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Meghan vs. Kate. Taylor Swift vs. Katy Perry. Jennifer Lopez vs. Mariah Carey. Famous female feuds are easy to list off, being, as they are, the bread and butter of tabloid media and bad television. As Sheryl Sandberg, for all her many flaws, has correctly observed, everyone loves a fight and they really love a catfight.

It'd have been tempting, then, for a miniseries like FX's Mrs. America, which premieres Wednesday, to have milked the tension between the conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly and feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug in its retelling of the fight over the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) during the culture wars of the 1970s. It'd have even admittedly made for compelling television; catfights aren't a pervasive TV trope because they're dull. But to its credit, Mrs. America circumvents the seductively easy narrative about powerful women at each other's throats for a more nuanced one that pits their ideas and organizing strategies against each other, with illuminating results.

There's no ignoring the natural binary at the center of the series: that you were either for ratifying the ERA, or against it. In the latter camp, played by two-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett in her first U.S. television role, was Schlafly, "the sweetheart of the silent majority" who led a successful grassroots campaign to thwart the ratification of the ERA on the grounds that it threatened the traditional family. On the other side were the feminist activists during what was arguably the height of the movement's political influence, a diverse group headed by the National Women's Political Caucus co-founders Steinem (Rose Byrne), Abzug (Margo Martindale), Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), and Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman).

To be clear, the ideas represented by the opposing sides of the ERA fight are mutually exclusive. There is no coexistence between the world desired by Phyllis Schlafly whose platform involved describing husbands as the "ultimate decision makers" in a marriage, whose "history of racism" is downplayed by the show, and whose final work was the posthumously-published Conservative Case for Trump and the world pursued by the feminists, who, while not a monolith, generally advocated for women's reproductive freedom, LGBT rights, and anti-discrimination protections. Mrs. America, however, wisely allows these ideologies to exist outside of symbolic character figureheads; Schlafly and Steinem, say, are not embodiments of their arguments, but people whose ideas are fiercely in conflict.

In other words, Feud: Phyllis and Gloria this is not. Schlafly and Steinem are the show's two most prominent characters, but despite their ideas being in conflict they never actually confront each other or even meet, much less share a frame (in real life, they occasionally exchanged barbs in the press). There are no narrowed eyes or spat insults, no tears, screaming matches, or petty remarks over the phone all usual staples of the catfight trope. Instead, the two women leaders are shown in many ways as almost being alike; both have followed an easy path to national celebrity because they are white, attractive women, and both face the same struggle to be taken seriously by the powers-that-be the men by virtue of their sex, too. Even their flaws can be parallels: Steinem is blind to her own tokenism at Ms. magazine, and Schlafly is only able to pursue her political ambitions because of the black cooks and nannies running her home in her absence.

Mrs. America further protects itself from sexist clich by emphasizing coalition building and the diversity of opinion within those coalitions. Schlafly and Steinem might both be leaders and expert organizers, but they're orbited by allies with whom they don't always see eye-to-eye. Schlafly makes concessions to southern chapter leaders who want to center pro-life arguments as part of the STOP ERA fight; Bella Abzug, meanwhile, invites Betty Friedan, who is outspokenly anti-lesbian, to be a "delegate-at-large" at the national women's convention despite disagreeing with her stance. "That's politics," both sides say at various points, a resignation to their own hypocrisies.

The show also never lets Schlafly and the housewives nor Steinem and the activists "win" or "lose," at least in those terms. Avoiding a battle between the women means neither leader can be seen as coming out on top. This is, admittedly, confusing. "Do We Need a Biopic Celebrating America's Preeminent Anti-Feminist?" wrote Vogue, while a Washington Examiner article written by Schlafly's niece blasts Mrs. America's "caricature of Phyllis Schlafly" as "pure propaganda." For both of these to be takeaways from the same show is a testament to its hazily-drawn battle lines. Who really wins? Who really loses?

After all, the great knife-twist of Mrs. America is that all women however enlightened or liberated or contentedly at home they may be are oppressed by the system they believe to have beaten in their own way. It is no mistake that many of the "strong female leads" in the show are depleted and homebound in Mrs. America's final shots. It's telling, too, that Mrs. America has not one but two major references to the 1975 feminist film Jeanne Dielman, which today remains a seminal depiction of stifling domesticity. The movie is played in the background in one scene and is subject of a direct homage in another, where the camera unwaveringly watches as Schlafly peels apples in her kitchen. To reference such a classic portrait of suffocating womanhood, one that still resonates today, is to cement the fact that these battles rage on even now.

