The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sued the Trump administration on Tuesday for launching an investigation into its guidance on sex-change procedures for minors. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began probing in January whether the AAP and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) made “unsubstantiated representations or engaged in unfair practices” in their […]

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Column Science Fiction Film Club Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel: A Disorienting Twist on the Classic Locked-Room Mystery A detective story gets very weird, thanks to the Strugatsky brothers and some aliens. By Kali Wallace | Published on February 18, 2026 Credit: Tallinnfilm Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Tallinnfilm Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (“Hukkunud Alpinisti” hotell) (1979) Directed by Grigori Kromanov. Written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, based on their novel of the same name. Starring Uldis Pūcītis, Jüri Järvet, Lembit Peterson, and Mikk Mikiver. A car creeps along a snow-covered road, surrounded on all sides by high, jagged peaks. It’s headed toward an isolated hotel that sits alone in a vast wilderness. A voiceover provides a framing device from the driver’s point of view: This is his memory of something that happened years ago, something he has not told anybody about, because he does not know how to tell them. The music is sparse and eerie. The mountains are so steep they could be cliffs. Hang gliders soar over the valley. The film’s opening is not, in fact, a snowy homage to the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980); this movie came out a year before that one and was filmed at about the same time. But the films’ opening minutes have similar effects, carrying the audience and the narrative directly into a beautiful but remote mountainous unknown, with the soundtrack confidently warning us that something bad will happen. Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel takes place in the mountains of some unnamed, possibly imaginary, Western European country, but in reality the exterior scenes were filmed in the Tien Shan of Kazakhstan. The production built the hotel’s façade for the wide shots and exterior scenes. In some places, the mountain backdrops are actually collages made up of silver paper. The interior scenes were filmed in Tallin, Estonia; the filmmakers built the interior of the hotel, with that maze of hallways and staircases, inside a then-new sports complex. It was an expensive project for the time, but the effort and expense were very much worth it, because it’s a beautiful movie. More than that, it’s just so aesthetically interesting in the composition and style of even individual scenes. Director Grigori Kromanov and cinematographer Jüri Sillart, both of them renowned and well-respected in the Estonian film world, crafted a film that looks as strange as it feels, with blindingly bright daylight contrasted against artfully dark interiors, long smooth pans and abrupt shaky cam moments, odd angles and uncomfortable close-ups, and a cast of characters who look more and more uncanny as the story progresses. The electronic score by Sven Grünberg is also great; it’s odd and understated and sets an unsettling tone from the start. The car’s driver is a cop, Inspector Peter Glebsky (Uldis Pūcītis—Pūcītis was the only Latvian actor in an otherwise fully Estonian cast; his dialogue is dubbed by Aarne Üksküla.) He has come to the eponymous Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel to follow up on a tip from a mysterious phone call, which told him there was crime afoot. He heads into the dark, shadowy interior, which is dominated by a neon-lit portrait of the dead mountaineer (who looks a little bit like John Lennon). The climber fell to his death and left a very good dog behind. The dog, Lell (played by an uncredited St. Bernard), is very large and very fluffy and I want to hug him. The hotel’s manager, Alex Snewahr (Jüri Järvet), tells Glebsky that no crime has occurred and he’s not sure why the police were called. Glebsky calls his captain to tell him there’s nothing wrong at the hotel, but he’ll just stay overnight rather than make the journey back down. He also says there is fog in the mountains, which is funny because the exterior scenes show a crystal clear day with visibility for miles, but who can blame him for wanting a night off work? Glebsky meets the other guests at the hotel: the consumptive businessman Hinckus (Mikk Mikiver), the amorous young hang gliders Olaf (Tiit Härm) and Brun (Nijolė Oželytė), the eccentric physicist Simon Simonet (Lembit Peterson), the sour Mr. Moses (Kārlis Sebris) and flirtatious Mrs. Moses (Irena Kriauzaitė). Most of them enjoy dinner, billiards, drinks, and dancing as night falls. Many of the guests are very eccentric, but there’s no sign of anything illegal—not until Glebsky discovers that somebody has slipped a note into his pocket to warn him that Hinckus is a notorious criminal. That’s when things start to get weird. And when they get weird, they get very weird. