Mediaboss Marketing

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, former Governor of Wisconsin and current Young Americas Foundation President Scott Walker joins Western Correspondent Tristan Justice to discuss how college campuses are the new frontier for the culture war and how conservatives can harness the opportunities presented by young people to spark change.

One of the mistakes I think conservatives have historically made is that we think and talk with our head. The left thinks and talks with their heart. We should never concede the logic, but find ways to communicate from the heart. I think thats just powerful, Walker said.

College campuses, Walker noted, are often a breeding ground for leftist ideology and conservatives should be ready to provide pushback now.

This is just an opportunity we have to address in our society for sure, but to use it to wedge in much, much bigger issues that are about really changing who controls the economy, about changing who dominates the government, and those are things that change the direction of where America is headed going forward, Walker concluded. We can continue to be a great country, and to improve. We dont need to adopt Marxist or even socialist philosophies to do that.

Listen here:

Visit link:
Scott Walker On The New Frontier Of The Culture Wars - The Federalist

When Presbyterian pastor Walter Kim became the first person of color to lead the National Association of Evangelicals, he said he wanted to get beyond the metaphor of "culture wars" and instead build bridges.

But Kim took over the role as the country reached new heights of political polarization last year.

The father of two is tapping into his familys history as he enters his second year as the organizations leader and addresses a path forward for evangelical Christians.

Kim didnt grow up as an evangelical. He established his faith in high school and says he found comfort within evangelicalism's deep commitment to scripture, to personal transformation of Jesus.

His father, a refugee, escaped communist China by crossing a river in a barrel, he says. Kims dad eventually took the family to the U.S. with the help of a Lutheran pastor. Then for years afterward, an Irish Catholic family took Kims household under their wing, he explains.

People of faith have been deeply a part of my own family history in terms of welcoming us to America, he says.

As a pastor of color, he says he wants to summon that level of care and hospitality to reach across differences that right now seem insurmountable in a time of tremendous polarization." That means starting conversations about identity and faith.

NAE leaders, including himself, understand that having conversations about faith and identity can be complicated by what evangelicalism is often associated with whiteness, a certain political identity and a sense of hypocrisy between what the moral witness and character is of evangelicalism versus its statement, he says.

One in three American evangelicals identifies as a person of color. But a lot of emphasis has been put on white evangelicals, in part because of political divisions that were laid bare during the Trump administration.

Kim says there is a much richer history and diversity to evangelicalism than what the current narrative implies. The Assemblies of God, he points out, is 50% white congregants and 50% congregants of color.

In the past, evangelicals have engaged in issues of racial justice and reconciliation, he says. In 1912, the second conference of the NAACP was hosted at Park Street Church, a flagship evangelical church in Boston Kim says, adding he was the pastor there for 15 years. The first chartered group of the NAACP rose from that conference, he notes.

Yet, Kim acknowledges the conversations about racial justice movements are incredibly painful. Within the NAE, theres a moment of reckoning in terms of not just diversifying the people in the pews on Sundays, but how to support a diversity of culture where we engage meaningfully and in solidarity with the vastly different life experiences and expressions of faith, he says.

Thats no easy task. If it were, it would have been solved already, he says. Kim believes faith is well equipped to address these issues, even if religion hasnt always adequately addressed problems of identity and faith in the past.

Some evangelicals feel like many leaders in the movement sacrificed their credibility and moral high ground by adamantly aligning themselves with former President Donald Trump, as The Daily Beasts Matt Lewis reports.

While Kim makes it clear the NAE doesnt give political endorsements or statements, he says the organization does engage in policy that pertains to faith. Evangelicals have a wide range of political expressions, he says.

After Trumps loss, he says the wider community has been soul searching again on what is the appropriate use of power, and how would a follower of Jesus engage in this pluralistic society and constructive dialog even as it seeks to challenge and present a faith perspective?

For him, that means strengthening the political, social and cultural expressions and implications of evangelicalism in the public eye.

Right now, Kim is thinking deeply about public theology and raising the next generation of believers, he says, so evangelicals become more informed by scripture than we are informed by our social media feed.

James Perkins Mastromarinoand Ciku Theuri produced and edited this interview for broadcast withTodd Mundt. Serena McMahonadapted it for the web.

More:
National Association Of Evangelicals Leader Strives To Break Down Barriers, 'Build Bridges' - Here And Now

Given todays long overdue focus on systemic racism and the raging culture wars that awareness has engendered its reasonable to wonder what the future will be (and should be) for storied but politically offensive movies like Gone With the Wind, The Searchers, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and The Jazz Singer.

