The revisionist history of the song “Fast Car”

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s come to this:

One recollection that I can confirm with the aid of historical evidence is that [in 1988] ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman was everywhere. I heard it in seedy gay bars, at civil-service leaving dos, at family barbecues. It is one of those songs that announces itself instantly as a classic for the ages. But unlike most songs in that category, it is beguiling in a subtle way. The acoustic guitar riff is simplicity itself, with just a few repeated, easily imitated notes…

It was a multi-platinum international mega-smash hit…

A recent cover of the song by country singer Luke Combs has returned ‘Fast Car’ to public attention. It has spent the past three weeks at the top of the Billboard Country Airplay Chart in the US, and has reached No2 in the Billboard Hot 100.

I remember the song well, too. It was one of those songs that grabbed you immediately – something about Chapman’s voice, as well as the unexpected rhythms of the song, and of course the understated but heartbreaking lyrics. Although Chapman herself was black and perhaps gay (who cared or even knew about the latter?), the song had no color. It was about hope, how love and obligation can tie a person to a life of failed dreams.

Now, a country artist – a white man, since to the left this is highly significant – named Luke Combs has made the song popular again. Cover songs of old hits are ubiquitous and ordinarily non-controversial, but guess what? This one isn’t allowed to stand without the woke crowd creating a fiction about the new version versus the old:

Sadly, in the Great Age of Stupid that we live in, somebody had to say something daft about the cover, to make it all about race and sexuality. Step forward Emily Yahr of the Washington Post. In a tweet announcing her article, she wrote: ‘As Luke Combs’s hit cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” dominates the country charts, it’s bringing up some complicated emotions in fans and singers who know that Chapman, as a queer black woman, would have an almost zero chance at that achievement herself.’

There is so much wrong in this tweet. For one thing, the fact that the original version is very clearly not a country song, and that Chapman is not a country artist, seems to have passed Yahr by entirely…

The article is on an even stickier wicket when it comes to Chapman’s sexuality. It tells us that Chapman ‘does not discuss her personal life’. Nevertheless, Yahr feels perfectly entitled to do so based on hearsay. She is also blasé about pigeonholing Chapman with the ridiculous word ‘queer’.

Worse still, the thrust of the Washington Post article more or less erases Chapman’s huge success in the 1980s, implying that being a black lesbian thwarted her ambitions. Back in the real world, Chapman was nominated for several Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year for ‘Fast Car’ (Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ beat her to those, somewhat incredibly). She won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist.

Oh, it’s just us old folk who remember. Yahr herself seems rather young, if you go to her Twitter page. The young seem increasingly willing to just make stuff up and ignore history, even recent pop song history, in order to make some sort of leftist point about racism or another “ism.”

Some of the replies there are as follows:

“Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman was nominated for 3 Grammy Awards including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. She won for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist.

She has 7 other nominations for Grammy Awards and two wins.

Never heard of Luke Combs but remember when Tracy’s Album blew up. I tend to listen to metal and I could still sing every word of her song to this day. But I guess that doesn’t make for much of a grievance story.

At this point, I think these “journalists” simply write these stories for the sake of controversy. They spend no time bothering to research the actual topic and instead pretend history doesn’t exist prior to today.

How old are you? This song was top of the charts when it came out and is STILL iconic to Gen X. Sad commentary from you.

Darius Rucker is black and is quite popular in country…

Are you serious.

Tracy Chapman absolutely crushed it with this song.

I still hear it all the time.

I think your editor should be fired for letting you do this story.

I know, right? It’s not like a Black woman could ever do a cover of a country song and have it blow up to be a worldwide hit!

“AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIYEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOUUUUUUUUUUUU…”

It just goes on and on like that, and I see no retraction or contrition from Yahr or the “democracy dies in darkness” WaPo – and come to think of it, isn’t that WaPo slogan racist?

Your children belong to the schools, where their trans status will be kept secret from parents

The New Neo Posted on by

Children used to be taught that it was a danger sign if anyone asked them to keep something a secret, especially if that “something” was related to sex. And children were taught that they shouldn’t keep secrets, either.

Now that’s so 20th Century – at least in many states. To take some examples:

There’s New York [emphasis mine]:

The New York State Education Department released guidance Monday to advise schools on how to create “affirming” environments for transgender children, suggesting that teachers keep students’ gender transitions a secret from their parents.

