I promise they’re not all about sports.

Those of you who read my blog regularly have likely noticed that three of the last six essays I’ve published were about sports — and you have probably wondered along the way, “Wait a minute, is she a sports writer now?”

Nope. This blog was, and continues to be, a blog about politics and the intersections with pop culture. I simply found myself intellectually more attracted to the crazy headlines coming out of the college sports world this year than I did anything else that inspired the start of this blog.

And when I say it’s been a crazy year in college football, the sport I follow closest, I mean it. Thus a big chunk of the stories that made my top 10 of 2021 do come from the world of sports. But there were other amazing, harrowing, and thought-provoking stories this year that I will never forget — stories that compel me to fight for the time, energy, and resources to publish regularly here and on other platforms in 2022.

In the meantime, here are my favorite stories in sports, politics, and pop culture from 2021, from the good to the G.O.A.T.

10. The FDA and CDC Pause the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 Vaccine

I don’t know how much of a lasting impact the FDA and CDC’s 10-day pause on the Johnson & Johnson covid-19 vaccine had on Americans getting vaccinated, but it was a defining moment for me in terms of revealing a deepening divide between the public health community and those in the journalism / media / communications world. A number of journalists at the time feared the government’s pause gave vaccine conspiracy theorists all the ammunition they needed to advance their campaign of misinformation just as vaccine eligibility and access were growing across the country.

More than anything, though, it became clear that the health experts who were tasked with delivering information about the vaccines to the public might not be the best folks to assess the risks and potential misuse of the information they put forward for a distrusting and politically polarized public to consume.

9. “The Great Resignation”

Where did millions of American workers go between 2019 and 2021? In early 2021, the answer to this question seemed obvious: People were afraid of dying from covid-19. So they quit. Or they worked in a job sector that had been decimated by the pandemic and were forced out of the market. But how were they supporting themselves without work? Easy. Extended unemployment benefits. Or so it seemed.

As the covid-19 vaccine became widely available and state and federal unemployment benefits began to dry up, the picture of what was keeping so many Americans out of work looked a lot fuzzier. To this day I remain unconvinced that there’s a simple or single answer to this question; but I appreciate deep dives like the one by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic that attempt to reconcile different explanations and embrace the humility that comes with admitting uncertainty.

8. The Second Impeachment of President Donald Trump

On January 13, Donald Trump became the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. The second impeachment followed Trump’s role in inciting the January 6 domestic terror attack on the U.S. Capitol. While the vote in the House to impeach Trump was bipartisan, the Senate did not convict him on the charges brought to the chamber (by the time the trial was over, Trump had already left office). It seems unlikely Trump will ever face accountability for his many efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results —through the intimidation of public officials, disinformation campaigns about voter fraud, and through mob violence — which is why I worry this won’t be the last time a story like this makes my end-of-year list.

7. Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License”

Rodrigo was perhaps the biggest breakout star in all of music in 2021, spearheaded by her evocative single “Drivers License.” I was surprised by how much I connected with this song and the real-life teenage love triangle that inspired it. But there’s a recurring theme in “Drivers License” that colors Rodrigo’s follow-up album, “Sour” as well: Sometimes the bigger heartbreak is the realization that the breakup didn’t mean as much to him as it did to you. The rage Rodrigo bellows out in two other popular singles, “Good 4 U” and “Deja Vu” is a clear signal to men who try to win the breakup by pretending they’ve lost nothing in losing you. We see you. And you’re an even bigger ass than we knew.

6. The Crash and Burn of Urban Meyer

I genuinely got of sick of seeing this man’s name in the news every other day, always for the dumbest, cruelest things. I wasn’t one of those naysayers from the beginning who felt the Urban Meyer experiment in Jacksonville was destined to fail like it did. But at a certain point — and for me, that certain point was when Meyer, a married man, chose to feel up coeds at a bar in Ohio after a loss rather than travel back to Jacksonville with his team — the situation just became a horrifying parody of what the league allows white men to get away with — even when they aren’t winning games.

5. Alexi McCammond Gets Cancelled…Kind Of

If there were ever a test case for the excesses of “woke” politics, former Axios reporter Alexi McCammond’s ouster from Teen Vogue over racist and homophobic tweets from her teen years seemed to be it. But back in March I ended up with a more complicated telling of her departure than what initial headlines lead me to believe happened. Of all the essays I wrote in 2021, the McCammond piece is probably the one I’m most proud of in terms of the research and willingness to offer a perspective that, well, doesn’t satisfy any one side in the end. It’s a messy thing that happened to her, and it’s a good thing when writers can unclutter the story without shoehorning a hero or villain or victim when there isn’t one.

4. The Summer of Realignment

The world of college sports was turned upside down in late July when the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners announced they would be leaving the Big 12 conference for the SEC after 2025. With the two most revenue-generating programs by a mile leaving the conference, many assumed the Big 12 would disband or experience death-by-a-thousand-cuts as the remaining Big 12 schools sought out other conferences to join. And on the heels of NIL’s legalization, the SEC was starting to look like the very monopoly the NCAA had been accused of running in the Supreme Court case that eventually ended the organization’s power to deny student athletes name, image, and likeness earning opportunities.

Looking back, if I had to pick the political equivalent to this bombshell story in the sporting world, I’d have to go with former President Trump firing former FBI Director James Comey. It was that big. And of course, this bombshell paved the way for a few recent and equally earth-shattering stories in college football — namely, newly minted USC head coach Lincoln Riley leaving the Sooners in November to avoid joining the SEC.

3. The Disappearance and Death of Gabby Petito

Much like the Alexi McCammond/Teen Vogue saga, I was drawn to the disappearance and death of 22 year-old Gabby Petito largely because I felt coverage of her story and the interest in it generated by social media lacked nuance — not just by the media, but by the media’s critics. Yes, Petito was a pretty, blond, fit white woman. No, the media would not have afforded a missing Black woman the same coverage, if any coverage at all.

But there were plenty of other reasons Petito’s story went viral.

For one, Petito was extremely active on social media, documenting the trip where she ultimately vanished and was murdered, likely by her fiancé, on YouTube. It makes sense that other young social media users would take an interest in the case and that the national media would follow suit. And of course, the bizarre circumstances of her disappearance were all digital-age true crime tropes: Petito’s Spotify playlist gets updated out of the blue to include songs about burial; her latest Instagram posts don’t match her usual posting habits; text messages from her phone use names she would never use to refer to members of her family.

But what frustrated me the most about criticism of the coverage of Petito’s case is that while Gabby Petito was very clearly a victim of domestic violence, the possibility that millions of young women might follow the case out of solidarity with her experience, or might be roused in light of her murder to seek help for themselves, was erased from the conversation — and Petito was reduced to the media’s “Missing White Woman” problem. It just felt wrong to deny a dead woman this public mourning and rage simply because women who look differently than her don’t often get the same attention from the media when they are killed.

2. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock Deliver the Senate to Democrats

Though overshadowed by the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by right-wing extremists, the January 5 run-off electoral victories of Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, two Democrats running to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate, was easily the most inspirational story in politics in 2021. Their victories gave Democrats the Senate majority needed to pass the American Rescue Plan which provided monetary relief to millions of Americans amid the covid-19 pandemic. But the ongoing intra-party scuffle over Biden’s Build Back Better agenda is a brutal reminder of the limits of the Democrats’ slim majority. Still, the organizing power, particularly within Black and Brown communities in Georgia, is something progressives have to feel good about for future elections.

1. Bottlegate

Yes, the ending to the Ole Miss-Tennessee game was my favorite news story in all of 2021. It was hilarious and humiliating and horrifying and just about the perfect tableau for the age of tribe politics and moral panics. But it was also kind of amazing to watch something on live TV that I had an instant historical reference for thanks to a sports history YouTube channel I watch regularly. A few years back I watched a short documentary about the original Bottlegate from 20 years prior and the similarly abject Cleveland Browns fans who trashed the football field following an inexplicable play review by the officials after another play had already happened.

But the best thing about this story? The mustard memes. That’s going to stick with Tennessee fans for life. And as an Alabama fan I couldn’t be happier about it.

Lincoln Riley wanted the Jimbo Fisher contract without following in Jimbo Fisher’s footsteps.

Donald Trump may no longer be in the White House, but the recurring detonation of bombshell news stories that marked his presidency now defines the college football news cycle in 2021. On Sunday, several sports news outlets reported that Oklahoma Sooners head football coach Lincoln Riley would be leaving the program to become head coach of the USC Trojans. The move followed nearly a week of persistent rumors linking Riley to the still-vacant LSU head coaching job. And considering the success Riley has had in Norman developing quarterbacks and competing for a spot in the college football playoff, there was simply no reason to think he would leave the powerhouse program he has built there.

But in a preseason marked by sudden and shocking changes — yes, the emergence of NIL in June but mainly the exodus of the Sooners and the Texas Longhorns from the Big 12 conference in July — Riley’s exit seems like the crazy, chaotic ending to a news cycle that never made sense to begin with. In just a few short months, the Sooners and Longhorns have gone from selfishly smart future SEC rainmakers to the red-headed stepchildren of a conference that didn’t really need them in the first place.

As a fellow older millennial, Riley’s decision to head further West after five seasons at Oklahoma makes a lot of sense to me. Although I had my doubts about the appeal of the USC job, I knew that whoever took it on needed to be young and eager for a project. Most importantly, they needed to figure out how to get California kids like Alabama’s Bryce Young to stay in California. That likely meant landing a coach known for his recruiting prowess.

But after a couple of months the USC job just seemed kind of forgotten, and ultimately less desirable as LSU and Florida gave their coaches the boot. Clearly Lincoln Riley took advantage of the shift in media attention away from the vacancy— and looking back, some now wonder if Riley may have been distracted by his contemplation of L.A. life all along. Just hours before Riley departed for L.A. for good, the Sooners had lost to their in-state rival Oklahoma State in the Bedlam battle.

At any rate, Riley and USC were able to reach an agreement for him to become the next head football coach without much of the college sports media getting the scoop. But USC is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a young head coach. Though jarring as the news was, anyone, even members of the team Riley left behind in Norman, OK, should be happy for him.

But Riley didn’t pursue the USC job like a coach who knew he was doing something people would respect. He pursued it like someone eager to teach a bunch of athletic directors, university system presidents and chancellors, and one very determined conference commissioner a lesson: money and brand can only take a program so far. You need a coach who can not only win games, but consistently position the program to compete for championships.

In other words, in choosing USC Lincoln Riley cashed in on his own stock when he feared it was about to take a hit. He wasn’t necessarily afraid to compete in the SEC — he just knows he can get more for his name by going out West where there is barely one playoff-eligible team every year than by going 10–2 in his first few years in the SEC. He’d rather battle Alabama or Georgia in the college football semi-finals once a year than do so regularly in conference play. Of course Alabama or Georgia could win out either way; but Riley creates more value for himself as the coach who got USC on the field with them, especially if he’s considering an NFL job in the future.

Still, I can’t help but think last night was Riley’s Aaron-Rodgers-trade-rumors-on-opening-night-of-the-2021-NFL-draft moment. Perhaps the rollout to this announcement went so poorly (Oklahoma players and staff found out about Riley’s departure at just about the same time as everyone else according to The Athletic) because Riley wanted to cause a firestorm. Oklahoma had ditched the Big 12 with little consideration for how the move might impact his coaching career moving forward. Now, he is leaving with little regard for the program as it inches closer to a new chapter in the SEC. At least that’s one way to interpret the five-hour wait between the first reports of the hire and Riley’s actual announcement that he had already left for L.A.

But this is what an exceedingly high-stakes college football world begets. The cold, calculated manner in which Riley acquired a coveted coaching job halfway across the country is the same sort of conceit that drove the Sooners and the Longhorns to the Deep South. It’s what I feared an increasingly deregulated and decentralized college sports world was building towards with NIL even though the status quo was undeniably untenable. When anything can be understood in terms of making a business decision, does it even matter what the right thing to do is anymore?

Last Saturday a video clip surfaced on Twitter that appeared to show Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer receiving a lap dance by an unknown woman at a bar. At the time, it was unclear when or where the video had been filmed; but based on social media posts from Meyer’s wife, Shelley Meyer, and others it seemed the video had been filmed during a birthday party Meyer attended while in Ohio on Saturday night.

Until a Monday morning press conference, no one in the Jaguars organization, the Meyer family, or even the big sports cable news outlets had commented on the video clip. According to ESPN, when Meyer was asked about the video during the Monday press conference, he claimed that he apologized to his team and staff for “being a distraction.” But at no point during the press conference did he acknowledge that his behavior as a married man and leader of young men was wrong. In fact, he blamed party attendees for “pull[ing] me out on the dance floor.”

The lack of moral reflection on Meyer’s part should not come as a surprise, though. For nearly two decades Meyer has been a brilliant football coach and a terrible person who has depended on his well-placed former players in the media to hide just how terrible he is.

To be sure, after 35 years of marriage, it would not be unusual for a couple like the Meyers to have an understanding— a little flirting, a kiss, or bodily touching might not cross the line into infidelity they’ve established for each other. But the Meyers, particularly Shelley, have built their public brands on being Christian, and Urban has attached himself at the hip to the most famous outspoken Christian in the sports world, Tim Tebow. If anyone believes that what Urban Meyer did was wrong, it should be Urban Meyer.

Meyer is also very close friends with former Ohio State and Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Cris Carter. Carter, now a sports podcast host, regularly posts Bible verses to his Twitter account. Although he has remained mostly silent on Meyer’s return to coaching this year, Carter was one of Meyer’s biggest supporters during his scandal-plagued final months at Ohio State and his subsequent resignation from the football program in December 2018. While he was co-host of the FS1 show First Things First, Carter delivered an impassioned defense of Meyer’s stated reason for stepping down from the Ohio State job — his health — claiming at one point that he feared coaching might literally kill his good friend.

