Black Conservative Caricatures, and more
A curated mix of diverse media
Contemporary Black Republican Conservatism can only be properly construed under the category of Blaxploitation. Allow me to explain: The media fortunes of Ye and Herschel in the last few weeks have underscored the patent ridiculousness of African-Americans laboring under the rubric of Trumpism. “There is a cruel hand chaining the rapper and the football player together as they pretend to be Black conservatives,” writes Juan Williams — who is, at the very least, conservative adjacent — for RealClearPolitics. “They are puppets for former President Trump.”
The artist formerly known as Kanye West, who spent the last week sounding not unlike David Duke, announced this morning that he is buying the grotty libertarian social media site Parler. “In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” West said in a grandiose sounding news release. “This deal will change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech,” Parlement Technologies CEO George Farmer said in the release. “Ye is making a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again. Once again, Ye proves that he is one step ahead of the legacy media narrative.” But that hasn’t stopped his business partners from backing away from the rapper.
And then there is Herschel Walker — a walking, talking caricature of Black manliness. “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move,” the Republican candidate for the Senate said of global climate change. “So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up, while they’re messing ours up.” He is the joy of television comedy writers desiring.
Then, add to this unholy mix “black conservative” Candace Owens, who is actually more of a scammer and an opportunist than a cognitively impaired stereotype like the other two.
The Trumpists must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel if this is what they came up with to represent African-American Republicanism this close to the midterms. I wonder what Thomas Sowell thinks of this new group of libertarian/Republicans. While I have never agreed with Sowell’s soulless, cynical brand of libertarianism, he at the very least presented his arguments with intellectual rigor. And consistency. A black orphan of the Great Depression in the Jim Crow South, Sowell did what he felt he had to do to survive — but he never played the clown.
After Rebecca Traister’s interview with John Fetterman as well as his notorious sitdown with NBC’s Dasha Burns, Jon Alsop writes a thoughtful post in CJR about how the media has to begin to better cover our aging leaders. He writes:
The interview—and, in particular, Burns’s contention that Fetterman seemed not to understand what she was saying without closed captioning—quickly drew criticism, including from Traister, who insisted, having herself interviewed Fetterman, that while his auditory processing is impaired, his comprehension, a very different faculty, is not; Kara Swisher, who also recently interviewed Fetterman and is herself a stroke survivor, was more scathing, referring to Burns’s comment as “nonsense” and suggesting that she might just be “bad at small talk.” Various prominent advocates for people with disabilities also pushed back on the fact that the interview was framed around Fetterman’s condition, describing it as “ableist,” a charge also leveled by Gisele Barreto Fetterman, Fetterman’s wife. “Recovering from a stroke in public isn’t easy,” Fetterman himself tweeted. “But in January, I’m going to be much better—and Dr. Oz will still be a fraud.”
Finally, the collapse of local news has accelerated the crisis of our democracy. The ad recession; the growing digitalization of news; Big Tech. All told seventy million residents, according to Northwestern Now, have lost access to local print newspapers. It has been blamed for everything from voter participation declines to the rise in government corruption. “My vision for addressing the huge decline in local journalism involves hiring 87,000 new journalists for about 1,300 news organizations with more than $10 billion in funding,” Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, Jr. writes. “Such a massive investment in local news isn’t going to happen next week and probably not next year, either.” The motto of the WashPost is, coincidentally, Democracy Dies in Darkness.
— The Psychological impact of consuming true crime (WIRED)
— Jared Kushner's memoir hit best-seller list mere days after Trump PAC spent $131K on books: report (RAW STORY)
— Why Are the Murdochs Thinking About Remerging Their Empire? (THR)