Once again, the blinding bubble surrounding the New York Times readership shows the rift between our two Americas. Alan Sepinwall, in his guest essay “This HBO Miniseries Gets Rural America Right,” the top “Reader Picks” in the comment section, does his best to mockingly depict Red State MAGA deplorables in shows like Task, Yellowstone, Tulsa King, and Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown as living lives of violent desperation in “geographically and politically disparate locales” in the miserable backwaters of rural America. Insert the obvious clichés of a shattered, drunken, fetid milieu where blue-collar rubes’ dreams and dignity have crumbled along with their factories, families, and churches. Thankfully, the Times readership seems to possess both the wisdom and moral high ground to comprehend the working man’s dilemmas — and save these dummies from themselves. Sepinwall and the op-ed editors, though not as ham-fisted, might be secretly pleased with the smug responses it inspired. At the top of the list on the first click was: “It’s not a story of rural dignity rising; it’s a story of white dominance fading,” wrote one from Brooklyn. Another declared, “I’m tired of being preached at to ‘understand’ the people there… I’m done.” A Philadelphian said she’s “tired of being asked to understand people who see me … as the enemy.” Others were blunter: “Rural America is not the best of America, sorry … Urban areas are the future regardless of what reactionaries think of them.” Many of the Times’ readers have nothing but contempt for these shows’ characters and locales. It’s a gritty portrayal of working-class life that explores moral compromise, community decay, and the difficult line between doing what’s right and what might be wrong. The writer and editors don’t help much, as the centerpiece of the essay and headline is Task, a seven-episode HBO miniseries set in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, which follows Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), a garbage man who becomes Robin Hood by stealing from outlaw biker drug dealers to support his family and avenge his brother’s murder by the same gang. Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), a boozy middle-aged FBI agent and former Catholic priest, is tasked with capturing him. Written by Philly local Brad Ingelsby (Mare of Easttown), it’s a gritty portrayal of working-class life that explores moral compromise, community decay, and the difficult line between doing what’s right and what might be wrong. (The show is entertaining and well-acted, though it has a few moralistic and somewhat predictable elements that we won’t focus on here. Overall, it functions as dependable Sunday night entertainment.) What the title and Sepinwall overlook from the jump is that Delco ain’t rural! It’s a dense Philadelphia suburb with 576,000 residents spread over 191 square miles, making it one of the most urbanized counties in the state — but that’s an obvious and pedantic oversight I won’t dwell on, but does work for the Times as its “rural” avatar. What’s more disturbing is how readers want to fit their political narrative neatly into a collectivist worldview. It seems too easy for many of them to reduce complex human lives into sentimental categories of victimhood, desperately needing the Times’ readers’ guidance — or should we say, elite pandering? The subtext here is a classic example of repurposing Task to align with a left-leaning, Democratic-friendly framework that seeks to bring working-class Americans under its influence by portraying them as powerless victims. This narrative, of course, is useful for mobilizing independent minds — and hopefully their votes. (RELATED: Working-Class Whites Anxiously Losing Ground) Sepinwall’s clunky essay argues that “it’s undeniable that larger societal forces in the region have worn these places, and their residents, down to a nub.” But Task, like Mare of Easttown before it, is not an overt sociological morality play; it’s a local story about culture, not a case study for the Columbia anthropology department. The gritty, dramatic tension and humanity of Robbie Prendergast come from his moral agency and foolish decisions. For the Times crowd, they’re political avatars — props for ideological gain. For this crowd, everything must be political; everything. (RELATED: Why Democrats Can’t — and Won’t — Replicate MAGA) For Sepinwall, these shows “may not be offering escapism, but they provide a chance at empathy.” Empathy for what? Their human foibles and fumbling? Their foolish blindness? Or something more political — like late-stage capitalism — or their subconscious clinging, as many commenters suggested, to the fading of their white cultural primacy? (RELATED: MAGA and the Citizen Against Globalism) This, of course, is a lazy and dangerous reading. Still, it does find a useful purpose among many on the left who want only to winnow these dramas into quick props by portraying Delco as a political allegory of what happens when “rural America” loses its cultural