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Donald Trump’s foreign policy morphs into something very different from its isolationist caricature. On Friday, he meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss, among other topics, whether Tomahawk missiles, whose long range would allow for strikes deep into Russia, might help Vladimir Putin see the virtues of peace. On Thursday, he announced talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, to occur later this month in Budapest, designed to hasten the end of what Trump calls “the Inglorious War” in Ukraine. Whereas the means of the Trump Doctrine appear manifold, the ends appear twofold. On Wednesday, the president confirmed his authorization of CIA covert operations in Venezuela. “I authorized for two reasons, really,” Trump explained. “Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. And, the other thing, the drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.” Last week, he brought together about three dozen nations to impose a peace on the Israelis and Palestinians. Like the “isolationist” caricature, the longstanding Hitler caricature made those depicting the Donald as the Fuhrer into the caricature, as Jews erected a giant “thank you” sign in Tel Aviv, distributed “President of Peace” hats in the Knesset, and elsewhere in Israel chanted “Trump!” In July, he banged heads together and brokered a ceasefire in the brief war between Cambodia and Thailand that killed 43. Later this month, Trump will preside over the formal signing of the peace treaty between the neighbors at the Association of South East Asian Nations in Kuala Lumpur. Can one call it America First? Surely Smedley Butler would not approve of billions for Argentina just because its president seems so swell and Robert Wood would look askance at the president authorizing covert operations in Venezuela. What word describes Trump’s foreign policy? Unpredictable. That seems its strength. It also seems to undermine its connection with any “doctrine.” James Monroe’s doctrine told Europe to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. Ronald Reagan’s doctrine supported the rollback of Communism anytime, everywhere. Donald Trump’s doctrine is to have no doctrine — at least about the methods he uses and where he thinks he can do some good. Trump’s foreign policy hails neither George Kennan nor Henry Kissinger as its intellectual forefather but Bruce Lee. As one who watches up to eight hours of television daily, Donald Trump, one guesses, caught Enter the Dragon or Fists of Fury on one of his sets at some point. The Chinese-American film star and founder of the Jeet Kune Do martial art famously advocated using no way as the way. In other words, do not allow doctrines to straitjacket one into ineffectiveness. Further buttressing Lee’s status as the greatest influence on Donald Trump’s foreign policy outlook, Jeet Kune Do roughly translates to the way of intercepting fist. Trump’s foreign policy art, like Lee’s martial art, seems preoccupied with turning punches into handshakes. Whereas the means of the Trump Doctrine appear manifold, the ends appear twofold. First, Trump wishes to advance America’s interests, which helps explain actions against the longstanding nuisance Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Second, Trump looks to act as a peacemaker abroad, which helps explain why he inserted himself into the conflict between Cambodia and Thailand. The Trump Doctrine means using no way as the way to advance both peace and America’s interests. The president likely sees the former as vaguely synonymous with the latter. Caricaturists paint public figures into fictional boxes that exaggerate truth into falsehood. It’s a rigid business without room for epiphanies, course changes, or shades of gray. The Trump Doctrine is everything that is not. READ MORE from Dan Flynn: One Nation Under Therapy Trump Wins the Words Battle While Democrats Speak a Foreign Language The Democrats Again Perform a Self-Own in Federal Shutdown

I have an acquaintance. She’s a lot younger than me. I like her, but she’s one of those people who thinks she’s a rebel by doing things which are annoyingly conventional for women her age. I try not to hold that against her, because it’s quite clear she’s been propagandized and indoctrinated into a worldview she will hopefully discard. I think she’s smart enough to do that. Eventually. And because I like to keep politics and even social commentary confined to my professional life and out of my day-to-day life as much as I can, and because she certainly doesn’t share my beliefs (at least not at this point in her life), when I see her, I try to steer clear of the heavy stuff. Who wants an argument when it’s not necessary? But the other day, I couldn’t avoid it. Because the other day, when I saw her, she whined to me that a male acquaintance of hers had told her that her nose ring (she actually has two, including the dreaded ring through her septum) was “repellent.” “That’s so obnoxious!” she protested. “How can he tell me that?” [S]he’s been taken in by a raft of propaganda that makes her believe that she’s somehow empowered by presenting herself in a way that makes her less attractive than God made her. I said nothing. I just gave her a look as though to say, Please leave me out of this. That wasn’t good enough for Ashley (which isn’t her name; I’m trying to protect the innocent/guilty here), so she demanded that I defend her choice of facial metallurgy. Which I was absolutely not going to do, as Ashley’s tormentor was clearly in the right — no matter how indelicate he may have been. “What do you care what this guy thinks?” I asked, instead of engaging with the subject. “I don’t,” she told me. Which seemed like a lie. Nevertheless, I used that — deftly, I thought — as a means of escaping from the conversation. But Wednesday I ran across a piece by Tyler Durden from a week ago at ZeroHedge that dived into the nose-ring question with far more boldness than I was willing to lay on Ashley. As Durden notes, single men are exhausted with a certain