Hilariously, when I first heard of Max Boot about 15 years ago my boss at the time explained him alternately as "a conservative apologist" and "the Times' pet pussy conservative."
I thought I was a pretty big lefty at the time and I couldn't see anything allegedly conservative about him. He sounded more like some of my solidly leftist friends who were overeducated and incapable of socializing without talking about politics, where they would assume the persona of a condescending assistant professor. A lot of them would probably have been called "beta cucks" today.
Anyway, that's literally all I can think of every time I see that "aren't I charming " avatar of Boot's that hasn't changed in 20 years.
We are all stupider now, just from reading that idiotic tweet. There were over 50 separate news outlets in the 1980’s. All “news” did not come out of six corporations as it does now. If Max Boot was my son, I would publicly disown him.
Boot is a neo-con who lost his mind during Covid - assuming he ever had one.
I grew up in the 80s as well and Montreal was no different from L.A. and NYC albeit on a smaller scale. We had all sorts of underground papers - in two languages no less. I visited NYC a few times pre-Giuliani and used to pick up the Village Voice or any of the other papers. 42nd street still had a Lou Reed vibe back then.
I wasn't naturally partial to anything left-wing but I read those papers. We used to get our hands on everything from National Lampoon's to John Birch. Well, me and my buddies actively sought that stuff and we were teenagers.
I went to university and few of us Alex P. Keaton types were a precious minority so we infused with the crowd. I dated but eccentric (which turns out I was as well), left-wing, and outspoken feminist women (I'm still friends with one to this day. She introduced me to Billie Holiday) in college. Society back then was just as divided but we seemed to let common sense and general overall respect prevail. We never let politics drive our - ahem - dating escapades or lives in general. It was 'beat the commies in hockey because they're assholes' and then go to the movies and play video games. We knew how to just move on.
Something was lost along the way from, say, Ferris Bueller and Croc Dundee to where we are now. I remember our science department in high school was made up of left-over 60s hippies one of whom was American. They used to tell us stuff like 'America is a fascist country cloaked up in a democracy'. Back then that was 'whoa' stuff.
Now it all appears to be more bitter, jaded, distrustful and without a modicum of how to enjoy life and respect differences.
It's getting better everyday, starting RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, because I CHOOSE TO BE an infectious carrier of hope, optimism, laughter, & love, and spread immunity to negativity & pessimism. FTW. Just Fuck The World. I'm a happy man. Anyway. Because I choose to be....why not join me? If I can do it, so can you, dude....
I love reading your blog, Chris! It's relieving to hear an intelligent voice of reason. I was on the left and thought I was "woke" just a year and a half ago. And yes I am embarrassed because I was ignorant and hadn't actually looked into what I thought I believed.
But over the years there were some things that woke me up. One of them was at the beginning of Covid, I had watched a documentary on amazon about a cartoonist who the FBI was after just for the zines he made. They were violent, sure, but they were only zines with a small circulation. I was really shocked that something like that happened in America (being a cartoonist myself it's something I'm sensitive too!) I ran out wanting to talk about it to meet up with another liberal friend at the dog park, but as soon as I told her there was a cartoonist in the 90s arrested for obscene comics, the first words out of her mouth were, "Good!" And I was just speechless.
I heard there was this saying from the 50s, "Scratch a liberal and you'll find a fascist." I'm not sure that's entirely true, as I think all the sane people on the left have been weeded out, but leaves me wondering was it there brewing all along?
I think she's just sort of vindictive like that. The conversation faltered after that because I was kind of stunned and we moved on. The friendship has faltered throughout the pandemic because she's really addicted to reddit and when the vaccines came out, she was getting a lot of schadenfreude out of the forum where people were posting about people who died after not wanting to take the vaccine.
But I guess that's just who she is as a person. I know that we were both also realizing that we agreed a lot more with Republicans than Democrats. I went and researched and tried to figure everything out, but she seems like she didn't want to give up her identification with Blue, and wanted to continue hating on the Red.
Maybe this is also just a sign that I didn't have very good friends. But other lefty friends of mine snapped at me when talking about finances. I made a comment about having to "crunch the numbers" and he yelled, "Personal responsibility! That's what the Republicans always say!"
And another friend has some self awareness about how ridiculous the woke stuff is, but she plays the game to get ahead and get promotions at work. While another is an avid twitter user and just seems to enjoy insulting people. Yet another just stopped talking to me for saying I didn't think the vaccines worked.
