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It was a rain-sodden Friday night at the end of another week of lockdown ennui and anxiety; what could be more soothing than pottering about, aperitif on the go, listening to some decent tunes? And hark! A brand new radio station to ring the changes, one promising not merely a schedule brimming with aural treats but one carefully curated to reflect the tastes, the sensibilities and the vitality of an entire generation.

Boom Radio, launched last week on Valentines Day, set its stall out in uncompromising fashion, with a poem, an Ode to Boomers that is part mild grievance (You are the original influencer, it insists, there when music was fearless and came from the heart, when live performances were more than an experience to film on your phone) and part rallying cry to the postwar babies who, it says, changed the world and are still running at full speed (Theres still too much to live/Too much to love). As I listened, adverts for fresh-fish deliveries and Dormeo mattresses punctuated a beguilingly odd mixture of numbers from post-Manfred Mann Paul Jones, Tom Petty and Jamie Cullum.

Friday nights host and, in Groundhog Day fashion, also Saturday mornings was Roger Twiggy Day, an alumnus of Radio Caroline and Manchesters Piccadilly Radio, more recently heard on the Costa Blancas Bay Radio, which explains why he was celebrating falling Covid infection rates not merely in the UK but also in Spain. He has a pleasantly random presenting style, flexible enough to take in the challenges of getting to grips with new technology, exhortations to cheeriness No gloom on Boom! and, somewhat startlingly, an expression of sadness at the recent death of US talk radio controversialist Rush Limbaugh.

But early-days output is often a little uneven, and Boom Radio has some heavyweight expertise behind it, not least in the shape of industry veterans Phil Riley, who launched the listener-magnet Heart FM and relaunched LBC, and David Lloyd, who has done his time at several radio stations and the UK Radio Authority, now part of Ofcom. They have identified the UKs 14 million boomers, noticed the money in their pockets, and realised that in the great identity-driven media land-grab, they are catnip to advertisers.

Alongside Day, theyve signed up DJs David Kid Jensen, David Diddy Hamilton and Nicky Horne. Esther Rantzen will chat to her daughter, Rebecca Wilcox; distinguished agony aunt Anna Raeburn will advise on listeners problems; Grahame Dene, who inherited Kenny Everetts breakfast show for Capital in the 1970s, will wake them up every morning.

Booms overwhelming message is one of empowerment, its mantra also the title of Rileys interview show, which today features Chris Tarrant that its audience is Still Busy Living. And it is not alone in understanding that, as platforms and technologies converge, audiences themselves are ripe for atomisation. Bubbles whatever defines them are how to maximise returns on investment.

Hence, of course, the emergence of Andrew Neils GB News, busy signing up a roster of presenters from Sky News and TalkRadio; hence the boom of TalkRadio itself, whose most voluble and contrarian presenters, from Julia Hartley-Brewer to Dan Wootton and the mask-ripping Mark Dolan, have created a very special niche for themselves during the pandemic by taking a position of so-called lockdown scepticism.

Age, though, is something else. Who are these boomers? I am listening to Boom Radio illegally, as it were; I was born four years after its official cut-off birth year of 1964 and must, I suppose, wait for a radio station dedicated entirely to me. But my partner himself a radio broadcaster, and music addict sneaks under the wire. I shout downstairs for him to come and listen to this new channel created for him, but he is too busy curating his own experience, playing his collection of singles by the reggae genius, U-Roy, who also died last week. What else is on his turntable at the moment, I ask? Fontaines DC and Fiona Apple, comes the answer.

And therein lies the issue. If you love music, you dont stop listening to it; you dont freeze it in time and, as much as you cherish and replay the songs of your youth indeed, your Big Youth you make room for the new.

Which is not to say that Boom Radio isnt on to something. Nostalgia is big business; but so too is the creation of identity silos, in which those who feel or, indeed, might be encouraged to feel that their needs are not catered to will be welcomed and made to feel at home.

In a broader context, covertly pitting the generations against one another has become a disquieting feature of our collective psyches problems. Greedy old people flouncing us out of Europe and millennials splurging their house deposits on flat whites and avocado toast are equally pernicious caricatures of disparate groups of people that foster mistrust and division.

The biggest problem with the culture wars? Theres so little culture in them. Reliant on a view of humans as unchanging, incurious and desperate to set up gated communities from which to defend their territory against all-comers, they ignore the opportunity for flexibility and renewal, for difference and diversity.

