They are asking simple questions, Margaret. Why in God’s name are we only the major country on Earth not to guarantee health care to all people as a human right?!”
More like…. simple-minded questions.
The only thing Canada guarantees that is real is the right to abortions and to assisted suicide so the medical ghouls can cash in on harvesting human organs. It’s a typical leftist death cult nation.
“Pretty simple question. Canada does it, Europe does it. Somehow we can’t do it.”
Pretty obvious answer. Guaranteeing crappy quality health care… ie “free stuff”… is easy to do. It’s what leftists do all over… everywhere, every time. The reality is… somebody has to pay for all that “free stuff” and it is always, ALWAYS the over-taxed, hard-working middle class, which results in the destruction of that middle class, which is the backbone of every nation.
“Why do we have an economy one man, Mr. Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom half of American society?”
Why do leftists never have a problem with wealthy fat cats like Soros and Singham. Oh, right. Because they donate to and support DemocRats. At least Musk creates actual jobs for patriotic Americans, whereas Soros/Singham only funds jobs for activists, protestors, propagandists and anarchists working against America.
“Why do the economists tell us the richest country in the history of the world our kids will likely have a lower standard of living than their parents?”
The economists won’t dare mention that the real reason that America might have a lower standard of living is because it’s a blatant lie. Why else would illegals flock to America and try to get into America… because the standard of living they’re escaping from is so much worse than the most poverty-stricken in America. But… if it was true, it would be because of the (deliberate) destruction that Democrats have already done TO America via open borders, socialism and corruption by the Democrats in positions of power. Leftists/Democrats are the destroyers of economies everywhere they are in power.
“The American people are tired of a rigged economy, a corrupt campaign finance system. They want real change.”
The American people proved last November that they are tired of rigged elections and Democrat corruption (See: Minnesota Somali fraud). They voted for and GOT “real change” and moved America away from the leftist corruption and insanity leadership by OBiden by overwhelmingly electing Donald Trump. Since last November’s election, the exposure of the Democrat corruption and destruction has been eye-opening, proving what most patriots already suspected. It is very likely that the next presidential election will again reflect the mood of most LEGAL American citizens that will, by then, know about even more Democrat corruption and sedition. Suck on that fact and reality, Bernie.
Has Vice President J.D. Vance been sidelined by President Trump over Iran? Right now, it seems that indeed, this might be the case.
Let’s take a look at a brief timeline.
On July 8, President Trump, joined by his Secretaries of War, State and Treasury at the NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey, publicly ripped up the Vice President’s “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) with Iran. He said it agreement was “over.”
“To me, I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them,” Trump told reporters at the Summit. “They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people.”
The President also issued orders for a new series of air attacks on Iran beginning with a wave of 90 U.S. air attacks that day – which continue to this evening.
And exactly where was Vice President J.D Vance on July 8?
He wasn’t at the White House. He wasn’t in the Situation Room monitoring events. Instead, he traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he delivered a speech about Medicaid and food stamp fraud.
Of course, if he were still engaged in Iran, Vance could have canceled his Milwaukee speech and remain in Washington to interact on both the diplomatic and national security fronts concerning Iran and his now dead MoU.
Vance wasn’t needed there at all. In fact, the administration was well represented in Milwaukee. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services was speaking at the same event on the same subject.
I believe that when the President decided that he was done with the MoU, he also decided he was through with his Vice President’s input on international affairs.
This is speculation of course. But based on public actions to date, and what I know of how inside Washington works, it appears that for now, Vance is largely out of the loop.
Remember, as a U.S. Senator, Vance had no committee assignments on armed services, intelligence or national security. He never sat on a single committee that dealt with foreign policy or military policy.
But, while Vance might have been sidelined, he really wasn’t done on all things concerning Israel.
On July 14, Politico reported, “Vance postponed earlier plans to address a Tuesday morning House GOP conference meeting, instead traveling to Texas to tape an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast.”
Now Vance was giving the big finger to the House leadership and instead decided it advanced his own interests as he traveled to Austin to appear with Joe Rogan. The podcaster has about 11 million viewers per episode.
In fact, the House Republican conference was confronting very important issues close to the President and could determine the outcome of the mid-term elections.
