Russia should use nuclear weapons in space to destroy all Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, demands Vladimir Putin’s most prominent TV propagandist. The call came after the SpaceX entrepreneur acted to block Kremlin forces using the satellite internet constellation without authorisation to attack Ukraine. Putin’s mouthpiece Vladimir Solovyov said: “Let’s tell the truth about what Starlink […]

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At the Spectacle PM Podcast, Ellie Holmes and Lyrah Margo did a great job — well worth your time to listen, by the way — going through a legal development which is going to be a big deal in the coming months and years. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 189: Doctors Performing Trans Surgeries Are in Huge Trouble) I’m talking about the Fox Varian case. This is the first big payday to be had by a “detransitioner” — a kid duped into going through medical mutilation by a corrupt cabal of doctors, shrinks, and activists who have pushed wacko gender ideology on the young, who grew up and realized what damage was done to her. The case is enough to make a normal reader want to throw up in disgust… On Friday, a jury in White Plains, NY, made history when it awarded $2 million to Fox Varian, 22, after she sued the psychologist and plastic surgeon who oversaw the gender-transition mastectomy she received at age 16 and then came to regret. I covered the case for The Free Press. The judge sealed all the case files at the start of the trial. But I downloaded the full case file before it was sealed and have it on hand. The judge also sealed all the transcripts from the trial. Given I was the only reporter to attend the entirety of the three-week trial, the furious notes I took might remain the only way for the public to learn about the finer details of this historic lawsuit. So my hope is to share much what I heard in the coming days and weeks. That’s from Ben Ryan’s Substack, and he has a whole lot more there. The first victory in court for a young woman who was harmed by gender doctors as a child! Fox Varian had her breasts removed as a 16-year-old girl because she was indoctrinated to believe she was trans. She has been awarded $2 million. https://t.co/ZjbBbonXKR — Billboard Chris

The tsunami that is the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has finally struck the shores of Norway, and in the most dramatic — and, frankly, entertaining — way possible. In the three million pages of documents released on Friday by the Department of Justice, the name of Norway’s Crown Princess, Mette-Marit, 52, appears over a thousand times, and it’s now been established that beginning in 2011, the two of them met several times and were, in addition, in close and frequent online contact. In her emails to Epstein, reports NRK, “the Crown Princess tells him about family life, asks for advice, and the two discuss literature, research, meditation, and health.” He recommended that she read Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature. They wished each other a happy birthday. Telling him that she was “more the emotional picture kind of gal,” she advised him to “read with your gut not your intellect.” (RELATED: Epstein Files Law Passed During Week of JFK Assassination Anniversary Seems Like a Sign) In one exchange, Epstein told her he was in Paris, looking for somebody to marry, to which she replied that Paris was good for adultery, but Scandinavians made “better wife material.” At one point an Epstein flunky conveyed an offer from him to arrange a dental appointment so Mette-Marit could get her teeth bleached. (Note: There are perfectly good dentists in Norway.) In yet another email, Epstein asks if she’s found him a new assistant. Then there’s one in which Mette-Marit tells Epstein that she’s just had a “[s]hitty flight”: Air France had demanded $3,000 for an upgrade, but she’d refused to pay it out of “principle,” and as a result “my back is f[*]cked.” Once she asked Epstein: “Is it inappropriate for a mother to suggest two naked women carrying a surfboard for my 15 yr old sons wallpaper?” (It’s unclear whether she’s referring to his screensaver or his bedroom wall.) It also emerges from this tranche of papers that in January 2013, while her husband, Crown Prince Haakon, stayed at home in the freezing Norwegian cold, Mette-Marit and her “Buddhist spiritual teacher” spent four nights at Epstein’s house in sunny Palm Beach. (In a related story, I just learned from Hans Rustad’s invaluable Sunday evening podcast that Mette-Marit has spent so much time in New York that the consulate staff got sick of having to follow her around.) Oh, and then there are her compliments and expressions of affection. “You always make me smile,” she told Epstein. “You tickle my brain.” “I miss my crazy friend.” “U are very charming.” “You are so sweet.” “You’re such a sweetheart.” All these communications took place after Epstein had been convicted, in 2008, of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. Parenthetically, some of the newly released documents expose other notable Norwegians. In 2014, for example, former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland hit Epstein up for a loan so he could buy an apartment in Oslo. It also turns out that Jagland stayed at Epstein’s residences in New York and Paris, and that Epstein visited Jagland’s home in Strasbourg when the latter was Secretary