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Halftime at the Super Bowl I failed to understand all but a few words. by Larry Elder

By on February 14th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/halftime-at-the-super-bowl/

President Donald Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, and his presence was flashed on the jumbo screen. It’s always a crapshoot when a politician attends a spectacle like this. Attendees will let him or her know exactly how they feel. When the big screen showed him, fans cheered. But when the big screen showed the hyper-woke Trump critic Taylor Swift, fans booed.

So far, so good.

What to say about the halftime show performed by the popular rapper Kendrick Lamar? USA Today wrote: “The Grammy-winning rapper took the stage … for an exhilarating medley performance that paid homage to the Compton emcee’s eclectic catalog.”

“Exhilarating medley performance”? OK, call me biased, and I’m certainly not in his age demo. “Artists” like Lamar could not care less what I think. But I lean toward performers who can sing, dance, play an instrument or, heavens, do all three.

Nearly 50% of voters in a poll conducted by Darren Rovell gave the performance an F.

My nephew, Eric, loves rap. While driving and listening to a popular “song,” I said, “Eric, I don’t understand a word.” He proceeded to translate each line as it was recited.

“How many times did you have to listen before you were able to figure it out?” I said.

“Figure what out?” he said.

“The lyrics.”

“Once.”

So maybe it’s me. During Lamar’s performance, I failed to understand all but a few words. Before the game started, a couple of songs were performed before the national anthem. A beautiful, well-dressed woman used sign language for the hearing impaired. Where was she during Lamar’s performance for those of us who suffer from rap lyric comprehension impairment?

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Woke Grammys Show How Out of Touch Entertainment Industry Is Who cares? by Daniel Greenfield

By on February 3rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/woke-grammys-show-how-out-of-touch-entertainment-industry-is/

Every entertainment industry awards show can be reduced to ridiculous outfits and woke special pleading acceptance speeches in which millionaires impassionately proclaim their love for drag queens, illegal aliens or Hamas, and in which most of the country (except for their deranged fan bases) look at them like clowns.

The Grammys, probably the first major awards show since Trump took office (unless I missed one), was no exception, celebrating its out-of-touchness by thumbing its nose at country music fans and then platforming Shakira and Lady Gaga to attack Trump and stand by illegal aliens and transgender activists.

The sum of it though would add up to ‘who cares’.

Kamala tested the power of celebrities and found them wanting at best. The public will spend a fortune going to see Taylor Swift lip sync but doesn’t care whom she endorses. The last time anyone effectively used celebrities in a political context was Barack Obama and he did it by appearing to become one of them.

Celebrities couldn’t help Kerry or Hillary, and it’s not at all clear that they can help any candidate at all.

Somehow celebrity culture has become an even stranger echo chamber over the years. A showcase for the mentally disturbed, (so of course Kanye West showed up), and for the just plain grotesque.

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Cancel Cowards “Officially in New Zealand it was ‘Girls can do anything year’. I was instructed to make the boys in my story into girls”Amy Brooke

By on December 7th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/society/cancel-cowards/

Although the move throughout the West to impose a cancel culture as a form of control seems to be nearing its apex, the fight against the truth has been decades in the making. For example, when moving some decades ago to Nelson, I tried to get from the local library some of the Enid Blyton books I and so many others had loved as children.

Blyton eventually wrote so many books that some of her themes became repetitive. But she was imaginatively outstanding, and her wonderful stories about the Faraway Tree, the Enchanted Wood, the Magic Wishing Chair, and Galliano’s Circus, followed by the Famous Five and Secret Seven adventure stories, spanned a career of nearly fifty years. Sales of her books were estimated at over 2 billion copies. As a young Froebel-trained teacher, with her father one of Britain’s top naturalists, her weekly courses of seasonal nature study evoked enthusiastic tributes from schools throughout Britain. She had an extraordinary knowledge of the natural world, coupled with a great flair for detail, and brought to thousands of children an increased awareness of the world around them.

Blyton was well aware that many children living in industrial towns in the 1930s with fathers on the dole couldn’t visit the country, but through her pages she tried to give them vicarious pleasure in the joys of rural life, and described how they might make tiny gardens of their own. One suggestion which met with a huge response was that country readers might like to send such things as budding twigs or wildflowers to their counterparts in town.