At that July 14 meeting, they were grappling with legislative efforts to finalize an $95 billion budget resolution, with supplemental requests related to fighting the war in Iran, and the President’s top priority, to pass the SAVE Act, an electoral reform bill to reduce electoral fraud.
In the end, the House did narrowly pass all three pieces of legislation today – but without J.D. Vance’s assistance on July 14.
And then, while on Rogan’s podcast, Vance decided to viciously attack Israel – America’s key ally in the Middle East as well as our wartime ally.
The Vice President claimed that Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 Presidential campaign manager, had committed political treason: he secretly lobbied on behalf of Israel through podcasters.
The Vice President was furious over a Time investigative article that focused on Parscale’s attempt to generate pro-Israel sympathies among conservatives through a digital campaign. Indeed, the contract was awarded to him through Havas, an Israeli-based global ad agency.
Vance lashed out at Israel, telling the podcaster, “When I open up the pages of Time magazine, and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways. You know, my response to that is, well, go to hell.”
But Pascale, in the same Time article categorically denied that his campaign tried to undermine the President of the MoU, or Vance’s ceasefire MoU, telling the magazine, “I have never funded, organized, or participated in any effort to undermine President Trump – ever – including his Memorandum of Understanding or ceasefire proposal.”
The conservative digital expert additionally told Time, “The claim that I am coordinating an effort to prolong the war is completely false. The only people manufacturing a conflict between President Trump, Israel, and me are anonymous officials using background quotes to make me the bogeyman.”
Vance did concede to Rogan that indeed, countries other than Israel do try to influence American public opinion as well as our government. “I wouldn’t say they’re the only effective country trying to influence American politics by any means,” he said.
In fact, according to the U.S. Attorney General’s latest FARA report to Congress, in the last six months of 2024 Islamic nations spent more than $46 million for public relations and lobbying in the United States. Israel, on the other hand, spent only $1.5 million in lobbying and public relations, according to FARA. If you add Pascale’s 2025 contract, you can add $4 million more.
According to Open Secrets, an American nonprofit that has long tracked lobbying and public relations by foreign governments, Qatar alone spent over $240 million on FARA-registered lobbying and public relations in the US since 2015. “This includes efforts through firms influencing policy, media, and academia. In 2024 alone, expenditures exceeded $30 million, dwarfing many other foreign entities while advancing Doha’s interests amid regional tensions,” the investigative nonprofit reported.
Vance’s hostility towards Israel appears to be part of an emerging plan by the Vice President to run against Israel in the 2028 Presidential election. In this regard, he’s aligning himself with Tucker Carlson and other conservative voices that are openly anti-Israel.
The only good news is, perhaps, President Trump has lost trust in Vance as his international point person on Iran. If indeed he is sidelining him, that would be good news.
But there are many chapters to be written about the war against Iran. Who knows if Vance will be resurrected within White House national security circles? And will the Vice President be asked against to serve as the President’s lead negotiator with Iran?
For almost four decades, I did expert witness testimony in wrongful death cases. The purpose of such testimony is often to place an affected party in a position of financial indifference between a “before” and “after” event. It’s the same premise for black reparations.
Most enslaved Africans brought to the United States came from Senegambia and west-central Africa, including present-day Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Angola, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Gabon. I did a calculation that compared wages in these countries today and compared them to current black wages in the US. I then did a present value analysis using a 5% discount rate on the income flows, extending it back 150 years.
The result is: blacks in the US have benefitted by just over $640,000 versus blacks who stayed in those African countries over that period of time. In other words, add up the income differentials for US versus African blacks, discount that wage differential over that 150 year period and US blacks have gained over $640K on average. So, if you are a descendant of a black slave, you owe non-blacks in the US a little over $640K.
On a sticky evening in July, leaders of the surging democratic socialist movement in New York City jumped onto Zoom to begin crafting the next phase of their campaign.
Democratic socialist candidates had just toppled five incumbents, capturing two House primaries in the city and a handful more in state legislative races. But with an off-cycle election year ahead, leaders in the city’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America were shifting their focus from winning votes to changing policy.
The group’s next order of business, its members agreed in the nearly hourlong Zoom, is to pressure Gov. Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat, to raise income taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers when the state Legislature convenes in Albany in January.