It would be unfair, of course, to project all this on to a pleasant enough radio station which, as I type, is belting out Barbra Streisand. Because, lets face it, young or old, we all love a bit of Barbra.

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Hello, boomers radio. How did you end up in the culture wars? - The Guardian

Traditional Tories and working-class converts agree on culture but little else

Feb 20th 2021

LONG BEFORE he or any of his readers had ever heard the term, Boris Johnson cast himself as the antithesis of all that is woke. His columns in the Daily Telegraph, the house journal of the Tory Party, took aim at assaults on common sense, real or imagined. If political correctness is not resisted, it will go on and on, becoming more and more irrational, he wrote. Even then, he had an eye on the culture war raging across the Atlantic. He praised the counter-revolutionaries opposing a ban on British fox-hunting, noting that their protest march was organised by an American who understands the weapons that must be used in the Kulturkampf.

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Mr Johnson has hardly changed his tune since becoming prime minister. He made clear his displeasure at the absurd form-filling initially required of volunteers helping with the rollout of the covid-19 vaccine and insisted last year that Rule, Britannia! be played at the Proms, an annual festival of music and pomp. This week, two more such sallies were enthusiastically trailed by his former employer as a major government escalation of the war on woke.

The first is an attempt by Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, to protect guest speakers at universities whose views cause offence. Mr Williamson plans to expand the scope of a legal duty to promote freedom of speech on campus to cover not just university authorities but also student unions, in the hope of preventing controversial talks being cancelled.

Such instances are rarea study at Kings College London found freedom of expression had been infringed at only six of about 15,000 events over five yearsbut attract considerable publicity. And there is more evidence that students and academics censor their own views for fear of adverse reaction from peers. Polling for Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think-tank, found only four in ten Leave-supporting students would be comfortable expressing their views about Brexit in class.

The second concerns the past. Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary, has reportedly called a meeting to urge museum and charity bigwigs to defend Britains culture and history. The National Trust, a charity that tends historic houses and gardens, caused a fuss by highlighting the colonial ties of its properties and their original owners; other bodies are mulling the removal of statues of figures such as slave-traders who are now considered villains of the empire. Mr Dowden wants the statues to stay, arguing that confident countries do not airbrush the history upon which they are founded.

Such worries may seem rather small during a pandemic that has closed the museums Mr Dowden is fretting about and cancelled even the least controversial university events. Nor do most voters care about cultural issues as much as vocal lobbies on either side. In a poll for The Economist last year, more than twice as many Britons thought the empire a source of pride than one of shame. But just under half of those polled reckoned it was neither or had no opinion.

That will not prevent more skirmishes in the culture wars. Senior Tories argue that such fights help them unite two distinct types of Conservative voter: Telegraph-reading traditionalists in southern England and working-class voters in red wall seats in northern England and Wales who switched from Labour to the Tories in 2019. That is probably true. Paula Surridge of Bristol University has shown that Labour did particularly poorly among left-leaning voters with authoritarian views, a good proxy for cultural issues. Support for Labour among such voters dropped by 17% between 2017 and 2019, the biggest decline among any group of voters. Not all cultural issues resonate equally. Voters who did not go to university themselves are unlikely to be concerned about campus politics, says one of the new breed of Tory MP, who represents an ex-mining constituency. But they are receptive to appeals to defend British history. Theres a huge sense of pride, he says.

There are two problems with the strategy. Sir Keir Starmer, who replaced Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader last spring, does not share his predecessors lack of enthusiasm for the national anthem and the queen. A greater danger for the Tories is that culture is just about the only topic on which their old and new voters agree. As the pandemic recedes, the government will have to make choices about the future role of the state and how to steady the nations finances, which cannot please both camps. How much easier, then, to put off such thorny decisions and play a little more Elgar.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Bonfire of the insanities"

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Bonfire of the insanities - Tories bet on culture wars to unite disparate voters | Britain - The Economist

Protesters burn an effigy of French President Emmanuel Macron during an anti-France demonstration in Pakistan last November. Photo: DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP via Getty Images

PARIS, France On the 17th of October, the day after French school teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded outside his school, threats from Frances far-right began to rain down on liberal academics across the country.

ric Fassin a professor of sociology at the University of Paris 8 who had written a blog arguing the reaction to terror attacks must at all costs avoid falling into their trap of becoming a conflict of civilisations became a lightning rod for their anger.

