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An ICE agent fatally shot a man in Houston on Tuesday morning after the man tried to run him over during a vehicle stop. According to the agency, federal agents were conducting a targeted enforcement operation when Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, tried to evade arrest. The agency says Salgado Araujo attempted to ram an ICE vehicle, refused multiple verbal commands, and then tried to run over an agent, who fired his weapon in self-defense.
Naturally, the left treated the story as another opportunity to smear President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement agenda, just as it has after every enforcement-related shooting over the past year and a half. The facts didn't matter. They never do.
On Tuesday's episode of The Five, Jesse Watters wasn't having it, and his leftist co-host Jessica Tarlov learned that the hard way.
"All right, so the bullet holes are right through the front windshield," Watters observed. "So this wasn't a side shot. The car was coming at the officer, we think, and they'll do a review. And if he's, you know, guilty of something negligent, then he'll face justice. Or if the person drove at him and he was defending his life, then that's it."
When Watters asked why Salgado Araujo was in the country in the first place, Tarlov offered up the best defense she could muster. "He's working," she said.
Oh, so that makes it okay?
"He shouldn't be here, Jessica," Watters fired back. He noted that Salgado Araujo wasn't even the target of the operation. "And so, if they say pull over, pull over," he said. "Now, this investigation will be over, but we have to grow up. Can we grow up? I mean, there's going to be fatalities in law enforcement situations, especially when there's foreign fugitives who are resisting and running away."
Then Watters compared Trump's record to Joe Biden's. "Biden didn't even try. Biden and the Democrats chose to let millions of migrants in here. And then they chose not to deport them."
"You said they should be able to break into the country and stay until they break a law," he said. "And then they can get deported. Then we don't have a border. That's just an invitation for Latin America to break into the country. And we have to wait for them to commit crimes? That's not a policy. That's insanity."
The reality is even worse than that, because when illegal aliens do commit crimes, Democrat-run sanctuary states shield them from the consequences. "So they say they want to get the criminals out," Watters said. "And then when we try to get the criminals out, they protect them." He even brought up the illegal alien child rapist in Minnesota who received a pardon from Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.). "Got pardoned by Tampon? I mean, what the hell? So he wouldn't get deported?"
Watters wrapped up by explaining what's really driving all of this. "Why, all of a sudden, we bring in all this foreign-born population, [and] Democrats are all of a sudden competitive?" he asked. "They just imported everybody that lived outside of the country into the country, and now it's closer. That's why they want them here, no matter if they commit crimes or not."
The Democrat Party's position on immigration collapses the moment anyone examines it. Its leaders claim they only want criminals deported, but then they protect the criminals. They claim they support law enforcement, then vilify the agents doing the enforcing. Tarlov had no answer for any of it.
President Donald Trump has announced that Communist China committed a massive election security breach, bribed U.S. journalists, manipulated our elections, and colluded with treacherous Americans to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.
Two hundred and twenty million — that's how many voters' registration data the Chinese Communists stole, Trump said. And there are at least 278,000 non-citizens on voter rolls, but the real number is almost certainly much higher, the president said. The system is "so broken," Trump argued, that it is "not defensible." There are also hundreds of thousands of dead voters' names on the rolls. "There's no third-world country that has elections like we have," Trump exclaimed.
Trump's Thursday primetime speech was indeed about election integrity, and according to him, the "Deep State" intelligence agencies during his first term ran a "shadow government" to hide information on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) meddling in our elections. Trump even said that his second administration has found burn bags meant to be burned under the Obama administration, with crucial evidence supporting criminal charges against powerful former and current politicians and bureaucrats. Electronic voting machines and ballot counting machines were incredibly vulnerable, and the feds knew it, but hid it, Trump accused. "The United States adversaries, including at minimum Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran," can compromise U.S. elections, he said. "The trust of the American people was lost." He urged passage of crucial election integrity legislation.
In mid-2018, the CCP's policy was to leverage anti-Trump sentiments to force him out, and Chinese money funded anti-Trump media blitzes, Trump said. China also influenced the 2020 election results, he declared.
