THE FRENCH PRESS

Why the Atlanta Massacre Triggered a Conversation About Purity Culture

The problem with purity culture is not Christianity. The problem is that its extremes are not Christian at all. 

David French Mar 21

(Photo by VIRGINIE KIPPELEN/AFP via Getty Images)

It always happens. Every time there is a mass shooting—often before we even know the number and identity of victims—there’s a desperate and immediate quest to know who was the shooter and what were his motives. Part of this is understandable, human, and necessary. When innocent women and men are gunned down in cold blood something in our spirits cries out, “Why?”

But another part of this quest for an immediate explanation is toxic and destructive. Every single mass shooter (and, sadly, there are many of them) becomes an immediate weapon in the culture war. Did the shooter wear the red jersey or the blue jersey? Does he fit or defy an existing narrative? 

Soon enough, the partisan argument drowns out the answer to the necessary question. We still need to know the reasons each shooter kills—no matter whose partisan or religious ox is gored. 

And that brings me to the Atlanta shooter (I will not use his name). Last week a young man walked into three metro Atlanta massage parlors and killed eight people, including six Asian women. Why did he do it? According to police, the shooter said he suffered from “sex addiction” and shot the women because “they were a temptation for him he wanted to eliminate.”

Does that mean there was no racial component to the killing? Well, no. For one thing, we don’t automatically take a killer’s word as the final explanation for his motives. For another thing, his actions provide their own testimony. The identity of his victims is plain to see. Moreover, there are disturbing cultural patterns that sexualize and exploit Asian women. There is much we still don’t know. At the very least we can and should mourn with our Asian American brothers and sisters and understand (and share!) their heightened concerns.

In the days following the shooting, however, the evidence of the shooter’s sexual confusion and dysfunction continued to mount. And so it’s important to focus on what we do know, on where the evidence is leading us now. The shooter is a Christian young man, baptized in a local Baptist church. He struggled so deeply with sexual sin that he was a patient at a local Evangelical treatment facility, called HopeQuest. He reportedly told a former roommate at a different recovery center that his “very salvation was at stake” if he couldn’t overcome his sexual sin.

And with these revelations, suddenly the Christian part of the internet broke out into a debate about Evangelical purity culture. The shooter’s stated beliefs and deadly actions represented a hyper-violent and extreme manifestation of a toxic theology that long corrupted a slice of Evangelical Christianity. Those same beliefs and actions brought an immense amount of pain bubbling to the surface of the Christian conversation. Soon enough the conversation burst into mainstream media and splashed across the virtual pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

But first, let’s define our terms. “Purity culture” is not a synonym for traditional Christian teachings about sexual morality—specifically the belief that sex is reserved for a marriage between a man and a woman. No, “purity culture” refers to the elaborate set of extra-biblical rituals and teachings that became popular in the 1990s and were designed to build safeguards and “strongholds” of sexual purity in Christian communities. 

The Gospel Coalition’s Joe Carter has written an excellent FAQ about purity culture, and he identifies a number of common characteristics, including specific “purity pledges” that young men and women would take, father-daughter “purity balls” where dads would often given their daughters “purity rings” to symbolize their commitment to chastity, and strict “courtship” relationships that would often feature parent-supervised meetings in lieu of dates and written “purity contracts” prohibiting physical contact.

All of this was distinctly different from what one might call normal or conventional Christian sexual teaching. I’ll give you some examples, from my own Evangelical upbringing. 

As many readers know, I grew up in the Church of Christ, and while my church was more fundamentalist than most, our teaching about sex was mainstream. It represented down-the-line Christian orthodoxy, but it was stripped of the bells and whistles of the purity movement. Our youth group talked about sex a lot (we were teenagers, after all), but there were no rituals. There were no rings. We’d never heard of “courtship.” We weren’t perfect, but we tried to do the right thing.

Fast-forward four years. My college girlfriend was devoted to purity culture, and when she tried to bring me into the fold, I felt like I’d entered a parallel Christian dimension. We both agreed on the top-line moral questions, but she believed so much more.

We didn’t date. We “courted.” And one condition of the courtship was that I attend a week’s worth of “seminars” held by Bill Gothard, then the head of the Institute in Basic Life Principles. At the time Gothard was a powerful Christian celebrity. His seminars could pack arenas, and hundreds of thousands of Christian families hung on his every word. 

His words, however, appalled me. Premarital sexual sin was viewed as defining, status-changing rebellion. You could be forgiven, but if you were no longer a virgin, your life, your wedding, and your marriage would be diminished as a result. You would walk down the aisle fundamentally tarnished, having lost something you could never get back. 

Purity was such a special virtue that God would reward purity with increased beauty, creating a “Godly countenance.” But that beauty must be concealed. Women bore a particular burden to protect “visual” men from temptation. Thus, modesty rules were strict. For example Gothard materials condemned even remarkably modest clothing if it contained what he called an “eye trap.” Here’s an example, posted by a former Gothard student:

(Gothard was later forced out of his ministry after facing dozens of allegations of sexual misconduct.)

By the late 1990s, the purity movement was spreading like wildfire. Josh Harris’s book I Kissed Dating Goodbye sold more than a million copies, and it urged Christian young people to abandon dating entirely. Movements or ministries like “True Love Waits” or the “Silver Ring Thing” elevated purity pledges and placed great emphasis on teenage purity. 

(Harris wrote his book when he was only 21. He has since repudiated the book, separated from his wife, and renounced his Christian faith.)

While some purity teaching was both orthodox and beneficial, other teaching kept lurching towards the same extremes. Time and again purity acolytes repeated the same themes. Sexual sin is a defining sin. Women bore a special burden to protect young men from lust and (later) satisfy their husband’s desires. 

In one particularly pernicious ritual, youth pastors and summer camps would show Christian teenagers two pennies (or other coins), one brand new and others that had been in circulation. The brand new penny was “pure.” The dirty pennies were “handled,” and the more they were “handled,” the dirtier they became.  

At the same time, some purity acolytes taught what the writer Katelyn Beaty has critiqued as a form of “sexual prosperity gospel.” Purity now would mean great sex later. It was God’s reward for your youthful obedience. Chastity was the pathway to sexual satisfaction.

It’s important to emphasize how much the extreme teachings were contrary to the Gospel. And by “contrary to the Gospel” I don’t mean that the orthodox sexual ethic is contrary to God’s plan or that sexual sin can’t be very serious indeed. Instead, I’m referring to the perverted theology of the abusive purity movement.

Are Christians defined forever by their sin? No. They are not “dirty.” They are white as snow:

Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:

though your sins are like scarlet,

    they shall be as white as snow;

though they are red like crimson,

    they shall become like wool.

Do women pollute men’s hearts with their beauty? Is the sight of women the source of male sin? No. Evil comes from within: 

For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.