Traitor wrote one far-right supporter on Twitter; collaborator added another. But one individual known in the neo-Nazi scene struck a more chilling tone with an overt death threat: Ive put you on my list of assholes to decapitate when it begins.

Fassin is among a group of French academics that supposedly embody the concept of Islamo-gauchisme (Islamo-leftism), a term suggesting an alliance between extremist Islamists and left-wing academics that had until recently only been used in neo-Nazi circles. The insult is levelled at those whose so-called woke theories point out the discrimination suffered by Muslims in France, where deep-set discrimination touches hiring, housing, policing and beyond paralleling culture wars currently raging in the US and the UK.

The term has found its way into the lexicon of prominent members of the French government. Islamo-gauchisme is an ideology which, from time to time, leads to the worst, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told French radio station Europe 1. Then Grarld Darmanin, Frances right-leaning Minister of the Interior, used the term in the National Assembly, referring to intellectual accomplices in terrorist acts.

On Sunday, events took a dramatic turn. Frdrique Vidal, the University Minister, went on TV channel CNews and denounced how Islamo-gauchisme plagues society as a whole and pledged to launch an investigation into academic research considered in breach, particularly postcolonial studies.

They are in the minority and some do it to carry radical ideas or militant ideas always looking at everything through the prism of their desire to divide, to fracture, she said, likening it to an alliance between Mao Zedong and Ayatollah Khomeini.

The comments have sparked outrage. On Tuesday, Frances Conference of University Presidents called for the debate to be elevated and that the government should not talk nonsense. On Wednesday, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who Vidal said should carry out the investigation, criticised the political exploitation that is... emblematic of a regrettable instrumentalisation of science. On Thursday, daily newspaper Libration dedicated its front page to the debacle, quipping that Vidal had lost her faculties.

However, for Fassin, and numerous other academics across France, the efforts to target them are cause for serious concern and could pose a very real danger. This is very worrying, he told VICE World News. This is a political attempt to control knowledge. One imagines that it will not succeed, but the effect sought is intimidation. Above all, it helps to justify repression.

Frdric Sawicki, professor of political science at Paris 1 University Panthon-Sorbonne, said he felt targeted by the move. If you declare yourself hostile to the ban on the wearing of the veil or to the organisation of a mandatory minute of silence in schools after a terrorist attack, he said. You are therefore an accomplice and as a consequence, you become an Islamo-left-winger!

I am outraged, he added. The French Republic, except during the period of the Vichy regime, has always protected academic freedom. The Minister should protect this freedom at the foundation of any democracy.

Eyebrows have also been raised at the timing of the move by Vidal, with protests in response to the widespread problem of sexual assault on campus and huge numbers of students forced into financial uncertainty during the pandemic leading to snaking queues for the subsidised university canteens.

The minister's words are just a political diversion to make us forget her catastrophic management of higher education and research, said Lon Thbault, a student at SciencesPo University Paris. If Frdrique Vidal put as much energy into fighting these problems as she does into the media show, we wouldn't have any more students living in precarity. She is out of touch with universities and students.

Michel Deneken, president of the University of Strasbourg, said the underlying motives behind Vidals announcement are purely political. The regional and presidential elections are on the horizon, he said. The government is using this as a way to capture the support of the right. [Right-wing daily newspaper] Le Figaro writes every day about Islamo-gauchisme every day now.

French Muslim campaign groups express little doubt that it is an attempt to flirt with the far-right. One has the impression that every week they want to find a new reason to talk about Islam, said Sefen Guez Guez, a lawyer for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF).

But the French governments crackdown on campuses also extends to legislation to limit research that is deemed unacceptable. The Senate last month adopted a bill setting the research budget for French universities, and while it is yet to pass through the National Assembly, critics say will curtail student protests and put freedom of research at stake by requiring it to align with the values of the republic.

Rim-Sarah Alouane, a French legal academic and PhD candidate in comparative law at the University Toulouse Capitole, said the vast majority of people working in academia are shocked and terrified for the future of research in this country. She added that French academia has been falling apart due to budget cuts and lack of recruitment.

