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Violence toward Black people and protests for racial justice were rampant in Philadelphia during the 1918 flu pandemic, in much the same way they have been during the current coronavirus pandemic.

Adella Bond fired her revolver outside her window into the South Philadelphia air, hoping to attract police as a mob of Irish American people gathered around her home to tell her she wasnt welcome.

Bond, a Black woman who was a municipal court probation officer, knew that racial conflicts unfolded in neighborhoods that had once belonged to only White people but were beginning to house Black people as they migrated from the South to the North during the Great Migration, said Kenneth Finkel, a professor in the department of history at Temple University in Philadelphia, and the author of Insight Philadelphia: Historical Essays Illustrated.

Black people were seeking work, property ownership and refuge from Southern violence from 1916 to 1970, when ultimately millions of them traveled north for industrial employment available there because of the labor shortages that started during World War I even during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Southern Black people sought those same features, as well as better quality of life, through World War II and afterward (although segregation and other obstacles persisted for a while).

Bond knew that White people had welcomed a Black family to a nearby neighborhood by harassing them and burning their furniture in the street earlier that July. She was also aware that another woman of color had previously lived in the house on Ellsworth Street that Bond moved into on Wednesday, July 24, 1918 so she supposed that the area may have been safer for Black people.

The second time she walked down that street, however, she was stoned. The violence came to her front door two days later, when about 100 White men and boys surrounded her house on Friday, July 26.

I heard them talk about having guns, and I saw the guns and cartridges. At last a man came along with a baby in his arms, Bond told her attorney on July 30, 1918, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper. He handed the baby to a woman, took a rock and threw it. The rock went through my parlor window. I didnt know what the mob would do next, and I fired my revolver from my upper window to call the police. A policeman came, but he wouldnt try to cope with that mob alone, so he turned it into a riot call.

The rock thrower, who had been shot in the leg, was arrested and held without bail. Police arrested Bond for inciting to riot, and the events of that day precipitated a slew of racial conflicts and riots that constituted one of the most violent periods in Philadelphias history.

Violence instigated by White people, violent police encounters and protests for racial justice were rampant in Philadelphia during the 1918 flu pandemic. George Floyd, a Black man from Minneapolis, was killed by a White policeman in May 2020. That killing and others by police led to the Black Lives Matter movement gaining momentum over the summer, in terms of national and global reach, numbers of protests and new supporters beyond Black communities.

Despite the challenges Black Philadelphians faced in 1918, they, too, summoned the spirit needed to work toward change.

The impact of these crowded race riots on the flu case and death rates in Philadelphia is unknown. The riots took place during a lull between the first and second waves of the pandemic, said Dr. Jeremy Brown, an emergency care physician and author of Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History, via email. As such, and during the continuing fighting during the great war in Europe, attention was surely focused on other issues. The riot was not a superspreader event, because at the time there wasnt much disease to be spread. That came back in the fall.

We may not be able to establish casualty scientifically or historically between the outbreak of disease and the virus of racism, but we understand all too well that when we fear for our very lives, our mortality can shred our civility, Brown said in an unpublished paper on the topic. This dread exposes a primal panic that unleashes the violent human impulse to blame and hurt others in ways inexcusable. There are many lessons weve learned from looking at the history of pandemics, but some, regrettably, we never seem to take to heart.

Philadelphia had the largest Black population of any Northern city in 1910, although African Americans were only 5% of the citys population, said Charles Hardy, a professor of history at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

The Great Migration resulted in Black newcomers in White neighborhoods and housing shortages, to which realtors responded by increasing rent prices effectively causing housing competition among Black and White people, and relocation by those who couldnt afford the new prices.

READ MORE: From the front lines, Black nurses battle twin pandemics of racism and coronavirus

Bond moved into a working class, tough Irish-American neighborhood, Hardy said. Philadelphia is historically known as the city of neighborhoods. The boundaries of ethnically specific neighborhoods werent to be crossed then.

Rather than blame the realtors, White residents harassed their new Black neighbors for their struggles and for not adhering to social codes in the segregated city. The citys a powder keg at this point in time, Hardy said.

