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This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** There are a lot of reasons to be excited about Ralph Lauren’s America 250 collaboration with the United States Postal Service. First and foremost are the “American Icon” stamps around which the collection is built: From Jackie Robinson’s glove to the top of the Empire State Building, these 13 images “celebrate the essence of our country.” Then, of course, there are the clothes: patriotic hats, polos, and a semiquincentennial edition of the brand’s famous American flag sweater. But most exciting is how Ralph Lauren, both the brand and its namesake, describes the collection in explicitly patriotic language. “I love America,” Lauren said at the launch of the series, which the brand describes as a celebration of “America’s shared values — freedom, independence, equality, opportunity, and the pursuit of happiness.” In Commentary this month, Robert Pondiscio laments that America’s 250th anniversary does not feel as celebratory as the bicentennial, largely because we have forgotten our “shared ideals.” The Ralph Lauren collection suggests that those shared ideals may still have some gas left in them. If nothing else, it means that America’s 250th anniversary, if not as triumphant as its 200th, may be more stylish. Gone are the bell-bottoms and kipper ties we associate with bicentennial kitsch; Americans will greet their country’s quarter-millennial milestone in roll-necks and Oxfords. America is in the midst of a preppy revival. When Ralph Lauren hosted its first men’s fashion show in 20 years this past January, it was only the latest confirmation of this trend. In recent years, we’ve seen J.Crew claw its way back from the brink of bankruptcy and irrelevance as menswear head Brendon Babenzien pushed the brand back to its classic roots.  J. Press, the original purveyor of Ivy style, is expanding its brick-and-mortar presence under Jack Carlson, the founder of renegade prep shop Rowing Blazers, who took the helm of the 124-year-old retailer earlier this year. And while European luxury brands grapple with plummeting sales, Ralph Lauren’s revenue is up 10% year-over-year. What makes this trend especially notable is that it’s being driven by Gen Z, a group not known for earnestly embracing tradition. Menswear industry insider R.F. Kenmore points to the popularity of FX’s “Love Story” and the renewed interest in John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette as a clear instance of this phenomenon. On TikTok, Zoomers valorize the “quiet luxury” and “old money” aesthetics embodied by the Kennedy clan, a prep rebranding for the social media age. Kenmore sees the entire trend as “a bit of a reset,” a response to the “era of streetwear … and COVID sweatsuits” from which we’ve just emerged. “I personally watched, while working at a large American brand, as consumers rotated directly out of booming knits categories such as tees, sweats, etc., and into button-up shirting and woven pants like khakis, driven by both a return to work and a desire to leave those days behind,” Kenmore told The Daily Wire. “The natural swing was into more structured and iconic-feeling uniforms or outfits.” O.W. Root, a menswear writer and cultural critic, also sees a commercial fashion logic to the preppy revival. Style swings back and forth. Young people who came up wearing hoodies on Zoom meetings want to wear ties; after stuffing themselves into slim-fit suits for most of the 21st century, men have decided to embrace looser, more traditional fits. But Root sees something deeper going on here, particularly when it comes to young men. “What many men really ache for, even if they don’t know they ache for it, is style that more or less can be recognizable 10 years from now and 10 years prior,” Root says. “Style that follows them through their life, that roots them in their life.” “Our clothes are our culture, they say something about our values, they say something about who we are, they say something about what we care about and what we believe,” he adds. “The beautiful thing about preppy style is you can wear it when you’re 17 and you can wear it when you’re 70, and you will wear it slightly differently, but you will still have a recognizably preppy through line through your life.” Unlike trends, which come and go, and fast-fashion garments, which deteriorate rapidly, classic preppy items are durable, both physically and aesthetically. As Kenmore notes, this has to do with economic realities as much as with a desire for authenticity. “People are getting tired of rotating disposable crap through their closets and are finally saying ‘enough,’” he says. “This is driving them to buy things that they can have as long as their favorite vintage pieces have lasted.” But will the prep revival last? Leaf through an issue of GQ and you’re bound to find the hallmarks of early-2000s style — front-zip hoodies and running shoes with boot cut jeans — dotting the pages. If the economy dips, we’re likely going to see a return to mid-aughts business casual — because when money is tight, you need one pair of slacks that can go from the office to the bar. There are also some concerning signs at the recently ascendant preppy stalwarts. Babenzien, who, as Root put it, “basically spearheaded J.Crew becoming good again,” departed earlier this year. And while he made the brand cool again, that may not have boosted sales enough to keep it out of the red long-term. Then there’s Brooks Brothers, the pillar of American prep, which recently came under fire for an ill-advised attempt to launch a streetwear line. “Brooks Brothers is terrible,” Root tells me. “They’ve just — and I hate to say use this language, because it’s so lame, but they’ve just lost their way. They’re not servicing any traditional Brooks Brothers customers at all.” But these setbacks pale in comparison to the strength of the prep revival. “Brooks will come back,” Root says. “Brooks Brothers is not going to die forever.” Similarly, Kenmore doesn’t think Babenzien’s departure will materially change J.Crew’s direction. Moreover, as he noted, the Ivy style revival has occurred in large part outside major brands. Today’s preppies care less about flashing their Polo horses and buying the newest collections than about acquiring good, timeless pieces and cultivating a sense of style.  Americans, it seems, want things that last. Things that matter. Things that connect them to what came before. Prep, like all styles, has ebbed and flowed over the years. But this latest resurgence isn’t just about the clothes. It’s about the attitude. It’s about tradition. It’s about America. And like America, it’s not going anywhere.

