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But widespread protests across the US immediately spread to similar outbreaks in different countries with very different histories.

This is just part of a globalisation phenomenon supercharged by social media and the self-serving desire for instant gratification.

It quickly and inevitably has become caught up in constant culture wars underpinned by an infinity of claims to moral superiority and denunciations of any alternative.

That can easily lead straight to farce in a brutalist model of enlightenment that rejects any concept of free speech, strongly disapproves of different views and cannot countenance even the more valuable lessons of hard experience.

Protesters outside Flinders Station in Melbourne during a Black Lives Matter rally.AAP

Cancel culture has plenty of its own historic roots although mostly not recognised by those averse to anything but their preferred versions of history.

But the modern adaptation is particularly absolutist in part because its perceived enemies are so numerous, usually impossible to define or limit but easy to decry.

That means no end to the ability to be offended and therefore to demand the offence be stopped, sometimes violently, sometimes by instant condemnation in an online brand aware world with no hard borders except for those of China.

From withdrawing Gone With the Wind from HBO Max or the series by Australian humorist Chris Lilley from screens; from defacing a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney or Winston Churchill in the UK or beheading one of Christopher Columbus in the US, the urge to succumb to the authoritarian impetus of a vengeful mob is much the same. No shades of grey, no sense of nuance and certainly no sense of humour allowed.

At least the BBCs streaming service realised it had gone too far in pulling a classic Fawlty Towers episode. It will return it to the platform, with "extra guidance and warnings... to highlight potentially offensive content and language". Of course.

Beneath the absurdities theres a much broader cultural battle confronting and convulsing the West.

The centre ground is deliberately hollowed out in favour of extreme partisanship or, even worse, extreme censorship. Cancel culture is the eager inheritor of this intolerance.

This has certainly gone mainstream and well beyond the confines of scared university leadership redefining the meaning of liberalism for students and lecturers alike. The derisory term "snowflake" has developed for good reason but it's not confined to one generation.

The notion of The New York Times firing its opinion page editor for running a column by a Republican senator, for example, is as deeply flawed as the bile from many commentators on Fox.

The centre ground is deliberately hollowed out in favour of extreme partisanship or, even worse, extreme censorship.

Cancel culture is the eager inheritor of this intolerance. The translation allows no acceptance of social advances also engendered by an often brutal past nor the difficulties of reversing past injustices. Just as it dismisses societys ability to learn from history and to reform itself rather than attempt to recast the past.

Australia is certainly not immune from this sort of pandemic even if Scott Morrison maintains he doesnt want to get involved in the history wars.

He is understandably confident he has the support of most Australians when he says his focus is the need to get people back into jobs on what needs to be built up rather than what should be torn down.

But he also knows sensitivities have to be managed in a political climate prone to sudden storms of destruction and always looking for easy answers and figures of blame.

So the Prime Minister quickly apologised for any offence created by his remark last week that there was no slavery in Australia, in order to head off the outrage about Australias history of kidnapping Pacific Islanders and the effective slavery of many Aborigines.

I acknowledge there have been all sorts of hideous practices that have taken place, he said on Friday. And so I'm not denying any of that, OK? I'm not denying any of that. And I don't think it's helpful to go into an endless history wars discussion about this. It's all recorded.

His emphasis remains on the crucial but stubbornly elusive challenge of practical reconciliation despite all the money and good intentions and policy efforts devoted to it in recent decades.

The challenges of Indigenous incarceration go across so many different areas of public policy, he said. Its health policy, its youth policy, it's suicide policy, its employment policy, its welfare policy, this is an incredibly complicated area and not all Indigenous experiences are the same.

All true. The larger question is whether these arguments can ever emerge from the dead end of repeated failures or be diverted once again into simplistic accusations of racism.

The answer wont be found on Twitter.

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Culture wars cancel the past and present - The Australian Financial Review

In Boston, Massachusetts, a statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded this week. In Richmond, Virginia, protesters toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

NASCAR announced this week it would ban the Confederate battle flag from its races. Credit:AP

Virginia's Democratic Governor Ralph Northam ordered a giant statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee to be removed "as soon as possible" from the state capital and placed into storage. The HBO Max streaming service has temporarily removed Gone With The Wind from its library to add contextual material about the film's race politics.

At times, the zeal for justice has tipped over into the "de-platforming" of those seen as insufficiently committed to the anti-racist cause.

When David Shor, an analyst at progressive data firm Civis Analytics, tweeted a summary of an academic paper that found race riots reduced the Democratic vote share in the 1968 presidential election, he was attacked online for undermining the current protest movement.

The statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, has been torn down.Credit:AP

Shor quickly apologised but was fired a few days later after an internal review, according to New York magazine.

Debates about historical symbols that previously raged on university campuses have now gone mainstream, including in institutions that few would describe as "woke". NASCAR - long perceived as a bastion of white male conservatism - announced this week that it would ban the Confederate battle flag or "Southern Cross" from its races because many see it as a symbol of racism.

And Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said he was open to a discussion on renaming military bases bearing the names of Confederate generals - an idea military leaders previously opposed.

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The Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee later approved a commission to rename Army installations currently named after Confederate figures within three years. This put the committee members on a collision course with US President Donald Trump, who said he would "not even consider" renaming the bases because they "have become part of a Great American heritage".

Trump appears to have public opinion behind him on this. Several polls released this week found more Americans oppose changing Confederate place names and removing Confederate statues than support such proposals.

It's a reminder of how deeply divided American society remains - even if progressives currently have the culture war winds behind their backs.

The rest is here:
How George Floyd's death changed the US culture wars - Sydney Morning Herald

JK Rowling had been tweeting warm, gushing messages to children who submitted drawings for her new book Eight? How can this have been done by an eight-year-old?! when, abruptly, her Twitter feed took a sharp swerve sideways.

She shared an article about period poverty in the developing world and Covid-19, tacking on her own, snarky take. People who menstruate. Im sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

It was an odd way to launch the latest salvo in the most toxic of culture wars. If you failed to recognise the phrase people who menstruate in an article about menstruation as an assault on your human rights, you havent been keeping up with the roiling war over trans issues.

Rowlings tweet elicited equal parts applause and vitriol, as she knew it would. Days later, her name was still trending on social media. Daniel Radcliffe, Eddie Redmayne and Emma Watson distanced themselves from her. She was threatened on Twitter with cancelling, punching and death.

The ugly episode underlined how polarised any discussion about the issues affecting trans and gender non-binary people has become. It is so incendiary, so mired in dogma, that most sensible, compassionate people approaching it with an open mind and a genuine desire to understand, take one look and back away.

In a longer and more nuanced post, Rowling delves into why she finds the phrase people who menstruate to be hostile and alienating; develops her own thinking on sex and gender, and proffers five reasons why she is worried about trans activism.

Reasons 1-3 are to do with her charitable work and free speech. Fourth, she wonders whether as a mentally sexless teenager,she too might have tried to transition. The fifth is that she is a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor with concerns about single-sex spaces. When she read about the Scottish governments gender-recognition plans, she went to a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered recurred on a loop.

On the one hand, how could you not feel empathy for Rowling, especially after the Sun followed up with a repugnant front-page interview with her first husband under the headline I slapped JK and Im not sorry?

On the other, why is she conflating her experience of domestic violence with rights for trans people? The two have as much to do with each other as octopuses and stilettos. As she acknowledges, trans people are frequently victims of violence.

In this particular culture war, where words are weapons of mass outrage, there is no room for nuance. Both sides trans activists and gender critical feminists are convinced that they are compassionate, well-meaning people whose duty it is to police the other sides speech. Both claim a monopoly on the science. Both throw around unlikely scenarios and terrifying statistics. For both, social media is their theatre of war.

But theres only one group directly affected. For all the hysterical arguments about bathrooms or elderly women scared to use the Marks and Spencers changing rooms, the only people whose rights are up for grabs are trans and non-binary people. And they, for the most part, are quietly getting on with their lives, far away from the arguments about biology and the shouty slogans. If youre a young person with gender identity issues, for whom life is a daily struggle against isolation, bullying, prejudice and violence, the culture war swirling around you is a distant roar.

So far, blessedly, that culture war has been a distant roar in Ireland too. Here, in 2015, without much drama, the Gender Recognition Act passed. Since then, Ireland has been offering an administrative process for transgender people over 18 to achieve full legal recognition of their preferred gender. To be clear, this is no utopia in which to be a trans person, but it has got some things right.

Five years on, were managing fine in the bathrooms department. There have been no showdowns in womens changing rooms, no explosion in men who never intend to transition clamouring to be recognised as legally female. In all, by mid-2018, fewer than 300 gender recognition certs had been issued.

Onto those terrifying statistics. Rowling claims there has been a 4,400 per cent increase in British girls being referred for transitioning treatment, she says. This is accurate, but its coming from a starting point of just 40 girls in 2009. She suggests the increase is fuelled by misogyny; in reality, more young people coming to terms with their identity is positive and empowering. She acknowledges that transitioning is a solution for some gender dysphoric people, but even this seems to imply there are good genuine trans people and bad fake ones.

Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented, she says. And yes, studies have found a substantial overlap between transgender identity and autism. But it would be grossly ablest to use this as a basis to withhold treatment, especially when depression and anxiety are also highest among this group.

Most controversially, Rowling claims that between 60-90 per cent of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of it. This figure is based on flawed research which included children who didnt meet the criteria for dysphoria.

The truth is there are no easy answers here. There are risks involved in medical treatment. There are risks to withholding it. Every situation is unique and best figured out privately by those affected and their doctors.

Despite what those who have taken to calling themselves biological women insist, affording equal rights to trans people does not erode anyone elses rights. Human rights are not a zero sum game. There is no quota on the number of women allowed to exist in the world.

Continued here:
Jennifer OConnell: There are no winners in trans-rights culture war - The Irish Times

When the slave trader Edward Colstons statue was sent tumbling into the harbour in Bristol on Sunday, it was easy to anticipate that the event would be folded into Britains febrile culture war surrounding colonialism and empire, and easier still to foresee the kinds of commentary it would arouse on the right.

A broad spectrum of reasons this was a Bad Thing was immediately brought to bear, from the relatively sensible (it would have been better to bring the statue down through democratic process, as indeed campaigners had been trying to do for years); to the equivocatory (Colston should be left on his plinth as testament to the complexity of history, his trade in human lives having been balanced out somewhat by his civic philanthropy); to the historically illiterate (Colston, being a man of his time, should not be judged for trading in human lives).

As the campaign against statues has widened, the rights response has been to cast it as a totalitarian campaign against history itself: hence theMails borderline demented headline of Toppling the past, and its comparison of Black Lives Matter to Maos Cultural Revolution. But what has begun to emerge most worryingly from the comment pages and talking heads is an implicit narrative that has been creeping ever more insistently into the debate about history, memory and education in this country: the spectre of racial replacement.

The great replacement owes its current name to the French far-right writer and activist Renaud Camus, who formulated it in his 2011 bookLe Grand Remplacement. Camuss main argument was that the indigenous white population of France was being replaced by North African and Muslim migration at the behest of replacist elites in government and international institutions such as the EU, and their intellectual handmaidens.

As a conspiracy theory, however, it has a long pedigree and a wide variety of forms. Its basic contours are this: indigenous white populations, and their cultures, societies and institutions, are being replaced by a tide of racial others Black people, Africans and Muslims. Moreover, this is happening not because of any natural demographic trend, but because enemies within have willed it, not only through weakness but through a suicidal, self-hating malice towards the civilisation of which they are a part.

Although no mainstream British figure is yet to commit explicitly to the great replacement as a conspiracy theory, its essential features haunt the language of the rights culture wars. Broadcaster Melanie Phillips piece on the Colston statue in MondaysTimesis as good an example as any.Headlined Were giving in to the race revolutionaries, Phillips piece took aim at the spineless reaction of the authorities to protesters attacks on statues and memorials not simply because lawbreaking should be punished but because, she argued, the protesters aims and motivations were inherently antithetical to our society itself.

They are accusing the police and white society of being fundamentally evil, she wrote; these demonstrations have been a form of insurrection against western society and its institutions. Lets pass over, for moment, that easy slippage from white society to western society, and move on to the next bit: On both sides of the Atlantic, this mayhem is the result of decades of appeasing those determined to bring down western culture Deeming western culture to be racist and colonialist, the education establishment set out to teach instead that black people were the inescapable victims of white society.

This is a familiar refrain, especially when it comes to education: Toby Young, for example, has written that British universities have become leftwing madrassas.

When in 2017 Lola Olufemi, the then womens officer at Cambridge University Students Union, wrote to the universitys English faculty recommending that the curriculum be broadened to include more non-white authors, the Daily Telegraph put a picture of her on its front cover beneath the heading Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors an inaccuracy, as the Telegraph was forced to admit.

But the passage from putting non-white authors on reading lists to replacing white ones was an easy one to make, and a potent way of stirring up a sense that white culture is being not simply eroded but replaced, intentionally, and with the aim of destroying it. As Phillips has written elsewhere, War is being waged against western culture from within. This is not a difficult sentiment to find replicated on a daily basis, either in the fever-swamps of the online right or the comment pages of respectable newspapers.

The narrative goes that decadent liberals the education establishment [sic] for Phillips, rootless anywheres according to journalist David Goodhart, or cultural Marxists in the words of attorney general Suella Braverman and various rightwing commentators are a fifth column intent on pulling down the whole faade of western civilisation and letting the barbarian hordes in. In many variants, this enemy within is Jewish: this is what the Unite the Right protesters at Charlottesville meant, in 2017, as they marched against the removal of a statue of the confederate general Robert E Lee, chanting Jews will not replace us. Its also what lies behind much of the rhetoric on the far right, popularised in Orbns Hungary and consistently flirted with by senior Tories, casting the Jewish financier George Soros as a dedicated enemy of European national cultures.