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky published their novel The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (or Inn) (Отель «У Погибшего Альпиниста») in 1970, and it’s a bit of an odd duck in their long and prolific careers as renowned sci fi writers. Boris Strugatsky wrote in his memoir that they conceived of the book because they wanted to play around with the tropes found in classic English-language detective fiction. These tropes are easily recognizable, even if one doesn’t read much from the Golden Era of detective fiction; they are the genre conventions that go along with a mystery writer playing fair with the reader, such as assuming that the killer will be among the named characters, the reader should have the necessary information for solving the crime, and the explanation should be realistic and rational. The Strugatsky brothers were sci fi writers, so of course they wanted to twist that requirement for a detective story to be firmly grounded in mundane reality by crafting a story that begins in one genre before veering into another. In the end, they didn’t think it was a successful literary experiment, but I haven’t read it, so I don’t know if they were being too hard on themselves. If anybody has read it, I would love to hear what you think in comments! (There is a 2015 English translation by Josh Billings that’s readily available.) That literary genre experiment underlies the film version as well, as the Strugatsky brothers also wrote the screenplay. (I have no idea if there was a translator involved; I looked around but couldn’t find any info about that.) I think that experiment is a big part of what makes the movie so interesting, even though it might not quite work overall. We enter the story firmly in Glebsky’s point of view and remain there throughout. He is comfortable in his position of authority. He believes in law and order. He is convinced that he is more rational than everybody around him. He certainly doesn’t believe in any nonsense like aliens or zombies. Now, as anybody who has ever argued with anybody on the internet knows, there is little in the world less trustworthy than the perspective of a man who believes himself uniquely intelligent and rational. When odd events start happening at the Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, Glebsky is completely unequipped to handle it. A whole lot of things happen, and while I always take notes, I may have gotten the order of some of these wrong: An avalanche cuts the hotel off from the rest of the world. Simonet tells Glebsky that Mrs. Moses is dead, but it turns out she’s just fine. Glebsky finds Hinckus tied to his bed, and Hinckus claims it was a doppelganger who tied him up. Olaf actually is dead, and Glebsky confiscates a suitcase from the crime scene that contains a strange technological device nobody can explain. A stranger named Luarvik (Sulev Luik) emerges suddenly from the wilderness and demands to see Olaf, even though he can’t explain how he knows Olaf or even what Olaf looks like. He also wants the mysterious suitcase. Sometimes people appear to shapeshift. Hinckus admits to being a member of a criminal gang, so Glebsky is briefly vindicated. But it doesn’t last, because the next thing he knows Simonet is telling him that Mr. Moses and Luarvik are extraterrestrial visitors from another world, while Mrs. Moses and Olaf are their robot companions. They were never supposed to get involved with humans, but Mr. Moses kinda sorta accidentally joined Hinckus’ group of criminals and terrorists (the subtitles on the version I watched switched between those terms), thinking he was helping humanity with some noble fight. The aliens want Olaf’s suitcase back so they can leave Earth. They are in danger, they explain, because they are believed to be terrorists, the military is looking for them, and they will be killed if they can’t get away. We can’t really blame Glebsky for responding to this revelation with “lol wtf.” That’s a fair reaction when somebody tells you they are aliens from outer space. The trouble is, he knows that there is more to their story. His gut is telling him there is something weird going on here. But he refuses to entertain his doubts, even though he is sympathetic toward the strangers. He can’t explain the doppelgangers, the shapeshifting, the people who are dead but not dead, and so he doesn’t try. He just decides that’s not how things work. It doesn’t fit into his view of the world as a rational place and of himself as a rational person, so he dismisses their story against his own instincts. He desperately wants to be able to appeal to authority. He wants his police captain to tell him what to do, but the phone lines are still down. So Glebsky does not help them. That’s left to Simonet and Snewahr, who restrain Glebsky long enough to return the suitcase. It’s too late, however, because a military helicopter is already on the way to hunt down the supposed terrorists, and it kills the alien visitors as they are trying to flee. It must be said that the fact that they try to flee by, uh, speed-gliding across the snow on the backs of their robots makes this scene a bit silly rather than tense. That is unfortunate, as it’s exactly the wrong point in the film to laugh at unintentional humor. But they look so silly—then they get blown up, and it’s not silly anymore. It’s a dark ending, but the real kicker comes in the tag at the end. We circle back to Glebsky’s opening voiceover, when he’s recalling the incident from some time afterward. He’s sitting in room, speaking plainly and directly, justifying his decision. He did the right thing, he says, because he was doing his duty as an officer of the law. He reasons that if they were criminals, they got what they deserved, and if they weren’t criminals, they weren’t people, and why should he care what