The Catholic Revival

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Sergio Infante, a professor at Yale, is on a mission from God. He’s determined to make sure the new Catholic revival energizing Generation Z is woke. Contra Professor Infante, it is essential that the new wave of young Catholics be anti-communist. I’d like to encourage them to sign up for the Anti-Communist Film Festival, which will be held at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. in October. Registration is free. Here is Professor Infante from his piece in Slate:

Around the United States, as you’ve probably heard, Gen Z Catholics are heading to the pews in eye-popping numbers. They meet up in pizzerias and follow one another on social media. They flock to Catholic student organizations, which are booming. And at Yale University, where I teach Latin American and global history, they attend classes and public lectures to learn about their faith.

(Read more.)

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The Banality of an Evil Pro-Abortion Art Exhibit

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Still, the effect of seeing Andrea Bowers’ art was mostly enervation. This kind of angry political art is by now very old hat. Take the first room one enters at the exhibit. In Wall of Letters: Necessary Reminders from the Past for a Future of Choice, Bowers has simply reproduced dozens of letters of women seeking abortions, as well as guides on how to perform abortions, blown them up to poster size, and wallpapered a huge white room with them. This performative exercise might have shocked people a few decades ago, but by now the public has already absorbed and passed its judgment on the nonsense of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. We have moved on. A hectoring and didactic display meant to incite insurrection in defense of abortion is old news. I mean, I was around to see Karen Finley smear herself with chocolate!

Bowers does better in the other rooms at Glenstone, which feature her pieces The Body is Not a Thing, It’s a Situation and Women and the Earth Have to Tolerate a Lot. Bowers has reproduced book illustrations, both from 1896, on square panels of cardboard. The illustrations themselves are quite beautiful, lovely representations of women in flowing Victorian dresses bodies intertwined. The original drawings were meant to illuminate women as deeply powerful and fertile beings with a seamless and metaphysical connection to nature. Then there are the works Ecofeminist Sycamore Branches: Women Have Always Thought Like Mountains, which feature tree branches illuminated with neon. The irony, of course, is that Bowers is using imagery evocative of the sensual and generative power of women to argue for killing babies. (Read more.)

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Jason Arday and Jesus the Vulnerable God

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Jason Arday was an academic at Cambridge who got exposed for lying about his past and plagiarizing his papers. Some conservatives are blaming Arday’s death on DEI, while the left says he was undone by racism. While it is important that frauds get called to account, it’s also possible to recognize that the “shame storm” of modern witch hunts can also be too much for some people to bear — and that sometimes the shame storm is out of proportion to the actual crime. (Some shame storms are also entirely created by the media.) 

    While everyone has been dissecting Arday’s academic career and past, I kept thinking of him in those last moments when he decided to take his own life. When he fell terrified and abandoned. He deserved the blowback from his actions, but did not deserve to die. There is a way through these valleys, although suicidal ideation is a hard cross to bear. And the frenzy of commentary following Arday's death is a little too gleeful. Perhaps the wisdom of Pat Buchanan should apply here: “When God puts his hand on a man, I take mine off.”

 The journalist Helen Andrews called the phenomenon of the media swarming a target a “shame storm.” In 2019 Andrews was publicly embarrassed on television when an old boyfriend began insulting her about how their relationship ended. Her shame was debilitating: “Everyone at work was supportive, but no amount of support could counteract the paranoia that settled in over the next weeks and months. My colleagues probably didn’t believe the woman they worked alongside was secretly a comic-book ­villain—but surely the suspicion had been planted? I never knew whether someone on the subway was giving me a second glance because he knew me, or because he recognized me from the video. Fellow journalists reported back to me from conferences where [my ex-boyfriend] Todd expatiated on my depravity at length—in one case, before an audience that included my boss.” (Read more.)

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The Future of the Anti-Communist Film Festival

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

  Movies change lives. Film gets into the soul and the subconscious, altering perceptions of the world and creating understanding. It’s why Roger Ebert called movies “an empathy machine.” the Left has owned Hollywood for a century. It’s time to change that. We also intend for the festival to be an annual event. As Al Pacino once put it, I’m just getting warmed up!

    I had the idea for the Anti-Communist Film Festival over a year ago, and the response has been great enthusiasm and some solid media hits. Before taking a short break for the August recess and then letting the Victims of Communism Foundation host news about the festival, including the schedule, I wanted to briefly lay out what I envision as the future of the festival.

    I see the Anti-Communist Film Festival as an annual event, a success from the first year but also expanding in size and stature into the future. I’d like it to become a place where young and upcoming filmmakers can creatively express their love of freedom and expose the lies told by Marxists. I want dramas and comedies and cartoons and shorts. I want this to expand into a national or even international event, with digital simulcasts going to anywhere people want to participate. (Read more.)

