Know Your Enemy - More Questions, More Answers [Teaser]

Some more answers to listener mail! Subscribe on Patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear the rest.

Duration: 2m
Broadcast on: 04 Nov 2023
Audio Format: other

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

In which we answer more of your excellent questions, including: the right-wing panic over children; how to leave grad school; Tillich, Niebuhr, and Dorothy Day; why 21st century Bob Dylan is the best Bob Dylan; how to teach a course on post-war conservatism; and more!

Sources cited:

Matthew Sitman, "Anti-Social Conservatives," Gawker, July 25, 2022.

— "Whither the Religious Left?" The New Republic, April 15, 2021.

Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 2018.

Kyle Riismandel, Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001, (2020)

Paul Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State, (2020)

Edward H. Miller, A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism, (2021)

John S Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism, (2021)

Kim Phillips-Fein, "Conservatism: A State of the Field," Journal of American History, Dec 2011.

Allen Brinkley, "The Problem of American Conservatism," The American Historical Review, Apr 1994.

Rick Perlstein, "I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong," New York Times, Apr 11, 2017.

Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Origins of a Movement, (1979)

Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, (1986)

Stuart Hall, The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays, (2017)

Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, (2017)

One of the things that really has sickened me the past few years given all the agitation from the right about things pertaining to public schools and public school teachers is how they've weaponized the really beautiful and wonderful situation where there's a special teacher that a young person feels is trustworthy enough that they can tell that they're struggling with their sexuality or gender or are confused or gay or trans, whatever it is. I mean, it's almost a funny cliche. How many people like me, gay guys, first told their female high school English teacher who was their favorite, right? One of the first people I ever talked to about it was my high school English teacher. - It really is demonizing this safety net, this place of potential help and care which is different from what you can get from the family but it is extremely kind and necessary for a lot of kids in their development to have somebody that they can trust to tell something, that they don't necessarily want their parents to know and that it wouldn't necessarily make them safer if their parents did know it. And I think that in every way this conversation about teachers and gender and sexual nonconformity plays out on the right, it is demonizing the very thing that didn't used to exist for kids which was like a sympathetic ear, somebody who would understand where they were coming from. So I do think that the effect of this rhetoric is truly toxic to creating more safety for kids especially in environments where their community or their school or their church or whatever would react very negatively to them sharing some doubt that they have about their sexuality. - I just wanted to add one detail, my beloved English teacher. She had a brother who committed suicide and years later she told me she thought it had to do that he was secretly gay. And so it was a special concern for her, I think, for that reason, given her family background. And to like tell a teacher like that, to not care for the students who might come to her with things they're struggling with, it's just so disgusting, you know? - It's demonic to use their term. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

Transcription truncated.

Some more answers to listener mail! Subscribe on Patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear the rest.