tribe of females in America and other Western countries, and the thumbs are most certainly down… In the swiftly degenerating world of western relationships one factor above all others can be identified as the culprit: Feminism. The driving force behind third-wave feminism is not the pursuit of equal rights (which women already have), it’s the pursuit of power. Like any communist movement, unilateral power over society is the end goal. When power is the goal, such movements naturally attract narcissistic people and inspire narcissistic behaviors. How can the nuclear family function when the female half of the equation (which is supposed to act as a nurturing balance) is conditioned to become self serving, ego-maniacal, conflict oriented, status obsessed, victim obsessed and desperate for control? Today, 63 percent of men are single with the majority not looking for a partner. By the year 2030, 45 percent of western women between the ages of 25 and 45 will be single and childless (spinsters). It’s a demographic disaster; it’s the end of civilization as we know it, and that’s exactly what the political left wants. Feminism is the key to creating this crisis because it disrupts the basic biological and psychological imperatives of men and women — this is well documented. But beyond women using their prime years to pursue careers over marriage and family, there is the factor of emotional and mental incompatibility with the vast majority of men. Even if modern women decided they prefer to find a man in 2025, most men do not want them. This has led to what some are calling the “female loneliness epidemic”; a rise in women seeking relationships but unable to find men willing to reciprocate. Within feminist circles, the word on the street is that men are “no longer approaching.” This is a trend that is visible in many European countries (and Canada and Australia) where feminism has been allowed to spread beyond universities and into vital social structures. Men wait for women to approach, or, they avoid women altogether. The theories are numerous. Feminists claim men are “losing their masculinity” and are “too frightened of strong independent women.” This is a bit of gaslighting and a bit of cope. At no point do modern women ever consider the possibility that they are the problem, nor do they ever ask men to explain the situation. Why? Because they don’t want to hear the truth. Among the videos Durden includes to illustrate the growing consensus among men in the dating marketplace that certain women are untouchable from the standpoint of a candidate for a relationship is one from the Whatever Podcast’s Brian Atlas (warning: the language here isn’t particularly safe for work)… Nose ring theory. Also, there’s that famous female empathy! pic.twitter.com/mCujsf8THI — Brian Atlas (@BrianAtlas) August 18, 2025 Then Durden notes that the nose rings have become a definitive tell… One particular trend that has gone viral and has feminists enraged is “nose ring theory,” also known as “septum ring theory.” The trend is based on an observable stereotype: The idea that many crazed feminists on social media tend to have the exact same physical characteristics. It’s the blue hair, the face, neck and full body tattoos, the high cut bangs and, of course, they almost always seem to have septum rings in their noses. Men have noticed the similarities and are now avoiding any woman with these features. The theory is supported by the leftist habit of using symbolic identifiers, much like a cult would use to pick out other adherents in a crowd. When the pandemic mandates failed to garner enough public support in the U.S. and the mask requirements were abandoned (largely because the masks were proven to be useless), the political left continued to wear them anyway. Why? Because the masks had become symbolic of the cult, a uniform for the woke. The septum ring is the new covid mask. It’s a signal to other believers that they are on the same side. Then there’s the psychological concerns. Women with inordinate body modifications including ample piercings and tattoos are seen by men as self obsessed, impulsive or mentally incapable of settling for normality. Nihilism is common, not to mention depression, manic unpredictability and lack of emotional intelligence (reason). In other words, they might be unhinged. This doesn’t stop some men from looking for a good time, but it does stop them from seeking a long term relationship. And this is exactly it. Men are generally much worse at sending signals to women as to what is desirable and what is not than women are to men. This is easily explained by biology, of course; the male sex drive is not easily controlled, and so guys will put up with things that are utterly intolerable if they think there is sex to be had in the bargain. (RELATED: He Loved You More Than Life Itself — And It Killed Him) But — and this is truer in the 21st century than perhaps ever before — while the woman might be in control of the question whether there will be sex, the man is in control of the question of how far the relationship will go. (RELATED: Please Deliver Us From the Poorly-Behaved Women) And men do not want relationships with women who wear rings in their noses. Those women might be worth a booty call or even friends-with-benefits status, but that’s all they’ve got coming to them so long as that circle — or horseshoe — protrudes from the schnoz. Now, this, for a disturbingly large percentage of the female population under, say, 35 years old, is not a problem. For many of these women, the nose ring is a signifier that they have no interest in a relationship with a man, and that they only want men for sex. That might be tragic, and it’s certainly less than optimal when your national birth rate is far below replacement and the percentage of children growing up in two-parent households is alarmingly low. But on the other hand, there’s a certain symmetry here — they don’t want a man, and they sure as hell aren’t getting one. (RELATED: The Left Has a Baby Dilemma) It’s hilarious, though, to hear some of these girls insist that