Black activists are extremely controversial.

Native decolonizers are extremely controversial.

Kanaka Maoli nationalists are extremely controversial.

Anti-Zionists are extremely controversial.

Queer radicals are extremely controversial.

Marxists are extremely controversial.

Corporate media pointedly ignore all of them.

But those media love to cover Jordan Peterson and other reactionary hacks (including neo-Nazis). They don't provide that coverage because the subjects are controversial (see above). It happens because corporate media have an affinity for regressive ideas and a vested class interest in promoting them. By conditioning debate around spectacle, with a cast of smug and unlikable protagonists, reporters and pundits can ignore economic and racial injustice, even as they gesture at disapproval of the provocateurs they cover. (You disapprove of Peterson? Great! Maybe start ignoring him?)

Don't let reporters and pundits absolve themselves of introducing awful people to wide audiences by hiding behind sensationalism. The world has tons of controversial thinkers who are also insightful and compassionate. Arbiters of the newsworthy don't want to cover them. And they wouldn't be allowed to, anyway.

Pay attention to all that is missing from corporate media rather than assessing what they offer. The real story, as always, exists in the systematic absence of certain narratives.

- Steven Salaita

#anarchism #queer #racism #whiteness #WhiteSupremacy #activism

Today in Labor History May 14, 1940: Emma Goldman (1869-1940) died in Toronto, at the age of 70. She had been raising money for anti-Franco forces in Spain. Goldman emigrated to the U.S. from Lithuania in 1885. The Haymarket Affair radicalized her and attracted her to the anarchist movement. She planned the assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, along with her lover Alexander Berkman. However, Frick survived and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. After that, she renounced “propaganda by the deed.” Nevertheless, she continued to agitate for women’s and workers’ rights and for anarchism. And she went to prison numerous times for “inciting to riot” and for distributing information about birth control. She also went to prison in 1917 for “inducing persons not to register” for the draft. When she was released, the U.S. deported her, and 248 other radicals, to Russia. She initially supported the “workers’ revolution.” However, after learning about the violent suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion by the Bolsheviks, she denounced the Soviet Union.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #anarchism #EmmaGoldman #soviet #russia #haymarket #BirthControl #feminism #revolution #riot #antiwar #rebellion #prison