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Archive for 2025

June 6, 2025

DEVELOPING: Deported Illegal Immigrant Abrego-Garcia Headed Back to the United States, but With a Big Twist.

IF THEIR POLICIES ARE SO GOOD, WHY DO THEY ALWAYS HAVE TO LIE? Demanding Moms Admit Rally Speaker Lied About Pennsylvania School Shooting.

GOODER AND HARDER (WITH A BACKBEAT), CALIFORNIA:

CA Republicans: fighting for more affordable homes, gas, and groceries.

CA Democrats: https://t.co/8afF47EBF4 pic.twitter.com/bzKh2FPc0g

— Kate Sanchez (@KateSanchezCA) June 4, 2025

If they knew how they looked, I imagine they might not be politicians.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Broke Into Mar-a-Lago to Preach a Little Gospel and Marry Kai. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we learn how not to woo the president’s granddaughter, how not to shoot par on the third hole, and why it had to be the bees.”

FATHER’S DAY GIFT: Headlamp Rechargeable 2980 High Lumens Super Bright LED Head Lamp for Adults. #CommissionEarned

THAT’S A SHAME: Second ispace lunar lander presumed lost. “While ispace said the initial phases of the landing attempt went as planned, telemetry displayed on the company’s webcast indicated that the lander reached the surface about one minute and 45 seconds before the scheduled landing time, with a reported speed of 187 kilometers per hour, far too fast for a safe landing. Telemetry was then lost, or no longer displayed, and the company ended the webcast about 25 minutes later with no updates on the lander’s status.”

THE SCANDAL OF DOGMATISM:

In the prologue to his new book The Last Supper, Paul Elie remembers being a young man in the 1980s, “riding the D train with The Village Voice and the Pensées in a black messenger bag.” His reading material was fitting preparation for this book, a masterful survey of pop culture—if a less sure treatment of religious controversy—in the ’80s. His canon is capacious: A-sides and B-sides, major works and minor, early stuff and late, live performances and music videos, installations, short films, feature films, essays, novels, memoirs, biographies. Elie deftly intercuts figures and artifacts in an elaborate chronology of the decade. It is a decade in which, he says, we are still living.

Elie describes the long 1980s as the full flowering of postsecularity—that phase of modernity in which religion rebounds from its losses, but religious authority does not. Religious topics and images suffuse a public that is rife with variance and contestation. The sacred mixes with the profane, if indeed the profane can still be called profane. Beheld by Andy Warhol, a soup can is sacralized, announcing that “presence is everywhere.” If this age has a dogma, it is that the ordinary is extraordinary.

A religious age produces religious art. But the art of the postsecular age, Elie proposes, is “crypto-religious.” Elie uses this term to denote art that “incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief.” Its styles are many: enigmatic (Bob Dylan, U2), rebellious (Madonna, Sinead O’Connor), sensuous (Prince, Leonard Cohen), ironic (Warhol), esoteric (Brian Eno, Arvo Pärt), blasphemous (Salman Rushdie, Andres Serrano), satanic (Robert Mapplethorpe). In every case, the artist’s religious profession is elusive. Crypto-religious art always “raises the question of what the person who made it believes.”

Elie’s canon encompasses any and every religion, but Catholics, more or less lapsed, are his most numerous and most typical subjects. Elie, of course, is the longtime Catholic correspondent for The New Yorker. But there is a further necessity. Catholicism is the great instance of a doctrinally and culturally thick religion that relaxed during the long 1960s, cutting loose millions of adherents and cutting slack to those who remained, even as its imperious phase lived in memory. So it supplies in spades the raw material of crypto-religious art: a public heritage that can be invoked, evoked, traduced, and remixed by artists who are shaped or exercised by it while disregarding its strictures.

Mark Judge dubs Elie’s book an exploration of “Art, Religion, and Culture in the ’80s:”

Put more simply, The Last Supper explores the deep hold Christianity still held on many people during the 1980s, including famous actors, artists, and writers. They took their religion seriously. Elie is a magnificent writer, and The Last Supper is deeply reported and researched. It powerfully evokes a time and place. Take, for example, Elie’s description of New York City. In the 1980s “the city was characterized by its celebrity nightlife: discos, launch parties, black limousines, lines of cocaine on the counters of mirrored bathrooms. And it was defined by squalor and decay.”