"The CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela, and that's exactly what happened," Trump said. Bad actors manipulated electronic vote totals. That's what happened right here in the USA, too. Yet the "Deep State" buried the evidence for years.
The FBI obtained evidence on just one voter registration operation in Michigan that included fraudulent ballot signing, submission of ballots without real individuals, and gift cards offered depending on how many false ballots each person submitted.
The Trump administration is already reaching out to compromised states to ensure that future elections can "never be bought, never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again," Trump added. He questioned why Congress has not passed the SAVE America Act. "The only reason you would [not] want to do that is you want to cheat," he argued. "Mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt," he said, arguing for a drastic reduction in legal justifications for mail-in ballots. He asked We the People to call our representatives to demand passage of the SAVE America Act.
Happy Wednesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. We will reconvene at sunset to distribute soft serve cones and extra Tiger Balm to the Pilates-inflicted.
Because he sits near or at the top of most of the very early polls for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, I think it's important to take occasional digs at California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
OK, I'd enjoy doing it even if he weren't running for president.
I'm still not sold on Newsom going over well enough with Democrats all across America to become the nominee. Yes, he has great name recognition now, but Democrats in Flyover, USA don't have to live under his insanity. They also probably don't spend a lot of time reading up on various Newsom-inspired policies in the Golden State.
I left California after 25 years, a little less than a year before Newsom became governor. Its psychotic leftward lurch had already begun, but Newsom arrived in Sacramento with a bulldozer to facilitate pushing the state off the progressive cliff even faster.
Gavin Newsom's California bears almost no resemblance to the California I left eight years ago. I'm not just talking about politics either. Pacific Palisades was still standing in 2018, for one thing. This list could go on for a while. So much goes wrong in blue states because the politicians in charge neglect the important things while they're focusing on their idiotic leftist plans.
California has suffered so much under Newsom's rule because no politician in America embraced the opportunity to become a tyrant during the pandemic like he did. Once he got a taste for it, he never let up. The supermajority Democrats in Sacramento are merely puppets who do his bidding.
Big Brother has a name, it's Gavin Newsom, and he's coming to inspect the trash of California residents.
Starting this month, Sacramento is sending city workers out to peer into residents' garbage, recycling, and organic waste bins, all in the name of complying with a mandate from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.). The California legislature passed the law behind this intrusion, SB 1383, in 2016, and it took effect in 2022. The stated goal was to cut organic waste disposal by 75% by 2025 to reduce methane emissions and slow climate change.
Is it working? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? That’s why Sacramento apparently decided the best way to find out is to start rifling through what people throw away.
Not creepy at all, right?
The article that Matt links to says that this is all to ensure that people "comply with Newsom's vision." It's Newsom's vision that has been the catalyst for the mass exodus from California. The state has seen the largest population decline of any U.S. state since — no surprise here — 2020.
Everything that Newsom pats himself on the back for is the kind of thing that I truly believe ends up being a disqualifying knock on him with Ma and Pa Dem in the Midwest. He doesn't know that because California is the biggest ideological bubble in the nation. He really thinks he's killing it there. His delusion is reinforced by hangers-on who are equally divorced from reality. As I wrote back in March, the California that Newsom keeps talking about doesn't really exist anymore.
What I meant in the headline is that almost everything Newsom does is something that could potentially doom his 2028 bid. He doesn't know that, of course. Now that the Young Commies are rising on the left, Newsom will almost certainly do whatever he can to out-commie them.
That should make for some fun stories to tell at the Iowa State Fair come caucus time in 2028.
The Democrats opened the door to the socialists, and they're doing all they can to take over the party while most of the Democrats are either welcoming them or talking about being a "big tent."
But the socialists don't want a "big tent" — they want to get in and upend our system of government, and they're not shy about admitting it.
Listen as the Democratic Socialists of America national co-chair, Ashik Siddique, explains one big thing they have in their platform to get rid of, if they get power. They want to abolish the U.S. Senate.
