The Social World

Category: Politics

  • Can India’s economy survive Trump’s 50 percent tariffs?

    Can India’s economy survive Trump’s 50 percent tariffs?

    President Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on India kicked in yesterday. The timing could not be worse: in May, India overtook Britain, Germany and Japan to become the fourth largest economy in the world. According to a report by EY only this week, it was already set to become the second largest globally by 2038, behind only China. After a decade of liberalization and rapid industrialization, it has witnessed exceptionally strong growth. And now, it looks like Donald Trump may kill off the Indian economic miracle.

    Over the last 20 years, India’s growth has averaged 6.9 percent, a rate that puts almost every other country in the world firmly in second place. A generation of Indian multinationals has emerged, and over the last five years alone, the benchmark BSE Sensex equity index has more than doubled. With a healthy demographic – the median age is just 28 – there was a strong argument that it was only a matter of time before it overtook China as the main rival to the US. 

    American tariffs look likely to kill Indian economic growth stone dead

    And yet that could be about to end. The US has imposed tariffs of 50 percent on everything India sells to them. The reason? It already faced 25 percent levies, like most other countries, but President Trump has imposed an extra 25 percent to punish it for importing oil and other commodities from Russia.

    This will hurt. India exports goods worth $86 billion a year to the US, and while some sectors such as pharmaceuticals will be exempt from the full 50 percent rate, around two-thirds will be subject to the full tariff. Exports to the US are about to fall off a cliff. That will be bad enough. But the knock-on impact will be just as serious. With what effectively amounts to a trade embargo in place, business ties with the US will start to wither away, investment will be hammered and Indian companies and entrepreneurs will be frozen out of the world’s most important market. 

    Of course, India can start to mitigate that. It has long-standing links with Russia that stretch back to independence, but it can gradually sever those. It has been buying up cheap Russian energy that was sanctioned elsewhere in the world, and while that was an attractive deal – so long as you don’t mind funding the war in Ukraine that is – there is plenty of oil and gas available on the global market. But given that Russia supplies 40 percent of its oil, that will take time, and it will lose an ally in the process.

    American tariffs look likely to kill Indian economic growth stone dead. It could take many years to recover from that – and until then China will extend its lead over its main emerging rival.

  • Is Jack White washed up?

    Is Jack White washed up?

    Once, it might have seemed strange for American politicians to use a rock star as a proxy means of sniping at one another, but these are not normal times. Gavin Newsom used the White Stripes’ song “Seven Nation Army” on Instagram to soundtrack various campaign posts, and the band’s songwriter Jack White commented that “Fans of this song and also democracy, notice that I’m ok with this track being used in this manner. Not so much when Trump and his gestapo try to use one of my songs. Keep hitting him back Gavin!” For good measure, he also attacked Trump’s redesign of the Oval Office, calling it “disgusting… a vulgar, gold leafed and gaudy, professional wrestler’s dressing room.”

    This went down badly with the President, who hit back via his communications director Steven Cheung. White, we learned, is a “washed-up, has-been loser” who has spent far too long “masquerading as a real artist.” The musician was stung by the criticism and responded on Instagram: “How petty and pathetic and thin skinned could this administration get? ‘Masquerading as a real artist’? Thank you for giving me my tombstone engraving! Well here’s my opinion, trump is masquerading as a human being.”

    On and on the excoriation went. White eventually concluded – after describing the President as “that orange grifter,” “a low life fascist” and a conman – that “no I’m not a Democrat either, I’m a human being raised in Detroit, I’m an artist who’s owned his own businesses like his own upholstery shop and recording label since he was 21 years old who has enough street sense to know when a 3 card monte dealer is a cheap grifter and a thief.” Clearly, the criticism had stung, hence the baroque invective of the response. But did Cheung have a point?

    White – let us be frank – owes his considerable fame and fortune to his work with the White Stripes. It now seems bizarre, but the band’s most famous and successful album in the United States was not Elephant, which contains their best-known and most iconic song, “Seven Nation Army,” but their final, 2007 release Icky Thump, which sold a huge number of copies to a thrilled public. Had the White Stripes continued, fame and fortune were assured, but White abruptly diverted his energies into solo projects instead, announcing in 2011 that his act had ceased “mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band.” (Romantic strife between him and the drummer, Meg, his ex-wife, probably didn’t help.) They reunite this year to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; we shall see if the inevitable performance is the precursor to anything more lasting.