The group had failed to persuade Ms. Hochul to do so earlier this year, settling instead for a much more limited tax on multimillion-dollar second homes in New York City. But with its influence on the rise, the group believes that a broader tax-the-rich campaign may succeed next year, despite Ms. Hochul’s continued resistance.
“We brought the fight to Hochul to tax the rich last session when we had only nine socialists in the State Legislature,” Gustavo Gordillo, the co-leader of New York City’s D.S.A. chapter, said in an interview. “This cycle, our forces will be almost doubled, and there’s a whole new crew of progressive legislators who are going to demand what New Yorkers want, which is for Hochul to tax the rich.”
Since Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary win last year, the New York City D.S.A. chapter, active since the 1980s, said it has added more than 7,000 members. Its current membership of roughly 15,000 is spread across the city, often concentrated in gentrified pockets of Brooklyn and Queens (the so-called Commie Corridor), along with Upper Manhattan.
A reader on my Facebook thread defending J.D. Vance’s opposition to capitalism:
We live in an economic “protectionist” world … Free trade will never follow a Idealist Milton Friedman Economic model again as long as there are States that use their economies as weapons to prop up their own economic initiatives like social welfare states or to pursue Global Military and economic dominance against us … Trade imbalances are the tools they use to defeat us ! IMO that is what Vance is talking about … the same as what Trump is now doing … and you don’t see that ? or am I missing something ?
My reply:
If every nation on earth were economically free, tariffs would be unnecessary. Because Americans opt to trade with totalitarians and slave holders like Communist China, Communist Canada and others, our government has to take some steps in self-defense. President Trump’s use of tariffs is an extension of his foreign and defense policy. The need for tariffs and other barriers to oppose bad governments is not a case against the free market. It simply shows how desperately the whole world needs free markets. At home and abroad, government is the problem, not unregulated markets. A better economist than Friedman is Ludwig von Mises; also his student, George Reisman, who wrote Capitalism. I have read all their books.
The faulty premise in what you (and others on this thread) have written is to assume that tariffs are the only or most important issue in human behavior and economics. False. If we didn’t have free markets and the wealth and profits they produce, there would be nothing to tax or impose tariffs on, because the economy would be stagnant. Again, the onus is on J.D. Vance to define his alternative to free markets. And if he is so great, does this mean the Republican Party will no longer be in favor of capitalism? We need Reagan and Thatcher as never before–at a minimum. If the Democrats regain power, as they likely will if their opponent is as weak and contradictory as Vance, then all this will be moot. Mamdani’s policies will be America’s, if we let Democrats anywhere near the federal government again.
Boys to Men: Rourke, Bacon, Barkin and More in Diner
by Rick McGinnis Rick’s Flicks
Barry Levinson’s 1982 film Diner is set in Baltimore at the end of 1959, in the final days of what had been a momentous year, and just before what would be a pivotal decade. The year had begun with the success of the Cuban revolution and its recognition by both the US and Soviet governments, and Barry Gordy’s founding of Motown. Pope John XXIII announced the Second Vatican Council and Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash in Iowa.
Later in the year China abolished the Tibetan government and replaced the Dalai Lama, NASA introduced the first seven Mercury astronauts, Miles Davis released Kind of Blue and Hawaii was made the 50th state. Nikita Khrushchev was invited to tour the United States by President Eisenhower and, later that same month, met with Mao Zedong in Beijing. The Guggenheim Museum opened in New York City, the Clutter family were murdered by Richard Hickock and Perry Smith in Kansas, Ben Hur topped that year’s box office and Bell Labs invented the MOSFET transistor.
But none of these events are mentioned in Levinson’s film, which concerns itself entirely with a half dozen young men, brought together by the democratizing machinery of the American public school, barely a few years past graduation and living in a holding pattern on the threshold of real adulthood. For a period picture set during the lives of the culturally dominant baby boomer generation, it’s remarkably free of nostalgia; its focus is on these six friends, and Levinson could have swapped the cars, clothes and music with that of any point in time ten or even twenty years on either side of 1959.
Or as Fenwick (Kevin Bacon), one of the friends, wonders aloud to Boogie (Mickey Rourke): “You ever get the feeling there’s something going on that we don’t know about?”