"That's part of our platform. We don't think that's extreme," Siddique said. "We think it's a change that will make the country more democratic."
So what he/they want is completely counter to the Constitution, which explicitly set up things like the Electoral College and the Senate to head off pure democracy and mob rule. The Senate is supposed to represent the interests of the states. We have a House to address proportional representation, which was what was so brilliant about the construction of the Constitution.
If the DSA got its way to just have the House, the country would basically be controlled by New York and California, and become a one-party Democratic (or socialist) state.
Siddique previously said that they wanted to replace capitalism with socialism.
So if this is what they think, how can any DSA member swear (honestly) to uphold the Constitution if they are sworn in?
As we noted, it isn't just this guy; some want to abolish prisons and borders. They want to use running as "Democrats" to get there.
Listen as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani spun his head off when asked about the positions of one of the New York City socialists, Darializa Avila Chevalier.
On our 250th birthday, they want to undo the very framework of our government — that's not "extreme" to them. The states that would be disenfranchised would never go along with what the DSA wants. Article V would require every state to agree, and that's not happening. But this just shows how extreme the socialists are. This is what the Democrats let into the House. This is what has fully captured their party.
WATCHING the ‘Salute to America 250’ festivities on this year’s Fourth of July holiday reminded me how much I love the United States for reasons too numerous to list here. Held on the National Mall in Washington DC, the ‘Salute’ was the signature national celebration held to mark America’s 250th birthday in the so-called Semiquincentennial. It featured some highly spirited musical performances by mostly military personnel, including a very respectable rendition of Village People’s YMCA by a naval officer in dress whites, a full symphony orchestra, some very talented young servicewomen singing contemporary pop songs, and a tenor (not military) doing considerable justice to Puccini’s magnificent aria Nessun Dorma from his final opera, Turandot. Maybe it was the brandy, but I even found myself oddly moved by an 83-year-old Lee Greenwood singing his own composition ‘God Bless the USA’, which I’ve never appreciated musically but whose lyrics expressing pride in being American, love of family, and honoring those brave men and women who have died defending freedom are more pertinent today than ever.
But the highlight of the evening was – it will come as no surprise to learn – the 40-minute speech given by the one and only President Donald J Trump, barely 24 hours after he delivered a similar speech in front of majestic Mount Rushmore to kick off the United States’ 250th Independence Day celebrations, in which he pledged that ‘the torch of America’s liberty will never go out’, an inspiring speech covered here in these pages. What a treat it was for an unsophisticated chap like me to hear a US president actually praising America and its extraordinary contributions to human civilisation! After years of doom and gloom with mega-rich celebrities trashing the nation while travelling abroad – who can forget Barack Obama’s excruciating ‘apology tour’ during his first year in office? – Trump’s positive remarks about this country’s past, present, and future must have acted as a tonic for millions of patriotic Americans hesitant to express their love of country. I know they did for me.
Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects have been quick to criticise both speeches for being too political, one going so far as to blaming him for ruining the July 4 celebration in Washington DC. To be sure, they would have found reasons to criticise even if he’d made no political references whatsoever. Such is the nature of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a seemingly incurable malady that deprives a sufferer of reason and the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction and that shows no signs of going away any time soon.
It is of course entirely possible that Trump’s critics have a point. They often do on minor issues, while studiously avoiding the larger picture, believing that the millions like me who voted for him did so because they thought him a paragon of good taste and moral rectitude. Would his words about American greatness and exceptionalism have been more effective had he left out references to specific legislation and the admittedly unwarranted lawfare that has been waged against him? I think the answer is yes, his words would have been more effective had he spoken more generally about what makes this extraordinary country so distinctive and pre-eminent in the history of the world. However, after hearing Trump call out the evils of ‘Cancel Culture’ and the very real threat of totalitarianism and ‘far-left fascism . . . in our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms’, threats to what he called ‘our magnificent liberty’, all is forgiven by at least one patriotic American.