First Things First on Twitter: ""He wants to coach, but physically he can't. He can't do this anymore. Urban Meyer is a good man, and he's had a tremendous impact on young people."@criscarter80 on his former WR coach & friend to step down at Ohio State pic.twitter.com/hlqO0eVU9j / Twitter"

"He wants to coach, but physically he can't. He can't do this anymore. Urban Meyer is a good man, and he's had a tremendous impact on young people."@criscarter80 on his former WR coach & friend to step down at Ohio State pic.twitter.com/hlqO0eVU9j

Nearly three years later, Meyer is back coaching under the extreme pressures of the NFL. And if recent reporting is any indication, he’s not much better a leader in the pros than he was at Florida or Ohio State. A CBS exposé published last month revealed chaos and low staff morale inside the Jaguars organization, in part because Meyer has created divisions among the staff with his temper and inexperience with managing an NFL schedule. He has also alienated players by defending his decision to hire Chris Doyle, a former strength and conditioning coach at Iowa who had been accused of racism and bullying during his Iowa days. Doyle immediately resigned from the Jaguars following the backlash to his hiring.

Today’s reports of a toxic workplace under Meyer align with the stories heard around the Florida program under his watch. Back then Meyer was alleged to have played favorites among the players, covered up player drug use, and misreported players’ medical injuries in order to land new recruits.

This is who Urban Meyer is. As so long as he’s been a head coach somewhere, it’s who he has always been. His success on the field — three national championships at two different college football programs— has no doubt afforded him second chance after second chance in his career. But he’s also got a cadre of enablers in the media who lean on their born-again Christian brands to justify giving Meyer another shot to self-destruct. And another program to run aground.

The night her husband was caught with another woman gyrating on his crotch, Shelley Meyer appeared to react on Twitter by retweeting a photo posted by one of the men in attendance at the party. “Meanwhile, I am babysitting,” she wrote, followed by the hashtag “#BuddyDeservedANightOut.” According to photos from his Twitter page, the man Meyer retweeted, Brian Schottenstein, is a real estate developer and Ohio State booster who is friends with former President Donald Trump.

Running in the same circles as Trump loyalists, the Meyers are no doubt familiar with how the cult of Christian enablers works. Despite decades of allegations of sexual assault and misconduct — and admitting to it on tape — former President Trump built a right-wing movement whose most devoted members identify as white evangelicals. Like Donald Trump, Urban Meyer coasts on the reputations of his Christian enablers. If prompted, Tim Tebow will surely come to Meyer’s defense, just as he has when others have questioned if Meyer will stay the course in Jacksonville amid a losing record and organizational turmoil.

That’s because the religious right are foremost committed to securing power and will enable anyone who gives them access to more of it. Tebow and Carter aren’t just former players enamored with their former coach. They are men who crave the institutional power he wields both as a current NFL coach and as a legend in the sport. Tebow found this out when he got to tryout with Meyer’s new squad as a tight end despite having no prior experience in that position.

Tebow was eventually cut from the squad, but this won’t be the last time he needs a favor from Meyer. And right now, Meyer could probably cash in a few favors of his own.

During the summer a number of high-profile Black musicians and professional athletes either voiced skepticism or skirted questions about receiving the covid-19 vaccine. Rapper Busta Rhymes was at the center of an expletive-filled anti-mask and anti-vaccine speech that went viral on Twitter. L.A. Lakers star Lebron James, normally outspoken on social justice issues, refused to state during an interview whether he had been vaccinated, calling the matter a “family” decision. Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Deandre Hopkins threatened to quit the NFL over its covid-19 protocols that punish teams that have to cancel games due to a covid-19 outbreak on the team.

Nicki Minaj on Twitter: "My cousin in Trinidad won't get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it & make sure you're comfortable with ur decision, not bullied / Twitter"

My cousin in Trinidad won't get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it & make sure you're comfortable with ur decision, not bullied

But rapper Nicki Minaj’s recent Twitter post about the covid-19 vaccine — she claimed that a friend of her cousin became impotent after receiving the shot — was so ridiculous that her post elicited as many memes as it did comments of condemnation. “You have an enormous platform and have just spread unimaginable vaccine hesitancy to your fans,” wrote Meghan McCain, former cohost of The View, in response to Minaj’s Twitter post. “Not only is it deeply irresponsible, it is very sad.” According to Yahoo News, health officials from both the United States and Trinidad, where Minaj’s cousin lives, also called out Minaj, with President Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warning Minaj of the dangers of spreading medical misinformation online.

In fact, the White House reached out to Minaj offering her a chance to speak with one of the doctors on staff to answer her questions about the vaccine. While Minaj claims she was invited to the White House and indicated she would go (the White House has so far only confirmed offering Minaj a phone call with a doctor), ultimately she doubled down on her vaccine skepticism, culminating in a retweet of a video clip of Tucker Carlson defending her against critics.

Nicki Minaj on Twitter: "🎯 pic.twitter.com/BdU0knwFLT / Twitter"

🎯 pic.twitter.com/BdU0knwFLT

Minaj’s skepticism-turned-defiance was, at this point, predictable. I don’t think there was ever a window of opportunity to convince her that her posts were harmful. That’s because in Minaj’s world, belief in conspiracy theories about vaccines is not only nurtured by friends and family members but enforced as a kind of in-group identity marker. In other words, for the wealthy and well-connected whose public personas and personal relationships depend on the validation of people who believe in covid-19 conspiracy theories, there is more to gain from defying medical elites like Dr. Fauci than there is in admitting the people they care about are wrong.

But why do so many Black famous people believe in this conspiracy theory? The history of medical racism in this country (from Tuskegee to the HIV/AIDs crisis to Black women dying at disproportionate rates during childbirth to the lack of affordable healthcare options in Black communities) certainly can be a factor, but to posit it is the primary reason so many Black celebrities are vaccine skeptics suggests most other Black people share skepticism. And if we do, it can’t be because Black people are susceptible to the same kinds of misinformation and partisan political cues as everybody else. No, our reasons must be good and pure.

That logic doesn’t seem right to me.

Nicki Minaj’s attempt to rationalize her vaccine skepticism with a story she heard from her cousin points to another, and perhaps more powerful, source of Black celebrity conspiracy thinking around vaccines — the desire to be loyal to those who keep them grounded in the culture.

After all, Black people who become elites through music or professional sports tend to retain their ties to the communities they are most comfortable and familiar with even after they gain access to other elites. This is in part the business of clout— Black people are the primary consumers of hip-hop music, just as Black consumers drive the popularity of many athletic brands associated with professional sports — thus Black superstars like Minaj keep people around who can speak to their own authenticity as Black people who made it out of street life or generational poverty (Minaj has been open about her early struggles as a young Trinidadian immigrant).

But clout in this respect can also serve as racial in-group enforcement. That is to say, what began for Minaj as defending her family quickly snowballed into defending all Black people who don’t trust the government and the medical establishment no matter the reason. A recent review of Spike Lee’s new HBO miniseries on the impact of 9/11 and the covid-19 pandemic on New York City describes people like Minaj who indulge the conspiracy theories of their family members as operating not from a place of “paranoia and hatred” but from a place of love and loyalty to one’s community. This is likely the case for professional athletes as well whose closest relationships involve their teammates. Lebron James has probably received the covid-19 vaccine based on a statement released by the league during the summer; but given the dynamics of his in-group (other Black male athletes, some of whom have expressed doubts about the covid-19 vaccine), using his giant platform to reveal his status and possibly advocate for others to receive the shot would be like crossing a picket line.