The film begins at a dance in what looks like a church or legion hall, with a local band teasing out the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” to keep the crowd on the floor dancing. We’re introduced to the friends gradually, starting with Modell (Paul Reiser), Boogie and Fenwick, who’s in the basement, drunk and smashing windows. Boogie tells him he’s not being very mature.
“Fuck mature,” Fenwick replies.
Fenwick, it turns out, has sold his date for the night to another young man for five dollars; Boogie, the most emotionally adept member of the group and its designated ladies’ man, convinces the buyer to forget about the transaction and the girl to let Fenwick take her home. After playing a practical joke on his friends by pretending to roll his car – one of the idiotic “smiles” that Fenwick lives for – they convene at the diner on Baltimore’s harbour that is ground zero of their lives together.
Shrevie (Daniel Stern) is the only married member of the group; he sells TVs for a living and defines himself by his record collection. Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) is the next one to go – his wedding is scheduled for New Years Eve but his fiancée Elyse (whose face we never see) has to pass a grueling quiz about his beloved Baltimore Colts or it’ll get called off.
Modell is the designated wiseass; Reiser only had a few dozen lines in the original script but his background in stand-up allowed him to improvise and Levinson eagerly expanded his part. Fenwick comes from a family with money – not a lot, but enough to give him a hundred dollars a month until he’s twenty-three and allow him to be jobless and alcoholic. Boogie works at a hair salon and goes to law school at night, but he has a gambling problem that’s put him deep in debt to the local bookies.
The only member of the group who’s escaped Baltimore is Billy (Tim Daly), who goes to school in New York City and has come home for the holidays to be Eddie’s best man. Boogie, Fenwick and Shrevie meet him at the train station and catch up at the diner just before the sun rises; you know for sure that they’ve been doing this almost every day since they had enough money to pay for a plate of fries with gravy and a coffee.
Billy catches up with Eddie later that morning; the groom lives with his parents, a grown man living in a boy’s room, tormenting his mother for as long as he’s still living under her roof. Billy, on the other hand, is the smart, apparently level-headed one, a favorite of everyone’s parents.
Levinson was a veteran of TV and movie comedy, with a resume that included Mel Brooks pictures (Silent Movie, High Anxiety) and the Carol Burnett Show. He got an Oscar nomination for his script for Norman Jewison’s …And Justice For All (1979) and did uncredited work on the screenplay for Tootsie; that probably explains how he was able to get $5 million in backing from MGM/United Artists for his first picture, an autobiographical story starring a cast of unknown actors. Or perhaps it says something about Hollywood in the ’80s, still coasting on the fumes of the risk-taking, renegade ethos of the previous decade.
Ever since it came out, Diner has been a favorite of screenwriters and directors, and the way Levinson introduces his main cast and sketches in their shared backstories is textbook character-based movie making. In a 2012 Vanity Fair article about the movie for its 30th anniversary, New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin writes that “Levinson should get royalties any time two or more men sit together in a coffee shop.”
The main cast came to the film with varying degrees of experience, though they were all in the struggling phase of their careers – Bacon was sleeping on a piece of foam in a New York SRO hotel. Stern had the most onscreen experience, making his film debut in Breaking Away (1979) followed by small parts in picture like Stardust Memories, One-Trick Pony and Honky-Tonk Freeway.
Guttenberg came a close second with small roles in Rollercoaster and The Boys from Brazil before starring alongside The Village People in Can’t Stop the Music. Bacon had his film debut in Animal House before roles in Starting Over and Friday the 13th; while Mickey Rourke had just made a big splash in Body Heat after bit parts in 1941 and Heaven’s Gate.
For Daly (the brother of actress Tyne Daly) and Reiser Diner was their film debut. Ellen Barkin, who plays Shrevie’s neglected wife Beth, had just one uncredited role as “Woman Playing Guitar” in Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke on her resumé.
The hardest part that Levinson had to cast was the diner. The youthful experiences that inspired the film took place at the Hilltop Diner in Northwest Baltimore but it had been turned into a nightclub and a substitute in the city fell through when the owners kept asking for more money. Levinson and cinematographer Peter Sova were driving around the city when the director saw an empty lot by the water with the Domino Sugar sign on the far shore and decided it was perfect.
