The cultural revolution continues.

The targets are random, but generally conservative, because the targeters are both ignorant and maliciously partisan. I’m sure plenty of celebrities gave terrible interviews to Playboy in the seventies. And plenty of them probably said things about race and gender that would get them banned from campuses forever today.

Except that they didn’t say them today.

Eras have specific contexts. And the seventies was a particular mess. 

Some lefty today rediscovering a John Wayne interview that he did with Playboy in the seventies an then using it to call for the destruction of all things Wayne-ish shows a remarkable ignorance on two levels.

First, you have a lefty digging up an interview that plenty of people knew existed back when John Wayne Airport and other places were named after the Duke. It’s obscure only in the age of millennial journalism where the likes of MSNBC’s Katy Tur think that George Washington was a New Yorker.

Second, there are the calls for forcing history to comply with the present. Never mind that even contemporary celebs have said terrible things in interviews about race and gender, more recently, but before the black nationalist craze of the last decade took hold.

This isn’t new in any sense of the word. It’s only new to angry leftist children who are constantly discovering things because they don’t know anything.

But if we’re going to rename John Wayne Airport, when are we renaming the FDR Drive and the thousand other things named after FDR?

“You and I, Burt, are old English and Dutch stock. We know who our ancestors are. We know there is no Jewish blood in our veins, but a lot of these people do not know whether there is Jewish blood in their veins or not.”

But that’s different. FDR was a Democrat.