they’re qualified for a guy six feet tall, with a six-figure income and six-pack abs. Good luck with those expectations. When guys of that profile hear you talk, they’ll have one look at that septum ring and all they’ll hear is “mmoooooo.” If we have too much of this, we’re going to have a whole country of people dying alone, having never actually procreated the species. It’s a whole different column that I don’t want to write, which will talk about what steps will then be necessary to keep our society from dying out. Which is a real possibility. Did you know that there are some advanced countries — South Korea being an example — where the birth rate is less than one-third of replacement? Ours isn’t that bad, but it’s too low and getting lower. This phenomenon isn’t helping. (RELATED: This Is What Civilizational Suicide Looks Like) Yes, I am fully aware that we have lots of problems with male performance in the dating marketplace as well. I’ll get around to doing a column on that, too, provided I survive the fallout from this one. And I feel bad for Ashley. Because she’s been taken in by a raft of propaganda that makes her believe that she’s somehow empowered by presenting herself in a way that makes her less attractive than God made her. I’m not arrogant enough to think I’ll be received as a white knight if I sat her down and tried to shake her out of the indoctrination that third-wave feminism has laid on her, and besides, it isn’t my business. But it does piss me off. Because the people foisting this on young women know something we’ve talked about here in this column and in the Spectacle Podcast that Melissa Mackenzie and I do, which is that single women vote Democrat by a factor of 2-to-1 or more, and the people in charge of the cultural institutions with the power to push the dominant narratives know it. They’re doing everything they can to make and keep women single. They don’t mind polluting the public square with faces full of metal to get that result. And in five years, or 10, Ashley will wake up and realize the time she’s lost having bought into their horrid lies. Hopefully, by then, the ring will be gone from her septum, the wound in her nose will have healed, and she’ll be happy with a husband and children. But I’m not sure about that. And it’s terrible. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Racism, Victimhood, and Louisiana v. Callais Maria Corina Machado Getting the Nobel Peace Prize Is Just Fine Five Quick Things: The Glorious Return of the 5QT

Here is the headline from Fox News that is focused on one Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is currently leading in the race to be New York City’s next mayor. The headline: “Mamdani stands by promise to arrest Netanyahu if he comes to New York City.” New York City … has over the decades routinely played host to all manner of international thugs and criminal heads of state…. Only the Prime Minister of the world’s lone Jewish state … gets threatened by Mamdani. The New York Times headlined: “Mamdani, if Elected Mayor, Pledges to Order N.Y.P.D. to Arrest Netanyahu,” with the subtitle, “Zohran Mamdani expanded on his vow to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying it would show that New York ‘stands up for international law.’” Well now. If a New York City mayor, Mamdani, does in fact do this, would it not be time for the United States government to arrest Mamdani? After all, no one is above the law. And there is nothing in the law that gives an American mayor the authority to arrest a foreign head of state for simply doing his duty as head of state. Which, in this case, and like his head-of-state peers from around the world, means showing up in New York City to address the opening session of the United Nations. If Mr. Mamdani doesn’t like it, perhaps it’s time for the U.N. to consider moving itself to a more welcoming American or foreign city. (RELATED: Zohran Has Two Daddies) The Times story reports: Mr. Mamdani had said earlier in the mayor’s race that he would arrest Mr. Netanyahu. In the interview on Thursday, he did not back down and offered new specifics, affirming that he would order the police to make the arrest upon Mr. Netanyahu’s arrival in the city. “This is something that I intend to fulfill,” Mr. Mamdani said. “This is a moment where we cannot look to the federal government for leadership,” Mr. Mamdani said. “This is a moment when cities and states will have to demonstrate what it actually looks like to stand up for our own values, our own people.” So let’s take Mr. Mamdani at his word. It’s time to “look to the federal government for leadership.” Which, based on the logic of the would-be Mayor Mamdani’s position means that the federal government, which is decidedly charged with arresting Americans who break federal law, should swoop down on the New York Mayor’s Gracie Mansion residence or City Hall (if he is elected!), slap the cuffs on him and send him to the New York hell hole known as the Rikers Island prison. Once there, the arrested Mayor Mamdani would find himself in the company of inmates who specialize in violence of all manner of types. The very same types he is threatening to surround an arrested Prime Minister Netanyahu with. Not to mention the type of violence Mr. Netanyahu’s Israeli constituents have to deal with routinely from Palestinian extremists. To say the least, at a minimum, this threat reveals the would-be mayor of New York City, Mamdani, as a decided antisemite. New York City, the home of the United Nations, has over the decades routinely played host to all manner of international thugs and criminal heads of state. With Mamdani completely silent on their presence. Only the Prime Minister of the world’s lone Jewish state — a country that elects its leaders in decidedly democratic fashion — gets threatened by Mamdani. What a coincidence! And oh yes, one other thing. Mamdani says: “This is a moment when cities and states will have to demonstrate what it actually looks like to stand up for our own values, our own people.” Indeed, this is just such a moment. If Mr. Mamdani — who aspires to hold the office of mayor of New York City that was once filled by distinguished Jewish New Yorkers with names like Ed Koch and Michael Bloomberg — cannot “demonstrate what it actually looks like to stand up for our own values, our own people,” then most assuredly, he does not deserve to be mayor. And one can hope New York City voters — who have a seriously good, non-bigoted alternative choice in former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo — will make that emphatically clear on election day. Stay tuned. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Trump’s History-Making Triumph Trump Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize Pritzker’s Projection Is Destroying His Prospective Presidential Race