The director and executive producer Mark Johnson discovered a “diner graveyard” in New Jersey and arranged to have an old diner from Long Island trucked to Baltimore and placed on site. It was so convincing that production crew had to wave off truckers who tried to pull up at night when they were shooting.
When shooting was over they returned the diner to New Jersey but it had become so important to Baltimore that WBAL, the local radio station, bought it for $34,000 and had it parked two blocks from city hall. Initially it was to be run by the city to help train students in the hospitality trades but it lost money consistently and the Hollywood Diner now sits empty, maintained but unused except for occasional rentals as a film location.
It’s not hard to see how the film’s cast all went on to subsequent fame; Levinson handed each of them at least two or three great scenes from which they could build a career. Rourke was the obvious standout – his Boogie not only had the most compelling character but the most to do, from the infamous “popcorn box” scene to his desperate decision to sleep with Beth to win a bet and avoid a beating.
Bacon teases the self-loathing barely concealed behind Fenwick’s self-destructive behaviour and Levinson even drops a broad hint that he’s hiding real intelligence when we see him ace every question while watching GE College Bowl. Shrevie and Eddie seem like the most unformed and emotionally stunted of the gang, the latter with his obsession with the Colts (who would leave Baltimore for Indianapolis the year after the movie came out) and the former willing to pick a fight with his wife when she misfiles his record collection.
“This is important to me,” he shouts at her. “You never ask me what’s on the flip side… Every one of my records means something to me. When I listen to my records they take me to some place in my life.” When you consider that this life spans barely two decades this sounds like an unwitting cry for help, and it’s likely that anyone writing Shrevie today would probably take the easy and terribly contemporary way out and place him firmly on the autism spectrum.
You don’t need to have known your share of serious collectors – I’ve known more than I can count – to recognize the anxiety about change and fear of time’s passage that informs Shrevie’s rant, but Barkin is heartbreaking in this scene, baffled by his oversized rage and what seems like a wholly inappropriate reaction.
Barkin bears a heavy burden in the picture as the only woman with a character drawn with similar depth to the half dozen men at centre stage. Billy has a deep but platonic friendship with Barbara (Kathryn Dowling) that’s threatened by a pregnancy after their one-night stand earlier that fall, but she doesn’t have much to do but reject his offer to “do the right thing” and in any case Daly’s Billy is the least interesting of all the boy-men in Levinson’s film.
He’s presumed to be the point of view character for the audience, and in a “making of” documentary produced for the film’s twentieth anniversary most of the cast speculate that Billy was Levinson’s surrogate. Ultimately, though, he’s less crucial to the picture than Reiser’s Modell, the group’s most vestigial member and the smallest part on paper when filming began, but the performance that helped Levinson commit to film the banter that he admitted was the real point of a movie where story and plot took a distant second place.
“I wanted the piece to be without any flourish, without anything other than basically saying, ‘This is all it was,'” Levinson told Vanity Fair. “These conversations that can go on endlessly through the night – bets over the stupid fucking things that you can bet on – is it. Without gimmicks: nothing. Without gimmicks. This is it. Period.”
The Vanity Fair piece goes so far as to call Diner the most important film of the subsequent decade – its reliance on dialogue over action and plot a direct line to Seinfeld, The Office and the films of Quentin Tarantino and Judd Apatow: “More than any other production, Diner invented … nothing. Or, to put it in quotes: Levinson invented the concept of ‘nothing’ that was popularized eight years later with the premiere of Seinfeld.
“In Diner (as well as in Tin Men, his 1987 movie about older diner mavens), Levinson took the stuff that usually fills time between the car chase, the fiery kiss, the dramatic reveal – the seemingly meaningless banter (‘Who do you make out to, Sinatra or Mathis?’) tossed about by men over drinks, behind the wheel, in front of a cooling plate of French fries – and made it central.”
Writing about the film in Baltimore magazine three years ago, Max Weiss notes that the film doesn’t get the attention it once did and wonders if a film about six young men hasn’t slipped to the far side of acceptable subject matter. “I have no patience for the phrase ‘They couldn’t make this film today'” she writes. “Of course, they couldn’t! Norms change. Sensibilities change. You need to put films like this in their proper historical and cultural context and stop judging old films by modern-day standards – it’s a recipe for missing out on a lot of great art.”