School systems should not use the student’s transgender name with their parents, unless the child advises otherwise according to the New York guidance. The student is the only one who knows if it is “safe” to come out to their parents and the first thing educators should ask a transgender student is how they can help them through their transitioning process, the guidance states.

“Some TGE [transgender and gender expansive] students have not talked to their families about their gender identity because of safety concerns or lack of acceptance and may begin their transition at school without parent/guardian knowledge,” the guidance states. “Only the student knows whether it is safe to share their identity with caregivers, and schools should be mindful that some TGE students do not want or cannot have their parents/guardians know about their transgender status.”

Extraordinary abrogation of parental rights concerning a minor child, with the school in collusion with the child to keep the secret. And yet typical, and not just in blue states:

At least 168 districts governing 5,904 schools nationwide have rules on the books that prevent faculty and staff from disclosing to parents a student’s gender status without that student’s permission, according to a list compiled by the conservative group Parents Defending Education and shared with The Post.

The 3,268,752 students affected by such policies go to class in all kinds of districts — large and small, affluent and poor, urban and rural, red and blue — stretching from North Carolina to Alaska.

The non-comprehensive list includes two of the largest school districts in the country, Chicago Public Schools and Los Angeles Unified School District — along with other city jurisdictions like DC Public Schools, Baltimore City Public Schools, San Francisco Unified School District, Portland Public Schools, and Seattle Public Schools.

Districts from deep-blue university towns — Berkeley and Palo Alto, Calif.; New Haven, Conn.; Iowa City, Iowa; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Hanover, NH; Durham, NC; and Madison, Wis. — appear on the list, as do 11 districts in deep-red Idaho, 16 in purple Pennsylvania and seven in Virginia, where Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected in 2021 in part on a platform of giving parents a bigger say in their children’s education.

I doubt that most parents are even aware of these general policies, either. The whole thing is somewhat of a stealth operation, although it’s been getting more publicity over time.

Here’s an article about the situation in Idaho.

And here’s a recent one that is quite comprehensive:

Districts are using legal theories pushed by activist groups like the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Among the most important are that children have a federally guaranteed right to privacy from their parents in school, that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishes children’s right to transition without the consent or knowledge of their parents, and that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects transgender students from the “harassment” of school districts “outing” them to non-compliant parents. The Title IX theory, the most chilling, is supported by the radically progressive notion that parents represent a danger to the welfare of transgender children until they prove otherwise by providing “affirmation.”

School districts that buy into these theories are not merely embracing the idea that hiding children’s gender transitions from their parents is legal, but that divulging the information without the child’s consent is illegal and possibly perilous to the student’s safety. In Dover, Pennsylvania, for example, a mother of a middle school student castigated a local school board after discovering that school staff had been addressing her 12-year-old daughter with male pronouns for a year. School officials even sent the child to a hospital for an evaluation without informing the parents. When the mother confronted the school board, she was told that there was a law against informing her.

Once again, we see the work of activist groups that for a while have flown under the radar while they helped changed policies all over the country. In some states, legislative bodies have enacted or are attempting to enact laws that make such secrecy illegal, although (and I can’t find the link at the moment) some school districts are defying the laws and continuing to secretly transition students.

If parents are actually abusive about this or any issue, there have been longstanding mechanisms in place in all states to deal with that. In these trans student situations, however, the secrecy policies have no requirement to prove or even to allege that parental abuse has occurred. A child’s request – a child’s failure to explicitly give permission for any reason – is enough to cause the secret-keeping. The child and the school are in collusion to keep a secret – a very big secret indeed, with major repercussions – from the parent.

It’s astounding that this is happening, but it’s really just part of a continuum of moves by which the left is increasingly taking on the task of child-rearing and indoctrination. The number of teachers and administrators who are fine with these policies, or go along with them out of fear, is extraordinary. And the number of Democrat state legislators who think it’s a great idea is enormous.

The left seems so confident that the secrets public schools keep will only be kept from those awful parents on the right. And so they don’t see a policy like that ever coming back to bite them. They expect to be in control forever, so it’s okay to take rights – or children – from conservatives. And in a state such as California, failure to affirm is increasingly defined as a form of child abuse; I’ve already written about that here as well as here.