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Counterrevolution: Thirty Years of the Conservative Press

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Conservative media has been engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the left for so long that sometimes we forget to pull the lens back and fully appreciate how much we have leveled the playing field. Thirty years ago, if a conservative got destroyed in the media, the only recourse was to submit a letter to the editor of the local Stasi press outlet, where it would be ignored or edited and buried in the paper a week later. Now conservative journalists can actually dismantle lies and even collapse things like a book launch by a major publisher for leftist journalists. 

    Part of what got me thinking about this was reading an advanced copy of the great new book by Victor Davis Hanson, The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement. The book doesn’t come out for a month, and I will have a fuller review then, but in terms of its overall message and how it diagnoses the media, it is a bull’s-eye. Hanson argues that Trump has been the most effective counterforce to the slow crawl of “progressive” politics over the last century - and that kneecapping the media was a crucial part of that. (Read more.)

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The Anti-Communist Film Festival - Official Dates Announced!

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

The 2026 Anti-Communist Film Festival will take place October 1-4 at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. The headline film will be The Lives of Others, which this year celebrates its 20th anniversary. Other films will be announced shortly. I’m hard at work promoting the festival, corresponding with filmmakers, and talking to would-be donors and friends.

    I would, however, like to take a brief moment to acknowledge the ground troops and Hot Air readers who helped get this thing off the ground. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to tell you a story about it.

    Over a year ago I was taking a shower (as we all know this is where ideas happen) when I was hit with a thunderbolt: the Anti-Communist Film Festival. I worked in a movie theater in college and have long been a fan of film festivals (although maybe not all of them). Over the course of time, I began to accumulate a mental list of great anti-communist movies - On the Waterfront, Trial, Night People. Then God gave it to me: Why not show these great films all together? Why not have a film festival? 

    This is where grassroots people, many of them reading these words, helped make this happen. I launched a GoFundMe for the festival with the idea that if it did not gain traction, I would shut it down. It gained traction, and quickly. A major breakthrough came last November when I got a call from Eric Patterson at the Victims of Communism Foundation. They were offering to host the event. It was the breakthrough I needed. There can be no better people and no better place to have this party. (Read more.)

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Gottfried is Right: Wokeness Is Not Communism, It’s Demonic Narcissism

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Gottfried, a former professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College, has authored many outstanding books—particularly on the question of Marxism—so I defer to his judgment on what qualifies and doesn’t qualify for the precise definition of Marxism and Communism. Rather than disagree with him, I’d like to offer a slightly different perspective. The woke, in fact, are clinical narcissists in the sense that term was defined by Christopher Lasch. 

Narcissism, Lasch argued in his 1979 classic The Culture of Narcissism, is not self-love, but the opposite. The narcissist is not full of ego but has no sense of self. Lacking a stable sense of identity, the narcissist hunts for meaning in therapy, self-help, sex, or radical politics. This is the mental illness that is driving the politics of the left.

Lasch argued that human personality and psychology have changed over the course of the last century. Americans have transformed from strong, confident and well-adjusted people to those evincing a “minimal” self. Having cast aside our former understanding of man’s purpose and meaning in this world, American personality has become weak and dependent on government, corporations, radical politics, sex, and bureaucracies for a sense of meaning. 

Central to Lasch’s analysis is an understanding how infants develop. Citing Freud, he argued that to an infant, interactions with the world result in two sets of feelings—either omnipotence or helplessness. In an infant’s fantasy world, that baby is either the king of the world, demanding that his needs get met right now, or he is totally helpless and dependent on others for survival.

To snap out of this infants must encounter limits or “transitional objects” as they grow. Toys, games, siblings, sports, and barriers introduce limits into the world of the child. These objects shrink the scale of fantasies, introduce reality, and allow a healthy transition into adulthood. In the latter part of the 20^th century, too much of the raising of children went to television, the helping professions, schools, and bureaucracies. (Read more.)

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Limited-purpose Libel

 From Mark Judge at The New Criterion:

To understand the negative effects of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court case that changed American libel laws, consider the example of David Enrich. An investigative reporter for The New York Times who participated in the paper’s smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, Enrich is the author of Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful (2025), a book that defends the press and, specifically, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Though Enrich has expressed regret for his own sloppy and malevolent reporting, it is protected by the very legal victories he celebrates in his own book.

The events of the case began in 1960 when The New York Times published a political advertisement critical of Southern opposition to desegregation that condemned the Montgomery police force but also contained inaccuracies. This led L. B. Sullivan, the Montgomery police commissioner, to sue the Times for libel. Sullivan prevailed in the trial court and won the appeal in the Supreme Court of Alabama. The Times then appealed to the Supreme Court. In an opinion authored by Justice William Brennan, the Court reversed the lower-court decisions: to be guilty of libel, a media outlet had to be guilty of “actual malice.”