There’s a lot of behaviour in the picture that would be flagged as “toxic masculinity” now – mostly by viewers whose knee-jerk reaction is the only one they trust, but Weiss insists that “it’s important to make a distinction between depiction and endorsement. Diner is very explicitly about the fact that these guys are afraid of growing up – and women come to represent one of two things to them: an object of lust to be chased or a potential wife, i.e., a jail sentence to be avoided at all costs. (They view Shrevie as a bit of a cautionary tale, even though he seems to hang out with the boys as much as ever.) They cling to each other, to the diner of their teen years, to their jokes and their games and their banter, as a way to fend off the inevitable.”
This contemporary reaction is notable considering how disappointed MGM was with the finished film. “The studio didn’t like it,” recalled Johnson in an oral history of the movie in another Baltimore magazine story. “They wanted it to be one those screw-around movies, they wanted it to be Porky’s – those crazy kids in Baltimore, trying to get drunk and laid, driving around. And it wasn’t one of those at all. They didn’t know what to make of it.”
The film was such a low priority for MGM that they couldn’t be bothered demanding changes or re-editing the picture, opting ultimately to cut their modest losses and bury it without a trace. But thanks to a bit of luck – Johnson’s mother happened to be best friends with Pauline Kael, the New Yorker‘s wildly influential movie critic, who gave it a rave review – MGM was shamed into a wider release. Still, if you want some idea of what the studio wanted you only have to look at the Italian poster for the film, released there as At Dinner with Friends.
(As a footnote, Mel Brooks told Levinson to watch Fellini’s I Vitelloni when he suggested he write a script based on the stories Levinson told him about his friends. But Levinson couldn’t find a copy. “Back then it wasn’t like you could pull it up on streamers.” Regardless, it’s the film Diner is compared to more than any other.)
My reasons for defending the picture are personal. I saw Diner when it came out, just as I was graduating high school, and couldn’t ignore how much it resonated with my own life, even if the characters were a few years older than me. I had spent the better part of my last few years at St. Michael’s College School in a group whose personalities and dynamics were remarkably like Levinson’s gang of friends.
We were a strange assortment of boys from different backgrounds (but all Catholic), and while I’m not sure we had our own Boogie we had at least two Fenwicks and swapped the roles of Shrevie, Eddie and Modell depending on the time of day and subject. It’s fun to speculate on what the future held for Levinson’s boy-men; it’s hard to imagine Shrevie and Beth making it but Eddie and Elyse might have stood a chance. Billy’s visits to Baltimore will probably be more and more infrequent until they’re finally reserved for funerals.
One of our Fenwicks has wholly reformed, the other just enough to make it to the verge of senior citizen discounts relatively unscathed. Some of us have moved away; others have fallen into distant orbits and a few new members have joined but we still get together several times a year for dinner and the same easy ball-busting and banter. If we ever had our diner it closed many years ago.
In a scene in a strip club near the end of Diner Billy confides to Eddie that “the whole thing with girls is painful. And it seems like it’s getting more painful instead of easier.” My first serious girlfriend once told me that she didn’t think men made real friendships but, looking back, I don’t know that she knew much more about men than I knew about women. But I do have a circle of friends who remember when we shared this kind of confidence, and from over forty years’ distance I’m confident enough to disagree with my old girlfriend.
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This is said to civilized men who are to venture into countries where sacred cows are fed, while children are left to starve – where female infants are killed or abandoned by the roadside – where men go blind, medical help being forbidden by their religion – where women are mutilated, to insure their fidelity – where unspeakable tortures are ceremonially inflicted on prisoners – where cannibalism is practiced. Are these the ‘cultural riches’ which a Western man is to greet with ‘brotherly love’? Are these the ‘valuable elements’ which he is to admire and adopt? Are these the ‘fields’ in which he is not to regard himself as superior? And when he discovers entire populations rotting alive in such conditions, is he not to acknowledge, with a burning stab of pride – of pride and gratitude – the achievements of his nation and his culture, of the men who created them and left him a nobler heritage to carry forward?”
