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Rishi Sunak

Portrayed as a Cameronite liberal, Sunak is in fact deeply conservative on everything from trans rights to refugees

It was one of the many strange quirks of the summer Tory leadership contest: that Liz Truss captured the mantle of the true blue Conservative while Rishi Sunak found himself painted as a wet, Cameronite liberal.

But in the past five months of his premiership, that portrayal of Sunak has started to become laughable. He is perhaps the most socially conservative prime minister of his generation, more so than Truss, Boris Johnson or even Theresa May.

Both his predecessors were happy to play to the Tory gallery on culture wars but Johnson as London mayor was a liberal on immigration and gay rights, and Truss was a stalwart at LGBTQ+ Conservative events, and as a student campaigned on drug legalisation.

May, who took a draconian approach to migration at the Home Office, also took a strong stance against stop and search, modern slavery and backed a ban on trans conversion practices.

There has been a tendency to see Sunaks focus on issues such as trans rights, grooming gangs and small boats as politically expedient ways for the formerly California-dwelling technocrat to win over his party.

Those close to him say that is demonstrably untrue. Far from being convenient red meat to the Tory members in the leadership election, his views on social issues such as gender, drugs, crime and migration are deeply conservative.

Sunak is said to be personally driven, in particular on the Equality Act and trans rights. He has taken a direct interest in Kemi Badenochs drive to change the Equality Act to allow organisations to bar trans women from single-sex spaces and events, including hospital wards and sports. It would redefine sex in the 2010 act to specifically refer to legal protections for biological sex.

No 10 sources have pointed out that was a formal pledge from Sunak from his leadership campaign, as well as one to review sex education material in schools. But, strikingly, it is one of the few pledges from that campaign that has survived. Others, such as fines for missing GP appointments, have been unceremoniously discarded.

There have been a number of other examples. Sunak gambled on vetoing Nicola Sturgeons gender recognition reform bill, and the prime minister is also thought to be taking a keen interest in the new guidance being considered for schools this term on transgender pupils, which would tell single-sex schools they cannot be obliged to admit trans students.

The number of pupils to which it will apply is likely to be negligible but it is the talk of certain circles since it was raised by the Girls Day School Trust, which runs 25 educational facilities in England and Wales. Sunaks daughters attend single-sex private schools.

The key area Sunak is exercised about is the rights of parents to be kept informed by the school on whether their child is questioning their gender identity, a move that some LGBTQ+ charities have said children may be keeping from their parents for good reason if they believe they are at risk from their own families.

But both Sunak and the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, are said to be determined that much higher regard is given to parental involvement and consent when it comes to pronouns, gender identity and sex education.

It is not just trans rights, which has become the unfortunate main battleground of the culture wars, where Sunak is demonstrating his deep social conservatism. He has made stopping the boats one of his five priorities and is set to make it virtually impossible for refugees to seek asylum in the UK apart from through an extremely narrow set of country-specific routes.

Again, this is not just the personal drive of Suella Braverman but of Sunak himself. Braverman, sacked just hours previously by Truss, was restored as home secretary as a price for backing Sunaks succession or so it was said. She was variably described as the shield behind which Sunak could hide his more liberal persuasions. That, again, now seems demonstrably untrue.

Sunak has been at the forefront of Bravermans drive on grooming gangs and although seemingly unwilling to echo her language, he has never disavowed it. It is another of the few pledges from his leadership campaign to have survived.

He also becomes obviously personally exercised on the subject of illegal drugs and is enthusiastic about banning nitrous oxide, calling the cannisters a scourge and promising a zero-tolerance approach.

Sunak may well reap some electoral rewards by trying to straddle both wings of the Conservative party leaning into his social conservatism, which is more in line with the perceived average traditional Conservative voter, and then advantaged in Liberal Democrat-leaning seats by being wrongly seen as a liberal.

Of course, the risk is that his enthusiasm for the culture wars backfires in the blue wall, while the economy tanks him in the red wall.

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Why Rishi Sunak may be the most socially conservative PM of his generation - The Guardian

Susan Stryker has a long list of titles and awards: first executive director of the GLBT Historical Society, winner of the Monette-Horowitz Prize for LGBTQ activism, and writer of books like Transgender History that are considered foundational to understanding trans history in the U.S.

Just before presenting a talk at Utah State University about trans history and its connection to our present, Stryker sat down to discuss her own history and how her works go from idea to reality.

I will find something thats interesting and go, how do I need to tell that story? Stryker said.

That strategy has led her to all sorts of mediums, from books to art to filmmaking, the last of which she had to teach herself in order to co-create the Emmy-winning documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Comptons Cafeteria.

The documentary tells the story of Compton's Cafeteria, an all-night cafeteria in a poor inner-city San Francisco neighborhood where many trans women would gather at night. It was constantly raided by police, and one night in August 1966, they decided they had enough and fought back.