While the U.S. navy blows up drug boats in Caribbean waters off Venezuela, Latin America’s narco-communism could be taking another direct hit in the Andean country of Bolivia, through the ballot box. Morales tried pulling off a fraudulent election victory in 2019 when attempts to hack into the vote count were uncovered by the opposition “I hope that Trump takes out that criminal Maduro. It would be a signal to his friends here” said a taxi driver in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, who will be casting his vote for conservative candidate Antonio “Tuto” Quiroga in elections this Sunday. It may be hard to imagine how events in this remote, landlocked but mineral rich nation that’s among the most impoverished in Latin America, can influence U.S. geopolitical interests. But a victory for Quiroga would be a major boost for president Trump’s efforts to align regional support for ousting Venezuela’s narco-socialist regime. It would end the two decade rule of Maduro’s similarly corrupt Bolivian allies that are turning the country’s strategic rare earth mineral reserves over to China. Quiroga has vowed to bring back U.S. anti-drug agencies expelled by former president Evo Morales, to conduct a massive crack down on illegal coca leaf plantations and cocaine processing labs growing exponentially in the region of Chapare, which is the main stronghold of Morales’ ruling MAS party. He also vows to fully prosecute Morales on pending criminal charges that the MAS administration under current president Luis Arce, wont pursue. “Tuto will open a new front in Trump’s war against the drug cartels,” says a Bolivian ex-army officer. Quiroga recently visited Washington for meetings with officials at the State Department and the NSC. Bolivia is the world’s third largest producer of cocaine, feeding much of its product to Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles in exchange for past financial backing, technical and military support. But the U.S. stake in Bolivia now reaches beyond the war on drugs. The country contains one of the world’s largest proven reserves of Lithium in the Salar de Uyuni, a thick 10,000 square kilometer salt lake occupying the Andean high plain. China has been scheming to control the rare earth reserves through a series of contracts with the MAS government, extending a $1 billion loan as a holding fee. Opponents in the Congress have held up approval of the agreements, and Quiroga wants to flip control of what could become the world’s largest lithium mine over to the U.S. He is proposing a joint venture between Wall Street hedge funds and a Bolivian public company his government would create to distribute $1,500 shares in the lithium mine project to all Bolivian families. A former administrator of state energy and mining enterprises, Jaime Davila, says it’s a privatization scheme that would ultimately involve the buying up the state issued shares by the American investors, locking in U.S. ownership of Bolivia’s strategic minerals. Latest opinion polls place Quiroga 8 — 10 points ahead of “centrist” candidate Rodrigo Paz but shy of a majority, with 13 percent saying they are undecided or casting blank ballots. Bolivians suffering the standard effects of socialist misrule — rampant inflation, currency restrictions blocking availability of dollars, crippling fuel shortages whose effects are seen in the mile long cues of trucks outside gas stations — virtually wiped MAS off the political map in last August’s first election round between five candidates. The ruling party’s official candidate scored 3 percent of the vote, or barely enough for the group to maintain representation in Congress. The international media has bought into the narrative that the left is dead in Bolivia and that both Quiroga and Paz equally represent a shift to the right. But a closer examination of Paz’s political legacy and the background of his closest advisors indicate that beneath a softer populist rhetoric and the adoption of a defunct Christian Democrat grouping to label his new party, he is deeply compromised with the corrupt radical leftists and narco-trafficking interests that have driven Bolivia to the abyss. Rodrigo Paz is the son of Jaime Paz Zamora, founder of the radical Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) which plotted armed revolution with Fidel Castro back in the 1980s and whose communist flag is unfurled at his rallies. His campaign manager and chief fund raiser is convicted drug lord Oscar Eid who was released from prison when Paz senior occupied the presidency in the early 1990s, through a highly controversial amnesty decree pardoning drug traffickers “regretting” their crimes. Paz senior was himself eventually indicted for narco links based on sworn testimony before a U.S. federal court by an extradited police chief. But the case against him was never pursued and his U.S. visa restrictions were lifted through the diligent efforts of the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia at the time, Manuel Rocha, recently charged by the FBI as a Cuban mole. Much controversy also surrounds Rodrigo Paz’s running mate, ex-police captain Edman Lara who was expelled from the force over accusations of extortion. He went on to get a law degree from the Bolivarian Union University, a Venezuelan funded college directed by Venezuela’s ambassador in