For four years, I have watched Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano from a seat on the Virginia House Courts of Justice Criminal Subcommittee. I have read his policies, tracked the bills his political allies push in Richmond, and listened to the families on the wrong end of his charging decisions. Last Thursday on Capitol Hill, the rest of America finally got the view I have had since 2022. It was ugly. Under questioning from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, Descano was asked why, one week after Congress requested his testimony, he scrubbed language from his website promising his office would “make charging and plea decisions that limit or avoid immigration consequences” and calling deportation as a criminal penalty “a perversion of justice.” That language sat on his campaign site for six years. Then, conveniently, it vanished. His explanation was the moment of the hearing. The promises were just “a campaign statement,” he said. Voters, he suggested, were “obtuse” if they could not tell the difference between what he told them to win the election and what he actually did in office. That is the whole sanctuary city playbook in one sentence. Tell the voters one thing. Govern as the opposite. Dare them to do anything about it. Cheryl Minter, sitting two chairs away from Descano in that hearing room, already knew the answer. Her daughter Stephanie was stabbed to death at a Fairfax County bus stop in February by Abdul Jalloh, an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone with more than 30 prior arrests. Descano’s office dropped charge after charge. Fairfax County police warned his prosecutors in writing, three separate times, that Jalloh would seriously hurt or kill someone if he were not detained. He did. And Marvin Morales-Ortez, an alleged MS-13 member from El Salvador, was rearrested for murder the day after Descano’s office declined to prosecute him on a prior charge. This is not a pair of unlucky outcomes. It is what the system is designed to produce when the prosecutor decides, in writing, that immigration status takes precedence over public safety. Here is what nobody at that hearing said plainly enough, so I will: sanctuary policies are a transfer of cost and risk from people who broke the law to people who did not. Every dropped charge, every ignored ICE detainer, every Crespo plea deal designed to dodge deportation is a bill someone else pays. The Fairfax County taxpayer pays for the courts, jails, public defenders, social services, emergency rooms, and schools, while absorbing the consequences of releases that should never have happened. The Stephanie Minters of this Commonwealth pay with their lives, and taxpayers are forced to fund it. And the bill keeps growing. The sanctuary model does not reduce crime. It recycles criminals. It does not save money. It pours money into welfare programs, housing assistance, and emergency services for populations that federal law says should not be here in the first place. It does not produce safer communities. It produces police officers writing prophetic emails to prosecutors about defendants they have arrested 10, 20, 30 times, begging them to do their jobs. There is exactly one fix, and it is the one the open-borders Left will fight to the last breath. Enforcement. Honor the detainers. Prosecute the charges. Hand over the people federal law says have to go. Stop running the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office as a drive-thru where repeat offenders pick up their dropped charges and head out the back door. I have spent four sessions in the General Assembly working to undo the damage this approach has caused the Commonwealth. The progressive prosecutor model that Descano represents, bankrolled by Soros-aligned money and dressed up as reform, has produced exactly what its critics predicted. And the data is readily available to back up these claims. A Commonwealth’s Attorney swears an oath to enforce the law. Not to edit it. Not to apologize for it. Not to scrub it off a website when Congress comes calling. The voters of Fairfax County will get their say in 2027. The rest of Virginia should not have to wait. Virginians have heard enough campaign statements. Time to enforce the law. *** Del. Wren Williams represents Virginia’s 47th District in the House of Delegates and serves as a member of the Virginia Crime Commission. He sits on the House Courts of Justice Committee and its Criminal Subcommittee.

