Dead Reckoning is fine. It’s not great. The problem is that the action scenes aren’t as dazzling as the ones in the last two in the series, Rogue Nation and Fallout. Cruise and his collaborator on these movies, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, seem to know they struck gold with Fallout, which deserves consideration as the best sheer action picture ever made, and they don’t really try to outdo it. The new movie’s biggest stunt—which features Cruise driving off a 10,000-foot high cliff in the Alps on a motorcycle—just doesn’t measure up to the sight of him in Fallout jumping out of a plane at 30,000 feet. What could?

I mean, I feel bad for Cruise, because he just wants to make our jaws drop. And they do—look, the guy actually drives a motorcycle off a cliff right in front of our eyes, for God’s sake—but it’s just a fact that they dropped more the last time.

The cleverest choice Cruise and McQuarrie made here was going smaller rather than larger. That’s the case with this movie’s car chase, which takes place around Rome rather than Fallout’s Paris. Cruise and his costar, the enchanting Hayley Atwell, are handcuffed together in an ancient, tiny, canary-yellow Fiat with a supercharged motor. Because the handcuffs are on his left wrist and her right, she’s the one who must drive in and around and past Italian cops, American spies, and a crazy woman in the employ of the A.I., who’s driving a giant military vehicle.

Atwell’s character is not a trained Impossible Missions Force operative; she’s just an ordinary pickpocket. And so Cruise must direct her through Rome traffic and down the Spanish Steps in a state of dire and impotent panic while she wears a priceless expression of sheer terror on her face. What results is a wildly unexpected and brilliantly funny scene that could have appeared in a silent comedy. In fact, there’s almost exactly such a sequence in Harold Lloyd’s Speedy, made in 1928, in which Lloyd is tasked with driving Babe Ruth (yes, the real Bambino) to Yankee Stadium from midtown Manhattan in time to play the game. (You can see the scene here.)

The Little Fiat That Could arrives an hour into the picture, which is not when you want the high-water moment of your action movie to happen. You want it near the end, like Fallout’s jaw-dropping final 15 minutes, in which two helicopters duke it out in the mountains of Afghanistan. In Dead Reckoning, the climactic set piece involves a runaway train with Cruise duking it out with the elegant Esai Morales. They punch each other and duck when the switching towers zoom by. Then they punch each other and flatten out when the train goes into a tunnel. It’s well-staged, but I just saw the same scene three weeks ago in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. (Here’s an uncomfortable fact for you: The greatest action-train scene ever made is in a movie nobody saw and that is now a permanent scandal. That’s The Lone Ranger, featuring alleged cannibal fantasist Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp playing Tonto.) And truth to tell, I saw a better action movie this year in John Wick 4.

There’s going to be a part 2 of Dead Reckoning. It will also be about the keys and the A.I. Only this time, if I read the tea leaves correctly, Cruise is going to go into space somehow and do something. If that does happen, he’ll be back on top. Unless Keanu does it first.

The post REVIEW: ‘Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One’ appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Stolzoff, a refugee from Silicon Valley who has found his way into some amalgam of journalism and self-help, acknowledges that "a job will first and foremost be an economic relationship." But he does not seem to grasp the finer points of supply and demand. The supply of people who want to be zookeepers—because they like animals or they think the job will be fun or at least more fun than delivering Amazon packages—is large enough that zoos can afford to pay people less than a UPS driver. In other words, being a zookeeper is one of the perks of being a zookeeper, and people will accept less money to do a job they love.

This is not to say that Stolzoff doesn't have some interesting thoughts about the culture of "workism" in America today and the way that employers are encouraging workers to think about their jobs. Before the folks at Google and Microsoft developed campuses with gourmet cafeterias, pods to nap in, and yoga studios, investment banks figured out that the key to getting employees to work long hours was to offer them dinner and a ride home. If they worked past 7 p.m., they could expense their takeout, and after 9 p.m., the company would give them a car service ride home. Even the BlackBerry, which was initially considered a workplace perk, was really a device to tether people to the office.

Stolzoff warns that it is not only these material benefits that get employees to center more of their lives on work. It is also the creation of a workplace culture. The proliferation of companies that say they are not in it just for the profit—the B corporations whose leaders promise to consider the social or environmental impact of their decisions—seem to have persuaded young people that they are not real companies.

Take Taylor, for instance, who joined Kickstarter as a receptionist in 2012:

"Once a week, Taylor started a happy hour tab with the company credit card at a local bar. He hosted a midnight movie club at the office where employees sipped negronis and watched cult classics. He played in a weekly Dungeons and Dragons game which … two of the company's founders regularly attended. Kickstarter became the center of Taylor's social scene. Coworkers weren't just colleagues; they were friends and bandmates, romantic partners, and political comrades."

These corporations refer to themselves as a "fampany" or, in the case of AirBNB, as an "Airfam." But as Stolzoff correctly notes, "families and businesses have fundamentally different goals." So when Kickstarter started making decisions that Taylor and his colleague disagreed with, they were shocked. And when they decided to form a union to push back against those decisions, the employees also seemed shocked that the leaders were hostile to the idea. "Never before had the divide between workers and management been so apparent." Things were a lot more clear when workers were mining coal or assembling cars on a factory line and management were the ones whose clothes didn't get dirty.

Companies want productive workers, and the research suggests that people who are happier at work will want to spend more time at work, and they will be more productive. But that may not be entirely true. Stolzoff cites a number of studies suggesting that reducing hours can boost productivity. A large-scale study in Iceland, for instance, found that when workers' hours were reduced from 40 to 36 hours a week, they were more productive across a wide number of industries. Other studies have suggested that after 50 hours or so of working, there is limited marginal benefit to working more.

Time at work, in other words, doesn't equal working more. Indeed, it's possible that all the distractions of the modern workplace—the meals, the exercise studios, the wellness seminars—may in fact be taking away from actual work. And what about when work is actually at home? The revolution in remote working over the past couple of years has confused people even more—both employees and employers. Neither is really sure when real work is being done. Work goes on at all hours, but productivity may be even more rare.

But this is the tradeoff that many of us are willing to make. As someone who was working from home long before the pandemic, I can say those tradeoffs are clear. Yes, you can go to the supermarket when it's not busy; you can exercise when there is daylight. You can work after everyone has gone to bed or before everyone has woken up. And you can attend all of your kids' school events or be home when they are sick. (More about them in a minute.) But you often have a feeling that you're not where you’re supposed to be. Or that you're pretending to do something that you're not actually doing.

Some of Stolzoff's solutions to the problem of workism feel, well, performative. Yes, of course, we could give people a universal basic income or forgive student loans. But the truth is that if their economic calculus were different, most people wouldn't end up working less. In fact, they might end up working more. Student loan forgiveness would free up more people to go into the kinds of low-earning public service jobs that Stolzoff tells us we should be wary of because of the way they exploit their workers.

Stolzoff's advice that we be more "clear-eyed" about work as an "economic contract" is well-taken. But the problem with work is not actually work. It's the rest of our lives. We do not value time as much as we value money. The young people he interviews who end up taking time off from work don't know what to do with it. They travel the world, smoke pot, and then end up coming up with ideas for new projects or books. But what most of them have in common is that they don't have other obligations as strong as their work obligations. They are single or at least childless. Not only does that mean that they are looking for meaning and connection in their jobs that they are not getting elsewhere. It also means that there is no one sitting there demanding their attention instead of their bosses. Nothing boosts efficiency like knowing a babysitter is about to leave.