I always thought the left was "good, free, and educated," but over the course of the pandemic I've been looking at my friends and liberals I know and finding it hard to respect them. It feels like they're a bunch of entitled, unthinking hypocrites. That's harsh to say and it's so uncomfortable to feel that way about people I once called friends. And also finding that the people in my life I do respect also happen to be on the more Christian conservative side.
(Sorry for such a long response! Just want you to know I really appreciate reading your posts!)
Wonderful, thoughtful post my friend. I am a ‘Christian Conservative’ and am appalled by this nascent unwillingness of anyone who may disagree with me to engage in any meaningful, give-and-take, conversation. I am 48 and went to University in the early nineties and robust debate with liberal friends was not only fun, we both LEARNED something from the other and came away far healthier young adults in the process. We’d shake hands as gentleman, drink a few beers and move on, without destroying the friendship. Mutual respect ruled the day and I miss that common ethos.
My motto is that if are nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. Be a jerk to me, I’ll still be kind to you because we are all created in the image of God and politics isn’t everything. It’s actually quite the opposite.
I agree with you; I always thought that's as it should be. That's what enabled us to have a solid civilization.
But something truly awful has happened with the left. I'm still struggling to understand it myself since I got swept up in it too, because I went to school in a super liberal area. But it's a problem with the whole media sphere. I used to listen to NPR and I remember being confused by a piece they had that was talking about how "there's a new class of people today. People who do yoga, shop at wholefoods, and listen to NPR." That described me at the time but I remember being dumbfounded by it. It stuck in my head because something seemed off about it, but at the time I didn't know what.
Aww man, I could really go on about this. James Lindsay has a term called "The Iron Law of Woke Projection," which is the law that whatever the woke are accusing others of is actually what they're doing. They accuse people of being bigots because they are.
It only took one step outside of that bubble that I didn't even realize I was in. Once I started listening and reading substack and other things out of the main mediasphere, I started waking up. It's like there's something on the left that's blocking people from getting good advice; any source of good, solid advice is utterly demonized.
I'm sure you know this already, but it has been a relief to find substack blogs and talk to people in the comments. Like I've found the reasonable people again. I've also been reading the bible and really just feeling humbled right now. In the past year and a half I've lost all my friends due to realizing the things we believed in have born terrible fruit! But I am finding my way to something much better I think.
I think you are reaping the sweet fruit harvest bounty of the GREAT AWAKENING, and that's usually the extra large share size. Klaus Schwab's "Great reset" ONLY comes in shrink wrapped individual portion sizes.....
Entitled, spoiled rotten, unthinking because it's easier to let Big Daddy tell them what to think, and the hypocrisy is the handle their puppet-masters use to control & manipulate them....
back then people SPOKE TO EACH OTHER without immediately categorizing another for having an opinion. Nuanced opinions were considered and you actually had to INTERACT with them IN PERSON typically, before tossing them in to a box that fit your narrow view point. If I had a dollar for every person who immediately brought up Trump or Qanon (an accusation of affiliation, which is false) the minute I questioned any aspect of the pandemic hysteria, I'd have more money and less anger.
That's the true purpose of Trump & Qanon, to the propagandists. They are "identities", and "identifiers", serving to establish warring, opposing "sides" in society, then assigning some people to that side, and the "others" to the "other" side. Thus, divide-and-conquer is advanced. When we learn to DECODE Fascist propaganda, we cease to be Fascist tools & useful idiots. You missed a lot of good opportunities to de-program & help AWAKEN people. The antidote to the TOXIN of Klaus Schwab's Great Reset is the nectar of the GREAT AWAKENING.....
And the Archive of Americana, with a massive collection of historical newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides. No one could ever spend ten minutes doing actual research with these resources and think, "Ah, American media culture used to be very narrow and monolithic."
I think you're being unfair to the USSR. The USSR never really pretended to be a democracy. Everything was for "Mother Russia." Max Boot is something worse.
I like the reference to the old newspapers in California. I miss those publications especially the Daily News. I still read the Daily Bulletin, but it's not the same.
The Herald Examiner was the bomb-especially the sports section. The LA Times had a great classical music critic in Martin Bernheimer and even a powerful rightist editorial writer in Richard Bergholz.