Its one of the first known acts of militant resistance to policing and incarceration on the part of queer people, three years before Stonewall, Stryker said. I thought, this is an amazing story, and I wanted to put it out to the widest possible audience.

With her background in academia, Stryker has also written a number of essays on the trans experience. Perhaps her most well-known is also one of her oldest: My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamonix. The essay, which turns 30 years old in just a couple of months, connects the story of Frankensteins monster confronting its creator to the experiences of trans people.

I thought thats just a great metaphor for the relationship between transsexuality and medical authority, Stryker said. To say you are doing these things for your reason, and youre kind of horrified at the fact that we have our own life.

The essay, which like Frankensteins Monster is split into seemingly disparate sections monologue, theory, criticism, journal entry seeks to reclaim words like monster that have been used against trans people.

If you kind of invite it towards you, take it on, but transform it, and then redirect that energy, Stryker said, it's like, to me that feels much more powerful."

Stryker says that act of transformation also applies socially, politically and even aesthetically. Its about reinventing what were given and learning how to create ourselves.

Lets just call that modern art, you know? Stryker said. And to feel that sense of experimentation, of playfulness, of creative inquiry about ones own embodiment, and ones way of being in the world that to me just feels quite beautiful.

"My Words to Victor Frankenstein remains the most-read essay in the history of Duke Universitys queer journal, GLQ. Stryker says she never wouldve expected it at the time, thinking of it as a one-off for a conference, but is nonetheless happy to see it persist.

I like the fact that people are still reading that old piece and that it still seems to resonate, Stryker said. Now of course, there are some things when I read it, Im going like, Thats a really clunky line, or its like, Oh, I shouldnt have said it that way, I should have said it like this. But by and large, Im still really happy with it.

Looking forward, Stryker hopes to do more public-facing work, including an art film about Christine Jorgensen, a trans woman who was (incorrectly) called the first person to get sex reassignment surgery and who, despite world-wide fame, Stryker says is not well remembered today.

Currently, shes working on Changing Gender, a book about the evolution of gender in the U.S. from colonization to the present. And no matter what shes working on, she says she always wants to speak on trans history in the hopes of informing and improving the present.

"Ive got a public platform for expressing my ideas, and the fact that this is happening right at the moment when trans issues have become such a divisive, contested, polarized issue in the culture wars, Stryker said, I feel a lot of responsibility and obligation to speak out in this context and use whatever I know and have learned to try to make the quality of life for trans people better.

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Queer theorist Susan Stryker reflects on 30 years of work in trans ... - Utah Public Radio

Attacks on public education in America by extremists and culture-war peddling politicians have reached new heights (lows may be more apt), but they are not new. The difference today is that the attacks are intended not just to undermine public education but to destroy it.

From book bans and censorship of honest history to the removal and rejection of Black, LGBTQIA+ and minority students existence and experiences, MAGA lawmakers have used culture wars to divide communities and enact schemes that drain resources from public education.

The Betsy DeVos wing of the school privatization movement is methodically working its plan: Starve public schools of the funds they need to succeed, and then criticize them for their shortcomings. Erode trust in public schools by stoking fear and division, including attempting to pit parents against teachers. Replace them with private, religious, online and home schools.

These are all steps toward their end goal of destroying public education as we know it, atomizing and balkanizing education in America, bullying the most vulnerable among us and leaving the students who have the greatest needs with the most meager resources.

Poll after poll has shown that parents and voters dont want politicized culture wars, and they want public schools strengthened, not abandoned.

I took on these attacks in a recent speech in defense of public education, outlining a four-part plan to help young people recover from learning loss and disconnection and to strengthen and transform public education: a vast expansion of community schools; experiential learning for all kids, including career and technical education; the revival and restoration of the teaching profession; and deepened partnerships with parents and the community.

Community schools wrap academics, food assistance, health and dental care, mental health services and much more around public schools to transform them into hubs that connect families and students with supports they need to learn and live. We are calling for 25,000 more community schools by 2025. This is an achievable goal. California is investing an additional $45 million for community schools, and President Joe Biden has doubled federal community schools funding.

Experiential learning is based on the idea that students learnand become engaged with the world, new ideas and each otherby doing. In one approach, career and technical education, students learn everything from welding and auto repair to nursing, IT, graphic design, plumbing, life sciences and robotics.

Experiential learning embeds the things that make kids want to be in school, deeply engaging them in what theyre learning and letting them experience the camaraderie and responsibility of working together on a team. In the age of AI and chatGPT, this type of learning is crucial to being able to think and write, solve problems, apply knowledge and discern fact from fiction.

This formula of starting by high school and identifying school-to-career pathwaysincluding community colleges, partnering with employers and ensuring the opportunities are paidcan be replicated everywhere.

