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.”  We have decodified the term and recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Very scary!  Rufo proudly told Joy that his “strategy had been enormously successful.”  And it has.  One survey said that 64% of Americans have heard of CRT, and have heard mostly negative things.

This blog is getting long, but I wanted to conclude by sharing with you the response of General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when asked by Rep. Matt Gaetz about CRT in the military.  Milley said:

“I do think it’s important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.  And the United States Military Academy is a university. And it is important that we train and we understand – and I want to understand white rage. And I’m white …. So, what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.  I’ve read Mao Zedong, I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding? Having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend? And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States Military – our general officers, our commissioned and noncommissioned officers – of being ‘woke’ because we’re studying some theories that are out there.”

As I said in my previous blog, there is nothing wrong with being “woke” either, but it is great to see a military perspective offer some sanity to the discussion.  More on all this next time!

This is my first blog on my new, The Conscience of a Progressive, website.  For those of you familiar with my academic work, I may occasionally write about issues of education, economics, and international development.  However, I plan to focus this blog on my reactions to popular media, especially television news shows, with particular attention right now to Bill Maher’s Real Time on HBO.

My Bill Maher Report

I have long been a fan of Bill Maher.  I’ve watched his shows – religulously, he might say – for years and have seen him do stand-up in person a few times.  I’m less of a fan now that Trump has gone, and Bill has moved a little more to the right than he used to be – although I still think his satire can be very funny.  But — in my view, of course — he is wrong-headed about many things.  Most of what he is wrong about these days is his criticism of left/progressive views.  Bill was very positive about Bernie Sanders for much of the 2020 presidential campaign.  While not always agreeing with Bernie’s positions, Bill now would likely agree with much fewer.

Bill was pretty crazy on his show last Friday (June 11) about seeing people outdoors still wearing masks.  He said it (the pandemic) is over, you can’t hide forever, stop cowering, life is a risk, and those who are outside wearing masks are morons.  This is wrong in so many ways.  The pandemic isn’t over, we still don’t know what the future holds, if you are not vaccinated, you should wear a mask, and even if you are vaccinated, a mask can’t hurt and might help.  CDC guidelines are just best guesses about what is needed, and there is nothing wrong with people still being worried about variants and spread.  Why such anger and hostility, Bill?!  You’ve never been so angry and hostile about the morons who refused to wear masks during the high points of the pandemic when – in the unbelievable name of freedom – they were endangering us all!

But this is really a small issue.  Bill is off base on some much bigger issues.  He often finds rather extremist, very minority views on the left and treats them as widespread and as examples of what’s wrong with holding a left, progressive perspective.  On Friday’s show, he made fun of two such views.  One by a councilperson in Seattle who supposedly wanted to “decriminalize crime.”  First, decriminalizing many current crimes is not a bad idea (Bill would agree with some, like marijuana possession).  The person Bill cited sounded like he or she was way overboard, but Bill used it to repeat his criticism of the defund-the-police slogan.  While this slogan may lose votes for the Democrats, most people who argue for it are not extremists – they don’t want to get rid of the police entirely, but just want, among other things, to switch some police funding to social services to prevent some of the problems police currently deal with.  While Bill prides himself on having debates, I haven’t seen him invite a sensible defund-the-police perspective on his show.

This last was just a passing remark for Bill on last Friday’s show.  He spent much more time on making fun of what he saw as another extreme view by the left – that racism today in the U.S. is worse than it has ever been. His evidence for this view was a quote from Kevin Hart, the comedian, that said something like “you’re witnessing white power and white privilege at an all-time high.”  Bill then goes on and on about how, of course, the era of slavery and Jim Crow was much worse than today.  Few people, if any, disagree with Bill’s point that there has been progress on racism and other social problems he mentions like sexism and homophobia. (Hart responded to not take him literally – Hart’s point might be and mine would be, in our current historical era where racism is named and shamed, white power and white privilege are still so pervasive, and openly so in this Trump-deranged era.)  Bill’s point on this show and others is what exactly?  That we should be grateful for progress?  Of course, most everyone on the left is – but progress is slow, and racism is still virulent.  Bill ended with “We’ve come a long way baby…even if we can’t declare mission accomplished.”  Bill seems to want them all to talk about the progress we have made when they rightly focus on how far we still have to go!

Bill does this on a lot of shows – finds some rather extremist, off-the-wall view and uses it to critique the vast majority of what are very reasonable left progressive perspectives.  The off-the-wall views are good for comedy but are not at all representative.  Bill has been particularly dismissive of critical race theory (CRT), mischaracterizing it, having many guests — finding Black guests especially — who are critical of CRT without ever having a guest who defends it.  CRT makes a lot of sense – Bill and many others don’t want to see American society as racist, but it is a very reasonable position to hold – and it is contrary to one of Bill’s Friday concluding remark, that “racism is not everywhere, it’s not in my house, it’s not in most of yours” (talking about his audience).  You would think that the right’s attack on CRT in schools across the U.S. would give Bill some pause to think that, given how scared the right seems to be of it, that there might be something to it.

Bill’s big issue underlying this is his decrying of “wokeness.”  But wokeness is not the extreme minority views Bill always highlights.  CRT has very sensible points and advocates.  Thinking about the Palestinian-Israeli situation, contrary to Bill’s view, issues of apartheid, racism, and CRT can be seen as very relevant.  Bill, there are many guests you could have who would explain this.  Thinking about free vs. “politically correct” speech, which Bill has harped on forever, there is a sensible perspective – not composed of “snowflakes” – that there are sensible positions that talk about the need to circumscribe some speech in some settings.  Shouting fire falsely in a crowded theater or directly inciting violence is not the only exception as libel laws and restrictions on hate speech in other liberal democracies like Germany evidence. It should give you pause that even the ACLU, a staunch defender of free speech, recognizes this as you said on Friday’s show.  It should also give Bill pause that the right is going on and on about wokeness, perhaps there is something to it.

Bill, you need to find guests on the left who challenge your view – too many of your guests, when not conservatives, are idiosyncratic oddballs – who agree with you on the critique of wokeness and the left.  Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and other progressives are not the problem with today’s Democratic party, despite your quoting James Carville on this.  We need a left, progressive view much more strongly if our society, the U.S., the world is to survive, let alone thrive!  Read my book, The Conscience of a Progressive!