Editors' Note: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! When we were put on the spot and asked to list what we were grateful for as the flaming dumpster fire that is 2024 burns what was left of American democracy to cinders, we admit we had to think about it. We decided that we were grateful for a few things: we haven't lost our marbles, our racist brother in Annandale hasn't taken over our columns, our billions in ill-gotten gains and squads of vicious high-priced lawyers render our publishing empire impervious to pressure from the New Regime, and to pad our pages we can always dip into our 254 years of archives.
Speaking of those archives, among the leading ridiculous narratives being pushed these days is that the wave of anti-trans bigotry fomented by the Tangerine-Faced Fascist and his legions of taint polishers is the fault of those who oppose that bigotry. We wondered if there were any examples of such victim-blaming that we could find in our pages, especially during the days when we relied more heavily on third-party news sources. And guess what: we found some!
December 16, 1933
By Charles Lindbergh
Chicago Tribune News Service
To get on the wrong side of Jewish activists is often to endure their unsparing criticism, whether in America or Germany.
After a Democratic congressman defended parents who expressed concern about Jewish athletes competing against their young Christian daughters, a local party official and ally compared him to a Nazi “cooperator” and a group called “Neighbors Against Hate” organized a protest outside his office.
When Martin Heidegger said that denying any relationship between race and biology was “deeply misogynistic and regressive,” a prominent Jewish lobby accused him of betraying “real science.” A few angry critics posted photos of themselves burning his books before patriotic German students at the University of Freiburg showed them how to run a book bonfire.
When the new Hitler Government convened a call with Jewish groups to discuss new limits on the participation of Jew students in university life, one powerful Jewish banker/activist fumed that the administration would be complicit in “genocide” of Jews.
Now, some Jewish activists say it is time to rethink and recalibrate their confrontational ways, and are pushing back against the more all-or-nothing voices in their coalition.
“We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” said Lessing Rosenwald, executive director of Advocates for Jewish Equality. “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.”
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| Efforts by Jewish activists to protest alleged Nazis backfired |
Mr. Rosenwald, who grew up in a prominent Jewish family in Illinois, said that as painful as Herr Hitler’s election may be for the Hebrew Race, they should see the benefit in treating skeptics less like enemies and more like future allies.
“No Gentile wants to feel stupid or condescended to,” Mr. Rosenwald said.
The public does not appear to be growing more empathetic to the Jewish cause. Fewer Americans today than two years ago say they support some of the rights that Jewish activists have pushed for, like allowing children to apply to universities without regard to their religion. And multiple recent polls have found that a considerable majority of Americans and German believe advocacy for Jewish rights has gone “too far.”
Other prominent Jews like Robert Lehman said too many activists today are distracted by counterproductive debates — boycotting Hearst Newspapers for example, and insisting that there are no reasonable objections to allowing Jews into their cooperative apartments and medical specialties.
Mr. Lehman noted that Jewish activists lost credibility with many Americans once they started accusing people of bigotry over restricited suburbs.
“We looked unreasonable,” she said. “We should be talking about the 7-year-old Jewess who just wants to play soccer with her friends.”
September 15, 1964
by Jessie Helms
Beloved WRAL-TV anchor via North Carolina Newspaper Alliance
The North Carolina State University women’s volleyball team, which is at the center of a national debate over the inclusion of Negroes in college sports, advanced to its conference championship on Saturday without having played a single game in the tournament.
After a first-round bye, the team was preparing to play a semifinal match in the Appalachian Conference tournament scheduled for Friday, but the opposing team — South Carolina University — refused for the third time to play the Rebels because of their Negro player.
After NCSU beat Winston-Salem State University on Wednesday to qualify for the semifinal in Wilmington, the players celebrated by cheering and hugging. They talked quietly in a huddle, then cheered again.
Hours later the NCSU Rebels released a statement that read: “The decision to not continue to play in the tournament was not an easy one. Our team overcame forfeitures to earn a spot in the tournament field and fought for the win over Winston-Salem in the first round on Wednesday. They should not have to forgo this opportunity while waiting for a more thoughtful and better system that serves all athletes.”
