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  • Quarter-zip Trip — Toward Tradition? Gen Z Moves “Right” With New Clothing Trend

    Two young men stand together, dressed in quarter-zip sweaters and a scarf, smiling and engaging in conversation.
    Image credit: ABC7NY/YouTube

    By Selwyn Duke

    It’s said that the “clothes make the man,” but do they also make the civilization? What’s for sure is that they reflect it, and America’s sartorial slouching these last decades hasn’t reflected well on her. As standards have dropped and laxity increases, we’ve seen deliberately frumpy young women and kids attending school in pajamas. But if a new fashion trend is any guide, there now may be a counterrevolution brewing against the bum look. If so, this change may end up being more than superficial, too. For a body of research (and common sense) shows that dress style actually influences human behavior.

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  • “Trumpism” Is Here to Stay: There’s Not “Going to Be a Return to Old Republicanism”

    Close-up of a speaking male figure in a suit with a pink tie, delivering a speech at a podium with the presidential seal. American flags are visible in the background.

    By Selwyn Duke

    Establishment Republicans may not like the MAGA movement. Establishment Republicans may want it to disappear. Establishment Republicans may hope it’s going to soon run its course.

    Establishment Republicans’ hopes are in vain.

    So says Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, one of America’s most influential think tanks. Who is he really, though, that we should put stock in such a prognostication?

    Answer: the latest in a long line of observers who’ve predicted likewise.

    “Trumpism Is The New American Phenomenon And It’s Here To Stay,” declared a July News X World headline.

    “Trumpism Is Here to Stay,” stated a June headline at the American Mind.

    “Trumpism Is Here to Stay,” proclaimed a 2021 headline at The American Spectator.

    “Why Trumpism is here to stay,” read a 2020 headline at The Hill.

    I don’t know who’s being original and who, if anyone, is being plagiarized but, well, you get the idea. There’s a chorus of voices. But assuming this Trumpism-staying-power thesis is correct, perhaps understanding why rests in grasping that it isn’t actually “Trumpism.” It’s far older.

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  • Affordability Crisis? Perspective and Propaganda

    Abstract illustration of a tree structure made of directional yellow signs pointing in various directions against a blue background.

    By Selwyn Duke

    Some politics wonks may remember 2010’s JournoList scandal. It was revealed that hundreds of left-wing journalists, academics, and political activists had been colluding via a private online gathering place and coordinating strategies and talking points. In other words, the “independent” media people certainly weren’t independent of each other; they were operating as a hive mind.

    Thus could we see revelatory video montages of liberal media figures all uttering the same lines — and thus do we still. And another example may be the now-common mantra about an “affordability crisis.”

    Interestingly, too, we didn’t hear this when the consumer price index (CPI, aka “inflation”) was 9.1 percent under Joe Biden. Yet we do now that it’s 3.0 percent under President Donald Trump.

    So what’s the truth? Is there really an “affordability crisis” — in particular, relative to the Biden years? Or is there just an ongoing honesty crisis in the once-mainstream media (which helps explain why it’s “once-mainstream”)? Commentator Bill O’Reilly examined this last week, offering the straight dope on what’s up, what’s down, and what’s, maybe, comin’ ’round.

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  • Man Who Said Men and Women Have Different Skeletons Jailed for Hate Speech

    An illustration of a giant businessman's shoe poised to step on a smaller man, symbolizing oppression and power dynamics.

    By Selwyn Duke

    When they found Ötzi, the Copper Age European whose remains were discovered in the Alps a few decades back, they nicknamed him The Iceman because they absolutely could identify him as having been a man. But maybe the forensic anthropologists making such determinations should be put in the pokey. That is, if the experience of a modern European, a hapless man named Emanuel Brünisholz, is any guide.

    After all, the Swiss wind-instrument repairman currently sits in jail for doing something related.

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  • Citizenship Clause Surreality: The Clause’s OWN Author Said it Doesn’t Include Aliens

    By Selwyn Duke

    Early in my commentary career, I found myself debating the meaning of one of my articles in an online chat with a woman who’d read the piece. Why the argument? Well, I was mischievous, I’ll confess, and, having a little fun, didn’t tell her I was the author. Towards our interaction’s conclusion she told me, quite confidently, that I didn’t understand what the writer was trying to say! (I lack self-knowledge, I guess.)