happens to them? It’s such a chilling statement to end on. It’s also perhaps a bit unusual that so obvious a critique of authority passed the Soviet censors in a state-funded movie made for mainstream release—but, of course, that’s why the film is set in an unnamed Western European country, why the secret criminal messages are written in French, why the characters have names like Moses and Simonet. I guess you could slip political commentary past the censors as long as you pretended to be criticizing the French. So many alien visitation films are a way of nudging us to ask questions about ourselves and our treatment of people we regard as “the other”: How do we react when we meet people who aren’t like us? Do we fixate on similarities or differences? How do we treat people who are strange, unexpected, or frightening? Sometimes that premise is made wholesome and heartwarming by focusing on the humans who help, such as in Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), E.T. (1982) and Starman (1984). Sometimes it’s bittersweet commentary on human connection, such as Man Facing Southeast (1986). And sometimes it’s an obvious metaphor meant to say a specific thing about a particular topic, like The Man Who Fell To Earth (1979) and The Brother From Another Planet (1984). Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel goes about it in a somewhat inside-out way, as it’s told from the point of view of the representative of authority who is so often the antagonist in other films. It offers a grim but believable answer to the question of what a person who believes himself to be righteous might do when faced with people who don’t fit into his rigid worldview: follow orders, refuse to bend, and justify violence by insisting the other deserves it. Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel was reasonably popular when it was released; one article states that more than 17 million people watched it in the year after its release, although I don’t know where they got that number from. That’s a small number for Russian-language Soviet films in the ’70s and ’80s, but it’s a huge number for an Estonian film. The movie is a bit more obscure these days, but it retains a small and steady cadre of admirers both within Estonian film circles and more broadly among cinephiles who like an odd, beautiful genre-bending experiment. I think I can confidently count myself among that number now, because I quite liked this film. It has shaky parts that don’t quite work, but I’d rather a film (or book, story, etc.) try something strange and fail than not try anything interesting at all. It has such a weird story and a cool, unsettling visual style that I was fully engrossed all the way through. What did you think of Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel? You won’t judge me if I admit I added this film to my list initially because I liked the title, will you? Next week: We wrap up our month of alien visitors with a trip to Scotland in Under the Skin. Find it streaming in a few places.[end-mark] The post <i>Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel</i>: A Disorienting Twist on the Classic Locked-Room Mystery appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Star Trek: Starfleet Academy How the Ghosts of the Past Haunt Starfleet Academy’s Future The revenants of Star Trek’s past inform where it’s going — and that might be a good thing. By Val Nolan | Published on February 18, 2026 Credit: Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Paramount+ Grab your raktajinos, activate your spoiler warnings, and take your seats, cadets; class is now in session! What class, you ask? Maybe Advanced Subspace Geometry? Perhaps Xenolinguistics? No, it’s something even more exciting… Cultural Criticism! Specifically that of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his notion of hauntology. Admittedly Derrida can be a tough read but, broadly speaking, hauntology (which is a pun: “haunting” + “ontology”, the latter being, well, the study of being) offers a framework for understanding how big and transformative ideas, though they may seem defeated, never really go away. Hauntology is the kind of philosophy—or cultural/literary criticism more broadly—which can often sound like science fiction (ontological shock at disharmonic anachrony, anyone? Wasn’t that an episode of Voyager?!). It comes complete with its own technobabble, canon of texts, and occasional reboots or retcons, as well as its own very niche, very passionate fandom. These days it is often interpreted as an inability to imagine a future (partly but not exclusively on account of how influential British academic Mark Fisher deployed the term) but that reading is more applicable to, say, a prequel series such as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. In the case of Starfleet Academy, however, we find something which is both much closer to Derrida’s original conception of hauntology as well serving as a toolkit to help us unlock the deeper themes behind the show: a series of metaphorical ghosts which emphasize vital connections between the past, the present, and the future. Essential to this is how Starfleet Academy takes place in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event known as The Burn, a disaster which has disarticulated the narrative of the franchise’s storyworld. The Burn is a literal historical rupture which has left time, to quote Derrida quoting Shakespeare, “out of joint” (for Derrida, “time” here broadly encompasses “history” among