Though Stolzoff writes enviously about other places and cultures where people seem to choose leisure over money, those people are rarely choosing to lie on a beach alone or take time to cook a meal for themselves. Rather, they are choosing time with family or a religious community over work. These other things pull at them as strongly as work does. Until younger Americans make those same kinds of commitments, they will be stuck playing Dungeons and Dragons with their fampanies.

The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work
by Simone Stolzoff
Portfolio, 239 pp., $28

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

The post When Office Perks Become Perils appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Take the barleycorn and wheat grain, for example, which are two of the oldest ways of measuring weight. Both grains vary according to how much moisture they contain, but generally four wheat grains were considered to equal three barleycorns. Both grains were used in England and elsewhere to determine larger weights like the pound, which was brought to England by the Romans. (The abbreviation for the pound, lb., comes from the Latin libra, which is a shortened version of libra ponda, or "pound scale.")

The troy pound, which may have been named after the French city of Troyes and was used mostly to weigh precious metals, came in at 5,760 grains. But the merchantile pound, which was used for trading, weighed 6,570 grains. William the Conqueror created the Tower pound after he invaded Britain in 1066. It was supposed to become the standard pound and was used to mint coins. It weighed 5,400 grains, but both the troy pound and the merchantile pound continued to be used. In 1588, Elizabeth I created the imperial pound, which weighed 7,000 grains and remained the standard unit of measurement in England and most English-speaking countries until 1959, when it was replaced by the international pound.

The barleycorn was also used to determine the length of a foot, which varied widely from place to place. The Welsh foot was 27 barleycorns. The Saxon foot was 39. In 1324, Edward II decreed that the English foot was 36 barleycorns. Today, one foot is 304.8 millimeters, but according to one scholar it was 294.86 mm in ancient Rome and 302 mm in ancient Greece. In 790, Charlemagne decreed that the Frankish foot "should be set at 1/6 of a toise, which is the span of an average man with his arms outstretched." This set the Frankish foot at 326.66 mm. "Recent analysis of buildings built across Charlemagne’s kingdom during his reign, however," Cock-Starkey writes, "show a number of different values for the foot, from 296 mm to 340 mm, indicating that his decree did not translate into common practice."

I could go on, but you get the idea. I know some people blame "liberalism" for the triumph of consumerism and the rise of a supposed woke international economic order, but if you are going to blame anything, blame the metric system.

Most early forms of measurement, Cock-Starkey notes, were established to facilitate trade. "Fingernails, fingers, palms, forearms, feet," as well as "a good-sized stone," helped to determine the comparable length and weight of things in an exchange (as well as the amount of tax). In addition to the pound and the foot, there were measurements like the rod and perch, the furlong and acre, again, all of which varied from region to region or town to town. But as trade increased, an international standard of measurement became increasingly important. Hence, the metric system. One Mr. Greenall complained to Parliament’s Select Committee on Weights and Measures in 1862 that "a stone of wool at Darlington is 18 lbs., while at Belfast it is 16¾ lbs. A stone of flax at Downpatrick is 24 lbs., and a stone of flax at Belfast is not only 16¾ lbs., but it is also 24½ lbs., so that it was two values in one town."

An international standard of measurement became increasingly important for science, too. This can be seen as recently as 1999 in the example of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter, which burned up as it approached Mars. "This was because," Cock-Starkey writes, "the engineers making the Orbiter used imperial tons to calculate the force the thrusters needed to exert, whereas the software used to deploy the thrusters used metric measurements." The imperial ton weighed 2,240 pounds. The metric ton weighs 1,000 kilograms, or 2,204.6 pounds.

One of the joys of The Curious History of Weights & Measures is to learn the history behind English measurements and how they changed over the years. Nearly all of them were first determined with reference to common objects or activities or the human body. A furlong was originally the distance two oxen "could plough without resting." An acre, which can be traced back to the Latin ager for "field," was the area "it was thought a single ploughman could work in a day." The mile comes from the Roman mille passus—a thousand paces. Every other time a foot hit the ground was a pace—or the length of two steps.

Did you know that the word "ton" comes from the French word for thunder (tonnerre), which is the sound huge wine casks would make as they were rolled across the floor? Or—since we’re now on the topic of alcohol—that a keg is not an official measurement for beer, but a hogshead is? (A hogshead is 54 imperial gallons, or 432 pints.) Most British kegs have the capacity of a firkin, which is from the Middle Dutch vierdekijhn for "fourth," and refers to a fourth of a barrel, or nine imperial gallons.

The Curious History of Weights & Measures is a must-read for introverts—or anyone for that matter—forced to attend the occasional cocktail party or business dinner. It has all sorts of odd facts that will keep a conversation superficially interesting for a whole evening.

Plus, it might help you make the most of your expense account. The next time you are out on the company’s dime, why not order a jeroboam of champagne instead of a bottle? That’s three liters of bubbly and more than enough to make any business dinner a delight. The guys in accounting won’t have a clue.

The Curious History of Weights and Measures
by Claire Cock Starkey
Bodleian Library, 200 pp., $25

Micah Mattix, a professor of English at Regent University, has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, and many other publications.

The post Conversion Therapy appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The movie begins with a gorgeous con artist in Tegucigalpa scamming a naïve Honduran father into leaving his two little children with her for the day as she takes modeling pictures. When he returns, the photo studio has been stripped bare and the kids are gone. Cut to Jim Caviezel (Mel Gibson’s Christ) as a Homeland Security officer busting a pedophile in California as the creep is downloading images to the dark web. He too is a con artist of a kind; he gets the pedophile to cooperate by posing as a fellow evildoer and is handed a photo of the little Honduran boy we saw in the first scene with instructions on how to find him at a border crossing from Mexico.

Once Caviezel finds the kid, he’s scored what his supervisor calls a "career capper." But the boy has told Caviezel his sister was with him, and the anguish of their father at having one back but not the other torments him into dangerous action that takes him to Colombia, where the second half of the movie takes place.

Sound of Freedom has remarkable commonalities with another film released this year: The Covenant, directed by Guy Ritchie, in which a tormented Jake Gyllenhaal cannot rest until he has found and rescued the Afghan interpreter who saved his life in the waning years of the U.S. effort there. Ritchie is not a subtle director, and his lack of subtlety served him well in this instance by engaging the audience’s ire as well as its sympathy. The director and cowriter of Sound of Freedom is Alejandro Monteverde, and he’s not subtle either—but he has a gimlet eye and has made a beautifully shot and deeply considered picture that really only loses you in a final rescue scene that strains credulity to the breaking point.

Sound of Freedom is based on a true character. Caviezel is playing Tim Ballard, who quit the Department of Homeland Security to dedicate himself to combating sex trafficking. The central sequence in the movie is based on an elaborate sting he and his organization pulled off to get traffickers and kids into one controlled location, whereupon Colombian authorities busted the monsters and freed the kids. You see footage from the actual event in the movie’s final moments (including a shot of the gorgeous con artist, which seemed until that moment like a made-up detail) as well as clips of Ballard testifying on the subject before Congress.

The tales told by buccaneering global saviors should always be taken with a grain of salt, but that Ballard’s heart is in the right place and that he’s put his money where his mouth is cannot be gainsaid. Unless you’re a jerk from Jezebel or the Guardian determined to assassinate this movie because it (a) mentions God twice, (b) salutes a cause taken up by social conservatives at a time when liberals are far more concerned with helping authority figures castrate children rather than save them from international criminals, and (c) stars an actor sympathetic with QAnon conspiracies playing a person who has said QAnon ideas have brought people to his cause and given him an opportunity to educate them in the realities.