Clout, both as a brand maintenance mechanism and as a racial in-group enforcer, can explain why Minaj defended her family despite evidence they were wrong. But clout doesn’t explain why she retweeted that video clip of Tucker Carlson defending her despite becoming in recent years the most prominent white supremacist figure on the right.

Nicki Minaj on Twitter: "Right. I can't speak to, agree with, even look at someone from a particular political party. Ppl aren't human any more. If you're black & a Democrat tells u to shove marbles up ur ass, you simply have to. If another party tells u to look out for that bus, stand there & get hit https://t.co/OhjQZCbmBa / Twitter"

Right. I can't speak to, agree with, even look at someone from a particular political party. Ppl aren't human any more. If you're black & a Democrat tells u to shove marbles up ur ass, you simply have to.

Perhaps Minaj isn’t very political and doesn’t know much about Carlson’s virulent racism. But even when confronted with it, she admitted she was willing to put it aside for open dialogue’s sake. But being able to put aside Carlson’s racism is a privilege that only Black people of a certain status can truly afford. Just as fellow rapper Kanye West used “freethinker” branding to mask the role status played in his access to, and political support for, President Donald Trump, Minaj cries for political independence from Democrats to deflect from the ways her money and fame insulate her from the worst of Carlson’s anti-Blackness.

As Black people we all know someone like Nicki Minaj — not someone famous, but someone whose tolerance for vaccine conspiracy theories isn’t motivated by fear and hatred of elites, but by being socially welded to those who do. They are the people we know and love up close unlike the researchers at Pfizer or Dr. Fauci in the White House. In 2016, the presidential campaign for Donald Trump understood the power of tribal identity and — more importantly — that given the right political climate, certain parts of people’s identities could be weaponized against other parts of their identities so that Republicans seemed more Black friendly than they really were.

Yes, even racists like Tucker Carlson can seem like allies to Nicki Minaj so long as they are defending the same people — namely, her.

We All Know Someone Like Nicki Minaj was originally published in ZORA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Perhaps the only thing more predictable than the swift wagon-circling of Beltway news outlets around Never Trump Republican commentary on the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan are the attacks on Biden from Republicans who once lauded former President Trump’s anti-intervention “America First” doctrine. Even Trump himself, whose administration negotiated the agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops by May 2021 (President Biden pushed back the date to September 11, and then up to August), blasted Biden last weekend for pulling out American troops too soon. “Joe Biden gets it wrong every time on foreign policy, and many other issues, the August 14 statement said. “He ran out of Afghanistan instead of following the plan our Administration left for him…”

There is no shortage of criticism of the Biden administration’s planning and messaging around the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. But it’s hard to tell from the news coverage that Biden did something that was, up until last weekend, relatively popular with the public — and truly bipartisan within the halls of Congress. Well-known MAGA loyalists on Capitol Hill from Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado to Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley praised Trump’s initial withdrawal plan and subsequently bashed Biden for following through with them. Their sudden change in tune is clearly a case of shameless political opportunism— but it is also a fitting end to the GOP pretending to be an anti-war party under Trump.

Tim Hogan on Twitter: "Pick any GOP Senator. pic.twitter.com/d3KA0jDZKU / Twitter"

Pick any GOP Senator. pic.twitter.com/d3KA0jDZKU

In the early days of 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump threw a grenade into the GOP presidential primary race when he attacked the last Republican president, George W. Bush, for starting two failed wars in the Middle East. Open racism eventually became a staple of Trump’s campaign, but it was his flagrant disregard for the foreign policy establishment that set him apart in the debates. This lack of deference to generals and policy elites turned out to be shrewd, as it set a clear contrast against the Democrat’s nominee, Hillary Clinton. Following a contentious primary race against left favorite Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton repeatedly faced jabs from the left and right for her 2003 Senate vote in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and her support as Secretary of State for the U.S.-backed NATO intervention in Libya amid the Arab Spring protests.

Still, it was obvious back in 2016 that Trump’s flippant commentary opposing the Bush wars after the fact did not reflect any deeper commitment to anti-war causes. It didn’t even reflect a preference for diplomatic or humanitarian alternatives to exercising U.S. military power abroad. Indeed, Trump’s brand of isolationism seemed more like an afterthought or distant corollary to his primary commitment to white identity politics. And the punditry that gave it credence in order to harm Clinton politically usually left out the xenophobic elements of his “America First” policy — from refugee caps to the Muslim ban to a militarized U.S.-Mexico border. The pundits also saw no need to reconcile candidate Trump’s supposed anti-war commitments with his endorsement of torture and theft of other countries’ resources.

Now in their rush to hammer Biden, Trump and his acolytes in the GOP are channeling the same Bush-era neocons they lampooned for four years — at least until they get caught.

For instance, in an August 16 follow-up statement to his initial criticism of Biden’s withdrawal plan, Trump seemed to endorse resettling Afghan refugees in the states, saying the Biden administration failed in “evacuating civilians and others who have been good to our Country and who should be allowed to seek refuge.” The following day, according to the Washington Post, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also insisted the U.S. should help Afghans seeking refuge from the Taliban during an interview with a Kentucky news station. Even Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, with his notoriously acrimonious relationship with Trump, fell in line with a statement on August 17 claiming Georgia would be open to accepting Afghan refugees.

But just one day later, Trump appeared to walk back his pro-immigration comments with a single sentence statement — “This plane should have been full of Americans. America First!” According to Daily Mail, included with the statement was the now-infamous photo of over 600 Afghan refugees crowded into a U.S. military evacuation jet. The evening before, Fox News primetime hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham had unleashed rants against establishment Republicans who, likely taking their cues from Trump, came out in favor of resettling Afghan refugees in the U.S. However, once Trump saw popular and pro-MAGA conservative media figures turning against the refugees, he realized he couldn’t attack Biden on humanitarian grounds, but on predictably xenophobic ones.

In an August 19 statement, Trump made sure to emphasize that Biden’s failure was that he didn’t “bring out all the American citizens” first, then their equipment. He made no mention of Afghan refugees. Instead he said the U.S. should just bomb their own bases — while the troops are still present.

As nonsensical as Trump’s statements are, the Afghanistan withdrawal isn’t the first time Republicans have been opportunistic to the point of absurd in their reactions to foreign events. Back in 2017, when Trump launched dozens of airstrikes on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase, Republicans applauded the move as a long-needed showing of American prowess, even though they had just spent an entire election cycle hammering President Obama and Hillary Clinton for getting the U.S. involved in the neighboring Libyan civil war.

“American First” was never an anti-war rallying cry. It was always an appeal to white identity politics within and beyond domestic political borders. Trump centered his newfangled opposition to the Bush wars during his 2016 campaign because they were already unpopular with the public and had thus become a useful weapon against his political enemies who, unlike Trump, had voting records that could be scrutinized.