Denying these eternal truths did and does tremendous damage to young hearts and minds. Singling out sexual sin as particularly pernicious and life-defining leads to fear and panic when people do stumble and fall. Perversely enough, it can even enable sinful conduct by leading people to feel hopeless when or if they do fail. “I’m ruined anyway. What’s the point of further restraint?”

Placing responsibility for male purity on women harms women. It creates an impossible burden. You cannot oppress women enough to protect men from themselves. You can ban porn, ban explicit TV and movies of all types, put women in long dresses, prohibit makeup, and require courtship contracts, and you still will not solve the problem of sin.

In fact, placing such burdens on women does not make the church more Christian. It instead connects the church to millennia of oppressive practices across the world and across faiths that have put women in a position of covered bondage all for the sake of avoiding the lustful male gaze. 

I saw the costs of an abusive purity culture with my own eyes. During the late 1990s, my wife and I served as volunteer youth directors in our church youth group. The youth pastor had just become a purity acolyte. Over our objection he prohibited dating. He condemned most forms of physical contact before marriage. Soon enough, I found myself consoling 17 year-olds who believed they’d already harmed their future marriage merely because they kissed their prom date. 

(Shortly after he initiated the dating ban, the youth pastor resigned after being caught engaging in inappropriate sexual activity online.)

When the youth pastor left in scandal, I became interim youth pastor, and we reversed course. We held to Christian orthodoxy but we rejected the idolization of purity. Sin does not define the Christian. Christ does. 

And this brings us back to Atlanta. When many Christian women (and women who’d left the church) heard the killer’s motive, they thought, “That’s an extreme version of an idea that I was taught for years—that men need to protect themselves from women, that they need to protect themselves from me.” 

At its most benign, purity culture put unnecessary burdens on young men and (especially) young women. In its more harmful manifestations, however, it has enabled abuse, and at the extreme edge the male demand that women save them from their own sin can lead to murderous rage. 

As this conversation unfolds, it’s important to keep two things in mind. First, the purity culture I’m describing never fully captured the church. Millions of people have thankfully lived their entire Christian lives free from the extremes I’ve described above. 

Second, however, it’s absolutely vital that Christians do not leave the task of confronting extremes to a secular world and media that is often hostile to (or doesn’t understand) Christian orthodoxy itself. The secular critique is typically all confrontation, no redemption. 

The Christian response, however, requires both confrontation and redemption. It recognizes that Christ holds the answer when the church fails. As I’ve written before when addressing the failures and faults of the purity movement, through Christ even stories of past pain and suffering can be redeemed and transformed into instruments of grace and mercy. 

Shortly after we received the first reports about the Atlanta killer’s motives, my friend and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Karen Swallow Prior tweeted two insightful words, “Culture cultivates.” A culture that defines a person by their sexual sin cultivates misery. When it places women in a position of guarding a man’s heart, it cultivates abuse. And sometimes, when a man’s heart is particularly dark, it can even cultivate murder.

The problem with purity culture is not Christianity. The problem with purity culture is that its extremes are not Christian at all. 

YEMEN WAR

Biden’s problem in Yemen: The Houthis are winning

MARCH 21, 2021
Written by
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen and Giorgio Cafiero

The Houthi rebels currently feel emboldened in Yemen’s war. The Iran-aligned movement believes that it is winning this gruesome conflict. This belief is well-founded. Ansar Allah (the dominant Houthi militia) controls the land where roughly 80 percent of Yemen’s population lives. Other factors contributing to Houthi confidence are the shift in Washington’s Yemen foreign policy with new leadership in the White House, and the continuation of Ansar Allah’s strikes against Saudi Arabia, recently exemplified by the Ras Tanura attacks of March 7 that targeted one of the largest oil shipping ports in the world. Rather than laying down their arms and agreeing to what U.S. special envoy to Yemen Tim Lenderking called a “sound” ceasefire plan, the Houthis have decided instead to continue their armed struggle to capture the hydrocarbon-rich Marib province.

Why stop a war you’re winning?

A major dilemma for the Biden administration is how to deal with the Houthis’ resolve to continue fighting. Because the Houthis are currently on the offensive, it will be extremely difficult for the U.S. leadership to figure out how to incentivize them to lay down their arms and trust a peace process that will require them to make concessions to their domestic, regional, and international adversaries. Much of the difficulty for Biden’s team stems from the fact that the U.S. has basically zero direct influence over the Houthis. By virtue of Washington’s support for Saudi Arabia in the war, the Houthi rebels understandably see the U.S. as an enemy. As soon as the Washington-backed Saudi campaign — Operation Decisive Storm — began in 2015, the Houthis began eyeing deeper relationships with Iran, China, and Russia in an effort to counter-balance Riyadh’s support from Western and other Arab governments.

Inspired by and aligned with Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis have gained an immense amount of power. The group will probably never have the strength to control all of Yemen, and the fluid nature of the war suggests that some of their gains could possibly be reversed if the conflict continues. However, the extent to which the Houthis control Yemen today should give all policymakers reason to discount the possibility of Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s weak government defeating Ansar Allah militarily. “One thing is abundantly clear: The Houthis will not succumb to pressure,” wrote the Brookings Intelligence Project’s Bruce Riedel. “Almost six years of Saudi bombing, blockade, and humanitarian catastrophe have not moved the rebels.”

Marib first, negotiations later

Indeed, the Saudi bombing campaign’s greatest achievements have been negative. It has built up extreme vitriol and worsened tribal and sectarian divisions in Yemen, which makes it far harder for sufficient or even minimal levels of trust to form among the warring parties. Ansar Allah is concerned that disarming without sufficient guarantees for protection of the Houthis would be too risky. Ultimately, the Houthis justifiably fear being attacked by their Yemeni and Saudi enemies after they have been defanged through peace negotiations. Within this context, Houthi fighters have been pressing on with their offensive on Marib and their increasingly sophisticated rocket and drone attacks against Saudi targets. As the rebels see it, both serve to increase Houthi leverage prior to roundtable talks.

There is a certain short-term logic to this strategy. If serious negotiations on peace begin after a Houthi takeover of Marib, Ansar Allah would be in a far stronger position to dictate terms. Strategically located east of Yemen’s Houthi-controlled capital, Sana’a, Marib hosts much of Yemen’s oil and gas resources and serves as the Hadi government’s last northern stronghold. Described by experts as the “beacon of relative stability” that was a “haven in the middle of a war”, Marib is now a major hotspot where both the Houthis and their adversaries have high stakes. If the Houthis could take control of this city, Ansar Allah would feel all the more emboldened, especially given how such a change on the ground would inevitably add to the Hadi government’s sense of weakness and probably greater pressure to agree to terms for peace that are favorable to the Houthis.