Bolivia, Cesar Trompis. “We are seeing another Petro” says a former senior U.S. intelligence officer with extensive experience in Latin America, comparing Paz with the current president of Colombia, a former member of a leftist guerrilla group who got elected on a moderate platform and turned into an ally of Maduro. Quiroga says that Paz-Lara are the “ continuity” of the MAS regime so resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of Bolivians. Some fear that Morales’ political machine which still controls much of the rural vote that counts 3 to 1 over the urban vote in his drafted constitution, is secretly backing Paz, having delivered his surprisingly strong showing in last August’s primary elections in which he received the largest vote share. Some analysts suspect foul play. An engineer who has held a variety of technical positions in Bolivian state enterprises and multinational corporations, Ivan Fernandez, has presented a study of results in recent elections which indicate what in Spanish he calls a “fraude depurativo,” by which anti-government voters are systematically purged from rolls or get ballots switched to blank votes during the count until a majority is secured for the “deep state” candidate. “MAS opponents have signed countless protest petitions filed with the government over the years, in which they wrote their national ID numbers. This information gets cross referenced with the voter rolls” says Fernandez. It’s the same system used to fix elections in Venezuela which failed in the last 2024 elections because the opposition vote was so overwhelming that it surpassed electronic capacities to alter it. The opposition also managed to receive authentic vote tallies from local precincts before they could be electronically manipulated through the centralized count. A prominent Bolivian opposition lawyer and law professor, Christian Barrientos, told The American Spectator of how he was shocked to discover he was erased from official registries when he went to renew his professional credentials last week. He says that he has heard of other similar cases in recent days, including that of his father, who worked with the U.S. embassy in drafting anti-drug legislation and whose national ID number is now assigned to someone else. Morales tried pulling off a fraudulent election victory in 2019 when attempts to hack into the vote count were uncovered by the opposition and denounced before Bolivia’s supreme court. The U.S. convened an emergency session of the OAS which condemned Morales, who was forced to resign when the army refused to put down mass protests calling for his ouster. The Trump administration and its regional allies need to remain equally vigilant this time around. A golden chance to strike a stinging blow against narco driven socialism in Latin America while challenging China’s rare earth monopoly used to blackmail the U.S. on trade, might otherwise be lost.  

I’ve been familiar with at least a few of Vernon Duke’s songs — among the most famous of them being “April in Paris,” “Autumn in New York,” “I Can’t Get Started,” and “Taking a Chance on Love” — for as long as I can remember. But until I read his newly reprinted autobiography, the delightful Passport to Paris (originally published in 1954), I knew almost nothing about his life. All I knew was this: he was born in Russia and composed a great deal of serious music under his birth name, Vladimir Dukelsky, before fleeing to the West and starting to write American-style popular songs under the pen name Vernon Duke. The life story of Vladimir Dukelsky … is a stirring account of the American dream made real. Well, Duke’s story turns out to be a fascinating one. Born in 1903, he grew up speaking both Russian and French, attended the conservatory in Kiev with Vladimir Horowitz, and composed his early music — all of it classical in style — under the influence of Debussy and Prokofiev. While he was still a conservatory student, just before the Bolshevik Revolution, his teachers disappeared overnight, replaced by young men who, instead of using musical terms in their lessons, spoke of “class war” and “bourgeois tendencies.” When the October Revolution took place, Dukelsky’s grandfather, who owned a conservative newspaper, was one of the first to be arrested. Soon almost everyone was spying on everyone else, including their own families. At the conservatory, Dukelsky and his fellow students were ordered to collaborate — in good collectivist style — on a Soviet propaganda opera. Dukelsky complied, but his appalled mother refused to let him attend the performance. During the next three years, Kiev underwent 19 changes in government — each of them accompanied by street battles, bombings, and machine-gun fire. Eventually, with Soviet troops closing in on the town, Dukelsky, his mother, and his younger brother, Alex, fled to Odessa. Not long afterward, with the Communists bearing down on that city, they escaped to Constantinople, where Dukelsky played piano in lowbrow saloons whose patrons wanted only to hear the latest hits by Irving Berlin and George Gershwin — whose “Swanee” sent Dukelsky “into ecstasies” and inspired him to write tunes that “sounded as if they were in the authentic American jazz idiom.” In 1921, the family relocated yet again, this time to New York. “Russians used to flee from the czar,” writes Duke, “we fled from the czar’s murderers.” In New York, Dukelsky began to meet the musical glitterati of the day. When he played one of his pieces — “an extremely cerebral piano sonata” — for Gershwin, the latter disapproved: “‘There’s no money in that kind of stuff,’ he said, ‘no heart in it either. Try to write some real popular tunes — and don’t be scared about going lowbrow. They will open you up!’” That last sentence, recalls Duke, “stayed with me through all the years that we were friends.” And with good reason: “opening up” was, after all, an American concept, alien to the Russian mind but key to Dukelsky’s musical assimilation. Gershwin did Dukelsky another favor: he came up with the name Vernon Duke, which the Russian, while