Biden could have certainly chosen the politically safe route and quietly kept thousands of U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan indefinitely; I suspect he went forward with the Doha agreement’s timeline for troop withdrawal in part because he took the right’s opposition to the war at face value and did not expect much pushback from them or the press. But Trump-aligned Republicans have shown time and again that other than racism, they have no real policy objectives or principles. They just want to see their political enemies suffer.

The public consensus is clear — college student athletes should be able to make money using their name, image, and likeness (NIL) while participating in NCAA sports. Much like the fight over Obamacare and same-sex marriage, the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in NCAA vs. Alston aligns with attitudes that had been shifting against the status quo for years.

But the era of NIL has come to represent so much more than a shift in attitudes around student athletes getting paid. It is also the ascension of economic attitudes typically promoted by the American right — namely, deregulation and the rights of individuals in the free market outweighing concerns over abuse, fairness, and parity within capitalist structures.

Mark Emmert, current president of the NCAA, seemed resigned to the NCAAs’s uncertain future in the NIL era, telling reporters last week that the organization’s regulatory power over student athletes should be the “bare minimum.” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey voiced a similar opinion in his opening remarks at SEC Media Days earlier this week. Sankey claimed the NCAA “can no longer resolve” issues related to player compensation, as the Supreme Court’s ruling effectively branded the organization a monopoly whose regulatory power over players’ compensation must be broken up (hence the variation in NIL rules across states and schools).

In a populist political climate, the bipartisan consensus on NIL and the sudden irrelevance of the NCAA as a governing body makes sense. Ultimately, the NCAA made its own bed by being greedy and refusing to adjust its policies in the wake of changing American attitudes about their relationship to capital. Whether it was the Occupy protests and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign on the left, or the Tea Party movement and Trump’s rise to power as a demagogue on the right, resentment and alienation from monied elites have been a part of American political life for well over a decade.

In other words, by the 2010s, when the first rumblings of populist fervor in the college sports world could be heard, there was simply no good reason for the NCAA to continue prohibiting student athletes from being paid a portion of the profits their labor generated, or allowing student athletes to make money from jersey sales and third-party endorsements. Moreover, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the structurally racist dynamic of the NCAA’s rules against player compensation was clearer than ever before. Not only do Black student athletes comprise a majority of the highest revenue-generating NCAA sports — football and basketball — the revenue generated from their labor helps pay for programs that are majority white such as softball, lacrosse, and swimming. And yet, until this month, only the players were barred from making a profit from their own labor.

With that said, there are few reasons to think the world of college sports won’t be better off without the big, bloated bureaucracy of the NCAA. And yet I’m uneasy with the ideology from which all of this has advanced — college sports is a marketplace, and in addition to being students and athletes, players are multi-million dollar business owners in need of very little oversight. While schools are primarily tasked with coming up with NIL restrictions, they are also their own enforcers especially if they live in a state without NIL legislation on the books. I’m all for student athletes making their own money; but I’m not ready to cheer on the anti-regulatory ideology that led to Enron or the 2008 housing crisis or the peeling away of net neutrality rules.

This is not to endorse any of the NCAA’s doomsday scenarios that were clearly intended to protect revenue streams rather than ensure parity in college sports (after all, pre-NIL rules didn’t stop my alma mater, the University of Alabama, from consistently posting top 5 recruiting classes and appearing in the national championship game 8 times over the past 11 seasons). But when it comes to racial justice, there is value in parity in college sports — to right old wrongs and to prevent new ones.

Back in 2016, former Vice columnist and editor Patrick Hruby’s made the definitive case for paying student athletes on the grounds that at the time, the only people allowed to profit from the labor of Black players in the highest-grossing college sports were coaches, university officials, and conference commissioners who are largely white. Even the title of Hruby’s article, “Four Years A Student Athlete,” a reference to the famous slave narrative by Solomon Northup, characterized the relationship between the NCAA and Black student athletes as one between overseer and slave. In the years since, however, Hruby’s views have tended to resemble most others in sports media, describing, for instance, the battle for NIL in one tweet as one in which student athletes are recognized as “separate and unequal economic citizens.” In a repost of a 2018 article he wrote, Hruby goes one step further and says there should be no restrictions on NIL earnings of any kind for student athletes.

But indifference to parity just comes across as smug refusal to engage the reality that allowing student athletes to earn unlimited sums of cash could go horribly wrong in all the ways that pitted public opinion against the NCAA. Despite being overrepresented in NCAA sports, it is possible that the biggest beneficiaries of NIL aren’t going to be Black basketball and football players, but young, blond white gymnasts with millions and millions of Instagram followers. Perhaps the uneven success of some players and positions (quarterback or shooting guard) disincentivizes student athletes from agreeing to pool and redistribute their earnings to support less marketable student athletes or enter into group earning contracts at all. Perhaps these self-regulating schools decide the revenue is too great for the rules to matter anymore and ditch them — further ballooning the divide between the richest athletic programs and everyone else.

When it comes to Black student athletes as well as those from other marginalized groups, either justice matters or it doesn’t. And if it does, NIL proponents must be willing to be admit the free market won’t work it all out on its own.

In the five months since Democrats took control of the White House and both houses of Congress, critical race theory has been the locus of political agitation for their Republican opponents. At least four states have passed bans targeting the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 public schools, and similar bans have been introduced in at least 20 additional states. As columnist Jeet Heer explained in a recent podcast episode on moral panics, the current panic over critical race theory follows a long tradition within the American right of using public education issues to “harvest” angry voters for upcoming elections.

Though mostly confined to Fox News TV segments, red state legislatures, and conservative PAC-engineered activism in local school board elections, the movement against critical race theory does seek some bipartisan buy-in. Conservatives can’t admit they’re using school children to intimidate teachers and to stifle academic scholarship they don’t like; instead they aim for media outlets to cast them as concerned parents opposing “divisive” theories rather than as partisans looking to stoke racial tensions ahead of next year’s midterm elections. This is a familiar tactic in the ongoing conservative panic over transgender student athletes competing in school sports. Conservatives trot out liberal feminist empowerment rhetoric to seem as though they are fighting trans girls’ rights because they care about the rights of cis girls.

But with passage of the American Rescue Plan, President Biden’s signature legislation giving parents of small children a majority of direct financial relief from the covid-19 pandemic, the false anti-politics of critical race theory opposition should be seen as a bet against the broad appeal of Biden’s economic agenda over the broad appeal of white identity politics. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans hope to prove that moral panics are much better at driving white voters to the polls than are Democratic promises of putting more money into people’s pockets.

President Biden’s rescue plan, which he signed into law back in March, provided considerably more direct financial relief to typical families than the previous covid-19 relief bills signed into law by former President Donald Trump. Adults making under $75,000 received $1,400 stimulus checks (up from $1,200 in the CARES Act) and an additional $1,400 for each of their dependents (up from $500 in the CARES Act). Biden’s rescue plan also included an expanded child tax credit, raising the credit amount from $2,000 per child to $3,000 per child (or $3,600 per child under age six). Parents could also opt to receive part of the new tax benefit as a monthly direct payment of up to $250 per child (or $300 per child under age six) beginning in July. Finally, in June, the White House announced a month-long partnership with local daycares that would provide parents with free childcare while they were getting the covid-19 vaccine.