The AFT is working closely on CTE and robust workforce strategy with the AFL-CIO; the U.S. departments of Commerce, Education and Labor; and Bloomberg Philanthropies. And we are reaching out to business groups large and small.

We are calling for ways to renew and revive the teaching profession by treating educators as the professionals they are, with appropriate pay; time to plan and prepare for classes, collaborate with colleagues, and participate in meaningful professional development; and the power to make day-to-day classroom decisions. This will help alleviate both teachers stress and critical school staffing shortages.

We are also working to deepen the connection between parents, educators, employers and the community.

The AFTs Powerful Partnerships Institute has already made 27 grants to locals totaling more than $1.5 million. For example, Montana is engaging thousands of public education-supporting families and educators around a shared agenda. And New Haven, Conn., is working with educators, families and students on equitable school funding.

The AFT has launched a Freedom to Teach and Learn hotline, with the Campaign for Our Shared Future, for parents, educators and the public to report instances of political interference and censorship. The hotline888-873-7227will serve as a clearinghouse for reports of such interference.

This is our agenda. But this cant just be the work of our union or of school staff and schools alone. This is the work of a great nation.

Our public schools are essential to the strength and survival of our democracy. They shouldnt be pawns for politicians ambitions or defunded and destroyed by ideologues. We are at a crossroads: Fear and division, or hope and opportunity. A great nation does not fear people being educated. A great nation does not fear pluralism. A great nation chooses freedom, democracy, equality and opportunity.All of that starts in our public schools.

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In defense of public education - American Federation of Teachers

The national Democrats may finally have found their champion in the culture wars: California Gov. Gavin Newsom. His recently announced appearances in Southern red states, the Campaign for Democracy mark a significant tactical turn for Democrats, whose hesitancy to engage on cultural issues has frustrated the governor.

Newsoms new tactical offensive most recently an appearance last week in Sarasota, Fla., to highlight conservative efforts to limit education marks the end of the When they go low, we go high brand of politics popularized by former First Lady Michelle Obama during the early days of the Trump era. Democrats believed that the vulgarization of the public square was beneath them, and that mindset was a losing tactic. The political reality is that the high-minded ideal doesnt work if you allow your opposition to choose the battleground.

Newsom has chosen to launch his national strategy by touring the Deep South and highlighting the progressive case for voting access, antidiscrimination laws, LGBTQ rights and academic freedom all currently under assault by the modern Republican Party.

This is a profoundly different approach for Democrats in the modern era of presidential campaigns, which was defined nearly three decades ago by a young southern governor named Bill Clinton. He adopted the informal campaign theme Its the economy, stupid to emphasize the New Democrats goal of focusing like a laser beam on economic issues in the post-Cold War era. Clinton, under the banner of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, pushed his party to focus on economic issues, not social issues, as it fought to win voters in the mainstream and get Democrats back in the habit of winning presidential elections.

Newsom is the right man at the right time to successfully employ this strategy. His famous move in 2004 allowing same-sex marriages when he was mayor of San Francisco, while proclaiming that social change was coming whether you like it or not made a lot of Democrats uncomfortable at the time, but also set his party on course to embracing rapidly changing social norms as a winning national strategy.

Newsoms unapologetic embrace of such broadly popular social issues as same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana and the nations most progressive positions on gun control and reproductive rights gives the countrys largest blue state governor the bully pulpit to drive Democrats in a new direction.

While Biden is wisely focused on inflation and the war in Ukraine, Newsom has picked up the issues that animate the necessary coalitions to win elections. Lamenting the lack of a fight just weeks prior to the 2022 midterm election, Newsom quipped Wheres my party? believing that by leaning into cultural issues, congressional Democrats had a better chance at fending off GOP attacks.

Newsom has good reason to believe this. The college-education divide is perhaps the single most significant dividing line in American politics. Those who have college diplomas are moving rapidly toward Democrats, and those without are moving just as rapidly toward Republicans. It is precisely these voters who are rejecting the social, cultural and race-based extremism of the GOP that cost Republicans in the 2018 midterms, got Joe Biden elected president in 2020, and helped Democrats mitigate a massive red wave in the 2022 midterm elections. The tenuous relationship that college-educated Republican voters have had with Trumps Republican Party has cost the GOP dearly in recent elections, and Newsom is betting theres more mileage to be had.

As a motivating issue, the economy is no longer moving key segments of voters as it once did. Republicans have chosen a path forsaking policy ideas about how to help workers in the post-industrial age and are focusing exclusively on opposing a changing America. That leaves both parties defaulting to culture wars.

For decades, Republicans have looked to Democratic cultural excess for success at the ballot box, but considerable demographic, social and technological change has transformed the traditional terms of political engagement. Simply put, American culture today is not what it was 30 years ago.