The Marxist librarian

The New Neo Posted on by

I missed this story back when it first happened, in April of 2022. This explains what I’m referring to:

A large organization that drives the training of U.S. librarians and their use of public funds has chosen a self-described “Marxist lesbian” as its next president amid growing concern about libraries actively connecting children to sexually explicit activities and materials.

Her name is Emily Drabinski, and she won the election 5,410 votes to 4,622. I mention that because apparently the organization has 54,000 members, consisting of “librarians, libraries, library graduate schools, members of library boards and associations, and library students.” If in fact they all get to vote, most of them certainly did not, because the total participation was a little under 19%, and Drabinski’s share amounted to 10% of the total membership.

I couldn’t care less if Drabinski is a lesbian; I care that she’s a Marxist, and I care that she’s an activist who supports the following:

In a TV interview with a Boise station last week about her ALA election, Drabinski conveyed surprise at public concerns about libraries making pornographic materials available to children and buying them with taxpayer resources.

“It’s like concerted political efforts to sort of push this, sort of story about what libraries do which seems very, you know, it’s anathema to what libraries actually do, that we are, sort of pushing pornographic materials on our patrons and it’s really not what we do at all,” she claimed. “…There’s no big library agenda.”

Contrary to her claims in that interview, however, Drabinski’s other YouTube videos are replete with teaching other librarians how to “subvert” and inject hard-left politics and sexuality into their publicly funded work. For one example, consider one of many such lectures she gave to other librarians on July 6, 2021, titled “Teaching the Radical Catalog.”

In the lecture, Drabinski discussed her homosexual coming out experience and how saturating in a campus environment of proliferating sexual identities changed how she approaches being a librarian. At her first librarian job, “At Sarah Lawrence, absolutely everybody was queer. … There were so many ways to be gay. … And it was my job to teach those students how to find themselves in our library catalog,” she said. She described queering the library as “critical thinking” and “thinking critically about the catalog.”

Here’s a slide from that presentation showing the sexuality sections of the Library of Congress catalog. In it, you can see the Closed Captioning of what Drabinski is saying while showing the slide, which includes affirming the idea that “queerness includes the subversion of those kinds of normal family types.” She’s referring to the family types that naturally produce children — i.e. a married man and woman…

“We can equip our students with the capacity to wring what they need out of library structures, and wringing what you need out of systems that exclude you is a necessary life skill for survival and revolution,” she concluded in her talk. “And we can also help build a way of shaping students as agents of change both inside the library and out.”

Much much more at the link.

The reason Drabinski’s name has come up recently is that recently the Montana librarians have said “enough”:

The Montana State Library Commission voted Tuesday to withdraw from the American Library Association (ALA) because of its self-described “Marxist lesbian” president.

“Our oath of office and resulting duty to the Constitution forbids association with an organization led by a Marxist,” reads part of the letter the Montana commission voted to send to the ALA.

In a 5-1 vote, with one member abstaining, the commission voted to immediately separate from the national library group…

And Idaho may follow:

“Drabinski has said in interviews that librarians aren’t focused on assisting minors in accessing pornography, but her writings and public presentations reveal that she has dedicated her professional career to precisely that while using taxpayer resources,” they wrote. “Drabinski proposed using ‘queer theory’ to guide the way books are cataloged in libraries.”

Drabinski proposed doing so in a 2013 paper at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Idaho lawmakers also complained “the ALA has provided LGBT resources and pressured libraries to include explicit materials on transgenderism and sexual deviance targeting young children.”

More whistleblowers on Capitol Hill

The New Neo Posted on by

Whistleblower “X” has been identified:

Whistleblower X is IRS Special Agent Joe Ziegler, a gay Democrat married to a man.

No doubt a secret white supremacist far-right homophobe.

Here’s a timeline of the Biden family’s activities relating to influence peddling.

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: if the perps were Republicans, this would be practically the entire 24-hour news cycle right up till the election and beyond.

The left’s Kamala problem

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of people think Joe Biden will somehow be “retired” from the 2024 election, and someone like Newsom will run instead. And although I think that’s a distinct possibility, I am far from thinking it’s a done deal.

Because – how do you solve a problem like Kamala (cue music)?