other things). In fact, spacetime itself has been left out of joint after The Burn in a manner extensively explored on Star Trek: Discovery. On that series, the largely collapsed Federation is reintroduced as a specter without a body, a quasi-secret concealed behind a distortion field whose representatives are rare and frequently intangible (consider the holographic Starfleet officers glimpsed via recordings in the episode “Su’Kal”). After The Burn, the myth of progress and forward momentum (particularly that of the Federation) has been left askew. The galaxy is thus haunted in this era. It is haunted by the lost idea of the United Federation of Planets (something we see throughout Discovery’s third season in particular, especially through the eyes of characters such as Aditya Sahil). However, if much of Discovery was about mourning the Federation, Starfleet Academy is about rebuilding it (that’s right there in the imagery of the opening credits). Because here the revolutionary idea of the Federation comes back. Though of course it has, technically, already come back by the end of Discovery, so Starfleet Academy essentially begins with this specter returning again (which is very Derrida; it’s a notion he derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet). As such, the narrative gestures of Starfleet Academy are largely resurrectional in nature. The most obvious example is how the USS Athena’s arrival at Earth—and so the institution’s physical return to its old campus in San Francisco for the first time in over a century—is depicted as a significant moment of rebirth (as, for that matter, is the emergence of new Academy buildings from the ground in the title sequence). But, more than these visual cues, it is among the teaching staff of Starfleet Academy that we see the greatest hauntological energy. Here we find a preponderance of specters in the Derridean sense, what the philosopher calls “revenants” (a term which he borrows from folklore and meaning a returned spirit or resurrected corpse). And while we could get bogged down in differentiating specters from spirits or from ghosts (in any event, all true Star Trek fans know that ghosts live in candles), that’s not strictly necessary to appreciate what’s going on here. It is perhaps more illustrative to picture Derrida’s go-to example of a revenant in literature, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the kind of urging figure which, as academic Kathy Shaw says, “confronts the contemporary with the necessity of participation.” Which is to say that such characters, and Academy has an abundance of them, typically call on protagonists to put things right. Doing this, Derrida says, asks characters not just to “learn to live with ghosts” (a reasonable description of the post-Burn era), but to speak of them, to them, and with them. This is something which Starfleet Academy cleverly literalizes by marshalling a variety of common science fiction tropes—the alien, the time traveler, the hologram, and even the ascended being—in order to depict multiple avatars of the Federation’s golden age (as well as some of the franchise’s most significant iterations), all without the concept becoming repetitive. We can in fact arrange the show’s characters on a spectrum of revenants in fascinating fashion. On the most straightforward level, Captain Ake is a 420-year-old educator who was there centuries earlier when Starfleet was “at its best” and who still remembers how the Federation used to be (this is, in fact, why she is tasked with the role of Academy chancellor). Half-Lanthanite, Ake is said to experience time differently from other humanoid species. She begins the series by coming back to Starfleet (again we see the Derridean return) after leaving the organization for fifteen years on a matter of conscience. Credit: Paramount+ While she may not be of the show’s present (or, at least, not entirely of the show’s present), Ake actively shapes those who are about to come of age in that present (with her cadets further symbolic of the future-to-come). She is, to take a big hit of Derrida, a “disjointure in the very presence of the present, [a] sort of non-contemporaneity of present time with itself.” As such, Ake embodies what academics such as Shaw see as the “dual directions of hauntology”: both the presence of the past and the anticipation of the future. The perspective which this provides the character is crucial in setting the tenor of the Academy. Her resulting idiosyncrasies grant permission for the next generation to live life joyfully and messily (#TeachableMoments). Next on our hauntological spectrum we find Commander Jett Reno, who jumped almost a thousand years into the future aboard the USS Discovery in that series, and so is a revenant who begins by physically/temporally coming back from the past (“I should not be here,” as she says in her introduction). Entirely in keeping with the franchise’s tone, she attributes her return to the laws of physics rather than something supernatural as in Derrida’s examples (that said, she almost immediately asks cadet Caleb if he’s ever seen a ghost, flagging up more traditional conceptions of haunting). Reno so, in addition to supplying deadpan humor, brings to the Academy a lived experience of the Federation’s early years. Further along the spectrum again we come to The Doctor. This character’s return is more metafictional in nature (and more substantially so than, say, Reno’s): a return to the franchise after his time on Star Trek: Voyager