Unfortunately, Newsoms pushing his party headlong into the culture wars means Democrats will give even shorter shrift to their economic message, a drift that has seen them lose a growing number of Latino and Black voters. The likelihood of this strategy pushing Democrats further away from developing the aspirational working-class message they need to win over blue-collar workers is considerable. But for the moment, the framing of Newsoms effort as the Campaign for Democracy is as accurate as it is urgent.

The reticence of most Democrats to engage in this aggressive style of politicsneeds to be set aside. Newsom is showing a new generation of Democrats they can win the culture wars if they can muster the fortitude to play the hardball offense they are so accustomed to losing to.

Mike Madrid is a Republican political consultant and co-founder of The Lincoln Project.

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Appearing in Florida, Newsom shows Democrats how to campaign in a culture war - Los Angeles Times

I once led a drink boycott.

It was my sophomore year of high school. At least, I think it was. Im hedging my bets because Im getting to the age where my kids or wife sometimes stop me when Im telling a story and suggest the details are different than the first 73 times I told it.

Age does things to our memory. But heres the story as I remember it:

We had two soda machines in our high school lunch room. Back then, a soda cost a quarter. My drink of choice was Mountain Dew. But one day, the machine supplier made a change. The price for my nectar of the Gods was now going to be 35 cents.

This cant stand, I thought. So I stood on the lunch room table and channeled the Mel Gibson portrayal of William Wallace in the movie Braveheart, thumping my chest and demanding freedom from price betrayal.

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OK, check that. Braveheart didnt come out until a decade after I graduated from high school. And I probably didnt stand on the table. But I did ask my friends to stop buying Pepsi products from the machine with the higher prices.

It worked. We drank Mello Yello for a couple of weeks. The price returned to 25 cents. For a while.

These days, kids dont even need loose change for soda and snack machines. They can use credit and debit cards. And I cant remember the last time I paid even 50 cents for a can of soda.

I mention this story because our fair citys most famous corporate citizen is involved in a drink boycott of its own. During the NCAA championship basketball tournament, Anheuser-Busch ran a promotion for Bud Light that included transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, who is a Tik Tok influencer. Back in my day, we had celebrity spokespeople. Now we have influencers. Get off my lawn.

Because literally everything these days must devolve into a culture war, so-called conservatives, politicians and celebrities are pushing a boycott of Bud Light. Apparently, they dont believe transgender people should be allowed to exist, let alone drink the same beer they do.

Country musician Travis Tritt tweeted vulgarities about Bud Light and said he would get rid of the product on his tour bus. Congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas made a video of his refrigerator no longer having any Bud Light in it. The video did, however, show a fair amount of Karbach, a Texas craft brewery that was bought by Anheuser-Busch in 2016.

This cancel culture business is tough, especially in the ever-shrinking beer world, where big labels like Anheuser-Busch buy up Goose Island and Karbach and Breckenridge Brewery. A few years back, Anheuser-Busch hooked up with hip-hop musician Jay-Z. Then it moved away from that partnership and dove into country music. Outrage in. Outrage out.

This is one of those things that happens on the left and the right, when a brands owner does something to offend those with a different political view or tries to appeal to a new demographic. More often than not, those who decide to boycott end up looking silly, as they rush to take videos of themselves tossing the products in the trash or burning their formerly beloved possessions.

The boycotts come and go; they backfire or fade out of memory. Most of us who follow politics closely deal with enough outrage real and ginned up that we dont need it to carry over to personal consumer choices.

Representation is sort of at the heart of evolution, Bud Lights vice president of marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, said in an interview with an industry publication.

She was explaining the new branding, which sought to update the beers fratty appeal.

Youve got to see people who reflect you in the work, she said.

I saw the video on Twitter. An influencer linked to it.

With all due respect to the generations of St. Louisans who made Anheuser-Busch what it is, I dont particularly care if there is a picture of Bob Dylan, Matt Dillon or Dylan Carlson on a can of Bud Light. My loyalty is to taste and, to a certain extent, region.

For instance, during Denver Broncos games, I drink craft beer from Colorado. During St. Louis City SC games, I drink craft beer from St. Louis, preferably a Brewligans from 2nd Shift Brewery.

I like beer. Straight beer. Gay beer. Country beer. City beer. Football beer. Most of it, anyway.

A few years back, Bud Light appealed to each NFL fan base by putting team logos on the beer. Even if I were a Bud Light beer fan, I would never as in Travis Tritt and Dan Crenshaw never drink a Bud Light with a Raiders logo on it. But I didnt blame Anheuser-Busch for trying to increase its market share by making a deal with the devil.

If youre offended by your favorite beer trying to appeal to different consumer groups, then you have 99 problems, and Bud Light aint one.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch metro columnist Tony Messenger thanks his readers and explains how to get in contact with him.

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Messenger: The culture wars come to Bud Light. Cry me a river (of beer). - St. Louis Post-Dispatch