On the other hand, Ansar Allah is taking significant risks in its push to capture more land prior to negotiations. The Houthis’ aggression in their quest to conquer Marib may unite the previously divided anti-Houthi forces against them. It also might make the Biden administration less open to engaging in dialogue with a group clearly committed to an escalation, rather than a reduction, of the conflict.

Bringing the Houthis to the table

In line with Biden’s expressed commitment to resolving the Yemen war diplomatically, how could Washington give Ansar Allah reason to see a ceasefire as a better path than continued warfare? To begin, the U.S. could demonstrate goodwill by convincing Saudi Arabia to end the blockade of Yemen, including the airport in Sana’a and the port at Hodeida, both under Houthi control. This siege has had a minimal effect on the Houthis’ ability to fight, but has been directly responsible for the deaths of countless Yemenis. Such a step would signal the Biden administration’s commitment to concrete steps aimed at helping to wind down this conflict and address unfolding humanitarian concerns. In the process, if the Saudis agree to lifting the blockade, the Houthis could, in turn, agree to halt all attacks on Saudi territory to address Riyadh’s legitimate security concerns.

Additionally, Washington should take advantage of all future opportunities to engage the Houthis in constructive dialogue in search of trust-building measures and achievable outcomes, generating momentum for eventual negotiation of a political settlement. The U.S. will most likely depend on other countries that can facilitate dialogue between Washington and the Iran-aligned rebels whom the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition has been fighting for six years. States uniquely qualified to play this role include Oman, Qatar, and possibly Russia — all of which have some history of engagement and dialogue with the Houthis. Muscat, Doha, and/or Moscow’s abilities to play bridging roles will be critical given the absence of trust between the United States and the Houthis.

Regardless of how the Biden administration approaches the Houthi movement, it is safe to say that the future of large areas of northern Yemen will remain under Houthi control, even after an end to the fighting with the Houthis which is but one of several zones of conflict in Yemen today. In terms of the country’s political landscape, there will be no return to past eras in Yemeni history. What comes after the dust settles will inevitably be a unique product of the past six years of civil war and human suffering. Any realistic foreign policy that Washington adopts in relation to Yemen must accept this, and certain other de facto realities, to engage with the war-ravaged country on pragmatic terms.

Looking ahead, it is safe to assume that Yemen will remain a deeply fractured country that needs far more international aid than it currently receives. However, there is no doubt that the continuation of the armed conflict is the main reason why outside groups are unable to provide the necessary help to the millions of Yemenis, who, in the words of UN World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley, are “knocking on the door of famine”. Ultimately, the Biden administration would be wise to back up its words about addressing humanitarian disasters in Yemen with concrete actions that prioritize the need to save lives above any other purpose. The only way that this can be done is through more engagement between Washington and the Houthis, and President Biden’s negotiating team must use these channels to slowly add to the scope and scale of negotiations.

This article has been republished with permission from the Gulf International Forum.
Written by
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen and Giorgio Cafiero

IRAN NORWUZ

Leader: US has trapped Saudis in quagmire of Yemeni War

Tehran, March 21, IRNA – Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said that "Khamenei stated that Saudi Arabia has not yet been able to force the people of Yemen to surrender after six years. He said that the US has trapped the Saudis in the quagmire of the Yemeni War."

According to the Supreme Leader's official website, Khamenei.ir, "On the first day of the Persian New Year 1400 AH, which has been named the year of “Production: Support and Removing Barriers,” Imam Khamenei - the Leader of the Islamic Revolution - delivered his annual speech in a live broadcast this evening. Imam Khamenei, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, said that after the passage of 6 years, Saudi Arabia has not yet been able to force the Yemenis to surrender. He said that the US has trapped the Saudis in the quagmire of the Yemeni War.

Addressing the Iranian nation in his New Year speech, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution stated, “The Saudis began the war against Yemen during the Obama administration. They did it with the Americans’ go-ahead. Actually, the Americans gave the Saudis permission and they helped them as well. They gave the Saudis abundant military equipment. Why? In order to force the people of Yemen into surrendering in the course of 15 days or one month after having dropped numerous bombs on them. Well, they were mistaken. They have not been able to do this over the past 6 years. The war on Yemen began on a day at this time of the year. Six years have passed since that day, but they have not been able to force the Yemenis to surrender. I ask the Americans, “The day when you gave the Saudis the go-ahead to enter into the war on Yemen, were you aware the Saudis would get stuck in such a difficult situation?”

Addressing the Americans, Imam Khamenei said, “You knew into what quagmire you were dragging the Saudis. At the present time, they can neither stay nor leave. The problem is difficult either way. They can neither stop the war nor continue it. Both ways are to their detriment. You Americans knew what a disaster you were creating for the Saudis. If you knew it and you did it anyway, how wretched are your allies because you treat them this way. And if you did not know it, then again how wretched are your allies for trusting you and for planning with you who are not familiar with regional issues.”

His Eminence went on to say, “Unfortunately, the Americans are mistaken about regional matters in general. They are making mistakes at the present time as well. Their cruel, unreasonable support of the Zionist regime is a mistake. Their occupying presence in Syria in extensive areas east of the Euphrates is definitely wrong, and so is their cooperation with the Saudi government in bombarding the oppressed people of Yemen.”

Imam Khamenei stressed that the US policies concerning Palestine are wrong, “The issue of Palestine will never be forgotten in the world of Islam. The Americans are happy to see that some pitiful governments have normalized relations with the Zionist regime. However, two or three such governments are insignificant, because the Islamic nation will never forget the issue of Palestine. The Americans should know this. The same is true concerning the issue of Yemen.”

Pointing to the failure of the maximum pressure policy adopted by the US, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution stated, “That previous fool had devised the maximum pressure policy in order to put Iran in a position of weakness. They wished to ultimately force Iran to sit at the negotiating table and to give in to their demands. Well, he [Trump] was kicked out and he left with such disgrace. Even his departure was not done in a good way. It was a disgrace for himself and his country.”

His Eminence also added, “Their maximum pressure policy has failed up until now, and it will continue to fail after this too. These new politicians will be kicked out too and be gone, but Islamic Iran will remain with increasing power and dignity.”

Referring to the JCPOA, he stated, “The country’s policy in dealing with the other parties in the JCPOA and the JCPOA itself has already been clearly announced. This policy should not be violated in any way. It is a policy that has already been announced and which has been adopted with everyone’s agreement. This policy is that the Americans should lift all sanctions. Then, we will verify that they have been lifted. If the sanctions have truly been lifted, we will return to our JCPOA commitments. This is our definite policy.”

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution added, “Some Americans even object to the current JCOPA. I have heard some Americans say the situation has changed since the JCPOA was signed in 1394 and 1395 AH. Therefore, the JCPOA should change as well. I too accept that today’s situation is different from what it was in the years 1394 and 1395. But it has changed to our advantage, not to the advantage of the Americans.”