    He certainly hasn’t been resting on his laurels since 2007. White has released six solo albums under his own name, two albums with the Raconteurs, and three LPs with the Dead Weather. Most of them have been successful – both his 2022 albums, Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive, entered the Billboard Top 10 – and critical acclaim comes as easily to White, one of the most prolific and admired American songwriters of the past quarter-century, as it did to his idols Loretta Lynn and Muddy Waters. It was not for nothing that the awestruck New York Times said of White in 2012 that he was “the coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time.”

    Has the blossom fallen from the bud since then? In all honesty, not in any way that should make any significant difference to public appreciation of the now-50-year-old musician. Inevitably, he will forever be remembered as the composer of “Seven Nation Army”; nothing that he has done since is as iconic as that. Yet perhaps now he has found a new, exciting public role, as botherer-in-chief to the Trump administration. The mantle previously was held by the actor Robert De Niro, whose usual public inarticulacy slipped from him when he was lambasting the President, but perhaps someone else should pursue such a course. If it is to be White – in his own words, less a Democrat and more an outraged independent businessman – then the next few years could be incendiary indeed.

  • Worse than woke, Smithsonian art is bad

    Worse than woke, Smithsonian art is bad

    There’s a common myth in American culture that only the left is capable of producing great art.

    Right-wing art must be formulaic and preachy because it values established norms, while only transgressive leftism can reach new frontiers of form – or so we’re told. But what happens when the left’s own norms become dominantly rigid?

    Well, you wind up with the 20 exhibits that the Trump administration now rightly aims to purge from the Smithsonian’s sprawling array of museums, along with many other abuses.

    Since his inauguration, Trump has worked to rid wokeness from our cultural institutions through executive order, prompting leftist outrage against a so-called “attack” on the arts. Yet the exhibits singled out in a White House statement earlier this week are so cartoonishly absurd, overtly political, and downright bad that one has to wonder how they’re even considered art – let alone worthy of consideration in our capitol’s preeminent gallery collection?

    One painting in the National Portrait Gallery shows an immigrant family climbing a ladder over Trump’s border wall. Hints of Soviet realism are glossed over by a contemporary AI aesthetic. Hey Grok, generate an image of white guilt.

    Another shows a black man in a pink wig and blue slip dress posed as the Statue of Liberty. Put it outside a campy West Village gay bar, sure – but not in the Smithsonian.

    Still another shows an Afro-Latina with butterflies stuck in her afro, along with the words “My Dreams Are Not Illegal.” The digitally rendered pop-style feels like something you’d find in TJ Maxx.

    Yet no lefty collection would be complete without a sketch series that “examines the career” of Dr. Fauci. Although your average Science Believer might find these depictions of Saint Fauci better suited for the Vatican.

    Perhaps worse than the art itself are the didactic placards often attached to even classic works.

    The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino uses quotes from avowed communists like Angela Davis to frame American history as rooted in “colonization.” The American History Museum claimed Pilgrims are a “myth” and reframed Benjamin Franklin’s legacy as “almost solely” about slavery. Even the American Women’s History Museum declared itself “inclusive” of men who claim to be women.

    The common strain in all these exhibits is best captured by the Smithsonian’s now infamous 2021 campaign against “white dominant culture” – the “ways white people and their traditions, attitudes, and ways of life have been normalized over time” at the expense of everyone else. Everything from “the nuclear family” to “work ethic” and even objective metrics like “intellect” are said to lead to the oppression of women and minorities.

    The Smithsonian now seemingly exists to dismantle it all: we are a nation of the oppressed, which must become a nation for the oppressed – and that’s all there is to it.

    It’s laughable to frame dismantling exhibits like these as a generic “attack” on the arts given the state of the arts today. But left with no other choice, liberals are forced to defend this garbage as art, naive to the fact everything they once said about conservative art now applies to their own cultural output.

    To be fair, the right has produced some pretty bad art in recent decades. How many preachy Lifetime-quality movies do we really need on the horrors of abortion? We get it. But the fringe segment of tacky, conformist con-art pales in comparison to the national arts establishment.

    An artist (or writer, or poet, or filmmaker) cannot win esteem within mainstream cultural institutions – nearly all of which operate like the Smithsonian – on his merits alone. So in order to find success, artists conform to the dominant cultural tendency whether they agree with it or not, all seeking to out-do each other in a race to the bottom of anti-Americanism. As this continues apace, the institutions must accept ever-worse art, throwing away their own legacy and prestige on the altar of political correctness. Far from filtering for talent or vision, this selection process actually incentivizes lazy art: after all, the ideological check-box is all that matters.