During negotiations over the American Rescue Plan, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer insisted that Democrats had learned from the mistakes they made while negotiating the 2009 economic recovery bill with Republicans. “Ten years [the recovery] took, because [the American Recovery Act] wasn’t deep enough and strong enough,” Chuck Schumer said in an interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow according to The Intercept. “We’re not going to make that mistake with Covid.”

For Democrats, optimizing pandemic relief for parents could reposition the party in the minds of voters as the party of family values.

This may not be a tall task given the way white identity politics have replaced the GOP’s usual fixation with the family. And former President Trump’s rise to power and unwavering support within the GOP despite his many sex scandals suggest evangelicals are far less animated by the optics of social conservatism than they are the raw power of Republican rule. Consequently, whatever inroads the GOP made with socially conservative Black and Latino voters in last year’s election are now being undermined by the party’s deeper commitment to making it harder for them to vote.

In looking to reclaim “family values” from the GOP through child-friendly economic policies, Democrats also answer lingering questions over how to compete with Republicans for rural and working class white voters in the Rust Belt as well as sustain the party’s inroads with college educated white voters in urban and suburban districts along the U.S. coasts. The choice of expanding the social safety net over moving to the right on issues like abortion and immigration is a clear sign that Democrats are siding with left economic populists who argue that the best antidote to white identity politics is a social-democratic agenda that proves government can be a force for good.

And fortunately for Democrats, there just isn’t much evidence that culture war-mongering on the right has moved public support toward the GOP in recent months. Biden remains relatively popular in job approval polls, and Democratic voters remain fired up according to the generic ballot, likely in response to a record number of voter suppression bills working their way through state legislatures.

The other problem for Republicans is the consistently mixed messaging of their own moral panic pursuits. Just a few years ago President Trump threatened to defund public universities that ban far-right activists like Milo Yiannopoulos who have a history of using hate speech; today, Republican-run state legislatures are banning entire theoretical traditions that threaten their delusions about America’s past. Similarly, following the wave of George Floyd protests in 2020, Republicans attempted to brand Democrats as anti-police radicals whose “defund” rhetoric contributed to the uptick in violent crime in major U.S. cities. A year later, however, one of conservative media’s most post TV stars wants to defund the military after a high-ranking general defended critical race theory education.

Still, what gives critical race theory opponents power beyond the base of the GOP is their appeal to a protest identity — to politics that clarify who they are and who their political enemies are. In that sense, the movement against critical race theory is the natural successor to the Tea Party movement from a decade ago or the MAGA movement of the last four years. The Biden policy agenda remains quite popular, but with good reason Republicans are betting that a year from now white voters will reward the party that gave agency to their anger and alienation from educated elites over the party that helped pay for their daughter’s daycare.

Once understood to be a critique of society’s overreliance on smart technology, this “Black Mirror” classic turns out to have much more to say about our current fixation with cultural reckonings.

In the third episode of “Black Mirror,” Netflix’s futuristic anthology series about the dangers and unintended consequences of new technology, humans are implanted with a chip that records everything they see, hear, and do. The chip, known as a grain, allows humans to access their recorded memories anytime they wish; and in this episode, “The Entire History of You,” a young man named Liam (Toby Kebbell), is slowly done in by paranoia over his wife Ffion’s (Jodie Whittaker) past relationship with their friend Jonas (Tom Cullen). Liam is ultimately vindicated—after berating her hours, Liam gets Ffion to show him grain footage of her having sex with Jonas around the time she became pregnant with their only child — but he has lost so much in the process of getting to the truth that in the end he decides to remove the grain from his neck.

Back in 2011 when the first season of “Black Mirror” debuted on British television (the show moved to Netflix at the beginning of the third season), the show’s primary focus on the dark side of emerging technologies meant viewers were likely to see the grain in “The Entire History of You” as symbolizing the ways in which smartphones were beginning to take the place of real life connections with other people. But today, Liam’s overuse of the grain to access the past is not as remarkable to me as the reasons for his and friends’ apparent discontent with the present.

In one of the more harrowing scenes from “The Entire History of You,” Liam and Ffion decide to have sex after a fight, but the two are unable to enjoy each other in the moment without watching grain footage from their past sexual encounters. Similarly playboy Jonas (Tom Cullen), Ffion’s ex-lover who quickly becomes Liam’s nemesis, admits during a dinner party with Liam, Ffion, and their mutual friends that he would rather watch grain footage of his past sexual conquests than have sex with his fiancée, with whom he has recently separated, in the present.

There are other hints that the young, upwardly mobile implanted class are miserable in grain culture. Jeff (Rashan Stone), another guest at the dinner party, has just purchased a new condo but spends most of the party complaining about the ugly frayed rugs in his new home, which he has plenty of grain footage to bore everyone with. For entertainment during dinner, the only thing the hosts can offer their friends is grain footage of themselves partying in their younger days. They even try to pressure Liam to show his grain-recorded memories of the job performance review he had earlier in the day so that they can judge how well or poorly he did. But Liam, suspecting the review was a disaster, resists until Jonas finally gets everyone to stop asking him to show it.

Liam and his friends aren’t simply denizens of a near future in which grain-watching parties have replaced TikTok videos as real life passes them by. What makes grain culture so terrifying in “The Entire History of You” is that young people are defined almost entirely by the contents of their recorded pasts.

In the years since this episode’s debut, it’s not hard to see similarities between grain culture in Liam’s universe and millennial addiction to the past — whether it’s rebooting old TV shows and movie franchises from their formative years or millennials’ own reckoning through op-eds and podcasts with the public’s past treatment of female pop stars and athletes of color. One major reason for this trend, according to Ashley Fetters of the Washington Post, is a desire among socially conscious millennials to “reexamine as adults what they remember absorbing in fragments during childhood.” But Liam’s descent from depressed lawyer in a sputtering marriage and legal career to restless vigilante offers another reason for young people’s predilection for the past: unlike the outmoded political processes of the present, technology has given young people greater narrative-making power over the past. And with this power the aggrieved (like Liam, like any indebted, underemployed 30-something who has witnessed two financial recessions in the prime of their lives) get to decide what justice for them looks like.

Liam’s justice-seeking begins at the dinner party he was not expected to be able to attend with his wife Ffion because of the performance review at his law firm. Sensing the review did not go well, Liam spends most of his time on the cab ride to the party analyzing grain footage of the review, paying close attention to the facial expressions of the firm’s partners. But to viewers, it’s suggested that Liam’s ethical compass likely cost him a promotion, as the tone of the review changed when he questioned the firm’s desire to represent children in dubious lawsuits against their parents. In essence, Liam is established early on as a familiar figure to millennials — a principled young professional struggling to get ahead in a world run by sleazy people.

People like Jonas.

Jonas is the archetypical ladies man — instantly charming and attractive to everyone he meets until he’s gotten what he’s wanted from them, at which point he reveals his true selfish and hedonistic ways. But of all the guests with grains, Jonas is probably the most present-minded person at the dinner party. As he entertains the others with jokes and anecdotes from his dating life, Ffion can’t stop smiling and chuckling in his direction at the dinner table. Liam takes notice and with the aid of the grain slowly uncovers the truth about their relationship.

