The performer known as Erika Kwerk has posted videos on TikTok dressing up, lip syncing, and dancing to clips of Kirk's speeches, raking in millions of views and even fundraising for the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU]
In August of 2022, a resident of Denton, Texas, appeared before his school board to demand the removal of a salacious library book. He read aloud passages from the novel describing detailed sexual acts. But the book he was reading from, Love Lies Beneath, wasn't actually available in the school district's libraries. He had confused the sexy psychological thriller with Lies Beneath, a young-adult novel about mermaids.
Donald Trump added another job title awards host to his presidential portfolio on Sunday when he took charge of the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, claiming his show was getting rave reviews even before it ended. The US president stayed away from the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts during his first term. But since returning to office in January, he has made the complex a lightning rod in a broader attack against what he has branded woke anti-American culture.
From Texas to Pennsylvania to Ohio, Democrat-backed candidates ran successful campaigns in some of the nation's largest school systems and in political battlegrounds. They emphasized test scores and bus safety over debates about which bathrooms transgender students use and banning books from school libraries. The result was a set of election results at the local level that accentuated the punishment meted out against Republicans by swing voters earlier this month.
"I take a lot of inspiration from our founders, who opened up in a complicated moment," Golden says. "My own career began in the midst of the culture wars of [the nineteen-nineties]. Understanding museums as a place that should be, can be, must be where we engage deeply in ideas-in this moment, that has to offer some hope as we consider a future."
The poll - which interviewed 4,027 people aged 16+ between 21 and 27 August 2025 - revealed there is no longer a majority of British citizens who feel 'pride' in their country, there are rising tension between those who are immigrants and British born, more people are feeling nostalgia for the past, many believe the country is changing too quickly and culture war issues are seen as a key dividing issue.
Now, in Donald Trump's second administration, that parallel economy is just the economy. Trumpist culture wars have made almost everything more expensive, effectively forcing all Americans to pay an anti-woke tax. Although conservatives usually use woke to describe some form of egalitarianism they oppose, it's proved such an effective epithet that they're now applying the label to anything they need their constituents to dislike.
Language policing. Cancel culture. Victimhood contests and cultural grievances. Despite attacking the left for partaking in such practices, there's an emerging set of individuals on the right who have became exactly what they've criticized. Meet the woke right. Thank you, President Trump, for ending a scourge that's plagued our nation for far too long. We've gotten rid of the woke. Woke no longer. Just kidding. The truth is, wokeness is actually alive and well.
Bad Bunny represents none of these values; his drag performances and style are the opposite of what families expect on football's biggest stage. Again, George Strait embodies unity, tradition, and the timeless American music that truly deserves the 2026 Super Bowl spotlight.
US national security expert Kori Schake warns that President Trump is asking the US military to fight his culture wars. Arguing that some places in the United States primarily those governed by Democratic officials are rampantly crime-infested, President Donald Trump has been deploying military forces to cities from Los Angeles to Washington, DC. Former National Security Council official Kori Schake tells host Steve Clemons that
Spanberger: My opponent has previously said that she does not think that gay couples should be allowed to marry. Earle-Sears interrupted: That's not discrimination. Spanberger continued: [Earle-Sears] said that she is morally opposed to same-sex marriage. Earle-Sears added again: That's not discrimination. Spanberger: My opponent has also previously said that she thinks it's okay for someone to be fired from their job for being gay. That is discrimination. Earle-Sears: That's not discrimination.
In 2018, Bari Weiss, then an opinion columnist at the Times, wrote about the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, a loose "alliance of heretics" who were "making an end run around the mainstream conversation." Adherents were photographed for the article in literally dark settings: glowering out from under an umbrella, perched amid mossy branches, standing half-obscured by bushes. Though they came from different ideological backgrounds, Weiss wrote, these figures-including Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Peter Thiel's venture-capital fund, who had "half-jokingly" coined the movement's name;
During the summer of 2020, when protests convulsed cities around the world, one of the most striking scenes took place outside a library in a wealthy Maryland suburb. Eight days after George Floyd was killed, hundreds of white people-masked yet packed together-assembled in Bethesda with banners that read I can't breathe. Then they thrust their hands to the sky and prayed, vowing to renounce the "white privilege" that marked them like original sin.
Happily, The Atlantic's garden bursts with the former and is almost entirely lacking in the latter, and in this new project of daily quizzes, I get to share a bunch of that trivia with you, curious readers. So set down the Snapple cap and stop to smell the blooms-is that geranium?-with questions from recently published stories. To get these questions in your inbox every day, sign up for The Atlantic Monday, September 29, 2025
The lengthy, bizarre political career of New York City Mayor Eric Adams has arrived at its inevitable, ignominious end. On Sunday afternoon-just weeks after insisting he was not dropping out of the race and taking a job with the Trump administration-Adams tweeted a suitably overwrought video from the steps of Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence, declaring that he was no longer seeking a second term,
In mid-July, Pierre Poilievre was apparently feeling very glum. Sources close to the Conservative leader told the CBC that he was deliberately reducing his public appearances. He was doing some self-reflection. One confidant described him as "deflated." The idea that Poilievre-a man whose tight T-shirt chest puffing had become a campaign trademark-was hiding out in a corner like an old party balloon was indeed quite the image to contemplate.
Conway hosted Friday's Hannity, where she pointed to recent comments by the restaurant's founder, who cast the ill-fated logo change in grim terms. If they don't get back to keeping the country, then it ain't gonna work, he said. Conway's guest went even further, stating that the failed logo change was part of a much larger sinister undertow of our culture led by the radical Marxist left.
T hroughout the culture war flareups of the last fifteen years or so, liberals and conservatives have periodically traded fire over matters that are fundamentally symbolic and often negligible to meaningless at the level of actual political substance. In their own different (and often quite cynical) ways, both factions have been adept at converting cultural issues into the language of political grievance and, in turn, into supposed forms of political engagement-and even activism-that have often amounted to little more than new kinds of shopping
There's a lot of history to our country, both positive and negative, but we need to keep moving forward. We can't just keep focusing on the negative-all that does is divide us," she added. "Like just about every other country in the world, the United States has a checkered past. We should be able to take our kids, our students through the Smithsonian and be proud when we leave.
"If you're coming from these states, you will take a test through the state department to show you're aligned to our standards," Walters said in a press conference in late July. "You're not going to come here and teach that there's 27 genders ... you're not going to undermine American exceptionalism by teaching anti-American and anti-semitic hate."
Rand's contemporary disciples, who are many and very illustrious, have not lost sight of the lesson of the mother of objectivism and fertile narcissism.
