My New Substack - The Culture Warrior

I'm late making the announcement, but as of about a month ago I'm posting all my latest articles at my new Substack account called Culture Warrior. The Culture Warrior tagline? "Make Western Civilization Great Again."

My avatar there (you can see it in the subscribe button below) is a flag with a red cross on a black-and-white field. Why? It is the Beauséant, the battle flag flown by the warrior-monks of the medieval Knights Templar. The cross, of course, represents Christ’s sacrifice, while the blocks of black and white symbolize the duality of evil and good. The black is on top because evil seems to hold sway in this world; but beneath, the good is ever-present and ultimately will prevail.

Subscribing at Culture Warrior is the best way to keep up with what I'm writing, reading, and doing henceforth. I don't currently have the time to cross-post those things here as well (unless there's a quick, automatic way to do it that I just haven't had the time to research yet), although marktapson.com will remain my personal website. It may see some changes too in the very near future.

In the meantime, please consider subscribing to Culture Warrior. It's free (many Substack accounts charge a monthly fee) and each weekend you'll get exclusive access to my weekly newsletter, which includes links to all my posts from the week including my podcast episodes, in addition to links to must-read books and articles that I highly recommend in order to keep up with and understand what's happening in the culture (and what to do about it).

Looking forward to seeing you there!

The Antidote to ‘Toxic’ Masculinity

Marine veteran Terry Bagley, a 70-year-old father of five who does housekeeping at a Veterans Affairs hospital, was walking to buy items for Thanksgiving in the Pigtown area of Baltimore, Maryland, on the Tuesday afternoon before the holiday. On his way to the market, a rowhome on the block exploded—likely from a ruptured gas line.

Bagley reportedly wasted no time hurrying to the rescue of anyone who might be trapped inside the burning building. Firefighters later found him in the rubble. Bagley, in critical condition, was placed in a medically-induced coma. His injuries—including a broken pelvis, femur, and hand—will require surgery. (A GoFundMe page set up for the Vietnam vet has raised over $40,000 of a $150,000 goal thus far.) But a 16-year-old girl and 48-year-old woman who were inside the home survived in stable condition.

Amid the usual litany of disheartening news items highlighting the worst of human behavior—mass shootings, wartime atrocities, and acts of random, pointless violence—Terry Bagley’s story is one that shines a spotlight on the best of what we are capable of.

His daughter Eris Bagley later told Baltimore’s 11 News, “He thought nothing about his own life to save two women that he did not know.” Questioned about why her father entered the burning home, she replied, “Because he’s a Marine.”

“My dad endured polio as a child. He also endured the thing with Camp Lejeune with toxic water and he also served in the Vietnam War,” she added. “[He was] heroic, but I wish he didn’t do it because now I’m scared that I am about to lose him. But I’m glad he did it to save people he didn’t know.”

His son Terry Bagley Jr. told reporters:

“His heroic behavior is nothing new. … I’ve always seen this, and I think that every child should look up to their father. … Every child should be proud of their father, and I am very proud of what he did, but I am also scared as well, and I’ve got to be honest with that. But I’m praying to my God, and I believe in my God, and I just want my father to get better, and I just want his story to be out there that a 70-year-old man put his life on the line to save two people.”

A 70-year-old man put his life on the line to save two people. Even at his advanced age, which he surely knew would make his own survival unlikely, Bagley did not hesitate to take that risk in an attempt to rescue total strangers in terrible danger. He exhibited the heroic degree of selfless courage that is the hallmark of a cultural virtue that, among younger generations today, has become a dirty word: chivalry.

Institutions of Lower Learning

 

As if you needed any further evidence that even our most prestigious institutions of higher learning have degenerated into woke indoctrination mills aimed at deconstructing the moral, intellectual, and cultural underpinnings of our civilization, a new course catalog for Princeton University reveals that the Ivy League school will begin offering its students courses on BDSM and fetishism next year.

As colleges and universities all over the Western world hasten to “decolonize” their curricula in order to erase the magnificent legacy of no-longer-relevant Dead White Males™ such as Will Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, they offer, as alternatives, courses like Princeton’s “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture” and “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization,” both of which students (or their parents) paying $57,000 in tuition can look forward to in 2023.

“Black Queer BDSM material culture resists contextualization in relationship to biographical narratives because of the underground elements of the community,” reads the jargon-bloated course description. What will students be doing in the course? Why, they will “consider the fragility of archival engagement with these communities by surveying existing BDSM archives in research libraries, community groups, and individuals and their personal ephemera,” of course.

Nothing expands the mind and prepares one to become a productive citizen of society quite like surveying the personal ephemera of BDSM enthusiasts.

Students of the Black + Queer in Leather course will be required to read such classic works of scholarship as The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography by Ariane Cruz and A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography by Mireille Miller-Young.