in the late 1990s (and a return rehearsed more recently on the second season of the frankly wonderful Star Trek: Prodigy). On Starfleet Academy, The Doctor serves as a witness to seven hundred years of galactic history. As a hologram, he already exhibits a spectral incorporeality (Caleb’s hand passes through his arm in their first encounter) but he doubles down on that here with a tendency to “pop in now and then” by appearing out of nowhere (or, if you prefer to see him in the fashion of the Derridean revenant, “one cannot control [his] comings and goings”!) Where Reno lived through the first century of the Federation and Ake lived through its collapse, The Doctor represents a broader experience of its ups and downs throughout a great sward of the human calendar’s third millennium. Nonetheless (and please remember your spoiler warning!), Starfleet Academy’s truest revenant must be Deep Space Nine’s Captain Benjamin Sisko. In the episode “Series Acclimation Mil,” Sisko appears but does not appear. He is both present and absent. He is simultaneously dead (in the Fire Caves of Bajor) and alive (assumed into the Celestial Temple). Though not a member of the teaching staff, the character is a tangible influence on cadet SAM in particular (“completely changed me, my whole life,” she says). Sisko further displays the paternal quality of the revenant which Derrida draws from Hamlet. He is the avatar of the father, or the “Anslem,” that being the Bajoran word for “father.” This is of course literal in the case of his son Jake—who here manifests in revenant-adjacent holographic form—but also, metaphorically, in the case of the equally holographic SAM who looks up to the elder Sisko as a role model. Yet what further elevates Sisko on the revenant spectrum is the unreality of his presence (helped, perhaps counterintuitively, by Avery Brooks’s retirement from acting). Sisko’s image is prominently displayed on the screens in the Academy classroom as one of the unexplainable mysteries of the last thousand years, however, as with Hamlet’s father, we never see his face. This is a rights issue, surely, but it is used smartly by the show’s creators. By essentially shrouding Sisko’s face in shadows, the character appears to look out from the screen at SAM (and, to an extent, at the audience) without himself being seen in much the same way the ghost of Hamlet’s father looks out from behind the visor of his armor. The revenant therefore observes without being observed in a way which prefigures the spectral suggestion of Sisko’s face in the clouds over San Francisco at the end of the episode. Of course, in Derridean fashion, the ultimate revenant requires a scholar—as Marcellus calls for in the opening scene of Hamlet—in order to interpret the specter. But, crucially, Derrida maintained that the scholar, who he characterized primarily as an observer or a recorder of events, may not the best person to speak to the specter (“It is offended,” Marcellus remarks of Horatio’s failed attempt to speak to the ghost; “’Tis gone and will not answer”). Thus Illa Dax, the Academy’s professor of the unexplainable, literal witness to Sisko’s life, and another candidate for revenant (on the spectrum somewhere between Ake and The Doctor) is able to guide SAM in her investigation; however, it is only SAM herself who can successfully speak to Sisko as she is revealed to be doing in the episode’s final moments. Credit: John Medland/Paramount+ In this way, Illa Dax is emblematic of how, together, the Derridean “radical untimeliness” of Starfleet Academy’s various revenants challenges the cadets to understand the Federation’s past as a stepping stone to imagining a new version of its post-Burn future. The show’s young characters are thus called upon, as Derrida and any number of temporal agents might have it, “to put time on the right path, to do right, to render justice, and to redress history.” The show’s rhetorical strategy is to tackle this in a manner which, in the best spirit of science fiction, prompts audience reflection upon the ills of our own world. In such a light, Ake’s assertion that democracy “lives in continuous action” certainly hits home in the present moment. Hauntology therefore reveals itself as a powerful theme for Starfleet Academy, one particularly apt in this year of Star Trek’s 60th anniversary (the new celebratory intro which debuted at the start of Academy episodes is just one signifier of this). It is obviously not the only way to interpret the series, but watching Starfleet Academy through this lens makes visible deeply embedded storytelling elements and techniques which, in the longstanding tradition of Star Trek, resonate with our real world (such as how The Burn serves as a stand-in for any number of hugely disruptive twenty-first century events). Applying some of Derrida’s ideas to Starfleet Academy is thus both a fun thought experiment and an unexpected means of appreciating the decisions behind why many of the show’s characters were chosen to begin with. Fittingly, it also asks questions of us, the viewers and fans, about how we see the connective narrative tissue between the past and the future. It offers a different way of thinking about a different type of Star Trek, one which has been created to reflect the anxieties which haunt our present day. Indeed, just maybe, it is an illustration of why Starfleet Academy is the Star Trek we need right now.[end-mark] The post How the Ghosts of the Past Haunt Starfleet Academy’s Future appeared first on Reactor.