These are just a handful among the hundreds maybe thousands of old Hollywood films with scenes, themes and language ranging from highly objectionable to abhorrent. The romanticization of slavery in Gone With the Wind, one of historys most successful and beloved movies, is truly shocking when watched today but so is the less familiar image of Al Jolson falling to his knees in blackface in The Jazz Singer and the insidiously cheerful musical sexism of 1954s Seven Brides.

For years the battle over such films has been between those who want these sorts of bigoted movies retired and deplatformed, and those who dismiss such ideas as cancel culture and prefer the world to go on as it always has.

Sometimes it feels like middle ground is hard to find between these warring factions. But I was cheered recently to see that Turner Classic Movies had chosen a thoughtful third way for dealing with what it called problematic or troubling old movies in a series called Reframed, which began March 4 and has its final episode Thursday.

Rather than burying racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive films in some basement vault and pretending they never were made, TCM instead picked 18 movies including the ones above and aired them over a four-week period. In the featured films, men abduct women, Asians are mimicked, Native Americans are dehumanized and slaughtered, African Americans are ridiculed and demonized (not to mention bought and sold).

But instead of presenting them without comment or judgment, TCM added intros and after-discussions in which its film expert hosts discuss the movies through a modern lens.

Male domination as romantic fantasy is discussed in connection with Seven Brides, a musical comedy in which seven backwoods frontiersmen kidnap seven women to be their wives.

The swaggering, macho, anti-Native American vigilante played by John Wayne in The Searchers was debated by the experts: Was he a hero or antihero? Gone With the Wind was flatly (and rightly) characterized as supporting a white supremacist point of view. Mickey Rooneys appalling comic portrayal of the Japanese photographer who lives upstairs from Audrey Hepburns character in Breakfast at Tiffanys was discussed as a vile relic of World War II animosity.

Discussion. Analysis. Reconsideration of the prejudices, stereotypes and bigotry that suffuse these films. A review of the historical context in which they were made. These strike me as a healthy way to approach troubling old movies (as well as troubling books, statues and school names). Suppression, by contrast, is a form of denial, of erasing the reality of past attitudes.

Not that TCM did it perfectly. The Reframed discussions are heavy on white presenters, even though audiences might prefer to hear from more of the Native Americans, Asians, Latinos and others who were so often the targets of anger or ridicule. There is an annoyingly measured quality in the discussions even of the most egregiously racist films. (Perhaps that was unavoidable from a group of avowed cinephiles speaking on a network whose core business, after all, is showing old movies.)

One of the big questions that went undiscussed in the segments I saw was how we should feel about these films. What if we fall for the romance of Rhett and Scarlett in Gone With the Wind, despite knowing all the reasons we shouldnt? What if we root for cowboys over Indians in a western? Are these things unavoidable or are they moral failings?

Still, I thought TCM made a serious good-faith effort toward a better, broader understanding of the nuance and complexity of our American past. According to Charlie Tabesh, TCMs senior vice president for programming, Reframed has received some criticism from both the right and the left, but more of the objections have come from the right, with people complaining: Dont lecture me. I just want to watch the movie.

Reframed comes in the wake, among other things, of a Los Angeles Times op-ed article written in June 2020 by John Ridley, the African American director, screenwriter and novelist, who called for HBO Max to remove Gone With the Wind from its rotation of films and then after a period to return it to the air, presented with more context. HBO Max did exactly that.

After the summers racial justice protests and a concerted push in recent years from within the industry Hollywood is rethinking what gets made, who gets to make it and what from the past should still be shown. According to a recent article in the Hollywood Reporter, for instance, Disney holds a monthly meeting with a committee of outside advisors to discuss inclusivity, diversity, stereotypes and insensitivity in programming. Some studios and streaming services are using content warnings or disclaimers about negative depictions in old films.

There are lots of ways of addressing these issues. But sweeping history under the rug or pretending that those old wounds werent inflicted is the wrong way to go.

@Nick_Goldberg

Read the original here:
What should happen to racist and sexist old Hollywood movies? - Los Angeles Times

Indeed he is. Morrison doesnt do culture, philosophy, or ideology. In 2017 he notoriously said freedom of speech doesnt create one job. (To which the reply could be made nor does the presumption of innocence.)

What the recent media attention on the behaviour of MPs and their staff in Parliament House has not done is derail the Morrison governments policy reform agenda because there isnt one.

Presumably the reason the Prime Minister has been silent about the handcuffing and arrest in her home by the Victoria Police of a pregnant mother following her social media protest supporting an anti-lockdown protest, is because he regards the maintenance of the rule of law in the country as falling into the culture wars category.

