Giant Shoulder Pads, Love Connection and Andrew Sullivan's Opinions on Race

Name three terrible ideas from the 1980s which should have stayed in the 1980s.

(To be filed at the very front of my file cabinet marked "Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says".)

From shoulder-pads to Baywatch and from Ready Player One to Roseanne, the 1980s have never stopped trying to muscle in on the 21st century.  Hell, Netflix was practically invented to give 10-episode reboots and rebirths to the likes of The Dark Crystal, Full House and One Day at a Time.

And the results are...mixed.

Some of these recovered media memories of the Age of Reagan are quite good.  I for one will ride for Stranger Things all day long.

On the other hand, some should never have been exhumed, zapped back to a shambling imitation of life and set loose on an already Trump-weary nation.  For example, the idea of America's Whiniest Gay White Privileged Tory Reaganite True-Conservative Catholic Stoner Shut-In being paid actual money to petulantly whitesplain what is and is not racism, what does and does not constitute the universal opinion of "the left" and what shall and shall not qualify as "resistance" in a country which he has never remotely understood.

A snip from Mr. Andrew Sullivan today:

But the alternative view — that of today’s political left — is that Jeong definitionally cannot be racist, because she’s both a woman and a racial minority. Racism against whites, in this neo-Marxist view, just “isn’t a thing” — just as misandry literally cannot exist at all. And this is because, in this paradigm, racism has nothing to do with a person’s willingness to pre-judge people by the color of their skin, or to make broad, ugly generalizations about whole groups of people, based on hoary stereotypes. Rather, racism is entirely institutional and systemic, a function of power, and therefore it can only be expressed by the powerful — i.e., primarily white, straight men. For a nonwhite female, like Sarah Jeong, it is simply impossible. In the religion of social constructionism, Jeong, by virtue of being an Asian woman, is one of the elect, incapable of the sin of racism or group prejudice. All she is doing is resisting whiteness and maleness, which indeed require resistance every second of the day.

Yes, Mr. Sullivan has finally come share the same sewer grate and same meal of rats and bitterness with the Dumbest Man on the Internet:

This is where Andrew Sullivan is at now - sharing Gateway Pundit posts about Sarah Jeong being The Real Racist pic.twitter.com/BPNBwfba6C

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) August 2, 2018

So who in their right fucking mind still thinks it is an excellent idea to pay actual money to America's Whiniest Gay White Privileged Tory Reaganite True-Conservative Catholic Stoner Shut-In to crank out such codswallop?

Adam Moss, editor-in-chief New York Magazine, that's who:

“I have had the privilege of working with Andrew from the beginning of his career (mine too). He is a major (deep and elegant) thinker and writer whose work has had tangible consequence, and he has written some of the more influential essays I have ever had the honor to publish. He also happens to be a true innovator―one of the first and best political writers online,” says Moss. “Since he stepped away from his blog in 2015, his voice has been greatly missed in our national dialogue. I’m grateful that he will return to writing at New York.”

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