But as I’ve said before in these pages, Trump is not all we’ve got, he’s what we’ve got. Besides, we’re at a point in this nation’s history when such quibbling seems a luxury. Without him this nation would have been lost with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. At present, there is no one else. Four years of Biden came close to destroying America, having caused possibly irreparable harm to the country. We simply cannot let this happen again.
Trump has already achieved much in his second term. But the forces of darkness – and readers of TCW know whereof I speak – remain in place and are just biding their time. The midterms are looming large on the horizon, and God only knows what will happen in 2028. Those of us who love this country and want to save it from those who seek to destroy it must not ignore the fact that the United States, Trump notwithstanding, continues to face the same existential crisis it has faced since, arguably, the 1960s.
Am I being alarmist in saying this? It’s certainly in my nature to be so. Anticipating the bailiff’s knock on the door is possibly a legacy of my Irish father. But we must not forget that much of the toxic madness that has befouled the developed world in recent decades – political correctness, DEI, anti-men and anti-family feminism, racialised identity politics, Black Lives Matter, the madness of gender ideology, and that latest nation-destroying blight known as wokeism, have been gestated at American universities. The men and women responsible for birthing this madness are still flourishing at all levels of American society. They continue to occupy positions of considerable power and influence.
Despite the emergence of the new rightward-leaning media, and Trump’s efforts to expose them, such people, and their sycophantic anchorites, retain their long-enjoyed and almost overwhelming monopoly over American culture, controlling the means whereby narratives are constructed, consumed, distributed, circulated and exchanged, to use words that would have sat well with Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci. They are united by two things: hatred of Trump and, increasingly, hatred of America.
Indeed, it needs to be emphasised that, as America celebrates its 250th birthday, patriotism and love of country can no longer be taken for granted among my fellow Americans. I must also stress that, among a certain class of people, invariably on the left, it has become almost fashionable to denigrate the United States and express shame for being American, mocking those among their fellow citizens who stand for the national anthem, place their right hands on their hearts during the Pledge of Allegiance, and hang American flags proudly outside their homes, the preponderance of the latter making some leftward-leaning elites feel unsafe.
Classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson has compared Donald Trump to tragic heroes like ‘the angry and old but still fearsome Ajax’ from the Iliad. He also draws parallels between the deeply flawed Trump and the flawed heroes such as Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne) in the iconic John Ford Western The Searchers, not to mention a long list of other films from Shane to High Noon. Being a lifelong aficionado of the Western, I hesitated to buy into this comparison when I first came across it in 2018, but am now convinced that Hanson has a point.
At this stage in his life and career, Trump cannot really be considered a tragic figure. He is, to be sure, a flawed individual, in keeping with those archetypes noted by Hanson. But his strengths far outweigh his weaknesses. Maybe the real tragedy associated with Trump is that so many of his detractors choose to ignore or are unable to see what he has done for the country and the world. Few if any will thank him for ridding Iran of nuclear weapons, or for securing the borders, lowering crime and inflation, attracting investment and jobs to the US, protecting the American labour force through tariffs, and raising the morale of the military, to name but a few of his achievements; but they will benefit from the results.
Allow me to finish by citing the great Kathy Gyngell, my friend and editor, when she said that America’s ‘achievements and freedom hang in the balance . . . Trump has ridden to the rescue, but if the revolutionaries and anti-Trumpists get their way . . .’ a quarter-century quest for liberty will have been wasted.
Trump is not a perfect vessel, but without him and for what he stands the West is lost. We had better realise that before it’s too late.
Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. The Sine Qua Non Sequitur is resting after some bacon-related intensity whilst watching last night's Home Run Derby.
If we have any new readers here today, I should probably mention that I use the words "socialist" and "communist" interchangeably. That's because they are, you know, interchangeable.
One of the things that I found so disturbing about Zohran Mamdani when I first learned about him was his age. Perhaps moreso than any other decade, the thirties are filled with wildly varying degrees of maturity. Some people hit their thirties and seem to leap straight to 50. Others still act like drunk 20-year-olds who just happen to have better stuff.
Mamdani struck me as being firmly entrenched in the latter group.