The episode ends with Liam wandering alone around an empty house, randomly clicking through grain footage of his life with Ffion and their daughter, before deciding to cut the grain out of his neck for good. It seems getting to the truth about the past cost him far more than he has gained. The lesson is straightforward: Knowing the truth about something doesn’t always make us feel better about it. And if the constant churn of myth-making about ourselves and our world is what it takes for people to be happy, what “justice” is there in stopping it?

The meliorist among us may be reluctant to admit this question crops up in every instance of cultural reckoning. But for every queer character injected into a 90s TV show reboot, for every male celebrity brought to his knees by social media rediscovering his past mistreatment of women, for every new film documenting America’s racial terror against Black people — there is also the gutting realization that our present political process offers very little in the way of permanent change.

In a made-up future in which everyone’s addiction to the past channels their discontent with the present, the world looks eerily similar to the one we live in now: A generation of highly educated and politically conscious young adults seek justice in reimagining what once was long after their degrees and their votes have failed to deliver the lives they were promised since they were kids.

In the early 2000s, genre-bending in music was all the rage, as artists like Kid Rock and Linkin Park contributed to a record number of chart-topping singles for the rap-rock genre. So why wasn’t Black fusion rock artist Res a part of the success story?

It seems every decade has a group of artists known for taking over the music charts with their genre-bending sound— and in the late 2010s, 19-year old singer and songwriter Billie Eilish was that artist. Mixing darkwave vocals with pop, electronic, and hip-hop beats, Eilish’s sudden popularity harkens back to the Second British Invasion in the 1980s when synth-pop-meets-soul acts like Culture Club, Dead or Alive, and Spandau Ballet traipsed their way into the American mainstream.

What also makes Eilish’s mainstream success so remarkable is her not-so-mainstream appearance. At last year’s Grammys ceremony, Eilish accepted the award for Song of the Year in an oversized black pantsuit and green undershirt to match her black and neon green-striped hair. Thirty years earlier, Boy George of Culture Club and Pete Burns of Dead or Alive had stood out from the new wave pop pack with curious androgyny and a full-on embrace of camp.

Bold as they were, these artists are considered genre-bending musicians ultimately because they are white and have integrated their sound with Black music. Black artists who mix rap and soul with music deemed white don’t often achieve the level of commercial success or accolade within the industry that white artists do because whiteness is central to the appeal of genre-bending music.

The rap-rock fad in the early 2000s, much less scrutinized than British Invasion or blue-eyed soul from decades earlier for mining Black music, is especially emblematic of the role whiteness plays in which artists are considered genre-bending. Bands like Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, and P.O.D. weren’t rap-rock simply for their embrace of vocal styles conceived in Black communities, but for the meaning assigned to their willingness to cross into a definitively Black and counter-cultural genre. They were seen as rebelling against whiteness — specifically white Christian America — and thus appealed to young white audiences angling to do the same. But for the most part, these artists only embraced the aesthetics of rap and not the politics. In contrast, Black artists, especially Black female artists who performed commercially accessible rock-fused pop and soul music like Res, were considered difficult to market to mainstream audiences and did not see the success that white rap-rock artists did.

The Fad in Rap-Rock

To call rap-rock’s popularization in the early 2000s a fad is not to suggest rap-rock artists were musically inferior, but rather to emphasize the genre’s chief goal of remaining marketable to white audiences all the while thumbing its nose at the white establishment. Moreover, not all rap-rock artists back then were the same. Linkin Park was rap-rock in its most literal sense, with Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda splitting vocal arrangements between Bennington’s nu metal angst and Shinoda’s nod to conscious rap. In contrast, rap made little more than a cameo appearance in Papa Roach’s earlier singles, including the 2000 hit “Last Resort” and 2002’s “She Loves Me Not,” before the band set its identity firmly in alternative rock. And of course, there were rappers from Lil Wayne to Kanye West sampling well-known rock songs throughout the decade, harkening back to Run-D.M.C.’s 1986 remake of the Aerosmith hit “Walk This Way,” perhaps the most famous crossover in rap-rock’s history.

The “fad” in rap-rock also refers to turn of the century groups like LFO that inserted rap into otherwise conventional boy band pop. Again, there was nothing particularly substantive about white artists’ use of the rap style, and it’s tempting to view them as having aided in the popularization of Black music to the benefit of Black artists seeking a wider audience. But as Wesley Morris wrote for the New York Times in 2019 on the popularization of blue-eyed soul in the 1970s and 80s, when white artists perform traditionally Black music, “[A] kind of gentrification tends to set in, underscoring that black people have often been rendered unnecessary to attempt blackness.”

Unlike blue-eyed soul artists, however, rap-rock artists in the early 2000s weren’t committing themselves to careers as white artists making Black music. On the contrary, many of them, like Kid Rock, abandoned rapping altogether as other types of genre-bending rock (namely pop-punk and emo) turned mainstream later on in the decade. For these artists, rap was an accessory, a demarcation separating them, the outcasts and troublemakers, from the privileged white kids who consumed their music. Their embrace of rap was an affront to white Christian America, but their disinterest in rap as a political protest identity showed they were not necessarily racial progressives.

White Artists Rebelling Against Whiteness

Because so much of rap-rock in the early 2000s did not embrace the political protest elements of rap, it’s difficult to pinpoint a reason as to why so many white artists at the time found refuge in rap or why white audiences loved it when they did. But there were reasons for white artists to want to set themselves apart from other popular sounds at the time and to seek out the increasing commercial appeal of Black rappers in order to do so.

In some ways, rap-rock bands were polar opposites of the pop boy bands that dominated the music industry from the mid-90s through the early 2000s. With their blonde-haired blue-eyed front men and monogamy-centric (as opposed to hyper-sexualized) lyrics, boy bands like NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and 98 Degrees represented the conservative cultural norms of the white upper-middle class. In contrast, some of the most popular rap-rock songs of the early 2000s, including Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie,” channel rap’s free-wheeling attitudes toward sex and women. Moreover, Linkin Park’s hit singles “In the End” and “My December” from their 2000 album “Hybrid Theory” convey the emotional trauma of relationships, rather than boy band pop’s optimism about them. Similarly, P.O.D.’s 2001 number one single “Youth of the Nation” serves as something of an ode to disaffected teenagers in the wake of the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School.

These artists weren’t working with explicitly political themes by calling out police brutality, poverty, mass incarceration or drug epidemics in their communities the way Black rappers were. But they nevertheless shared rap’s alienation from white Christian America. In other words, rap was a natural ally to rock’s counter-culturalism, which in the early 2000s meant resisting the religious-driven social conformity and sex negativity of the George W. Bush administration. Ultimately, rap-rock was honest about the social inequalities that drove people to antisocial behavior and self-harm. And it revealed the hypocrisy of white Christian America, which claimed to embody Jesus’ message of love but instead sought to punish those who did not confine themselves to heteronormative versions of it.

But rap-rock, both as a specific genre and as a general influence on pop and metal in the early 2000s, was not without its own racial and gender blind spots. After all, the vast majority of artists considered to be rap-rock are white men. Moreover, Black and female artists who blended different styles of music were not generally seen as genre-bending artists but rather as Black-specific artists lacking the potential for mass appeal like their white counterparts.