In “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization,” a course which impressively manages to combine the Left’s obsessions with perversion and anti-Westernism, students will be reading, among other works, On the Worship of the Fetish Gods by Charles De Brosses and “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” by Karl Marx.

With a reading load like that, who’s got time to trudge through Shakespeare?

The Right Take Podcast Episode 11: "Has Our Culture Lost its Mind?" with Dr. Chloe Carmichael

  

Clinical psychologist Dr. Chloe Carmichael and I discuss everything from gender ideology to the crisis of masculinity to COVID masking and more. She was a fun, enlightening guest. Check it out:

Here is the episode on FrontPage Mag. And Spotify. And Apple Podcasts.

This Thanksgiving, 'The Nation' Was Grateful for Abortions

 

This past Thanksgiving Day was greeted with the usual chorus of anti-American diatribes from the miserable utopians of the Left. Wealthy celebrity ingrates like Bette Midler and John Leguizamo sneered at Americans and the holiday on social media (the John Wick actor tweeted, “Happy indigenous survivor’s day! F*ck thanksgiving!”). MSNBC’s resident race-monger Joy Reid accused Republicans of wanting to portray Thanksgiving as a “simplistic fairy tale” to cover up that America was founded on “genocide.” Even the head of terrorism-linked CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, lectured Americans about “the dark history associated with this holiday” and the “unspeakable atrocities” committed against Native Americans.

But nothing sank to the depth of the Left’s perverse worldview quite like a Thanksgiving Day essay in the radical rag The Nation titled, “We’re Thankful for Our Abortions,” which declared there’s literally nothing to be grateful for in our current state of the union except the endangered freedom to abort one’s own unborn children.

The essay’s author is Nikiya Natale (preferred pronouns “she/her”), deputy director of We Testify, a group created by the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) which advocates for women who have undergone abortions. Her bio on the group’s website states that Natale’s “passion” for her work “stems from her own multiple abortion experiences.” Multiple “experiences.”

Natale claims in her Nation article that many of those who have had abortions “celebrate their experience”; some of the women themselves – We Testify “abortion storytellers” – then go on to detail their infanticides in the article and why they are “thankful” for them.

Predictably, like all social justice warriors who live in a state of ceaseless discontent over perceived historical injustices, Natale felt compelled to begin her essay by wondering “why our nation celebrates the complicated holiday of Thanksgiving at all” – “complicated” because America was “founded on the unforgivable genocide of Native Americans.”

Traditional Masculinity Should Be GQ’s 'New Masculinity' -- My latest at Intellectual Takeout

 

Several years ago when I wrote cultural pieces for the now-defunct Acculturated.com, Intellectual Takeout reposted about a dozen of those articles. Last Monday they published this new one I wrote specifically for them, and I hope to contribute to them more often:

 GQ magazine held its 25th “Men of the Year” event in London last Wednesday. Talents from across the fields of culture, sports, and entertainment gathered for the glitzy gala celebrating the British men’s style magazine’s honorees for Men of the Year. Curiously, over a third of the personalities on that list were women.

Of the 26 honorees named, an eyebrow-raising nine were female, including Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney, The Batman actress Zoë Kravitz, English soccer captain Leah Williamson, and House of the Dragon star Emma D’arcy, who apparently identifies as “non-binary.” Other women were Marisa Abela, Sheila Atim, Es Devlin, Myha’la Herrold, and Sharon Horgan.

Making a feeble stab at clarification, the host Condé Nast Events wrote in a statement, “Rather than honouring people in a distinct ‘awards’ section of the issue, the entire MOTY issue will become a celebration of the people who dominated culture and shaped the zeitgeist of 2022.”

The Right Take Podcast Player

I've fallen behind in posting my latest episodes of The Right Take podcast -- I'm up to 10 now -- but it finally occurred to me to just embed the player to the upper right side of the page. So you can now just check out the latest episodes there. I'll post here whenever a new episode is up.

The latest is my conversation with Dr. Peter Wood, author of two important books we discuss in the episode: 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, and Wrath: America Enraged. Check it out in the player to the right.

All the episodes are collected here at FrontPage Mag, here at Spotify, and here at Apple Podcasts.

The Right Take podcast ep. 5: 'The Muslim Brotherhood of Death'

The latest episode of The Right Take podcast is up, this one a fascinating talk with my friend, Egyptian-American scholar and patriot Cynthia Farahat, about her new book on the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Right Take podcast: 'My Son Hunter' and Conservative Storytelling (featuring Brian Godawa)

 

Check out my latest episode of The Right Take podcast, featuring my good friend and screenwriter Brian Godawa discussing his controversial new film My Son Hunter and the state of Hollywood and "conservative" storytelling.

The Right Take podcast ep. 3: Debunking Zinn and the 1619 Project (featuring Mary Grabar)

Here is episode #3 of my new podcast, featuring my guest, scholar Mary Grabar, discussing her important books Debunking Howard Zinn and Debunking the 1619 Project. Don't miss it!