Insight into the case is provided by Carson Holloway, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, in his new book No Liberty to Libel: The Constitutional Case Against New York Times v. Sullivan, published by Encounter Books. (Editor’s note: The New Criterion and Encounter Books are both published by Roger Kimball.) As Holloway describes it, 

“Actual malice” here carried a specific, technical meaning—that the allegedly defamatory claims had been published with knowledge of their falsity, or at least with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity. To win damages in a libel action, the Court held, plaintiffs who were public officials would have to show not only that they had been defamed by a false publication, but also that the falsehood had been published knowingly or recklessly. This new standard gave the press (and others) what the Court believed was the constitutionally required breathing room to discuss vital public issues without undue fear of incurring large damage awards for erroneous publications—with the admitted side effect that some public officials who had actually suffered reputational damage from false reports would be unable to secure legal redress for their injuries.

In the years after Sullivan, Holloway notes, “additional rulings proceeded further down the trail blazed by the Sullivan Court, extending the ‘actual malice’ requirement to cases involving not only public officials but also ‘public figures.’” In 1967, the Supreme Court found in both Curtis Publishing Company v. Butts and Associated Press v. Walker that the actual-malice rule should apply not only to libel cases brought by public officials but also to those brought by all public figures—entertainers, professional athletes, musicians, business leaders, or university presidents. “Many who do not hold public office at the moment are nevertheless intimately involved in the resolution of important public questions,” Chief Justice Warren wrote in his decision on Curtis Publishing Company v. Butts. He continued, “our citizenry has a legitimate and substantial interest in the conduct of such persons, and freedom of the press to engage in uninhibited debate about their involvement in public issues and events is as crucial as it is in the case of ‘public officials.’” (Read more.)

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'The Trial': A Rare Documentary Reveals the Hell of a Communist Show Trial

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

A cold Moscow winter in 1930 is the setting for The Trial, a rarely seen but vitally important 2019 documentary by Ukrainian filmmaker  Sergei Loznitsa. The Trial - which should not be confused with Trial, the great 1955 anti-communist drama starring Glenn Ford - is constructed of restored black-and-white footage from one of Joseph Stalin’s first show trials, recorded in 1930 in Moscow. Stalin had falsely accused a political rival of seeking to sabotage the USSR at the behest of French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré and other Western leaders. In shocking footage, the accused, all innocent, confess to crimes they never actually committed. 

    The Trial is not available on streaming, but I reached out to director Loznitsa and his team was kind enough to provide me with a screener. I am currently in talks with them to perhaps show the film at the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival. The Trial is a film that should be shown in every university classroom in the United States and the West. It depicts the kind of nightmare that our own American socialists would not hesitate to inflict on the rest of us. (Read more.)

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Is God Using Communism to Punish Us?

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

 In his 1948 book Communism and the Conscience of the West, Bishop Fulton Sheen argues that Christianity and communism have similar world views. Christianity contains the truth about our lives, teaching us that love of God and neighbor, respecting the natural law, and the anticipation that we will have to battle real evil in this world. It is bluntly realistic. Communism is a distortion of Christianity. It makes the individual, in Sheen’s phrase, “a robot,” a slave to unstoppable historical and economic forces, which will result in utopia - if only after a lot of violence.

     Yet both Christianity and Communism see the world as the spiritual battleground that it is. Sheen respects Communism more than he does liberalism, which seeks comfort and virtue without any real battle.“Thought utopian and violent,” Sheen wrote, “Marxism reveals a better insight into the historical process than liberalism, which saw peace coming without a struggle and which denied that even a relative Easter of economic order would come without the Good Friday of self-sacrifice and effort.”

 Sheen goes on to argue that “the Gospel for the last Sunday of Pentecost and the Gospel for the first Sunday of Advent are gospels of catastrophe, they proclaim that the final era of peace will not be ushered in until the final conflict between good and evil, when God shall come to judge the living and the dead and the new city of Peace will be descending from the heavens.”

    Sheen also points out that the Russians learned Marxism from German intellectuals:

As many a parent who educated his child in an extremely progressive school, where the child equated freedom with doing what he pleased, is now the parent who wants to know what to do with his recalcitrant, alcoholic, neurotic son, so the Western world that taught Russia some bad ideas may soon want to know how it can be saved from a country which learned is lesson all too well. A Freudian psychoanalyst cannot help the son, so neither politics nor economics can help the Western world, for the fault is deeper; the world is under the judgment of God and needs repentance.    

    Sheen writes that “though Babylon fell because it was very wicked, it was nonetheless God’s instrument for disciplining the people of Judah. Assyria was bestial, but to was the ‘rod and staff’ of God’s anger against the people of Israel.” In the West, “communism may be the instrument for the liquidation of a bourgeois civilization that has forgotten God.” (Read more.)