That these kinds of narratives inspire violence is no surprise: after all, if the fight is existential, what means are off the table? One recent adherent of replacement theory is thought to be Robert Bowers, the suspect in the killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Bowers is said to have written that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish refugee charity, likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I cant sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, Im going in.

Another is Anders Behring Breivik, whose fantasies about European genocide led him to murder 77 people, mostly youth members of the Norwegian labour party attending a summer camp, in 2011. Breivik quoted Melanie Phillips in his manifesto: challenged on this, Phillips responded that the revelation had the left in general wetting itself in delirium at this apparently heaven-sent opportunity to take down those who fight for life, liberty and western civilisation against those who would destroy it reproducing, of course, Breiviks concerns almost exactly.

What this kind of rhetoric is supposed to accomplish is open to question, but its effects are plain to see. Before Sunday was out, an association of football fans in Plymouth had posted a chilling photo of themselves standing on the steps of a war memorial to defend it from BLM protesters; Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) and the Democratic Football Lads Alliance have announced their intention to come to London en masse this weekend to make sure that the monuments of our national heritage are defended from well, by now you know who from. It might be in the interests of the media to recognise the narratives they are promoting before its too late.

Peter Mitchell is a writer and historian

Original post:
To the far right, attacks on protesters as enemies of 'western culture' are a gift - The Guardian

A landmark US supreme court ruling expected before the end of June could shutter most of Louisianas abortion clinics and precipitate clinic closures in more than a dozen other states.

The case, June Medical Services v Russo, is one of the most high-profile supreme court cases of the year, after Donald Trump appointed two justices who tipped the balance of the court to a conservative majority. And it might never have reached the supreme court without the aid of another Trump-appointed judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan.

The Louisiana case centers on law that would force abortion doctors to gain permission to admit and treat patients at nearby hospitals, known as admitting privileges a bureaucratic hurdle that has been shown to shut down a large swath of abortion clinics.

The supreme court ruled an almost identical Texas law unconstitutional in 2016, but Louisiana is arguing that what is unconstitutional in Texas can still be constitutional across the state border.

Duncan fought the Louisiana case while in private practice until the spring of 2018, when he was confirmed as one of Trumps five lifetime appointments to the fifth circuit court of appeals.

This year, several states have sought to severely restrict a womans right to abortion by designating it an elective treatment that is not necessary during the coronavirus pandemic. Though appeals courts largely refused to uphold these bans, Duncan was one of two judges on the fifth circuit court who repeatedly upheld Texass ban in a series of rulings that threw abortion access into weeks of disarray.

In just three years, the Trump administration has stacked federal courts with an army of conservative judges: 143 district court judges, 51 appeals court judges and two supreme court justices. Trumps lasting legacy may be stuffing Americas most important courts with largely white, male, conservative justices who will rule over important social and cultural issues such as reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues and immigration for the next three or four decades.

One-fifth of the federal trial judges now owe their seat to Trump, as do one-fourth of appellate judges. According to the progressive research group Data for Progress, Trumps cohort are also ideologically to the right of previously appointed Republican judges.

With the election looming in November, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, vowed to push ahead with nomination hearings and leave no vacancy behind.

And nowhere will Trumps impact be felt greater than in the states that lie under the jurisdiction of the nations most conservative appeals courts. The fifth circuit, for example, covers the Republican strongholds of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, making it the likely final arbiter on the constitutionality of a slew of conservative laws.

For the overwhelming number of cases, the constitutional rights of the people in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi will be made by Kyle Duncan and the other ultra-conservatives on the fifth circuit, said Daniel Goldberg, legal director at the progressive judicial non-profit the Alliance for Justice.

Five of the 17 active judges on the fifth circuit are Trump appointees, making an already right-leaning appeals court arguably one of the most, probably the most, conservative in the nation, Goldberg added.

The mantle is significant. While most attention tends to fall on the supreme court, that court hears only about 100 cases in a year. Appeals courts collectively handle in the range of 50,000. The nations 94 district courts are geographically organized into 12 circuits, which hear the bulk of appeals, and from those cases, the US supreme court chooses just a fraction.

It was a fifth circuit panel that ruled to uphold Louisianas admitting privileges law in 2018, despite the fact the Texas law had been struck down two years prior. In early 2019, the full bench of the fifth circuit voted to refuse to rehear the case, forcing the supreme courts hand and setting the stage for this summers looming decision. Since he had represented Louisiana, Duncan abstained from the courts decision.