A commie infused with and fueled by ignorant youthful zeal is the worst kind of commie. Zohran Mamdani is the worst kind of commie. He's not keeping it a secret, either. There are days that I swear he's determined to prove that conservatives were right about him as quickly as he can.
Last week, my good friend and partner in thought crime Stephen Green wrote about the ever-increasing disgruntlement with Mamdani that residents of New York City. In his headline, Stephen wrote that Mamdani is "just getting started."
It's true. We are a little more than halfway through Comrade Mamdani's first year in office and the buyer's remorse is hitting a fever pitch. It began with the exodus of the wealthy people who Mamdani and his commie hordes are always railing against. It turns out that if you repeatedly tell people that you're coming after their money, they will take their money somewhere you can't find it.
Thanks to Mamdani, a lot of people who aren't millionaires or billionaires will soon be forced to leave because they can't afford to live there. This is from my Townhall colleague Joseph Chalfant:
Under the leadership of race-communist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, rent in Manhattan has risen to an all-time high of $5,295 a month, representing a nearly 10 percent increase year-over-year.
That's right, the most expensive U.S. city to live in just took an insane leap upward. There should be a lot more space for squatters opening up, which is always a classic sign that socialism is "working."
This is a good time to remind ourselves that New York City mayors can't be impeached. The child locks are on while Manhattan residents are in the back seat of the Commiemobile for this bumpy ride.
Even those who feel nothing but disdain for New York City shouldn't want to see it deliberately destroyed by a gleefully anti-American commie freak. Well, mostly destroyed. As I wrote back in April, the city will probably survive, but it might not want to. I happen to love New York, and have a lot of great personal and professional memories from over the years. Just on a personal level, I worry that everything there will be ruined for me the way that it has been in Los Angeles.
Seriously, everything that these people touch turns into a fetid cesspool of awful.
Voters in New York are no doubt already realizing that taking a walk on the Democratic Socialist Party wild side wasn't a good idea. Now they have to stand by and see how much damage Mamdani can do with almost a full term still left ahead of him.
Hey, maybe they'll get lucky and he'll resign to run for president in two years.
On X (formerly Twitter), the actor Kevin Sorbo, best known for playing Hercules in the mid-1990s, recently posted a commercial from that era:
Sorbo wrote, “Few things will radicalize you more than seeing what the world looked like 30 years ago.”
Fair enough, but these images are not “what the world looked like 30 years ago.” They’re a tightly curated and edited series of film clips designed to boost the sales of disposable razor blades to 1990s-era men. But they do say a lot about what large corporations and the firms they hired to create their commercials thought about their potential customers, and how to reach them. For Gillette, those customers were young men.
As 2026-era Gillette is hoping you’ll forget, by 2019, with the #metoo movement still in vogue, Gillette’s corporate overlords had a very different opinion of their customers:
This worldview among the establishment left reached a peak during Kamala Harris’s stillborn presidential bid, as Don Surber wrote at his Substack in October of 2024, in a column titled, “Gillette, Bud Light, Kamala:”
Women are 50% more likely to get into college and men are 9 times as likely to be in prison. The media and the government repeatedly try to emasculate men as they want to turn us into drones for these queen bees. The gender gap merely shines light on the problem.
After decades of this stereotyping of men as evil and the constant discrimination against men, males have had it. The backlash may have begun with Hillary but it later torched Gillette, which launched a ridiculous ad campaign on attacking toxic masculinity.
On January 15, 2019, Forbes gushed, “As Gillette has come under increasing competition from low priced competitors such as Dollar Shave Club and Harry's, along with a resurgent Schick who is offering refill cartridges that fit Gillette razors, its market share has dropped from 70% to 50% over the past decade. Gillette has been forced to drop the price of its razors by about 15% over the past few years and is on the verge of losing master brand status.