A city tense over war, the flu pandemic and race riots erupted as what started at Bonds house that Friday night spread across about 2 square miles. Crowds of hundreds of rioters became thousands as the unrest escalated.

When things exploded, Finkel said, it went on for days. Every night was another chaotic mess.

On Saturday, a Black man named William Box was accused of thievery and chased by White men. A police bureau clerk tried to stop Box, who allegedly pulled a knife and cut the clerks arm.

Several policemen arrived on the scene, but were unable to curb the mob of whites and the negro was struck many times by persons in the crowd,' wrote Vincent P. Franklin, then an author and professor of history, in a 1975 paper on the race riots. Cries of lynch him' caused the police to send for help, and a squad of reserves arrived in time to prevent the mob doing serious injury to the negro,' Franklin continued, quoting a Philadelphia Inquirer report. They arrested Box and took him to the hospital.

The next morning, a White mob chased Jesse Butler as he walked home from a party. While running, Butler fired a shot into the mob and allegedly injured Hugh Lavery, a White man. Police who had arrived soon found that Butler was also wounded and took both men to the hospital, but Lavery died before their arrival.

Hostility spread as groups of White people attacked Black people on their regular travels throughout Philadelphia. Civilians, as the Home Defense Reserves typically used for emergencies, assisted around 250 policemen in maintaining a riot zone near Bonds neighborhood.

Black people felt tension and concern over police brutality, Hardy said. Philadelphia police forces were segregated, (and) most policemen were political appointees. Then theres this discriminatory enforcement of laws.

One of those was a type of stop-and-frisk practice. White patrolmen Roy Ramsey and John Schneider stopped a Black man, Riley Bullock, on an avenue and searched him on Monday. After finding a pocketknife Bullock legally carried, the patrolmen beat and arrested him. As they took Bullock into the station, he was fatally shot in the back, Finkel said, by a negro, who was seen making his escape. The police gave chase, but the alleged assailant managed to escape, reported many local newspapers that ran the unsubstantiated story.

The next day brought the revelation that Bullock was killed by a bullet from the gun of patrolman Ramsey who claimed that he slipped and his gun fired when he was taking Bullock into the station.

Bullock wasnt the only victim of police violence. When Ramsey and Schneider arrested a Black man named Preston Lewis that morning, they beat him so severely that Lewis had to be taken to the hospital. As Lewis laid on the operating table, Schneider reportedly began striking him before ultimately being carried out of the room by White officers.

Tuesday was calmer, but mobs tried to lynch a Black man for allegedly stealing a watermelon that day. When its all done four days later, youve had several hundred people who were injured, four people dead, Hardy said. The houses of dozens of Black families had been destroyed, forcing them to flee. And though White people had instigated most of the violence, the majority of the 60 people arrested were Black.

What you have in the early 1900s and today is rising nativism, White ethnocentrism and White supremacy, Hardy said. After World War I is when you witness the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan which, in the 1920s, becomes a major political force. The culture wars that were witnessing today are very much reminiscent of the culture wars in the 1920s. Its basically fear of a White minority.

READ MORE: Fed study: 1918 flu deaths linked to relative strength of Nazism

There are chilling parallels between what we have seen in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic with the revelation of quite brutal police killings of African Americans and what actually happened back in 1918, Brown said.

That story is a very sobering one not least for which it reminds us that this kind of violence against the African American community is nothing new, sadly, he said. We know how long its been around, but when it comes to pandemics, its been around for well over a century.

Many Black Philadelphians organized to prevent experiencing further violence, destruction and death at the hands of White people, Franklin wrote.

Ministers and other prominent Black Philadelphians met and wrote a letter to the citys director of public safety. In it, they castigated the police force over the lack of protection and arrests of Black people during the violence, Franklin wrote, quoting the letter as reprinted by local newspapers.

In court, Black lawyers defended Black people who had been arrested during the riots. Black ministers and civic leaders formed the Association for the Protection of Colored People (or Colored Protective Association) in August, immediately gaining hundreds of members who worked and fundraised to represent prosecuted Black people and to support the civil rights of Black Philadelphians.

The association was responsible for the prosecution of patrolman Ramsey for killing Bullock, and patrolman Schneider for assaulting Lewis, but neither of the men were convicted partly due to fellow Black patrolmen backing down from testifying what they had really seen.