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‘Full of Grace’

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Open up the May issue of Washingtonian magazine, and you find a hagiographic article about Sarah McBride. McBride is the 35-year-old transgender representative from the state of Delaware, who went under the name Timothy Ryan McBride for the first 21 years of “her” life. The title of the Washingtonian profile is “Sarah, Full of Grace.”

The Washingtonian photographed McBride at the top of a lavish stairwell, a golden yellow lamp producing a saintly nimbus. The article summary reads:

The nation’s first openly trans congresswoman, Sarah McBride, believes in kindness, tolerance, and reaching across the aisle. But in the face of vilification from the right—and some disappointment from the left—her faith his being tested.

In other words, the Washingtonian is comparing a person suffering from gender dysphoria, a man who insists on dressing like a woman and using women’s private spaces like bathrooms and showers, to the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

Actually, they may be comparing McBride to Joan of Arc. Writer Sylvie McNamara describes how two weeks after being elected in 2024, McBride discovered that Republicans on Capitol Hill had passed a rule restricting bathroom use in the Capitol to those whose sex at birth matched the restroom they use. McBride complied with the rule, angering left-wing activists. “I think the thing I am proudest of is that in the face of a very concerted effort to try and derail me and turn me into a caricature, I have remained disciplined and focused and try to fight for a politics of grace.”

This is the second time in 2026 that McNamara has written about McBride for the Washingtonian. In January, she got together with McBride to watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. “A freshman Democrat from Delaware—and the first out-trans member of Congress—she’s long been a proponent of ‘a politics of grace,’” McNamara then wrote of McBride, “of meeting differences with kindness and curiosity and giving people space to grow.” Then McBride said Republican leader Mike Johnson should be featured on Queer Eye.

The McBride canonization in Washingtonian is noteworthy because it reminds people that the media is not only out to lie, but to wage a spiritual war—and one that promotes evil. Sure, some people, even conservatives, might say, McBride and the bathroom issue are important, but the controversy doesn’t reach the level of, say, the war in Iran.

In fact, it does. As I once explained in an essay about the film The Exorcist, even more than geopolitical conflicts, human sexuality is a target for demonic exploitation. The point of the demonic in The Exorcist was not to levitate bodies or vomit on priests; it was to convince human beings that they are nothing but base, animalistic creatures unworthy of God’s love. To convince us of this, the demon in the film attacks people in vulgar, sexual terms, even to the point raping the victim, a young girl named Regan. The demon makes God’s beautiful design ugly, disfiguring the face of a beautiful young girl. The devil cannot create; it can only imitate and destroy. (Read more.)

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The Left’s History of Violence

 From Mark Judge at Splice Today:

Journalist Noah Rothman has a new book out. Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America charts the long and often untold history of the Left’s political violence in America. The book is especially timely in light of the recent, and third, assassination attempt on President Trump, and the mental derangement of the Democrats.

According to Rothman, “It is necessary to bring a gratuitous amount of evidence to bear in support of the observable fact that the American left—too often, fringe and mainstream alike—either refuse to confront or are disconcertingly comfortable with a certain level of domestic political violence. Indeed, its members will heartily protest the allegation that there is a rising tide of left-wing violence to speak of. They are inclined to ignore it, excuse it, explain it away, or marshal their own evidence in support of their belief that the American right is the font from which all political violence springs.”

Blood and Progress reminds readers that in 1995, community activist Barack Obama launched his first run for the Illinois state Senate at the house of Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. In 1970 Ayers and Dohrn were indicted for inciting a riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings. Dohrn was convicted and Ayers wasn’t. Ayers told The New York Times in 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers and his fellow terrorists bombed the Pentagon as part of his anti-war activities. As journalist Bernie Quigley once put it, “Maybe we should begin to ask ourselves where we are going in our world today when a right-wing terrorist, resolute in his conviction to the very last, like Ayers, gets a quick and short ride to the death chamber and a shallow and forgotten grave, while bombers from the ’60s get tantalizing offers from Harvard, $100 million grants from Ambassador Walter Annenberg and dinner with [celebrity academic professors].”

I wish that Rothman had spent more time on Obama’s mentor, the card-carrying Communist Frank Marshall Davis—or “Old Frank” as Obama called him. There’s also nothing about Hasan Piker, the left’s new Marxist darling. A mix of Lenin, Paul Bunyan and Torquemada, Piker posed in a recent photograph on a train with a copy of What Is To Be Done? by Lenin. As Sam Tanenhaus notes in his biography of Whittaker Chambers, would-be revolutionaries often tout Lenin’s work while ignoring the violence in those same pages.

