Category: The American Spectator
Administering Colleges: 1960s and Today
In clearing out an office with six decades of materials — grade books, journal articles, papers given at scholarly meetings,…
The Rise of the New Confederacy
“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is…
Don Lemon Walks Free With No Bond, No Travel Limits
The court imposed no domestic travel restrictions
Sydney Sweeney spurns Cosmo girl’s desperate ‘MAGA Barbie’ bait
Feminist glossy “Cosmopolitian” could use a reminder: No means no.
When it comes to the media’s attempts to use Sydney Sweeney as a political pawn, the star has made it clear that she does not consent.
‘I’ve never been here to talk about politics.’
From claims that a jeans ad is a product of white supremacy to outrage over her use of a firearm, the 28-year-old is asked by reporters to reveal her politics nearly every time she is put in front of a camera.
And every time, she refuses.
Private parts
That didn’t stop a pushy writer from Cosmopolitan — single gal lifestyle mag turned leftist propaganda organ — from doing her best to wear Sweeney down.
After discussing body image and Sweeney’s new lingerie line, writer Alexandra Whittaker took an abrupt turn toward politics by bringing up what she called the star’s “charged nickname”: MAGA Barbie.
“I see it in Instagram comments constantly. How do you understand this label, given that you’ve been private about your politics?” Whittaker asked.
“I’ve never been here to talk about politics,” Sweeney plainly replied. “I’ve always been here to make art, so this is just not a conversation I want to be at the forefront of. And I think because of that, people want to take it even further and use me as their own pawn. But it’s somebody else assigning something to me, and I can’t control that.”
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Party lines
The reporter then asked why Sweeney would not want to correct any untrue labels.
“Where is the line for you?”
“I haven’t figured it out. I’m not a hateful person. If I say, ‘That’s not true,’ they’ll come at me like, ‘You’re just saying that to look better.’ There’s no winning. There’s never any winning. I just have to continue being who I am, because I know who I am. I can’t make everyone love me. I know what I stand for.”
Trying a different angle, Whittaker — executive director of Cosmopolitan’s website — asked Sweeney to define some of her values, “not party affiliations,” that she wants people to understand.
Sweeney simply described leading with “love” and being “kind to whoever you meet.”
American ogle
Despite Sweeney’s clear lack of interest, the reporter kept on pressing, asking Sweeney about not talking about politics and if she ever will.
“You don’t speak to your fans directly about your political beliefs. … Is there a future in which people will get to see what you believe, politically?”
The Spokane, Washington, native completely shut the idea down.
“No. I’m not a political person. I’m in the arts. I’m not here to speak on politics. That’s not an area I’ve ever even imagined getting into. It’s not why I became who I am.”
Readers will have to check out the full interview to see other attempts to discuss the “culture war” and separate online narratives that Sweeney is asked to answer to.
The actress was consistent in saying she does not have any control over what others print, say, or claim about her for their own gain.
“It’s been a weird thing having to navigate and digest, because it’s not me. None of it is me. And I’m having to watch it happen. I’m online and I see things, but I’m slowly pulling myself away,” she explained.
‘Looksmaxxing’ and the war on male self-improvement
If you’ve been anywhere near social media lately, you have probably heard of the latest oddly named lifestyle: looksmaxxing.
It’s laughed at, pathologized, and treated as a digital disease. It is filed under narcissism, extremism, or maladaptation — anything that avoids taking it seriously.
What really offends critics isn’t the vanity but the accountability. Looksmaxxing puts the burden back on the individual in a culture addicted to external blame.
But what is it?
Checklist for Chads
At its most basic, looksmaxxing refers to a loose online movement encouraging men to improve their physical appearance through deliberate, practical self-improvement rather than passive acceptance. In practice, this usually means mundane, unglamorous changes: losing excess weight, lifting weights consistently, grooming properly, dressing with intention, fixing posture, and presenting oneself as a capable human being. It is not a philosophy so much as a checklist.
There are, inevitably, outliers — internet backwaters where bone-breaking routines are discussed without irony, extreme facial surgeries are contemplated, and pseudoscientific measurements of skull angles are treated as destiny.