    This is how we wind up with embarrassingly bad art in the Smithsonian – but it can’t go on forever.

    “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

    The real cutting edge of modern art lies in the very bright and different future that Trump imagines. But those visionary artists who discover it will have little need for the failed gatekeepers of the Smithsonian.

  • Where did it all go so wrong for Britain?

    If I had to summarize, in a word, the mood of Britain in 2025, I’d probably plump for fraught. It’s not just the protests against illegal migrants in hotels, or the apparent collapse of the political parties which have governed us for so long, or the anger for and against free speech.

    There is something in the air that I can’t quite recall having sniffed before, the kind of crackle that might be quite exciting or intriguing if you were standing a little bit further back from it, flicking through the pages of a history book, maybe. But it’s rather different to live through it.

    People like me, and probably you over in America, were socialized in a more stable and reliable world, where everyone and everything muddled along. So we find it very hard to adjust to the return of history with a capital H.

    That lost age on the domestic front in Britain, which lasted from about the end of the miners’ strike in 1985 up to the subprime crunch of 2008, was the era in which we assured ourselves that “things will sort themselves out.” We told ourselves that things would probably turn out fine; there was nothing much you can do about it, after all, so best just to potter along. No one wanted to run about squawking like Chicken Licken, who thought the sky was falling in.

    This complacency was justified, because often – in that curious interregnum, which we mistook for how things were just going to be from now on – things often did sort themselves out, or at least they appeared to.

    How quaint Britain’s big worries of the 1990s now seem

    How quaint Britain’s big worries of the 1990s now seem! Let’s look back thirty years to the big news stories of 1995. Nick Leeson crashed the stately old Barings Bank, a soccer player kung fu kicked a fan at Selhurst Park stadium, pubs stayed open for the first time on Sunday afternoons, and Princess Diana granted TV interviews. Ethnic strife and economic murk were forgotten, things of the past. It’s dizzying to realize that this was the country, presided over by John Major’s slightly hapless Conservative Government, that Tony Blair’s 1997 slogan “things could only get better” came from.

    True, it was often the boring people during boring times who led us to where we are now. The subsequent first term of Tony Blair was also colossally dull, at least on the home front. But under that screen of fog, it ripped up and tore apart centuries of vital constitutional structure. We looked away, to Big Brother and Eminem as much that we rested so blithely upon was smashed up, boringly. Net migration, for example, rose from 48,000 in 1997 to 273,000 in 2007, reflecting the cumulative impact of incredibly tedious policies that nobody looked at. Were the results of that ever likely to just sort themselves out?

    Where are we now? The years since 2008 have been ever more rancorous and turbulent. It’s been tempting to cling on to our illusions, and imagine we will somehow drift back to the age of security. Perhaps we’re imagining it all – after all, we still live (mostly) uneventful lives in an affluent, if retrenching, society.

    But I fear we are just at the start of a return of ferments and upheavals, with our foundations seriously weakened. World politics is slipping back to the age of empires, with the big difference that this time we haven’t got one. We are back in the world of Shakespeare’s history cycles; endless battles, reverses, false hopes, the strange alliances of sworn enemies. It rumbles on and on and on, with the little people tossed about in the tides, grabbing whatever driftwoods of solace that they can.

    And that is not unusual. Crack open any history book. It’s the natural state of things.

    When Keir Starmer’s Labour got in last year, we had a good old laugh at clownish figures like the liberal journalist Otto English, who tweeted tweely that the “quiet” was going to be such a refreshing change. “For the first time in many of our lives, actually Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability,” said the veteran newsman Andrew Marr on Question Time. He might as well have donned a flashing neon sign reading HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE.

    But. If we are feeling honest, and generous – and I do have occasional twinges of both – those of us of the same generation as such silly people can understand the impulse, their longing to believe in the return of the apparent stillness of our young adulthood (even if it was at least partly illusory).

    Now even Tory-in-name-only Lord Finkelstein is admitting that he’s had his doubts all along, writing in the London Times of the simmering atmosphere of 2025. “People’s failure to live and let live baffles me,” he says. On the immediate level, that sentence terrifies me; that someone so divorced from the basic reality of human beings could have been attached to the Conservative Party. But I understand too, because I also come from that world and that lost “family of man, Kumbaya, it’ll be fine” age.