Despite these signs of moral decay, pilgrims to the city saw excitement and opportunity:

And yet those of us who had come from somewhere else were struck by by the stone-and-iron solidity of the city, not by the signs of decay. New York City at that moment was as ancient-looking as Rome. It was an unreconstructed place, free of the shopping malls and space-age sports arenas that had transformed the mainland. It was still in touch with the dark forces of clan and tribe and territory, of sin and retribution, and the Old World feel of the city was what set it apart from continental America.

Elie concludes that “the city was powered by the shared belief that it was the center of everything and that being a New Yorker gave your life meaning and purpose. It was this belief that drew you there and held you there.” Anyone who was alive at the time and familiar with the place can vouch for the accuracy of this assessment. It was a thrilling time to be a young artist, or even a young fan.

Artists like Madonna, U2, Sinead O’Connor, Martin Scorsese, and Andy Warhol saw the spiritual in art, film, dance, everyday objects. “As moderns,” Elie writes, “they affirmed the integrity of ordinary experience, in defiance of the Church; as Catholics, they saw the ordinary as imbued with a supernatural presence, in defiance of modernism in the arts.” This caused them “to express their Catholicism furtively—and cryptically.”

While ‘80s artists were creating “crypto-religious art,” at the Free Press, Madeleine Kearns describes Catholicism on the upswing: How Catholicism Got Cool.

Why are so many adults in the once-secularized West seeking to be baptized into the Catholic Church? I’ve been reporting on the rise in religiosity for a while now, and have heard many theories: Modern Americans are starved of beauty, meaning, purpose, and community. The Church of Rome offers all these things, but so do other religions. So: Why Catholicism?

“In an age of instability, people are attracted to ancient traditions; in an age of therapy-speak, there’s something appealing about the tough demands of Catholic doctrine,” Dan Hitchens, a senior editor at First Things and former Catholic Herald editor, told me. “Catholicism also has a visual and aesthetic heritage which has translated well into online culture. Catholics have turned out to be surprisingly good at using the internet to evangelize.”

To find out more, I tracked down a handful of the several thousand or so American adults who were baptized this past Easter, and spoke to those who hadn’t been raised Catholic, to find out why the religion appealed. Most of them were in their 20s, which makes sense: The Catholic boom is especially notable among Gen Z. A 2023 study by Harvard University found that the percentage of Gen Zers identifying as Catholic jumped from 15 percent to 21 percent from 2022 and 2023.

Why am I reading this story in the Free Press rather than the New York Times? Perhaps this cultural hot take from the Gray Lady a month ago explains why: “The New York Times just ran a 1,400-word story to explain what cross necklaces are.”

PLANETARY PROTECTION: Bug-eyed telescope ready to find Earth-smashing asteroids.

ROGER KIMBALL: Is Biden’s autopen mightier than the sword?

Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?

The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.

Moreover, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.

As I note in another Speccie piece, on January 17 of this year, 2,490 pardons and commutations were issued over Biden’s name, more than any prior president had granted in the course of his entire presidency. Who decided to issue that wholesale clemency? And who signed the documents ratifying the decision?

“The issue,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich wrote on X, “is not President Biden, who was clearly cognitively incapable of these acts. The issue is who was doing them and what did they get for doing them?”

Gingrich is right. We do not yet know the answers to those two questions, but we might soon. Yesterday, President Trump issued a memorandum directing the Attorney General and White House Counsel to investigate “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President.”

Curiously, this is yet another aspect of the “Biden” administration where Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are unwilling to name names.

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S The West Coast, Messed Coast™: States Team Up for a Terror Attack. “The California Dems held their annual convention and discovered their limp-wristed Spartacus was a Nazi. The Antifastan Rose Festival is going back to its home base in downtown Portland — with extra security, naturally. We bring you the quintessential East L.A. workout as we “blow off a little steam,” hand-pick some of your comments to highlight, and lead with PNW leftist terrorists making a recent terrorist bombing a West Coast, Messed Coast™ ‘family’ affair.”

WHAT YOU DO WHEN YOU CARE ABOUT KEEPING THE LIGHTS ON: What solar? What wind? Texas data centers build their own gas power plants.

CURIOUS: Why Did the Liberal Justices Write Unanimous Conservative Rulings at the Supreme Court? “I consider it far more likely that Kagan, the craftiest of the three, orchestrated this trifecta of rulings as a strategy. The next time conservatives fault Sotomayor, Jackson, or her for an ideologically skewed ruling, Kagan can point to these opinions as evidence of their ‘fairmindedness.'”