These exist, and they’re easy to mock. But they don’t represent the broader phenomenon. They emerge at the margins, where men believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have exhausted ordinary options. The typical looksmaxxing example is far less exotic. A sedentary man quits junk food, joins a gym, gets a proper haircut, replaces stained hoodies with fitted clothes, and steps out of his mom’s basement.
Scarcity mindset
Looksmaxxing is a response to scarcity: romantic scarcity, social scarcity, economic scarcity. Young men are told relentlessly that confidence matters, that personality wins, that being “yourself” is enough.
Then reality arrives, usually with a swift kick to the nether regions. Faces, frames, height, grooming, fitness, posture — these things open doors long before a sentence is spoken. They decide who gets seen, who gets listened to, who gets to move on to the next round. The lie isn’t that personality matters, but that it matters first.
Critics default to dismissal because it requires no engagement. It costs nothing to tell a struggling man that he should simply “be kind” or “work on his inner self.” It costs nothing to shame him for caring about how he looks, while a culture sells beauty as destiny and desire as status.
The same people who insist looks don’t matter meticulously curate their appearance through filters, lighting, angles, brands, and cosmetic interventions. They publicly reject the rules while privately enforcing them. Everyone else pays for the pretense, most notably the average American man.
And the term average couldn’t be more apt. Overweight. Sedentary. Winded by a flight of stairs, pausing halfway like he’s summiting Everest. He is the product of abundance without discipline, comfort without consequence, a culture of convenience, couches, and calories. And he is told, endlessly, that his problems are emotional rather than physical.
Law of attraction
Looksmaxxing begins where denial ends. It says the body matters; the face matters; presentation matters. It refuses to treat biology as a slur. It doesn’t ask permission to acknowledge that attraction is selective, visual, and often cruel.
In a dating environment dominated by apps, where most singles are judged in a fraction of a second, this isn’t ideology but reality. That honesty unsettles people who have built careers telling men soothing stories about how the world ought to work rather than how it does.
As noted above, looksmaxxing can become obsessive. That pattern is familiar in any movement shaped by exclusion. But remove the extremes, and what remains is entirely reasonable. Lift weights. Lose the gut. Fix posture. Groom properly. Dress like you respect yourself. Sleep. Eat like an adult. Stop looking like you lost a bet with your mirror. None of this is radical. None of it is hateful. It is common sense.
Man up
What really offends critics isn’t the vanity but the accountability. Looksmaxxing puts the burden back on the individual in a culture addicted to external blame. It tells men that improvement is possible, but optional excuses are not. That message is intolerable to systems that profit from passivity. It is far easier to medicalize male dissatisfaction than to admit that a doughy, slumped, self-neglecting body will be judged accordingly.
There is also a class element no one wants to touch. Good looks are increasingly a luxury good: time to train; money for decent food; knowledge of grooming, style, and fitness. These are not evenly distributed. Telling men that looks don’t matter is a convenient way to ignore how much effort the winners quietly invest. Looksmaxxing is, in part, a grassroots attempt to close that gap — crude at times, desperate at others. But earnest.
There is also an undeniable element of misandry at play. When women improve their appearance, it is framed as empowerment, self-care, or self-expression. When men do the same — deliberately, analytically, and without apology — it is framed as an illness requiring immediate intervention. Looksmaxxing, a movement dominated by men, is treated as evidence of a psychological defect. The behavior is identical; the judgment is not. The double standard is structural.
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Alexandre Guerra/Getty Images
What about both?
And most straight women, if they are honest, aren’t confused about what they find attractive. Who doesn’t want a good-looking man? Who doesn’t respond positively to a strong frame, a defined jawline, a body that signals health and self-command?
This doesn’t negate the need for depth. No one wants a handsome face paired with the emotional range of a vacuum cleaner. But the inverse is no more appealing. Emotional intelligence struggles to shine when it is housed in a body that signals neglect. The idea that a man must choose between substance and appearance is false. It is entirely possible — indeed reasonable — to demand both.
Looksmaxxing doesn’t promise eternal happiness, but it does promise leverage — a chance to be seen before being dismissed. A chance to compete rather than be invisible. For the overweight man incapable of doing a single pull-up, it offers something rare: a clear target and a measurable path.