The sharp observational writing that drove the rise of Alex Turner began in Sheffield, England, where Turner was raised and educated before becoming one of the defining songwriters of 21st-century British rock. Born on January 6, 1986, Turner developed an interest in music during his teenage years and received a guitar as a Christmas gift in 2001. Alongside friends Matt Helders, Andy Nicholson, and Jamie Cook, he formed Arctic Monkeys in 2002. The band quickly built a following through live performances and internet sharing of demo recordings, an approach that helped transform the way younger audiences discovered new music in The post Complete List Of Alex Turner Bands And Musical Projects appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. Jack Fowler: All right, here’s the headline, Victor. Kamala Harris torched for progressive wish list. Here’s the first few paragraphs of this article: Harris said during a Wednesday night livestream on the “Win With Black Women” podcast that Democrats need, quote, “an expanded playbook and need to consider radical positions ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, including abolishing the electoral college, packing the Supreme Court.  “Look,” she says, “this is a moment where there are no bad ideas. A no bad idea brainstorm is what I’d like to call it,” Harris said in the video, which quickly went viral on social media.   I know Kamala Harris and the word brain in the same sentence are –  Victor Davis Hanson: It’s an oxymoron.   Fowler: Yeah, yeah. So, Puerto Rico statehood, neutralizing red states. She says they’re cheating on the maps, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.   Victor, your take.   Hanson: Yeah, I mean, she goes through these metamorphoses depending … she has no real ideology. I know she’s a black woman, half Asian black, and she uses that, but she has no deep-seated beliefs.  In the ’80s and ’90s and at the millennium and after, there was this sort of Bill Clinton democratism, and so she tried to distinguish herself as a tough prosecutor. She would prosecute parents whose kids were tardy to class or truant. She would go after marijuana possessors. She was the consort of Willie Brown, and she was trying to be the moderate voice.  And then when the Obama years came, she radicalized, and then her bathos point was when we had that five months of 2020 looting, killing, arson, and she got on CBS News and she said it’s not going to end. It shouldn’t end. I think it was with [Stephen] Colbert. It’s gonna go on, and it’s gonna go on to the election.  And then it was very funny because all the Left was trying to get Trump, Jack Smith, on insurrection because he had, you know, supposedly egged on the crowd, but he did say assemble peacefully and patriotically. She didn’t even have that out. And yet they all said, “Well, she wasn’t mentioning…” And that day in Washington, of course, they had tried to storm the White House, and Trump went into his bunker, and The New York Times said he was kind of a coward for doing that.  I suppose they wanted him to go out and fight with the protesters. But the point I’m making is they all said it was just nothing.   And then she reincarnated herself again under Biden as vice president as open borders, borders are all this left-wing. And then she ran and remember she said that she didn’t really know whether she was for deportations or not.  She had that clip came out where she was going, No deportation, no deportation. And so she tried to tack to the center. She wasn’t even…  Remember, she had said she’d eliminate fracking, but now she wasn’t sure. Pennsylvania was important. So now she’s going to go hard left because that’s where the Jacobin Party is.  And then if she gets the nomination, which I pray that she does, then she will go back to left-of-center. She doesn’t believe in anything.   As I said, I didn’t want to be cruel, but it is true that when she starts talking and the word feelings, empathy, any metaphysical term, time, being, come up, her eyes start to go like this, you know, like “Twilight Zone” music.  And then she starts to babble. And then when she sees that nobody is, everybody’s going, “Is this person sane?” Then she starts cackling. And that’s, she knows she can’t do that and yet she can’t resist or maybe it’s some affectation, but it’s sad. It really is.   Fowler: Well, she knew enough as a candidate, a forced-on America candidate, to not talk to the press for, what was it, like 35 days or something?  She didn’t answer a question.   Hanson: Yeah, she didn’t do it the first … I want to ask the Democrats, you had power for eight years with Bill Clinton. You had power with eight years with Barack Obama, and you had the Congress at the beginning. Why didn’t you get rid of the Electoral College then? Why didn’t you bring in two states then?  