Black Philadelphians did succeed in getting the commander and all members of the police force transferred out of the 17th District, where most of the rioting had occurred. This event was hailed as a major victory for Philadelphias black community, Franklin wrote.

The association achieved mobilizing Black Philadelphians by informing them of their lawful civil rights, advising them on handling racial discrimination, giving speeches in churches and providing legal assistance for those who had been arrested or assaulted. When Black people made protests to government officials about violent White sailors, the commander of the Fourth Naval District investigated the situation, Franklin wrote.

When you look at Black Lives Matter demonstrations and the calls for police accountability and changes in police behavior, Hardy said, we can see a sort of predecessor to that in Philadelphia during the First World War.

These were the more significant and graphic results of the organized efforts of blacks to improve their situation in the City of Brotherly Love in the aftermath of the July, 1918, riot, Franklin wrote.

The similarities between the race riots of 1918 and racial conflicts today emphasize the importance of knowing the truth, Finkel said. Its really important not to just pat ourselves on the back and move on and forget the ugly chapters. Those ugly chapters are very informative and useful and real.

READ MORE: For churchgoers during the Covid-19 pandemic, a deadly lesson from the 1918 flu

The parallels also highlight that the movement toward racial equality is one step forward, two steps back, Hardy said.

Weve gotten unprecedented numbers of people of color in political office on the state level, he added. Weve got Kamala Harris as vice president. So, its a mixed bag. Its just this ongoing struggle. Clearly White supremacy and nativism are very strong movements in the United States today. On the other hand, a movement towards greater racial and gender equality I think continues.

Read more from the original source:
White violence and Black protests during the 1918 flu have a lesson for today - WTOP

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The politician who championed the bathroom bill in the Texas Legislature in 2017 is now singing The Star-Spangled Banner.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick unfurled the first of his priority bills this week, in reaction to news that the NBAs Dallas Mavericks had stopped playing the national anthem before home games.

That went on for 13 games before anyone noticed, according to The Athletic. But when they noticed, they really noticed. The news traveled all the way to the lieutenant governor, and before you could say dawns early light, he had proposed the Star Spangled Banner Protection Act.

It hasnt been filed yet, but it would require the playing of the anthem at all events that receive public funding. Presumably, that would include sessions of the House and Senate, which start with prayers, and pledges to the U.S. and Texas flags, but no anthem.

It is hard to believe this could happen in Texas, but Mark Cubans actions of yesterday made it clear that we must specify that in Texas we play the national anthem before all major events, Patrick said in a news release. In this time when so many things divide us, sports are one thing that bring us together right, left, Black, white and brown.

Cuban is the owner of the Mavericks.

We respect and always have respected the passion people have for the anthem and our country, Cuban tweeted. But we also loudly hear the voices of those who feel that the anthem does not represent them. We feel that their voices need to be respected and heard, because they have not been. Going forward, our hope is that people will take the same passion they have for this issue and apply the same amount of energy to listen to those who feel differently from them.

The problem, as far as professional basketball is concerned, has already been solved. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday that the leagues teams will be required to play the national anthem before each game.

That was after Patrick had a chance to tweet that Cubans decision was a slap in the face to every American & an embarrassment to Texas. Sell the franchise & some Texas Patriots will buy it. We ARE the land of free & the home of the brave.

The states culture wars are back, led by their most prominent warrior. In 2017, Patrick led the unsuccessful, session-dominating effort to prevent transgender Texans from using restrooms and other public facilities that match their gender. It was a divisive fight that fired up voters and activists who were variously delighted and outraged at the proposal. And it established the understated theme for the 2019 legislative session that followed: Were not messing with things like the bathroom bill this time.

Thats all behind us now. While its dealing with a pandemic, economic troubles, police behavior and funding, election and voting laws, and all the rest, the Texas Legislature is also going to discuss regulating the playing of the national anthem.

Patrick has kept his trap shut for the first month of the five-month regular session, buttoning his lip about the recount of the 2020 votes for his friend, Donald Trump, staying out of the news around the siege of the U.S. Capitol and holding his silence as Gov. Greg Abbott laid out his own priorities for the current session.