For Alouane, its the latest in a long line of tightening of civil freedoms, including the controversial separatism law aimed at tackling the Islamist terrorism that has grown since 2015 but labelled Islamophobic by rights groups that was passed by the National Assembly, and the Global Security law, which at the end of last year proposed banning the filming of police, despite several high-profile cases of police violence.

You need to integrate this kind of announcement into a broader scope which is the hyper securitisation of our society, that is processed by limiting civil liberties on the ground of national security and public order, she said.

It comes as part of a wider reckoning in France, with woke leftist theories on race, gender and post-colonialism said to be imported from the US and the UK the target of the governments ire. Theres a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities, Blanquer said in October.

Philippe Marlire, professor of French and European Politics at University College London, says that those Anglophone countries are themselves facing battles over freedom of speech, wokeness and so-called cancel culture at universities.

I think that theres a bit of a deja-vu with whats happening in the UK, he said. But the French situation is far worse. In the UK, the attacks remain quite implicit, but in France the government is trying to taint the personalities and reputations of academics. These are highly dangerous means that is the usual approach of the far right.

Marlire, who has himself been the target of far-right attacks including in a recent article claiming he has not ceased to work to promote racialist ideology warns there could be serious repercussions for this approach.

France is in complete denial when it comes to race, he said. Islamo-gauchisme is of course an insult. Its almost a physical aggression because you put people at risk. What is remarkable is that its becoming more mainstream.

The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation did not respond to a request for comment. But government spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday that French President Emmanuel Macron has an absolute attachment to the independence of teacher-researchers.

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If You Thought the Culture War in the US and UK Was Dumb, Check Out Frances - VICE

Anglo-Saxon shareholders appear to have the backing of the yogurt-makers French patriarch

Feb 20th 2021

EMMANUEL FABER used to be seen as the spiritual son of Franck Riboud, honorary chairman and former boss of Danone, whose father Antoine co-founded the French yogurt-maker. Mr Riboud handpicked Mr Faber as his successor and loyally backed his transformation of Danone into Frances first entreprise mission, a corporate form with a defined social purpose.

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In recent months the relationship has soured. According to the French press, Mr Riboud thinks Mr Faber is more interested in saving the planet than saving his firm. Danones share price fell by 27% in 2020 while those of rivals such as Nestl and Unilever made gains amid pandemic larder-stocking. Its full-year results, due on February 19th, are unlikely to inspire investors confidence.

Danone has been hit harder by covid-19 than rivals because of its large bottled-water business. Its Evian, Badoit and Volvic brands make money mainly from sales in restaurants, bars and airports. But that is not the only problem. In 2017 Danone overpaid for WhiteWave, an American maker of health-focused fare that it bought for $12.5bn. The deal, which strained the balance-sheet but did not produce hoped-for returns, is the main reason for Danones current malaise, says Alan Erskine of Credit Suisse, a bank. Bruno Monteyne of Bernstein, a broker, points to years of underinvestment in brands, which face stiff competition from supermarkets private labels, at a time when Danones dairy and baby-food businesses slow as birth rates fall and people drink less milk.

Faced with these challenges, in October Mr Faber announced an overhaul of the business along more geographic lines. Perhaps 2,000 jobs will be cut. It was the fifth reorganisation on his seven-year watch.

Enough already, huffs Artisan Partners, an American investment fund which says it is Danones third-biggest shareholder with a 3% stake. In a meeting with board members on February 16th it demanded Mr Fabers exit, a stop to his latest restructuring, and the sale of struggling brands such as Mizone, a Chinese vitamin drink, and the Vega range of plant-based foods.

Artisan is the latest Anglo-Saxon meddler to pile on the pressure. In November Bluebell Capital Partners, a London-based hedge fund that owns a stake in Danone, demanded that the firm boot out Mr Faber and split the role of chairman and CEO. Causeway Capital Management, an American fund, has echoed Bluebells call.

Mr Fabers entourage refers to the demands, which appear to have the blessing of 65-year-old Mr Riboud, as a revolution of gunslinger grandpas. The activists may still succeed, and not just because they are not in fact that wizened. Helpfully, the French state is staying out of the fray; its spokesman said it had no comment. The government has no stake in Danone, but in 2005 declared it an industrial jewel to be defended against foreign buyers. Maybe not when they have an ally on the inside.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Culture wars"

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Culture wars - Can Anglo-Saxon activist investors whip Danone into shape? | Business - The Economist

Rush Hudson Limbaugh IIIBorn: January 12th, 1951Died: February 17th, 2021

Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political shock jock radio that made him so influential. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of what we now call fake news, became the template for televisions Fox News, and at its peak played a huge part in Newt Gingrichs Republican Revolution of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clintons Democrats.

Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling womens rights activists feminazis, referring to HIV/Aids as Rock Hudsons disease and claiming environmentalist wackos were a bunch of scientists organised around a political position.

He argued that the existence of gorillas disproved evolution, characterised both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019) as false flag operations organised by leftists, and accused the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe of allowing the Charlottesville rioting in 2017 to worsen in order to boost his presidential ambitions. Have you ever noticed how composite sketches of criminals always look like [the black activist] Jesse Jackson? he asked his listeners.

When he cut off callers on air, he would play a vacuum cleaner noise, shouting caller abortion. His listeners, whom he dubbed ditto-heads ate it up, while those who were offended often tuned in to express their disgust. In recent years the independent fact-checking site PolitiFact consistently rated Limbaugh high in terms of pants on fire untruths, and just as consistently at zero on truths.

Limbaugh (pronounced LIM baw) was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, into a family of conservative judges that included his father, whose name was also Rush. His mother, Mildred (nee Armstrong), was the family clown, and encouraged Rusty in his love of radio. He did poorly at school, then quit Southeast Missouri State University after a year and found a job with a radio station in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as Bachelor Jeff Christie, but was fired after he told a black caller he claimed to find difficult to understand to take the bone out of your nose and call again.

After being fired from several other stations for he fetched up in 1983 at KRBK in Sacramento, California where he began to attach attention. In 1987, during the Ronald Reagan era, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required users of the public airwaves to allow equal time if they broadcast political opinion. This opened the floodgates to the likes of Limbaugh, and in 1988 he moved to WABC in New York, which became the flagship for a 56-station network broadcast of his show, scheduled, unusually for talk, at midday. By 1990 he had five million listeners.

Another godsend for his show was the election of Clinton in 1992, the year in which Limbaugh began a syndicated TV programme produced by the future Fox News boss Roger Ailes.

Limbaughs deeply personal anti-Clinton campaigning was so effective that when Gingrich and the Republicans re-took the House, they made him an honorary member of the Republican caucus. He and Sixta had divorced in 1990, and in 1994 he married Marta Fitzgerald , an aerobics instructor. He told an interviewer he struggled with love because: I am too much in love with myself.

The TV show ended in 1996, but on radio Limbaugh went from strength to strength. He now lived in Palm Beach, Florida, where he produced his radio show from his southern command centre.

He was divorced from Marta in 2004, and for the next two years was linked romantically to the CNN anchor Daryn Kagan. In 2006 Limbaugh was arrested on his return from a trip to the Dominican Republic, where he had bought viagra with a false prescription. Although charges were dropped, WBAL in Baltimore became the first station to ditch his show.

The George W Bush years seemed to stretch him; he said the US torture of prisoners in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was no worse than what happens at a Skull and Bones initiation, perhaps forgetting that Bush and his father were both members of that Yale University secret society.

But just as Clinton had been a godsend, so Barack Obama seemed to inspire Limbaugh to new heights of partisan venom. Apart from claiming that Obama was foreign-born, he accused the president of allowing ebola into the US in revenge for African slavery. When Republicans rallied in the 2010 midterm elections, Limbaugh again reaped much of the credit.

In 2008 he had signed an eight-year $400m contract with the Cumulus broadcasting company, and in 2013 he moved his home station to New Yorks WOR. After signing a four-year extension in 2018, his income that year totalled $84.5m, second only to one of the original, non-political, fellow shock jocks, Howard Stern. In 2010 he married for the fourth time, to Kathryn Rogers, a party planner. Elton John sang at their wedding reception for a reported $1m fee.

In January 2020 he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer; he announced it on air the following month, the day before he received the presidential medal of freedom from Trump. Nevertheless he failed to throw his full backing to Trumps attempts to overturn the election result; he accused the presidents lawyers of failing to support their claims of voter fraud with evidence.

He is survived by Kathryn. Guardian

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Rush Limbaugh obituary: Shock jock radio host who set the tone for US culture wars - The Irish Times