Now, I hate QAnon, and I’m sorry Jim Caviezel is a nut who goes on Steve Bannon’s podcast, and I really wish Ballard wouldn’t play footsie with any of this. But seriously, when I see liberals actively seeking to suppress a movie because its star and subject are not aligned with them politically, it makes me want to throw a pie in their faces. I’ve spent 50 years tolerating political views I find repellent from actors who make creditable movies and acknowledging the value of movies whose politics I might abhor. Give cultural and creative open-mindedness a shot, you idiot commissars. And screw you besides.

Released by a crowdfunded micromini studio called Angel Studios after it sat on a shelf at Fox and then Disney for five years (it was made in 2018) and with a profile so low in the pop-culture publicity mainstream it’s likely you’ve never heard of it until you started reading this piece, Sound of Freedom has made more than $40 million since its July 4 release. It has outearned the Jennifer Lawrence raunchcom No Hard Feelings (which I also liked), in part because it is experimenting with a fascinating direct marketing campaign. At the tail end of the movie, Jim Caviezel comes on screen with a "special message" in which he talks about how he and others want this movie to be for sex trafficking what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to slavery. To that end, he says, Angel Studios has a "pay it forward" proposal for the audience. He asks those watching to open their phones and take a picture of a QR code. That takes you directly to a screen in which you are invited to buy tickets to Sound of Freedom that can be given to others.

I read a box-office report on an industry website (since edited, so I can’t quote it directly) tut-tutting about how Hollywood feels like this ticket-buying ploy is somehow unfair and a form of cheating but that movie-theater owners are absolutely delighted. Yeah. A ticket bought is a ticket bought. End of discussion, you whiny losers.

Here’s a test for Hollywood. This movie will likely be one of the few box-office surprises of 2023 when all is said and done. And it happens to feature what may be the best supporting performance in any American movie so far this year, from the extraordinary Bill Camp. If you know him at all, you know him as Mr. Shively, the orphanage janitor and chess guru on the stunning Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit. Here he plays Vampiro, a former Medellin cartel lowlife who helps Caviezel in Colombia.

It’s a sensational performance. And Camp is a beloved character actor with a sterling reputation on stage, on the small screen and on the big screen. If this were any other kind of picture, he would be a shoo-in for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. If he doesn’t get one, I will be back when nominations are announced early next year to double-down on my "screw you, you whiny losers" take on the morally decrepit response to this painful, necessary, one-of-a-kind movie.

The post REVIEW: ‘Sound of Freedom’ appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The film was, of course, a commercial failure, and it failed to put an end to a debate that has been raging, in some form, since the middle of the 19th century. If you consult that oracle of knowledge, Wikipedia, you will find a total of 87 people who have been put forward, at one time or another, as being the "real" author of Shakespeare’s plays. This includes everyone from the just about comprehensible (Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon) to the frankly ludicrous. It was once suggested that the playwright was, in fact, an Arab scholar named Shaykh Zubayr—Anglicized to "Shakespeare"—who had been shipwrecked while on a trading vessel and had somehow made his way to Stratford, written the complete works of William Shakespeare, and even endeared himself to Elizabeth I in the process. It says all that needs to be said for this theory that it was a favorite of Colonel Qaddafi’s, who publicly endorsed it in 1989.

The journalist and critic Elizabeth Winkler, then, enters into a tempest of her own with Shakespeare Was a Woman, which seeks to further an argument that she first proposed in the Atlantic in 2019. That feature suggested—albeit without much in the way of concrete evidence—that "Shakespeare" might have been a nom de plume for the English female poet Emilia Bassano, who was not, in her reading, the so-called Dark Lady to whom he addressed many of his sonnets. In an entertaining early set-piece, Winkler details the outrage her piece caused; she was accused of "conspiracism," denigrated as neurotic, even deranged, and her refusal to accept the "Stratfordian" belief that William Shakespeare, son of a Stratford glover, was the author of the 38 plays and hundreds of poems that bear his name saw her compared to Holocaust deniers.

Yet this book is clearly the result of the interest that her feature stirred up; published by the "subversive spirits" at Simon & Schuster, it has been launched to an avalanche of hype and expectation, complete with endorsements by the bestselling likes of Stacy Schiff and Karen Joy Fowler. Is it possible that Winkler succeeds where countless others have failed and successfully challenges centuries of scholarship?

It is undeniably true that little is known of Shakespeare’s life. The stories that are commonly recognized (the "second-best bed" bequeathed to his wife; the various records of his property purchases in Stratford) say nothing about his work as a playwright, and in the absence of hard evidence, it is easy for the inquisitive—or the opportunistic—to attempt to fill this apparent vacuum with their own theories. Winkler places herself at the center of her narrative, writing breathlessly, "Should I write it? Did I dare? The taboo was alluring." Then a professor urges her to undertake the quest, and, no doubt aided by a substantial advance check, Winkler travels to England to remonstrate with the Stratfordians and to unearth the truth which hundreds of scholars, critics, and attention-seekers have failed to delve to the bottom of.

Shakespeare Was a Woman may not work especially well as a piece of investigative scholarship—it is not a spoiler to reveal that not only does Winkler not come to any definitive conclusions about the authorship question, but her previous extolment of Bassano as "William Shakespeare" is briefly recapped and then ignored. But, perhaps unintentionally, it’s enormously entertaining as a comedy of manners about academic scholarship. The eminent likes of James Shapiro and Stanley Wells, fully paid-up Stratfordians who have spent their lives arguing with the likes of Winkler, are portrayed as characters straight out of a Philip Roth campus novel, refusing to engage with their interlocutor’s questioning and losing their tempers at her—in her own estimation, at least—salient arguments. And they’ve bitten back, too; Sir Jonathan Bate, who is criticized here for his Stratfordianism, has already reviewed the book in the Daily Telegraph and described its author as "entertaining … [but] sometimes cruel."

Meanwhile, Winkler approvingly cites Alexander Waugh, grandson of Evelyn, as, in his words, "an out-and-out anti-Stratfordian" and proponent of the Oxfordian theory. It should be noted that Waugh—like his illustrious forbear, and indeed his father Auberon—is generally regarded by his countrymen as a provocateur with a neat sideline in flamboyant mischief-making, even though his Oxfordian beliefs appear to be both sincere and deeply held. Yet his presence (over a lunch at his manor house of "venison, courgettes, omelet, sausages and salad") is a boisterously entertaining one, and hints at another, more darkly comic book than the one Winkler has produced.

There is undeniably something depressing about the "Bardolaters," as the late critic Harold Bloom so fatuously styled himself. Shakespeare may have been the greatest playwright who ever lived, but his work is not and should not be above criticism; one thinks of Ben Jonson’s famous quip, "I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand.’"

Yet Shakespeare Was a Woman does not concern itself with any serious attempt at questioning bardolatry, but instead sees Winkler place herself at the heart of a modish—if oddly pointless—argument. In the end, surely, Shakespeare remains a writer who can illuminate the human condition with pathos, wit, and poetry. Seeking to unearth spurious biographical details might be a legitimate journalistic task, but it also runs the risk of seeming like after-the-fact gossip. Finishing Winkler’s book, I was reminded of Touchstone in As You Like It, and his recollection of an old saying: "A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool." Those who seek to delve into this intriguing but ultimately unfruitful topic might be wise themselves to bear that injunction in mind.

Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature
by Elizabeth Winkler
Simon & Schuster, 399 pp., $29.99

Alexander Larman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of The Windsors at War: The King, His Brother, and a Family Divided (St. Martin’s Press).

The post Tempest in a Teacup appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

And maybe that’s the point.