Imam Khamenei stressed, “Iran has become much stronger now in comparison with the year 1394. It has been able to stand on its own feet and find confidence in itself. However, you have become increasingly disreputable since the year 1394. During this period of time, the administration that was in power disgraced your country with its statements, actions and behavior and finally with its departure. Economic problems have engulfed all parts of your country. Yes, things have changed, but to your disadvantage. So if the JCPOA is to change, it should change to the advantage of Iran, not them.”

At the end of his statements, His Eminence emphasized, “When we say that it is they who should lift the sanctions first, I have heard some politicians in the world respond, ‘What difference does it make? You say the US should act first, and the US says that you should take action first.’ The issue is not who should act first. The issue is that we trusted the Americans during the Obama administration and we honored our commitments in the JCPOA, but they did not honor their commitments. They only said on paper that the sanctions had been lifted.”

He also said that the production movement in the country should be continued and underlined that obstacles hindering production have to be removed.

Earlier yesterday, Ayatollah Khamenei, issued a message on the new Iranian year wherein he described 1399 as the year of the manifestation of the Iranian nation's capabilities both in face of COVID-19 and in confronting enemies' maximum pressure.

He chose the slogan “Production: support and the elimination of obstacles” for the year 1400.

In his today speech, Ayatollah Khamenei recalled that the beginning of the last century, 1300, was the beginning of Reza Khan's dictatorship who came to power with the UK Coup, and now the beginning of the new century in the year 1400 coincides with the upcoming elections, he underlined.

The year 1300 was the onset of Reza khan's dictatorship and the UK Coup was in fact carried out by Reza Khan, he noted. 
In fact, the rule was dependent, dictatorial, and was controlled by the UK in the country, he further noted. 

This year, entering the century 1400 should be named the year of elections, Ayatollah Khamenei said, adding that the current period of time shows that the Iranian system now is based on national self-confidence and self-reliance; that is the difference in this century.

Last year's slogan, "surge in production", was not completely realized, he stated, though some progress in important manufacturing areas were achieved if it is evaluated fairly.

There is a complete list proving the rise of the productions, he stated, noting that some areas including home appliances, car tires, aluminum, petrochemical, and steel experienced growth.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech was broadcast live on TV, his official website, and his official pages on social media. Due to protocols to stop the COVID-19 virus from spreading, he did not travel to Mashad for addressing the nation this year.

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'The light of hope': Japanese same-sex couple overjoyed by marriage ruling

By Akira Tomoshig

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© Reuters/AKIRA TOMOSHIGE Lesbian couple Jenny and Narumi in Tokyo

TOKYO (Reuters) - Jenny and Narumi wept for happiness last week when a Japanese court ruled that barring same-sex marriages was unconstitutional, a decision that allowed them to move a step closer to a legal marriage and starting a family.

© Reuters/AKIRA TOMOSHIGE Lesbian couple Jenny and Narumi in Tokyo

The ruling by the Sapporo district court, the first in Japan on the legality of same-sex marriages, was a major symbolic victory in Japan, the only country in the Group of Seven major nations to not fully recognise same-sex partnerships.

© Reuters/AKIRA TOMOSHIGE Lesbian couple Jenny and Narumi in Tokyo

For Jenny and Narumi, who plan on a life together and have held a non-legally binding marriage ceremony, it was much more personal.

"I felt light, the light of hope," said Narumi, 27. Both she and Jenny declined to give their last names to Reuters due to Japan's still-conservative views on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) couples.

"It was a soft hope that perhaps soon, I don't know when, I might be able to marry Jenny in Japan."

It was love at first sight for Jenny, 28, when she met Narumi in January 2020 via a dating app.

Their romance developed quickly, and by August they were living together and had taken out a partnership certificate, which helps with renting apartments and hospital visits but doesn't provide legal guarantees such as inheritance rights or custody of a partner's children.

"We're really happy," said Jenny, who is half-American and half-Japanese. "But if we could get legally married, for example, we could become parents."

"As it is, the child would be legally registered as having only one of us as its parent."

The two have discussed moving to the United States if nothing changes in Japan, since Jenny is a U.S. citizen.

Last week's ruling was on one of five similar ongoing cases in Japan. The ruling could set a precedent that influences other cases, but for same-sex marriage to be allowed, a new law needs to be put in place, which is likely to take some time.

© Reuters/AKIRA TOMOSHIGE Lesbian couple Jenny and Narumi in Tokyo

Public thinking is changing, though. A weekend opinion poll by the Asahi Shimbun found 65% of respondents supported the ruling.

Both women said a big part of their joy was a sense the voices of LGBT Japanese residents had finally been heard in high places.

© Reuters/AKIRA TOMOSHIGE Lesbian couple Jenny and Narumi in Tokyo

"I felt something long suppressed within myself come bursting out, that we'd finally been recognised," Narumi said.

Jenny said she realises being able to marry legally could take some time, but she is holding onto her dreams.

"If we could have the same legal guarantees as everyone else, I'd like to have children and live with Naru-chan," she said, using an affectionate nickname.

"I'd like to live in a house full of children, dogs and cats, a warm place full of laughter."

(Writing by Elaine Lies; Editing by Karishma Singh)

A transgender Islamic school in Pakistan breaks barriers

By Asif Shahzad© Reuters/STRINGER Rani Khan looks at one of her students during a tailoring lesson in Islamabad

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A long white shawl on her head, Rani Khan gives daily Koran lessons at Pakistan's first transgender-only madrasa, or Islamic religious school, which she set up herself using her life savings.

The madrasa is an important milestone for the LGBTQ community in the overwhelmingly fundamental Muslim country, where transgender people face ostracism, even though there is no official restriction on them attending religious schools or praying at mosques.

© Reuters/STRINGER A group of transgender women learn the Koran at Pakistan's first transgender only madrassah or a religious school, in Islamabad

"Most families do not accept transgender people. They throw them out of their homes. Transgender people turn to wrongdoing," Khan, 34, said, as other transgender people, their heads similarly covered, swayed back and forth behind her, reciting Koran verses.

© Reuters/STRINGER Rani Khan prays with one of her students in Islamabad

"At one time, I was also one of them."

Holding back tears, Khan recalled how she was disowned by her family at 13 and forced into begging

© Reuters/STRINGER A group of transgender women learn the Koran at Pakistan's first transgender only madrassah or a religious school in Islamabad

At 17, she joined a transgender group, dancing at weddings and other functions, but quit it to connect with her religion after a dream in which a deceased transgender friend and fellow dancer pleaded with her to do something for the community.

© Reuters/STRINGER Rani Khan buys vegetables at a market in Islamabad

Khan studied the Koran at home, and attended religious schools, before opening the two-room madrasa in October.

"I'm teaching the Koran to please God, to make my life here and in the hereafter," Khan said, explaining how the madrasa offered a place for transgender people to worship, learn about Islam and repent for past actions.