    Believing what is convenient or reassuring rather than what’s true is great, so long as you can afford it. Continuing with it when you can’t is disastrous. For all we know, the Britain of 2025 may look like a paradise to the Britons of 2055. And that’s the scariest thing.

  • Will Kim Jong-un meet with Trump?

    Hours after his first bilateral meeting with Donald Trump earlier this week, the South Korean President Lee Jae-myung admitted that he feared that his one-to-one would become a “Zelensky moment.” Although the reality was far from the case, it made for somewhat vomit-inducing listening. 

    As Lee showered Trump with praise for his handling of North Korea during his first term, Trump’s ego ballooned one sentence at a time. Monday’s episode was a clear example of how Trump likes diplomacy to be done, but for all Trump and Lee’s calls for talks with Kim Jong Un, both leaders will face the obstacle of North Korea’s recent affirmations of its lack of interest in dialogue with its Western adversaries. 

    As the two leaders took their seats in the Oval Office, the South Korean President began his charm offensive. He had done his homework, having read The Art of Deal and seen Trump’s bilateral meetings with other world leaders. The left-wing Lee lauded his anything but left-wing counterpart for the recent high reached in the US stock market as well as Trump’s handling of North Korea during his first term in office. Only through Trump’s intervention, Lee said, would “a new era of peace” on the Korean Peninsula be realized, going as far as to say that the “only person” who can “make progress” on the North Korea issue is the US President. 

    To hear these claims emanating from the mouth of the recently elected left-wing populist leader was a surprise. After all, this is a man who, long before his election on June 3, had criticized the presence of US forces stationed in South Korea as “occupying forces” and called military exercises between Washington, Tokyo and Seoul – a vital component of deterring North Korea – a “defense disaster.” Even on his flight to Washington, Lee mentioned his discomfort at the possibility of US troops stationed in Seoul playing a wider regional role, amidst Trump’s ongoing claims of prioritizing deterring China over North Korea. 

    Pyongyang is happy to halt and restart its delinquency if it does not get what it wants

    In the White House, however, it was as if the world saw a different Lee Jae-myung. But time will tell as to whether Lee is as committed to what he calls the “future-orientated alliance between South Korea and the United States” and in what ways. His past statements have been the antithesis of subtlety, and he is a shrewd politician after all.

    North Korea featured more than many expected in the meeting, but it remains one of the only areas in which Lee can attempt to implement his agenda of reconciliation with the hermit kingdom. Had he not mentioned North Korea, the first bilateral summit with Trump would have been a missed opportunity to push for his desire for inter-Korean reconciliation, not least given the US President’s willingness to gloat about his “good relationship” with Kim Jong-un. How better to say – not completely in jest – that he hoped that a Trump Tower would be built in North Korea, where he could play golf.

    Whilst Trump once again erroneously stated how there were over 40,000 US troops in South Korea (there are approximately 28,500), he was correct to argue that had he been in power over the past four years, North Korea may have paused some of its missile testing and Kim Jong-un might have even decided to meet Trump again. Yet, Pyongyang would not have taken any steps towards denuclearization, a word which concerningly featured only twice in the entire Oval Office dialogue and was not used to refer to North Korea. 

    We need only to go back to the first Trump administration to see that Pyongyang is happy to halt and restart its delinquency if it does not get what it wants. In just one infamous example, in December 2019, Kim Jong-un decided to lift his moratoria on missile and nuclear tests and continue his quest for North Korea to be recognized as a nuclear-armed state.

    Lee Jae-myung has been said to lack any ideology, but what he has in abundance is the ability to be a political chameleon. His actual commitment to maintaining – let alone defending and bolstering – Seoul’s alliance with Washington remains to be seen. But what is clear is that he wants to differentiate himself from his conservative predecessor, Yoon Suk-yeol, under whom relations between Seoul, Tokyo and Washington developed positively. In yet another act of flattery to his US counterpart, Lee said that his decision to visit Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru prior to meeting Trump was to iron out the longstanding creases in Japan-South Korea relations. But creases can only be ironed out for so long before they reappear.

    Whether Trump’s stipulation of a willingness to meet Kim Jong-un later this year will be realized depends on North Korea. What Trump said of his relationship with Putin equally applies to Kim: “it takes two to tango.” 

    While North Korea has long viewed the United States as the principal actor from which it can gain concessions, the failure of the Hanoi Summit in February 2019 left a bitter taste in Kim’s mouth. Moreover, North Korea in 2019 is not the same as in 2025. For now, Pyongyang has Moscow’s unwavering support, and the North Korean regime has not been shy to argue that for all Trump and Kim’s bonhomie, inter-state ties during the first Trump administration failed to improve.