Mrs. America doesn't need to pit women against each other for cheap narrative tension. Because even on opposite sides of the war, some uphill battles are always the same.

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Mrs. America resists the urge to pit women against each other - The Week

Some right-wing media personalities are encouraging Americans to protest stay-at-home orders, arguing it is time to start to re-open the economy.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Wednesday tweeted approvingly of people in Michigan demonstrating against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's order. "Time to get your freedom back," Ingraham declared. "Soon Marylanders, Virginians, etc will stand for their right to work, travel, assemble, socialize and worship? Massive long lasting damage is piling up day after day as many 'experts' continue to get the virus analysis wrong," Ingraham wrote in another tweet.

Ingraham wasn't the only Fox personality to express such a sentiment. Jeanine Pirro told Sean Hannity Wednesday night that the health officials "overblew what was going to happen in terms of the number of people who were going to die" and now are telling people to stay home. "No," she said. Pirro later added, "The American spirit is too strong and Americans are not going to take it. And what happened in Lansing, [Michigan], today, God bless them, it's going to happen all over the country."

Fox also spent the day spotlighting the protests. It was the top story on FoxNews.com for a fair amount of time, with the headline, "NO TO THE 'NANNY STATE.'" And it received airtime on shows where hosts appeared to somewhat agree with the protesters.

Outside Fox, others in right-wing media have also started speaking out. A prominent Infowars host is organizing a Texas rally for later this week. "Are we in martial law right now?" the host asked Wednesday. "Because we're acting like it."

The far-right blog The Gateway Pundit framed the protests as people protesting a "tyrannical governor" who had implemented "police state policies." And Candace Owens tweeted this week she was going to the grocery store every day, expressing outrage at the fact that she was asked to wear a mask. "WTF is going on?" Owens wondered.

"We can't be careless"

I thought I'd ask Jason Miller, the former Trump comms adviser, what he thinks of right-wing media stars saying such things. Along with Steve Bannon and Raheem Kassam, Miller has co-hosts "War Room Pandemic" -- a daily radio show that has covered the coronavirus for weeks.

Miller said that he believes right-wing media personalities encouraging Americans to protest stay-at-home orders are "on the outskirts of sensible voices on this topic." Miller added, "We all want the U.S. to reopen as soon as possible, and there's plenty of room for debate for how best to do that, but we can't be careless in how we go about doing it."

The social distancing culture wars

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Some in right-wing media egg on protests against stay-at-home orders - CNN

That #YouClapForMeNow video is a passive-aggressive blast against a country that does not exist.

So, its finally happened someone has managed to turn the Covid-19 crisis into an opportunity to call British people racist. A video in which various key workers of migrant backgrounds read out a poem about how Covid has proven anti-immigration people wrong has gone viral, along with its accompanying hashtag, #YouClapForMeNow.

In the clip, the workers ranging from doctors to Deliveroo riders to that comedian Tez Ilyas, for some reason basically stick two fingers up to the people who might have once told them to go home and stop stealing our jobs but are now relying on migrant workers to get them through this crisis. Theres also a random reference to Malala and Greta Thunberg, for reasons that arent immediately clear. Still, the implied sentiment of the overall clip is well summed up by identitarian commentator Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu.

You see, social-media campaigns like this are not really about celebrating migrant workers and ethnic-minority Brits and the work many of them are doing to keep us safe and well. They are about bashing an imagined bigoted populace. To retweet something like this is not to show your solidarity with migrants, but to show you are better than the conjured-up anti-migrant bogeyman the poem alludes to.

The tiny problem with all this is that this video is trying to land a blow against a country that doesnt exist. Britain is the most pro-immigration society in Europe. Attitudes to immigration have actually become more liberal here since the Brexit vote. No one outside of a bigoted fringe wants to pull up the drawbridge and / or shudders when they think of hardworking migrant-descended Brits in the health service.

It all goes to show that Covid-19 really hasnt killed off the culture wars.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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The myth of bigoted Britain - Spiked

Even in the face of this crisis, the identitarians are doubling down.