Lenin’s The Soviets at Work is a book that, as Tanenhaus notes, “is written in a prose of almost unrelieved brutality, a combination of insults (“Let the poodles of bourgeois society scream and bark”) and threats (“everyone who violates the labor discipline in any enterprise and in any business… should be discovered, tried and punished without mercy”).” Lenin’s analogies “are drawn almost exclusively from the battlefield” and “he is thrilled by the spectacle of violence. His favorite adjective is ‘merciless.’ Nor does Lenin conceal the authoritarian character of the government he is assembling. Democracy in the new world can be achieved, he explains, only ‘by subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one.’” (Read more.)

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The Lost Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe

 

Marilyn worked very hard to better herself, as an actress and as a human being. She studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasburg and while in New York became friends with journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. She was good with money, too. She lived frugally and invested wisely. She was no spendthrift, as some people might think. From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Marilyn Monroe read books. A lot of them. That’s the revelation of Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe, a fascinating new volume by Gail Crowther. It isn’t a grasping-at-straws attempt to make Monroe a literary figure based on her love of a few good novels. Crowther has done her research, itemizing the books Monroe owned when she died, finding receipts for books she bought at the Ivy Bookstore in Los Angeles, and going through old letters in which Monroe discussed her favorite books. Monroe was a reader, which may explain why she was drawn to one of her husbands, the playwright Arthur Miller—a man who made his living with words.

When Monroe died in 1962, her collection included more than 400 books. “These books,” Crowther notes, “some dating from her childhood, had followed Marilyn around from one address to another.” Crowther describes the collection: 

The scope of Marilyn’s personal library and the number of genres it contained was impressive. She read literature from all around the world, America, England, France, Germany, but certainly favored Russian novels. She enjoyed poetry, politics, psychology, plays, biographies, science, short stories, cookbooks, horticulture, contemporary novels, children’s books, religion, crime, adventure, art, pets, music, reference, and self-help. She was probably one of the few readers in the world whose personal library contained a biography of herself (Marilyn Monroe “Her Own Story,” 1961, by George Carpozi). 

Monroe loved D. H. Lawrence and owned a poetry collection, the novel Sons and Lovers, a collection of his travel writings, Etruscan Places, and a critical study of Lawrence and his works by Mary Freeman. She also owned copies of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She owned a first edition of Ian Fleming’s From Russia, With Love, a book that included a chapter titled “The Mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” Monroe loved Russian literature, bonding with actress, columnist, and writer Sheilah Graham over Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Turgenev, and Pushkin.

Monroe also had “an edgy liking for banned books.” This included The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis. Monroe’s copy of the novel sold for $3,220 in a 1999 auction. She also owned a 1934 first edition of Ulysses, published after the ruling that the James Joyce novel was not obscene and could not be banned. (Read more.)

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‘National Geographic’ Reclaims Its Legacy

From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

On June 1, the National Geographic Society is opening a new, stunning, multimillion dollar museum. According to its promotional material, the 2026 debut of NatGeo’s “Museum of Exploration,” will feature

a state-of-the-art pavilion entrance, auditorium, iconic photo gallery, exhibition space, immersive walk-through attraction, retail, food and beverage, education center, archives, tours, and exciting new event space. The capstone of the renovation is a one-of-a-kind nighttime experience in the courtyard.

The new museum opens just as the National Geographic Society appears to be reclaiming the grand legacy it lost over several decades in the jungle of wokeness. The spiral has been particularly difficult for me to watch because my father was a writer and editor at National Geographic for the better part of 30 years, from the early 1960s to 1990. This storied organization that was so much a part of my early life and education devolved into a habit of promoting pseudoscience, anti-white racism, and transgenderism. If the new museum, and some recent issues of the magazine, are any indication, National Geographic may be on the path to getting its mojo back.

First, however, a quick journey through NatGeo’s descent into liberal madness. In 2017, the magazine ran a special issue on “The Gender Revolution,” which became the basis for a documentary hosted by left-wing dingbat and TV personality Katie Couric. The magazine issue itself featured a “girl” on the cover—that is to say, a confused and exploited boy—and the section titled “Helping Families Talk about Gender” offered this: “Understand that gender identity and sexual orientation cannot be changed, but the way people identify their gender identity and sexual orientation may change over time as they discover more about themselves.”

As Andrew T. Walker and Denny Burke wrote of it in Public Discourse,

the first half of this sentence asserts the immutability of gender identity, but the second half of the sentence claims that people’s self-awareness of such things can change over time. But is there not a contradiction here once we define our terms? Gender identity is not an objective category but a subjective one. It is how one perceives his or her own sense of maleness or femaleness….If that perception is fixed and immutable (as the first half of the sentence asserts), then it is incoherent to say that one’s self-perception can change over time (as the second half of the sentence asserts).