“It is within this competitive context that Gillette debuted its ‘We Believe in the Best in Men’ ad campaign on its website yesterday, part of an overall shift to the slightly modified tag ‘The Best a Man Can Be.’ The 1:48 length video starts out with images of remarkably troubled looking men as a narrator makes reference to bullying, sexual harassment, and toxic masculinity. It then poses the question ‘Is This the Best a Man Can Get?’ The viewer then sees depictions of a series of very ugly and negative behaviors, including bullying, fighting, sexual harassment, and blatantly interfering with a woman speaking in the workplace. The ad goes on to state it is time for men to stop making excuses and to renounce the idea that ‘boys will be boys.’ Gillette concludes that by calling for and showing images of men holding other men accountable and emphasizing that the boys of today will be the men of tomorrow.”
I saw the ad, blinked twice, and threw all my razors into the trash.
In 2019, Glenn Reynolds of PJ Mdeia’s sister-site Instapundit.com responded to Gillette’s ad by noting that the real reason Gillette’s ad “really struck a nerve is this: Men are used to being treated badly on TV shows and in ads, because women control most discretionary spending. But now men are even being treated badly in ads for the products they themselves buy. Advertisers thinking they can get away with that is a pretty open expression of contempt. And the contempt is being returned.”
Pushing back against the Cultural Revolution
2020’s color revolution and the Biden-Harris era were right around the corner. But several years before “the Great Awokening,” some men tried to push back against these toxic trends, which were prevalent back then, but were beginning to accelerate exponentially in the establishment left. In the introduction to his 2013 book, Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness, Eric Metaxas described writing his book in part to push back from the Vietnam/Watergate-era leftist mindset of “questioning authority.” He writes, “you could say that we’ve gone all the way from foolishly accepting all authority to foolishly rejecting all authority. We’ve gone from the extreme of being naive to the other extreme of being cynical. The golden mean, where we would question authority in order to determine whether it was legitimate, was passed by entirely. We have fled from one icy pole to the other, missing the equator altogether.”
Metaxas added that in his opinion, what makes a man great is a combination of being near or at the center of a historic moment, and the ability to affect that moment, along with “that of surrendering themselves to a higher purpose, of giving something away that they might have kept. All of them did this in one way or another. Doing this is noble and admirable, and it takes courage and it usually takes faith. Each of the seven men in this book have that quality.”
In “Raising Good Men,” her interview with Metaxas at National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez asked him about why he chose the historic figures he profiled, beginning with George Washington. Lopez asked, “Did anyone really need to write anything new about George Washington?”
METAXAS: I don’t write anything new, nor was that my goal. On the contrary, I only wanted to reiterate the basics, because I’m afraid most Americans aren’t really aware of those basics about him anymore. It was once de rigueur in our schools to teach his story, but as I say in the introduction to this book, that’s no longer the case and this is having a baleful effect. We’ve so focused on the negative things about him that we have forgotten how superlatively great he was and what tremendous sacrifices he made. Every American needs to know his story.
LOPEZ: What was your goal and what do you think you accomplished in Seven Men?
METAXAS: I wanted to begin a cultural conversation on what men are and what they ought to be. We’ve gotten so confused on this subject that we’ve shrunk from it, and that’s been tremendously unhealthy. And as part of beginning this conversation, I wanted to hold up the examples of these seven men whom I think worthy of general emulation. These were real men who faced monumental difficulties with courage and grace. We need to educate ourselves — and the new generation — with these stories. We used to do that. Plutarch’s Lives was popular for centuries. Bonhoeffer actually was reading it during his last days on this earth. We need heroes very desperately, and these seven men are a good place to start.
Given the pop culture of the last 30 years or so, men particularly need heroes today to push back against how they’re depicted on TV. In Seven Men, Metaxas wrote:
One of the most popular TV shows of the 1950s was called Father Knows Best. It was a sweet portrayal of a wonderful and in many ways typical American family. The father, played by Robert Young, was the unquestioned authority, but his authority was never harsh or domineering. His strength was a quiet strength. In fact, he was gentle and wise and kind and giving—so much so that just about everyone watching the show wished their dad could be more like that! But of course today we tend to see fathers depicted in the mainstream media either as dunces or as overbearing fools.