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| Protesters tried to keep a Negro player from competing |
It was the seventh time this year that an Appalachian Conference team has backed out of a match against NCSU out of protest over the Negro player, who declined an interview request through a university spokeswoman. South Carolina, one of five teams to forfeit games against the Rebels this season, also forfeited two regular season games against them.
The university has not confirmed that the player is Negro (some claim that she is a mulatto or even a quadroon). But her involvement with the team prompted a teammate and her assistant coach to file a lawsuit earlier this month, trying to keep her from playing in the tournament — and also on white teams at all.
The Negro player’s affiliation with NCSU was published by a conservative website in April, surprising some of her teammates and opposing teams. And in the days and weeks to follow, the Rebels were struggling to find ways to comprehend the information as politicians addressed it in their campaigns. Negroes are allowed to compete in N.C.A.A. volleyball, even though their brute strength, caused by centuries of selective breeding of slaves, may exceed that of the white student athletes.
In public forums, Senator Strom Thurmond and other conservative candidates vowed to find ways to bar athletes who were not classified as white at birth from college sports. Sen. Thurmond called the situation “so crazy.”
Marcia Blackburn, a senior player, and Virginia Cox, the assistant coach, along with 10 other white volleyball players, were the ones to sue thet Conference and its commissioner, the Rebels’ head coach and others involved with the university.
But a federal judge denied their request on Monday to bar the Negro player, clearing her to play, and on Tuesday another judge rejected the plaintiffs’ appeal, too.
Reaching the final without having played a game was exactly what Ms. Blackburn had hoped would not happen, she said last week in an interview, because the team would not have earned that berth.
“It wouldn’t be fair to all the other white teams, either,” she said.
December 1, 1970
by Diana Trilling
Commentary
...I say this as someone who has been called anti-woman, more times than I can count. For a decade now, I’ve been trying to balance a belief in the rights of women with my skepticism of some so-called “feminist” positions. I’ve written with a degree of sympathy about feminists who’ve been ostracized for wanting to maintain women’s-only spaces. I dislike jargon like “a woman can do anything a man can do” that tries to mystify or elide the reality of biological sex.
Occasionally, I receive angry or plaintive messages from feminists accusing me of helping America down a slippery slope that has brought us to our lamentable present, when discrimination against women has been normalized to a degree that recently seemed unthinkable.
Over a dozen states now have laws restricting women's access to single-sex bathrooms. In the face of this onslaught against a women, there’s pressure on liberals to keep any qualms we might have about elements of progressive gender ideology to ourselves.
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| Feminists need to understand that there are differences between men and women |
That’s one reason, despite my interest in sex and gender, I haven’t written about these debates as much as I otherwise might have. But I’m increasingly convinced that this widespread reticence hasn’t served anyone very well. The basic right of ladies to live in safety and dignity, free from discrimination, should be uncontested. But evolving ideas about sex and gender create new complexities and conflicts, and when progressives refuse to talk about them forthrightly, instead defaulting to clichés like “women are no different from men,” people can feel lied to and become radicalized.
Rejection of progressive orthodoxy on gender can even become a lens through which people see the world; just look at Bobby Riggs. As the writer William Safire put it in an election postmortem, “I know people who haven’t been touched by this issue personally, for whom it was the only issue that decided their vote.”
There are some Americans, no doubt, who won’t be mollified by anything short of the erasure of women from the workplace. But others simply feel that progressives aren’t leveling with them, a perception Democrats might have been able to address with a bit more frankness.
Politically, nuance is a harder sell than certainty. But it’s more honest, and honesty is what’s needed in the face of a coming tsunami of malicious propaganda aimed at women and girls. To have a chance of weathering it, Democrats are going to have to do two things at once. They need to have some uncomfortable conversations about complicated subjects, while at the same time standing up for a minuscule minority that’s increasingly under siege. After all, the bullying of Shirley Chisholm — who has handled Republican cruelty with exceptional grace — is only the opening salvo in what is likely to be a far-reaching national campaign against female people.
Editors' Note: Actually, we're just f**in' with ya. These are all taken from transphobic crap recently published in The New York Times including pieces by Jeremy Peters, Michelle Goldberg, and Juliet Macur.