privileges. What is lost in these interpretations is the deeper philosophical struggles that underpin a show like Task: the way nostalgia can distort reality and cause individuals to lose themselves. Unmoored nostalgia is a form of bad faith: it imagines that something once satisfying can never be recaptured, leaving us as victims of decline. Jean-Paul Sartre understood this and warned against living in “bad faith,” the denial of freedom by treating the past as fixed. Unmoored nostalgia is a form of bad faith: it imagines that something once satisfying can never be recaptured, leaving us as victims of decline. The result isn’t reflection but paralysis — civic and personal energy replaced by resignation. If one believes that their Delco Thanksgiving morning parish football games “peaked” in the late 1970s, no amount of Yuenglings will bring them back. The kids on the field become apparitions of a bygone era, and one’s identity begins to slip away. The warm blanket of nostalgia — mixed with eight too many Yuenglings and a few bumps — feels safe, but the kids lose. The freedom of what could be becomes overwhelming. These ideas, not identity politics, are the most interesting aspect of Task. But of course, that’s not helpful to Sepinwall or the Times’ subscribers’ agenda. It’s not what they want to get “right” about “rural America.” So the decline explored in Task is not socio-economic — it’s moral. People collapse not when jobs vanish but when virtue and discipline disintegrate. That’s not a crisis the government can solve. It’s deeply personal and requires effort and honesty. Something new can always be made. That is what America was founded upon. Sepinwall’s empathy — and that of the Times — may be sincere, but it’s deeply pandering. Many of their readers seem just plain vengeful. Pity is not understanding; it’s condescension. Working-class communities of any race don’t need to be pitied or mythologized by coastal elites. They need to be taken seriously — as individuals — and they certainly don’t need the Times editorial board and their readers to rescue “them.” READ MORE from Peter Connolly: AI Can Save Education Real Leadership in the Unsung Men of the Armed Forces The Poisonous Fruit of Youth Worship

I have a friend who has a foolproof trick for when he wants to do something forbidden: “act completely normal.” Using this system, he’s crashed other people’s weddings to eat the appetizers, sneaked into concerts without tickets, and gotten me into a few troubles, because I, unlike him, am incapable of acting normal while doing something abnormal. Once, he drove me, against my will, to a golf club where I wasn’t a member but he was. The security guard stopped us at the entrance. He said, “Act normally.” The guy rolled down his window and triumphantly showed his ID, and when he came to my window to ask for mine, I got nervous and, inexplicably, improvised gestures and guttural sounds, pretending to be mute. My friend, putting his hand to his forehead like an emoji, said, “He’s mute. He’s a member, but he didn’t bring his ID.” They let us in. But it wasn’t because I was acting normal — it was because the guy had never seen anyone as stupid as me up close. I’m not a good liar either. At least not sober. After four drinks, I become a wonderful liar. But I’m the friend who always avoids finding out there’s a surprise party planned for someone. Because if I know, I’ll run into that person without hesitation two minutes later, and the first thing I’ll say is exactly what I don’t want to say: “Well, I’ll see you at your surprise party on Saturday — it’ll be fun!” And then I’ll wish the ground would open beneath me. Who the hell would suspect someone climbing the facade of a museum in a damn crane? Now you know who not to take as an accomplice if you’re planning to rob a bank or pull off a big scam. I was reminded of this while watching the heist of the century at the Louvre Museum. Those guys acted as normally as possible. They were dressed as construction workers. Who the hell would suspect someone climbing the facade of a museum in a damn crane? Still, there was a striking opportunity to be suspicious — not during the climb, but when the thieves pulled out a radial saw, smashed the window, and started destroying the cameras protecting the treasures. They had a full four minutes to start realizing that something was seriously wrong — hell, they were robbing the museum and smashing it with a radial saw! Just think: France is the typical country turned into a hellhole, full of thousands of idiotic prohibitions and hundreds of cameras on every corner. You can be fined for not wearing a seatbelt, for being on your cell phone in the car, for driving an unlicensed car into an environmental protection zone — you name it. Those guys can fine you for almost any stupid thing you can imagine! I imagine their cameras and drones have ultrasonic zooms to detect environmental stickers on cars. And therein lies the amusing paradox: they can detect a tiny, incorrectly placed environmental sticker, but they can’t see a seven- or