Culture

There are plenty of reasons to despise TikTok, the most downloaded app in the world and certainly the most popular among teen girls and young women. It poses a national security threat to the US due to its connection to the Chinese Communist Party, which uses it as both spyware and a means of socially engineering our youth. In a previous edition of this newsletter, I discussed the devastating effects that social media use can have on young women, from screen addiction to body image issues and deeper mental health problems.Photo and video-based apps such as TikTok and Instagram provide young women with more reasons to hate themselves than ever before.

It was once said by somebody, and then repeated ad nauseum, that Brian Wilson invented California. Or, at least, the California of our dreams: sunshine, surf, cars, girls, rock ’n’ roll; the bronzed surfer boy, cradling his longboard in one arm and his sun-kissed, golden beach bunny in the other, getting ready to drop in on some tasty swells at Doheny or Rincon before throwing on a Pendelton and cruising down to the hamburger stand in his flathead deuce coupe or ’62 Impala SS with the 409-cubic inch scalloped head W-series. (Or perhaps, her T-Bird.) In much the same way, Jimmy Buffett invented Florida. Or, at least, the Florida of our imaginations: rum, sand, humidity, boats, weed, weirdness.

About ten years on from the first appearance of a San Francisco “poop map,” which documented human waste incidents on the city’s streets, the Bay Area gem is struggling more than ever. It boasts a 25.7 percent office vacancy rate, nearly ten percentage points higher than the average rate across the United States. The city’s population fell significantly during the pandemic. Property crime rates are the highest of any city in the country. The streets are filled with homeless encampments that foster grime, drug abuse, sexual assault and violence. Just a few days ago, fashion retailer Nordstrom closed its five-level store in San Francisco after thirty-five years of business. The store had been a fixture of the city’s downtown area.

Friends from my hometown are often shocked when they come visit me in the DC area and find that many Americans are still adhering to long-expired Covid restrictions. Thankfully I recently moved to the suburbs, but whenever I travel into the city — or even Arlington or Alexandria — for work, it’s not uncommon to see people driving alone in their cars with a mask over their face. People here still wear N95s into the grocery store, “socially distance” and otherwise behave like paranoid hypochondriacs.  We are now more than three years out from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

America’s girls are in a serious crisis. Mental health maladies are becoming more common among all teens, but the problem is particularly acute for young women. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that almost 60 percent of US girls said they felt persistently sad or hopeless. More than twice as many girls as boys reported experiencing poor mental health in the past thirty days. And 30 percent of high school girls in America said they were seriously considering suicide, while 13 percent have already made an attempt on their life, almost twice the rate of boys.

Trust in the public healthcare system declined among Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s no wonder: public health bureaucrats pushed for various insane policies that ran counter to common sense, admitted to deceiving the American people and worked to shutter debate surrounding the national and global coronavirus response. But instead of doing everything they can to restore trust in the system (and prove that they’re still deserving of it), government officials and medical associations have continued to politicize the healthcare field, sowing discord between patients and their doctors.  A consistent theme throughout the pandemic was that while Americans were less likely to trust the medical establishment, they mostly liked their personal doctors.

The entertainment world has been in shock the past couple of weeks because Ariana Grande, the pop artist behind the song “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored,” stole another woman’s husband.  And once again, the mainstream media is on a mission to convince us that we’re not allowed to blame women when they get involved in extramarital affairs.  Grande, a Grammy award-winning singer and former Nickelodeon actress, has reportedly been dating her co-star in the upcoming Wicked movie adaptation. The only problem is that both Grande and the co-star, Ethan Slater, are married.  It’s a classic on-set Hollywood drama (even though the movie is filming in England).

Cuss out a cop, spit in his faceStomp on the flag and light it upYeah, ya think you’re toughWell, try that in a small townSee how far ya make it down the roadAround here, we take care of our own That’s a sampling of the lyrics to “Try That in a Small Town,” the new Jason Aldean single that led left-wing Twitter trolls to try to “cancel” the country music star. Critics claimed the song was racist, particularly because the music video was filmed in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Tennessee (which was the site of a lynching back in 1927) and features news clips of BLM and antifa riots.

Megan Rapinoe, the sometimes blue, sometimes pink-haired star forward on the US Women’s National Soccer Team, announced earlier this month that she will retire after the 2023 Women’s World Cup. Rapinoe is a talented soccer player and an American success story. She grew up relatively modestly and her older brother, her inspiration to start playing soccer, suffered from a heroin addiction and spent time in prison. Rapinoe managed to avoid the all too common injury-to-opioid addiction pipeline that crippled her equally athletic fraternal twin sister’s soccer career.

One of the first things my fiancé and I did after purchasing our first home was install a security system. This included a Ring-style doorbell camera that alerts us when people approach our front door and automatically starts recording video and audio. The resulting clips are saved in a mobile app and can be exported with ease.   Imagine my surprise when I learned this week that wanting to monitor my home is racist!  A new article in tech magazine WIRED says they don’t recommend Ring cameras because they supposedly make it easier “for both private citizens and law enforcement agencies to target certain groups for suspicion of crime based on skin color, ethnicity, religion or country of origin.”  How does WIRED think policing works, exactly?

It is nearly twenty years since the most iconic moment in modern music history: when Madonna, aged forty-five, made out with two women nearly half her age on the MTV Video Music Awards stage. Britney Spears, who was twenty-one, and Christina Aguilera, twenty-two, were pounced on in front of millions of television viewers, along with an uncomfortable looking Justin Timberlake and Guy Ritchie.  Two decades later and Madonna would likely be canceled for sexual harassment, with Britney and Xtina offered therapy and a book deal to “speak their truth.” But in August 2003, Madonna pulling off a garter from Aguilera's leg, frenching Spears and then giving Aguilera a smacker on the lips was a standard Saturday night watch.

It’s been just over a year since the Supreme Court decided in the Dobbs case to overturn Roe v. Wade — and pro-life activists were right when they predicted that the fight against abortion was just getting started.  Of course there was plenty for them to celebrate in the aftermath of Roe, which essentially kicked the issue of abortion back to individual states. Thirteen states had “trigger laws” in place that would almost immediately enact near-total bans on abortion, with some exceptions, in the event Roe were overturned. Other states reacted to the Supreme Court’s ruling by passing gestational bans on abortions ranging between six weeks after conception and fetal viability outside the womb.  The new bans are already saving unborn lives.

Cockburn doesn’t have any acknowledged children, but if he did, he’d like to think that he wouldn’t give them drugs. Any normal parent that gave their kids drugs would end up with a social worker, or potentially prison time. But Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of Will, isn't just any old mother.  Her son Jaden Smith recently let slip that his mom was the reason for their family’s psychedelic drug usage. “I think it was my mom, actually, that was really the first one to make that step for the family,” the rapper said at the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver this week, as reported by USA Today. He added, “It was just her for a really, really long time and then eventually it just trickled and evolved and everybody found it in their own ways.