Culture

One of the great comedic actors of our time, Vince Vaughn, appeared on the most recent episode of Hot Ones, an interview program in which celebrities answer questions about their lives and careers while eating progressively spicier wings. I highly recommend watching the full episode because Vaughn is incredibly charming, funny and way more intelligent than he gets credit for. One question really caught my attention. The host, Sean Evans, asked Vaughn, “There’s been endless ink spilled about Hollywood no longer making the R-rated, wide-release theatrical comedies that were such a tower of strength in your career. How have you seen Hollywood’s interest in making those kinds of films change over the course of your career and what do you think are the forces at play?

I am typically a huge Olympics fan because I am very big into national pride and love to shamelessly root for the USA. Gymnastics, swimming, volleyball, soccer, or even canoeing, judo and fencing — don’t care, will watch. Unfortunately, this year’s Summer Olympic Games in Paris, France were immediately marred by the obvious mockery of the Christian faith during the opening ceremony. There was a drag show version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s depiction of Jesus Christ’s Last Supper with his apostles prior to his crucifixion (plus, separately, a faceless rider on a pale horse and a queer ménage à trois).

Hello everyone and welcome back to Culture Shock! We took a couple weeks of off because I went on vacation and then was in Milwaukee covering the Republican National Convention.  We’re going to kick off this edition by hopefully settling the years-long debate as to whether Donald Trump is as good at golf as he claims. Trump said earlier this year that he won both the Club Championship and the Senior Club Championship at his course in West Palm Beach, and last year said he won the Club Championship at his course in Bedminster by firing off a 67, which is five strokes under par. However, sportswriter Rick Reilly claims Trump routinely cheats at golf, which has given some haters the impression that Trump isn’t actually any good.

Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès made more than 500 films in his career, but 1896 was a banner year for the Frenchman. He captivated audiences with Playing Cards, his sixty-seven-second exploration of three cigar-puffing men as they are waited on by two young ladies. One man reads the paper and pours the wine as the other two play cards. It was the first reboot in film history. One year earlier, Louis Lumière released Card Game, a forty-three-second exploration of three men with cigars drinking wine and playing cards as they are waited on by a man. Méliès rightly recognized the original’s lack of representation, not to mention the absence of a news- paper.

Yeezy porn may have been put on ice, but Kanye West is still intent on bringing debauchery to the world. West’s wife Bianca Censori, whom the rapper often styles in, well, nothing, was spotted in one of her most scandalous outfits yet, evoking outrage for the couple’s X-rated stunts.   On Monday, the Australian architect and model was on her way to the Melrose Tanning Company in Los Angeles in nothing but underwear and a completely see-through top. With the amount of sun Censori must get from her frequent displays of public nudity, Cockburn is surprised she has to go to a tanning salon at all. Censori did, however, have the decency to at least cover her hair with a hat.

Social media last week was ablaze with memes about “Hawk Tuah” girl, the nickname given to a young woman in a viral man on the street video who got awfully candid about oral sex. Hawk Tuah girl, whose real name is Hailey Welch, was asked, “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” She replied, “You gotta give him that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang, ya get me?” The clip has been viewed millions of times and Welch has since appeared onstage with country singer Zach Bryan for his “Revival” encore, appeared on influencer Brianna Chickenfry’s podcast and is selling merch and planning to start her own podcast. The video admittedly made me laugh, mostly because of how unexpected her answer was and how confidently she delivered it.

Left-wing activists are working overtime to smear the conservative majority on the Supreme Court in a blatant attempt to undermine rulings coming out of the nation’s highest court. They attempted to stop Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination with dubious, vague and uncorroborated sexual assault accusations. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was painted as a Catholic extremist — Senator Dianne Feinstein declared during her confirmation hearing that “the dogma lives loudly in you” — and her husband was targeted with a Rolling Stone article that charged him with the crime of... being a lawyer.

Say you’re easing along a meadow stream, upslope but not steep, somewhere in the Rockies. It’s a morning in spring, the mountains ahead still mostly snowy against a blue sky. A bird sings, giving itself away in a clump of alder. New to birding, you’re naive but full of hope, and through the binoculars you find a thing with feathers, small and olive with yellow breast and black cap. A Wilson’s warbler, says the field guide with its nifty pictures, and you feel the satisfaction of putting a name to a part of the profusion of nature. You’re out there — need it be said? — for the peace, and the bird, deftly identified, is a totem of tranquility.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Dobbs decision two years ago this month, pro-abortion activists have scrambled to prove that ensuing state laws restricting abortion are putting women’s lives in danger. Although the vast majority of abortions are performed for reasons of convenience, the new trope is that women are going to die en masse if they can’t have access to these procedures. There are a couple of angles to this argument:  Abortion bans and restrictions will render doctors unable to provide life-saving care to women  Because abortion is safer than pregnancy, forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term puts her life in danger  In this edition of Culture Shock, we are going to dig into the first claim.

The popular dating app Bumble was forced to apologize recently when its anti-celibacy advertisement didn’t land the way that it had hoped. Bumble tried to tap into many women’s frustration with modern dating, telling women who are having trouble finding a significant other that “a vow of celibacy is not the answer.” But whoever is on Bumble’s marketing team failed to realize that many women are opting out of casual sex and hook-ups as they realize they prefer settling into a long-term partnership before they engage in a sexual relationship. Others are taking a break from dating entirely, as they feel a deep dissatisfaction with the current landscape, which seems centered around fleeting physical attraction and short-lived connections.