ten-ton articulated-arm truck ascending the most visited museum in the world, one of the few cultural icons still unmolested by French politicians. (RELATED: Carbon Tax and the Green Deal: The EU’s Climate Heist Is Underway) I’m not happy about the robbery, of course, but I can’t think of a better metaphor for Macron’s France: infinitely incompetent, with no laws for illegal immigrants or major criminals, and the full weight of the law and surveillance aimed at French citizens. And if that weren’t enough, all its cultural pillars are crumbling. If years ago the terrible symbol was Notre Dame on fire, now the symbol of decadence will forever be linked to the image of four thieves climbing the Louvre facade in broad daylight with the museum open. (RELATED: France: A Country Perpetually at Odds with Itself) You might think it’s an exaggeration to say that the robbery signifies France’s decadence. But that’s because you haven’t yet heard that Culture Minister Rachida Dati went to the museum to expressly congratulate the security guards for their conduct, as they failed to react when intimidated by the thieves, thus avoiding casualties — something that could obviously have had an even greater political cost for the government. Why promote heroism, right? Now I’m just waiting for Macron to step out and, too, congratulate the thieves for the audacity of their plan I know France well because it’s a neighbor of Spain. The last time I was in Marseille, I realized there wasn’t a single French person left. And trying to walk through neighborhoods dominated by Islamic illegal immigrants without ending up stripped down to your underwear is a pipe dream. Not just in Marseille, of course, but across all of France. The state has a monopoly on violence, but it only uses it against its own truly French citizens. (RELATED: Paris Is Still Beautiful — From Behind Bulletproof Glass) France is a former state, and it will remain so if it continues to be governed by globalist dwarves. READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: A Brief World History of Conversation Trump Is Europe’s Alarm Clock Why the Left Can’t Congratulate Trump

Over the past century, American women have been blessed with freedom, making us the envy of the world. It is no accident that the majority of legal immigrants to the U.S. are women. Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted in 2015, “[T]here has never been a better time in history to be born female.” Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine. However, both women and men have come under attack from an extremely toxic worldview that undermines our progress and obscures the truth of women’s unique dignity. Gender theory infected our nation in the 2010s, intensified during the COVID pandemic, and reached new extremes during the Biden administration. Its supporters have worked to upend universal and timeless natural law, placing women in harm’s way while also emasculating men. The Attack on Women The public proliferation and popularization of gender theory over the past decade represents the biggest blow to women’s rights in my lifetime. Yet rather than resisting this ideology — which undermines decades of our many advancements — most progressive feminists have remained silent or, worse, openly embraced it.  Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine. Everywhere we look, the damage from the lie that men can become women is unmistakable. Women are losing out on sports scholarships and trophies that should rightfully be theirs while also being forced to share locker rooms, prisons, and domestic violence shelters with men. Careers have been derailed, families destroyed, and women and children deeply harmed. Although this nightmare began in the 1930s at the Frankfurt School, which also brought us critical race theory, it did not proliferate beyond academic lounges until the 1990s. Academics finally got their wish in the pre-COVID era as American public schools, following Great Britain, planted and nurtured the idea that kids could be born in the wrong body and could magically change their gender or even their sex. Everywhere we look, the damage from the lie that men can become women is unmistakable. Prepubescent girls who felt uncomfortable with their bodies were rushed into puberty blockers and mastectomies before they could even apply for a driver’s license. They were promised that the drugs would simply “pause” puberty, but instead they were left with irreversible consequences, including deep voices, infertility, and reduced bone density. This toxic worldview even made people afraid to answer the question “What is a woman?” for fear of being shamed, harassed, or labeled a bigot simply for acknowledging biological reality. Thankfully, with President Donald Trump’s election, we have begun to unwind the chaos. The course of a nation — its triumphs or failures — starts at the top. During the Republican primary, Trump made his stance on women’s rights clear when he signed Concerned Women for America’s Presidential Promise to American Women. He pledged to “uphold the truth that women are exclusively female” and promised that, under his administration, “the status and dignity of women and girls [would] not be compromised in law or policy.”  