Looksmaxxing exists because the social contract broke first. When institutions stopped offering stable work, when dating turned into a market, when community receded and screens advanced, men adapted.
Mock looksmaxxing if you want. Call it vain. Call it sad. But don’t call it irrational. It isn’t the sickness but the symptom. And until we are willing to tell the truth about attraction, status, and the price of neglect, young men will keep gravitating toward the only strategy that abandons pretense.
Democrats panic at sight of Tulsi Gabbard at FBI raid of Fulton County election office
The FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office on Wednesday as part of an apparent investigation into possible violations of federal laws related to the preservation of election records and intimidation or defrauding of voters.
Georgia Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were among the Democrats who rushed to condemn the raid, which took place just days after President Donald Trump stated that the 2020 U.S. presidential election “was a rigged election” and “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”
‘A US election can never, ever be rigged again.’
Although generally critical of the raid that Warnock suggested was a political errand “for a vengeful president,” some Democrats appeared particularly rattled by the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Referencing a Reuters photo placing Gabbard at the site of the search on Wednesday, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner (D) asked, “Why is Tulsi Gabbard at an FBI raid on an election office in Fulton County?”
“Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus — in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed’ of relevant national security concerns,” continued Warner, “or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”
Warner, who also shared a video of his corresponding meltdown, was hardly the only Democrat who panicked over the sight of Gabbard in Fulton County.
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Ct.) joined Warner in penning a letter to Gabbard on Thursday questioning her involvement in an apparent domestic law enforcement operation and demanding an explanation “given the politically fraught nature of elections for federal office.”
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Democrats’ vexation might have something to do with Gabbard’s proven efficacy in blowing up official narratives and exposing bad actors. Last year, for instance, she helped expose the origins of the Russia collusion hoax and corresponding “years-long coup” against Trump.
Evidently the administration’s attention has moved from the 2016 to the 2020 presidential election.
White House officials told the Wall Street Journal that Gabbard has spent months re-examining the supposed results of the 2020 election and looking for potential crimes. This investigation has involved scrutinizing voting machines, analyzing data from swing states, and looking at glaring discrepancies.
Gabbard is expected to prepare a report on her findings.
“President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “Director Gabbard is playing a key lead role in this important effort.”
ODNI press secretary Olivia Coleman told the Journal that Gabbard “has a vital role in identifying vulnerabilities in our critical infrastructure and protecting against exploitation.”
“DNI Gabbard has and will continue to take actions within her authorities, alongside our interagency partners, to support ensuring the integrity of our election,” added Coleman.
Trump told reporters that Gabbard is “working very hard to try to keep the election safe, and she’s done a very good job.”
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Congress needs to go big or go home
Last week marked one year since President Trump returned to the White House with a mandate to reshape America’s future after four long years of the Biden administration’s failures.
Overnight, illegal crossings at the southern border were brought to a halt. DEI initiatives that picked winners and losers based on group identity were eliminated from the federal government. Lethality returned as the rightful marker of success in our nation’s military.
Despite holding a majority, Republicans in Congress have produced a historically low volume of legislation, leaving much of the Trump agenda uncodified and the deep state intact.
Under President Trump, Americans finally have leaders willing to put them first. But despite a record number of executive orders and a landmark reconciliation package that delivered the largest tax cut in American history, $140 billion for border security, and the elimination of the $200 tax stamp on National Firearms Act items, the job isn’t done yet.
Obamacare’s broken framework continues to get more expensive each year — both for taxpayers and enrollees. Young Americans remain priced out of the American dream, unable to afford a home. And despite holding a majority, Republicans in Congress have produced a historically low volume of legislation, leaving much of the Trump agenda uncodified and the deep state intact.
These challenges are precisely why Republicans were elected: to fix the mess Washington created. We cannot coast into November on “tax cuts,” nor can we pretend that the nation’s most urgent challenges will be solved through uncodified executive orders or rogue discharge petitions.
We need decisive action to address the crises facing the nation. We need to make the American dream affordable again. Congress needs the structure, discipline, and publicity of a new reconciliation bill that forces lawmakers to prioritize results and deliver tangible outcomes for the American people.
