Culture

Black History Month is now over, and we’ve moved on to Women’s History Month. In April, we’ll get the best of both worlds, with Black Women’s History Month. May will be Jewish-American Heritage Month, and then in June the nation will enjoy a blowout celebration of LGBT Pride Month, if the normalization (and commercialization) of the cause in recent years is any indication. The point of all of this is to serve as an annual national re-ratification of diversity, inclusivity and equity as America’s preeminent causes (and doctrines, as Spectator World editor Matt Purple has so perceptively assessed).

When I went to the mall last week, I noticed all the women in their late teens and early twenties were wearing the same thing: long-sleeved tees with little prints, high-waisted jeans and canvas sneakers. It was a little surreal, because that’s how the girls in my preschool used to dress. Apparently, college students have collectively decided to dress like toddlers from the late Nineties. According to pop-culture experts, many of my fellow millennials are feeling a little disoriented, too. We’re undergoing what they call a “vibe shift.” And sadly most of us aren’t going to make it. As Allison P.

Remember when gay people were cool? Libertines and romantics, reviled, spat-upon, defiant and irreverent? Gay life could be sexy and thrilling, tragic and shameful. If the homosexual offered nothing else, he carried an arsenal of bawdy tales that left any housewife glued and dithering at a cocktail party. Judge his life as you may, but never call it ordinary. The mystique is gone. That dusky boundary between the dark and dirty and the workaday has evaporated. Assimilation has meant the faces of gay are either vapid, Instagram-famous semen receptacles, complete goobers or repulsive shrills. And they’ve dragged the rest of us, by association, into their orbit of cringe. The Forces of Biden particularly love the latter two.

Eric Adams had no idea what drill rap was until just last week when his son introduced him to it. Now he’s convinced it’s the reason for rising rates of lethal firearm crimes in New York City. As crime spirals to new highs in urban areas nationwide, Democratic mayors, who have controlled these cities for decades, are looking for any excuse that doesn’t implicate their policies or those of their predecessors. That’s why Mayor Adams has turned his attention to the presence of an aggressive form of hip-hop on YouTube. Adams threatened to pull social media companies into the principal’s office and “sit down with them and state that, ‘you have a civic and corporate responsibility.

This is Black History Month when we are invited to think through a certain spectrum of the people who came before us. As it happens, I am very much interested in black history. I wrote a book about it, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, and several books about diversity, and I have been working for several years on a nearly completed documentary about the early days of black theater and film. But, lacking any black ancestors, I must make do with my own sketchy line of progenitors. When I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, my father attempted to find his great-grandfather — GGF in anthropological parlance. GGF had an air of mystery since all anyone knew about him was his last name and GGM’s inveterate reply when asked about him: “He was lost at sea.

We are spending too much time talking about Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan is spending too much time apologizing. “Whenever you're in a situation where you have to say, ‘I'm not racist,’ you fucked up,” Rogan apologized on February 5. “And I clearly have fucked up.” Rogan was addressing a montage that is circulating on social media, showing him saying the N-word on multiple episodes of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. When Joe describes the montage as “the most regretful and shameful thing that I've ever had to talk about publicly,” I believe him. And I don’t think Joe made a mistake apologizing. That was Joe expressing his authentic self.