She says the school has not received aid from the government, although some officials promised to help students find jobs.

Along with some donations, Khan is teaching her students how to sew and embroider, in hopes of raising funds for the school by selling clothing.

Pakistan's parliament recognised the third gender in 2018, giving such individuals fundamental rights such as the ability to vote and choose their gender on official documents.

Nonetheless, the transgender remain on the margins in the country, and often have to resort to begging, dancing and prostitution to make a living.

The madrasa could help trans people assimilate into mainstream society, Islamabad Deputy Commissioner Hamza Shafqaat told Reuters.

"I'm hopeful that if you replicate this model in other cities, things will improve," he said.

A religious school for transgender people has opened in Dhaka, the capital of nearby Bangladesh, and last year a Christian transgender group started its own church in Pakistan's bustling southern port city of Karachi.

Pakistan's 2017 census recorded about 10,000 transgender people, though trans rights groups say the number could now be well over 300,000 in the country of 220 million.

"It gives my heart peace when I read the Koran," said one madrasa student, Simran Khan, who is also eager to learn life skills.

"It is much better than a life full of insults," the 19-year-old added.

(Reporting and writing by Asif Shahzad; Editing by Gibran Peshimam and Karishma Singh)

Nawal El Saadawi, trailblazing Egyptian writer, dies aged 89

Egypt’s trailblazing writer Nawal El Saadawi died MARCH 22 at the age of 89, after a lifetime spent fighting for women’s rights and equality.

Clea Skopeliti and agencies 5 days ago

© Photograph: David Degner/Getty Images El Saadawi established and led the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, as well as co-founding the Arab Association for Human Rights.


The feminist author of more than 55 books first spotlighted the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) with The Hidden Face of Eve in 1980. A trained doctor, El Saadawi also campaigned against women wearing the veil, polygamy and inequality in Islamic inheritance rights between men and women.

She died in a Cairo hospital after a long battle against illness.

Born in October 1931 in a village in the Nile delta, north of Cairo, El Saadawi studied medicine at Cairo University and New York’s Columbia University. The novelist, who wrote regularly for Egyptian newspapers, also worked as a psychiatrist and university lecturer.

One of the leading feminists of her generation, El Saadawi’s 1972 book Women and Sex unleashed a backlash of criticism and condemnation from Egypt’s political and religious establishment, resulting in the activist losing her job at the health ministry.

She was jailed for two months in 1981 by the late president Anwar Sadat during a wide political crackdown in which several intellectuals were detained. While imprisoned, El Saadawi wrote about her experience in Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, writing on a roll of toilet paper using an eyebrow pencil smuggled in by a fellow prisoner.

The writer became a target of Islamist militants, with her name on death lists that included Egyptian Nobel literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who in 1994 was stabbed in an attempt on his life.

“This refusal to criticise religion … This is not liberalism. This is censorship,” she said.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2009, she said: “I regret none of my 47 books. If I started my life again I would write the same books. They are all very relevant even today: the issues of gender, class, colonialism (although of course that was British and is now American), female genital mutilation, male genital mutilation, capitalism, sexual rape and economic rape.”

After undergoing female genital mutilation at the age of six, and seeing the damage it could do during her work as a village doctor, she campaigned against the practice.

“Since I was a child that deep wound left in my body has never healed,” she wrote in an autobiography.

El Saadawi also established and led the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, as well as co-founding the Arab Association for Human Rights.

El Saadawi moved to North Carolina’s Duke University in 1993 due to death threats. After returning to Egypt, she ran for president in 2005 but abandoned her campaign after accusing security forces of not allowing her to hold rallies.

In 2007, she was condemned by Egypt’s highest Sunni Muslim authority, Al-Azhar, for her play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting – in which God is questioned by Jewish, Muslim and Christian prophets and finally quits.

Her views resulted in her facing several legal challenges, including allegations of apostasy from Islamists.

Despite challenges from authorities, the writer said in 2010 that she was motivated to keep going by the daily letters she received from people who say their lives have been changed by her writing. “A young man came to me in Cairo with his new bride. He said, I want to introduce my wife to you and thank you. Your books have made me a better man. Because of them I wanted to marry not a slave, but a free woman.”

In 2005, El Saadawi was awarded the Inana International Prize in Belgium, a year after she received the North-South prize from the Council of Europe. In 2020, Time Magazine named her on their 100 Women of the Year list.

Egypt’s culture minister, Inas Abdel-Dayem, mourned El Saadawi’s passing, saying her writings had given rise to a great intellectual movement.

El Saadawi married three times, and is survived by a daughter and a son.

 CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M CRYPTOCURRENCY

Binance Suffers From $2.4 Million TurtleDex Exit Heist

CryptocurrencyMar 21, 2021 

• Binance Smart Chain project TurtleDex pulls the rug on its users and steals $2.4 million.
• 
  
• TurtleDex drained the liquidity funds on Ape Swap and Pancake Swap and turned their pot to ETH

TurtleDex, a decentralized finance (DeFi) file storage on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), is believed to have pulled an exit scam yesterday. As a result, more than $2.4 million fund was drained from trading pools on major BSC DeFi exchanges like Ape Swap and Pancake Swap.

TurtleDex was launched on March 15, promoting itself as a DeFi storage platform to help users save data and files securely online. Its pre-sale that day increased 9000 BNB tokens, or about $2.4 million, in just two hours.

TurtleDex drained the liquidity funds on Ape Swap and Pancake Swap and turned their pot to ETH. Furthermore, the ETH digital asset was transferred to Binance wallets, according to Etherscan.

The alleged heist was first to be flagged up by Twitter user @DefiStalker. Also Jetfuel.Finance, a yield farming platform that tied-up with TurtleDex, showed its shock and confusion at the rug pull on Twitter.

All eyes are on Binance to lessen the loss to investors’ pockets. So far, there has been no word, but a tweet from company head, CZ, earlier this week explains that “We actually help with a few rugs pulls recently too.” Moreover, the Binance Smart Chain is a semi-closed ecosystem. It means that Binance leads the various entry and exit points to the Smart Chain. Consequently, this guarantees hard to get funds off the Smart Chain without passing under the monitoring of Binance’s central control.

This article first published on coinquora.com

Continue reading on CoinQuora

HISTORY

Coverage of Bay Area Anti-Asian Violence Is Missing a Key Element

Understanding the complex historical interplay between Black and Asian communities can help us avoid simplistic narratives today.

BY REBECCA ONION

MARCH 19, 2021

San Francisco police officers on a foot patrol in Chinatown on Thursday. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images


In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed announced this week that the city’s police would patrol predominantly Asian neighborhoods more frequently, following the killings of eight people at spas in Atlanta. Tuesday’s events in Georgia have ratcheted up anxieties in the Asian American communities in the Bay Area, following a full year of crimes against community members, including a string of assaults of Asian American elders—most recently, septuagenarian Pak Ho, who was robbed and killed near Lake Merritt last week.

