“That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad.” That comment is from a May 2017 essay by the writer Freddie deBoer, whose coining of “offense archaeology” looks prescient. Here are three reasons why:
First, as the Washington Post reports, “snippets of an old interview [John Wayne] did with Playboy magazine, in which he expressed racist and homophobic sentiments and railed against socialism, began circulating on Twitter. A tweet with portions of the interview sent Sunday night from a screenwriter in Tennessee went viral — and, with that, Wayne’s politics were news again.” Marion Mitchell Morrison, who went by the stage name John Wayne, was born 112 years ago, and he died 40 years ago.
