Standing Tall for the National Anthem

While all his Pittsburgh Steelers teammates hid in the locker room rather than be put in the position of taking a stand on the protests currently sweeping the National Football League, one player stood apart and stood tall on Sunday for the playing of the national anthem.

The controversy, as everyone in the known universe is painfully aware now, was kicked off last year by former 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who began sitting or kneeling during “The Star-Spangled Banner” at game time to protest the “oppression of people of color” in America. A slow trickle of other players gradually followed suit.

Last Friday, President Trump added fuel to the fire when he suggested at a rally in Alabama that any “son of a bitch” who “disrespects our flag” should be fired. This virtually guaranteed that many players who otherwise might not get involved would feel compelled to push back, and indeed, there was a surge of protests during last weekend’s games.

Members of both the Ravens and Jaguars, for example, took a knee while the national anthem was played ahead of their game in London. More than a dozen Cleveland Browns and at least ten Indianapolis Colts knelt before their contest. The Dallas Cowboys and their owners did likewise just before the anthem at their Monday night game. Thousands of spectators booed in each instance, and the hills were alive with the sound of countless fans at home collectively switching off their TVs in disgust.

Our Free Speech Crisis

The Land of the Free is facing a crisis of freedom. A new study from the University of California at Los Angeles polled 1,500 students at four-year universities about their views on free speech. The results are disheartening, to say the least.

Forty-four percent of the student respondents believe that the First Amendment does not protect “hate speech.” Sixteen percent answered “don't know,” and only 39 percent answered correctly. Disturbingly, not even conservative students seemed to understand First Amendment protections: only 44 percent said that hate speech is protected, compared to 39 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Independents.

A stunning 51 percent of students thought that “shouting so that the audience cannot hear” was a valid tactic for opposing a controversial speaker. Violence as a means of shutting down a speaker was acceptable to 19 percent, or one out of five, of respondents.

“The majority of students appear to prefer an environment in which their institution is expected to create an environment that shelters them from offensive views,” the study concludes.

This is concerning for many reasons, but the most urgent one is that our culture has reached the point of hysteria about an imaginary tide of neo-Nazis threatening to turn America into the Fourth Reich. White supremacists – a discredited fringe of politically impotent, openly despised losers – suddenly loom large in our collective consciousness thanks to a relentless propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by the left-leaning press, to demonize President Donald Trump and right-wingers in general as literal Nazis.

Kate Millett’s Destructive Feminist Legacy

Feminist icon Kate Millett passed away recently in Paris at the age of 82. Obituary portraits and reminiscences of the author of Sexual Politics and other books ranged from respectful to reverential to “tongue-tied fangirldom.” But what has the legacy of her brand of feminism truly been?

Sexual Politics, Millett’s first book, traced the insidious ways she claimed that the “patriarchy” was institutionalized throughout the culture and kept women repressed, often unconsciously so. The “fundamental instrument” of patriarchy, she declared, was the family unit, which encouraged women to embrace their own conformity to the system. Real liberation was only possible by casting off the chains of a woman’s traditional role of wife and mother. Critic Irving Howe observed that the book displayed such little interest in children that it was as if it had been written by a female impersonator.

Called “the Bible of Women’s Liberation” by the New York Times, the 1970 book had a seismic effect on feminist thought and launched her as what the Times called “a defining architect of second-wave feminism.” In a cover story that same year, TIME magazine crowned her “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation.” Fellow feminist Andrea Dworkin said that Millett woke up a sleeping world.

I am friends with Kate’s sister Mallory, whose perspective on her sibling gives some necessary insight into the true nature of the feminist vision. In a riveting article from a few years back bluntly titled, “Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives,” she shared what she saw of the subversive undercurrent of her sister’s passionate radicalism.

Is it Time for Conservatives to Create an Alternate Culture?

The culture leans sharply left, and in our current, highly-polarized political climate that means conservatives in the arts tend to be treated as outsiders at best and pariahs at worst. Listen to the personal experiences of conservatives in Hollywood, for example, whether “above the line” (the stars, producers and directors) or below it (the rest of the crew), and you will understand why most keep their politics in the closet to avoid bad vibes, ostracism, and/or outright hostility. The left, of course, dismisses complaints of blacklisting and bias as paranoid whining, but they are very real indeed.

The publishing world is not exempt from this state of affairs. When conservative author Dinesh D’Souza's new book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left appeared at No. 7 on The New York Times bestseller list, despite actually having outsold all 14 of its competitors on the list, D’Souza called out the Times on Twitter: “In what alternative universe do Jeff Flake's 7,383 book sales for this week (BookScan data) top mine at 11,651? Thanks @nytimes fake list!”

This was far from the first time conservative authors had called foul about their books’ rankings on the Times’ all-important bestseller list. Cortney O’Brien at Townhall pointed to another noteworthy recent example: Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer, by co-author couple Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. A horrifying exposé of the dark(er) side of the abortion industry, the top-selling Amazon release was perceived by some as an attack on the left’s sacred cow of abortion rights. The New York Times did have the book at No. 13 on its “Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction” list, but did not place Gosnell at its deserved No. 4 slot among bestselling nonfiction titles.

“It's not only an insult to the people who have bought this book,” McElhinney said “but an insult to the readers of the New York Times who buy the newspaper and think they are getting the truth about book sales across America but instead get false facts disguised as a neutral list.”

Melania Trump’s Crimes of Fashion

The left spent eight years gushing about Michelle Obama as a First Lady style icon second only to – if anyone – Jackie O. Embraced enthusiastically by the fashion world, Michelle appeared on magazine covers from InStyle to Glamour to Vogue (multiple times). At the end of Barack’s Oval Office tenure, HuffPost even posted a farewell piece to Michelle titled, “Michelle Obama Breaks Hearts With Final Vogue Cover As First Lady.” “Looking ethereal in a white Carolina Herrera gown, she is, as usual, the epitome of elegance and grace,” HuffPost fawned breathlessly.

Last year, with Michelle on her way out, the heartbroken left, looking forward to Hillary Clinton as President, began to wax enthusiastic about Hillary’s “presidential” pantsuits. Had she won the election, there is no question that fashion critics would then have spent the next four years wracking their brains finding ways to praise Hillary’s boxy, Mao-inspired, solid-print tents. But Donald Trump burst that bubble, and the traumatized left watched as he and his wife, the stunning former model Melania, moved into the White House instead.

Literally overnight, the Trump-hating left decided fashion needed to be politicized and weaponized against the new First Lady. Designer Sophie Theallet, who had dressed Michelle for eight years, made a very public announcement of her refusal to work for Melania. Other virtue-signaling designers who are not exactly household names quickly followed suit, if you’ll pardon the pun.