continuing for many years to sign his serious music as Dukelsky, began using to distinguish his American-style pop music from his still Russian-flavored classical works. Living in New York was a heady experience. At swank Manhattan soirees, he met Marcel Duchamp, E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, and H.L. Mencken, among many others. Professionally, however, he struggled. Although he got a piece played at Carnegie Hall, there was no money in it. He made small sums playing inferior popular music at down-at-heel night spots, an activity that he found mortifying; phoning Gershwin in desperation, he was taken him to meet Max Dreyfus, heads of the Harms Music Publishing Company. Alas, Dreyfus didn’t cotton to the kid’s work. One feels for the youth, whom the elder Duke does a wonderful job of bringing to life: he loves nice clothes and enjoys parties but is not good “at either drinking or lechery.” Indeed, the idea of sex, Duke confesses, “still filled me with uncomprehending terror.” On the whole, then, “I was a badly frightened young man.” A sojourn in Paris changed his luck. He earned some of the money for the trip by arranging the piano solo version of Rhapsody in Blue (the job paid $100). In Paris there were more big shots: Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, Jean Cocteau, Coco Chanel. He met Diaghilev, who loved his first piano concerto. “I began to feel important,” he writes, “a dangerous feeling when one is twenty.” Just as he credits Gershwin with having done more for Duke’s songwriting career than anyone else, he credits Diaghilev with doing more than anyone else to help Dukelsky succeed in the classical realm. Like Gershwin, Diaghilev had advice for him, which Duke records in a characteristically amusing passage: Diaghilev warned me to keep away from women, whom he professed to abhor, not merely as useless (to him) sexually but because of their colossal stupidity and greed. Sergei Pavlovitch was, I’m afraid, overfond of such generalizations; along with women, his pet peeves were homosexuals and balletomanes. This intelligence might appear startling in view of his being both of these things himself. However, he explained the paradox by insisting that he only liked manly and virile youths….Simpering and mincing tantes [fairies] he detested and thought worse than women. While in Paris, Duke sat for a portrait by Picasso. He triumphed with a ballet, Zephyr et Flore, which took him to Monte Carlo and London — where there were still more marquee names, including William Walton, P. G. Wodehouse, and Cecil Beaton. In London, he wrote pop songs with lyrics by the author Beverley Nichols and signed the name Vernon Duke to his first published popular song. He met George Balanchine, “probably the most lovable creature that ever lived,” with whom he visited a bordello in Turin where both men, upon inspecting the availablle ragazze, decided not to avail themselves of their services after all. He made a road trip with Prokofiev to the south of France. Back in Paris, he was slapped at a party by Jean Cocteau. The Soviet government invited him to translate Gershwin shows into Russian — a proposition that “greatly intrigued me, as I felt that no better anti-Soviet propaganda could be imagined than a big, healthy dose of Gershwin music, and all the good American things it stands for.” Soon enough Duke was back in America, a country that he frequently pauses to celebrate. America, he notes, is “the country to which we Dukelskys owed everything — our exodus from enslaved Russia, our subsistence in Constantinople, Alex’s brilliant scholastic career [he attended MIT], made possible by Americans who had faith in him.” As for Russia, Duke regards the change of St. Petersburg’s name to Leningrad as an “unspeakable sacrilege” but consoles himself with the thought that the now vanished St. Petersburg “will live forever in the music of Pushkin’s poetry.” (I would like to think that Duke, who died in 1969, somehow knows that the city’s old name has been restored.) Time went on, and Duke accumulated more celebrity friends: Oscar Levant, George Kaufman, Yip Harburg, Fanny Brice. He composed songs for Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers. In 1932, missing the City of Light, he wrote “April in Paris,” which, like his later song “Autumn in New York,” made no impact at the time, even though both would go on to become standards. One person who appreciated his pop music, it turned out, was none other than Jerome Kern, the father of modern American popular song, who, encountering him in the offices of Harms, staggered him by saying: “I’m under your influence.” Prokofiev was less impressed by Duke’s — as opposed to Dukelsky’s — output. From the moment Duke began writing pop songs, his mentor referred to them as “whoring.” This didn’t reduce Duke’s affection for Prokofiev, whose story, as told here, is particularly poignant. Having fled to the U.S. from Russia in 1918, Prokofiev spent much of his life in Paris before returning to the USSR in 1936. When asked by Duke how he could bear to live under Communism, Prokofiev replied loftily: “I care nothing for politics.” Alas, it turned out that politics cared about him. Although the Soviet Union treated him as a national treasure and supplied him with a chauffeured limousine, he was forced to write propaganda music and was obliged, when he traveled to the West, to leave his sons at home as hostages. Inevitably, the ax fell: in 1948, he was officially denounced, his works banned, his finances ruined, and the right to travel to the West denied him. In a cruel irony, he died on the same day as Stalin. Meanwhile, back in the West, Dukelsky’s career as a serious composer was moving along nicely, although Duke’s efforts to churn out hits were hit-and-miss. After Cabin in the Sky (1940) conquered the Great White Way, his luck ran out. Self-deprecatingly, he claims to have spent years as “Broadway’s No. 1 Composer of Unproduced Shows.” Tired of failure, he returned to Paris, where his serious music was still being enthusiastically performed and respectfully