Madison Ave. Overdoses on Irony
Fast-forward to today; the last bastion of network destination television that many American men watch on a regular basis is the NFL. We want to watch the games live, which means having to sit through endless amounts of TV ads. And when they’re not being shamed by corporations that want to sell them disposable razor blades, in most TV commercials, men are invariably portrayed as dunces or fools, or both.
In part, that’s because, unlike the 1990s Gillette commercial seen at the start of this post, when they’re not hectoring men as Gillette did in 2019, modern TV commercials are absolutely saturated in the sort of irony that used to be the province of David Letterman in the 1980s. Merrill Markoe was Letterman’s companion for most of that decade, and the head writer on his show, who invented many of its most popular tropes. In 2015, she was asked by Salon.com about the style of irony that Letterman traded in, and if it had “filtered more deeply into comedy in specific and American culture in general.” She replied:
Yes. It’s frequently the language of advertising and corporate P.R. now. It is the voice of what [musician Andy Prieboy of the rock group Wall of Voodoo, her longtime companion] calls “Your buddy the corporation.” Everyone’s hip. Everyone’s ironic. Everyone who is selling you something wants you to know they have the same limitations and daily strife that you do. You definitely should be wary when you hear this voice now. It’s not to be trusted. Unless you’re in the market for an aluminum cookware set or an Apple watch.
Because of that need for irony, TV commercials are required to be jokey and edgy, but the only group they can make fun of are men, because the sponsors would be accused of being sexist and misogynistic otherwise.
This trend went into hyperdrive by 2023. When Bud Light self-immolated that year, it wasn’t just because of hiring Dylan Mulvaney to help sell the beer most associated with men; it was also the words that Alissa Heinerscheid, their then vice-president of advertising, said on a podcast in March of 2023:
“I’m a businesswoman, I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was ‘This brand is in decline, it’s been in a decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand there will be no future for Bud Light.’”
She also said, “We had this hangover, I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
Two days later, she solved the problem of too many frat bros quaffing her beer. She signed Dylan Mulvaney up as a spokesman-pretending-to-be-a-spokeswoman and voila! No more frat bros hogging all the beer. Sales dropped and she became the FIRST WOMAN vice president of the brand to be fired.
As with Gillette, bashing your male customers and mocking them with a transvestite performance artist like Mulvaney is not a way to build your brand, which is why Heinerscheid was eventually shown the door. But the damage was done; “Bud Lighting” became a codeword for woke, virtue signaling executives dynamiting their brand’s sales into oblivion.
In Seven Men, Metaxas wrote:
[B]ecause men have sometimes used their strength selfishly, there has been a backlash against the whole idea of masculine strength. It has been seen—and portrayed—as something negative. If you buy into that idea, then you realize the only way to deal with it is to work against it, to try to weaken men, because whatever strength they have will be used to harm others. This leads to the emasculated idea of men. Strength is denigrated because it can be used for ill. So we live in a culture where strength is feared and where there is a sense that—to protect the weak—strength itself must be weakened. When this happens, the heroic and true nature of strength is much forgotten. It leads to a world of men who aren’t really men. Instead they are just two kinds of boys: boasting, loud-mouthed bullies or soft, emasculated pseudo-men. Women feel that they must be “empowered” and must never rely on men for strength. It’s a lot like a socialistic idea, where “power” and “strength” are redistributed—taken away from men and given to women, to even things out. Of course it doesn’t work that way. Everyone loses.
The knight in shining armor who does all he can to protect others, the gentleman who lays down his cloak or opens a door for a lady—these are Christian ideals of manliness. Jesus said that he who would lead must be the servant of all. It’s the biblical idea of servant leadership. The true leader gives himself to the people he leads. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. Jesus died for those he loves. That is God’s idea of strength and leadership and blessing. It’s something to be used in the service of others. So God’s idea of masculine strength gives us the idea of a chivalrous gentleman toward women, not a bully or someone who sees no difference between himself and them.
Those are all noble ideas; no wonder academia, advertising, and pop culture have worked extremely hard to make them anathema.