Another article offers a full-page picture of a shirtless 17-year-old girl who recently underwent a double mastectomy in order to “transition” to being a boy. Walker and Burke ask this probing question that gets to the heart of the matter: “Why do transgender ideologues consider it harmful to attempt to change such a child’s mind but consider it progress to display her bare, mutilated chest for a cover story?”

National Geographic received significant blowback for the issue,  prompting a defense from Editor Susan Goldberg. A key paragraph:

We realized several years ago that beliefs about gender were shifting rapidly and radically. For almost 130 years, National Geographic has explored the world through science, exploration, and storytelling. Gender permeates every part of what it means to be human, and reporting on the changing understandings of a biological and social concept is, put simply, what we do. Our coverage doesn’t come with a political or partisan agenda. We created the gender issue—as we do every issue—with the intent to research, understand, and explain.

So gender is not a reality but “a biological and social concept.” Goldberg also equivocated about hormone blockers, which have since been proven to be dangerous.

As part of the magazine’s April 2018 edition, “The Race Issue,” Goldberg offered this headline: “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.”

Goldberg hired John Edwin Mason, a scholar at the University of Virginia, to dig through the archives to find evidence of white supremacy. Interviewed by Vox, Mason announced that National Geographic “was born at the height of so-called ‘scientific’ racism and imperialism—including American imperialism. This culture of white supremacy shaped the outlook of the magazine’s editors, writers, and photographers, who were always white and almost always men.” Responding to a 2018 cover featuring a cowboy on horseback, Mason argued that “the image of the white cowboy reproduces and romanticizes the mythic iconography of settler colonialism and white supremacy.” (Read more.)

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An Invitation to Premier 'Dune: Part Three' at the Anti-Communist Film Festival

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

At its heart, Dune and its sequels offer a powerful argument against big government, high taxes, and political messiahs who promise to save the world. In fact Dune: Part Three would be a perfect fit for the Anti-Communist Film Festival. Director Villeneuve and star Timothee Chalamet can consider themselves both invited.  

    The world and politics of Dune have been expertly analyzed by Daniel Immerwahr, a professor at Northwestern University. Immerwahr has explored the two sides of Dune author Frank Herbert: The environmentalist who grew up in Washington state, hung out with hippies and did drugs in the 1970s, and whose mentor was an American Indian, and Frank Herbert, the conservative Republican who hated taxes and leaders who promised people everything only to go on a power trip.

    Although raised by socialist parents, Herbert experienced commune living with Native Americans, and it filled him with hostility to the federal government. Herbert rejected  “any kind of public charity system” because he “learned early on that our society’s institutions often weaken people’s self-reliance.” Herbert worked for four Republican candidates, including very conservative Guy Cordon, the US senator from Oregon. Cordon was pro-logging, pro-business, pro-military, anti-labor, anti-regulation, and a supporter of Joseph McCarthy. A book Herbert wrote before Dune calls Soviet agents “the sinister embodiment of everything evil.” (Read more.)

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Don’t Take Advice From Arthur C. Brooks

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

In 2017, Brooks gave a speech at the annual prayer breakfast in Washington, D.C. Trump was in the audience. Brooks ladled out his message of human flourishing and “loving your enemies.” He exhorted Trump to follow the words of Jesus. After Brooks took his seat on the dais, Trump stepped up to the mic. “Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you—and I don’t know if Arthur is going to like what I’m going to say,” Trump said, before ripping into the “very dishonest and corrupt people” who had “done everything possible to destroy us, and by so doing, very badly hurt our nation.” “They know what they are doing is wrong,” Trump went on, “but they put themselves far ahead of our great country.”

Politico described the fallout this way: “In the media firestorm that ensued, observers quickly pointed out that Trump had not just repudiated Brooks’ advice; he had questioned the teachings of Jesus Christ himself.” 

To the contrary, President Trump was reminding the audience of the reality and nature of evil. Unlike Arthur Brooks, Trump rejects the lazy theology that pretends evil must be tolerated. Yes, Jesus taught us to love our enemies. He also cast out demons. (Read more.)

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Blood and Progress: New Book Reveals the Left’s History of Violence

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Blood and Progress is a corrective to the censored history of the left’s political violence in America, going back at least a century. I’ve obtained an early copy, and Blood and Progress is must-reading.

    Here is the thesis as laid out by Rothman: “It is necessary to bring a gratuitous amount of evidence to bear in support of the observable fact that the American left—too often, fringe and mainstream alike—either refuse to confront or are disconcertingly comfortable with a certain level of domestic political violence. Indeed, its members will heartily protest the allegation that there is a rising tide of left-wing violence to speak of. They are inclined to ignore it, excuse it, explain it away, or marshal their own evidence in support of their belief that the American right is the font from which all political violence springs.”

    Rothman emphasizes that he is not dismissing right-wing violence, only arguing that the media, academia, and politicians explain away the violence on their own side while trumpeting the problem on the right. Liberals will talk about January 6th for decades while watching their own cities burn to the ground or their children get assaulted by illegal immigrants.

