Matt Philbin
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Ireland probably thought cultural suicide would bring it peace. But, having shuffled off this mortal coil, the Emerald Isle’s sleep of death is not going to be terribly restful. Eire has opened the Hellmouth of social liberalism. Even as Irish and international progressives are celebrating the newly minted right to snuff out babies in the womb ...
The interwebs are an invaluable source of information about the pivotal figures in religious history. Just this morning I learned that Moses became president of the NRA and the Buddha was a Crossfit pioneer. And the Prophet Muhammad hosted the first production of The Vagina Monologues.
Netflix just announced the third season of teen suicide drama 13 Reasons Why with a teaser released today on its social media accounts. This is coming after pressure from healthcare professionals and organizations including The Parent Television Council (PTC) and the American Family Association (AFA) about the harm the show is doing to teens. As stated in a recent NewsBusters post, they urged Netflix to pull the show. Netflix refuses to listen despite the evidence of harm.
Pro-tip for pro-athletes. If you win the championship, its courageous and patriotic to skip the White House visit. Unless you were invited by a liberal Democratic POTUS. Then, you’re selfish and rude and, if you previously had a “boy-next-door image,” you’ve trashed it.
Samantha Bee has an alleged comedy show on TBS. She doesn’t think Ivanka Trump should sharing photos of her spending Sunday morning with her son because immigrants or something. So with her characteristic charm and incisive wit, she called Ivanka a “feckless c*nt.” (She also alluded to the liberal hothouse theory that there’s incest going on in Trump world, but the C-word drew attention from that slimy innuendo.)
If you know anything about Keith Olbermann, you know he’s The Worst Person in the World to help ESPN pull out of its social justice spiral and get back on course covering sports. But according to USA Today, The Sultan of Sanctimony, the Colossus of Condescension, is returning to Sports Center as a guest host. And the timing could be any, well, dumber, just a day after the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “How a Weakened ESPN Became Consumed by Politics.”
Dante had the ancient Roman poet Virgil to lead him through the circles of hell. We have a diminutive British blonde woman named Amelia Dimoldenberg.
Hate to say we told ya so … no, actually it’s kind of fun to say we told you so. According to Variety, the May 20 Billboard Music Awards earned a “2.4 rating in adults 18-49.” It suffered “a decrease of approximately 8% in the demo and 9% in total viewers compared to the 2017 ceremony.” And the 2017 Awards show was it’s a new low.
Thank goodness for Colin Kaepernick. Without the one-time quarterback and full-time jerk out filing laughable collusion suits and steadfastly maintaining that he is entitled to play in the NFL, sports hacks like USA Today’s Jarrett Bell might have to write about sports.
These are interesting times for the legacy of Ulysses Simpson Grant. On the one hand, Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography started or furthered a reputational rehabilitation of the 18th president, whose administration was tainted with corruption (though Grant himself was never implicated).
“If a man is not a socialist at 20, he has no heart. If he is still a socialist at 40, he has no brain.” And if at 17 a girl thinks socialism is “where the community (rather than rich people) have ownership and control over their labor,” she’s been reading Teen Vogue.
GLAAD, the thought police for all things gay, has its knickers in a twist because Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, has been named to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Perkins was nominated to the commission by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In a May 15 tweet, GLAAD described Perkins as an “Anti-LGBTQ hate group leader.”
Gotta hand it to Hamas: it knows its audience. For example, this headline from The Washington Post May 15: “Israelis kill more than 50 Palestinians in Gaza protests, health officials say.”
Nobody can say these twilight years of Western Civilization are without their entertainments -- just try not to laugh as public trust in the media drops faster than Ted Kennedy’s pants in a South American brothel. And the best is yet to come.
Some lines spoken between the great lovers of stage and screen are immortal. “It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.” “We’ll always have Paris.” “Donald Trump is an enormous douche.”
You’re a New York Times sports editor at the end of an eventful weekend. The NBA and NHL playoffs are heating up (admittedly without any New York teams). The Yankees are firing on all cylinders, as are their arch-rivals in Boston. The Mets are, well, the Mets. There was PGA golf at the Wells Fargo tournament. There must still be issues worth discussing around the Giants’ and the Jets’ draft picks. And I assume Gotham has a pro soccer team (I can’t really be bothered to check.)
From the lunch counter to the bathroom counter, from Whites Only toilets to Whites Only toiletries. Yes, racism lurks everywhere and a singer named Halsey has heroically called it out in the high-end hotel sector.
With the news that William and Kate have named their third child Louis, we know all there is to know about the little royal. He’s healthy and he won the cosmic jackpot. God bless him. Now, because we’re separated by an ocean, a bloody revolution and nearly 250 years of republican statehood, we Americans can tune out.
It’s always fun when cosmopolitan progressives done their pith helmets, grab their notebooks and head off study the fabled natives of the American interior -- that vast, dark blank space between NY and LA.
Kids TV and movies can be a hard slog for modern adults -- at least for this one. From PBS cartoons featuring bilingual Hispanic dragons playing wheelchair basketball to mega-zillion-dollar features where cars become robots and fight each other very, very loudly, watching video with my boys was often as an endurance test.