In early March, more than 300 employees at the Guardian signed an open letter to the editor Katharine Viner to protest against the publication of supposedly anti-trans material. The catalyst was Suzanne Moores article on the deplatforming of Professor Selina Todd at Oxford University, an action that had been justified by the organisers on the grounds that Todd had previously spoken at a meeting of Womans Place UK (a group that campaigns for separate spaces and services for women). The signatories to the open letter argued that by publishing Moores views, the Guardian was no longer a safe and welcoming workplace for trans and non-binary people. To complain to ones employer about feeling unsafe has become a standard manoeuvre among those who have little tolerance for the opinions of others.

Many are now asking whether in the midst of a global pandemic in which the notion of safety has been temporarily restored to its original definition such tactics can still be effective. The problem has never been with the cry-bullies of the social-justice movement who disingenuously claim that their safety is compromised by alternative viewpoints, but rather with those in authority who capitulate to their demands. When activists called for the removal of the statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, part of their strategy was to insist that it was a form of violence to expect black students to walk in its vicinity. The statue remains in place because the university authorities had the courage not to defer to this kind of entitlement. The same cannot be said for the plaques commemorating the visit of King Leopold II of Belgium to Queen Mary University in London, which were removed because of his tyrannical reign in the Congo after a student outcry about 130 years too late.

It should go without saying that nobodys safety is being threatened by atrocities committed by long-dead historical figures. The language of physical harm is a rhetorical device intended to strengthen the case for ideological submission. More generally, the lexicon of social justice has a tendency to reduce individuals to their corporeal substance; we hear this in phrases such as female bodies, black bodies or queer bodies, a strangely dehumanising choice of words. Similarly, those who challenge the content of LGBT sex education at schools are accused of erasing gay people and somehow denying their very existence. Even the phrase brothers and sisters can be reframed as genocidal. As one activist put it, When you say brothers and sisters, youre erasing non-binary, two-spirit, and gender-expansive trans folks who live beyond the binary. Constantly being erased is exhausting.

With the coronavirus death toll rising, and the NHS struggling to cope with the rate of infections, claims that mainstream opinions are tantamount to erasure, violence and a threat to peoples safety now seem more absurd than ever. Leftist identitarians who have spent the past five years having conniptions brought on by fantasies that we are living in a state of near-fascism, and insisting that thousands of relatively affluent people are nonetheless oppressed, are now being confronted with a glimmer of actual hardship. Might it be the case that intersectional identity politics will be fatally undermined by the spread of Covid-19?

Much as I would like to believe that the pandemic will put matters into perspective, I am also aware that the agents of the culture war are already well inoculated against the concerns of material reality. Even as governments around the world are imposing draconian restrictions to citizens liberty in order to curtail the spread of the virus, social-justice activists are busy claiming the impact will be most keenly felt by disenfranchised groups. An article in Salon declares that the pandemic has been accelerated by white male privilege and the racist white voters responsible for the Trump administration. A writer for Vice bewails the postponement of trans surgery in favour of coronavirus victims. Rolling Stone explains how social distancing could lead to a spike in white nationalism. CNN criticises Donald Trumps coronavirus task force for its lack of diversity. Australian senator Mehreen Faruqi calls it a gendered crisis that carries a disproportionate risk to women, in spite of the fact that men are statistically more likely to die. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that deaths are spiking in ethnic-minority communities, and that Covid relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations.

Closer to home, the Metropolitan Police are urging members of the public to be on the lookout for hate crime related to the Covid-19 pandemic, and academics at Queen Mary University are calling for an intersectional view of the coronavirus pandemic. Not to be outdone, the African-American Policy Forum has just hosted a webinar to explore the intersectional failures that Covid lays bare. One participant, Professor Dorothy Roberts, even went so far as to argue that the spread of the virus had been caused by the current racial-capitalist system and that prisons with their disproportionate number of black inmates should therefore be abolished. It has become all too apparent that it would take an apocalyptic event of Biblical proportions to put an end to the culture war, and even then there would always be commentators available to denounce the plague of locusts for their heteronormativity.

This widespread reassertion of the values of intersectional activism is just one example of how the coronavirus pandemic is being interpreted as an opportunity to win ideological battles. Depending on who you read, the crisis either vindicates socialism or advances the case for capitalism. It either proves that the European Union is a failed enterprise or that Brexit was a mistake and must now be reversed. It will either bring us together and prove the inherent benevolence of humanity, or drive us apart and expose us as the self-interested creatures we always were. Somehow, this disease conveniently ends up proving whichever political or philosophical point wed prefer to make.