General of the Council of Europe. But the news about Jagland (so far, anyway) isn’t anywhere near as intriguing or sexy — or potentially damaging to the Norwegian state — as the revelations about Mette-Marit. Unfazed by his notoriety, the rich and famous from all over the world courted this creep. Over the course of the Epstein saga, it’s been staggering to discover how broad his circle of so-called friends was. Unfazed by his notoriety, the world’s rich and famous courted this creep. But why? In some cases, the answer is obvious. Many, like Bill Clinton, enjoyed the sybaritic pleasures available on Epstein’s island. Others, like Jagland, thought Epstein could be a ready source of money. Børge Brenden, a Norwegian politician who is the current president and CEO of the World Economic Forum and who, it now emerges, met several times with Epstein, sought his support for a covert effort to replace the U.N. as a power center with the WEF and Davos. But what was Mette-Marit up to? What did she want out of Epstein? Was it so terribly important for her to score a few free days in Palm Beach? For heaven’s sake, she already lived in one palace and had access to another one. Plus, a fact, she and her husband receive over a million dollars a year from Norwegian taxpayers, and can thus afford to pay for their own holiday accommodations. Finally, as she well knew, there were plenty of men in her own country who could have made her smile and tickled her brain. Why didn’t she give me a call? Seriously, to understand just how this Mette-Marit story hits in Norway, you need to know a bit about her history. Before marrying Crown Prince Haakon, the heir to the throne, in 2001, Mette-Marit, who was a smashingly gorgeous young blonde of the classic Scandinavian type, was known to have led a very active social life, which included relationships with several men who had rap sheets for narcotics as well as for acts of violence and other serious offenses. With one of these men, a convicted felon, she had a son out of wedlock — Marius Borg Høiby, who at the time of the royal wedding was an adorable little blond moppet and who, ever since, has been treated like a member of the royal family (in recent years, he’s even traveled on a diplomatic passport). Now 29 years old, Marius has been in serious legal trouble for years. On Tuesday, he’ll go on trial for raping four women and for violating numerous other drug and assault laws; he faces no fewer than 38 criminal counts, and a possibility of up to 16 years in prison. To what extent, one wonders, can his bad choices in life be blamed on a mother who, when he was 15, asked a convicted child molester whether she should recommend pictures of naked women for the boy’s wallpaper? Be sure, by the way, not to confuse Mette-Marit with another Norwegian princess — namely, Märtha Louise, her daffy sister-in-law, about whom I’ve written a few times here. In June 2022, I reported on the engagement of Märtha Louise, who had founded an “angel school” at which she taught students how to communicate with the dead, to a fellow New Age fourflusher, a black, bisexual Los Angeles shaman named Durek Verrett, who claims to cure cancer. In August 2024, I wrote about the lucrative deals the couple had made for wedding coverage with Britain’s Hello Magazine and Netflix; last September, I reviewed Rebel Royals, the mortifying Netflix documentary about their wedding, in which Durek pretty much called the king, queen, and Crown Prince racists. When that thing came out, the whole country cringed at once. (RELATED: The Princess Weds Her Shaman) But back to Mette-Marit. All those years ago, when her engagement to Prince Haakon was announced, she was prevailed upon to make a statement to the press in which she admitted to, and apologized for, having led a “wild” life. The understanding was that she was now turning over a new leaf, solemnly embracing her obligations as a member of the royal house. Well, that was a quarter century ago. She and Haakon now have two children together, and they go out in public together doing the kinds of things that royal families do — cutting ribbons, shaking innumerable hands, delivering banal speeches. But some of us have suspected that Mette-Marit never entirely gave up her old party-girl ways — and that the Skaugum Estate, where Haakon and Mette-Marit live, is the only house on earth where the cuckold chair is a throne. Okay, cheap joke. Still, the release of her email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein (“you tickle my brain”?) suggests that the future queen of Norway is still pretty “wild.” I’ll add this: when Haakon appeared on the NRK evening news on Saturday, apparently having been buttonholed by a reporter on a street in Oslo, he looked like a broken man as he whimpered an apology on his wife’s behalf. I felt sorry for the poor fellow. I’ve always felt that he seemed like a decent chap, despite his Davos inclinations. Why, then, had his wife, the mother of their two children, cozied up to an internationally infamous slimebag? Why had Haakon let her? Is it possible she was actually attracted to Epstein? A 2011 email from Epstein to one of his advisors raises disturbing questions about the nature of the princess’s relationship: “What happened with Mette now?? She wants to carry your kid?” Epstein’s reply: “Mette is a mess.” Of course, these revelations about Mette-Marit raise a significant question: why should