Further, he agreed, “That sex is binary is a scientific reality, and all federal agencies will be directed to uphold this fact in every policy and program at home and abroad. A person’s claim of ‘gender identity’ does not overrule their sex.” Undoubtedly, voters in the 2024 presidential election were sick and tired of the transgender madness and wanted a leader who would stand up for biological women’s rights. An exit poll by Concerned Women for America found that 70 percent of voters shared this conviction. Clearly, they viewed Trump as the candidate who would uphold the sex-based distinctions that protect women across every area of society. After his inauguration, President Trump moved quickly, signing an executive order establishing that there are only two sexes — male and female. The order requires government-issued identification to reflect biological sex and protects single-sex spaces such as women’s shelters and prisons. States are also moving in the right direction, no doubt bolstered by the new administration. To date, twenty-seven states have passed laws to protect children from the harms of so-called gender-affirming care. The Trump administration also worked quickly to protect women’s sports. Under the Biden administration, women had been slapped in the face by a radical Title IX athletics rule that stripped female athletes of federal protection against sex discrimination in sports. In response, Trump signed the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order, which upheld Title IX’s original intent and banned biological males from competing in women’s sports, therefore protecting female athletes’ opportunities and safety. Underscoring the importance of this action, research by Concerned Women for America found that trans-identifying males have stolen over 1,941 gold medals from women and girls in the United States. The fight for female-only sports continues, however. In July, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Education and the California Interscholastic Federation for violations of Title IX. It is seeking a permanent injunction against the state’s policy of allowing biological males to compete in girls’ sports. The “bathroom wars” of recent years — in which school districts have allowed students to use the bathroom they identify with rather than the one that matches their biological sex — are also still front and center. The Department of Education has rightly interpreted that Title IX prohibits sex discrimination, and, as such, biological males and females must have sex-segregated bathroom facilities. However, there are some school districts that are refusing to comply, including five school districts in Northern Virginia, putting the safety of female students at risk. The Trump administration has made tremendous progress for women. But it is appalling that we even had to fight for this at all. Just over one hundred years after the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, the definition of a woman was up for debate. Thankfully, President Trump is restoring what was too easily lost under the last administration. The Attack on Men Ultimately, national success is bolstered by strong families. And strong families depend upon strong men and strong women. Children growing up in homes in which two parents (male and female) are married are more likely to thrive and less likely to experience a wide range of problems, not only in childhood but also in adulthood. By Bill Wilson for The American Spectator And yet masculinity has come under attack, with it constantly being smeared as “toxic.” Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri captured the situation well when he said the Left “want[s] to define the traditional masculine virtues — things like courage, independence, and assertiveness — as a danger to society.” Men cannot provide a stable foundation for their families when their strengths are constantly emasculated and deemed harmful. Women want strong men, and true masculinity is the opposite of toxic. Men have been so thoroughly emasculated that some have overreacted by following faux-masculine influencers like Andrew Tate, who stands completely opposite to conservative values. Tate has not only been charged with sex trafficking in Romania, but he is also openly in favor of creating pornography and exploiting women, and he teaches young men to do the same. Men are inundated with pornography, weed, sports betting, and other vices that seek to captivate them, but all of which ultimately cause destruction. Men need to be empowered to be strong, to embrace marriage and remain faithful husbands, and to have children and build families. Our nation cannot truly be great again until our men are great again. A now-famous picture from the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan shows a baby being lifted over a wall with barbed wire to U.S. Marines. One