    In 1995, community activist Barack Obama launched his first run for the Illinois state Senate at the house of Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. In 1970, Ayers and Dohrn were indicted for inciting a riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings. Dohrn was convicted; Ayers was not. Ayers is not sorry, telling The New York Times in 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers and his fellow terrorists bombed the Pentagon as part of their anti-war activities. As journalist Bernie Quigley once put it, “Maybe we should begin to ask ourselves where we are going in our world today when a right-wing terrorist, resolute in his conviction to the very last, like Ayers, gets a quick and short ride to the death chamber and a shallow and forgotten grave, while bombers from the ’60s get tantalizing offers from Harvard, $100 million grants from Ambassador Walter Annenberg and dinner with [celebrity academic professors].” (Read more.)

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Conservatives Have Failed at Culture

 Well, at least one of my books has been made into a film. I never received a cent, however. From Splice Today:

Over the last century, beginning with movies, jazz and literature, liberals have been the great artistic visionaries. They defended James Joyce. They founded magazines like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Orson Welles put on groundbreaking plays in the 1930s and directed Citizen Kane. The Beatles worked all-nighters in Hamburg. Jann Wenner turned a $7500 loan into Rolling Stone magazine. And Lena Dunham was 24 when she wrote and directed Tiny Furniture. Go ahead and hate her and the film. Then shut up and make a better one.

Wealthy people like Ben Shapiro won’t even fund the arts that could change the culture. Writing for Commentary, social historian Fred Siegel once explored how the American masses embraced the art in the 1950s even as philanthropists and gatekeepers were offering the best of Western culture. Americans at the time, wrote Siegel, “were sampling the greatest works of Western civilization for the first time.” The book Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America revealed that “twenty years ago, you couldn’t sell Beethoven out of New York. Today we sell Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gabrieli, and Renaissance and Baroque music in large quantities.” There was a 250 percent growth in the number of local symphony orchestras between 1940 and 1955.

In 1955, writes Siegel, “15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games. 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million out of an overall population of 165 million.”

Siegel notes there were gatekeepers to get this great art to the people: “NBC spent $500,000 in 1956 to present a three-hour version of Shakespeare’s Richard III starring Laurence Olivier. The broadcast drew 50 million viewers; as many as 25 million watched all three hours.” Siegel observes that “on March 16, 1956, a Sunday chosen at random,” the viewer could have seen a discussion of the life and times of Toulouse-Lautrec by three prominent art critics, an interview with theologian Paul Tillich, an adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Hook, a documentary on mental illness with Dr. William Menninger, and a 90-minute performance of The Taming of the Shrew. Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” a National Book Award winner, sold a million copies in paperback in the early-1950s.

John F. Kennedy supported the arts. “The life of the arts,” he said, “far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose.” (Read more.)

From The Chivalry Guild:

I often read complaints about the failure of Hollywood to bring the life of Richard the Lionheart or Scanderbeg or Godfrey of Bouillon to the screen in a blockbuster epic.1 It certainly sounds like a grand idea—but always be careful what you wish for. Even if the studios could be trusted to depict the hero as heroic (rather than “problematic,” perverted, or overrated) and show his cause to be just (rather than brutal Christian aggression against noble Muslim victims), little subversions still have a way of creeping into the projects and undermining the whole thing—democratic cliches, enlightened pieties. Then there’s the question of quality. Truly getting Richard right would require a director with elite vision, a screenwriter with a deft touch and knowledge of the past, an actor who could credibly pass as one of the greatest men who ever lived, and more—and the likelihood of all these pieces coming together are increasingly slim. More likely they would just make him a toxic mediocrity and/or a repressed homosexual.

Would you rather have a C- version of the hero or no movie at all?

With every passing year I grow less and less interested in shows and movies. My divorce from Hollywood is certainly made easier as everything on the screen turns embarrassingly shoddy and emotionally manipulative—an inevitable consequence of frenzy for sidelining talented white men in favor of DEI hires. But I’ve come to suspect something larger at work than just declining skill and political machinations. The current embarrassments are likely more of a feature than a bug, the kind of thing that can’t really be solved by simply putting “based” people in charge of the studios.2 (Read more.)

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James Ellroy’s 'Red Sheet'

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

As if right on cue, the great author James Ellroy is publishing a new novel in June. Red Sheet is the latest offering from the fantastic creator of L.A. Confidential and American Tabloid. Like other books, it has to do with Los Angeles, cops, drugs, fringe characters, politics, and corruption. 