Res and the Limits of the Neo-Soul Label

At the same time that rap-rock was becoming a staple of radio and music TV stations, neo-soul developed its own following on Black airwaves. Like rap-rock, neo-soul in the early 2000s was as much a physical aesthetic as it was a sound, with artists pairing big Afros and pan-African prints with bare-bones acoustic rock, R&B, and funk. But unlike rap-rock, neo-soul was dominated by Black women including Erykah Badu, India Arie, Jill Scott, Lauryn Hill, and Goapele.

Around this time, Black fusion rock singer Res released the single “They-Say Vision” from her 2001 debut album “How I Do.” The song itself was a commercial-friendly blend of dance-pop, rock, and edgy reggae-inflected soul while the music video provided an unforgettable punk aesthetic. The song and video were, in essence, everything the music industry had been looking for in the early 2000s, but the song only saw modest success on Billboard’s Top 40 chart (peaking at number 33) and Res largely faded from the airwaves afterward.

I was 14 years old when “They-Say Vision” was released, and both the validation I felt seeing another Black woman on TV embody the punk rock aesthetic I loved and the bewilderment I felt over her sudden disappearance from the screen has stuck with me in the nearly two decades since the song’s release. In 2009, Res self-released her second album “Black. Girls. Rock!” on her website, where fans could download an mp3 version of the album for free. After 8 years I was excited to hear new music from Res, but was nevertheless gutted that her album did not have any major label backing.

Oddly enough, most of the curiosity around Res’ inability to top the music charts with her genre-bending sound ends up citing her music as the culprit. Perhaps she “just didn’t fit comfortably enough” into any one genre, a 2007 article from Entertainment Weekly proposed. But in an era that saw dozens of white rappers with rock bands release hit single after hit single, artists being too much of everything genre-wise just doesn’t cut it as far as explanations go.

Res didn’t enjoy the success white rap-rock artists did in the early 2000s because society doesn’t afford the same meaning to Black women breaking cultural norms that it does to white men. As far as the music industry was concerned in the early 2000s, being Black, not a Black rock musician, is what made Res different, a difference with little market value beyond Black audiences.

And yet according to her Spotify biography, Res views her own music as having “offered…an alternative to the neo-soul wave” of the early 2000s, which suggests that even in a genre dominated by Black women making music not fit for MTV, there were limits to what kind of music was deemed a good fit for Black audiences. Twenty years later, the many controversies surrounding rapper Lil Nas X — from whether his hit single “Old Town Road” should be considered country in addition to hip-hop, to whether his queer-inflected tousling with Satanic imagery in the music video for “Montero” would ever find acceptance in the Black community — reveal that there’s an ongoing struggle for Black genre-bending artists to find a home.

Rap-Rock in the Aughts and the Black Woman It Left Behind was originally published in The Riff on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp isn’t playing three-dimensional chess with the state’s new election law. He’s just being a Republican.

Late last month Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law a new election bill that would give the Republican-appointed State Election Board unprecedented powers over county election boards and put in place new restrictions on absentee voting, including new photo ID requirements, shorter periods to request an absentee ballot, and fewer drop box locations available to submit absentee ballots.

The new legislation is a direct response to Democrats sweeping the state in national elections last November and in January of this year, even though Kemp spent much of last fall being bullied by former President Trump to overturn Georgia’s results based on baseless claims of voter fraud. Kemp was not the only Republican elected official to push back against Trump’s ridiculous claims, but Trump has been especially eager to punish Kemp with a Trump-backed primary challenger in next year’s elections.

Given the likelihood of facing a tough primary challenge, some in the media have speculated that Kemp signed the unpopular and largely unnecessary election bill into law in order to consolidate Republican support behind his reelection bid. When Major League Baseball (MLB) announced last Friday that it would move the All-Star game out of Georgia in response to the new election law, Kemp accused MLB of caving to the “wishes of Stacey Abrams and Joe Biden.” Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal Constitution noted in a tweet one day after MLB’s announcement that an aide to former Republican Gov. Nathan Deal told him “Stacey Abrams couldn’t have done more for Brian Kemp’s re-election hopes if she’d written a $10 million check to his super PAC.” Similarly, the New York Time’s Maggie Haberman tweeted that one “smart” Republican told her that the new election law would provide Kemp “something of a shield against Trump’s vengeance mission” to find someone to run against him in next year’s primary.

The Republicans talking to Bluestein and Haberman would like the rest of us to think that Kemp’s decision to spin the fallout over the new election law into a cancel-culture-run-amok story was a strategic move made in serious consideration of what Republican primary voters really want. In fact, their statements sound a lot like the statements Trump-aligned conservatives would offer up to explain something the former president did that clearly hurt Republicans in an election or in their legislative negotiations with Democrats on the Hill. As Five Thirty Eight’s chief editor Nate Silver opined back in 2017 when Trump lashed out at the National Football League (NFL) over the anti-police brutality protests, the three-dimensional chess coverage of President Trump refused to engage a much simpler explanation for his behavior: Lacking impulse control, Trump falls back on his narcissistic tendencies to attack his perceived political enemies (including those like Kemp who advance his anti-democratic agenda) and to elevate those whom he thinks are his real friends.

In other words, President Trump didn’t really know what he was doing.

To be sure, I don’t doubt there are conscious efforts among Republicans to rally their voters to the polls by supplying them an endless stream of white male identity outrage. But Kemp isn’t attacking MLB or Delta Air Lines because he knows this is the fight Republican primary voters want to have. He’s just doubling down on the GOP being completely out-of-touch and uninterested in backing policies that would improve the political participation and material wellbeing of most Americans, including their own voters.

To put this another way: Kemp isn’t doing anything today that he would not do if he weren’t up for reelection next year. Republicans have become convinced that the only way they can appeal to voters is to defer to whatever feigned controversy Fox News pundits are foaming at the mouth about because they have no ideas and no interest in making government work.

Political reporters are biased toward giving Republican decision-making more credibility than it deserves. Part of this stems from a deeper bias toward “horse-race” news coverage in which Republicans and Democrats are treated like political animals motivated by nothing more than the glory of winning the next legislative fight or political scandal or election contest. But for the most part, it’s just easier for those covering the parties to believe that Republicans are principled political actors who always have a good reason for what they do even when their actions harm other people.

But there was no good reason for Kemp to sign an unpopular bill and lash out at its critics in corporate America, just as there was no good reason for Senate Republicans to uniformly oppose giving Americans more covid-19 relief and states millions of dollars to save jobs and safely reopen schools. The tell-tale sign? Some Republicans are taking credit for provisions in the American Rescue Act that help their states.

The same Republicans who assumed it would be politically safe to kill a vote to give Americans $2,000 stimulus checks just days before the January 5 Georgia Senate run-off elections shouldn’t be taken seriously when they claim Kemp is playing smart politics by picking fights with MLB and Georgia companies over the new election law. Whether or not he faces a serious primary challenge next year, Kemp will continue to do what Republicans do when they’ve become accustomed to power they no longer believe they need to work for — to punish those who try to vote them out. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the correct one.