The Guest tells the story of 22-year-old Alex, the high-end escort turned live-in girlfriend of Simon, an older, wealthy executive with a penchant for stability and routine. It’s summer in what appears to be the Hamptons, and Alex’s listless days are filled with beach trips and painkillers, until she commits a faux pas at a dinner party and is abruptly ejected from Simon’s manicured mansion and life.

From there, the novel oscillates between upstairs/downstairs-style narrative to grifter account, only half-heartedly accomplishing either. That may be intentional, the novel coyly suggests a few times, but is it a cop-out on the part of the author? Either way, it’s debatable if the novel is intriguing enough to make the exercise worth it.

Part of the lack of personality stems from Alex’s former life as an escort. She explains that the key to client cultivation is subduing her own quirks and turning herself into a blank slate onto which potential patrons can project their own fantasies. She defaults to these skills to survive in the Hamptons once Simon kicks her out, closely observing those around her—from entitled homeowners and their apathetic children to the butlers, gardeners, and nannies who make their fiefdoms run—to procure food, shelter, and electricity to power her dysfunctional mobile phone.

There’s a metaphor being constructed here, one meant to lecture readers about class and privilege. America has turned people at the bottom of the economic ladder into products to be consumed by greedy consumers at the top. Alex articulates this point most successfully in her commentary on 21st-century art collection. She notes that "sometimes the work was a mere idea of the work, existing only as an image emailed back and forth, collectors reselling a piece they bought before they even ever saw it in person."

Cribbing from postmodern theory, she convincingly emphasizes the primacy of marketing, advertising, and hype over a painting’s inherent value—defined, perhaps, by the spiritual toil that went into producing it, and its degree of participation in God’s creation—and compares this to how sex work functions. The hyperreality generated by advertising, she seems to say, commodifies the most beautiful and transcendent parts of life—art and sex—rendering them into the transactional byproducts of shrewd power brokering.

To Cline’s credit, Alex is complicated enough that this lecture comes across as less annoying than it would otherwise be: she’s not just an avatar of woke moralizing. She’s flawed insofar as she’s too self-absorbed to recognize her own contribution to the chaos and excess she condemns, giving herself a pass for what she seems to think is the inherent virtue of being essentially homeless. She inconveniences the working class with whom she supposedly sympathizes, while violating the affluent to degrees beyond what they deserve for their supposed crimes of privilege.

In this way, the novel is reminiscent of HBO’s White Lotus, to which other reviews have compared it. The popular series is notable for casting a critical eye not just on wealthy patrons of the titular resort, but on the flawed men and women who help run it, and everyone in between.

Then again, aside from the contradiction of being both class-conscious and self-absorbed, Alex isn’t that complicated after all. The plot goes out of its way to deny readers any indication of Alex’s background: where she’s from, why she became an escort, or what her future goals might be. This blank-slate anonymity is part of the larger argument the novel is trying to construct—but at what cost? There’s no personality for readers to latch onto, just a portrait of a woman reduced to survival mode, with a keen instinct for social observation.

It's interesting that female protagonists in these types of tales are becoming more and more wan and detached from familial and romantic connection. They also keep straying farther from the traditional female plot, that of marriage and reproduction. (Even Edna had a husband and children!) Feminists will celebrate this as some type of victory for liberation, however flawed. But it makes for a boring, sad story of a single woman that reinforces the categories of a sterile, vapid, materialistic world, where the only fertile force is debt, which seems to multiply.

The Guest is not a remarkable novel—and that’s by design. Those who enjoyed the sparklingly offbeat accounts of other female scammers—like Anna Delvey, Caroline Calloway, and Sarma Melngailis—may enjoy it. But be warned that the book has been stripped of the glitter and peculiarities that made those other women memorable—all in the service of spinning a yarn into a parable.

The Guest: A Novel
by Emma Cline
Random House, 304 pp., $28

Nora Kenney is director of media relations at the Manhattan Institute.

The post Great Exploitations appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

You knew the knives would be out for The Idol early on. The series opens with Jos showing more skin during an album cover photo shoot than her nudity rider allowed, prompting a squeamish "intimacy coordinator" in a man bun to comically attempt to intervene. (Nipples are no good, but "side boob, underboob, and the side flank" are all fine, according to her enlightened knight.) His complaints make little sense—no one is being exploited here; the star herself is the one pushing the envelope; if The Idol wasn't allowed to show Jos's nipples each episode would be about 15 minutes shorter—yet he demands that the shoot shut down until she revises her rider and waits 48 hours to make sure she really wants to take her clothes off. This prompts co-manager Chaim (Hank Azaria, sporting a fantastically comic Israeli accent) to lock the adviser in a bathroom and pay a passerby $5,000 to keep the door shut so they can do the nude scene in peace.

One thing I've long admired about Sam Levinson, the executive producer and director of four episodes of the show, is his willingness to work out his personal-professional beefs in the context of his work. It's one reason so many critics hated Malcolm & Marie, his two-hander for Netflix shot during the pandemic in which one of the characters (a director, as it happens) rants about an idiot film critic for the Los Angeles Times (a newspaper whose critic had savaged one of his films, as it happens), who mistook one cinematic technique for another. That level of pettiness—and the howls of outrage he knows it is likely to prompt—is almost admirable; as a connoisseur of spite, I know the good stuff when I see it. One can only imagine Levinson's annoyance with coordinators of intimacy on the set of Euphoria, his show about the scuzzy world of young adult sexuality. And one can't help but laugh out loud when an intimacy coordinator said, likely with tears welling in her eyes, that she was "appalled," that she "felt really betrayed," that she couldn't believe anyone would dare "[use] us as the butt of a joke." Some things are just off limits, you know.

The Idol is a mildly frustrating show because it's really two shows, one of which is quite interesting and the other of which is… tolerable.

The more interesting show is the one that revolves around Chaim, his fellow co-manager Destiny (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), manipulative record label exec Nikki Katz (Jane Adams), and the desperately put-upon, yet still somehow exploitative Live Nation representative Andrew Finkelstein (Eli Roth, in the role he was born to play). When The Idol is at its strongest, it's following these characters as they try to navigate the exceedingly complicated world of pop stardom. Talent matters, of course, but as Nikki understands all too well, these pop starlets are almost interchangeable (and, indeed, she tries to exchange a new bright young thing for Jos when Jos is hesitant to perform the song the label has procured for her). More important than manipulating the public and the press—a hovering Vanity Fair reporter watches the season unfold, and it's kind of funny to see both how much fear her presence inspires and easily influenced she is—is steering the whims of the singer herself.

The Idol is a little like a demented version of Entourage, one in which we're not really supposed to sympathize with the star and her hangers-on like Leia (Rachel Sennott) so much as pity them as they attempt to survive Jos's mood swings and her abusive new boyfriend-cum-producer, Tedros. Which brings us to the second, less-interesting half of The Idol: the relationship between Jos and Tedros, which has one giant, glaring problem. The show presupposes Tedros as this amazingly charismatic figure, and I have no doubt that sort of individual exists in Hollywood—perhaps The Weeknd is that charismatic in real life!—but it simply doesn't show up on the screen. The frustrating thing is that Tedros is an interesting character and I kinda-sorta understand what The Weeknd and Levinson were going for with his harem of talented, discarded young people like the nymphet Chloe (Suzanna Son), who is prone to playing piano in the nude, or the Sisqó-like Izaak (Moses Sumney). But he completely lacks the onscreen magnetism needed for us to buy that Jos—who is played with a fascinating variety of dead-eyed sensuality by Lily-Rose Depp that makes her both appealing and mildly terrifying—is the sort of person who might fall under his sway.