It is in our nature to see confirmation of our existing biases in the world around us. This is why, for the time being at least, we would be well advised to hold back on our prognostications. I make no secret of my hope that the cult of social justice will lose its stranglehold on our media, our arts, and our major educational, political and law-enforcement institutions. In a post-coronavirus world, is it conceivable that English faculties at top universities would yield to student demands to decolonise the curriculum of white male authors? Or that thousands of British citizens would be investigated by the police for non-crime? Or that art and literature would be judged primarily on the basis of their fealty to identitarian bugbears?

Although institutionally powerful, the agents of social justice have always been in the minority, and have been indulged largely because of their intimidatory tactics. I would like to think that in the wake of an actual crisis their more hysterical grievances will be treated with the insouciance they deserve, and that this seemingly interminable culture war will draw to a close. But in this respect I am probably as guilty as everyone else of assuming that the effects of the pandemic will confirm the views I have long advocated. Certainly in the short term, the clout of these culture warriors will be diminished. But I fear that it is wishful thinking to suppose that they wont find a way to turn this crisis to their advantage, and emerge more determined and vitriolic and authoritarian than ever before.

I hope Im wrong.

Andrew Doyle is a stand-up comedian and spiked columnist. He is doing a live tour with Douglas Murray in the spring, called Resisting Wokeness. Get tickets here.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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Coronavirus wont kill the culture wars - Spiked

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to burn its way through America and the world and millions hunker down in their homes, many of the cultural issues that only recently sparked fierce debate now seem oddly irrelevant.

Does anyone want to argue about politically correct language when were facing disaster?

These days, a safe space is one in which you are protected from a deadly infection, not from offensive ideas. Even the controversy over President Donald Trumps attempt to troll the media by using the term Chinese virus faded quickly. And while a few feminists have tried to claim that women are hardest hit by the pandemic even though more men aredying, no ones paying much attention.

But the culture wars havent gone away theyve only shifted focus. While the so-called social justice warriorson the left have mostly grown quiet, the culture warriors on the right have found a new battlefield in opposition to epidemic control measures. Its a stance that is not only divisive but actively dangerous.

For weeks, right-wing media figures such as radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and Fox News host Laura Ingraham have been promoting a no big deal narrative about the COVID-19 epidemic (Limbaugh has even insisted that its nothing more than the common cold). They have also railed against stay-at-home orders intended to flatten the curve of the virusand curb the spread of the disease. Some have backed away from that position now that Trump seems to take the coronavirus seriously and has abandoned his plan to reopen America by Easter. Yet Limbaugh still insists that the epidemic is overrated and grumbling that our response to it is dictated by unelected health experts who are part of the insidious Deep State.

Conservative commentator, radio talk show host and frequent Fox News guest Jesse Kelly still rails against the quarantines on Twitter, warning that our economy is being turned into a smoldering wreckage. But the economy isnt Kellys only concern; he believes that the epidemic is an excuse for leftists to turn America into a progressive tyranny. Were reporting our fellow citizens to the police, deciding which businesses are allowed to open, and arresting pastors for having a church service, Kelly tweeted on Tuesday. Coronavirus is not the deadliest thing we imported from China.

Kelly has also connected the lockdown to his perennial theme of the liberal-driven decline of manhood in America: the lockdown, he says, shows that weve apparently become the scared suburban housewife society, cowering in our homes while being terrorized by the prophets of doom. The culture warriors seem to think that risking exposure to the coronavirusto save the economy is somehow akin to risking ones life in battle. Apparently, they still havent realized that in this war, a person who becomes infected can quickly become an unwitting enemy weapon.

Other pundits on the far right are stoking hate toward the progressive, multicultural cities that are seen as strongholds of blue America and that are hardest hit by the coronavirus. Sean Davis, a contributor to The Federalist a once-interesting conservative website that has become a home to crackpot conspiracy theories recently lamented on Twitter that the rest of the country was being shut down because New York City is a filthy, disease-ridden dystopia run by an incompetent communist.

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Its not just a matter of vile rhetoric. The coronavirus deniers actively encouragepeople to defy the quarantine and promoteconspiracy theories that depict the epidemic as a hoax.

This culture war could literally kill us.

Cathy Youngis a contributing editor to Reason magazine.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor to Reason magazine.

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A COVID-19 culture war that can kill us - Newsday