    It is also a bracingly anti-communist novel, perhaps the most anti-communist work of fiction I have read since Mickey Spillane’s One Lonely Night. Knopf, Ellroy’s publisher, was kind enough to send me an advanced review copy. Out of respect for Ellroy, I will save a detailed review until closer to publication date, but for now let me just say that Red Sheet is a brilliant, powerful novel that should be read by every American. Set in 1962, it opens with a quote from Whittaker Chambers, vindicates Richard Nixon, and makes it clear that the American anti-communists of the last century were right-on in their opposition to this evil pseudo-religious cult.  

    In fact, let me quote directly from James Ellroy’s official page:

Red Sheet is an anti-communist novel. It stands foursquare in the tainted tradition of Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane. Ellroy is out to scramble your long-held perceptions and force you into a state of jumped-up disavowal.

Red Sheet scorns the mock-martyred Hollywood Ten and ballyhoos the Blacklist and the ’47-’48 HUAC hearings. Red Sheet forces you to live within the twisted and oddly tender soul of Richard M. Nixon. Red Sheet spotlights the Spanish Civil War and atrocities committed by the commie-infested International Brigade, heretofore held as heroic. Red Sheet lionizes name-naming kingpin Whittaker Chambers and bestows kudos on ratfinks Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg.

(Read more.)

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Feminism vs. Feminine Mystery in Film

 

 I first saw Jessie Buckley in War and Peace as Princess Maria, whom she portrayed with depth and sincerity. And she has done well in other things I have seen her in, I have been really impressed. Such a shame she chose this vile film; she is probably being poorly advised. From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Take the rage of modern feminism, the scourge of pornography, and add classic Hollywood movie musical and horror elements, overlap with an insane storyline, sew them all together, give the resulting monster a jolt of pointless modern violence, and you’ve got the new movie The Bride! It is, quite possibly, the worst film I’ve ever seen.

Here’s the plot—and no, this is not a joke. The Bride! is set in 1930s Chicago. Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), or “Frank,” is living in the Windy City. Suffering from loneliness, he visits Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), a surgeon who specializes in reanimating the dead. Frank is matched with a recently murdered woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley). Ida, it turns out, was murdered shortly after she was possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelly, the original author of the novel Frankenstein. The resuscitated couple go on a Bonnie and Clyde-style road trip, committing crimes that attract the attention of Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penelope Cruz). The couple gets caught, shot down—and then reanimated …  again. The Bride! is the kind of film where you sit in the theater, incredulous both about what you are watching and the fact that you are bothering to watch it.

The film is directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who, through this film, may be signaling that she needs professional help. The point of the movie, as far as I can tell, is that patriarchal society abuses women, kills them, and drives them mad. The only way to cope is to become a kind of punk rock mercenary (Buckley’s makeup and electroshock blonde hair is pure 1980s LA). The only acceptable male companion is an obedient monster who, like you, is an outsider—or “a non-compliant,” as Dr. Euphonious puts it. Gyllenhaal is a Hollywood A-Lister, so she was able to attract the best actors for her movie. Jessie Buckley switches between Ida, who has a Yonkers accent, to Mary Shelley, who was British, to the Bride, who falls somewhere in between. Buckley gives the performance her all. It’s just sad that her dynamic energy wasn’t put to use for something that makes sense. Ditto for Christian Bale.

There is something deeply disturbing at the heart of The Bride!, but it has nothing to do with the so-called patriarchy. It is more about the corrosive effects of our porn culture.

Every male character in the film has, in some way, abused a woman. The men in the 1930s nightclub at the beginning of the film are not the mannerly companions one might expect from that era, but leering, aggressive abusers with dirty minds and dirty mouths. The dialogue is pure 2026—I don’t think anyone during the Great Depression, for example, regularly used phrases like, “What the actual [expletive]!” Frank is a huge fan of the movie star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), but even Reed turns out to be a jerk. When Reed dismisses an emotional Frank with a quip about the monster “not being my type,” Frank implodes, crashing a chandelier and helping the Bride escape after she shoots a cop. Did I mention that this might be the worst film I have ever seen? 

The depressing takeaway from The Bride! is a theme that conservatives have been warning against for decades. Namely, that we now have multiple generations of young people who are so emotionally fragile that the smallest criticism becomes a mental health crisis and turns them into raging monsters. Take Ronnie Reed’s innocuous line about Frank not being his type. Reed is not even rejecting Frank outright, just offering an innocent quip. Yet it is somehow portrayed as an excuse for monstrous behavior. 

If America’s pornography culture really has corroded sexual relationships and men to the degree portrayed in this film—where they cannot be with women in any social situation, or any situation at all, without acting like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (Christian Bale’s true monster role)—then we do, indeed, have a crisis. But it’s worth noting that that crisis, like American Psycho itself, is about the gay culture’s hatred of women, and something that Hollywood will probably never confront honestly. If you want to see real toxic misogyny, gay Hollywood is where you’ll find it. (Read more.)

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