“In New Hampshire. [AOC’s] the number one Democrat candidate in the country in New Hampshire. That’s today’s poll. I think she’ll run for president. I don’t think she will run for Senate. But I’m going to make a prediction for you, Sean. My prediction is comrade Mamdani will be the next Democrat senator from New York. That Mamdani will replace Schumer. I think Mamdani is the single most powerful Democrat in the country. And I got to say, by the way, there are some Republicans that are celebrating. This is great. Our opponents are crazy. That’s going to help us. I want to say for the record, I’m not celebrating. I think this is bad for the country. I think this is unhealthy…
…I want to see two normal parties that are not filled with crazy people who can actually do something reasonable and who actually love the country,” he added. “OK, if a Democrat likes some higher taxes and higher regulations, I don’t like that. But could we start with the premise that you love America? And the problem is these communist radicals, they not only don’t love America. They hate America. If you’re a small business owner, they hate you. If you’re a Christian, they hate you. If you’re a Jew, they hate you. That is dangerous. And I don’t like to see — look, in history, we’ve always had a pendulum from one party to the other. Unfortunately, there’s going to come a time when the Democrats are back in power. And I think it’s really dangerous if the Democrat who gets back in power, and I hope that’s not for a very long time, it’s dangerous if that Democrat is an open communist who aspires to be Mao or Stalin or Fidel Castro. These are the people driving today’s Democrat Party.”
2023, the New York Times ran an article entitled, “Increasingly, Women Are Running the World’s Great Museums.” Some of the museums mentioned were the Louvre, the Vatican Museum, and the National Gallery of Art.
But it’s not only museums where women dominate. Other arts and cultural institutions seem to be on a permanent trajectory to hire women as CEOs. On the surface, this shouldn’t be a problem. Qualified women should certainly take their place at the top if they are the best candidates for the job.
But….
There seems to be a troubling common denominator here. The vast majority of the women in these positions fit a certain mold. They come pre-stamped and processed. They are monochrome, feminist, left-leaning women schooled in the progressive agenda.
That agenda might be summed up this way: they are the products of left-leaning universities where life is seen through a lens of oppressor and the oppressed. Feminist and gender ideology is also a big part of the mix, and so suddenly you have heretofore great cultural institutions like the Athenaeum of Philadelphia bowing before the latest left-wing craze to come down the pike.
The Athenaeum used to be a unique place. Once an institution of great cultural impact, it has now been “democratized” in a weedy grassroots way — thanks to the death of many of the classically educated old white men on the board and the institution’s takeover by a board of political progressives, all inspired by female leadership.
What happened to the Athenaeum of Philadelphia reminds me very much of what the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has turned into: a museum too focused on “oppressors and the oppressed.”
The Athenaeum’s cultural offerings — lectures and receptions — has a largely woke focus. An author like Lionel Shriver, who wrote “A Better Life,” a novel about migrants who destroy a New York American family, would never be invited to speak there. That’s because there’s an ideological test every author and speaker must pass before being given the chance to appear before an audience there. This is cancel culture hiding behind a polite female smile; it’s censorship in the name of programming.
One Athenaeum offering slated for December is a talk by Bench Ansfield, an Assistant History Professor at Temple University who uses “they” pronouns. On videos Ansfield appears to be of indeterminate sex — the slanted little bun on the top of “they’s” head and “they’s” choice of intricately designed shirts suggest female, but the voice suggests otherwise.
Now, I am no enemy of androgyny. The hyper-masculine male culture in the 1970s needed a huge dose of David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Lou Reed theatricality, but that’s not what is happening today. Today, the fun theater of Bowie has been exchanged for gender polemics as serious as Marxism.
By leftist standards, I’m sure the quality of Ansfield’s work is noteworthy. (Ansfield’s book won the Athenaeum’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.)
One must not forget that these prize-winning works are all judged by leftist literary standards, so if you are on the wrong editorial page, you’ll never be on their list to win an award.
(Ansfield’s area of expertise in “their” latest book, “Born in Flames,” is a look into “late-twentieth-century transformations in race and capitalism.”)
While progressive, white liberal women are having their moment in the sun, the damage they often do in the institutions they control has negative consequences.
This brings us to the 162-page report issued on July 4 by the White House Domestic Policy Council, which accused the Smithsonian museum of being “subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”
The council faulted the National Museum of American History with downplaying the Founding Fathers and early colonial and Revolutionary history. It also charged that the museum engaged in “anti-white,” “illegal alien,” and transgender activism, and accused the museum of trying to “indoctrinate” teachers and students through its exhibitions, programming, and teaching resources.