Why didn’t you pack the court and get your, I don’t know, your six liberal judges then? Why didn’t you end the Senate filibuster? Barack Obama tried to filibuster Sam Alito.   And the answer is that as long as they have power, they put those things off. Then, when they get out of power, the system’s not fair.  The system’s fair that got them power. Right. And then when they’re enjoying … They’re like little adolescents, you know what I mean? 13-year-olds. If everything is my way, then the whole world is wonderful. And when I don’t get my way, I throw a tantrum and are mad at my parents. And the parents in this case are the Constitution and 250 years of tradition.  Yeah. You didn’t get me my power. You didn’t get me elected, so I’m mad at you. I’m gonna get in two states. I’m gonna get rid of the filibuster. I’m gonna get rid of the Electoral College. That’s what I’m gonna do, and I’m gonna … It’s like, well, look … it’s childlike.   Fowler: Yeah, along those lines, Victor, we didn’t talk about it, the Virginia Supreme Court ruling and rollout, but between the rejection from the state Supreme Court and then the bungled application to the U.S.  Supreme Court that had misspelled Virginia—even misspelled the word Senate and other things, misspelled Virginia, there was talk of an effort to remove all the Supreme Court justices from the Virginia court. I saw that. By the age of 53. Yeah. So right. Yeah. They don’t get their, “Well, we’re gonna do whatever we can to, to shoehorn in” —   Hanson: And I think a lot of this is when you’re looking at even the left-wing analysis, you know, Nate Silver or Cook or whatever report.   Fowler: Yeah, that’s Charles Cook, yeah.   Hanson: You start to look at it, and they’re gonna pick up about 10 to 14 seats probably, the Republicans are, in this redistricting war, and they’re gonna pick up maybe four or five in the racial gerrymandering wars, and that’s not counting this, as I said earlier, this census.  It’ll be long term. But when you look at the actual seats that are up that are contested, there’s only about 25, if you don’t count leaning left or leaning right, and it’s about 50/50 in those 25, 11. So I would say that the Republicans have, right now, a 30% to 45% chance of holding the House.  And it’s gonna be contingent on … There’s such little adolescents on the left. They really do believe that the war is lost. In fact, the president of Iran came out today, Jack, and he said, “It doesn’t do any good, essentially, for us to lie to the Iranians,” said, “We haven’t hurt … We’re not hurting. We’ve suffered a lot of damage.”  He is more accurate than the Left is. They’ve said that, you know, Iran is winning. And my point is whether it’s, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I have an instinctual gut feeling that sometime Tuesday night to Friday, we’re going to go back into kinetic operations and it’s going to be quick and there’s going to be a, you know, a tumult and prices will up, but I don’t think it’s going to last.  I think it’s going to solve the problem. They’re going to open the Gulf and there’s going to be a lot of speculators with high priced oil that want to unload it.   We said last time there’s 250 freighters out in the seas full anywhere from a half a million to 2 million barrels, and they’re going to be unloading it.  And if Trump can by June or July get back on the economy, the indicators are all strong. And I think the Left knows that. And then when they look at the redistricting, it’s not, it’s not a done deal for them. And they like, also like little kids, they just get in these temper tantrums or wild enthusiasm.  Here in California, when they redistrict, they were just wild. Like, “Well, we did. It’s gonna be … ” And then when Virginia did, “Oh, that’s the icing on the … Oh, and then we’re gonna impeach these people.” They go from like this, this, this. And I don’t, I don’t know. Yeah. This is not a democratic party.  It isn’t. These people are really weird. They’re full of anger and hate. And I don’t, I don’t know. It’s a weird mixture of Islamicism and socialism, communism, and then DEI. It’s got all of these in, these clouds that make a perfect storm.   Fowler: And grifting. Yes. Stalin and the boys all needed their dachas, and these people—   Hanson: Well, there’s a good article today in The Wall Street Journal about champagne socialist and about all, like Bernie Sanders’ lifestyle that he leads and a lot of these billionaires, the Soros people, and all the nice things that accrue to all.  Hasan Piker and his $200,000 Porsche. Yeah. They surely don’t live the life they advocate for others.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

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