She became one of the first victims of the cancelling culture, which apparently sprang from the envy of a rival children’s writer in Britain, and by the end of the 1950s librarians were banning her books in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. The librarian I spoke with some decades later dismissed Enid Blyton with apparent contempt, her reasons hard to find. One was the silly suggestion that Noddy and Big Ears, in the stories younger children loved, had “an unnatural relationship”. Doubtless this would be a reason to have these stories highly regarded these days. Then there was the claim that she wrote for middle-class children only, that she had no social concern—utterly untrue. She and the many thousands of children who belonged to the clubs she formed raised astonishingly large quantities of money for the many charitable organisations they took under their wing. She personally answered a staggering number of letters each week for the children who wrote to her and whose views she always asked for. This didn’t stop the accusations piling up, including from New Zealand librarians and writers such as children’s books specialist Dorothy Butler, who claimed that, “regrettably”, Blyton was a snob.

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Canada’s woke Stasi An elderly school trustee who questioned trans ideology has been subjected to a legal witch-hunt.

By on October 13th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/13/canadas-woke-stasi/

Under other circumstances, former school trustee Barry Neufeld may have retired as one of your curmudgeonly, albeit amusing, elderly neighbours, equipped with a brash sense of humour, a glass of wine and a cigarette. Had he not introduced himself at a recent panel event I spoke on in Victoria, British Columbia (BC) about the harms of gender-identity ideology, I would never have pegged him as a supposed hate-monger. He seemed rather jovial, in fact. Yet the Canadian media and some of Canada’s most powerful unions see things differently. They have made Neufeld their nemesis.

Neufeld is now in his seventies. His troubles began in 2017. This was when he discovered a new gender-identity curriculum for kids coming down the pike in his school district of Chilliwack, BC. This was the year that the SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) 123 programme was implemented in public schools across the province, with the aim of making classrooms more ‘inclusive’ for LGBT-identified kids. That same year, Bill C-16 was passed by the national parliament, adding ‘gender identity’ to the list of protected characteristics under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Both pieces of legislation were introduced with little public debate and most Canadians were completely unaware of what was even happening.

But Neufeld noticed and spoke out on Facebook, criticising SOGI 123 for instructing ‘children that gender is not biologically determined, but is a social construct’. ‘At the risk of being labelled a bigoted homophobe’, he wrote, ‘I have to say that I support traditional family values and I agree with the [American College of Pediatricians] that allowing little children to choose to change gender is nothing short of child abuse’.

After facing backlash, he apologised a couple of days later ‘to those who felt hurt’ by his opinion. He explained that ‘I am critical of an educational resource, not individuals. Those who have worked with me for over 24 years know that I do believe in inclusion and a safe learning environment for all of our students.’ Yet he didn’t relent, adding: ‘SOGI 123 resources need to be reviewed by engaging parents and teachers in conversation… before full implementation.’

This didn’t happen, of course. This is never how the trans issue has been handled by the Canadian government and its state-funded institutions. Rather, gender-identity policy and legislation have been slipped in under the radar. By the time most of the Canadian public noticed, it was far too late.

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Paris Olympics: a smug spectacle of wokeness The self-consciously ‘queer’ opening ceremony was offensively drab. Brendan O’Neill

By on July 28th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/27/paris-olympics-a-smug-spectacle-of-wokeness/

Is anyone else bored of ‘queering’? Everything’s getting ‘queered’ these days. We’ve had ‘Queering the Curriculum’. ‘Queering the Arts’. And my personal favourite: ‘Queering Palestine.’ This entails academics ‘unpack[ing] the multiple intersections of queer politics and the Palestinian struggle’. Hot tip for these profs: if Hamas ever invites you to discuss your theories, don’t agree to meet them on the high floor of a building. ‘Queering the Pavement’ is the only thing they’re interested in.

Now, with soul-zapping inevitability, we’ve had the ‘queering’ of the Olympic Games. Yesterday’s rain-sodden opening ceremony in Paris was super LGBTQIAzzz.
There were drag acts everywhere. A bearded bloke twerked for the world. A bollock-naked man in blue paint was served on a platter of fruit to a gaggle of diet-dodging drag queens. Look, if I wanted to be exposed to the camp debauchery of drag culture, I’d go to a kindergarten.

It really was a naff, dispiriting affair. It was the first opening ceremony to take place, not in a stadium, but in the heart of the hosting city. Boat after boat after boat carried the Games’ athletes along the Seine as 300,000 spectators in soaked plastic macs craned their necks for a glimpse. It seemed to go on forever. It was so bad that even square liberals on X started using the favoured slogan of the right: ‘STOP THE BOATS.’