This is what progressive museums under the direction of leftist female academicians do, and it should come as no surprise to anybody.
During a heated House DOGE subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. Nancy Mace pressed Smithsonian Director Dr. Anthea Hartig on whether men can become women, what defines a woman, and how many genders there are.
Like most progressive women when they are asked such questions, Hartig refused to answer Mace when pressed on these questions. Throughout it all, Hartig was amazingly poker-faced and kept repeating the all-too familiar lie that the Smithsonian is a non-partisan institution, while neglecting to explain why a 2020–2023 exhibit there included a diary from a 13-year-old girl exploring issues including gender identity.
Gender identity, along with ICE and immigration, are the two chandelier issues of the left. For her part, Hartig seemed to have no knowledge of the gender exhibit and stated that she’d have to check into that.
Shortly after the Capitol Hill hearing, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, wrote a letter in support of Hartig:
We stand with Dr. Hartig…. The Berks remain steadfast in its commitment to inclusive feminist historical scholarship and the collaborative networks that make this work possible.
If only it were possible to bring the House DOGE subcommittee hearings on Capitol Hill to Philadelphia to get institutions like the Athenaeum of Philadelphia to answer a few questions.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt expressed the Trump administration’s solidarity Thursday with Sophie Cunningham, a Christian WNBA star who’s been under fire for opposing men in women’s sports.
During a press briefing at the White House, Leavitt said she doesn’t believe President Donald Trump has yet reached out to Cunningham, but is following the story of the 29-year-old Indiana Fever guard as she has fielded left-wing attacks and been mocked as “MAGA Barbie” for supporting the integrity of women’s sports.
Cunningham, an eight-season WNBA veteran who was re-baptized earlier this year to reaffirm her Christian faith as an adult, made headlines in 2022 when she approvingly retweeted an X post by CBS host Josh Prate opposing trans-identified male swimmer Lia (Will) Thomas being allowed on the women’s team.
During an interview with ESPN published earlier this week, Cunningham asserted that she doesn’t hate transgender-identifying people, but believes in standing up for young girls in their private spaces.
“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that,'” she told the outlet. “I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” She also pushed back against the “MAGA Barbie” moniker, noting she is “very much in the middle” of the political spectrum.
When asked later about her remarks to ESPN this week, Cunningham remained adamant, saying, “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”
Sophie Cunningham addresses her recent comments to ESPN about wanting to protect women’s sports.
“I said what I said, I think it’s kinda common sense.”
Leavitt used Cunningham’s story as a springboard to reiterate the Trump administration’s support for shielding women from competing against men, noting that such a position is overwhelmingly shared by the American public.
“As you know, this is something the president feels strongly about as well, and the American people do too: that men should not be playing in women’s sports,” said Leavitt.
“It’s completely ludicrous that anyone could support that. It’s even more ludicrous that you do have Sophie Cunningham, a female athlete herself, very accomplished in her own right, coming forth and speaking that truth, that men shouldn’t play in women’s sports.”
Leavitt went on to push back against those on the political left who continue to push for ignoring biology when it comes to competitive sports.
“We want to protect women and girls, and the backlash [Cunningham] is receiving from Democrats and left-wing figures across the country is astonishing. They are clearly very out of touch with the American public on this issue, which, again, is an 80/20 issue.”
“It’s common sense. It’s rooted in basic biological fact that men should not be competing against women on playing fields across the country,” she added.
Cunningham said during an appearance on a podcast last year that being an outspoken Christian in the WNBA hasn’t come without challenges, and that some want to silence her.
“It’s different,” she said. “I’ve learned that my competition isn’t with anyone else, like, God gave me all these gifts and blessings to show all these young boys and girls and sometimes my parents and older people too, like, it’s OK to be like this, but you got to learn how to channel it a little bit.”
Cunningham said there are more Christians in the league than many realize, but that some of them prefer to keep their faith private.
“There’s a lot more believers than you would actually expect, because a lot of people don’t speak out about it. I think our league, they want to have a certain look to them, they want to have a certain style to them, and if you speak out against it, sometimes they want to hush you, but that’s not what I’m here for,” she said.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 