Salt Lake City

Tuesday

Cockburn

Taylor Swift engaged – thanks, quite frankly, to ‘TRUMP’

It’s a love story, baby just say ‘yes’ Despite her shilling for Kamala Harris last November, Taylor Swift has evidently not had a Cruel Summer. Everything Has Changed for the singer, despite President Trump’s declaration that she is “no longer hot.” If things go as planned, the Gorgeous Swift will live evermore with Travis Kelce, her boyfriend of two years to whom she is now engaged. Cockburn is waiting with bated breath for the President to claim credit: she was never going to get married under Biden or Obama, clearly. This afternoon, Trump said, “I wish them a lot of luck… I think he’s a great player, a great guy. I think she’s a terrific person. So, I wish them a lot of luck.

taylor swift engagement

Friday

Greg Matsen

Is Mike Lee a bad Mormon?

Politico recently published a piece titled “Mike Lee Can’t Stop Throwing Social Media Grenades. His Church Isn’t Happy.” It cast Senator Lee as a liability to his own religion and positioned him against the church. The entire article hinges on a premise that is misleading at best and manipulative at worst: that Lee, being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church), must conform to a certain political tone or risk disapproval from “his Church.” But this article isn’t reporting on some objective religious rift. It’s a political attack dressed up in ecclesiastical robes. The author of the piece is himself a member of the LDS church.

Tuesday

Orson Fry

Perudo in Utah

I’m two miles outside Wanship, Utah, at a remarkable new hotel called The Lodge at Blue Sky. I’ve just met my host in the bar, a bear of a man called John Tuffman, or ‘Tuff’, as I’m told to call him by his assistant. Owing to my delayed flight, we’re running a little behind schedule. ‘Down the hatch’, he says, nodding to my beer while he repositions his Stetson. We climb into a car and are driven up to the barn. A few weeks ago, I received an email which I had every right to believe was a scam or an elaborate catfishing attempt. It was an invitation from an events company in San Francisco to appear as the World Perudo Champion at an executive retreat in Utah. At 6 p.m.

perudo

Sunday

Bill Kauffman

Let Utah be Utah

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Salt Lake City, Utah Here I sit in a Salt Lake City coffeehouse, wishing I’d donned the uniform (white shirt, black tie, nameplate) of a Mormon missionary. Now that would throw the ambient hipsters for a loop. Last time I buzzed through the Beehive State was the dawn of 1984, when I fled the Imperial City on the Potomac after 30 months legislatively assisting Sen. Pat Moynihan. I went to Washington a left-of-center populist and returned a novice in what Henry Adams called the Conservative Christian Anarchist party, of which he mistakenly thought himself the only member.

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