of the soldiers involved in the rescue remarked that helping that baby to safety was one of the “greatest things” he’d ever done in his life. During the recent Minneapolis school shooting at Annunciation Catholic School, it was reported that one young boy threw himself over his friend to shield him from the bullets. These stories are as far from toxic masculinity as they can get. President Trump won with strong support from young men, who recognized a leader who fights for them and wants to build up our men, not destroy them. Decisive Action for American Families Crucial to the well-being of both men and women is the sanctity of human life, and the Trump administration has brought a pro-life mindset to the White House. President Trump signed an executive order enforcing the Hyde Amendment, secured the release of pro-life prisoners jailed for peaceful protests, and rallied congressional support to block Medicaid reimbursements for abortions. The latter action has dramatically led to the closure of twenty-five Planned Parenthood clinics across ten states in anticipation of lost government funding. No president has moved so decisively to protect Americans, uphold faith, and restore common sense. Future generations will marvel at how quickly the conservative movement gained ground and rectified the ills of the Biden administration. But we are only several years away from a new presidential election, bringing the potential for conservative policies to be reversed. Ultimately, the foundation for conservative success rests on protecting women and emboldening men, and we should carry these goals into all of our efforts.  Penny Young Nance is CEO and President of Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization, and author of Seven Rules for Success in Business and Life: A Woman’s Guide. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine.

I am now 80 years old. Let’s not kid ourselves: That’s OLD. I have a number of observations about life, and I will share them with you nice people gradually. The one I want to talk about today is one of the simplest ones. Financial insecurity is not just a bad thing. It’s a terrifyingly bad thing. This comes to mind because a few months ago, because of a series of awful calamities, mostly wild misconduct by a bank and an insurance company and some lawyers, I was just about out of money. (RELATED: Moving on From Financial Trauma) I still had some valuable assets, especially real property in Beverly Hills and Malibu. But converting real estate to cash is not easily done. (RELATED: Insights From a Big Spender) I soon found a simply wonderful woman named Dina Brown, who was able to go through my wife’s and my art collection — wonderful Lichtensteins and Warhols — and give us cash money almost immediately for them. The moment that I got the call from my bank telling me that the wire from the art dealer had arrived was probably the single happiest moment of my adult life. Now, I face another similar crisis. It might seem that I could easily get out of the issue, but I can’t. Again, I will. But it’s scaring me a lot. A further reinforcement about this problem came when a man I will call M. kindly referred me to a doctor I needed for my stomach. I noticed that his voice sounded not just tense, but nuclear-powered tense. “What’s the matter ?” I asked. “I’m broke,” he said. “I know the feeling,” I said. “No, you don’t,” he said. “I have nothing. Absolutely nothing. I have anxiety like nothing you can imagine,” he added. But I could imagine it. One of the main reasons I can imagine it (but not the only reason) is that I had a number of small accounts at Chase Bank. That’s a huge bank, one of the biggest banks on earth. Two of the accounts were hacked over and over again. Every time I asked the bank to reimburse me and fix the problem, they did nothing. The total loss for my wife and me would be very roughly 40K. The attitude of the people I talked to was usually terribly unhelpful. Recently, I was shown a list of transactions that had drained my accounts. Several of them were in Nicosia, Cyprus. Others were in cities and towns in the USA that I had never been to. I wrote to Mr. Jamie Dimon, billionaire head of Chase. I reminded him that I knew him from my days as a columnist for a very large newspaper. Nothing helped. This is a bad thing. Basically, Chase has countenanced theft against an 80-year-old man. I needed that money. Friends, I speak up for capitalism, as you well know. But money is extremely vital, especially for us old folks. It would not be amiss for the government to help. Financial terror is a terrible thing. READ MORE from Ben Stein: Return to Gunskirchen Lager and Col. Denman No Sense Quarreling John Coyne, RIP