And while you might chalk up the late-season reversal—in which she becomes the dominant player in their pair, in which the full grotesquerie of their codependency is revealed, in which we see how her status as an idol allows her to abuse the abuser—to that very lack of magnetism (turns out pop stars were the real cult leaders all along, don'tcha know), it doesn't change the fact that the pairing fundamentally breaks the willing suspension of disbelief in the early going.

The final two episodes of The Idol are borderline great: There's something darkly alluring about watching Jos turn the tables on Tedros even as Tedros manipulates the Hollywood press to get Jos's movie star ex-boyfriend falsely accused of sexual assault, and the interactions between Finkelstein, Chaim, and Nikki in the final episode are laugh-out-loud funny. One can't help but wish there had been a slightly less bumpy path to getting there, however.

Sonny Bunch is culture editor of the Bulwark, where he hosts the podcasts Across the Movie Aisle and The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, and is a contributing columnist at the Washington Post.

The post REVIEW: 'The Idol' appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The post Happy Independence Day! appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In recent years, left-wingers have directed a sustained attack against America’s Founding Fathers. Elite institutions like the New York Times have claimed that "the beginning of American slavery" was "our true founding," not the Declaration of Independence, and that "one critical reason" the colonists fought for independence was "to protect the institution of slavery." After getting lambasted by serious historians, the Times sneakily edited out its most egregious errors but left these misbegotten essays online. Other lefty ingrates have torn down statues of the Founders, and some vandals in Portland, citing the Times, spray-painted "Genocidal Colonist" on a statue of our first president.

To see a real genocidal colonist, look no further than Yevgeny Prigozhin. A Russian petty criminal who rose to prominence as Putin’s caterer, Prigozhin linked up with a bunch of Russian Nazi enthusiasts and in 2014 founded the Wagner Group. Over the next several years, Wagner’s thugs looted, murdered, raped, and tortured across Africa and the Middle East while serving as one of Putin’s proxies. In 2018, several hundred Wagner fighters and their allies attacked an American unit in Syria, only to discover that you don’t mess with Uncle Sam. Reportedly, Prigozhin was furious that the Russian Air Force stood by as American drones, helicopters, stealth fighters, and heavy bombers annihilated his mercenaries.

Prigozhin’s frustrations with Putin finally boiled over in June. For months, he had complained that the Russian government had given Wagner insufficient support in Ukraine. Among his grievances are that the Russian rubber-stamp parliament is "useless" and that Russian defense officials are sitting "like fat cats" and withholding ammunition and equipment from his convict army. On June 23, Prigozhin declared a "march for justice" and sent a column of Wagner tanks and armored vehicles on its way to Moscow, shooting down several Russian aircrafts before abruptly halting his mutinous uprising the next day and decamping to Belarus under mysterious circumstances.

During the Revolutionary War, General Washington encountered similar problems. The trials of Valley Forge, where American troops left a trail of bloody footprints as they marched barefoot to winter quarters without sufficient blankets or food, are legendary. But the army’s supply problems started years before and continued for years after: In October 1775, Washington was already writing home, "We are obliged to Submit to an almost daily Cannonade without returning a Shott [sic] from our scarcity of [gun] Powder." And throughout the war, Washington and his army had to fend off backbiting mediocrities like Horatio Gates, Thomas Conway, and their congressional supporters.

After eight years of shortchanges and broken promises, Washington’s officers had enough of the Continental Congress and were ready to mutiny. Shortly after he initially took command in 1775, Washington had told his army that it was constituted "in defence of the common Rights and Liberties of mankind," not for personal gain or profit. As rumors of the plot spread throughout the army, he summoned his officers and condemned the plan, saying there was "something so shocking in it, that humanity revolts at the idea." Pausing to find his glasses at one point, he asked, "Gentleman, you must pardon me, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country." His shamefaced subordinates burst into tears; the mutiny was broken.

This is only one of the many times that Washington saved the republic. If he wanted power, his army would have followed him in an uprising against the elected government. He might have become a dictator, or he might have failed and plunged the country into a civil war, but in either case our experiment in self-government would have failed in the prototype stage. Leftwing cranks today denounce Washington as a murderous tyrant, but when he had the chance to become one, he turned away.

Toward the end of the war, King George III asked the American painter Benjamin West if Washington would remain in command of the army or take over the government instead. When West told him that Washington would resign his command and go home quietly, he replied, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." As usual, George III got it wrong. Washington was not just the greatest man of that time, he is the greatest man in the history of the greatest country on earth—because of what he did not do.

Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute's Center for the Future of Liberal Society.

The post Why George Washington Is Still the GOAT appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Just on those terms, Joshua Zeitz’s new book, Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation, is a gamble, since Lincoln never handed out descriptions of what his religion was. He is the only president never to have joined a church, never to have been baptized, never to have taken communion, and attempts to lure affirmations (or denials) from him on religious topics usually fizzed away evasively into qualifications and metaphors.

At the same time, though, Lincoln had more to say publicly about faith, and with greater sophistication, than any other American president. This is enough to persuade Zeitz that Lincoln "underwent a spiritual renewal" during his presidency and that religion became "a commanding force in his personal and public lives." The principal difficulty in making this declaration is that the personal part of the evidence is so scanty. Despite well-meaning claims after his death that Lincoln had been secretly baptized (as in the notorious Maria Vance narrative), or that he kept his religious renovation concealed for political reasons (as his first full biographer, Josiah Gilbert Holland, believed), or that he was on the eve of making some public declaration of Christian faith at the time of his assassination, there is not only no worthwhile substance behind any of these suppositions, but a good deal of testimony otherwise. One of the best proofs Lincoln’s God offers of Lincoln’s religious vitality are the numerous thanksgiving and fast-day proclamations Lincoln issued as president—except, of course, that it’s generally understood that these were not written by Lincoln at all, but by his secretary of state, William Henry Seward.

The case Lincoln’s God wants to make for Lincoln is further compromised by how the reach of the book frequently exceeds its grasp, since Lincoln’s God at the same time wants to be a history of American Protestant evangelicalism in the Civil War years. The argument it formulates runs more-or-less like this: Religion in early America was a feeble affair, burdened with the weight of Puritan Calvinism; however, evangelical revivals tossed aside the encumbrance of Calvinism in favor of a self-centered free-willism that just happened to blend harmoniously with the new republic’s free-will political democracy; Lincoln pushed away his own family’s Calvinism and rallied American evangelicals to become activist supporters of the kind of large-scale modern government needed to win the Civil War. These evangelicals became the heart and soul of a war to end slavery, just as Lincoln became "the nation’s first evangelical president," and they grew from there to become liberal Social Gospellers.

But the moment any real weight is placed on it, this narrative collapses. In the first place, Lincoln’s God displays no real sense of what evangelical means, and certainly seems to have missed entirely the fact that the revivals which are supposed to have transformed a sickly American religion into a boisterous powerhouse of democratic self-assertion were themselves the offspring of Calvinists, both in their 18th- and 19th-century forms. In the second place, it makes no sense to speak of Lincoln as an exemplar of this evangelical democratization when, as Lincoln’s God repeatedly concedes, Lincoln regarded God as an "abstract and unknowable force" and "never shared the personal relationship with God in Christ that most of his coreligionists felt." Even more of a contradiction is the assertion in Lincoln’s God that the God Lincoln is supposed to have recognized was really a renascence of the predestinating Calvinist deity "he had rejected in his youth." If evangelicalism was a movement that shucked off Calvinism in favor of abolitionist democracy, how can Lincoln be its model?