The lieutenant governor poked his head up at the beginning of the legislative session to make sure Republicans in the Senate can get things done without Democratic help when need be. But he has been uncharacteristically quiet.

Until, that is, he became aware of the absence of the sound of music. He was already working on presenting a list of legislation he wants the Senate to work on, but jumped at the prospect of a culture battle over the anthem and Cuban.

The man who brought you the bathroom bill is back, starting the game with a call for all to rise for the playing of the nations fight song.

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Analysis: A Star-Spangled culture war in Texas - The Texas Tribune

Unlike many of her predecessors, though, Gaga spoke to the LGBTQ community as one of its members. She told interviewers that her 2008 hit Poker Face was about masking her own same-sex desire, and in a 2009 Rolling Stone cover story she identified as bisexual. In clear ways, she set out to destabilize gender too. While other divas shellacked themselves into paragons of feminine glamour, Gagas grotesque fashions seemed to satirize the idea of the socialite, the model, and the doll. A rumor took hold online alleging that Gaga was actually a man in drag, or maybe a woman with a penis. Rather than seem offended by the plainly transphobic and obnoxious speculation, Gaga made sport of it. I do have a really big donkey dick, she told an interviewer when asked about the matter. Her bracing 2010 speech calling for the repeal of Dont Ask, Dont Tell demonstrated Gaga pairing her aesthetics with activism.

Gagas 2009 EP The Fame Monster added leather-goth angst to her sparkly brew, resulting in smashes such as Bad Romance and Alejandro. But she still needed to tackle the much-feared test of longevity facing new stars: the sophomore full-length album. For this, she would go lighter, brighter, and make all her subtext into text. To record the song Born This Way, Gaga turned to producersFernando Garibay, Jeppe Laursen, DJ White Shadowwho were conversant in both disco history and the new EDM sound that was trending at the time. Lyrically, she sought to make as clear a statement as possible. I want to write my this-is-who-the-fuck-I-am anthem, but I dont want it to be hidden in poetic wizardry and metaphors, she told Billboard. I want it to be an attack, an assault on the issue, because I think, especially in todays music, everything gets kind of washy sometimes and the message gets hidden in the lyrical play.

Indeed, outside of Chistina Aguileras Beautiful, scattered Black Eyed Peas tracks, and Kanye Wests provocations, the 21st centurys first decade was not a banner time for social conscientiousness in pop music. But as the always online, famously idealistic Millennial generation came of age, the tides began to change. Barack Obamas first years in office saw Beyonc, Kesha, Katy Perry, and other peers of Gagas make feminist messages a de rigueur subject on Top 40 radio. The emergence of Kendrick Lamarwho spoke to the grievances underlying the nascent Black Lives Matter movementmarked a renewed period of forthright political engagement in commercial hip-hop. MTV created a new award, Best Video With a Message, in 2011, and Born This Way won it.

Really, though, Gagas song reached back in time as much as it looked forward. The track drew from the 1970s Motown song I Was Born This Way, which was popularized by the openly gay singer Carl Bean. Its first lines go: Im walking through life in natures disguise / You laugh at me and you criticize cause Im happy, carefree and gay / Yes, Im gay. Talk about a this-is-who-the-fuck-I-am anthem, right? In a 2016 Vice interview, Bean explained how his openness wasmaybe counterintuitively, given how much gay rights have progressed since thenof its era:

At the time, what the disc jockeys coined as message music was pretty big, and thats what I wanted to do. Message music came out in the late 60s, and it caught on with the young folk at the time. We were in the middle of the civil-rights movement, women were staging sit-ins, and there was a huge dislike for the war in Vietnam. You started to hear, little by little, messages that spoke to what people were dealing with everydaywhat people were feeling Whether youre in the club or wherever, you were hearing about the times.

Message music never fully died out; Gaga was also inspired by the early-90s period of TLC and En Vogue singing of empowerment and safe sex. Whats notable is how these obvious predecessors for Born This Way were created by Black people speaking clearly from their own individual experiences.