It is one of the most iconic photos of the Second World War: General Douglas MacArthur wades through knee-deep waters on the approach to “Red Beach” located north of Palo near Tacloban on Leyte Island in the Philippines. His face is stern, defiant. He strides with a purpose. He is keeping the promise he made two and a half years earlier when President Franklin Roosevelt ordered him to leave the Philippines as his armies were being routed on the Bataan peninsula and his headquarters on Corregidor was besieged. After he had landed in Australia, he told a crowd greeting him: “I came through, and I shall return.” It was a little after 2:30 pm on October 20, 1944, when MacArthur, some of his staff, and Filipino President Sergio Osmena exited a landing craft to once again walk on Philippine soil. American forces had only secured a small beachhead less than a mile inland. In his memoirs, MacArthur described the scene: As we slowly bucked the waves toward “Red Beach,” the sounds of war grew louder. We could now hear the whining roar of airplane engines as they dove over our heads to strafe and bomb enemy positions inland from the beach. Then came the steady crump, crump of exploding naval shells. As we came closer, we could pick up the shouts of our soldiers as they gave and acknowledged orders. Then, unmistakably, in the near distance came the steady rattle of small-arms fire … The smoke from the burning palm trees was in our nostrils, and we could hear the continuing snapping and crackling of flames. MacArthur called his approach to the beach “one of the most meaningful walks I ever took … I knew I was back again — against my old enemies of Bataan.” MacArthur’s return almost didn’t happen. U.S. Navy leaders, led by the irascible Admiral Ernest King, wanted to bypass the Philippines and invade the island of Formosa (Taiwan) to use as a base for the planned invasion of Japan’s home islands. In late July 1944, President Roosevelt convened a conference at Pearl Harbor to discuss rival plans with MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz. At a home overlooking Waikiki Beach, MacArthur and Nimitz laid out their respective plans for the next offensive in the Pacific. FDR pointed to a large wall map and asked MacArthur, “Well, Doug, where do we go from here?” (RELATED: Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Man Who Ended the War) MacArthur explained the military reasons for invading the Philippines but emphasized the moral obligation to liberate our allies and American prisoners of war. He even warned FDR that bypassing the Philippines would cost him votes in November. He reminded the president that he, too, had promised Filipinos that U.S. forces would return to liberate the islands. “Promises must be kept,” he said to FDR. It would be a “blot on American honor” to leave them to their fate at the hands of their Japanese conquerors and oppressors. Admiral Nimitz suggested a compromise whereby MacArthur’s forces would land in the southern Philippines but bypass Luzon, while the Navy invaded Formosa. Casualties on Luzon and in Manila would be heavy, Nimitz said, and FDR agreed. MacArthur replied that American losses would be no heavier than in the past in the Southwest Pacific campaign. In the end, MacArthur’s plan was adopted — even Nimitz came around to support it. In mid-September 1944, MacArthur’s forces landed on the island of Morotai, several hundred miles south of the southernmost Philippine island. After MacArthur came ashore on Morotai, he looked north and gestured in the direction of the Philippines and remarked: “They are waiting for me there. It has been a long time.” (RELATED: MacArthur Lands at Atsugi Airfield: August 30, 1945) Soon after landing on Leyte, MacArthur used a mobile broadcasting unit to address the Philippine people in one of the most memorable wartime speeches in history: People of the Philippines, I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil — soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples. We have come, dedicated and committed, to the task of destroying every vestige of enemy control over your daily lives, and of restoring, upon a foundation of indestructible strength, the liberties of your people. At my side is your President, Sergio Osmena, worthy successor of that great patriot, Manuel Quezon, with members of his cabinet. The seat of your government is now therefore firmly re-established on Philippine soil. The hour of your redemption is here. Your patriots have demonstrated an unswerving and resolute devotion to the principles of freedom that challenges the best that is written on the pages of human history. I now call upon your supreme effort that the enemy may know from the temper of an aroused and outraged people within that he has a force there to contend with no less violent than is the force committed from without. Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on. As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike. Strike at every favorable opportunity. For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! In the name of your sacred dead, strike! Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His Name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory! READ MORE from Francis P. 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West Virginia's House of Delegates arrested for making terroristic threats to kill President Trump