Obviously little Max was clueless about media in the 1980’s. In Detroit, you could get your news from ABC, NBC, CBS, and a variety of other channels including 9 (Ontario), 20, 50, 56, and 62. The Detroit News (conservative), Free Press (liberal), and a local daily in just about every county (usually Conservative) provided print news, local radio provided broadcasts, and there were plenty of magazines. Growing up in the 70’s, thanks to my parents, I was able to regularly consume three newspapers and a dozen magazines. Thankfully those were the days before the corporate media cabal dictated the story. There isn’t a shred of authenticity in his dumb argument.
Go ahead! Anyone who makes me laugh by calling someone else a turd gets brownie points. Back to the topic… just go to the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois. There’s an entire “fun house” style room plastered with articles, editorial pieces and cartoons, absolutely skewering Lincoln and his party. Maybe it was easier to tune it out and go about your business at certain times in history but if humans are involved, there’s contention. Some would call it “original sin”.
I wonder if Max boot writes his 'bits' while physically licking garbage off of Jeff Bezos' shoe soles. There is a desperate and self-humiliating string that runs through everything he writes
I grew up in 80s in Czechoslovakia, a full-blown Soviet satellite. We actually had 3 newspapers and 2 channels of TV. The censorship was real, there were even things like state committee on film fairy tales that decided if the particular movie was fitting with the official party line. Fun fact, this committee wasn't under Ministry of Culture as you might think, but under Ministry of Information, which means the movies were deemed as straight propaganda. I did several researchs on newspapers in our history and it always fascinated me how little different were those papers from today. I very much doubt that thing were even remotely similar over the ocean.
Hilariously, when I first heard of Max Boot about 15 years ago my boss at the time explained him alternately as "a conservative apologist" and "the Times' pet pussy conservative."
I thought I was a pretty big lefty at the time and I couldn't see anything allegedly conservative about him. He sounded more like some of my solidly leftist friends who were overeducated and incapable of socializing without talking about politics, where they would assume the persona of a condescending assistant professor. A lot of them would probably have been called "beta cucks" today.
Anyway, that's literally all I can think of every time I see that "aren't I charming " avatar of Boot's that hasn't changed in 20 years.
I love this post!!
ME TOO!
Me, too! Thanks, Chris!
We are all stupider now, just from reading that idiotic tweet. There were over 50 separate news outlets in the 1980’s. All “news” did not come out of six corporations as it does now. If Max Boot was my son, I would publicly disown him.
This is a point that I missed: Media is actually way more monolithic today.
Boot is a neo-con who lost his mind during Covid - assuming he ever had one.
I grew up in the 80s as well and Montreal was no different from L.A. and NYC albeit on a smaller scale. We had all sorts of underground papers - in two languages no less. I visited NYC a few times pre-Giuliani and used to pick up the Village Voice or any of the other papers. 42nd street still had a Lou Reed vibe back then.
I wasn't naturally partial to anything left-wing but I read those papers. We used to get our hands on everything from National Lampoon's to John Birch. Well, me and my buddies actively sought that stuff and we were teenagers.
I went to university and few of us Alex P. Keaton types were a precious minority so we infused with the crowd. I dated but eccentric (which turns out I was as well), left-wing, and outspoken feminist women (I'm still friends with one to this day. She introduced me to Billie Holiday) in college. Society back then was just as divided but we seemed to let common sense and general overall respect prevail. We never let politics drive our - ahem - dating escapades or lives in general. It was 'beat the commies in hockey because they're assholes' and then go to the movies and play video games. We knew how to just move on.
Something was lost along the way from, say, Ferris Bueller and Croc Dundee to where we are now. I remember our science department in high school was made up of left-over 60s hippies one of whom was American. They used to tell us stuff like 'America is a fascist country cloaked up in a democracy'. Back then that was 'whoa' stuff.
Now it all appears to be more bitter, jaded, distrustful and without a modicum of how to enjoy life and respect differences.
Everything moves in cycles -- it'll get better. No guarantees on when, though.
It's getting better everyday, starting RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, because I CHOOSE TO BE an infectious carrier of hope, optimism, laughter, & love, and spread immunity to negativity & pessimism. FTW. Just Fuck The World. I'm a happy man. Anyway. Because I choose to be....why not join me? If I can do it, so can you, dude....
