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Tucker Carlson Is Using Controversy about Literature Classes to Promote Fascism

There is something of a culture war going on right now over which books students should be assigned to read in literature classes. I’ve been meaning to write an article on this subject for over six months now, but, until now, I haven’t had time. Sadly, I’ve been so insanely busy with the many other things going on in my life that I haven’t had much time for researching and writing articles lately. Now, however, recent events have compelled me to write an article about a different aspect of the controversy than I originally planned.

Many of my readers are probably already aware of Tucker Carlson. He is a far-right political commentator who has a long and well-documented history of promoting white supremacist, fascist, misogynist, and xenophobic ideas. He has his own show on Fox News called Tucker Carlson Tonight and, on 14 May 2021, he did an entire segment about the literature class controversy titled “Classic literature out. Sexual propaganda in.”

In this segment, Carlson first protests the removal of works that he considers “classic literature” from English syllabi and then pretends to be absolutely scandalized by the reading of explicit passages in young adult novels that have been approved for students to read in one public school in Loudoun County, Virginia. Carlson frames the controversy using a standard fascist narrative that misrepresents the issues and ignores many demonstrable facts, including the fact that many works of so-called “classic literature,” including many works that are often read in schools, are just as sexually explicit as the works he protests against—or, in some cases, even more explicit.

“Rewriting History” Is Not Inherently a Bad Thing

There seems to be something of a trend going on right now in politics where people have developed a habit of accusing their opponents of wanting to “rewrite history.” I’ve mostly seen conservatives accusing progressives of this, but I’ve also seen a few cases of progressives accusing conservatives of it without further clarification. In all cases, people who accuse other people of wanting to “rewrite history” portray this as something unambiguously bad.

The problem is that “rewriting history” is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, “rewriting history” is literally a historian’s job description. It is inevitable that each generation will rewrite history and there is really nothing anyone can do to stop it. It is, however, extremely important that the people who rewrite history do so honestly, using correct evidence and correct methods of interpretation. When we talk about “rewriting history,” what matters is not whether people are doing it, but how they are doing it.

Why We Should Avoid Using the Name ‘Anglo-Saxon’

As many of my readers are probably already aware, on 16 April 2021, Punchbowl News released documents, which revealed that Trump allies in the Republican Party, led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, had founded what they were calling the “American First Caucus,” which was supposed to be dedicated to promoting “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and infrastructure that “befits the progeny of European architecture.”

The caucus was immediately denounced as white supremacist. According to this article from The Washington Post, Greene is now trying to distance herself from the proposed American First Caucus, insisting that the documents Punchbowl News released were “a staff level draft proposal from an outside group.”

This relates to a controversy that has been boiling in the field of medieval studies for years now over the use of the name Anglo-Saxon. The term has been widely used for over two centuries to refer to the English-speaking inhabitants of Britain after the Germanic invasions of the fifth century CE until the Norman conquest in 1066. Now, though, many scholars, especially young scholars and scholars of color, argue that people should avoid applying the name in this way, because it is largely anachronistic, it inherently implies racial whiteness, and it alienates people of color. Below is a discussion of the issue, along with a few of my thoughts on the matter.

What It Means If Biden Recognizes the Armenian Genocide

On 21 April 2021, The New York Times published an article reporting that President Joe Biden plans to declare that the mass murder of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1918 was an act of genocide. The declaration is planned to take place on 24 April, which the Republic of Armenia has designated Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

This declaration will mark the fulfillment of a campaign promise that Barack Obama made in 2008 but never fulfilled and a campaign promise that Biden himself made last year. The declaration is controversial, however, because it may further harm the United States’ already-frayed relationship with the Republic of Turkey, whose government officially maintains that the genocide never happened. As a student of history, I thought I would give some background on the Armenian Genocide and what Biden’s declaration might mean.

How Vaccines Were Really Invented

I am greatly pleased to say that I am finally in the process of being vaccinated for COVID-19, since Indiana University (the university I am currently attending) has a huge stockpile of vaccines reserved for students. I received my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on 8 April 2021 and I am scheduled to receive my second dose on 29 April. Since lots of people like me are now receiving the vaccine for COVID-19, I decided that now would be a good time to write an article about the history of vaccines.

The story that most people have been told is that Edward Jenner, a white English man, single-handedly invented the very first vaccine—a vaccine for smallpox—in 1796. The reality, though, is much more complicated. Notably, many people are not aware of the fact that Jenner’s vaccine was an improvement on the much older procedure of inoculation, which originally independently developed in at least three different parts of the world (in China, West Africa, and the Ottoman Empire) and only later spread to Europe and the Americas through a process of cultural diffusion.

Elon Musk Declares Himself “Imperator”?