The wiser path for Lincoln’s God to have pursued begins with a concession that Lincoln grew up a rebel against his parents’ Calvinism and against any real form of evangelical piety at all. There is little to show that this changes in Lincoln before his presidency. It was the Civil War and its maddeningly unpredictable course that forced Lincoln to reflect on the purposes of a God who was visiting this calamity on the nation, and which produces the private "Memorandum on the Will of God" and the Second Inaugural. It is true that the Second Inaugural is the closest thing to a sermon ever delivered by an American president. What is also true is that the theology of the Second Inaugural is not an evangelical one; it contains no reference to Christ, and speaks only in terms of judgment, with no concept of redemption.

This is not the only way in which Lincoln’s God often seems out-to-sea with the complexities of 19th-century American religion, not to say of Lincoln himself. The endnotes do not indicate much beyond the use of secondary literature (for instance: in the chapter on "Soldiers’ War," 20 out of the 45 citations are drawn from just three secondary works). And the narrative is content to repeat superficial howlers about the Civil War being a "total war," without any explanation of how one can wage a "total war"—or even a modern war—with infantry weapons limited to single-shot black-powder firearms. Lincoln’s God claims that the war was originally supposed to be waged politely according to a "West Point code." But there was no such "West Point code," which is why Lincoln’s God does not quote from it. Congress moved beyond politeness when it passed two Confiscation Acts to seize rebel property—but Lincoln’s administration did little to enforce them, and what was confiscated under the acts was frequently turned back to its owners through federal court challenges after the war. Above all, Lincoln’s God never addresses the conundrum that bothered so many of the evangelical clergy in 1865: Why was Lincoln in a theater, watching a comedy, on Good Friday, when he was shot?

And then there is the plethora of simple factual errors: that Lincoln had an "older brother" (he had a younger brother who died in infancy), that Elijah Lovejoy was "lynched" by a "proslavery horde" (he was shot to death in an exchange of gunfire), that Lincoln received a "bar license" to practice law (he was licensed by the Illinois state supreme court to practice in all of the state’s courts), that it was Arthur Tappan who found a translator for the Amistad captives by wandering the "wharves of Brooklyn" (it was the Yale linguist Josiah Willard Gibbs), that his business partner in New Salem was William F. Barry (it was Berry), and that "millions of Americans" sang "Rescue the Perishing" or "Blessed Assurance" by "the eve of the Civil War"—which they could not have done because these hymns were not written until 1869 and 1873.

Perhaps the best thing which can be said about Lincoln’s God is that it wants to take Lincoln seriously as a religious thinker. But doing that requires a more complicated set of tools than Lincoln’s God displays.

Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation
by Joshua Zeitz
Viking, 331 pp., $30

Allen C. Guelzo is director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in Princeton University's James Madison Program and author of Robert E. Lee: A Life.

The post The God of Abraham appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Turns out that image is more than symbolic: Sly was taking calls from the president himself on the set of Rambo III.

"One day I got quite angry," Rambo III director Peter Macdonald told The Last Action Heroes author Nick de Semlyen. "I said, ‘Where the fuck is Sly?’ They said, ‘He’s on the phone to the president.’ I thought it was the president of [production company] Carolco, so I said, ‘Well, tell him to put the fucking phone down and come here and talk. I didn’t realize he was talking to Reagan, not Andy Vajna or Mario Kassar.’"

Reagan and Stallone had much to discuss, given that the star had asked the president for Secret Service assistance when he became the target of protests—and death threats—in Europe as the face of a resurgent, newly confident America. It’s that optimism, that confidence, that had catapulted Stallone to stardom at the end of the 1970s as the working class mook made good, Rocky. The shocking success of Rocky, both critically and commercially, suggested America was tired of the downer cinema that had served as a hallmark of the decade prior, an age when flicks like Easy Rider, Papillon, and Nashville could be smashes. Great movies, yes, but they suggested a sense of, well, malaise.

Malaise and weakness were out; confidence and musculature were in. Stallone, jacked as he was, was dwarfed in the latter department by Austrian bodybuilder-cum-movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who racked up huge box office bucks as Conan the Barbarian and as a Terminator and as a commando and as a running man and as the predator (killer). Commando in particular felt like a real turning point in the action movies of the 1980s, one that added a sort of self-aware humor, Arnold whipping out one-liners like Henny Youngman zinging random audience members.

"Watching him in Commando was like witnessing some kind of prehistoric beast unleashed," writes de Semlyen. "His acts of violence, free of any bothersome emotion or consequence, yielded a cathartic secondhand high." That contact high will be seconded by anyone reduced to giggling hysterics by Arnold’s Austrian intonation of "Let off some steam, Bennett" after impaling a villain with a length of pipe, or the deadpan delivery of "don’t disturb my friend, he’s dead tired" after having covered up a corpse with a blanket on an airplane.

Schwarzenegger and Stallone were indisputably the top dogs of the era, at least until Bruce Willis showed up with Die Hard toward the end of the 1980s, and their feuding was legendary; de Semlyen’s book opens with them bickering over who will be the last, and thus most important, to enter a blockbuster Cannes party thrown by Carolco in 1990. The two fought over roles (Schwarzenegger used this to his advantage, tricking Stallone into making the legendary bomb Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) and public acclaim, only coming together when there was money to be made in the form of Planet Hollywood (and, later, The Expendables).

As interesting as these heavenly bodies were the smaller satellites in orbit around them. Some, like Dolph Lundgren, became stars in their own right after starring opposite the bigger guns. Others, like Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Steven Seagal, found their way into action stardom by dint of their own martial arts prowess, becoming human special effects able to perform all manner of action on the big screen.

If I have a complaint about The Last Action Heroes, it’s that at 333 pages (288 pages before the index) it’s stretched too thin. There’s arguably a book to be written about each of these guys. Lundgren’s a literal genius, at least as measured by IQ; it took Chan the better part of a decade to break through in the United States; and Van Damme comes off as the most personable of all of them, in his own weird way, having lived on the streets of Los Angeles after abandoning his wife in Europe to live the American dream, eventually falling in with Norris and his camp.

The star who comes off the worst in the book is Seagal, a braggart who, famously (and possibly apocryphally), wasn’t able to back up his big talk when confronted by a stuntman tired of his yapping. Given what we know of the film and its disastrous reception now, you can’t help but smirk at Seagal’s clueless braggadocio at the premiere of On Deadly Ground: "I had many of the greatest directors on earth come to my premiere. … And I wasn’t really too nervous about it, what they’d think about it, because I was proud of my work." Michael Caine’s comment was pithier, in a backhanded sort of way: "I really didn’t think it would be anywhere near this good."

Norris, on the other hand, comes off the best: steadfastly decent and hardworking; willing to take a chance on a young man with talent like Van Damme; even turning the other cheek, Christlike, when confronted by a drunk in a bar who didn’t have any idea who Norris was when he picked a fight with Walker, Texas Ranger himself.

But it’s the big screen work that lives on, and here too Norris is a legend of sorts. In Romania. Where, according to screenwriter James Bruner, the movie Invasion USA was "an underground sensation." Bootleg copies of the film were passed around, samizdat-style, inspiring the rebels tired of Ceausescu to storm the palace and string him up.

"They use the poster, to this day, in Romania when they protest against the government," Bruner told de Semlyen. "Ultimately, action movies are about freedom. Overcoming evil, in whatever form it may be. To find out that was one of the inspirations for them to become free, it was really nice. Never in a million years would I have expected it."

One imagines Ronnie might have seen it coming.

