Amber Duke

Welcome back to Culture Shock! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and is gearing up for the big winter storm that is supposed to hit the east coast this weekend. The latest models in the DMV suggest we’re mostly getting sleet, which is a bit disappointing after years of mild winters and very little snow. This was my first Christmas since getting married, and it’s tough to figure out how to divide time between your family and your in-laws. We decided to spend Christmas Eve with my family and then flew to Florida on Christmas morning to see my husband’s family for a couple of days. I am very lucky in that pretty much all of my family members are conservative, so our political arguments are limited in scope.

The number of parents choosing to homeschool their children has risen sharply since the Covid-19 pandemic. There are plenty of reasons for this trend, but the overarching issue was that parents simply lost trust in the public education system, whether because of the adoption of illogical Covid policies pushed by teacher’s unions or the introduction of controversial, politicized content into curricula. It became clear over the past few years that school boards and teacher’s unions mostly don’t have the best interests of students in mind, are resentful of parental involvement and are willing to lie if it means avoiding accountability for their bad decisions. The effect of liberal control over public education? Math and reading scores in the US are at their lowest level in decades.

It’s officially Spotify Wrapped season! For the uninitiated, this is the time of year when Spotify subscribers receive their year-end data on what they listened to the most throughout the previous twelve months. The streaming app tells you your top songs, artists, albums, genres and any other cookie they’ve been tracking. Every user’s Spotify Wrapped is packaged up nicely into an immensely shareable infographic that dominates social media for days. I do not share mine because my music listening habits when no one is watching are completely embarrassing! But a lot of people do, usually to show how cool or niche their music or podcast tastes are.

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I plopped on the couch for a quiet evening in and turned on the new Netflix comedy special Natural Selection by Matt Rife. We were both vaguely aware of Rife because he’s posted some videos of his crowd work that have gone viral on social media. Young women in particular seem to like him because he can be quite charming on stage and will openly flirt with female audience members (Gen Z would describe Rife’s charisma as “rizz,” I think). The set was fine but not super memorable, so I was caught by surprise when I recently saw an article on BuzzFeed explaining that Rife’s fans were furious with him over a joke he made regarding domestic violence.

You shouldn’t make a habit out of watching the daily White House press briefings unless you want to get much dumber, but every now and then they are good for some cheap entertainment. On Monday, for example, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre decided to dedicate precious podium time to “Transgender Day of Remembrance.” GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ activist organization, says that Transgender Day of Remembrance is meant to commemorate “transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.” TDOR (they really like their acronyms, huh?) was started in 1999 by a transgender activist in memory of Rita Hester, a transgender woman whose murder remains unsolved. I found it a bit interesting that the catalyst for TDOR was an unsolved murder case.

All of my ladies out there who read this newsletter are probably familiar with the food blog “Half Baked Harvest.” Tieghan Gerard, the thirty-year-old founder and owner of the blog, has posted a cozy and delicious recipe nearly every single day since 2012, inspiring women everywhere to dust off their crockpots and grease their baking pans. Fellas, if the woman in your life suddenly decided to try her hand at pumpkin cinnamon rolls or made white chicken chili for game day, there’s a good chance she snagged the recipe from Half Baked Harvest. Gerard has millions of loyal followers and naturally this has led to criticism from bitter, jealous losers. The New York Times recently managed to snag an interview with Gerard (no, Tieghan, run!

When this newsletter launched in June, it opened with my exclusive report on the disturbing nature of the New York Times’s kids section. Across a handful of issues, which are sent out monthly and tucked into the Sunday edition of the NYT, the NYT for Kids encouraged children to explore their gender identity in online chatrooms, cheered on a child drag queen who had money thrown at him by grown men, insisted that “gender-affirming care” for children is totally safe and saves lives and instructed children to ignore adults who reject the left-wing propaganda in its pages. I’ve still been reading the New York Times for Kids every month and am happy to share that subsequent issues following my report were mostly free of agitprop... until now.

Allow me to introduce you to Sabrina Carpenter, a former Disney actress (red flag #1) and current rising pop star. Carpenter has had two songs on the Billboard Hot 100 this year and opened for Taylor Swift on her history-making Eras Tour. Carpenter’s latest single, “Feather,” has nearly 90 million streams on Spotify. She released the track’s accompanying music video, which already has 2.3 million views on YouTube, on Halloween. Carpenter is petite, blue-eyed and blonde-haired, and her performance outfits leave little to the imagination. Her artist persona is somewhat dependent on the profane; live performances of Carpenter’s song “Nonsense” went viral among Gen Z fans for her ad-libbed, often R-rated outro lyrics.

I’m back! As I mentioned in my last newsletter, my husband and I recently set off on our ten-day honeymoon to Morocco. We went to Casablanca, Meknes, Fez, Marrakesh, the Agafay Desert and Essaouira. I didn’t travel much growing up and so this trip was really special for me. We toured one of the largest mosques in the world and a fifteenth-century synagogue that is still active today, visited the Roman ruins of Volubilis, trekked through the Medinas, haggled in the souk, watched artisans create their handmade crafts with techniques handed down for centuries, rode camels and enjoyed traditional Berber food and music. Before we left for our trip, we fielded a lot of safety concerns.

Peep the new byline! I got married on Saturday and have decided to take my husband’s last name, which is nice because hopefully now there will be no confusion about how to pronounce Athey (for those who always wondered, it has a long “a” sound, but I wasn’t really in the business of correcting people). My husband (still weird to write!) and I first met on a dating app about two and a half years ago. On our first date, when I found out that he was raised Southern Baptist, I warned that I only intended to get married in the Catholic Church. We got engaged last September, my husband converted to Catholicism at this year’s Easter Vigil, and we got married on October 7.

One of the most anticipated films to hit theaters this October is The Exorcist: Believer, a direct sequel to one of the greatest horror movies of all time, The Exorcist, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. Coincidentally, the original film’s director, William Friedkin, passed away just a couple of months ago. In the wake of Friedkin’s death, Matthew Walther reexamined The Exorcist in a guest essay for the New York Times. He posited that the film hinges on the acknowledgment of supernatural evil and the use of longstanding Catholic theology and tradition in defeating it.

It was a tale of two events Tuesday night at Georgetown University, the oldest “Catholic” university in the country and my alma mater. Michael Knowles was set to speak about whether President Joe Biden is more evil than Putin and Xi in an event organized by the Georgetown University College Republicans (GUCR) and Young America’s Foundation (YAF). After GUCR announced the event, left-wing campus groups denounced Knowles due to his alleged transphobia (read: denying that people can — or should! — change their sex). I spoke to a couple of leaders for GUCR who told me they’d been on the receiving end of a lot of online vitriol and that flyers they put up for the event wouldn’t last for more than ten minutes before being ripped down.

Maren Morris, a country music artist who won a Grammy for her debut single “My Church,” announced in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that she is officially leaving the genre. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out! Announcing her departure from country music in the LA FREAKING TIMES should tell you everything you need to know, but let’s dive a bit deeper into why Morris is so upset.  According to Morris, country music is toxic and filled with “misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic” people (really capturing all of the buzzwords there, Maren!) . She apparently got tired of trying to “burn it to the ground and start over,” instead feeling satisfied that country music is “burning itself down.