The DSA Hates America. Democrats Helped It Grow.

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The seemingly endless war of words between Morrissey and his former friend and The Smiths bandmate Johnny Marr has resumed once more. The latest eruption concerns the imminent broadcast of a new eight-part BBC 6Music podcast series, The Rise and Fall of the Smiths, presented by Steve Lamacq and Elizabeth Alker, which will air from July 13. A synopsis for the series on the BBC website reads: "The series draws on archive BBC interviews with band members Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, as well as Factory Records co-founder Tony Wilson, producers Stephen Street and Grant Showbiz, Jo Slee and Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records and The Smiths’ manager Joe Moss. It explores how The Smiths created a foundational blueprint for modern indie rock and Britpop in five years, and how their unparalleled, meteoric rise led to an acrimonious, bitter fallout."In a (since-deleted) post on his Morrissey Central website titled 'THE ART OF FORGERY', Morrissey says that he was not invited to participate in the series, and that he believes it will cast him in an unfavourable light. He also takes aim at Johnny Marr, saying, "Marr has intentionally divided the Smiths audience into Marr or Morrissey factions; he has legally claimed the Smiths trade mark name as his - knowing full well that the name was devised by Morrissey. "He has devoted his entire life to killing Morrissey in whatever way available. He embodies precisely what he claims to hate in others. His predatory sport of ‘calling Morrissey names’ is now in full wachine-machine overdrive. Why isn’t he bored of it all yet?"The statement in full can be read below.A BBC radio program supposedly tracking the story of the Smiths will be aired on July 13. The BBC has warned that it is critical in nature towards Morrissey.Morrissey was not invited to take part in this timeworn story - which has seen at least five identical documentaries wherein Marr grabs center stage as the unchanging face of discord … and Bigmarr Strikes Again. The souring of the Smiths dream unravels once again through Marr’s mechanical paces, which are by now totally predictable plot development. The outcome is never in doubt - Marr angel; Morrissey executioner. Forty years on, Marr cannot do anything with his life but look back. The truth is always ignored. The tired lie that I left a note on Andy Rourke’s car saying ‘you are fired’ lives on with sly determination. Yes, I imagine there was a note, and yes, I imagine my name was scribbled across it mischievously - by someone unknown to the BBC. But I hadn’t hired Andy Rourke and I would have no place nor right to fire him.The Smiths was my voice, my lyrics, my song-titles, my album titles, my single and album artwork, my vision, my vocal melodies, my emotions - nobody else’s. When The Guardian say that they love the Smiths but hate Morrissey, it is like saying ‘we hate David Bowie but we love the Spiders From Mars’. It’s all so staged, isn’t it?As if ANYONE could listen to the Smiths yet somehow magically find a way to negotiate AROUND Morrissey and pretend he wasn’t there! When The Guardian first jumped on me in 2015 and made me the focus of their hourly malice, Marr possibly appeared in their offices the next day - sweeping the stairs and waxing the floors. This was his big chance to sway people away from the notion of the Smiths as my project. Beyond playing the music, nobody else had one single idea - but the writer Gareth Roberts took it too far when he recently said: “Remove Morrissey from the Smiths and you are left with Haircut 100”.Funny, but not quite true.This new BBC program already sounds like it is NOT for anyone who knows or cares about the Smiths. Marr has intentionally divided the Smiths audience into Marr or Morrissey factions; he has legally claimed the Smiths trade mark name as his - knowing full well that the name was devised by Morrissey. He has devoted his entire life to killing Morrissey in whatever way available. He embodies precisely what he claims to hate in others. His predatory sport of ‘calling Morrissey names’ is now in full wachine-machine overdrive. Why isn’t he bored of it all yet?I am somehow more shocked by the words of Grant Showbiz in this BBC program. They are slanderous, and even worse-they come from someone whom I always held solidly in the highest regard - until now. Even Soviet Statues crumble.The people who continually shout the loudest are those who look for relevance. Marr, I firmly believe, is destroying the legacy of the Smiths. He plants seeds of doubt everywhere. He’s done it so loudly and so often that he has trapped himself.I have relentlessly faced the slings and arrows of the most vile of the devils snares - be they Marr, or The Guardian. It is said that those who vomit out the same corrupt hatred decade after decade are half in love with their targets, hence their romantic possession. Otherwise, they’d move on - disinclined to devote their adult lives to someone whom they claim is tat. Marr has turned his back on the Smiths in order to get the black wax seal from the haters. He has not ever felt the lyrics to How Soon is Now? - which is why he sings them with all of the romantic enchantment of Leslie Crowther.How fantastic life would have been if Marr had chosen four more studio albums with the Smiths instead of joining and then being thrown out of the Pretenders.Let the pie-fights continue. I shall always be reborn. The only artistic beauty in this world is whatever we bring to it. On the other hand, you have those who obliterate for pay. They have absolutely nothing else to offer.I apologise for use of my own name in the third person (illeism), but it’s easier on both eyes.MORRISSEYOslo, NorwayMonday 22 June 2026Last year, Johnny Marr revealed that he rejected a proposal offering "an eye-watering amount of money" for The Smiths to reform, and that he has no regrets about doing so. "I’m not an idiot, I just think the vibe’s not right," he stated.