Some (not all) of the video evidence of anti-Asian attacks in the Bay Area has featured Black perpetrators. I spoke with Claire Jean Kim, a professor of political science and Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine, who has previously written a book about Black-Korean community relations in New York City and is finishing up a new one: Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World. I asked Kim to give some historical context for the Bay Area attacks and to critique how the media has been doing in covering the racial dimensions of these crimes.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rebecca Onion: When it comes to understanding the history of the overlap or interplay between Black and Asian American communities in the Bay Area, what are the important events people should know about?

Claire Jean Kim: Well, of course, it’s good to remember that both communities are diverse—especially Asian American communities in San Francisco, that consist of a lot of national origin groups, some people who’ve been there for generations and some who are recent immigrants.

If we go back to the late 1800s, we see large numbers of Chinese immigrants coming to San Francisco. That was the original Chinatown. Then, following the exclusion of the Chinese in 1882, there were large numbers of Japanese immigrants coming into San Francisco. Both groups are really so concentrated in San Francisco, and in California, that the origins of the Asian American story are in San Francisco.

Asian American immigrants were subjected to various kinds of persecution, a lot of which are recorded in the constitutional law books you read in law school, because some things that white San Franciscans did to persecute the Chinese—and the Japanese immigrants after them—were very creative! The groups were often segregated—the Chinese kept in Chinatown, Japanese immigrants in what became Little Tokyo—and kept out of white neighborhoods, often by racial covenants that also kept out Black people.

A turning point was during World War II. Japanese Americans on the West Coast were sent to internment camps. And for the first time, San Francisco acquired a larger Black population—until World War II, the Black population in San Francisco was small, but during the war, because of the defense industries and the shipyards, there was enough work to draw Black workers from across other areas of the country, so the Black population really swelled.


At that point something important happened, which is that they started doing public housing in San Francisco, and they segregated Black people in particular public housing projects, away from others. At the same time, Asian Americans—I’ll focus on Chinese and Japanese Americans—started to see the barriers they used to face in moving into white neighborhoods start to fall. Part of this was the Cold War, since the United States was trying to present itself on the world stage, in its competition with the Soviet Union, as having “solved” its race problem, and one way to do that was to say, Oh, we’re letting Asian Americans into white neighborhoods. In San Francisco, examples might be the Richmond District and the Sunset District, which used to be all white and now have a plurality or maybe even a majority Asian American population.

So there was a differentiation in treatment, in terms of residential segregation, which of course leads to differentiation in housing value and intergenerational wealth and educational equality. And Asian Americans began to see better occupational mobility. They were let into more jobs that used to be closed off to them, and remained closed to Black people.

The Bay Area was a hot spot for student activism and Black Power activism in the ’60s and ’70s. How did the area’s Asian American populations react, or participate, in those movements?

There was an Asian American movement that emerged in the late ’60s, and that was the first time people started using the term Asian American. A whole pan-ethnic racial identity emerged as a result of this movement.

The activists were very inspired by two things: the Vietnam War—they understood imperialism in Asia in a different way than other Americans who were talking about it. And they were inspired by the Black Power movement. A lot of Americans don’t know it, but many Asian American activist groups at the time were actually revolutionary socialist groups; some of them modeled themselves directly after the Black Panthers. The Red Guard, which started out in San Francisco’s Chinatown, were sort of directly nurtured or mentored into being by the Black Panther Party, and had a 10-point platform that was almost the same as the Black Panthers’. Some things were different, but if you look at the two documents side by side, you really start to see how much influence the Black Panthers had on the Asian American movement.

An event to remember is the Third World Liberation Front strike, at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley. At both places, activists of different communities of color pushed for the foundation of ethnic studies at the schools, and there were really intense protests with the police using tear gas and violence and the students risking a lot, but they did eventually win!

There were always tensions when Asian Americans worked in solidarity, in coalitions with other groups of color, because there was a sort of an elephant in the room, which was this recognized fact that Asian Americans were sort of doing better in American society than the other groups. More occupational mobility, more people in the middle class.

What were the legacies of that activism, in the Bay Area?

One aftereffect of that activism is the founding of the field of Asian American studies. I think it also created a lot of race consciousness in a lot of Asian Americans who went on to other fields like law and politics and took some of the movement ideals along with them. If you look at Asian American advocacy groups like Asian Americans Advancing Justice or Asian Law Caucus, which is in the Bay Area, these groups were founded by people who came out of the movement.

But when you look at the ’70s and ’80s, you start seeing the growth of mass incarceration, which of course disproportionately affects Black Americans. It’s not that it doesn’t affect Asian Americans or white people, but to a lesser degree. So that’s another factor here.

And in California, specifically, I’ve been looking in my work at the way affirmative action debates in the 1990s affected these relationships. I’ve been writing about a lawsuit called Brian Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District, from 1994, brought by a number of Chinese American plaintiffs. This case was a precursor to the Harvard affirmative action case being reviewed by the Supreme Court now [Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College].

The Brian Ho case involved Lowell High School, which is a public magnet high school—extremely prestigious and hard to get into, sent a lot of students to Ivy League schools. The argument was that Lowell High was discriminating against Asian Americans, because they had a formula they applied to try to have a certain number of students from different race or ethnic groups, and it ended up meaning that Chinese American students had to have higher admissions scores because so many applied. And Chinese American parents brought the lawsuit and settled with the school district. They removed that differential admission score system, and Black and Latinx enrollment in Lowell plummeted.

I want to point out, because this is important, that actually the differential score system to get into Lowell was benefiting other groups of Asian Americans that weren’t that well represented. But the Chinese Americans who brought the suit called their group “the Asian American Legal Foundation,” because they wanted to make it look like they were fighting for all Asian Americans. Chinese American groups could be politically conservative; they might lean Republican, and they generally were not superrich, but middle-class, upper-middle-class, lawyers, accountants, people like that. The same kinds of groups now backing the suit against Harvard.

Your first book was about Black-Korean conflict in New York City. If you were to make a comparison between the history of Asian American and Black community relations in the Bay Area versus other cities in the United States, what would that comparison look like?

One obvious difference is that the Asian American demographic is so much larger in the Bay Area. In San Francisco it’s 30 percent, or maybe even higher; a very large number of those people are Chinese American. So there’s a greater consciousness, greater political power, and a history of persecution. That history really shapes the viewpoint, not just of Chinese Americans in the Bay Area, but of Asian Americans everywhere. What happened in San Francisco to the Chinese, and in California to the Chinese and Japanese, is imprinted on people’s brains.

I wanted to ask, when you look at the media coverage of violence against Asian Americans, especially maybe when it looks like the perpetrator was Black, how do you think the media is doing, handling it? Especially with a string of violent events like these, where the perpetrators have been both white and Black, it seems like the media is fairly unequipped to analyze the racial dynamics involved.