It’s time to go big or go home. Despite prediction markets giving Republicans a 76% chance of losing the majority in the House, many lawmakers don’t seem to care. Just last week, 81 Republicans joined Democrats to fund the National Endowment for Democracy — a rogue CIA cutout that fuels global censorship and domestic propaganda. Many of those same Republicans had praised the Department of Government Efficiency just months prior for freezing the NED’s funding.
Likewise, 46 Republicans joined Democrats to vote against defunding the office of federal district court judge James Boasberg, who repeatedly uses nationwide injunctions to override duly executed federal law and substitute his own radical policy preferences for those of the president.
A few short years ago, Democrats attempted to lock Trump in prison and throw away the keys.
Republicans, by contrast, can hardly muster the courage to dispense with a rogue judge.
Meanwhile, much of the work of the American people remains to be done. While the House has passed Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act twice, the Senate refuses to put it up for a vote on the floor.
On health care, members of the House Freedom Caucus have offered Americans an alternative to Obamacare’s failing architecture with market-based solutions that lower costs. Yet House moderates in our ranks, by contrast, have doubled down on stupid, joining Democrats to pass an extension of Biden’s $448 billion temporary COVID subsidies, which thankfully stalled in the Senate.
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Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Despite a good-faith effort from the administration on home ownership, Americans need more than solutions that subsidize demand. High interest rates, illegal immigration, and absurd capital gains taxes are crushing the market.
If Republicans don’t act now, we may not get the opportunity again. Democrats are on record clearly stating their intention to derail the administration with subpoenas and impeachments should they assume the majority in the House. We are a nation nearly $39 trillion in debt. Americans are sick of rhetoric and half measures.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed in July 2025. If, 12 months later, we can only offer the American people last year’s accomplishments, do we expect them to believe we are legislating on their behalf?
The Republican Study Committee recently released a strong blueprint for a new reconciliation bill. The legislation would put more homes on the market by eliminating capital gains taxes on sales to first-time buyers. It includes health care reforms that empower Americans to direct their health care dollars toward insurance plans that best meet their individual needs, rather than those of their employers. The proposal also cuts over $1.6 trillion in government spending, returning a semblance of fiscal responsibility to Congress.
Republicans were elected to enact Trump’s America First agenda, not to manage decline and finance the status quo. If members of Congress fail to seize this moment, they will have no one to blame but themselves when voters decide it’s time to send them home.
America’s old cultic trick: Sex, salvation, and the return of polygamy
American religious history is littered with cult leaders who promised a blessed life through deviant sexuality. From the earliest frontier movements to the modern era, the pattern is remarkably consistent: a charismatic figure announces that traditional Christian morality is oppressive, outdated, or unnatural — and that true freedom, enlightenment, or spiritual power is found through sexual transgression.
Today’s polygamy apologists are not offering anything new. Like cult leaders before them, they package sexual license as enlightenment and rebellion as honesty.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s can be understood as a much larger cultural wave of the same desire. “Any way you want it, that’s the way you need it,” became a slogan of liberation, echoing the older Luciferian maxim, “Do what thou wilt.” The point was not merely freedom from social constraints, but freedom from moral law itself.
The LGBTQ+ movement followed this trajectory and intensified it by questioning the very idea of nature altogether. Gender was no longer something discovered or received but something invented by the autonomous mind. Reality itself became plastic, malleable to inner desire. If the mind declares it, then it must be so.
That impulse represents the more openly “liberal” side of the sexual revolution. But today we are witnessing what some might call a more “conservative” version gaining traction: a renewed interest in polyamory and polygamy. This, too, bears all the classic marks of rejecting Christian marriage — only now it does so in a more crafty way, cloaking itself in appeals to nature, history, and even Scripture. This camouflage makes it especially dangerous.
The first move modern polygamy advocates is an appeal to what comes naturally. Men, we are told, are not designed to be with just one woman for life. What is the proof? Male desire. Men experience lust for multiple women; therefore, monogamy must be unnatural.
This argument collapses on closer inspection. It amounts to saying that because men experience disordered desire, they should not be expected to govern it. Lust becomes its own justification. By this logic, no appetite — sexual or otherwise — should ever be restrained. Gluttony, rage, greed, and violence would all be “natural” simply because they occur.
