Culture

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.

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.