But Trumps other four appointees were among the nine judges that upheld Louisianas law. One, James Ho, has since made headlines for decrying the the moral tragedy of abortion in an opinion. Others have criticized the Voting Rights Act a civil-rights era law that forced states with histories of violent voter suppression to obtain approval from the justice department over changes to elections, a law that conservatives on the supreme court gutted in 2013.

Duncan is a lawyer with proven culture wars credentials, said Amanda Bursky-Hollis, author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution.

The vote to confirm his appointment to the fifth circuit bench split along party lines, 50-47, and his bid was aided by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network an ally of the Federalist Society, a conservative group that has aided Trump by selecting judges for him to nominate. The Judicial Crisis Network spent tens of thousands of dollars on TV ads in Louisiana praising Duncan after Senator John Kennedy expressed skepticism at giving a seat conventionally held for a Louisianian to a Washington lawyer. By the time of Duncans nomination hearing, Kennedy hailed Duncan as staunchly and vociferously pro-life and pro-religious liberty.

Duncan, a married father of five, was born in Baton Rouge in 1972.

Religious liberty is Duncans specialty, going back to his time in the mid-2000s as a professor of law at the University of Mississippi, where his scholarship centered on the separation of church and state. Duncan has argued alongside the religious liberty powerhouse the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and taught at its Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a kind of career boot camp for elite Christian lawyers that the ADF calls a ministry.

Duncan made his name in 2014 at the boutique religious rights firm the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, when he was the lead counsel on the victorious supreme court contraception case Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores. That pivotal decision laid the groundwork for corporations to opt out of providing birth control for employees based on religious objections, and it preceded another major contraception case the court heard this spring, one that could further favor the religious and moral objections of employers over the rights of their employees to access healthcare.

Duncan is a devout Catholic. Before his appointment to the fifth circuit, on mornings before he was scheduled to argue before the supreme court, he would recite the rosary to calm himself.

A large part of his career as an appellate court specialist was spent defending Republican state laws popular with the religious right and social conservatives. He fought to keep Louisianas same-sex marriage ban: the matter belongs in the states, would have unforeseen consequences, and LGBTQ rights have nothing (his empasis) to do with civil rights cases, he argued. He defended a North Carolina anti-trans bathroom law and a similar Virginia school board policy. And he argued in favor of a North Carolina voter ID regulation that the fourth circuit found targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.

Paul Baier, a law professor at LSU who never taught Duncan, supported his nomination despite having argued against him in the same-sex marriage case at the Louisiana supreme court. Duncan is a superb advocate and a very careful, painstaking judge, he said. He described Duncans reasoning in his opinion to uphold Texass coronavirus-related abortion ban as an exemplar of the studious judge judging.

The Federalist Society acts as an alternative to the American Bar Association with a monopoly on Republican nominees, Hollis-Brusky said, strategically placing people like Duncan who cant be dismissed as a crazy Christian or Bible-thumper.

Over the course of his nomination process in 2017, the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein questioned him about some of the arguments he had made in past controversial cases. Duncan responded by stating that in representing clients I do not advance my personal views, but the interests of my clients.

During his nomination hearing, Duncan presented himself as fair-minded and reasonable. He strove especially to reassure the Democratic Senator Dick Durbin over his record of advancing religious rights above all others.

Where do we draw the line with your right as an individual, asked Durbin, as opposed to my right to assert religious liberty?

Its a balance, its gotta be a balance, Duncan replied.

He referenced the Hobby Lobby case, describing it as a close case because women would be deprived of contraception.

Three years earlier, Duncan had used opposite terms. We find ourselves in the midst of what we see, and what we see correctly, as one of the most flagrant attacks on religious liberty that that weve ever seen in this country, Duncan told a panel in 2014.

And most importantly, from our point of view, its not about striking the appropriate balance, he went on. The first amendment has struck the balance for us, and that balance is in favor of religious liberty.

Few Trump appointees have survived the nomination process without outrage from progressive groups. Duncan is no exception.

The specific judges the Federalist Society supported are selected by the president to implement his agenda of dismantling health care, eliminating civil, women and workers rights and shielding his wealth and actions from public scrutiny, said Nan Aron, the founder of the Alliance for Justice.

Duncan summed up his lifes work in 2014, in an article for the Ivy League Christian Observer. All I really want to do, he said, is what God wants me to do with the talents he gave me.

Originally posted here:
Stuart Kyle Duncan: the Trump-appointed judge working to ban Louisiana abortions - The Guardian