Others dress this same claim in evolutionary language. Men, we are told, are merely advanced apes whose biological purpose is to spread their seed as widely as possible. This argument is simply an abdication of moral reasoning. If evolutionary impulse defines moral obligation, then fidelity, sacrifice, and self-control become irrational. Civilization itself becomes a mistake.
Proponents of polygamy then pivot to the Bible. Didn’t Jacob have two wives? Didn’t David have many? And Solomon more than all of them?
Therefore — what, exactly?
These are not normative examples for the Christian. Scripture never presents polygamy as an ideal. At best, it records God’s tolerance of sinful arrangements within a fallen world, never His approval. In fact, the biblical record consistently highlights the misery, injustice, and disorder produced by polygamous households. The entire account of Jacob having children with four women is an account of their contest and jealousy.
Most strikingly, the very man most often invoked by modern apologists — Solomon — is the author of Scripture’s greatest celebration of monogamous love: the Song of Solomon. The man with many wives wrote the Bible’s most eloquent testimony to exclusive devotion between one man and one woman. That irony should give pause.
From the beginning, marriage was instituted as a one-flesh union. One man. One woman. One covenant. When adultery occurs,it is not the creation of a new marriage but the violation of an existing one. Bringing in a third, fourth, or fifth person breaks the union between one man and one woman as the man moves on to the next woman. This is why God uses adultery as His primary image for Israel’s sin. The prophets do not praise Israel’s “polyamory” with other gods; they condemn it as betrayal.
RELATED: Michael Knowles explains why he isn’t a Christian Zionist
Photo by Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images
In the New Testament, Jesus explicitly reaffirms this creational order. Appealing not to cultural norms but to Genesis itself, He teaches that from the beginning God made them male and female and that the two — not three, not many — become one flesh. Jesus was perfectly aware that pagans often practiced polygamy.
Paul makes this even more explicit in 1 Timothy 3. As the gospel advances into pagan cultures where polygamy existed, Paul does not relax the standard for Christian leadership. An elder must be the husband of one wife. Polygamist marriages of people who converted to Christianity were not dissolved, but they were not held up as ideal in the place of Christian marriage, which points us to Christ’s monogamous love for his church. A man should have known better, even as a pagan, and thus Christian leadership was preserved for those who understood what marriage pointed toward from the beginning.
From beginning to end, the biblical story is monogamous. The Old Testament image of God and Israel gives way to the New Testament image of Christ and His bride, the church. History itself culminates not in a harem, but in a wedding: the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Christ has a bride — not brides.
Today’s polygamy apologists are not offering anything new. Like cult leaders before them, they package sexual license as enlightenment and rebellion as honesty. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they aim not at hardened skeptics but at the unguarded and naïve.
Christians must be better equipped. Know the Scriptures. Understand the arguments. Do not be deceived by appeals to desire dressed up as nature or sin disguised as tradition. The sexual revolution — whether “progressive” or “conservative” — always ends the same way: with broken people, broken families, and broken faith.
Truth, by contrast, calls us not to indulge our lusts, but to master them. The Christian marriage points us to Christ’s monogamous love for his church.
BALLOT BOX BLITZ: FBI Hits Fulton’s Election Hub With Court-Authorized Search Warrant [WATCH]
![BALLOT BOX BLITZ: FBI Hits Fulton’s Election Hub With Court-Authorized Search Warrant [WATCH]](https://hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/GettyImages-2182515534-300x200.jpg "Georgia Ballots Are Processed And Counted On Election Day")
FBI agents executed a court-authorized search warrant on Wednesday at Fulton County’s Election Hub and Operation Center in Union City, Georgia, seeking 2020 election records.
‘Nothing Less Than Holocaust Inversion’: Prominent Holocaust Scholars Denounce Israel-Bashing Nonprofit Named After Holocaust Survivor
More than 100 prominent Holocaust and genocide scholars are sounding the alarm on an “extremist” Israel-bashing nonprofit named after a Holocaust survivor who coined the term “genocide,” according to a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Exploiting the survivor’s name while accusing the Jewish state of genocide, the letter’s leader said, is “nothing less than Holocaust inversion.”
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