reviewed. In his closing pages he deplores the state of serious music “today” (i.e., in the 1950s), most of which, composed by the melodically challenged disciples of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, didn’t — and still doesn’t — appeal to wide audiences. Duke’s own taste ran to the more traditional and melodic — Gian Carlo Menotti, Kurt Weill, Walter Piston, Leonard Bernstein’s Fancy Free, and, not least, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which he pronounced America’s best opera. For what it’s worth, I share Duke’s musical taste. I haven’t heard all of his songs, but I love the ones I know. I love his love of America and his withering contempt for the upscale “progressives” he encountered in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris who were appalled that he’d left the Soviet Utopia for the capitalist hell of the U.S. I love the humor, humility, and frankness with which he recounts his life story, telling us as much about his professional failures as his successes, and not omitting the several occasions on which he experienced unrequited love and had his heart broken. I’ve never been familiar with his classical work, but I’ve started to acquaint myself with it, and what I’ve heard is beautiful. (I can’t promise to learn it all: his catalog, both as Duke and Dukelsky, is voluminous.) How to sum up? Easy. The life story of Vladimir Dukelsky, who officially changed his name to Vernon Duke when he took U.S. citizenship in 1939, is a stirring account of the American dream made real. It’s the story of a man who deeply loved the freedom and the people of his adopted country and who, in turn, became one of that country’s undying cultural ornaments. Perhaps it was his fellow songwriter Alec Wilder who, in the section devoted to Duke in his definitive, delicious 1972 book American Popular Song, said it best: “although he was born in another culture, his absorption of American popular music writing was phenomenal.” Indeed. And the immensely charming Passport to Paris is an ideal introduction to this two-headed musical marvel. READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Prepare to Say Goodbye to the Transgender Moment Almost Famous Turns 25 Play It Again, Woody

As Daniel Flynn shows in The Man Who Invented Conservatism, the unlikely life of Frank Meyer offers insight into the Communist Party, the founding of National Review, and what Meyer called “fusionism.” For readers of all persuasions, the “Homeschool” chapter could prove the most significant. “Perhaps no other issue,” Flynn notes, “even Communism, ignited Meyer as education did.” Meyer decried the “totalitarian implications” of  government education and found it rife with “gobbledygook.” The teachers “no longer studied the subjects they taught and presented themselves as partners facilitating learning rather than classroom authorities transmitting established methods and truth.” (RELATED: The Organizer of Victory: Frank S. Meyer) Frank and Elsie Meyer paid taxes to support the system, but “could not entrust the cultivation of the most precious fruits of their union to the state.” So after kindergarten, they homeschooled their children, John and Eugene. With her background in literature at Radcliffe, Elsie taught English and geography. Frank taught algebra, and the couple brought in tutors for French, science, and so forth. The children did well in their Woodstock home, but as Flynn notes, the state of New York “did not always tolerate” the arrangement. A “flustered social worker” told Elsie she had not received permission to keep her children home. She responded with a “libertarian roar.” “You need my permission to do anything with my children,” Elsie told the social worker. “I don’t need yours.” “You need my permission to do anything with my children,” Elsie told the social worker. “I don’t need yours.” Elsie was right about that, but “other authorities looked askance upon the unusual arrangement beyond grade school and into college.” John averaged above 700 on college boards, but Princeton sought to have John interviewed by a psychiatrist. Princeton eventually relented but “made further requests that Frank found onerous and unnecessary.” Just so parents know, homeschooled John Meyer became an attorney, a kind of “fifth columnist” for Frank inside the federal leviathan. Homeschooled Eugene Meyer helped found the influential Federalist Society, and in time became its president. Frank Meyer passed away in 1972, and in 1983, the A Nation at Risk report contended that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” If the 1950s offered “gobbledygook,” readers have to wonder what Frank would say about the “junkthought” now forced on children and, in some states, hidden from their parents. Long before the lockdowns of the COVID pandemic, many parents discovered the advantages of homeschooling. But as with the Meyers, their tax dollars continue to support the government monopoly system, in which money must trickle down through layers of bureaucracy before reaching the classroom. (RELATED: For Too Many in Education, Charlie Kirk’s Assassin Is Exactly the Type of Person They Are Trying to Create) The government and the teacher cartels believe they have a right to perpetuate this failed system for all time. They don’t, but at some point, parents’ right to choice seems to have been cancelled. Congress should tap the insight of Frank Meyer and deconstruct government monopoly education, a vast collective farm of mediocrity and failure. With the fervor of Elsie Meyer, parents should demand a system in which the dollars follow the scholars, a GI Bill for K-12 students. (RELATED: Linda McMahon Body-Slams Woke Classrooms) Parents don’t need the state to tell them what’s best for their children. Putting parents in charge will help restore the nation’s fortunes moving forward. READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley: California’s ‘Pillage’ People Lose Equity Theft Battle California’s Real Safe Districts Newsom’s Search for the Secret Police Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.