    Lee assured Trump that he believed Kim Jong-un would be waiting for the US President, but the key question is when this waiting will begin. As evidence emerges of another North Korean missile base near the country’s border with China, at a time when Pyongyang is likely receiving missile and military technology from Russia, South Korea and the United States must not abandon their goal of a denuclearized North Korea.

  • With Love, Meghan 2 is just as vacuous as season one

    Like death and taxes, the second instalment of With Love, Meghan has come around again, sloughing into view to the usual chorus of disapproval and confusion. The news recently broke that Netflix has deigned to allow Harry ’n’ Meghan another five years of deciding not to make their future projects. In light of that, this second series of the hitherto unloved show – filmed at the same time as the first – has been presented to a previously indifferent global public in the hope that it will distract from many of the unflattering and embarrassing stories about the Duke of Sussex that have proliferated this year.

    Harry is entirely absent from this series of With Love, Meghan, although he and the couple’s children are often referred to. Instead, this is Meghan: the solo show, and as she trills Californian-inflected pieties to her sycophantic assortment of not-so-special guests, there is the occasional gleam of desperation just about visible underneath her equally gleaming smile. It is fair to say that the many attempts to launch her as a solo star – via television, podcasts and, of course, her “As Ever” product range – have not been as successful as she (and those with a vested interest in her earning power) might have wished. Unless she is prepared to write yet another tell-all memoir, she risks dwindling into obscurity.

    With this in mind, what’s With Love, Meghan II like? The surprising answer is that the second run-around is actually slightly more bearable than the first. Don’t get me wrong – it’s still ghastly, tedious dreck, seemingly produced for an audience that has no critical faculties whatsoever and is content to regard whatever is taking place on their televisions without any necessary judgement – but it throws up a few minor points of interest, which is more than the earlier series did. The presence of the Michelin-starred British chef Clare Smyth – who did the catering for Harry and Meghan’s wedding – in the sixth episode lifts proceedings considerably. Smyth is a proper person, unlike most of the non-entities featured here, and in her brief appearance manages to imbue the show with a professionalism and dry wit that are entirely absent from the platitudinous nonsense elsewhere.

    This is brand reinforcement, pure and simple

    As for the rest of it, your tolerance and enjoyment for therapy-speak and carefully ladled-out nuggets of minor gossip will be tested. Meghan offers fleeting, inconsequential details that are expressed with virtually the same amount of gravity, whether it’s her reminiscing about her love for the “grandma radio” show Magic FM, describing her three-week separation from her children in the aftermath of the Queen’s death as something that left her “not well,” or the revelation that she made her husband a personalized baseball cap for his 40th birthday party, emblazoned with the logo PH40. There is also the surreal reminder that Meghan and her friend Chrissy Teigen briefly appeared as briefcase-wielding models on the American version of the quiz show Deal or No Deal, although sadly Meghan never appeared alongside Noel Edmonds, which would have made for a cosmic shock of toxic proportions.

    I cannot imagine that those who shunned the first series of With Love, Meghan will be lured back in for this go-around, and I’m already dreading the Christmas special. The food cooked is largely unappetizing, and viewers are likely to be mystified by both the identity of the “special guests” and why, say, putting a roast chicken in the oven is treated with the kind of reverence usually reserved for the opening of the Ark of the Covenant, but this is not the point. 

    This is brand reinforcement, pure and simple. And should – heaven forbid! – Harry and Meghan ever go their separate ways, this is a reminder that the distaff half of the brand is more than capable of putting herself out into the public eye as a solo prospect. That revelatory memoir has, you feel, just come a tiny bit closer.   

  • Will Venezuela crisis spill into conflict with US?

    Will Venezuela crisis spill into conflict with US?

    The authoritarian left wing regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has mobilized his ruling Socialist party’s paramilitary militia in response to US President Donald Trump sending a task force of warships into Venezuelan waters as part of a US crackdown against alleged cocaine trafficking by the poverty-stricken country.

    Declaring that “no empire will touch the sacred soil of Venezuela “ Maduro sent his militia to reinforce the country’s borders with neighboring Colombia, who he has accused of collaborating with America in a pincer movement against his country.

    Trump has charged the Maduro regime with drugs trafficking on a massive scale, and the US Department of Justice has recently increased the reward it is offering for Maduro’s arrest and detention to $50 million, describing him as the “ world’s biggest narco trafficker”.

