Category: The American Spectator
Reiner and Son
I first met Rob Reiner the first week I moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1976. He was…
Remembering Rabbi Dov Fischer
God sent me Dov Fischer. Many years back, stressed and overwhelmed by the needs of The American Spectator, this desperate…
The Senate: Where Term Limits Go to Retire
When did it become acceptable for the United States Senate to be overwhelmingly dominated by individuals qualifying for Medicare and…
The Spectator P.M. Ep. 178: Seattle Public Schools Indoctrinates Kids With LGBTQ Curriculum
The Seattle Public School system is forcing students — from kindergarten to fifth grade — to read books that push…
California’s Hitler Youth
At Branham High School in San Jose this month, eight students formed a human swastika on the football field. A photo of…
Taking the fentanyl challenge: Whacked-out American junkies now big in Japan
The United States’ fentanyl crisis is being mocked on the other side of the planet.
Videos with millions of views show Japanese content creators mimicking a bizarre and all-too-common sight in cities like San Francisco and New York: half-conscious drug addicts bent over sharply at the waist but somehow still standing.
‘Japanese social media influencers are going viral for mocking America’s fentanyl addicts.’
Typically from the effects of heroin or fentanyl, this telltale folded posture has become known as the “fenty fold.”
“Japanese social media influencers are going viral for mocking America’s fentanyl addicts who are often seen hunched over and flailing on the streets,” one user wrote on X. An attached video that showed a young woman in Okinawa, Japan, hunched over has received more than 2.5 million views.
RELATED: How to win the opioid fight
Know when to fold ’em
On TikTok, similar videos have captions like “Bringing American culture to Japan” and show participants folding over in locations typical of American drug addicts, like a subway station. One such video has garnered over 1.2 million views.
Other videos take place in parking garages, city centers, and public parking lots. Most of the viral content uses a Japanese song labeled “Anime Girl,” although the song is actually a combination of the songs titled “Don’t Forget Me” by Schinya and “Sparkle” by Radwimps.
Cleaning up
Drug seizures have increased under the Trump administration, resulting in a slight increase from FY2024 versus FY2025.
However, if FY2026 continues on trend, there will be a significant jump in the amount of annual drugs seized (measured in pounds), according to CBP statistics.
RELATED: Mexico has cartel armies. Blue America has cartel politics.
Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
For example, in October 2025, approximately 51,500 pounds of drugs were seized by the federal government. In October 2024, that number was 40,700 and just 37,400 in October 2023 under President Biden.
Overdoses down
Fentanyl, however, represents one of the least confiscated drug types in terms of weight, likely due to its potency. Marijuana, methamphetamines, and cocaine are the most seized by weight, in that order.
At the same time, overdose deaths have significantly dropped in the United States between April 2024 and April 2025. There was a 24.5% decrease during that time period, the CDC reported. The number of overdoses peaked around August 2023 but have since been declining.
Some of the biggest decreases in overdoses have come in states like Louisiana, New Hampshire, New York, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
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‘Enough white guys already’: The war on white men because of DEI in the working world exposed in damning report
Jacob Savage, a Los Angeles-based writer, looked at the phenomenon of the “vanishing white male writer” earlier this year in an eye-opening piece for Compact magazine.
He noted, for instance, that whereas the New York Times’ “Notable Fiction” list included seven white American men under the age of 43 in 2012, not a single white male Millennial made the list in either 2021 or 2022. In each of the subsequent two years, only one individual from that particular demographic made the list.
‘The phenomenon of white male dispossession strikes at the core of what’s been going on over the last decade.’
Savage stressed that the Times’ list was hardly exceptional in its exclusion of white Millennial men. Last year, nobody from that particular demographic was apparently featured in the year-end fiction lists for Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, and Vulture. Of the 53 Millennial fiction writers featured in Esquire magazine’s year-end book lists since 2020, only one was a white American man.
Savage — who concluded in March that “white male Millennials are still unable to speak directly to their own condition” and that “in some ways that inability is their condition” — is back with another damning piece about the “lost generation” and the fallout of the DEI war on meritocracy.
In response to the viral article, which was published on Monday, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairwoman Andrea Lucas stated, “This is a story chock full of unlawful discrimination. There’s no DEI exception to the bar on race and sex discrimination. We need courageous employees/applicants to speak up to help attack and remedy this misconduct.”
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon echoed Lucas’ post and wrote, “Step up!”
RELATED: University of Minnesota faces backlash over project that seeks to cure the ‘Whiteness Pandemic’
Photo by Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images
At the outset of the article, Savage provided several indications that the world of literary fiction was not the only place where the institutionalization of DEI proved to be bad news for white men.