taxpayers be footing the bill for such people? The current Norwegian royal house dates back only to 1905; before that, the country spent decades being ruled by Denmark, then Sweden. When Norway broke with Sweden, it could have chosen to go the modern route and become a republic, as Iceland did when it broke from Denmark in 1918. Instead, Norway asked Denmark for a spare prince and made him king. Yes, King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav (later King Olav) performed admirably during World War II, when they and their government-in-exile operated out of London, but even then, there were heady rumors to the effect that Crown Princess Märtha, Olav’s wife, who waited out the war in the White House, was getting it on with FDR. Which, if true, suggests that the current Crown Prince comes from a long line of — well, let’s not go there. No, the point here should be a broader one. Norway, after all, isn’t the only constitutional monarchy in Europe that has turned into a clown show. In Britain, Harry and Meghan’s hijinks, Andrew’s involvement with Epstein, and the ascent to the throne of a slavering fan of Islam, proponent of homeopathy, and absolute sucker for climate-change ideology — a vainglorious fool who seems either blind or indifferent to the catastrophic course his country is taking — have made it feel as if the House of Windsor, in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death, has jumped the shark (if it didn’t already do so long ago). And the more you look around the continent, at all those countries in which the sovereign is supposed to be a unifying figure and a symbol of nationhood, what you see is a bunch of societies increasingly compromising their own cultures and values and yielding to Islam — and a bunch of crowned heads who, if anything, are encouraging this treachery. In any event, it was a busier than usual Sunday in the Norwegian media. An essay by Hanne Skartveit, editor of Norway’s largest newspaper, VG, was headlined: “Can the Monarchy Survive This?” An article by Aftenposten‘s political editor, Kjetil B. Alstadheim, bore the subhead: “Can Mette-Marit Become Queen after This?” In a break with protocol that a royal expert described as “sensational,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre publicly criticized Mette-Marit for her lack of judgment. On Sunday evening it was reported that on Tuesday — the same day Høiby goes on trial — the Parliament will vote on abolishing the monarchy. And on Monday evening, NRK-TV ran a special edition of its trademark public-issues series, Debatten, on which high-profile commentators, politicians, and diplomats offered many takes on the crisis, but agreed on one thing: that the royal house is in deep, deep trouble. I must admit that after a long, long period during which the Norwegian media entertained themselves by parroting rumors that Donald Trump had ugly Epstein-related secrets to hide — all the while taking it for granted that the good and great of Norway were untainted by such sordid business — it felt rather good to see the American president being totally cleared even as Norway’s queen-in-waiting was exposed as (to put it gently) a steadfast Epstein intimate. Time, then, to end it all? Not off with their heads, but off, in any case, with their crowns? READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Why the Oscars Had to Look to Norway Capote, 20 Years Later A Neglected Art Gets Its Due Image licensed under Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Texas A&M University announced Friday that it will be shutting down its women’s and gender studies program. The university’s interim president said the decision was based on low enrollment as well as “the difficulty of bringing the program in compliance with the new system policies.” He was referencing the fact that A&M courses are no longer allowed to “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” as a result of a policy passed last year by the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents. (RELATED: The Problem Isn’t That Plato Is Woke) This, of course, posed a problem for A&M’s gender studies program because the entire field of study is premised on advocating gender ideology. When gender studies programs first began in the 1970s, they were initially marketed as studying women in history and society. In actuality, however, the field immediately became obsessed with theorizing on the most minute insanities of gender ideology. That bait and switch is present in the now-removed description of gender studies on Texas A&M’s website: “Women’s and gender studies is a flexible interdisciplinary program devoted to the critical analysis of gender and the pursuit of knowledge about women throughout history and around the world.” (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 270: Rep. Harrison Exposes A&M’s Woke Cover-Up) You would be hard-pressed to find courses in any gender studies department that actually do what the second part of that description promises: examining the role women have played throughout history. You instead find courses devoted to the “critical analysis of gender.” Social constructs of gender, systems of privilege, embodiment, microaggressions, intersectionality, performativity, identity politics, colonialism, deconstruction, and a bunch of other crackpot theories, such as queer theory and critical race theory, are what gender studies courses are really focused on. The longer the field has existed, the more the boundaries have been pushed, and the more the field has devolved into discussions that are incomprehensible to laypeople. This is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo nonsense on theories that have spun further and further from reality with each passing year. To understand just how crazy gender studies has gotten in recent years, take a look at some of the gender studies courses on offer this semester at some of America’s most elite universities. Princeton University is offering gender studies students a course on “queer rave culture” titled “Raving: Encounters & Collisions in Night/Life.” The course description promises that students will use “dancing explorations” and “collectively imagined and constructed raves” to explore “queer rave culture” as “aesthetic, political, and subjective complex societal networks.” This rave culture, explains the course description, is “situated at the confluence of Blackness, queerness, and transness.” Students are advised that “All dance backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome; a deep desire and curiosity for dancing is required.” Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago, gender studies students are engaged this semester in a course titled “Sex, Drugs, and Mantras: Tantra and Subversive Religious Practices.” Evidently, the point of the course is to consider whether things such as the chanting of mantras on burial grounds “to gain supernatural powers,” the practice of “erotic yoga to achieve mystical union,” and the ingestion of illegal drugs to “channel cosmic deities” are “merely the irrational behaviors of a superstitious mind” or actually represent “expressions of profound systems of embodied spirituality with sensible motivations.” At Bowdoin College, gender studies students are this semester studying LGBTQ children’s picture books, young adult novels, and children’s TV shows in a course titled “Queer Youth Cultures: Texts and Contexts.” The course asks students to consider how LGBTQ children’s picture books “reinforce or disrupt normative understandings of youth, sexuality, queerness, and growth.” The course promises: “Through critical, intersectional engagement with fictional works crafted for younger audiences and scholarship in queer youth studies, students will challenge ideas used to conceptualize Western understandings of childhood and adolescence, such as innocence, knowledge, growth, and experience.” (RELATED: Supreme Court Saves Religious Parents From Radical LGBTQ Indoctrination of Their Children) This is simply not a serious academic field. There is no rigorous scholarship, and there is no truth to be pursued. The content of gender studies academic journals leads to the same conclusion: This is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo nonsense on theories that have spun further and further from reality with each passing year. For example, Gender and Society, one of the top-ranked journals in the field, has in recent months published articles titled “The Economic Penalty of Gender Nonconformity Among Sexual Minorities,” “How Mid-Range Trollish Behavior Legitimates Hegemonic Masculinity in Digital Spaces,” “Gender Privilege and Vasectomy Experiences of Childless Men in Chile,” and “How Siblings of Transgender Youth Divest from Family Gender Norms.” Book publishing in the field is perhaps worse. Tomes released in the past two years in the field of gender studies include Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance, Outskirts: Queer Experiences on the Fringe, The Witch Studies Reader, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire, and Everyday Coercion: Men’s Routine Use of Sexual Coercion Toward Women. One gender studies professor at Texas A&M, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, bemoaned the university’s decision to shut down the gender studies department in an interview with the Texas Tribune, saying, “We have to keep fighting and standing up for our students’ right to have an education that is critical for the times they live in.” A look at her work, however, shows that the education she offers her students is one they could do without. Lakkimsetti supposedly “brings to light contemporary struggles for social justice … undertaken by sex workers … in India.” To do so, she “deploys Foucauldian lens of biopolitics and postcolonial understandings of the state to understand these contemporary transformations.” Nothing in the field of gender studies provides anything of value to society, and everything taught in it has the effect of brainwashing students into idiocy. Every college should be pressured to quickly follow the example of Texas A&M. READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 189: Doctors Performing Trans Surgeries Are in Huge Trouble New York State Serves Up Insanity on Egg Freezing UCLA Med School in Big Trouble for Using Affirmative Action

If your pantry is in desperate need of a spring clean, Martha Stewart has a genius tip you can use to minimize mess by utilizing this unlikely kitchen staple.

from Sputnik News: The United States and Russia can initiate dialogue on nuclear disarmament following the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), according to Daryl Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association. The New START treaty between the US and Russia is set to expire on February 5. “Even with […]