Excerpt from:
The Lady Gaga Anthem That Previewed a Decade of Culture Wars - The Atlantic

The NBA put a quick stop to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cubans attempt to end the singing of the national anthem before home games. The anthem was sung and cheered before last nights tipoff against Atlanta in the American Airlines Center.

But many people say the short-lived drama is a microcosm of their experience in a culture that is increasingly hostile to their beliefs.

The Mark Cuban national anthem story is not a sports story. Its part of a much larger campaign against conservative values, financial analyst and Fox News news host Charles V. Payne wrote on Twitter.

Payne grouped the anthem in a cornucopia of issues that include the U.S. flag, religion and guns, saying they generate political attacks designed to demonize the brand.

Conservatives better fight back soon, he concluded.

The starred-and-striped conservative brand is draped with red, white and blue, and former President Donald J. Trump used it effectively, so much so that Americans not aligned with Trump are struggling to reclaim the symbols and the use of the word patriot.

A recent analysis of people who voted for Trump in 2020 found that patriotic sentiment was a unifying force that drove people to support Trump even if they had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. And oversized American flags and red caps became a controversial part of Trumps Make America Great Again brand.

The anthem, however, became a political issue because of an athlete, not a politician. And despite long-standing complaints about how difficult it is for ordinary people to sing, for many Americans, The Star-Spangled Banner is a beloved and reliably inspiring tradition that signals the start of diverse sporting events, from the Super Bowl to small-town 5K races, and is even a part of Super Bowl betting.

Heres a look at how a poem scribbled by an attorney in 1814 came to be part of Americas culture war in 2021, and what its future might be.

In the same week that Cuban said the anthem would no longer be played at Mavericks games, an article in People magazine described Sundays Super Bowl performance by Jazmine Sullivan and Erick Church as incredible and unifying.

Months earlier, however, the Mavericks owner had decided to drop the song before games.

According to Tim Cato of The Athletic, who broke the story, the anthem had not been played at any of the games at American Airlines Center in Dallas this season, and no announcement had been made. When asked about it, Cuban confirmed to The Athletic that he had made the decision, declining to say anything else.

Cuban later described the decision as something of a social experiment he had purposefully designed.

We have no problem with playing it. But we do want these very important conversations to continue, he told a reporter for The Dallas Morning News.

But the absence of the anthem had gone unnoticed for weeks, and in fact, the song was not always a pregame ritual in Dallas.

According to The New York Times, God Bless America had been sung before games for 16 years under owner Donald Carter. The national anthem replaced it when Ross Perot Jr. bought the team in 1996, and The Star-Spangled Banner continued after Cuban acquired the team in 2000, even as controversy erupted over former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernicks decision in 2016 to protest police brutality and racism by sitting, then later kneeling, during the anthem instead of standing with his team.

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way, Kaepernick said to reporters after his initially quiet protest got attention.

Kaepernick, who has not been able to find work in the NFL since opting out of his 49ers contract in 2017, has since found greater sympathy for his action, as the 2020 death of George Floyd energized the the Black Lives Matter movement. The Mavericks knelt as a team during the anthem last year, even as some conservatives said they found the action offensive.

The minute one player kneels during the anthem, I am out, Dallas radio host Mark Davis tweeted in July, to which Cuban tersely replied, Bye.

He later added, The National Anthem Police in this country are out of control.

Francis Scott Key had a day job as a Maryland attorney, but he also had a window seat to history as he watched the British Navy bombard Fort McHenry in 1814 from Baltimore Harbor. (He was on a ship at the time, having been stuck there after helping to negotiate the release of a captured civilian, according to History.com.)

Inspired by the sight of the American flag waving over the fort and absent suitable paper, he wrote the start of a poem that would be called Defence of Fort MHenry on the back of an envelope. When completed, the poem was published in local newspapers and eventually set to the tune of an English drinking song. As much as it could in the 1800s, the song went viral, and by the end of the century, the U.S. military was performing it during ceremonies involving the flag, and President Woodrow Wilson declared it the national anthem in 1916 by executive order. (Congress followed up with its own proclamation in 1931.)

In an age when the sins of ancestors are under scrutiny, composer Key is a candidate for cancellation.