He noted, for instance, that white men represented 48% of lower-level TV writers in 2011 but only 11.9% last year. At Harvard, members of the same cohort held 39% of tenure-track positions in the humanities in 2014 but only 18% in 2023.
“In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man — and then provided just that,” wrote Savage.
While some older white men, specifically those in the Boomer and Gen X camps, may have mistakenly concluded that DEI is a relatively benign practice — especially since the “mandates to diversify” apparently tended to impact their younger fellows — Savage suggested that for white male Millennials, “DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing — it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed.”
A man identified only as Andrew who experienced this shift firsthand in a new media environment told Savage, “With all the declarations these newsrooms had been making, the imperatives — ‘enough white guys already’ — seemed to me to be the mantra.”
An unnamed senior hiring editor at a major media outlet told Savage that “the hope was always that you were going to hire a diverse candidate,” adding that a competent black woman “would get accelerated to the New York Times or the Washington Post in short order.”
While most major media outfits such as the Times and the Post had by 2019 gone out of their way to make sure their offices were majority female, Savage noted that “in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a ‘reckoning.'”
‘It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.’
Savage highlighted an apparent aversion beginning in 2020 at various companies to hiring men and whites from an American population that U.S. Census Bureau data indicated was 49.1% male and 57% non-Hispanic white.
For example, women reportedly made up 75% of the new hires in 2022 at Condé Nast — a mass media company that set a goal in 2020 to have 50% of the candidates on its hiring slates to hail from a “wide range of backgrounds and schools” — and only 49% of new hires identified as white. The following year, men and whites made up 34% and 50% of new hires at the company, respectively.
The Atlantic, another operating theater in the campaign against meritocracy, boasted in its 2024 DEI report that roughly 46% of the individuals the magazine hired between July 2023 and June 2024 were non-white and that 71% were women.
Savage indicated further that at the Los Angeles Times, only 7.7% of interns have been white men since 2020; that between 2018 and 2024, “just two or three” of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at the Washington Post have been white men; and that only 10% of the nearly 220 fellows who have participated in the New York Times’ yearlong fellowship since the program replaced the paper’s summer internship in 2018 were white men.
Various other publications including Indy Week have no white men left on their editorial staff to displace or replace.
“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” one hiring editor told Savage in reference to this so-called racial “reckoning” championed by academics, activists, and others bad actors. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person. … It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.”
According to a November 2022 ResumeBuilder.com survey, one in six hiring managers across the United States indicated they were told to deprioritize hiring white men; 48% said they were asked to prioritize “diversity over qualifications”; and 53% said they believed their jobs were in danger if they didn’t hire enough “diverse employees.”
Andrew — who was apparently teased for months with the promise of a senior reporter position at a well-known publication only to later learn the job went to a non-white homosexual 10 years younger — said, “If you’re a white man, you gotta be the superstar.”
Savage underscored that this anti-white misandry is alive and well in the entertainment, medical, and tech industries but also in the academy, where the severity of the problem is partly hidden by the continued employment of elderly white male faculty members behind whom the doors to entry were closed.
“White men may still be 55% of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63% a decade ago), but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen X employment patterns,” wrote Savage. “For tenure-track positions — the pipeline for future faculty — white men have gone from 49% in 2014 to 27% in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39% to 21%).”
The situation is similarly bleak for the cohort at other institutions, including Brown University, which has hired only three white American men as tenure-track professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2022.
“For a decade, it kept going, faster and faster. Without any actual quotas to achieve — only the constant exhortation to ‘do better’ — the diversity complex became self-radicalizing, a strange confluence of top-down and bottom-up pressure,” wrote Savage. “No one ever said what the right number of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had.”
BlazeTV host Lomez said of the incredible response online to Savage’s article, “6 million views on a political article is insane. The phenomenon of white male dispossession strikes at the core of what’s been going on over the last decade. Any politician, anyone with any ambition to influence, must take on this fight. The time is now.”
Gene Hamilton, the president of America First Legal who previously served as Trump White House deputy counsel, noted, “If you are a person who believes in merit and wants to restore merit to hiring/firing/admissions/etc, you must understand that it is not enough to sit quietly and hope things get better. If you know someone who has been harmed, encourage that person to take legal action now.”
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Trump sues BBC for billions over ‘deceptive and defamatory’ edit of his Jan. 6 speech, blasts foreign election interference
President Donald Trump filed a massive defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation on Monday over an edit of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech that appeared in a BBC “Panorama” documentary.
