Elitism

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Trump is liberating the Smithsonians from ‘Woke’

Back in March, Donald Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History.” Its aim was to counter the “revisionist movement” in our cultural institutions that sought “to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”   Exhibit number one was the Smithsonian Institution, the sprawling agglomeration of museums, libraries, historical landmarks and assorted educational centers in and around Washington DC with affiliate institutions in 47 states.  Founded in 1846, the Smithsonian was the culmination of an earlier movement, supported by such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, to “promote science and the useful arts.

Smithsonian (Getty)

Sunday

Larry O'Connor

Howard Stern disappeared years ago

It’s hard to say out loud, but it looks like The Howard Stern Show may finally be winding down at SiriusXM. With his contract coming to an end and no clear word on renewal, even Stern himself sounds noncommittal. For the first time since the 1970s, the radio world is bracing for a future without him.But for many of us – particularly those of us in Gen X who came of age during his prime – that future started a long time ago. Because the Howard Stern we grew up on, the one we admired, feared, laughed with (and sometimes fought with) has been gone for years.I was a teenager in the Eighties and a driven, hard-working young professional in the Nineties. I didn’t just listen to Stern – I studied him: his timing, his fearlessness, his command of the mic.

Friday

Newt Gingrich

The Biden-Trump debates won’t measure up to the past

It’s happening. Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump will debate. Of course, the Biden team is making sure the debates are dominated by the left-wing media and held in studios with no citizens present. Given this surprisingly undemocratic arrangement, it occurred to me it might be useful to look at the most famous candidate debates in American history. In 1858, while running for the US Senate in Illinois, incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas agreed to debate his opponent, Abraham Lincoln, seven times — once in each congressional district in which they had not yet spoken. Douglas was frustrated. Lincoln had spoken in Springfield and Chicago one day after Douglas and just torn apart all of Douglas’s arguments leaving him with no chance to respond.

Monday

Ross Anderson

Monkey Man proves fighting the gods is a bloody affair

Only a few short years ago, I was a professional bartender working for Michelin-star chefs in fine-dining restaurants and, eventually, serving the social elite in five-star hotels. Most of the known names were genial. Killer Mike and El-P of Run the Jewels were gentlemen. So too were Thundercat and Anderson .Paak — who were particularly keen on my margaritas. Some night porter friends anticipated trouble when they heard Nicki Minaj was staying, but found her to be extremely down to earth, pleasant and normal. Others, however, were not.

monkey man

Monday

Casey Chalk

Ford Madox Ford and the decline of the American WASP

“I don’t know how many times in nearly forty years I have come back to this novel,” Graham Greene said of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, published shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. The fiction of both English authors — both converts to Catholicism — share a deep cynicism towards modernity and a depiction of the English establishment as decadent and in decline. The Good Soldier, whose original title The Saddest Story was canned by the publisher because it would render the book “unsaleable” during World War I, tells the tale of two married couples, one British (British Army Captain Edward Ashburnham and his wife Leonora) and the other American (John and Florence Dowell). Both pairs are, on the face of it, young, prosperous, and happy.

Monday

Matthew Continetti

Revenge of the populists

In February 2021 the FBI indicted L. Brent Bozell IV for crimes committed during the Capitol riot. The significance of Bozell’s presence in the rabble that broke into the Senate chamber was not lost on the media. “Mr. Bozell’s father is a high-profile right-wing activist known for infusing his politics with Christian values,” the New York Times mentioned in its write-up of the arrest. And Bozell’s grandfather, L. Brent Bozell Jr., had been William F. Buckley Jr.’s debate partner, Joseph McCarthy’s and Barry Goldwater’s ghostwriter, the founder of Triumph and organizer of the first anti-abortion protest in the United States. Liberal critics traced the arc of the American right from Bozell Jr.

populists

Sunday

Chadwick Moore

The mask caste system

Visitors to New York tell me how surprised they are to see so few masked up people on the streets. But a sizable portion of the NYC population isn’t letting go of the disgusting, soggy, disease vectors strapped to their faces — and they never will. This set aren’t true-believers in the still-unproven effectiveness of masks; for them, it’s both an identity and psychological disorder. On the streets of any city, the forever-masked are broadcasting their allegiance to authoritarianism, letting you know they’re most comfortable somewhere on a hierarchy of coercion, whether among the hopelessly obedient, or tyrants themselves. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You now have a visual cue letting you know exactly who you’re dealing with and who to avoid.

mask caste

Wednesday

Carlos Roa

The global elite is egregiously rich and corrupt — and you’re paying for it

Deep down, everyone has always known that the wealthy and powerful hide away vast quantities of often ill-gained money in far-flung tax havens. In recent years though, with the Panama and Paradise Papers, the public has had chances to see how the clandestine industry that helps the elites do so operates. Another such opportunity has come knocking with what is being called the biggest leak of offshore data in history. The Pandora Papers consist of almost 12 million files that lay out the secret financial affairs of almost three dozen world leaders and hundreds of high-level public officials from more than 90 countries. The details make for sensational headlines: the king of Jordan has a hidden $100 million real estate empire (including a seven-bedroom mansion in Malibu!

pandora paper elite