The Left does play the long game well — certainly better than Chief Justice Roberts.

PADDY CHAYEFSKY, CALL YOUR OFFICE! An Anti-American Propaganda Network Encouraged Violent Protests at Columbia—Then Produced a Documentary Lauding Them.

The Encampments, produced by the nonprofit BreakThrough Media, tracks the Columbia University students who orchestrated anti-Israel protests at the school last April. Apple TV+, which offers the film to rent for $9.99, bills it as an “insider” look into a “historic moment that continues to reverberate across the globe.”

But it may actually serve as a propaganda coup for a sophisticated network of nonprofit groups funded by pro-CCP tech mogul Neville Roy Singham.

BreakThrough Media, which claims its film debuted as the #3 documentary in Apple’s documentary category, is the media arm of Singham’s propaganda empire. Singham, the husband of CODEPINK founder Jodie Evans, has poured millions of dollars into two nonprofits, The People’s Forum and the Justice and Education Fund. According to tax records, those groups gave more than $1.4 million in grants and office space through 2023 to BreakThrough Media, which operates a popular YouTube channel that features interviews with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist group, and episodes with titles like “How the pro-Israel lobby hijacked Judaism.” The People’s Forum and BreakThrough Media also share an address, according to a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a think tank housed at Rutgers University.

The Singham network’s involvement in both the protests and the documentary underscores the extent to which America’s enemies see the anti-Israel campus movement as a means to destabilize the U.S. The NCRI report concluded that the Singham network serves as “the conduit through which CCP-affiliated entities have effectively co-opted pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S., advancing a broader anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist agenda.” According to a New York Times report, Singham “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.”

Several BreakThrough Media executives worked on The Encampments, which has so far received buzzy reviews from The Guardian, the New Yorker, and other outlets. BreakThrough journalist Kei Pritzker is a co-director of the movie. Ben Becker, the editor in chief of BreakThrough, is an executive producer of the film, and the movie’s credits acknowledge contributions from BreakThrough host Eugene Puryear. Both Becker and Puryear are founders of the Party of Socialism and Liberation—a far-left organization whose past members include Elias Rodriguez, the suspect accused of murdering two Israeli diplomats outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C.

It really is “The Mao-Tse Tung Hour” from Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network come to life. (Language NSFW):

BAD NEWS: Scientists make disturbing discovery while analyzing tumors from young cancer patients: ‘Urgent need for increased awareness.’ I dunno, it’s Chinese research.

OUT ON A LIMB: The Harvey Milk Controversy Is a Microcosm of Our Cultural War.

BLUE ON BLUE ACTION: Well Meaning but Delusional Democratic Moderates Gather in D.C. to Pick a Fight With the Left.

THE GUY IN THE PICTURE SEEMS TO BE HOLDING A TRIPLE BOURBON, WHICH MIGHT EXPLAIN BOTH THE NAPS AND THE EARLY DEATH: Naps associated with increased risk of death, report says.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY: Israel providing guns to Gaza gang to bolster opposition to Hamas.

Israel has been arming a criminal gang in the Gaza Strip as part of an effort to strengthen opposition to Hamas in the enclave, defense sources confirmed on Thursday following remarks on the matter by former defense minister Avigdor Liberman.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later confirmed the report, saying the move helped save Israeli soldiers’ lives.

Liberman, who heads the opposition Yisrael Beytenu party, told the Kan public broadcaster on Thursday morning that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had unilaterally approved the transfer of weapons to the Abu Shabab clan, an armed gang or militia that is opposed to Hamas’s rule in the Gaza Strip.

No pun intended when I say that I hope that arming a different bunch of Gazans doesn’t backfire.

HIS FACE! LOL! Watch Scott Jennings as CNN Panel Pushes Stealing Healthcare from Americans for Illegals. “Dude is cool as a cucumber, no matter how crazy they get about illegals deserving healthcare on our dime. Watch this and pay special attention to Jennings’ face as he sits back and takes in all the craziness.”

Cloward and Piven are smiling as well, albeit for different reasons:

The one-man voice of reason continues to dazzle on CNN. https://t.co/zYFG3OUhvR

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) June 6, 2025

John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist adds that in 2025, “by ‘healthcare,’ Democrats also mean transgender surgeries/mutilation. So their position is actually worse than ‘free healthcare for illegals.’ It’s ‘free trans surgeries & hormone therapy for illegals.’ Good luck running on that, Dems.”

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