A few weeks ago Morrison was asked on Melbourne radio [whether] we are too woke and thats affecting democracy and debate, do you think we are too woke?.

Morrison replied: I think theres a lot of talk about all this. But you know what? Right now, what people care about, and what I care about is their health and their jobs.

The challenges the Coalition faces cant be overcome by the application of the Prime Ministers pragmatism.

Morrison has a tendency to personalise policy and draw on his personal and family experiences when talking about the government. All politicians do it, but Morrison does it more than most. For example, when he announced the royal commission into the disability sector he talked about his family.

Using empathy to frame questions of policy can be very powerful indeed, but it does mean that when empathy appears to be lacking the result is particularly stark, such as when in response to a question about the federal governments management of bushfires, Morrison answered: I dont hold a hose, mate. Thats a true statement, but not one thats empathetic.

Whether to select a person to represent the Liberal Party not on the basis of their ability, but according to their gender or ethnicity or some other aspect of their identity is a question of principle, not practicality.

Contrary to what might have been expected, the pandemic hasnt paused the culture wars, it has accelerated them. For at least some people the suffering they endured during the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown of their lives has prompted a search for non-material outcomes that are different from what went before.

From the migration of the Black Lives Matter from the United States to Australia, to the toppling of statues associated with slavery or colonialism, to the debate about the date of Australia Day, the culture wars show no signs of abating.

The empathy and understanding the public demand of their leaders in the current political climate isnt a product of practicalities or pragmatism.

Avoiding any talk about the countrys culture is a strategy that might have worked for Morrison at the last election. He is probably the only conservative politician who could have won the 2019 federal election, albeit narrowly. The persona of a daggy dad focused obsessively on the hip-pocket nerve suited the times of two years ago perfectly. Plus, Morrison wasnt Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten.

But the zeitgeist of 2021 is different from 2019.

Visit link:
Woke warriors are after the PM - The Australian Financial Review

Vaughan Gething on Question Time

Wales Health Minister has said that the UK Governments decree that the union flag should be flown above all of their buildings was an attempt to have culture wars.

Speaking on BBC Question Time, Vaughan Gething said that it was an attempt to create a row on an issue that would have no real impact on anyones life.

Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price responded that it was an attempt to quash the Welsh independence movement, but would backfire as the union flag was representative of Wales invisibility within the union.

The panelllists, which also included Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies, former Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox and retired rugby union referee Nigel Owens were asked whether there was any danger that forcing people to fly to flag could be met with resistance.

Theres a danger you get too upset about this when we already have the Welsh flag and the union jack flying over the Welsh Government building, Vaughan Gething said.

Im proud to be Welsh and British and Im proud of my Zambian heritage as well. I think for politicians its not so much about having a row about flags but about the future of the country.

You know if we fly the flag over all local council buildings or not, well have a row about it but will it change anybodys life? I dont think it will.

Asked about First Minister Mark Drakefords comments in which he said the union was over, Vaughan Gething said that those comments werent about the flag theyre about how the UK works.

Recognising that power is held in different parts of the UK. And just having the UK Government making all the choices when people dont agree with each other isnt the right way forward.

Its about remaking the Union. Its a voluntary association of the four nations. I think were all better off in the Union together, but we need a way for the Union to work in the future, otherwise the danger is that well end up dividing the UK and well see it fall apart.

That obviously isnt what I want to see. But in Wales we need to be able to make our own decisions on a whole range of areas that are already here in the Welsh Parliament, that people are going to vote on at the start of May.

Refused

Adam Price said that flying the flag represented how Wales was treated within the UK.

This has obviously been designed really as a response to the growing support for Scottish and Welsh independence. It might have the opposite effect in Wales, because there is no more potent symbol of Wales invisibility within this Union than the Union Jack, Adam Price said.

Because were the only home nation that isnt represented on it. And therein lies a deep truth about how we are treated as a nation within this unequal United Kingdom.

Therein lies the experience of Wales. We saw it with the furlough, didnt we the firebreak. The Welsh Government asked for the furlough to be extended.

We were refused, endangering our lives. When the situation changed in England, hey presto, they extended the furlough. And the people of Wales noticed that.

This is how Wales has been treated in this United Kingdom and its there to see on the flag itself.

Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies said it should be mandated that both flags fly in Wales because we are a proud country on our own and also part of the United Kingdom.

Im proud to call myself an Unionist, but Im equally proud to be a Welshman as well a passionate Welshman, who puts 19 and a half stone on the veterans rugby field now and again, he said.

Read the original post:
UK Government's order to fly union flag 'an attempt to have culture wars' says Health Minister - Nation.Cymru