I love reading your blog, Chris! It's relieving to hear an intelligent voice of reason. I was on the left and thought I was "woke" just a year and a half ago. And yes I am embarrassed because I was ignorant and hadn't actually looked into what I thought I believed.
But over the years there were some things that woke me up. One of them was at the beginning of Covid, I had watched a documentary on amazon about a cartoonist who the FBI was after just for the zines he made. They were violent, sure, but they were only zines with a small circulation. I was really shocked that something like that happened in America (being a cartoonist myself it's something I'm sensitive too!) I ran out wanting to talk about it to meet up with another liberal friend at the dog park, but as soon as I told her there was a cartoonist in the 90s arrested for obscene comics, the first words out of her mouth were, "Good!" And I was just speechless.
I heard there was this saying from the 50s, "Scratch a liberal and you'll find a fascist." I'm not sure that's entirely true, as I think all the sane people on the left have been weeded out, but leaves me wondering was it there brewing all along?
Did she say why she thought that arrest was good?
I think she's just sort of vindictive like that. The conversation faltered after that because I was kind of stunned and we moved on. The friendship has faltered throughout the pandemic because she's really addicted to reddit and when the vaccines came out, she was getting a lot of schadenfreude out of the forum where people were posting about people who died after not wanting to take the vaccine.
But I guess that's just who she is as a person. I know that we were both also realizing that we agreed a lot more with Republicans than Democrats. I went and researched and tried to figure everything out, but she seems like she didn't want to give up her identification with Blue, and wanted to continue hating on the Red.
Maybe this is also just a sign that I didn't have very good friends. But other lefty friends of mine snapped at me when talking about finances. I made a comment about having to "crunch the numbers" and he yelled, "Personal responsibility! That's what the Republicans always say!"
And another friend has some self awareness about how ridiculous the woke stuff is, but she plays the game to get ahead and get promotions at work. While another is an avid twitter user and just seems to enjoy insulting people. Yet another just stopped talking to me for saying I didn't think the vaccines worked.
I always thought the left was "good, free, and educated," but over the course of the pandemic I've been looking at my friends and liberals I know and finding it hard to respect them. It feels like they're a bunch of entitled, unthinking hypocrites. That's harsh to say and it's so uncomfortable to feel that way about people I once called friends. And also finding that the people in my life I do respect also happen to be on the more Christian conservative side.
(Sorry for such a long response! Just want you to know I really appreciate reading your posts!)
Wonderful, thoughtful post my friend. I am a ‘Christian Conservative’ and am appalled by this nascent unwillingness of anyone who may disagree with me to engage in any meaningful, give-and-take, conversation. I am 48 and went to University in the early nineties and robust debate with liberal friends was not only fun, we both LEARNED something from the other and came away far healthier young adults in the process. We’d shake hands as gentleman, drink a few beers and move on, without destroying the friendship. Mutual respect ruled the day and I miss that common ethos.
My motto is that if are nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. Be a jerk to me, I’ll still be kind to you because we are all created in the image of God and politics isn’t everything. It’s actually quite the opposite.
I agree with you; I always thought that's as it should be. That's what enabled us to have a solid civilization.
But something truly awful has happened with the left. I'm still struggling to understand it myself since I got swept up in it too, because I went to school in a super liberal area. But it's a problem with the whole media sphere. I used to listen to NPR and I remember being confused by a piece they had that was talking about how "there's a new class of people today. People who do yoga, shop at wholefoods, and listen to NPR." That described me at the time but I remember being dumbfounded by it. It stuck in my head because something seemed off about it, but at the time I didn't know what.
Aww man, I could really go on about this. James Lindsay has a term called "The Iron Law of Woke Projection," which is the law that whatever the woke are accusing others of is actually what they're doing. They accuse people of being bigots because they are.
It only took one step outside of that bubble that I didn't even realize I was in. Once I started listening and reading substack and other things out of the main mediasphere, I started waking up. It's like there's something on the left that's blocking people from getting good advice; any source of good, solid advice is utterly demonized.
I'm sure you know this already, but it has been a relief to find substack blogs and talk to people in the comments. Like I've found the reasonable people again. I've also been reading the bible and really just feeling humbled right now. In the past year and a half I've lost all my friends due to realizing the things we believed in have born terrible fruit! But I am finding my way to something much better I think.