At this year’s Grammy awards, pop artist Billie Eilish made national headlines not for her music, but for a political statement wrapped in an award acceptance speech. After thanking her supporters and fellow artists, she added, “As grateful as I feel, I honestly don’t feel like I need to say anything, but, that no one is illegal on stolen land.”  This comment echoed two familiar positions of modern, progressive left-wing ideology: first, that the United States should allow unrestricted immigration and, second, that Americans are living on land illegitimately taken from Native Americans. While it may be tempting to dismiss such rhetoric as another example of celebrity activism at an awards show, doing so would miss a more troubling reality. The idea that America is fundamentally “stolen land” is not confined to award show stages, it has become increasingly embedded into the schools that teach America’s children.  In 2024, Defending Education released a report revealing that 155 school districts, representing more than 2.7 million students have adopted so-called “land acknowledgments.” These are formal statements intended to recognize Indigenous or Native peoples as the original inhabitants or stewards of the land a school district, staff, and students occupy.  On the surface, land acknowledgments may appear benign or even respectful. In practice, however, they function as a form of virtue signaling by institutions and leadership. Students are often asked or told to recite these statements, seeding the belief in young students’ minds that they occupy “stolen land” that is morally illegitimate and does not rightfully belong to the United States, but Indigenous tribes.  Consider the land acknowledgment used by Frances C. Richmond Middle School in Hanover, New Hampshire: “We, the RMS community, would like to acknowledge that our school is built upon the unceded land of the Abenaki and Pennacook people. The land was stolen.”  For a young student, this is not a neutral historical observation. Imagine hearing this as an elementary or middle school student. What conclusions are they expected to draw about their families, their neighbors, or their town? Rather than learning history, students are pushed toward a moral judgment that their community, their country, and even their family bear collective guilt simply for existing where they do. For a child who trusts the public school system to teach facts, not an ideologically skewed version of the past, this can be deeply troubling. Instead of fostering civic understanding, these statements frame American history primarily through grievance and condemnation.   This messaging is not limited to land acknowledgments alone.  Another example comes from District of Columbia Public Schools that in 2021 sent a message to families ahead of Thanksgiving encouraging them to “Decolonize your Thanksgiving” by not, “sugarcoat[ing] the past.” They advised parent to use terms like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “stolen land,” and “forced removal” when discussing the American history of the holiday. While older students should be exposed to both the proud and the dark side of our nation’s history, language such as “stolen land” means schools have replaced education with ideological indoctrination.  The messaging extends beyond words to art and images in classrooms as well. In one Los Angeles Unified School District high school, a poster was displayed reading, “Make Israel Palestine again and Make Amerikkka Turtle Island Again.” Such imagery does not invite critical thinking or intellectual diversity to play out. It asserts, as fact, that nations such as the United States and Israel are illegitimate occupiers whose existence should be undone.  A student exposed to these messages repeatedly could reasonably conclude that the United States has no rightful claim to its own territory. Over time, this worldview cements students’ belief in a far-left orthodoxy where law enforcement, people who express traditional views, and even our fundamental and treasured American institutions can no longer be allowed to exist.   Against this backdrop, Eilish’s remarks sound less like a spontaneous celebrity opinion and more like a familiar refrain. Without the context of a Grammy stage, her statement could have easily been mistaken for language heard at a school board member or a student assembly. For many young Americans, this speech likely sounded familiar and echoed ideas they already encounter in the classroom.   Parents should recognize that Eilish’s words are not just the personal opinion of an influential celebrity–and they are not isolated or inconsequential. They reflect a broader ideological worldview that has overtaken public education, and their children have likely already been put on the path to becoming the next Billie Eilish. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post It’s Not Just Billie Eilish, Students Get Indoctrinated About ‘Stolen Land’ in Schools   appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Amber Glenn, a United States figure skater in the Winter Olympics who proclaimed herself a “woke bitch,” finished 13th place in the short program.  