I had to leave a negative review after listening to episode 81 on “Anglo-Saxons” and “WASPs”. The entire crux of the episode was essentially American cultural erasure - in it, the host of the podcast literally mentions nothing of America until the last segment, and essentially gives “the Anglosphere” and Britain credit for the American culture that it has nothing to do with. He says “Hollywood is as much Australian as it is American”…no, it is not. He mentions “The Beatles” alongside Shakespeare as if The Beatles weren’t a product of a British and wider European cultural obsession with America - The Beatles were copying The Crickets, they were playing American music… There in lies my extreme irritation with this episode and with this host in general - that episode espoused such a snobby British revisionism oozing with hidden spite and jealousy of the US as a sovereign culture, and he literally writes it off as a “child of Britain” alongside small, culturally insignificant, Americanized commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia as if it hasn’t been a superpower since the World Wars and a cultural power well before that - this host makes no mention of the Revolutionary War, and never mentions America’s cultural dominance since the start of the Jazz Age and the Golden Age of Hollywood. He credits all of this to Britain, even though Britain has not been anywhere near as big a cultural player as the US has since the turn of the 20th century. This isn’t even subjective, this is objective reality. The global cultural hegemon and superpower has been America since the 1920s. You can’t just ignore American sovereignty and invention of culture to take credit for it as a British person. That is reprehensible and disgusting.
