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 How do you create a generation that will believe in anything? After Oct 7, some purple-haired genderqueer activists on TikTok have taken to reading the Koran and are pondering converting to Islam. That may seem like a leap, but once you’re a teenage girl who decides to be a boy for internet clout, changing to Islam is less difficult. Hijabs, like dyed hair and androgynous clothes, have long become just another accessory of restless social change. Commercials that claim to relate to the youth invariably include a woman in a hijab as a progressive marker alongside a purple haired they/them, an ascetic activist type in a t-shirt and random minorities laughing together while having lattes on a college campus. Every generation in the last 60 years has grown up with less of a sense of who it is than the previous one. The intangible sense of being an American that once came from boundless frontiers, a work ethic, a sense of fair play and meritocracy was replaced by cultural programming d...

Gingrich vs Romney has some familiar echoes. The obvious precedent for Gingrich is another bombthrower, Barry Goldwater, who would propose explosive things that were actually common sense, lacked patience for dealing with the media and his voting record was more liberal than his positions. The Republican establishment is frantically warning us that we need to choose Romney as our Nelson Rockefeller, the stable reliable middle of the road guy. The man that no one can call an extremist. Maybe they're right. Maybe in a national election Gingrich will get the Goldwater treatment, just like he did while Speaker of the House. And maybe they're wrong. Gingrich has plenty of enemies in the party like Goldwater did, including a former president or two, He has the establishment after him, which is terrified that the base will come into its own and shake their cozy chardonnay politics.

  Woke’, the term, peaked in 2020. In 2017, it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary and appeared as a category on Jeopardy. Next year, Essence magazine announced its list of ‘Woke 100 Women’. In 2020, Disney’s Hulu aired ‘Woke’:, a tedious series about a college activist. By 2023, wokeness has come to mean leftist extremism. It’s most often used by Republicans and hardly ever by Democrats who act baffled at the idea that there was ever such a thing as wokeness. Much like ‘Defund the Police’, a set of sounds that once defined lefty culture, has been flushed down the memory hole and everyone is pretending they never heard of it. In Seattle, the home of wokeness, “race and equity experts”  say it’s  “time to get rid of woke.” “That word has been taken,” Erin Jones, a DEI consultant who charges $1,000 an hour for her workshops, admitted. “There’s no good way to use that term. I think it’s been so weaponized at this point that there was not a positive way to use the word...

   T here was a time when fat was in and thin was out. Obesity was the privilege of wealth and being thin meant being poor. In simpler societies, before slumming became a romantic pose, there was nothing attractive about not having enough to eat. To be fat was to be part of the leisure class. Thin meant you were on the road to the poorhouse or to consumption, which meant your body was being consumed, not that you were the one doing the consuming. Then agriculture was revolutionized and the values flipped. No one in the West was starving to death and the poorest man could still grow fat. By the time the social programs kicked in, weight no longer meant leisure. With packaged foods widely available and jobs shifting from the factory to the desk, it was entirely possible to work hard and get fat.

  "F oremost,” the NASA administrator described his marching orders from Obama, “he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world.” The great new mission of America's space agency would be to make Muslims "feel good about their historic contribution to science.” President Trump has another mission for NASA. Looking over at former Senator Schmitt, the last living man to walk on the moon in the Apollo 17 mission forty-five years ago, President Trump said, “Today, we pledge that he will not be the last.”

   Around the time that the United States Constitution had been hammered out, across the way in the UK, social theorist Jeremy Bentham was coming up with the Panopticon. Bentham had denounced the ideas of the Declaration of Independence as "subversive of every actual or imaginable kind of Government". He demanded that force be used to "teach this rebellious people" that "there is no peace with them, but the peace of the King".

  The end of free speech will not necessarily come when there are soldiers in the streets, secret police in the alleyways and a mustachioed man screaming at you on a television set that can't be turned off no matter how hard you turn the knob or click the buttons. Some of these things certainly existed in totalitarian countries. But they were there to sweep up the hardened dissenters who refused to be silenced. The vast majority of citizens did not have bugged phones or men in trench-coats following them around. That was what their friends and neighbors were for. The first line of offense by a totalitarian society against freedom of speech is crowdsourced to the people in the streets. It begins with the imposition of a social norm, escalates to punishments for violating that norm and concludes with gulags and firing squads.