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. *** We Americans are no longer talking to our neighbors as much as we once did. This is especially true for younger people, with only 25% reporting conversing with their neighbors a few times per week. There’s also an educational gulf. For those without college degrees, a mere 46% have spent an evening hanging with someone from the ‘hood, compared to 58% for the grads. Even when technology is in the mix, just 45% of youngsters are texting or emailing vs. 65% of those who matriculated.  We’ve gone from keeping up with the Joneses to only paying attention to their social media output. The neighborhood, once the cornerstone of community, is becoming extended-stay housing, with people who live next to one another doing little more than offering a passing wave as they pull into or out of their garages. As an American Enterprise Institute study points out, there are myriad reasons for this. Though work from home has given way to returning to the office, people still spend more time around their homes than they did pre-COVID. Technology is another factor, whether it’s because one doesn’t have to walk a few steps and knock to send a text or because we post so much of ourselves online. There is also the fact that our kids are overscheduled and have to be driven here and there. Sports parents may commiserate, but largely it’s done on the sidelines or in a hotel lounge, not sitting in one another’s backyards.  There is also the trend toward turning what used to be called offices into campuses, replete with stores, coffee shops, bars, restaurants, hotels, daycares, and any and everything else an employee might need. While marketed as a testament to concern about the well-being of those who work there, c’mon. The purpose of these splendiferous campuses is not to enrich the lives of the people; it’s to ensure they never have to leave. The residents of these abominations may not have to worry about loading 16 tons, but we’ve almost come full circle back to them owing their souls to the company store. The campus also reduces the number of outsiders people will talk to as they go about their day-to-day lives. Gone is stopping for a few things on the way home, perchance to run into someone along the way. Instead, it’s returning a package while talking to the person you were working on a PowerPoint deck with a few hours ago. And it’s not a conversation about how the kids are doing in school or that Ben and Stella are installing a pool, it’s about the PowerPoint they’re going to work on tomorrow.  It’s easy to mock those who yearn for buggy whips and typewriters as hopelessly caught in the past. The loss of neighborhoods is different. It’s not the sort of change that eases life, enriching it along the way, but one that diminishes it. While people may yearn for the freedom of the college years, sprawling office parks without a quad or a stadium are but a pale imitation of the true campus. Likewise, the algorithm can never provide the frisson, or the tensions, that neighbors do. Online, it’s easy to settle into echo chambers, ones where there is no possibility of getting slugged in the mouth. On the streets, more decorum and bonhomie are required. The streets also offer more opportunity to see people as full humans rather than caricatures, ones based solely on their job titles and voting preferences. Losing neighborhoods — places for community, for tribes — to extended-stay housing atomizes us instead of helping to build those bonds. We are not meant to be atoms, careening around alone in the world save for our immediate family members, people who are also likely isolated in the digital panopticon rather than sitting in the living room together. It seems dark and difficult to surmount. It isn’t, though, not with a modicum of effort. All you have to do to be the change you want to see in the world, to quote something Gandhi never said, is to go out and be in the world. Take a walk. Get a dog and take him to play fetch. Bake some cookies and deliver them to your neighbor. Sit on your front porch. Randomly fire a pistol in the air to attract attention to yourself.  Actually, don’t do that last one unless your goal is to sacrifice yourself in order to bring the rest of the neighborhood together in opposition to you and your flagrant disregard of HOA regulations as well as common sense. If you’re planning to move, though, no, still don’t do that. Maybe put up one of those giant Halloween skeleton statues but leave it up year-round?  While technological progress and the economy (mostly) just keep humming along, life is more than the sum of our material inputs and outputs. Government is not simply the name for things we choose to do together, but instead a necessary evil since we ate our way out of the garden. Becoming digital recluses is not the mark of progress, but an omen of the dystopian future that awaits us if we don’t start fighting back. Civilization encompasses the entire tapestry that we weave together, one not solely focused on key performance indicators or politics as sports fandom, but on shared sorrow, hope, fear, and joy. No one should have to put up those stupid giant letter signs announcing the arrival of a child or to honor someone’s birthday. We should just know that the mom and dad could use some heat-and-eat meals or that the party is on Saturday and we’re responsible for an appetizer.  Nor should it take a study to remind us to talk to our neighbors, to go hang out with them from time to time. Most of us who walk this earth are destined to be forgotten. There will come a day when the last person to remember us will die, and our memory will die with him. Much better to leave a legacy focused on working together, on celebrating together, on crying together, on building up the spaces immediately around us together such that we leave them better than we found them. But we cannot do that without doing something far simpler first: saying hello. *** Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4.

