Why Is the Drudge Report Covered in ‘N*GGER’? The Coming Right-Wing Freakout Over Django Unchained

Drudge’s attention-grabbing headline, elucidated over the course of the morning in a series of smaller headlines, was an oblique reference to the frequency of the slur in the movie, and Tarantino’s own, much-criticized history of using it in his scripts. It’s hard to take Drudge — who’s obsessed with black people to the point of fetish — seriously on this score, though: is the guy who uses his national news site to hype stories of marauding black teens really, all of a sudden, taking Spike Lee’s side on something?

That’s a rhetorical question: no, he doesn’t care that Tarantino writes “n*****” into his characters’ mouths 80-plus times in Django Unchained, in which a slave played by Jamie Foxx seeks to free his wife from a vicious plantation owner. He’s just used his particular genius for understanding white American racial anxiety to seize on its newest front line.

This isn’t the first time Django Unchained has been on the Drudge Report this week. On Monday, it got a photo and headline above the main story: “UNCHAINED: Foxx Jokes About Killing ‘All The White People’ In New Movie…” Above the headline, Drudge had a production still of Foxx, in a cowboy hat, holding a revolver.

The link took readers to Jamie Foxx’s Saturday Night Live monologue, which was one of Monday’s big “stories” in the online conservative media. “Black is in,” Foxx had riffed. In his new movie, he said, “I play a slave. How black is that? […] I get free. I save my wife and I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?