Do you currently enjoy a workplace environment that is free of violent criminals? Is your work bathroom reserved for members of the same sex as you? You might not enjoy those commonsense benefits for much longer. The Biden administration is flexing the bureaucratic state’s muscle to force businesses to comply with its progressive worldview. Last month, the Biden administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that it was suing Sheetz, a popular gas station and convenience store chain in the mid-Atlantic, for alleged racially discriminatory hiring practices. Sheetz is a great American success story. It was opened by Bob Sheetz in 1950 in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and is still owned by the Sheetz family to this day.

Should students be allowed to use their phones during school? The answer seems like it should obviously be no. But apparently this is has become a difficult subject for school districts to grapple with. Across the country, school boards and administrators recognize that phones distract students from learning, diminish attention spans and affect students’ mental health. But few have the gumption to remove personal devices entirely from schools.

I had the pleasure — my therapist says the misfortune — of growing up in a doggy dynasty. My grandpa showed dogs at Westminster, my father’s a dog breeder, my mom owned the Miami area’s biggest puppy shop — the list of dog industry relatives goes on and on. My heritage didn’t traumatize me because of the way my parents cared for animals (my mom loves dogs so much that she keeps all her dead pets’ ashes in marble urns; until recently, she kept my grandpa’s ashes in a cardboard box), but because extremists targeted us. PETA protested my mom’s puppy store on the weekends.

Prisha has a crushed larynx from weekly testosterone injections; she cannot sing or even talk for long periods of time without feeling pain. She also describes feeling “phantom breasts” — similar to someone who has lost a limb — from her double mastectomy. Chloe will forever live with broader shoulders, wider hips, a more angular jaw and “severe atrophy” of her reproductive organs.  Ritchie is completely numb in his genital area, minus the pain he feels when trying to dilate his “neovagina” or use the restroom. It typically takes ten minutes for him to empty his bladder and it almost always ends in a mess.

Comedian Bill Maher is often a fascinating person to watch. His show, Real Time with Bill Maher, airs Friday nights on HBO and features monologues and a panel of guests who discuss the week’s news stories. What is interesting about the program is that Maher is a sort of “anti-woke” liberal — the weed-smoking, pro-choice, left-libertarian kind — that despises political correctness. This makes for entertaining viewing because Maher alternates between spitting out hideous ideas, hilarious jokes that cut both sides of the political aisle and occasionally stumbling upon — and being willing to vocalize! — an important but perhaps inconvenient truth.

Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Seraphina Rose, appeared to come out as transgender last weekend. The chosen venue for this announcement? Her grandfather’s funeral. The young lady recently got a buzz cut and wore a black suit to the memorial service, at which she introduced herself to the audience with her new name before reading a Bible verse.  “Hello my name is Fin Affleck,” she told the grieving audience. The intent is not to beat up on Miss Affleck here — she is a minor and is clearly going through a lot. She is the middle child of parents who went through a very public and messy divorce with allegations of infidelity and alcoholism. Her father has since gotten remarried to an old flame.

As all regular readers of Culture Shock know, we cover a lot of the goings on in country music. Not only am I personally a fan of the genre, but it is one of the few remaining subsections of art that isn’t outright hostile to conservative and traditional values. There are music executives in Nashville and the corporate media who would like to subvert the genre away from its roots in telling the stories of working-class people and reflecting on the hardships and joys of a simple American life.

Christine Blasey Ford, the professor who accused Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school, is back in the spotlight. Five-and-a-half years on from her public testimony about her allegations, Ford has released a memoir titled One Way Back. Amazingly, Ford has once again conquered her crippling fear of flying — which delayed the Senate’s investigation into her claims back in 2018 — to promote her book on major television programs. Blasey Ford first accused then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her in a confidential letter to the late Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office. Feinstein kept the letter to herself for weeks until revealing the letter to Democratic colleagues, who urged her to act on the information.

Are children more likely to be abused in a homeschool environment than in a public school? That key question has emerged in response to the recent surge of parents who have chosen to homeschool their children. Late last year, I wrote in this newsletter about an anti-homeschooling series by the Washington Post. The Post series argued that parents regularly use homeschooling as a shield for abuse, most aggressively in an article headlined “What home schooling hides: a boy tortured and starved by his stepmom.”  “Most schools have teachers, principals, guidance counselors — professionals trained to recognize the unexplained bruises or erratic behaviors that may point to an abusive parent.

“It’s like a candy store 😍😍😍” That’s the way one pedophile described Instagram in a private messaging channel monitored by New York Times reporters. In the Sunday edition of the paper this week, the Times unveiled its month-long investigation into mothers who run Instagram accounts for their young daughters — and the grown men who love them for it. These women are known colloquially as the “Instamoms.”  Instamoms are the online version of pageant or stage moms. Their daughters are usually enrolled in traditionally feminine extracurriculars, like dance, gymnastics or cheer, but the activities are ultimately just a vehicle for the true goal: making their girls rich and famous.