I’ve talked to many reporters in recent weeks about the attacks on Asian Americans since COVID began. And it’s hard, because it’s not like there aren’t good journalists who mean well and are high-quality. But a lot of times, producing stories on quick news cycles, the media relies on accepted frameworks of thought, settled interpretations of things, to analyze events, and that’s true when it comes to race as much as anything else.

In this case, one of those settled ideas has to do with playing up Asian-Black conflicts. One of the perpetrators in these Bay Area attacks was caught on video, and was Black, and reporter after reporter was asking me—are Black people going after Asians? These were Asian American reporters I was talking with. And I kept asking them, What’s the evidence? Are there other videos? There was a rush to judgment about these cases all being about Black people going after Asians, and when you think about the tendency in American society to criminalize Black people, it’s a problem to reach for that frame and apply it before the evidence warrants it.

And if you use that frame, you make it an Asian-Black thing, you’re focusing on the two groups and taking attention away from the larger structures of power in which they’re embedded—not just racial structures, but also capitalism. Think about the relationship between Korean merchants buying a liquor store in Compton, and their Black customers. This is about capitalism, the way it creates divisions between groups and deems certain people disposable.

What we see in the United States are these periodic attacks on Asian Americans, always related to something else going on in the world. In this case it’s COVID. In the 1980s, it was U.S.-Japan trade relations. In the 1870s, it was a regional depression in the West and Southwest, and white workers turned against Chinese American workers. So there’s always been some kind of larger economic, political cause for these upsurges in anti-Asian violence. I think that’s different from what we see with anti-Black violence. Violence against Black people in this country is continuous, structural; violence against Asians is more periodic, contingent on events.

This is not to minimize what happens to Asian Americans! When you are harmed by an assailant because of anti-Asian racism, it doesn’t matter to you whether the violence was contingent or continuous or whatever. I’m not minimizing it. Clearly during COVID-19 something really alarming and troubling is happening.

But I think it’s important, when looking at violence against Asian Americans, not to lose that context. When Asian Americans understandably feel fear and anger and sorrow about these attacks on our own communities, I think we also have to ask ourselves, Are we fighting for Black lives as hard as we’re fighting for our own? It’s in moments like this that it’s really difficult to remember, because we’re afraid and upset. But to remember that we are advantaged, compared to Black people, is what it takes to be a good ally—even though it can be very hard, at times like these. But I think these are the moments when it’s the most important to do it.

RACISM IN AMERICA

Even if the anti-Asian American violence in the US is not a hate crime, there is racism behind it

Race can play a role in violence and prejudice, even if the offender does not clearly express a racist intent.

Pawan Dhingra, The Conversation
Mar 22, 2021 · 

People gather at a rally to demand safety and protection of Asian communities in the aftermath of the March 16 shootings in Atlanta. | Oliver Douliery / AFP


In the United States, over the past year, attacks on Asian Americans have increased more than 150% over the previous year, including the March 16 murders of eight people, including six Asian American women, in Atlanta.

Some of these attacks may be classified as hate crimes. But whether they meet that legal definition or not, they all fit a long history of viewing Asian Americans in particular ways that make discrimination and violence against them more likely.

I have researched and taught on Asian America for 20 years, including on the pernicious effects of stereotypes and attacks on individuals. Race can play a role in violence and prejudice, even if the offender does not clearly express a racist intent.

Much remains unknown about the attacks in Atlanta, but the man charged with the murders has said he did not have a racial prejudice against people of Asian descent. Rather, he has claimed he has a sexual addiction. But that statement indicates that he assumed these women were prostitutes, whether that is true or not.

This assumption, and the resulting violence, is just one of many that Asian Americans have suffered through the years.

A police officer hands out information leaflets advising how to report on hate crimes, at a park in Chinatown, New York City, following the shootings in Atlanta.

History of prejudice

The presupposed connection between Asian women and sex dates back almost 150 years: In 1875, the US Congress passed the Page Act, which effectively barred Chinese women from immigrating, because it was impossible to tell if they were travelling “for lewd and immoral purposes,” including “for purposes of prostitution”. The assumption that all Chinese women were of questionable moral character placed the burden on the women themselves to somehow prove they were not prostitutes before being allowed to immigrate.


The United States military contributed to this conception of Asian women as hypersexualized. During the wars in the Philippines at the start of the 19th century, and during the mid-20th-century wars in Korea and Vietnam, servicemen took advantage of women who had turned to sex work in response to their lives being wrecked by war.

In the 1960s, the US government brokered a deal with Thailand to be a “rest and relaxation” center for military personnel fighting in Vietnam. That bolstered what became the foundations of Thailand’s modern-day sex tourism industry, which attracts men from the United States and Europe.

This association of Asian women with men’s sexual fantasies has permeated popular culture, such as a scene in the 1987 Stanley Kubrick movie Full Metal Jacket in which a Vietnamese woman entices two servicemen by saying, “Me love you long time,” and regular themes in the animated comedy Family Guy. This makes Asian women more desirable to sex traffickers, brought over to serve male desires in spas and massage parlours such as the ones attacked in Atlanta.

This history of the sexualization of Asian women, shaped by the US military and patriarchy, creates the backdrop to the Atlanta shootings. It helped create the conditions for the Asian spas and massage parlours to be there in the first place. It presents Asian American women as submissive, responsive agents of sexual temptation.

Race and gender inform what happened, and the public response to it, whether the alleged shooter articulates racist motives or not.
Perceptions matter

Other crimes against Asian Americans may also lack clear evidence of racial bias, but still echo anti-Asian American stereotypes.

For instance, many elderly Asian Americans have been shoved to the ground in recent weeks, and Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old man, died in one such incident in February in San Francisco.

The public defender representing the accused perpetrator in Ratanapakdee’s death denies that race motivated the crime. But that is different from saying race was not a factor at all.

Practically all Asian Americans, but elderly men in particular, are often viewed as nonaggressive, meek and unable or unwilling to fight back, in contrast to men of other races. They are easy targets.

Not always crime

Other anti-Asian American racism is not criminal at all, but still fits with the nation’s racist history. As Covid-19 spread across the US, Asian-owned restaurants and stores were the first to experience declining revenue, even though most of the earliest cases in the U.S. came from Europe.

There is a long history of suspecting Asian Americans of carrying disease into the US, which made it seem natural for people to avoid Asian American-owned businesses. US President Donald Trump’s repeated public declarations that the “Kung Flu” virus came from China reinforced those feelings.

This race-based and erroneous assumption has resulted in Asian Americans having among the highest unemployment rates in the nation, though they had among the lowest before the pandemic.