Just as airlines reward high spending customers with perks such as flight upgrades and special airport lounges, so the Trump administration has decided to provide concierge service to nine universities that, apparently, for the most part, have generally been cooperative with it during the turmoil of the past year. One of the schools, MIT, has already turned down the deal, suggesting that giving preferential treatment to schools on such things as scientific research is totally inappropriate, violating the principle of giving grants solely on the basis of perceived scientific promise. The nine schools (six private, three public) have been told they will gain special benefits, such as enhanced grant support for agreeing to abide by a fairly extensive number of provisions, seven of which are listed below. First, the schools have to agree not to discriminate in admission based on such non-merit-based achievement criteria as race or gender, with new undergraduate students required to take a standardized test like the ACT, SAT, or the newer Classical Learning Test. Related to that, secondly, they must agree that not more than 15 percent of undergraduate admissions will be foreign-born (and not more than 5 percent from one country). A Wall Street Journal analysis by Brian McGill and Sara Randazzo shows all nine schools are currently below that level. A related third provision extends the non-discrimination strictures to staff hiring. (RELATED: Higher Education’s Triple Crisis: Finances, Integrity, Leadership) A fourth provision states that the signatory schools agree to be marketplaces of ideas, with no tolerance for disruptive behavior inconsistent with civil free expression. Fifth, schools must commit to requiring students to earn their grades based on academic achievement, implying a crackdown on grade inflation. Sixth, schools must agree that there are two genders, based on biological realities. Seventh, the schools must agree to freeze tuition fees for five years. This is an innovative approach to using federal financial pressures to effect change. Four of the nine schools are prestigious elite Ivy League (plus MIT) institutions. A couple of others are highly regarded but not top 10-ranked private schools (Vanderbilt and the University of Southern California), while three are flagship state universities (Virginia, Texas-Austin, and Arizona) with good to superb reputations. By providing extra funds and favored treatment to these schools, presumably the administration believes it can gain the cooperation of other institutions wishing to share the spoils of concierge service. And the goals are superb ones. For example, institutional neutrality is critical to a truly open marketplace of ideas where discussion is heated and frenetic, but also fruitful and consistent with robust discoveries and civil debate that advance humanity. This idea promotes academic excellence over identity politics. In particular, I am delighted to finally see a governmental agency attack the grade inflation that has, over time, led to a pronounced decline in work effort by American college students. The standards in the new rules are disappointingly very vague, although they are a first step to recognizing a huge problem: most college students don’t study very much or work very hard because it is unnecessary. (RELATED: The Outrageous Scandal That Should Be Rocking Higher Education) The tuition freeze is probably mostly meaningless, since few students pay the posted sticker price in this era of rampant tuition discounting. Oscillating and contradictory federal policies sow confusion and over-politicization of higher education, so presidential educational proclamations likely will do more harm than good in the long run. Moreover, the new higher education fatwa from the Trump administration can be criticized on principle. To begin with, modern American political history is replete with big changes in presidential administration policy orientation. The Obama administration’s higher education policies differed materially from those of the first Trump administration. Take the issue of sexually inappropriate behavior  — the Obama administration’s dramatic and, to my mind, un-American assault on the rights of those accused was dialed back dramatically in the first Trump administration, only to be largely reversed under Biden and, no doubt, once again under Trump II, which wants to radically reduce the regulatory state. Oscillating and contradictory federal policies sow confusion and over-politicization of higher education, so presidential educational proclamations likely will do more harm than good in the long run. For example, a Democratic administration elected in 2028 might declare climate change is the premier issue of the day, requiring completion of a wokish course on the topic by all schools receiving federal subsidies. Indeed, while I like the tenor of most of the recent provisions in the Trump concierge grant approach, I think it would be far more preferable to decentralize federal funding of higher education, reduce federal grants, end the disastrous student financial assistance programs, and, better yet,  eliminate the entire U.S. Department of Education — even going so far as to destroy its headquarters building or turn it over to the very popular and nearby Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. A strength of American higher education, and of our federal system of government generally, is that we have 50 different approaches to higher education competing with one another for customers and academic leadership. American higher education today, by many criteria, is in worse shape than it was in, say, 1970, before we had a federal education department and heavy-handed federal efforts to direct the creation and dissemination of knowledge and ideas to new generations of Americans. Borrowing from Chairman Mao, let us “let 50 flowers bloom,” (one for each state), or even better and more accurately, “Let’s let thousands of flowers bloom,” by decentralizing control over the business of higher education largely to the university-college level, just as we have largely allowed private firms to quite successfully control literally thousands, even millions, of business enterprises. Then let these individual institutions, constrained by student preferences, work with their governing boards and donor bases to remain competitive in a world where declining fertility, irresponsible federal spending, and other problems create big challenges for the next generation of higher educational leaders. The concierge approach to higher education should be a transitory strategy to restore rationality to existing broken national attempts to govern what is best handled by individual schools. Hopefully, schools can ultimately be weaned off a dependence on a federal government that cannot even put its own fiscal house in order. READ MORE from Richard K. Vedder: Higher Education’s Triple Crisis: Finances, Integrity, Leadership Why Are People Fleeing Highly Educated States? Blue States’ High Tax State-of-Mind Richard Vedder is an emeritus economics professor at Ohio University, a Senior Fellow at both the Independent Institute and Unleash Prosperity, and author of Let Colleges Fail.