The lawsuit claims that the BBC’s “deceptive and defamatory distortion, doctoring, manipulation, and splicing damaged President Trump in his occupation, damaged his professional reputation, and portrayed him as engaging in supposed calls for rioting and violence that he never actually made.”
‘The FAKE NEWS “reporters” in the UK are just as dishonest and full of s**t as the ones here in America.’
The complaint notes further that the “aggressively anti-Trump” documentary, which aired shortly before the 2024 presidential election and painted Kamala Harris as an optimal candidate, constituted “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment.”
A tale of two speeches
Trump originally said at 12:12 p.m. in his speech on Jan. 6, 2021:
Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down — and I’ll be there with you — we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Any one you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness.
The president noted nearly an hour later after first raising concerns about voting irregularities and potential fraud in the 2020 election, “Most people would stand there at nine o’clock in the evening and say, ‘I want to thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said, ‘Something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong — can’t have happened.’ And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
The “Panorama” documentary spliced and reorganized Trump’s remarks to make it appear as though he said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
In addition to creating a false narrative by coupling two parts of the speech that were divided by over 50 minutes’ worth of content and omitting Trump’s call for supporters to behave “peacefully,” the documentary showed flag-waving men descending on the Capitol after the president spoke — despite the video having been recorded before Trump’s speech.
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The Telegraph obtained and reported on a whistleblower memo earlier this year revealing that there were concerns at the BBC over the apparently deceptive work.
The whistleblower memo noted that the “mangled” footage made Trump “‘say’ things [he] never actually said” and insinuated, with the help of the footage of men marching on the Capitol, that “Trump’s supporters had taken up his ‘call to arms.'”
Too little, too late
Last month, the BBC came under fire both in the United States and in the United Kingdom.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Telegraph, “Trust in the media is at an all-time low because of deceptive editing, misleading reporting, and outright lies. This is yet another example, of many, highlighting why countless Americans turn to alternative media sources to get their news.”
Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “The FAKE NEWS ‘reporters’ in the UK are just as dishonest and full of s**t as the ones here in America!!!”
“This is a total disgrace. The BBC has doctored footage of Trump to make it look as though he incited a riot — when he in fact said no such thing,” wrote former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “We have Britain’s national broadcaster using a flagship programme to tell palpable untruths about Britain’s closest ally. Is anyone at the BBC going to take responsibility — and resign?”
In the face of mounting pressure, the BBC issued a retraction, and the director-general of the BBC, Tim Davie, and Deborah Turness, the head of BBC News, both resigned in disgrace.
“Like all public organizations, the BBC is not perfect, and we must always be open, transparent, and accountable,” Davie said in statement. “Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made, and as director-general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
Turness similarly assumed some responsibility for the fiasco, noting the controversy had “reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC” and adding that “the buck stops with me.”
‘The BBC had no regard for the truth.’
Turness suggested, however, that the broadcast corporation was not biased.
“In public life, leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down,” said Turness. “While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
Samir Shah, the chair of the BBC, subsequently sent a personal letter to the White House apologizing for the edit; however, the network refused to pay compensation, claiming that there was no basis for Trump’s defamation claim.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss encouraged Trump to take legal action against the BBC, suggesting in a Nov. 15 interview that the network’s apology was insufficient “because they keep doing it again and again. They have painted a completely false picture of President Trump in Britain over a number of years. They’ve done the same thing about conservatives in our country.”
Pay the piper
Trump’s lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida and demands judgment against the BBC for at least $5 billion in damages, states:
The lack of any effort by the BBC to publish content even remotely resembling objective journalism, or to maintain even a slight semblance of objectivity in the Panorama Documentary, demonstrates that the BBC had no regard for the truth about President Trump, and that the doctoring of his Speech was not inadvertent, but instead was an intentional component of the BBC’s effort to craft as one-sided an impression and narrative against President Trump as possible.
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told the Guardian that “President Trump’s powerhouse lawsuit is holding the BBC accountable for its defamation and reckless election interference just as he has held other fake news mainstream media responsible for their wrongdoing.”
A spokesperson for the network said in a statement, “As we have made clear previously, we will be defending this case.”
A spokesperson for the prime minister’s office noted that while Downing Street will always “defend the principle of a strong, independent BBC as a trusted and relied-upon national broadcaster reporting without fear or favor,” the prime minister’s office has “also consistently said it is vitally important that they act to maintain trust, correcting mistakes quickly when they occur.”
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The Federalist’s Notable Books Of 2025
Seasons greetings! It’s time for another exciting and sprawling books recommendation column.