    Maduro, a former bus driver and Trade Union official, took over the Presidency in 2013 after the death from cancer of his charismatic but dictatorial predecessor Hugo Chávez. Together, the two men’s far left Socialist party has brought the oil rich but badly misgoverned state to its knees, a humanitarian crisis which has seen almost 8 million people flee the country for foreign destinations since 2014.

    That exodus represents a staggering one third of Venezuela’s total population of 29 million. The refugees have chiefly crossed the border into Colombia to escape hunger, unemployment, hyperinflation, and an acute shortage of basic food and goods: an economic and social catastrophe presided over by Maduro’s government which rules by dictatorial decrees rather than law.

    Only a year after taking office, Maduro used violence to put down widespread rioting by protesters against the economic chaos, and since then he has ruled by repression rather than consent. Only a year ago, Maduro “won” his third Presidential term in a contest widely condemned by international monitors and media as rigged. The opposition candidate, former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez, fled to Spain in fear for his life after Maduro unilaterally declared himself the winner.

    The US and other western allies regard Maduro as an illicit dictator who only remains in power through a mix of cheating, corruption and repression, but although most members of the Middle class have long since left the country, Maduro still retains some residual support among the poorer masses.

    Thousands of such people lined up this week to register with the regime’s so-called Bolivaran militia, after Maduro charged Trump with interference in Venezuelan internal affairs and seeking regime change by sending in the naval task force.

    For his part, Trump is reacting against the double danger of desperate Venezuelan migrants flooding into the US, and the ravages caused by drugs made in Venezuela in US cities. As the US warships near the capital Caracas, this is clearly a crisis that could spill into violence.

  • Taylor and Travis save America

    Taylor and Travis save America

    Elon Musk and Taylor Swift fans rejoice! America’s birthrate is saved!

    News of the engagement between America’s reigning sweetheart, Taylor Swift, and jock, Travis Kelce, can mean only one thing: a millennial marriage boom is upon us. And with it, natalists will hope, an impending baby boom.

    I’m no Swiftie. Nor am I one of those men who’s organized his entire political identity around hating the singer. Still, I can’t deny that I feel uplifted by the jubilation erupting across the nation this afternoon. Why? Because Taylor and Travis are taking a stand against pessimism. America’s permanently heartbroken oldest daughter has escaped her fate (for now). These are people taking the leap! Committing to something! How exciting is that?

    Talking about the birthrate is so passé. Cringe, even. I have no desire to weigh in (and wouldn’t be, had my editor not twisted my arm into writing this piece), even as I acknowledge that it poses a serious problem for the nation’s future. So too does the hesitancy toward marriage and even dating among the young. But any Millennial or Zoomer forced to brave the dating market in recent years knows the battle of the sexes has gone nuclear. An overriding pessimism about the value of relationships, with all their potential for pain and suffering, has metastasized; in heterosexual relationships, a casual two-way hatred of the other sex has also become disturbingly commonplace.

    Enter Travis and Taylor. Their engagement post, which at the time of writing has racked up some 10 million likes, is surprisingly suburban. It looks like an engagement backdrop I’ve scrolled past a thousand times. There is little extravagance in it (excluding the boulder of a diamond). But they’re making a marriage proposal – a daunting prospect – appear attainable, and more than that, mundane. There’s something lovely about that everydayness that shouldn’t be lost on the billions of people who see it.

    Commentators will quickly point out that this engagement is timed eerily close to the announcement of Taylor’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl. Maybe this is all stage-managed opportunism, then. Probably. But everything our celebrity class does is stage-managed opportunism, and this example is at least subversive for how surprising and against-the-current it is. The underlying message: take a chance. Ask her out – if not on your family sports podcast, then at least at the bar. Certainly this is less damaging to the national psyche than, say, the public dissolution of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s union.

    Conservatives will quickly claim the Tayvis union as a win for their political camp. But Taylor mastered the art of vague messaging long ago, and as is often the case, there’s something for everyone. With the announcement, Taylor seems to be telling her fans that you can have it all – the marriage and the career (not exactly a New Right talking point). Anyone with an internet connection, which is to say everyone, will recall that she was most recently in the news for the announcement of Life of a Showgirl, on the cover of which she appeared very scantily clad. Contrast this with the image of her today in a walled-off garden wearing a modest dress. You can be a showgirl and a happy fiancée, she seems to be saying. Is this tenable? Will it end in heartbreak? Who knows. But it’s a nice thought.  