I think you are reaping the sweet fruit harvest bounty of the GREAT AWAKENING, and that's usually the extra large share size. Klaus Schwab's "Great reset" ONLY comes in shrink wrapped individual portion sizes.....
Entitled, spoiled rotten, unthinking because it's easier to let Big Daddy tell them what to think, and the hypocrisy is the handle their puppet-masters use to control & manipulate them....
There's noting more vicious than a liberal. Blue Republican neocons. Nothing more. They do tweet kinder, though.
Free speech was a big thing in America until the Globalist Neo-Fascist Eugenicist Oligarch’s J-6 coup. Since we are now an Oligarchy, not so much.
back then people SPOKE TO EACH OTHER without immediately categorizing another for having an opinion. Nuanced opinions were considered and you actually had to INTERACT with them IN PERSON typically, before tossing them in to a box that fit your narrow view point. If I had a dollar for every person who immediately brought up Trump or Qanon (an accusation of affiliation, which is false) the minute I questioned any aspect of the pandemic hysteria, I'd have more money and less anger.
That's the true purpose of Trump & Qanon, to the propagandists. They are "identities", and "identifiers", serving to establish warring, opposing "sides" in society, then assigning some people to that side, and the "others" to the "other" side. Thus, divide-and-conquer is advanced. When we learn to DECODE Fascist propaganda, we cease to be Fascist tools & useful idiots. You missed a lot of good opportunities to de-program & help AWAKEN people. The antidote to the TOXIN of Klaus Schwab's Great Reset is the nectar of the GREAT AWAKENING.....
Yep. Newspapers.com is a treasure trove of information, 21,000 papers. And Mark Twain knew a thing or two about Journalism as well.
And the Archive of Americana, with a massive collection of historical newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides. No one could ever spend ten minutes doing actual research with these resources and think, "Ah, American media culture used to be very narrow and monolithic."
https://www.readex.com/sites/default/files/productflyers/AofA-flyer-v2.pdf
To be fair, he's a f*cking moron. You can take the boy out of the USSR, but you apparently can't take the USSR out of the stupid boy.
I think you're being unfair to the USSR. The USSR never really pretended to be a democracy. Everything was for "Mother Russia." Max Boot is something worse.
I was a delivery boy for the Daily Breeze, almost sixty years ago.
I like the reference to the old newspapers in California. I miss those publications especially the Daily News. I still read the Daily Bulletin, but it's not the same.
The Herald Examiner was the bomb-especially the sports section. The LA Times had a great classical music critic in Martin Bernheimer and even a powerful rightist editorial writer in Richard Bergholz.
Obviously little Max was clueless about media in the 1980’s. In Detroit, you could get your news from ABC, NBC, CBS, and a variety of other channels including 9 (Ontario), 20, 50, 56, and 62. The Detroit News (conservative), Free Press (liberal), and a local daily in just about every county (usually Conservative) provided print news, local radio provided broadcasts, and there were plenty of magazines. Growing up in the 70’s, thanks to my parents, I was able to regularly consume three newspapers and a dozen magazines. Thankfully those were the days before the corporate media cabal dictated the story. There isn’t a shred of authenticity in his dumb argument.
THIS! Bravo Chris.
Go ahead! Anyone who makes me laugh by calling someone else a turd gets brownie points. Back to the topic… just go to the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois. There’s an entire “fun house” style room plastered with articles, editorial pieces and cartoons, absolutely skewering Lincoln and his party. Maybe it was easier to tune it out and go about your business at certain times in history but if humans are involved, there’s contention. Some would call it “original sin”.
I wonder if Max boot writes his 'bits' while physically licking garbage off of Jeff Bezos' shoe soles. There is a desperate and self-humiliating string that runs through everything he writes
"The shame is part of the kink."
Yes, Max Bootlicker....
I grew up in 80s in Czechoslovakia, a full-blown Soviet satellite. We actually had 3 newspapers and 2 channels of TV. The censorship was real, there were even things like state committee on film fairy tales that decided if the particular movie was fitting with the official party line. Fun fact, this committee wasn't under Ministry of Culture as you might think, but under Ministry of Information, which means the movies were deemed as straight propaganda. I did several researchs on newspapers in our history and it always fascinated me how little different were those papers from today. I very much doubt that thing were even remotely similar over the ocean.