It defies logic to claim that race is not relevant in attacks on Asian Americans unless the perpetrator actively references it. Research has found that most Americans assume a person of Asian descent is foreign-born unless there is some aspect of their appearance that clearly marks them as American – such as being overweight.

Asian Americans of all types experience this perception of being “forever foreigners” in a wide range of ways. Regardless of whether some or all – or none – of these latest assaults on Asian Americans are proved to be hate crimes or not, race plays a historic role.

Pawan Dhingra is a Professor of Sociology and American Studies at Amherst College.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Ring-Wing Comedians Are Right-Wing Media
By Seth Simons | March 22, 2021  

Image is a screencap from Steven Crowder's You

This article was originally published on Humorism, a newsletter about labor, inequality, and extremism in comedy. Subscribe here to get posts like this in your inbox.

Last week Media Matters reported on a series of racist jokes Steven Crowder and his co-hosts made about Black farmers during a critique of the American Rescue Plan on his show Louder with Crowder. “I thought the last thing they would want to do is be farmers,” said Dave Landau, who recently joined the show from Compound Media, where he was Anthony Cumia’s sidekick. “Wasn’t that a big problem for hundreds of years?” YouTube removed the episode, telling The Verge it violated the platform’s Covid-19 misinformation policy. This incident came barely a week after Crowder earned a similar wave of condemnation for racist jokes about Meghan Markle.

Crowder, a stand-up comic turned Fox News contributor turned streamer, is part of an ecosystem of entertainers who make a living telling racist jokes on YouTube. He is a rare example of someone in this cohort widely recognized for what he is: a conservative pundit. These people are more commonly described as comedians, a classification that confers many privileges, namely the ability to make those racist jokes free of mainstream scrutiny. What I would like to propose today is that we start recognizing these comedians as part and parcel of the right-wing media apparatus poisoning American life.


This apparatus is vast and multifaceted. It encompasses traditional media like Fox News and the New York Post, digital publications like The Federalist and The Daily Caller, and multimedia platforms like The Daily Wire and Blaze Media, the latter of which is home to Crowder, Glenn Beck, and Dave Rubin. Elsewhere in the landscape you’ll find Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Tomi Lahren, Candace Owens, Jesse Kelly, and Charlie Kirk. They traffic in bigotry and fear under the guise of truth and reason, painting themselves as victims of persecution even as they commandeer rabid fan bases against their enemies. Their particular ideologies, audiences, and reach may vary (slightly) by person, but they all serve the same function: to uphold and enforce white supremacy.

A great many comedians use all these same tactics toward the same ends. They evade criticism because they are comedians, which is taken to mean they are not serious: not that they don’t believe their own words, but that their speech exists in a mystical realm of non-meaning where words have no power other than to evoke laughter. They’re not politicians, the logic goes. They’re not cable news pundits. Their audiences aren’t going out in the streets and committing crimes on their behalf. It doesn’t matter what they say; it doesn’t matter that people listen and agree. To critique them is to embark on the fool’s errand of taking unserious people seriously.


This attitude is difficult to reconcile with the fact that no conservative commentator is a serious person. Tucker Carlson’s ravings are no more grounded in reality than Steven Crowder’s or Tim Dillon’s. There is very little about the conservative movement writ large that can be described as serious, nor about the politicians leading it, who increasingly seem to view themselves as performersfirst and lawmakers second. The conservative media machine is so dangerous precisely because it’s pure fantasy. Its effect has been to detach millions of people from the real world and render them immune to reason. The few who launder their role in this project through artistic practice are just as dangerous as those who do it openly.

The unseriousness of their practice never seems to stop them from engaging in serious discourse anyhow. Last month Andrew Schulz, who in his debut Netflix special blamed the pandemic on China, argued in a lengthy podcast segment that China is seeking to overtake the U.S. as a world power, at which point it will suppress American culture. He said China has taken advantage of American greed to become a major manufacturing center for American companies, and that the Chinese government is buying up controlling interests in American companies so it can censor criticism of China. The U.S. was able to become such a world power, he continued, because it exported its popular culture to other countries, culture that celebrates the core American value of freedom. Chinese citizens don’t get to consume American media—barring the occasional censored export, like 10 or so movies each year edited by the Chinese government “to fit into the communist standards”—and as a result “they don’t know what freedom is, so they don’t know what they’re missing.” Whereas Trump took a tough stance on China, Biden and the Democrats are bending over to appease it because they know its era of dominance is fast approaching; they wish to enter that era on good terms. “I don’t have enough data to back up that claim,” Schulz concluded, “but it seems like that.” His Patreon currently brings in $94,800 per month.


This is a small sample of the bigotry Schulz peddles as a matter of course. In an episode earlier this month he again suggested China is to blame for the pandemic and mocked Jeremy Lin for “snitching” on teammates who called him “coronavirus.” In a January segment he argued that Biden nominated Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services so his administration could deflect all criticism of its health policy as transphobic. (Schulz didn’t seem to know Levine hasn’t been confirmed or that he had the position wrong, referring to her as “Health secretary.” He also appears to call her a transphobic slur early in the segment, although most of the word is censored so I can’t be certain.) These are political opinions. The man is commenting on politics. They all are: Nick DiPaolo, Tim Dillon, Legion of Skanks, Sam Tripoli, Yannis Pappas, Kurt Metzger, nearly everyone on Compound Media, the list goes on. Some are more prone than others to refract their political analyses through culture war bugbears, but their analyses are political all the same. The only thing differentiating them from your average Fox News contributor is that they’ll get very upset if you attach them in any way to the ideologies they openly hold. (In his Netflix special’s credits, Schulz thanked Federalist publisher Ben Domenech and libertarian pundit Matt Welch.)


Comedy is the art of calling things what they are. It may seem pedantic to classify a relatively small cohort of comedians as extensions of right-wing media, but we must see them clearly if we are to treat them properly. They are not truth-tellers nor rebels nor crusaders for free speech; they are liars, pawns, and crusaders for the ideologies contained in their speech, which they have always made freely. Their bigotry is not a matter of aesthetic taste, as their defenders are wont to insist, nor are their ideas worthy of debate. (Fascists are always challenging you to defeat them in battles of ideas, as if they have not already been defeated in numerous actual battles.) They are simply mouthpieces for the most powerful forces in our lives, a job so banal it almost circles back around to being funny that they think success makes them special.

It doesn’t. They’re not. They’re really terribly boring. It’s a huge drag to have to pay them any mind. But we cannot fight back the forces they represent without meeting them at every turn with contempt and scorn; without treating thosewhoplatform them and those who share their platforms as participants in an avowedly white supremacistproject; and without doing everything else in our power as comedy consumers or workers to toss the whole lot of them from the public square.


It’s unpleasant business, deplatforming bigots. The alternative is much worse.

Seth Simons is the writer of Humorism, a newsletter about labor, inequality, and extremism in the comedy industry. He’s on Twitter @sasimons.