    Kelce, whom I suspect can’t read, is certainly marrying up. He’s no slouch, of course. NFL-loving men across the country have had their hearts repeatedly broken by the future Hall of Famer and the Kansas City Chiefs on too many Sundays in recent years. But his fiancée is the biggest star in the world. Perhaps there are valuable lessons here for both sides in the battle of the sexes. Women: take a chance on the idiots. Men: don’t be so afraid of a go-getting woman.

    In addition to celebrating the couple’s big win, we can quietly celebrate the knock-on wins coming our way. Travis, we can only hope, will be thoroughly distracted by the wedding planning. This should hinder his on-field performance, and America therefore may soon be released from the tyranny of the dominant, evil Kansas City Chiefs. Also, this country, allergic to monarchy, doesn’t have royals. So this union will be the closest thing to a royal wedding we have, and everyone loves a good wedding party. 

    Maybe I’ll feel more pessimistic about all this later. It feels likely I will. But who wants to pooh-pooh a couple on their engagement day? Even our petty Gossiper in Chief has caught the cheeriness bug: “I wish them a lot of luck,” Donald Trump said during a Cabinet meeting, “I think he’s a great player. He’s a great guy. And I think she’s a terrific person.” 

    For now, we owe Taylor and Travis. Optimism is back – at least for one day.

  • Trump should buy Hooters

    Trump should buy Hooters

    In the wake of the US government taking on a 10 percent equity stake in Intel, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is floating the idea of the government investing in defense companies like McDonnell Douglas. “If we are adding fundamental value to your business, I think it’s fair for Donald Trump to think about the American people,” he said.

    When this news broke last week, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the last true living conservative, told Politico, “If conservatives endorse this now, they hand Democrats a blueprint to expand government ownership over the private sector later. Socialism is literally government control of the means of production.” Sure Rand. While that idea might fly in your senior-year political science independent study seminar, this is Donald Trump’s America we’re talking about here. He is running the “HOTTEST” economy the world has ever seen. America has the best companies, but no one runs companies quite like Donald Trump. Here are some other companies where a US investment would be not only valuable, but vital.

    Disney

    Even Snoop Dogg is balking at Disney products these days, saying he’s “scared” to go to the movies with his grandchildren because there was a same-sex couple in Lightyear. Snoop’s right, that movie was terrible, and the lesbians worthless pandering. This isn’t America’s Disney that we grew up watching. We’ve had enough weird CGI dwarves and princesses of power. A US equity investment would ensure a return to Disney’s optimistic world of tomorrow and would also restore the original Disney from the adult-baby wokeism that has taken over the franchise. The Country Bears will sing the Song of the South once more, as the Trump administration awakens Disney with true love’s kiss.

    Cracker Barrel

    I think we can all agree by now that the Cracker Barrel revamp is a national embarrassment, turning a beloved roadside institution into something bland and generic. A Trump Administration equity stake is just what the restaurant chain needs. Let’s restore the rocking chairs on the porch, the buckets of stale candy and the shelves of wind-up raccoon toys. And let’s beef up the menu with literal extra beef, plus some Trump-branded items. Chicken and Trumplings, anyone?

    Meta

    Aren’t you tired of an unaccountable mega-corporation operating in secret, gathering intelligence on you even while you sleep, never having your best interests at heart while trying to rot your brain with propaganda slop? That’s the government’s job! The feds should take 10 percent of Meta so it can replace our tax revenue with slow-burn ad dollars from comedy videos about Gen X getting older and the difference between dating in the US and France. Welcome to the AI-narrated “A Day In The Life Of A Jack Russell Terrier” video economy.

    Tesla

    We know President Trump and Elon Musk have had their difficulties. No one’s missing the DoGE era. Well, we are, because it was fun to write about, but the country isn’t worse off without Elon grinding his chainsaw on stage every five minutes. But now that Musk is out of the national spotlight and back to running his 19 companies, his companies actually have value again. It’s definitely in the national interest for the government to control the transportation industry, the media, space travel, and Las Vegas underground train systems. Let’s just make sure Elon signs an NDA this time.

    Gold’s Gym

    Fitness is back. US schoolkids have to run a mile again, RFK Jr. is doing pull-ups in jeans, the Kennedy Center is honoring Sylvester Stallone and the UFC is going to stage a battle royale on the grounds of the White House. But if the Trump administration wants Americans to bulk up, it’s going to have to provide subsidized gym memberships. Exercise equipment for 400 million couch blobs is expensive. A 10 percent equity stake in any one of our fine national fitness chains would do the trick. And the TVs would no longer be tuned to the Fake News Media.