Commenter “Jerry” writes:

I think you are overestimating how big an obstacle Kamala is to a Newsom nomination (in the event that Biden “decides” to not run).
She was such a loser in 2020 that she dropped out practically in the same speech she announced her candidacy. She’s gotten no better. Plus there is already at least one viable, if odious to many, opponent declared. The party also finds that other candidate odious but fears he could easily defeat Harris. So Newsom is “invited” to run and Kamala is off the stage by the second debate.
Yes, there will be some half-hearted grumbling about another white men only primary but that will fade quickly with a few public and private consolation prizes.

That seems to be a popular opinion on the right, but it’s not my opinion. I don’t think the grumbling will be half-hearted.

Of course, some Democrats would be relieved to see Kamala go. But for others I believe that she has too many intersectional pluses: that is, she is female and black (her Indian heritage isn’t as much of an advantage as those two, but it does solidify her position even further as a “person of color”). Pushing her aside will be a trigger for rage for quite a few Democrats, I believe, either female or black or both – and that’s a sizable proportion of the Democrat constituency. And they’re not the only ones.

But most importantly, she is already VP; not only that but she’s the very first female VP. Historic! Also the first black VP, although that’s not quite as historic because we’ve already had a black president. I think a sizable number of Democrat voters will feel that she shouldn’t have to be in a presidential debate against other candidates for the presidency. She should be the obvious choice if Biden “retires.” If she’s booted out because she performs poorly, I think a lot of people on the left will be quite angry.

The Democrat leadership – whomever is plotting the course – will have to figure out a way around that, and I don’t think it will be all that easy.

Also, I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I think Joe himself will not go gentle into that good night. As a very young man, he decided he would and should be president, and now he has that prize. He will not give it up easily, although they may indeed figure out a way to force him to do so. But I think Biden himself is a more formidable obstacle than most people credit.

From a post I wrote in April of 2020:

But what does Joe Biden want, and why would he think that he’s the man to do it? Is he running merely to stop Trump? That certainly wasn’t true in his previous bids. To bring a divisive America together? But on that score he offers nothing but intermittent and lukewarm lip service. Not rhetoric, not energy, not unity, not a record of achievement, nothing but the desire to be president. one he’s had since he was a very young man:

“When [Biden] first met [future wife] Neilia’s mother, she asked what he wanted to do for a living. Biden informed her he intended to become president of the United States.”

Biden had met wife-to-be Neilia when he was 22 years old and married her at 24, so this encounter with his future mother-in-law must have occurred during those years between 22 and 24. That’s how early he had the ambition to be president, and had not only formed the notion but it was firm enough that he was willing to state it to his future in-law as a solid intention and qualification to marry her daughter.

Biden has lost quite a bit of cognitive power over the years. But I don’t think he’s lost a single ounce of ambition and narcissism.

Two tiers of justice: more on the Hunter Biden protection squad, plus a new Trump indictment?

The New Neo Posted on by

From James Comer:

Today, a former FBI supervisory special agent assigned to the FBI’s Wilmington office and the Biden criminal investigation confirmed key portions of the IRS whistleblower’s testimony. The night before the interview of Hunter Biden, both Secret Service headquarters and the Biden transition team were tipped off about the planned interview. On the day of the Hunter Biden interview, federal agents were told to stand by and could not approach Hunter Biden—they had to wait for his call. As a result of the change in plans, IRS and FBI criminal investigators never got to interview Hunter Biden as part of the investigation.

The Justice Department’s efforts to cover up for the Bidens reveals a two-tiered system of justice that sickens the American people. The Oversight Committee, along with the Judiciary Committee and Ways and Means Committee, will continue to seek the answers, transparency, and accountability that the American people demand and deserve.

Does that two-tiered system of justice “sicken the American people”? Half of them; what about the other half? Do they applaud it? Do they even know about it?

Speaking of those two tiers:

Would anyone be surprised if they indict Trump for incitement, despite the fact that he clearly is not guilty of it (see this by Jonathan Turley)?

And then there’s more evidence of the extent of Biden family corruption:

According to House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), the Biden family allegedly set up over 20 shell companies in an effort to launder millions of dollars paid by foreign entities…

“We found all these shell companies that make absolutely no sense,” Comer told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business. “I don’t believe they have paid a penny of revenue, a penny of taxes on most of this… millions of dollars they received from our adversaries around the world.”

“But then the question is, what did they do to receive this money? How did they list that on their taxes? Is it a service they provided? As a capital investment? We don’t know.”

If Democrats controlled the House as well as the Senate, we would never know.