The weather didn’t help. The lashing rain hampered the audio, making it hard to hear the ceremony’s star turns, Celine Dion and Lady Gaga (an upside of the downpour, I suppose). What we could hear was just weird. Like when a headless Marie Antoinette sang the opening bars to an ear-splitting heavy-metal ditty. The ceremony organiser, Thomas Jolly, said he wanted his spectacle to be a ‘celebration of being alive’ – here we had a celebration of being dead.

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Drag Queens Parody the Last Supper During Olympics Opening Ceremonies Haley Strack

By on July 28th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/drag-queens-parody-the-last-supper-during-olympics-opening-ceremonies/

Drag queens parodied Leonardo da Vinci’s rendition of the Last Supper during the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics on Friday evening, creating international outrage.

During the Olympic ceremonies, 18 performers re-created the scene, a depiction of Jesus Christ’s final meal with his disciples before his crucifixion. The burlesque performance was an “interpretation of the Greek God [of wine and festivity] Dionysus” to make viewers “aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings,” the Olympics said on X.

The scene featured some half-naked performers, one in the middle with a halo atop her head, behind a long table. A man who was painted blue, and with only vines covering his genitals, sat in the middle of the table and was surrounded by flowers. Viewers called the performance “crazy,” and Christian commentators on social media said that the scene made a mockery of the Christian faith.

The Paris games also opened this year with a performance by LGBTQ icon Lady Gaga paying tribute to French dancer and singer Zizi Jeanmaire near the River Seine, a performance by French-Canadian singer Céline Dion by the Eiffel Tower, and a torch-bearing act by rapper Snoop Dogg.

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‘Jaws’ Out of Water? Veteran actor Richard Dreyfuss gives the USA an intriguing – and brave – civics lesson. by Thom Nickels

By on June 7th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jaws-out-of-water/

The shark in the movie Jaws is alive and well, but instead of attacking innocent ocean swimmers, it is going after woke ideologues in out-of-water venues.

Recently, the Cabot Theater in Beverly, Massachusetts, managed by J. Casey Seward, hosted a Jaws symposium Q-and-A with Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss. Hundreds of people attended the event, no doubt thinking it was going to be a superficial conversation on Jaws movie nostalgia.

That changed when Dreyfuss walked onstage in a blue floral print house-dress, sashaying and wiggling his hips before the audience after which stagehands then rushed forward to remove the dress and help him put on a sports jacket.

The woman-to-man skit was more sophomoric, self-indulgent SNL-fare than genuinely funny. But it was certainly not a transphobic skit worthy of the attention it received from the progressive, left-tainted mainstream press.

Yet many media outlets “exploded” with sensationalistic breaking news headlines. It was as if Dreyfuss had been found guilty of infanticide. What media outlet didn’t jump into the act? There was Vanity Fair, AOL News, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Blade, as well as hundreds of TV news stations across the country, like WCVB-5 Boston.

Most posted videos of Dreyfuss walking onstage in that tacky house dress. And they followed the actor—dressed as a man—as he sat down with the host of the interview, a short, diminutive woman with an NPR-style, feminist buzz cut, who looked more than a little nervous as she immediately started talking about the award-winning movie, ignoring what had just happened onstage.

In online videos of the Cabot event, what’s noticeable is intense audience applause and enthusiastic appreciation. While media reports stated there were boos from some in the audience from the start, those boos were so soft they were drowned out by the cheers and clamor of approval.

Yes, yes, okay…one can hear a few disgruntled groans when Dreyfuss tells the audience that civics needs to make a comeback in America’s public schools.

Dreyfuss, who founded the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative in 2006, then urged audience members to “make sure your kids are not the last generation of Americans. And you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Here we have a purely patriotic comment that should not be controversial at all—unless, of course, you’re a Howard Zinn fan and want American history rewritten with a Marxist slant.

Saying you favor civics classes in public schools is a mild-mannered conservative talking point, but to woke folks it can trigger something like an epileptic seizure. In fact, many of the “offenses” that Dreyfuss was claimed to have uttered on the Cabot stage were not recorded on video at all, which strikes me as odd considering all the news attention this “story” generated.

