Voting, Drag Queens, Fox: 3 Stories You Should Read 11/05/2018
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In the category of: Someone needs to have a chat with NBC.
Fox News Pulls Racist Trump Ad
The Trump-friendly network said it’s decided to stop airing the ad “upon further review.”
The 30-second spot includes footage of Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico citizen sentenced to death in April for killing two police officers in California in 2014.
The ad compares his behavior to members of the caravan, which mostly comprises adults and children who plan to legally seek asylum at ports of entry into the U.S. The video then urges viewers to “vote Republican” before a voiceover from Trump says he approves the message.
CNN called out the ad as blatantly “racist” in replying to critical tweets from Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, who charged that the network would “only run fake news and won’t talk about real threats.”
Fox’s decision follows NBC saying earlier Monday that it had erred in running the ad.
In the category of: Makes sense to me.
Drag queens are more political than ever. Can they lead a movement?
Drag has always been political. But with RuPaul’s Drag Race ushering in a new era of performers, fame comes with a powerful platform.
“DragCon has never been a bubble in denial about reality,” said Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, co-founders World of Wonder and DragCon and executive producers of RuPaul’s Drag Race, in a statement to Vox. “It’s a celebration of life through difference and diversity, and it’s about planting that flag in the ground and claiming our place in this world.”
Nonetheless, classifying drag only as a guilty pleasure underestimates its power, Bailey and Barbato say.
“Because as playful and as fun as drag can and will always be, it can also be serious fun, by playing with society’s norms in a very profound way. And drag only becomes more pointedly political in an environment where an illegitimate regime seeks — picking just one example — to impose reductive and cruel ideas about gender that fly in the face of gender’s proven complexity.”
In the category of: No pressure here…
Voting to save democracy
In the wake of the election meddling scandal of 2016, most Americans are not confident that America’s election systems are safe. Most believe it is likely that Russia or some other foreign government will attempt to influence Tuesday’s elections. But in August, Senate Republicans rejected a $250 million measure to help states protect their systems.
It is clear that, in action and attitude, Republicans are on the wrong side of democracy. And they’ve combined that anti-democratic spirit with a nearly unprecedented embrace of shamelessness. On Sunday, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp accused Democrats of trying to hack the state’s voter registration system. There are two things notable about this accusation: First, as The New York Times pointed out, he made the charge while offering “scant evidence” to support it. Second, and most alarmingly, Kemp is Georgia’s GOP candidate for governor: Integrity would normally require somebody to step aside from such clear conflicts of interest, at least to avoid being seen as being compromised. But Kemp took a different route: He doubled down.
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