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. *** As America celebrates its big birthday this summer — writing from across the pond to wish you “happy Semiquincentennial,” I must say you look remarkably good for your age — it is worth taking a moment to consider that such a milestone anniversary is being ignored by this summer’s crop of blockbuster movies. Aside from the “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” three-day limited release of Hillsdale’s documentary “Revolutionary America,” and the Revolutionary War-adjacent “Young Washington,” which depicts the nation’s first president learning his soldiering as a British subject in the French and Indian War, our movie theaters this summer will be free of tricorn hats and flintlock pistols. Which is rather a shame when you think about it, given the significance of this year.  That wasn’t the case back in 1986, when to mark America’s less catchy 210th birthday, Alan Alda wrote, directed, and starred in “Sweet Liberty,” a charming little film about an idealistic history professor watching with growing dismay as a Hollywood film crew arrives in his small town and proceeds to turn his book on an obscure Revolutionary War battle into a trashy crowd-pleaser. Seeing how little the film’s director and screenwriter care about historical accuracy, Alda’s character offers to rewrite the screenplay to keep the film’s story at least a little closer to actual historical events. He ends up falling in love with the actress played by Michelle Pfeiffer, who is cast as the loyal wife of a patriotic hero off fighting elsewhere. Michael Caine stars as a philandering British movie star playing the film’s token baddie, a Redcoat general trying to seduce Pfeiffer’s character while her husband is away fighting. The movie itself, though not a classic, is similar in tone to other movies Alda wrote and directed in the ’80s, sort of Woody Allen-lite comedies about relationships and middle-class neuroses. But Alda’s charm as an actor, along with the cast he assembled for “Sweet Liberty,” makes this film eminently watchable, especially at the moment. The film satirizes those historians who look to the past and cannot help but idealize it, and it honors the uncompromising truthfulness we should bring to our depictions of the past. It also savagely mocks Hollywood’s self-importance and sense of reckless entitlement. Surrounded by a film crew that cares only about making a brainless popcorn movie, which the director sums up as containing three plot-points: “defying authority, the destruction of property, and people taking their clothes off,” Alda’s appalled historian finds unlikely allies in the local band of historical reenactors hired as extras to beef up the film’s battle scenes.  These reenactors are the comic relief of the movie in their earnest fussing over costumes and obsession with the 14 different firing positions on a musket, but they are also its beating heart through their reverence for the country’s past. “Sweet Liberty” ends with Alda and the reenactors rebelling against the bullying Hollywood movie machine, along with its condescending professional stuntmen, all of whom are playing Redcoats, by changing the film’s final battle scene so that it correctly retells the historical events.  Another thing the film does, though Alda could not have known it at the time, is anticipate the kind of creative environment from which Mel Gibson’s bombastic blockbuster “The Patriot” sprang. Now, as a British historian, I am sure it may appear that I am writing from a place of “unconscious bias” in my objection to “The Patriot.” But I assure you my reasons are professional and not (purely) patriotic. Scores of distinguished American historians joined British voices in crying foul over the film’s largely invented depictions of the Redcoats as murderous Nazis. It should be noted that the screenwriter, Robert Rodat, had just been Oscar-nominated for his screenplay for “Saving Private Ryan” and was essentially told to repeat the formula for the Revolutionary War. For all its stirring imagery — who can forget Mel Gibson brandishing his tomahawk — the film turned out to be exactly the kind of historically illiterate crowd-pleaser “Sweet Liberty” had parodied. One of the most telling things about “Sweet Liberty,” however, is the snapshot it gives us of the culture scene 40 years ago, when Hollywood could laugh at itself, something that feels impossible to imagine now. Alda’s film also reminds us of a time when the Revolutionary War was such a safe topic that he could choose it as the backdrop for his frothy comedy. There is an ease and innocence in the references to the 1770s, which feels hard to picture in the ruthlessness of the post-“The 1619 Project” world. In Alda’s 1980s, the American Revolution was not yet a battleground of the culture wars but something that genuinely united Americans. In Britain, we have historical reenactors who recreate the key battles of the English Civil War, our own struggle against tyrannical royal authority, which took place almost 150 years before the Revolutionary War. Our reenactors, called the Sealed Knot, are similarly passionate about costumes, cannonballs, and muskets, and they work to keep the knowledge of our Civil War alive. But the sad truth is that too few people care anymore this side of the Atlantic. Our Civil War had been fought over ideals that are strikingly similar to those of the American Revolution, and much of the language used by the framers of the Declaration of Independence was inspired by legal documents written a century earlier as English Parliamentarians put King Charles I on trial for tyranny. In 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson even took a week-long road trip to visit the battlegrounds of the English Civil War, rather like we may visit key sites of the American Civil War, or cemeteries in mainland Europe from the two World Wars. They wanted to pay tribute to that “holy ground” where a previous century’s soldiers had sacrificed everything in the cause of freedom. Yet Adams was shocked at how quickly the English were losing interest in their own history, writing in his diary: “Do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for?” Watching Britain today going through a profound identity crisis, I think Adams may have had a point. Maybe one reason I have always had such affection for America is that you do care about your history, even if you may not have as much of it as we Europeans do. But what you don’t have in quantity, you make up for in quality. Which is why, for all their twee silliness, I will love thinking about those faithful reenactors parading in small towns across America this summer. They are keeping alive the memory of an ideal that was worth dying for. Even if we can laugh at them for having period-correct breeches, knowing all 14 firing positions on a musket, and matching the theme-park quality of a place like Colonial Williamsburg, there is something essential to a nation’s future health in the way it cares about its past. So happy birthday, America! I hope you have a great celebration and eat way too much cake and ice cream. *** Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in Medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.

Working with local Indigenous elders is often the only way to learn about ancestral traditions.

On Wednesday, PolitiFact chief correspondent Louis Jacobson reported some self-interested news on their GlobalFact conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, organized by the International Fact-Checking Network. Both PolitiFact and the IFCN are projects of the Florida-based Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Angie Holan, director of the IFCN and former editor of PolitiFact, preposterously claimed in Lithuania: "We have been under attack by political players who would shirk accountability for their false messages," she said. "We’ve been accused of bias even when we made every effort to be fair and nonpartisan." Fact check: False! That's ridiculous. They haven't "made every effort" to be nonpartisan. We've documented that in the first three months of 2026 in "Truth-O-Meter" ratings for elected or appointed officials, the Republicans were rated “Mostly False” or worse in 22 of 32 fact checks (69 percent), and they drew zero “True” ratings and two “Mostly Trues.” By contrast, the Democrats were never rated as “Mostly False” or worse (zero percent), and were awarded one “True” rating, six “Mostly True” ratings, and four “Half Trues.” There’s a disparity in the number of fact checks of 32 to 11, or almost three to one, and the disparity in “False” warnings is 22 to 0. In 2025, we found Republicans were deemed "Mostly False" or worse in 124 of 146 fact checks (84.9 percent). The Democrats were tagged as "Mostly False" or worse in just 17 of 49 checks (34.6 percent). So if you compare the numbers of "False" warnings, the party breakdown is 124 to 17, or 7.3 to 1. The number of checks are roughly 3 to 1. PolitiFact can be accused of bias because their bias is blatantly obvious.  Jacobson added Holan also quoted Pope Leo XIV, whose recent encyclical on artificial intelligence included the guidance that "truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence." Add to the list of pom-pom speeches the Poynter Institute's chairman, Neil Brown who equated their efforts with democracy -- and their critics with repression: "Misinformation is repression, and fact-checking is absolutely essential in the fight against repression. Why else would so many powerful forces be hard at work to try to undermine what we do? The work of fact-checking is hard, it is honorable, and it makes a difference."  You can't fact-check the fact-checkers. That's somehow anti-democracy. The arrogance of that is jaw-dropping -- especially since the badly named "independent fact checkers" were used to degrade and censor social-media messages they found False. So guess who was the keynote speaker at this event?  Nina Jankowicz — who was ousted from the U.S federal Disinformation Governance Board in 2022 amid a campaign by critics who accused it of government censorship — urged the fact-checking community to act with "solidarity," "audacity" and "courage," adding that the movement has not always been as unified as the moment requires.... "We were, and in many cases remain, too timid, too careful, too technical in a moment that rewards bold action and emotional connection," she said. "Now I’m not suggesting that we fight fire with fire, that we stoop to the level of the autocrats attacking us. We don’t need to traffic in AI slop and online abuse to gain ground in this battle. But we do need to meet people where they are and speak to them in a language they understand on topics they care about." Jankowicz told attendees that if they remembered one thing from her keynote, she wanted it to be this: "We do not need to reinvent ourselves. We did not do anything wrong. The liars of this world have spent so much time and energy and money attacking us, precisely because what we are doing is working, and because we represent a formidable challenge to their power and their profit. … We need to keep fighting." Late in the article, Holan made another obviously untrue claim: "Fact-checking is not censorship; it is not a partisan cause. It never was."