Though his celebrated anthem proclaimed the United States the land of the free, Key was in fact a slaveholder from an old Maryland plantation family, and as a U.S. attorney argued several prominent cases against the abolitionist movement. He did speak out against the cruelties of the institution of slavery, but did not see abolition as the solution, according to History.com, which is owned by A+E Networks.

Public sentiment toward the anthem, however, is still so strong that the NBA quickly moved to counter Cubans decision, issuing a statement saying that playing The Star-Spangled Banner is not optional and that all teams must comply. The Mavericks quickly agreed, ending that singular controversy, but adding another chapter in a multi-faceted debate that will continue.

Is the anthem, like the flag, an unnecessary point of contention, as NFL Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe recently said?

Or is controversy over the flag a deep and sinister sign that America is unraveling at the seams? Many conservatives fear the latter.

For now, the Mavericks story appears to have hardened the divide between Americans who cherish the anthem and those who say it does not represent them.

The Republican lieutenant governor of Texas even filed a bill that would require the national anthem to be played at all events that receive public funding.

To Washington Post sports columnist Barry Svrluga, that would defeat the purpose, as he says the anthem already suffers from overexposure. Hearing it so often 162 times in a baseball season, half that in basketball or hockey makes each version less special. At most ballparks and arenas, theres a hot dog-buying, finding-my-seat murmur beneath the song, Svrluga wrote.

Though Svrluga finds the singing of the anthem somewhat silly and agrees with Cuban that both perspectives pro and con should be heard, he sees that the anthem could also settle into a space where it is a unifier.

The Super Bowl performance of the anthem, after all, brought together a country singer (Eric Church) and a rhythm and blues artist (Jazmine Sullivan) that was widely praised independent of the national enthusiasm for the sign-language interpretation by Warren WAWA Snipe.

And earlier this year, when a Black professional opera singer, Emmanuel Henreid, joined with a white Portland State University student, Madisen Hallberg, in an impromptu duet of the national anthem, it was described on NPR as a magical moment.

Could more moments like that lift the anthem from the hand-to-Twitter combat of the culture wars?

Svrluga says its reasonable to debate whether a polarizing song should be played in a deeply polarized society.

But, he added, At a time when we need whatever unity we can find and sports might be one place to find it, the anthem could be a two-minute span when we agree that were all Americans, that we should be together rather than separate. It could remind us that not very long ago we had more in common than we did not. Its a nice way to think, at least.

Read more:
Why is the national anthem controversial? - Deseret News

Larry Flynt, the Hustler publisher and self-made pornography magnate who died yesterday at 78, was an extremely crass man.

Aesthetically, Flynt was a one-note gold accent obsession accentuated with frat-house-horny kitsch. Professionally, Flynt trafficked in offense, peddling whatever transgression would scandalize the most people.

He published nude photos of a revered, sanctified First Lady. He published a crude joke about a reverent televangelist coupling with his own mother in an outhouse.

Flynt provoked, insulted, and scandalized for profit. And he persisted to do so, despite enormous personal cost. This is how Flynt became an accidental First Amendment antihero, and an extremely important American.

Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, build a multi-million-dollar fortune in the adult ... [+] industry and became a free speech crusader before passing away in February at 78 years old.

A generation before the online culture wars and bad-faith actors popularized and then mangled the term, Flynt was a target of what we might call cancel culture. Except that unlike Josh Hawley whining about a (briefly) revoked book deal or Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald sanctimoniously self-canceling from plush jobs at the pinnacle of the mainstream media hierarchy in order to further self-promote, Flynt, a constant underdog, suffered and survived real physical and professional violence in the name of free speech, that almost always challenged a more powerful adversary.

In this way, he offered an example of what free speech actually is, and how precarious the First Amendment can actually be. He refused to be truly and actually canceled.

He took a bullet, went to jail, and gambled his fortune in commitment of this ideal. He was an antidote to the disingenuous and entitled contemporaries who cry victimhood at the first sniff of conflict, at the first challenge to their platform and authority.

You may not have enjoyed his company, and you may think Barely Legal doesnt offer much to Western civilization. That was the point. In these and Flynts many other contradictions is a lesson in what our societys ideals really are.

