If you think things are weird in America right now, just watch how bizarre they will be in the next four months
Up is down in modern America, where the media reports things that don’t happen and a letter calling out censorship faces calls to be censored.
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The United States has officially entered bizarro world.
Four months before what looms as the most bitterly fought election in recent history, Americans have this week been subjected to so many contradictory statements from politicians, social justice warriors and the media that it has been hard to tell which way is up.
It started with President Donald Trump’s Independence Day address at Mt Rushmore.
The Washington Post described “a dark speech” and part of his “unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination”.
The New York Times said Trump had tried to “exploit race and cultural flash points to stoke fear among his base of white supporters.”
Potential Democrat vice presidential pick Tammy Duckworth said Mr Trump “spent all his time talking about dead traitors”.
There’s no denying Mr Trump outlined his election campaign strategy: stop the left from trashing history and get law and order back into cities.
But a reading of the speech shows it was more rousing than dark, more celebratory of American achievement than division, even if in doing so he was attacking his far-left enemies.
The only Civil War reference was when he praised Abraham Lincoln for the abolition of slavery. He was cheered when he quoted Martin Luther King and alluded to the contribution of American heroes including Jesse Owens, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Muhammad Ali.
By midweek, the culture warriors were obsessing over a new controversy. This time an open letter from celebrity writers stating that free speech should be protected.
Commentators were extremely exercised by this outrage from authors including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and JK Rowling and so promptly argued that the letter should be censored.
The next day came calls for Killing Eve star Jodie Comer to be “cancelled” because some internet sleuthing involving a paparazzi pic revealed she might be dating a Republican, who might even be a Trump supporter. Yes, the left has very strict rules about a lot of things, and one of them is whom actresses who play edgy bisexual TV characters are allowed to date.
But that’s nothing compared to Bronx cafe owner Thomas Bosco, who had to change the name of his business after his neighbours and regulars denounced him for admitting during an MSNBC interview that he was a 2016 Trump voter who might have the nerve to repeat the act.
Meanwhile, Kanye West continued to talk up his bid to contest the November election. But his family reportedly said he was going through a bipolar manic episode because he wouldn’t take his medication. He is calling his new party the Birthday Party – “because if we win, it’s everybody’s birthday”.
Finally, we learned the US country music band formerly known as Lady Antebellum was kicking the absurdity level up to 11.
The caucasian trio said last month they were shortening their name to Lady A to acknowledge their initial moniker’s slavery-era roots, just as the Dixie Chicks renamed themselves The Chicks.
Intended as a tribute to African-Americans amid the nationwide Black Lives Matter upheaval, the band pulled the legal trigger against a black blues singer, Anita White, who has been known as Lady A for 20 years, demanding $A14.3m to “affirm their trademark”.
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White said she felt the band was “trying to erase me”.
“They’re using the name because of a Black Lives Matter incident that, for them, is just a moment in time,” she told Rolling Stone.