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Affirmative action Scrabble to hit shelves soon By Olivia Murray

By on April 11th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/affirmative_action_scrabble_to_hit_shelves_soon.html

Scrabble is revamping—a more “inclusive” and “accessible” version is set to hit the shelves for those who don’t like the “competitive” nature of the traditional game. (Spoiler alert: The intended audience is Gen Z.)

Here’s the story, via a BBC report out yesterday:

Mattel is to launch a new version of Scrabble which is designed to be more collaborative and accessible for those who find word games intimidating.

The new double-sided Scrabble board will still feature the original game for those who want to play the traditional version.

But the new game on the flip side will include helper cards, use a simpler scoring system and be quicker to play.

Here’s what English broadcaster Gyles Brandreth said of the announcement:

‘The makers of Scrabble found that younger people, Gen Z people, don’t quite like the competitive nature of Scrabble….’

A “simpler” scoring system? How much “simpler” could Scrabble be though? As long as you can add into the single- and double-digits (or triple-digits with the right letters and premium squares), and you know your multiplication tables, the scoring system is self-explanatory. 

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Having a ‘mangina’ is not a human right A ‘nonbinary’ Canadian wants the state to pay for him to have both male and female genitals. Jo Bartosch

By on April 5th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/04/having-a-mangina-is-not-a-human-right/

Most men are quite attached to their penises. Even the fellas who tuck theirs into silky ladies’ knickers and ‘identify as women’ rarely actually part with their meat and two veg. So it should come as no surprise that a 33-year-old ‘nonbinary’ man in Ontario, Canada is suing for the right to keep his willy.

No, he is not at risk of some cruel and unusual punishment from the state. KS, as he is referred to in court documents, is actually demanding to undergo a ‘penile-sparing vaginoplasty’. This costly procedure would leave him with intact male genitals alongside a faux vagina. This is apparently so his body can better align with his nonbinary ‘gender identity’.

The Canadian health service has, quite sensibly, refused to pay for KS’s mix-and-match surgery out of the public purse. So he is now suing the government. Bizarrely, this self-absorbed man has not been laughed out of court. Instead, his case is being considered as a matter of human rights.

KS is demanding that the Canadian state pay for him to travel over one thousand miles to a specialist clinic in Austin, Texas where the surgery he wants can be performed. Ontario’s Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) initially denied his request back in 2022, on the grounds that the procedure is experimental and not performed in Canada. Following an appeal from KS, and a counter-appeal from his insurance provider, the decision has landed with Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, where the case was heard in late February.

Why is KS so persistent? Supposedly, this is a vital treatment. ‘It is very important for [KS] to have a vagina for her [sic] personal interpretation of her gender expression, but she also wishes to maintain her penis’, his doctor wrote in a letter to OHIP. Apparently, this is because KS ‘is transfeminine but not completely on the “feminine” end of the spectrum’. KS himself has gone further by claiming that denying this request amounts to an act of conversion therapy.

It would be easy to laugh off KS’s ludicrous demands for a surgically constructed mangina. But he has good reason to think that his special request might actually be granted. This is the wacky world into which Canada has been led by the trans ideology.

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The UN’s insult to women Why has yet another man been appointed to represent British women on the global stage?Julie Burchill

By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/05/the-uns-insult-to-women/

‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’, sang Henry Higgins in the 1964 film, My Fair Lady. If there were to be a remake in 2024, the film might be called My Fair Ladyboy. It would update the story of a professor of phonetics, who turns a cockney girl into the toast of high society, into the tale of a professor of hormonology, who turns a mockney boy into the toast of café society. For today, a sizable minority of trendsetters and lawmakers think men can be just as good – if not better – at being women.

A man in a frock has even been appointed by UN Women to represent British women on the global stage. ‘Katie’ Neeves was on X last week smarming that: ‘I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted as a UN Women UK delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, which is the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.’

Neaves’s X handle – @cool2btrans – gives the game away. As does the name of his business, Martin Neeves Photography and Film. Presumably he retained the old name in case potential customers think kooky Katie might be less efficient.

We’ve been here before, of course. The ‘model’ Munroe Bergdorf – born Ian Beaumont to middle-class parents in the picturesque village of Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex – was appointed the first ‘UK champion’ for UN Women towards the end of last year. This understandably caused a right kerfuffle, not least because Bergdorf has shown contempt for the historical struggles for women’s rights. Infamously, he once branded the Suffragettes ‘white supremacists’ – this from an airhead who probably thinks that ‘force-feeding’ means being slipped a few hidden carbs before Marbs by an envious frenemy.

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