Sports Illustrated reported, “With a score of 67.39 … Glenn finished in 13th place in Tuesday’s competition.”  SI added, “Her mistake cost her seven technical points from her score. It’ll be extremely difficult for her to medal on Thursday following the free skate.” The poor finish follows a gold-winning performance on Sunday, after which Glenn showed off her medal with teammate Alysa Liu in a a TikTok post that read: “They hate to see two woke bitches winning.”  The post continued, “If ‘Woke’ means people who use their platforms to advocate for marginalized communities in the country that they are actively representing …… Then yeah sure?” Glenn describes herself as a “pansexual” and “bisexual,” Breitbart reported. Glenn has repeatedly criticized President Donald Trump while at the Olympic games in Milan Cortina, the Huffington Post and other outlets reported. She previously said, “It’s been a hard time for the [LGBTQ+] community overall in this administration.” Another olympian, U.S. freestyle skier Hunter Hess, professed “mixed feelings” about representing the U.S., because of the Trump administration. This led to Trump calling her a “real loser.” The post Unluckily Woke: Anti-Trump US Figure Skater Finishes 13th at Olympics appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. European governments framing social media bans for minors as child protection are quiet about what those bans actually require: identity checks for everyone. Every adult who wants to use Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube in France, Spain, or Germany would need to verify their real-world identity to access the platform. Anonymity, one of the oldest protections for dissenting speech, goes with it. That’s the context Emmanuel Macron left out when he called free speech online “pure bullshit” in New Delhi on Wednesday. https://video.reclaimthenet.org/articles/macron-bshit.mp4 The French president was addressing companies and their American backers as European governments push social media restrictions, as well as curbs on “hate speech,” a move the Trump administration has criticized as censorship. Macron’s counterargument is based on algorithmic opacity. “Having no clue about how their algorithm is made, how it’s tested, trained, and where it will guide you, the democratic consequences of this bias could be huge,” he said. “Free speech is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided to this so-called free speech, especially when it is guided from one hate speech to another.” Recommendation systems do shape what people see, and the companies running them don’t publish the details. But Macron isn’t actually proposing algorithmic transparency. He’s defending a regulatory agenda that mandates age verification, which means ID verification, which means governments and platforms knowing exactly who is speaking before they’re allowed to speak. Anonymous speech has a history worth defending. Whistleblowers, dissidents, journalists protecting sources, abuse survivors, political minorities in hostile regions: these are the people who depend on the ability to speak without attaching their name to it. Age verification systems don’t carve out exceptions for them. They require a real identity for everyone, or the system doesn’t work. The EU’s Digital Services Act goes further. Beyond the ID checks, it requires platforms to police content flagged as harmful under definitions that include “hate speech,” a category European regulators get to define, redefine, and apply at their discretion. The US has already imposed visa bans on a former European official and activists involved in enforcing these standards, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling the effort pushback against the global censorship-industrial complex. The chilling effect of social media digital ID checks is the point. When people know their real name is attached to their account and that “harmful” speech (defined by the government) can get that account deleted, they say less. They avoid the contentious, the political, the inconvenient. In unprecedented moves, France has previously arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and has raided the offices of X. Macron is in New Delhi promoting a vision of regulated, multilingual AI as a third path between the US market model and China’s state-led approach. He frames European governance as the responsible alternative. What it looks like from the speech side is a system where governments decide who can speak anonymously (no one), what content platforms can host (whatever regulators don’t call harmful), and which companies can operate (those willing to build the ID infrastructure the bans require). If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Macron Calls Online Free Speech Argument “Pure Bullshit” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

This Is How Bad Public Schools Are

Complex cells are thought to be the result of a union between two ancient microorganisms, but scientists have long been stumped over how this unlikely pair came together.