On 12 April 2021, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who currently has a net worth of approximately $175 billion, changed his Twitter bio to say “Technoking of Tesla, Imperator of Mars.” This change immediately sparked headlines in Newsweek, NDTV, and dozens of other news outlets. Ordinarily, one person—even an ultra-wealthy CEO—changing their Twitter bio probably wouldn’t make the news. Elon Musk, however, has a massive cult following of adoring fans who, for the most part, wholeheartedly believe that he is a brilliant, forward-thinking, polymathic genius who is single-handedly ushering in a new era of technology and freedom. Thus, everything he does automatically attracts attention.

I’m sure that some of Musk’s fans are reading this. I hope they will forgive me for the fact that I am not one of them. Indeed, I think that Musk has risen to where he is to a large extent through exploitation, that he isn’t nearly as personally brilliant as most of his fans think he is, that he has an obnoxious personal ego the size of the planet Jupiter, and that he is generally a rather odious person. I do, however, want to talk about Musk’s updated Twitter bio because I think it reveals a lot of startling things about how Musk thinks of himself and his position in the world.

Monte Testaccio: A Literal Mountain of Ancient Roman Trash

A lot of people nowadays are talking about how plastic takes thousands of years to decompose and our landfills will therefore still be full of plastic thousands of years from now. It is, however, important to note that massive landfills filled with waste that takes thousands of years to decompose is not an exclusively modern problem. People in the ancient world commonly used ceramics for storing, transporting, cooking, and eating.

Like plastic, ceramic takes many thousands of years to decompose. As a result, pieces of ceramic dating back thousands of years are present at pretty much any ancient site. In fact, one of the most common methods used to archaeologists to determine the date of a particular site is analysis of the style of the pottery found at that site. Ancient people used and threw away so much pottery that there is at least one mountain made entirely of ancient pottery.

Here’s the Meaning of the Symbolism in Lil Nas X’s Controversial New Music Video

Until last Sunday, I honestly had no idea who Lil Nas X was. I don’t really follow music in general and I honestly know especially little about rap in particular. Then, while we were driving back to Bloomington after visiting our parents for Easter, my sister mentioned to me that Lil Nas X is a rapper, that he wrote a song about being gay—which I later learned is titled “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)”—and that the music video for it includes a scene of him riding a stripper pole down to Hell and giving Satan a lap dance. She explained that religious conservatives were having a huge moral panic over this music video because they think it glorifies homosexuality and Satanism.

Having heard this, I naturally decided to look up the music video for myself to see what all the fuss was about. I have to say that, for a three-minute clip that involves the main character riding a stripper pole to Hell and giving Satan a lap dance, the music video is remarkably intellectually sophisticated. The people who worked on this video clearly did a ton of research. As soon as I watched it, I was genuinely impressed by the sheer number of classical and Biblical allusions that they managed to cram in.

It incorporates specific references to works of ancient Greek and Roman art, the Bible, Greek mythology, works of Greek philosophy, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. They even managed to include an exact, direct quote from Plato’s Symposion in the original Classical Attic Greek! Here’s a detailed explanation of the music video’s classical and Biblical symbolism.

Jordan Peterson Does Not Understand Mythology

In case you’ve had the extraordinary good fortune of having never heard of him, Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He largely rose to fame in 2016 over his vocal opposition to an act passed by the Parliament of Canada to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression.” Since then, Peterson has developed an enormous cult following as a self-help author and YouTube personality. His followers generally tend to be young, heterosexual, cisgender men who come from middle-class backgrounds and have conservative political leanings.

Peterson calls himself a “classical British liberal” and a “traditionalist”—both terms that are commonly used as euphemistic self-descriptors by members of the far right. As we shall see shortly, he has publicly promoted various misogynistic, transphobic, and white supremacist claims. Much of what Peterson has written and said has already been thoroughly analyzed and debunked. In this article, however, I want to especially focus on an aspect of Peterson’s work and activism that I don’t think has been adequately addressed: his interpretation of mythology.

Peterson has made the psychoanalytic interpretation of myths into a major backbone of his work. Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which was first published in 1999, talks about mythology extensively, and he routinely uses mythical examples in his lecture videos and in his 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This is all in spite of the fact that he clearly does not understand mythology and much of what he says on the subject is incorrect.

Transgender People Exist—And That’s Ok

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the news over the past few years, you have almost certainly heard about how a lot of conservatives are really mad that transgender people exist. They routinely insist that acknowledging the existence of trans people is “gender ideology” and that it goes against both science and the Bible. They insist that there are only two genders—male and female—and that a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and can never, under any circumstances, truly be changed.

In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that these arguments are, in fact, incorrect and that the existence of more than two genders is totally compatible with both science and the Bible. This essay has taken me nearly a month to research and write, so it will be quite long and will incorporate evidence from a wide range of different fields, including biology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and religious studies.