The Man With The Golden Wheelchair: Flynt was confined to a gold-plated wheelchair after a white ... [+] supremacist, upset that Hustler published pictures of an interracial couple, shot him.

Hustler was in every way a reactionary response to the social-justice warriors of the 1960s and 1970s. Flynt offered a rejection of both politically correct feminism and a repudiation of the smug, upper-crust liberal veneer of Playboy. Hustlers founding ethos was a direct appeal to the forgotten man trope, the blue-collar mans-man disturbed and disempowered by shifts in acceptable speech and thought. Flynt is sort of Donald Trump-like in that way, but he is also very hard to categorize.

In a very Hustler way, Flynt used his magazine to challenge accepted norms of racial and gender hierarchy. Flynt was confined to a gold-plated wheelchair after he was shot by a crazed white supremacist, who was upset that Hustler had published pictures of an interracial couple engaged in coitus. Keep in mind what a radical and provocative act that was, less than a decade after the Supreme Court struck down the countrys last miscegenation laws.

As VICE pointed out in a 2016 profile, Hustler also risked alienating that target basechauvinistic blue-collar heterosexual maleswhen it published photos of a pre-op trans woman. Heightening contradictions like these, a serial transgressor, Flynt became a darling for critical theorists and cultural critics.

But what set him apart from the intellectual dark web, the contemporary contrarians who deem any consequence for their speech choices as censorship, is that Flynt was at constant odds with the power hierarchy, and not its product nor its defender. Flynt never demanded that his speech be given someone elses platform, that Hustler not be sold in the seedy stores on the wrong side of town. That was okay; you knew exactly where to find him. Flynt did not demand Simon & Schuster publish Barely Legal, or scream into Substack when Chester the Molester wasnt given a full-page in the New York Times.

The Obscene Man: Flynt defended himself against multiple obscenity lawsuits throughout his career ... [+] publishing Hustler magazine.

The key moment in Flynts life, and the reason why he will live on forever in American jurisprudence and in law school textbooks, is his 1987 victory in the Supreme Court. Hustler Magazine vs. Falwell was the lawsuit triggered by the 1983 satirical Campari ad, in which Rev. Jerry Falwellwho used his immense power and clout with Ronald Reagan and the Republican party to marginalize gay people, AIDS victims, and, yes, womenwas portrayed as a drunk who debauched his own mother in an outhouse. Outrageous and obviously false, the genius of the ad is that it demonstrates the concept of First Amendment free speech in its purest form: an affront, to power.

Larry Flynt found one of the biggest bullies on the playground and took his shot. Larry Flynt made a big man feel small. He continued to do this during his bounty-hunting years, when he offered million-dollar rewards for verified information of major political figures committing corrupt or immoral acts.

Larry Flynt did not have a sacred cow and Larry Flynt wanted to offend everybody, but that always meant challenging most hierarchies of control.

The obvious exception to this, where Larry Flynt is unsympathetic, is Hustlers depiction of women. There is an argument to be made that any male-centered, male-dominated pornography industry harms women, who must be exploited and must have profit extracted from their labor in order for the business model to work. Hustler, of course, transgressed much further than this. Gloria Steinem believed that if Flynt had portrayed dogs and cats the way his magazine portrayed women, he would never have been in business. While she may be right, the irony is that Steinems broadside against Flynt and his somewhat hagiographical 1996 biopic, The People Vs Larry Flynt, fueled what was absolutely a moralistic cancel crusade, that gave Flynt more attention in the form of earned media than he could ever have paid for. And at that point, who was the more powerful figure: Americas most revered feminist, or the leering man-child and king of porn?

After defending himself against a lifetime of lawsuits, Larry Flynt became a self-styled free-speech ... [+] champion.

Larry Flynt hated the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. He hated corporate control of media and thought. He thought Donald Trump was a serial liar who deserved to be impeached. He thought cannabis should be legal and loathed the pharmaceutical companies, on whose products he was addicted.

At his best, Larry Flynt constantly challenged and afflicted power, and both accepted and challenged the attendant consequences. He would never be canceled, and heunlike many others using the same rallying cryknew exactly what being canceled meant.

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Larry Flynt, The King Of Obscene Who Refused To Be Canceled - Forbes