Spectator Life

Dear God, please help me. The winged monkeys of incel outrage have mobilized in their millions. Basement warriors have exerted more sputum and energy than the average American would find imaginable. And all because of a 27-year-old actress, best known for starring in a romcom with Glen Powell, who, when I last checked, was spared such opprobrium. But we are in a different age, and if you are a woman, you’re fair game. In the Fifties, there might have been an outraged headline. “Pretty young blonde woman wears denim jeans to promote a product!” But in 2025, Sydney Sweeney is less a thespian and more a product in her own right. In the great carnival of modern celebrity, where every gesture is dissected and every utterance weaponized, she’s a moving target. For the uninitiated, Ms.

 The President is usually set on "winning," but he has settled this week for a draw. Columbia University and the administration reached a settlement yesterday that, in theory, brings a months-long battle between the academics and politicos to an end.On the face of it, Columbia has still pulled the short straw. The university will pay a $200 million fine over three years to address the allegations that it was in breach of anti-discrimination laws, specifically in regards to the safety of Jewish students on campus.Moreover, Columbia has agreed to a "jointly selected independent monitor" that will watch over the university’s actions as it implements new student assessments and hiring policies.

In the annals of stupid and poorly run schemes, the California High-Speed Rail project ranks among the worst. Its future, even a dramatically scaled down one, has become ever more precarious since the Trump administration’s Department of Transportation rescinded $4 billion in funds already granted the project. Governor Newsom has already filed a suit to reverse the action, but he can’t legislate away the reality that this project is an abject embarrassment. When voters approved $9 billion for the plan in 2008, the California High-Speed Rail Authority estimated that it would cost $33 billion and start running by 2020 – and that was just for the San Joaquin Valley portion. The cost has since ballooned to $130 billion, and no stretch is operational.

The big education news this week is a court ruling that allows the Trump administration to begin cutting jobs at the Department of Education. A cascade of familiar voices can be heard lamenting that ruling. That’s the angry, unified message from Democrats, the Washington Blob and their Media buddies. Woe betide the students, they wail. Damn this President. They are not just wrong. They are 180 degrees wrong. Why? First, they are wrong for democratic reasons. Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to demolish the Department of Education. He’s carrying out that pledge, not backpedaling. That’s what citizens should expect from elected leaders in a constitutional democracy. They seldom receive it. Trump is not only right democratically, he’s right educationally.

Blessed greetings From Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott recently signed a bill that will require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Teachers must display the Commandments as a poster or framed copy, at least 16 inches by 20 inches, in a typeface that is clearly legible from any part of the room. Supporters of the bill say the Ten Commandments are a cornerstone of American history, though they may have that confused with the Ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

While the fact that Zohran Mamdani had identified as black on his Columbia University application stole the headlines, the hack that exposed this information highlighted something much more insidious in the college admissions system.Admitting the accuracy of the leaked data, Mamdani claimed that he was simply trying “to capture the fullness of [his] background” by checking the “Black or African American” box in 2019. New Yorkers raised an eyebrow. But what would have alarmed them more was the revelation buried in the trove of hacked data: that affirmative action is alive and well in America. The leak of Columbia’s admissions data demonstrates that, even after the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action policies unconstitutional in SFFA v.

The University of Pennsylvania just reversed course on one of the most controversial sports decisions in recent memory. After a federal investigation, the university agreed to restore titles and records to biological female swimmers who were forced to compete against Lia Thomas – a transgender-identifying male athlete. In addition, Penn will send apology letters to the affected athletes and adopt sex-based definitions going forward, limiting women’s sports and facilities to biological females.It’s being hailed in some circles as a win for common sense and women’s rights. And it is. But let’s be clear: this was not a moral epiphany. It was a forced retreat.Penn, like many elite institutions, didn’t arrive at this outcome willingly.

Fifteen years ago, when Congress enacted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), Vice President Biden, at that time a man with full verbal faculties, indecorously stated to President Obama, “this is a big fuckin’ deal.” So it was, or so it seemed. Today however, Obamacare has become yet another reckless source of federal spending, significantly contributing to the inefficiencies and corporatist structure of American healthcare.Obamacare’s reinforcement of the healthcare status quo should lead us to think more deeply about what we want healthcare to be like in America. Should we not strive for the alignment of healthcare with the fundamental principles of democratic capitalism, ensuring that freedom and accountability for patients – i.e.

“Authoritarianism can be stopped,” Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, was saying, even though Weingarten was a prime mover, if not the prime mover, behind years-long Covid-era school closures that crushed education opportunity for an entire generation. But we’ll stop this particular round of authoritarianism, she said, with our voices and our bodies: “We have to be on the streets in a very, very public way.” This was on an AFT organizing call yesterday evening for No Kings, a massive nationwide protest taking place this coming Saturday, which had been scheduled long before last weekend’s Battle of Los Angeles.