    At least, though, inherent in the exchange was the idea that original intent matters. I mention this because people today often behave as if it’s irrelevant. Just consider, for instance, the “birthright citizenship” issue, currently before the Supreme Court.

    Do you know that Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, a man who coauthored the Citizenship Clause, clearly explained what we’re all now arguing about? Read on.

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  • The Great Worker Replacement? Trump Admin Turns to Humanoid Robots for Productivity

    A digitally manipulated image of a woman with a robotic face, featuring mechanical components integrated into her head, set against a background of binary code and a world map.

    By Selwyn Duke

    A quarter-century ago, Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy wrote the jarring essay, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” He warned that new technologies threatened to make humans obsolete (if not endangered). Now that future is nigh.

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  • Climate Alarmism Downgraded: The World Is Still Ending — but Only a Little Bit

    A sunset view with clouds forming the letters 'CO2' in the sky, over a landscape featuring distant city skyline and open fields.

    By Selwyn Duke

    There may be a reason why, according to an AI analysis, approximately 40 percent of global-warming girl Greta Thunberg’s recent activism has involved anything but global warming. And it could just be because, as a commentator recently noted, the “climate alarmists are not ‘alarming’ anymore.”

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  • Federal Judges Are Now a “Form of Tyranny,” Warns Former Litigator

    A judge in a black robe shouting angrily while sitting at a courtroom bench.

    By Selwyn Duke

    “I know what the law is, but I think…” This statement, which an ex-litigator actually heard from a judge, epitomized a phenomenon she observed repeatedly.

    That is, she saw, as she puts it, “left-leaning judges make up the law as they went along.”

    As a litigator in the hard-left San Francisco Bay Area for 30 years, Andrea Widburg certainly was in the right place to observe such judicial fauna. Yet this is a gross violation of their duty, she also points out, while quoting late SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia.

    “The judge who always likes the results he reaches,” he once noted, “is a bad judge.”

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  • Will Derek Chauvin Be Freed? There’s Now a Serious Challenge to the Ex-cop’s Conviction

    By Selwyn Duke

    Alfred Dreyfus, Leo Frank, the Scottsboro Boys, Stefan Kiszko — legion are the cases of men being wrongly convicted, then exonerated. And now a question arises:

    Will the case of ex-cop Derek Chauvin, found guilty in 2021 of killing criminal George Floyd, someday be among them?

    The answer will be yes if attorney Greg Joseph, who’s now representing Chauvin, has his way. Joseph filed a “Memorandum in support of petition for postconviction relief” on November 20 for the former officer. He’s seeking to vacate Chauvin’s conviction and obtain a new trial.

    Joseph’s filing “challenges what he describes as abusive prosecutorial conduct and the presentation of misleading or false testimony during Chauvin’s trial,” reported commentator John Dale Dunn, M.D. on Sunday. Among the bombshells, reported Alpha News recently, is that

    50 former and current officers provided sworn declarations stating that the technique used by Derek Chauvin was part of MPD [Minneapolis Police Department] training.

    This is significant because central to the case against the officer is that he used an illegal restraint on Floyd.

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  • Warning: Pseudo-elites Encouraging Immigrants to Segregate, Not Assimilate

    A large group of people walking along a dirt path, flanked by trees and tall grass, creating a visible migration or movement.

    By Selwyn Duke

    “Everybody, in all mainstream political parties and media … would laugh — laugh — about the word assimilation,” lamented journalist Mikael Jalving in 2014. It “is a Nazi word in Sweden [now]”

    What kind of people was Danish journalist Jalving talking about? A good example is Swedish multiculturalist Mona Sahlin. Commenting on her land’s Islamization in 2001, she actually said that “the Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden.” The “old Sweden is never coming back.”

    And, warns a top immigration expert, like-minded, powerful pseudo-elites in America have the same attitude today. “Citizens of the world,” they dislike their country and culture, eschew Americanization, and thus discourage assimilation. Only, they’re not as forthcoming as Sahlin about their aims.

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