The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage
by Nick de Semlyen
Crown, 333 pp., $28.99

Sonny Bunch is culture editor of the Bulwark, where he hosts the podcasts Across the Movie Aisle and The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, and is a contributing columnist at the Washington Post.

The post Get to the Chopper! appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Why wouldn't she? Liberal donors seem eager to keep giving her tens of millions of dollars to lose elections while enriching herself and her friends. There are few things Abrams's core supporters (rich white liberals) love more than hearing a black woman complain about racism and so-called voter suppression.

Until then, Abrams must content herself with raising money for her shady nonprofits, working for a dark money activist group lobbying to ban gan stoves, and going on MSNBC to talk about her new crime novel.

Rogue Justice: A Thriller is the second installment in a series starring the thoroughly obnoxious and improbable protagonist Avery Keene. The first installment, While Justice Sleeps: A Thriller, topped the New York Times bestseller list upon its release in May 2021. Several weeks earlier, Abrams helped engineer a corporate boycott of her own state that prompted Major League Baseball to move its All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver after Georgia enacted an election reform bill critics denounced as "voter suppression." NBCUniversal, the same company that paid Chelsea Clinton $600,000 a year for "journalism," immediately bought the television rights.

Your humble reviewer quickly realized that reading While Justice Sleeps would give him a better sense of whatever the hell is going on in Rogue Justice. For instance: How (and why) did the president of the United States commit "treason, murder, and genocide," and why is he still in office? In any event, it wasn't worth it. Abrams the politician is a cartoonishly corrupt charlatan. Abrams the author is a massive nerd with a fondness for bureaucratic acronyms and tedious exposition that made your humble reviewer long for the resplendent prose stylings of former FBI director James Comey.

Some liberal politicians and their supporters are easily caricatured as overly credentialed homework lovers who think all the world's problems could be solved through diligent research and expert analysis. Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren come to mind. Avery Keene is a caricature of this caricature. The preternatural genius started making money in middle school by "completing homework for overprivileged, lazy kids." She overcame her father's death and mother's addiction to graduate from Spelman College and Yale Law. (Abrams's alma maters, natch.)

In Rogue Justice, Avery is a 28-year-old Supreme Court clerk who excels at "copious and obnoxiously thorough research." Puzzles are her "happy place." She uses her "once-in-a-generation mind" and "eidetic memory" to uncover international criminal conspiracies and occasionally to win huge sums at blackjack that are "duly reported on her taxes." Avery is a notorious figure now, having exposed the genocidal traitor, President Brandon Stokes, who is obviously a Republican. Nevertheless, she is concerned that her heroic exploits have ruined her career prospects. (Some context: Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a bureaucrat no one had heard of until he testified against former president Donald Trump, was a guest on practically every talk show and starred in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.)

The hero is called into action once again when a federal court clerk in South Dakota stumbles upon a deadly conspiracy and (naturally) seeks out Keene, whom he has never met, for advice. He is gunned down on the streets of Washington, D.C., moments later. Homework assignment in hand, Avery embarks on a thrilling campaign of "copious and obnoxiously thorough research" to uncover the global conspiracy and the mastermind behind it. Indeed, most of the book's plot unfolds via Avery explaining her findings to various groups of supporting characters, from her "military-trained security expert" boyfriend to the entire U.S. intelligence community.

Avery must utilize her genius brain to figure out how FISC, FERC, NERC, OLEC, ERCOT, MISO, and the Feres Doctrine fit together in a mysterious scheme to wreak havoc on the United States for motives that remain unclear. The (confoundingly improbable) answer raises a number of annoying questions, such as, "WTF?" and "What if the villain is actually good (despite murdering innocent people), and the real bad guys are the racist Republicans?"

There's a #MeToo angle, obviously. Cryptocurrency makes an appearance, as does an ex-Mossad assassin Avery manages to subdue after watching some YouTube videos about judo locks and choke-hold escapes. She really is amazing. While conducting her research to save the world, Avery also finds the time to finish an actual homework assignment on ransomware for the chief justice of the Supreme Court and checks in on a friend she rescued from the throes of addiction.

Rogue Justice is a must-read for anyone interested in detailed explanations of the U.S. power grid and surveillance court system. Readers who enjoy characters who act "assiduously" and speak "sardonically" will be similarly thrilled. Observers of Stacey Abrams will be intrigued by the author's voluminous knowledge of tax havens and non-extradition countries. The book depicts a political world in which everyone is obsessed with money and luxury. Bribes are offered and accepted, earmarks deployed to rig elections, favors called in to get dumb relatives into exclusive universities, jealousy vented about former colleagues making higher salaries. Notwithstanding the impeccable protagonist, Rogue Justice is awash with shameless grifters trying to move up in the world and make their bag.

Write what you know.

Rogue Justice: A Thriller
by Stacey Abrams
Doubleday, 368 pp., $29

The post Write What You Know: Tryhards, Grifters, Frauds Star in Stacey Abrams's Crime Novel appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

If the finished product is something Mangold thinks is an "adrenaline blast," then he must be the most depressed person on earth. The experience of seeing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is more like listening to someone speaking in a monotone describing a not-very-memorable trailer at very great length than it is watching one. Which is weird, because on paper, Mangold was a good choice to take over from Spielberg. He's often a very good director whose best pictures, Logan and Ford v Ferrari, are kinetic and emotionally resonant. And to be fair, Dial of Destiny is beautifully made for the most part. Most important, I guess, Harrison Ford delivers the goods not only as his own 80-year-old self but also as a "de-aged" Harrison made to look as though he's 40 and then again as though he's 60. It's the best use of that special-effects technology yet.

But the overall picture is just incredibly boring. There's a fight on top of a train, and a chase through a parade that ends with a horse riding down a subway tunnel, and a shipwreck with eels, and a tuk-tuk barreling through Tangier, and even with all that strenuous effort to make the action exhilarating, this is Indiana Jones Watches the Paint Dry.

Worse still is the plot. Here, the relic everyone is chasing is a clock-like thing made by the mathematician Archimedes in the third century B.C. with time-travel properties. The villain is a Nazi scientist who (like Wernher von Braun) helps the United States get to the moon. This guy who is otherwise a professor at the University of Alabama has several henchmen working for him. Who's paying them on a professor's salary? Also, there's an African-American CIA agent who is somehow supposed to be watching him or helping him as he chases Archimedes' dial but mostly just looks angry as the henchmen keep shooting people.

Eventually this all leads to a mind-bogglingly deranged third act—and I don't mean this in a "wow, this went sideways unexpectedly and you gotta see this thing to believe it" way. I mean it in a "they spent $295 million and this is the twist they came up with?" way. I know the words "Indiana Jones" must have seemed like IP catnip to the pooh-bahs at Disney when they decided to make a fifth movie back in the mid-teens, and that it took many iterations and false starts to get to the point where they could actually start making it. But some sane person should have stepped in at the 11th hour and said, "Oh, no, I'm sorry, we're not risking 300 million simoleons on this nonsense."

Robert Iger, who returned as Disney's chief at the age of 71 following a brief retirement after the most successful run as an entertainment CEO in history, is not having a Steve Jobs second go-round triumph in his restoration era. Everything is going wrong for Iger right now. His Pixar movie tanked earlier this month, and this one is going to tank too. He's more like Winston Churchill returning to 10 Downing Street in 1951 and bringing his world-changing career to a mediocre end.

Trump fans, take note.

The post REVIEW: 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

• Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Elizabeth Warren made the list, but Donald Trump did not.

What it means: Trump is the least racist, most anti-slavery president of the United States, according to the findings of the Reuters investigation.

