A Comfy Softness for Radicalism
Not to go back to the well of content that is Naomi Chomsky, but this passage from an interview appearing on Liberation (“Newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation”) is of note far beyond the topic of drag queen story hours:
What about media coverage of the events?
It’s been quite positive. I’ve done a lot of back and forth with the Massachusetts Family Institute. They made comments comparing drag to blackface, and called it misogynistic. But they’re fighting to restrict women’s bodies. They also are proponents of conversion therapy. I said this to everybody, and mentioned how these groups are attacking abortion rights— but none of the media printed that. They sort of softened my message a little bit, as they do.
Softened the message as they do for whom? I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a conservative, for example, complain that the media is softening his or her message — quite the opposite.
If you don’t read very broadly, across alternative media from all ideological angles, your understanding of controversies of the day is going to be very limited. And it’ll be limited in the particular way of softening the edges for the progressive pill that the mainstream news media wants our society to swallow.