[NOTE: It’s extremely depressing to report on this stuff. But it’s no longer surprising. Maybe that’s why it’s so depressing.]

Let women speak – then again, maybe not

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Bob Wilson.”)

Here’s a good example of the workings of the hierarchy of victimhood in the Woke world:

Eventbrite is facing blowback for taking down an event page for women advocating on behalf of single-sex spaces on the grounds that it violates the platform’s policy against hateful content.

Independent Women’s Network chapter leader Michelle Evans, organizer of the Aug. 12 Texas-based event Let Women Speak Austin, said her gathering was “intentionally misrepresented by Eventbrite as hate speech.”

“Eventbrite‘s team of Trust and Safety experts politely communicated to me that they were capitulating to the trans ideologues, the loud minority who are perpetually offended by women speaking out against their intrusion into our sports and private spaces,” said Ms. Evans in a statement…

Ms. Evans said she still plans to hold the event, which is billed on Facebook and other platforms as a gathering “where women can speak freely about the risks of gender identity ideology to women and girls, the dangers of gender self-ID, and the need to protect women’s sex-based rights.”

Right now, in the left’s all-important hierarchy of victimhood, pride of place is held by people identifying as trans. Even though it’s pretty clear that most trans people are not activists and merely want to be left alone to live their lives unencumbered, there is an activist subset that is vocal, energetic, and determined to take over spaces that once were limited to women. And by “women,” I mean what the word has always meant and been understood to mean.

Years ago, when trans activism became a thing, a group of feminists saw the danger and spoke out, and were branded by trans activists as being “TERFS” – which stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminists”:

First recorded in 2008, the term was originally used to distinguish transgender-inclusive feminists from a group of radical feminists and social conservatives who reject the assertion that trans women are women, including trans women in women’s spaces, and transgender rights legislation. Trans-inclusive feminists who support transfeminism assert that these “TERF” ideas and positions are transphobic and discriminatory towards transgender people.

To accuse someone of “transphobia” is a typical leftist rhetorical move, particularly against other leftists who care about such labels. It is typical in the sense that it is just another in a long line of such designations, including “homophobia” and “Islamophobia.” Fall short of complete approval of every aspect of a group’s agenda and one is accused of having such a “phobia” – and even the word “phobia” is not meant in these cases to signify “fear of” but rather “hatred for.” Many people get with the program rather than face being designated as a “hater” of the group in question.

It’s a very clever and useful ploy on the part of the left, and although one would think it loses much of its force over time, it apparently still stings. The “Let Women Speak” group is being called hateful to trans people, and that is considered a powerful tool to silence them. The trans activists in this case who want to enter female-only spaces are predominantly male-to-female transitioners, who are of course biological males. Although I would be labeled transphobic for stating this obvious truth – and although many male-to-female trans people would actually agree with me on this and freely admit that they are still biological males – it has become anathema on the left to say so. That brings us to the highly ironic looking-glass-world phenomenon of trans activists calling male-to-female trans people “transphobes” if they say that they themselves are still males in the biological sense.

Why do women want their own sports competitions? The answer is obvious. Why do they want their own “spaces” – such as in prisons or abuse shelters or restrooms or lesbian bars? I think the answer there is obvious, too, and it is rooted in the differential propensities to violence of men and women, and the danger women can face. Men are not afraid of female-to-male trans people in the same way, in that they are neither a threat in sports nor in prisons, and I’m not even aware of any female-to-male trans people trying to enter male sports or male prisons, also for obvious reasons.

One of the approaches trans activists take is claiming that trans people are the victims of a lot of violence, in particular against male-to-female trans people, and especially black male-to-female trans people. But here’s what’s going on, the gist of which is that most of the victims met deaths that had nothing to do with their trans identities and everything to do with the environments in which they were living or operating (read the article for the details).

But the best way to get a leg up in the victim-identity competition on the left these days is to claim a higher degree of victimhood, and at the moment the trans community has been winning that skirmish.

[NOTE: Here’s the website of the group sponsoring the event.]

Open thread 7/18/23

The New Neo Posted on by

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Vera-Ellen is very skillful, with remarkable strength and energy, and she’s got great legs. On the other hand, I just don’t like the choreography or the style. But you have to admire that toe-tapping, which reminds me of Georgian male dancers:

The Georgians, yikes!: