Category: The American Spectator
Trump Admin Moves to Defund Hospitals Performing Trans Procedures on Children
The Trump administration on Thursday moved to cut off all federal funding from hospitals that perform transgender medical procedures on minors, escalating its crackdown on what officials describe as irreversible and unproven interventions on children.
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Norman Podhoretz, a Grateful American
It is one of my favorite stories, told in Norman Podhoretz’s 2000 book My Love Affair with America—a tale for which I told my friend Norman, who died this week at the age of 95, I am eternally grateful, as it features so often in my sermons:
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The Spectacle Ep. 310: Merry Christmas From Scott McKay and Melissa Mackenzie!
On this special episode of The Spectacle Podcast, hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay discuss the growing trend of younger generations returning…
On Venezuelan Oil Tankers, Chinese AI, and American Energy Traitors
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Two Retractions Raise the Question: Is Climate Science Really Settled?
Sometimes papers are published that overturn the conventional wisdom. Other times papers are retracted since what they purported to be…
Putting God back in ‘degraded’ US Chaplain Corps: Hegseth axes pagan codes and New Age guides
Earlier this week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that he would be overhauling yet another aspect of the military: the Chaplain Corps.
On Tuesday, Hegseth explained a directive that will effectively overhaul the United States Chaplain Corps, “the spiritual and moral backbone of our nation’s forces” that, for hundreds of years, “ministered” to the “souls” of American servicemen and women, as he explained in the video.
‘In an atmosphere of political correctness and secular humanism, chaplains have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers.’
Hegseth recounted the long history of the Chaplain Corps, which dates back to 1775, when George Washington himself established it. The “weakening” of this important institution has become “a real problem for our nation’s military,” Hegseth said.
“Sadly, as part of the ongoing war on warriors, in recent decades its role has been degraded,” Hegseth said in the video. “In an atmosphere of political correctness and secular humanism, chaplains have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers. Faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care.”
Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
As evidence of the New Age influence in the military, Hegseth referred to the United States Army’s Spiritual Fitness Guide, which mentions “God” only once and “virtue” not at all, even as 82% of the military identify as “religious.”
Hegseth ordered the elimination of this “unacceptable and unserious” Spiritual Fitness Guide and the simplification of the Faith and Belief Coding System, an “overly complex” classification system of over 200 different beliefs.
The Faith and Belief Code was apparently expanded in March 2017. The expansion went into more detailed distinctions among Protestant denominations, and it included alternate belief systems like “Magick and Spiritualist,” “Wicca,” “Pagan,” “New Age Churches,” “Humanist,” and “Heathen.”
Hegseth promised more changes in the near future, saying that there will be a “top-down cultural shift” in the military that puts “spiritual well-being on the same footing as mental and physical health.”
“We are going to make the Chaplain Corps great again,” he posted on X.
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Trump takes a wrecking ball to the woke campus economy
To the far-left loons and anti-American activists who dominate large swaths of the nation’s four-year college campuses, a reminder: Donald Trump is your president. And whether you like it or not, he now functions as your college dean.
The title may be unofficial, and no one expects Trump to hand out diplomas, but the reality is unavoidable. Through executive orders and funding decisions, Trump is now calling the shots in higher education. His administration is dismantling a long list of Obama-Biden-era policies that entrenched DEI bureaucracies, racial discrimination, radical gender ideology, and other woke orthodoxies that turned college campuses into centers of political indoctrination rather than education.
Faculty lounges and administrative offices dominated by liberal orthodoxy have failed students for too long.
Trump, alongside Education Secretary Linda McMahon, is not only shrinking the Department of Education’s bureaucratic footprint but demanding that universities deliver measurable value to students. For the first time in years, outcomes matter again.
End this discriminatory rule
That shift should become unmistakable this month, when the Department of Education launches the Accountability in Higher Education and Access through Demand-driven Workforce Pell Committee negotiated rulemaking. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act directs the department to establish new accountability measures tied directly to student outcomes, including a uniform earnings premium standard for all colleges and universities.
This reform creates an opportunity to finally eliminate the Gainful Employment Rule, a discriminatory relic of the Obama and Biden administrations’ radical education agenda. Under Trump’s approach, earnings standards would apply across the board, regardless of an institution’s tax status or curriculum.
The goal is straightforward: Colleges should prepare students for productive careers. Programs will be evaluated by comparing graduates’ median earnings to those of working adults with only a high-school diploma — or, in the case of graduate programs, a bachelor’s degree. Programs whose graduates fail to outperform those benchmarks for two out of three years would lose access to federal student aid.
That standard exposes the true purpose of the GER under Democrat administrations. It was never about protecting students. It was about punishing institutions disfavored by the academic establishment — especially career colleges and faith-based schools — while shielding traditional four-year universities from scrutiny.
Biden’s war on for-profit schools
Obama and Biden applied the GER almost exclusively to proprietary schools, even though public and nonprofit universities enroll the vast majority of students. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that if the Biden administration’s debt-to-earnings metrics were applied evenly, nearly 80% of failing programs would be housed at public and nonprofit institutions.
The left sees no problem saddling students with six-figure debt for degrees in fashionable but economically useless fields. But students training to become construction managers, electricians, or caterers must be “protected” from choice — even though they typically graduate with far less debt and far better job prospects.
Selective enforcement reveals the real agenda. By targeting career colleges while exempting elite institutions, Democrat administrations sought to limit educational choice and justify mass student loan forgiveness. The system was designed to funnel students into four-year degree programs regardless of whether those programs matched their skills, interests, or career goals.
RELATED: Christian students are pushing back — and universities are cracking
Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Reversing the damage
It is no coincidence that public confidence in higher education collapsed during this same period. By 2023, a majority of Americans said a four-year degree was no longer worth the cost. Only about 30% of recent graduates found entry-level jobs in their field of study, and roughly two-thirds of Gen Z graduates say they would reconsider attending college if given the chance.
The AHEAD committee now has an opportunity to reverse that damage. By repealing the Gainful Employment Rule and implementing a single, fair accountability standard, it can restore value to higher education and respect the diversity of educational paths students choose.
Higher education should foster intellectual growth, opportunity, and freedom — not ideological conformity or lifelong debt. Faculty lounges and administrative offices dominated by liberal orthodoxy have failed students for too long. Americans should welcome a president who not only recognizes the problem but is finally doing something about it.
How anti-fascism became the West’s civil religion
At the end of World War II, much of the West stood in ruins. Europe’s great powers were shattered, millions were dead, and political leaders searched for a framework that would prevent another civilizational collapse. What emerged was what R.R. Reno later described as the “postwar consensus”: an elite agreement to reorganize Western society around a single overriding moral imperative — never again allow a figure like Adolf Hitler to rise.
Anti-fascism became the West’s civil religion. This was understandable in the immediate aftermath of the war. Nazi Germany’s atrocities demanded more than mere condemnation. But over time, anti-fascism ceased to function as a historical judgment and instead hardened into a permanent moral framework. In the process, it began to distort politics, hollow out institutions, and undermine the concept of the nation itself.
The longer conservatives wait to make reasonable corrections, the more radical — and likely authoritarian — the eventual correction will be.
Anti-fascism served a second, less acknowledged function. The United States and its allies had partnered with the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler. That alliance was strategically necessary but morally grotesque. Communist regimes starved millions, persecuted Christians, liquidated entire classes, and carried out ethnic cleansing on a scale easily outstripping the Nazis.
To sustain the moral legitimacy of the postwar order, Nazism had to remain the singular, unrivaled evil of modern history. Any serious moral accounting risked an intolerable conclusion: that the West had joined forces with a regime at least as monstrous as the one it defeated.
Because communism retained elite defenders in academia, media, and politics, fascism became the only ideology that could be universally condemned. Conservatives opposed both, but liberals embraced or excused communism. Anti-fascism thus became the sole moral language the entire ruling class could share.
That imbalance persists. Public figures openly describe themselves as socialists or communists without consequence. Communist symbols appear on clothing and merchandise, sometimes celebrated as ironic rebellion. Fascism alone remains socially radioactive.
The power of taboo
This asymmetry transformed the definition of fascism into a weapon.
Anything directly associated with Nazism became forbidden, and soon anything vaguely adjacent followed. Online platforms remove or demonetize historical content for displaying Nazi imagery, even in documentary contexts. History itself must be censored to comply with the taboo.
Meanwhile, symbols of communist regimes that murdered tens of millions provoke little more than mild disapproval. A guy wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt or a hammer and sickle may earn a sneer. Wearing a swastika ends careers — even lives.
Absolute stigma confers absolute power. Control the definition of fascism, and you control the moral boundary of acceptable thought.
Mission creep as strategy
The left quickly grasped this dynamic and began expanding the category. Traditional social institutions were recast as latent fascism. Academic works such as Theodor Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality” asserted that family structure, masculinity, Christianity, national identity, capitalism, and law and order were markers of authoritarian psychology.
Over time, the list expanded from Nazi symbols to Confederate flags, Christian imagery, art styles, gestures, numbers, and ordinary behaviors. Organizations like the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center labeled everything from physical fitness to drinking milk and the “OK” hand sign as potential indicators of extremism.
Conservatives often mock the more absurd examples, but many accepted the earlier ones. Borders became suspect. So did preferring some immigrant groups over others. Explicit national identity became a huge red flag. Christianity as a political foundation became authoritarian.
Anti-fascism succeeded not because it was coherent, but because it was unchallengeable.
A society without tools
The result is a civilization that has locked away the tools required for its own survival.
A functional society requires cohesion: shared language, culture, norms, and traditions. Not everyone must conform fully, but enough must for assimilation to mean something. When every mechanism of cohesion is labeled fascist, cohesion becomes impossible.
RELATED: Do you want Caesar? Because this is how you get Caesar.
Blaze Media Illustration
Crime, educational collapse, family breakdown, falling birth rates, and social fragmentation are not impossible to fix. The corrective measures are well understood. But they have been rendered politically illegitimate because they’re all somehow hallmarks of fascism. Conservatives often avoid them out of fear — or worse, oppose them in the name of anti-fascism itself.
This does not prevent authoritarianism. It guarantees it.
What remains
If the present trajectory continues, only two outcomes remain.
One is an increasingly authoritarian managerial state that governs a disintegrating society through surveillance, regulation, and bureaucratic coercion. The other is a decisive leader who smashes the glass labeled “fascism” and uses the forbidden tools outright.
The longer conservatives wait to make reasonable corrections, the more radical — and likely authoritarian — the eventual correction will be.
Nazism was evil, and opposing it was obviously right. But elevating anti-fascism into the West’s single, unquestionable religious principle has been catastrophic. It has stripped societies of the means to govern themselves prudently and ensured that when the correction finally comes, it will be far harsher than anything its most ardent anti-fascists claim to fear.
Stacey Abrams’s Climate Group Banked $5M in Taxpayer Funds Before Trump Admin Axed the Grant, Tax Docs Show
Rewiring America, the climate group where Democratic activist Stacey Abrams served as senior counsel, quietly banked more than $5 million in federal climate funding shortly before the Trump administration axed the Biden-era grant earlier this year, according to tax documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. They suggest that Abrams played a larger role in obtaining the grant than she claimed.
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