    Hooters

    Word broke this week that Neil Keifer, the man who’s trying to take over America’s run-down “breastaurant” chain in bankruptcy court, will revitalize the brand by bringing back hot pants and making it “delightfully tacky.” The Golden Age of Hooters is long behind us, but we also thought the Golden Age of America was behind us. So why not Hooters? It’s already bankrupt. A national investment would be inexpensive, with an easy return. President Trump could oversee the redesign himself. He knows a thing or two about Hooters. We want more sauce, shorter pants, and the most beautiful waitresses in the world. Hooters is for sale, America. Let’s grab it by proverbial.

  • Queers for Palestine burst Pride

    Queers for Palestine burst Pride

    The annual Ottawa Pride rally was cancelled on Sunday after the group, Queers for Palestine, blocked the parade, owing to the refusal of the organizers, Capital Pride, to agree to the demands of “pro-Palestine” activists. Among the demands was for Capital Pride to back a complete boycott of Israel, and for Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe to apologize for not attending last year’s parade, which was described by Jewish groups as more a ‘protest against Israel’ than a rally for LGBT rights.

    Regardless of one’s position on the conflict, for supposed human rights activists in a North American capital city to successfully hold the rights of the local gay community hostage to developments in the Middle East, is illustrative of the state of activism in the West and the succumbing of local authorities to “pro-Palestine” thuggery. Not only is there nothing “pro-Palestine” about insulting queer Palestinians by glorifying their jihadist persecutors Hamas, whom Gazans have been protesting against for years, but it takes a colossal lack of introspection to demand that an LGBT rights movement call for the boycott of a state that does a much better job of safeguarding those very rights than anyone in that far-away region of focus.

    Perhaps what busts the gauge on the hypocrisy-meter is the silence of groups such as Queers for Palestine on the single largest threat facing LGBT rights in the world today.
    One is unlikely to find, for instance, anywhere on the Instagram page of Queers for Palestine-Ottawa that Islam is the sole religion and organized ideology in the world today that still codifies death for homosexuality, with over 10 Muslim-majority countries upholding the capital punishment, and numerous others mandating caning or harsh prison sentences for the “crime” of being queer.

    When certain Jewish groups found last year’s Capital Pride statement on Israel to be “antisemitic”, they chose to boycott the rally, a right Queers for Palestine could have exercised this year. There are numerous pro-Palestine demonstrations taking place across the West, including in Ottawa, where these activists can register their protests against Israel, without harming the rights of those very people they are using to propel themselves into recognition.

    The histrionics of the current pro-Palestine groups in the West are even alienating those who have for long stood for Palestinian rights, with many LGBT activists in Ottawa accusing Queers for Palestine of “hijacking” the movement.

    Queers for Palestine of Ottawa should ask themselves why there is no Queers for Palestine in any of the Arab states? Why do Gulf monarchies not allow any public pro-Palestine or anti-Israel rallies, at all? Why isn’t Queers for Palestine protesting against the Arab states, including Israel’s neighboring states of Jordan, Egypt, and Syria that have aligned themselves with Israel’s security policies and want to have nothing to do with the Palestinians?

    In fact, one is freer to demonstrate for Palestinians, including queer Palestinians, in Israel more so than Arab states, as evidenced by the ongoing protests in Tel Aviv.

    Surely Queers for Palestine should have a word or two to say about Saudi Arabia? Saudi has not only hanged and lashed members of the LGBT community, but has more Muslim blood on its hand than any non-Muslim state, having long used Palestinian lives to propel Salafi jihad around the world.

    There should also be some self-reflection over evident Muslim hostility towards the queer community in the West, whether it’s the US’s first Muslim-led city council banning pride emblems in Hamtramck or Muslim parents rallying for LGBT erasure in British school curricula, or Muslim kids being asked to stomp on pride flags in Canada.

    But, of course, instead of protesting against these unsavory views, policies, regimes and groups, Queers for Palestine are misusing the freedoms of the West to champion the Islamists who hold them. Israel fits a one-point agenda for these activists who seek to paint Jews as the perpetual aggressors and Muslims as the perennial victims. Unfortunately, they have fallen too far deep in narcissistic echo chambers to realize that their anti-Israel, and often anti-Jewish, hysteria, is doing absolutely nothing to help the real queers of Palestine who are being persecuted and killed by Hamas.