The Slow Sovietization of the West

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

 'Comrade, come to our kolkhoz!'

The circular firing squad has finally come for leftist cultural icon J.K. Rowling. Her tweet heard round the world:

Sex is not real, it would appear, to a large number of the twitterati, who promptly dogpiled Ms. Rowling whilst lamenting their now-ruined childhoods:

To understand how such a surreal sequence of events can in fact be unfolding, we offer this piece of research from a few years back. We hope you find it illuminating.

[Re-post, original post here.]

Mad About Minstrelsy

                                                                                                                                   Image source

                                  "If I could have the nigger show back again in its pristine purity,

                                         I should have little use for opera." -- Mark Twain

Spike Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled follows the tale of a disgruntled black TV exec who tries to get himself fired.  Like the two Broadway scammers in The Producers, he picks the most shocking premise possible—a modern-day minstrel show—and is horrified to see it succeed wildly.

In 2000, then, it is understood that minstrelsy is the most odious entertainment imaginable. Why?

    Minstrel shows lampooned black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, happy-go-lucky, and musical. … Racial integrationists decried them as falsely showing happy slaves while at the same time making fun of them.

The Stuttering Coon, H.Y. Leavitt, 1898

Mel Watkins, minstrelsy scholar:

So this was not advertised as a stage show. It was advertised as a peephole view of what black people were really like. To that extent, it affected all of society because those people who didn't know blacks, and there were many places where there were very few blacks, assumed that those characterizations, those depictions, those foolish characters on stage, were real black people. And so it had an immense effect on the way mainstream society thought about blacks.