• "President Joe Biden and every living former U.S. president—except Donald Trump—are direct descendants of slaveholders," the analysis found. "Trump's ancestors came to America after slavery was abolished."

•  Obama, the first mixed-race president in American history, is a descendant of slave owners on his white mother's side.

Why it matters: Being a slave owner is very racist. Obama and other privileged descendants of slave owners have benefited from the suffering and exploitation of slaves. In the interest of fairness, perhaps they should pay reparations to Trump's family and others who patiently waited for the United States to abolish slavery before immigrating.

Bottom line: Dumb investigations often yield dumb results. Nevertheless, we must respect the science.

The post Donald Trump Is Least Racist Living President, Historical Analysis Finds appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In an intriguing passage, Buruma describes the use, in some formerly occupied countries, to which "collaborators" were put in postwar mythmaking: "They were the fallen ones, the symbols of depravity, whose crimes served to highlight the glowing virtuousness of the plucky majority." It was the reaction against that mythmaking (together with unease over anti-Semitism) that allowed Friedrich Weinreb (1910-88), by some distance the most reprehensible of the three people on whom Buruma focuses, to achieve, for a while, a partial rehabilitation, however unmerited.

Buruma’s taxonomy is far from complete (how could it be otherwise?). Even allowing for that, it’s hard to see where one of his trio, Felix Kersten (1898-1960), fits in. Kersten was a Baltic German with a Finnish passport and not, in the most common Second World War usage, someone who had "collaborated." Finland had been the victim of Soviet aggression in 1939-40 and entered the war as a co-belligerent of the Germans when they attacked the USSR. It continued in that role until almost the end of the period when Kersten was acting as Himmler’s masseur and, in many respects, confidant, his "magic Buddha." Kersten thus didn’t betray his country (as Buruma accepts). As a result, other than in a more general sense of the word, it’s hard to agree with Buruma’s assessment that he was "certainly a collaborator."

Buruma’s loose use of that term is consistent with the this book being something other than a conventional history of wartime collaboration. A clue lies in the first part of the book’s subtitle: Three Stories of Deception and Survival. Kersten survived. Not only that, he flourished—the revolting company he kept served him well. His deceptions, however, mainly involved cleaning up his résumé to a point where he could "survive" in the postwar years. To a degree, I suspect, Buruma included Kersten because his story is so extraordinary, and his relationship with the truth so complex that he made a suitable companion for Weinreb and the third of his "leading figures," Kawashima Yoshiko (1907-48).

Much of Buruma’s interest in Weinreb, Yoshiko, and Kersten (beyond the sheer strangeness of their biographies) arises out of, as he sees it, the way they reinvented themselves "in a time of war, persecution, and mass murder" and, relatedly, the way they played games with the truth, at a sometimes terrible cost. But in each case, the reinvention had begun before the war years. Take Beijing-born Kawashima Yoshiko, a cross-dressing Manchu princess (tellingly, she is usually remembered by her Japanese name) whose sense of her nationality was as fluid as her sexual identity. Her transformation began when, at the age of six or seven, she was given over by her father to be adopted by a Japanese ultranationalist he had come to befriend through political intrigues in China. Fatally, her new father (and later, probably, rapist) never completed the paperwork that would have made her a Japanese citizen.

Kersten’s ascent began when, already a qualified masseur, he arrived in the Weimar Republic, where he received further training from two prominent German doctors and, more importantly, a Dr. Ko from China. Ko (supposedly) taught him arcane (and supposedly) Tibetan and Chinese healing techniques well geared to cater to the fashionable fascination with the occult and the "exotic" that was shared by some who would later rise high in the Third Reich. Neither Buruma nor anyone else has been able to find any trace of Dr. Ko, but, adds Buruma cautiously, "this doesn’t necessarily mean that he was an invention, just that his presence remains hard to pin down." Kersten’s apparently remarkable talents as a masseur eventually smoothed his way into high society. This included an industrialist who asked if he would treat a "special friend," who suffered from chronic stomach cramps, namely Heinrich Himmler. In time, the Reichsführer-SS calculating that his masseur might make a useful spy, encouraged Kersten to work on other top Nazis. After all, who doesn’t confide in his masseur?

Friedrich Weinreb’s family, originally Jews from Austro-Hungarian Lemberg (now Lviv) in Galicia had moved to Scheveningen in the Netherlands during the First World War. As Weinreb grew into manhood, so did his feeling that he was cut from a different (and better) cloth than most people. This and the need to protect both himself and his family go a long way to explain the astonishingly elaborate sequence of deceptions on which he embarked during the German occupation of Holland, including selling Jews places on lists that allegedly guaranteed a seat on trains that would take them to safety. There were no trains, but the promise was backed up by a rigmarole that included medical "examinations" (cursory for men but more thorough for some unfortunate women). Out of the roughly 4,000 Jews on Weinreb’s lists only "a handful," notes Buruma, survived the war. Maybe Weinreb helped some Jews go underground, but at some point (it’s not clear when), he began to betray many more.

In trying to establish the truth about his subjects, Buruma received only limited help from their own accounts. These, he relates, were always written "with a particular purpose in mind: to embellish their biographies with exotic tales of adventure, or with demonstrations of great courage and gallant acts of resistance." Early biographers (or their approximate equivalents), whatever their motives, only deepen the murk.  Thus the claim in Yoshiko’s memoir that, braving Chinese machine gun fire, she had driven the last emperor of China (and future emperor of Manchukuo—Japanese-controlled Manchuria)—at breakneck speed to the Japanese steamboat that was waiting for him is made up. It was, in fact, borrowed with necessary changes from a fictionalized version of her life, The Beauty in Men’s Clothes, that she had asked one of her lovers, a Japanese "boulevardier and connoisseur of Chinese low life" to write. Over the years, Yoshiko was indeed a spy (even if details of that remain, to use Buruma’s word, "fuzzy"), a Japanese envoy, a Japanese propagandist, and a supposedly heroic military commander (there is no evidence that her unit saw action). But the wildly exaggerated account of her exploits that she, her accomplices, her handlers, and Japanese media created eventually led to her doom.

Kersten’s memoirs, by contrast, played no small part in his painstaking attempts to reengineer his reputation after the war, something only underlined by the way its American, Swedish, German, and Dutch versions all differ in emphasis, and in the case of the Swedish version, Buruma explains, gives "conflicting accounts on various matters." The Dutch edition contains Kersten’s claim that he persuaded Himmler "not to carry out a plan to deport the entire Dutch population to Poland," a claim that doesn’t appear in the German version and is nonsense. Nor, almost certainly, did Kersten persuade Himmler to "spare" Finland’s Jews (the Finns took that decision of their own volition) or refrain from blowing up The Hague. On the other hand, he helped save the lives of some Swedish businessmen arrested in Warsaw, who had smuggled out information about the horrors underway in Poland. He also played an important role (how important is disputed) in the evacuation of thousands of prisoners from concentration camps, including some Jews, to Sweden in the dying days of the war. While Kersten undoubtedly had an eye on his postwar future in doing so, what he did was not without risk and, maintains Buruma, "we should not discount the possibility that [he] … was also moved by a sliver of human decency."

Weinreb’s account (which ran over a thousand pages), was, according to Buruma, "factually unreliable but does reveal something of his disposition." Greed and the chance of sexual exploitation helped inspire his schemes, but so too did being thought of as a fixer, a man who got things done. Whether he deceived himself, as Buruma suggests was also the case with Yoshiko and Kersten, seems unlikely. Kersten appears to have had all too keen a grasp of reality, and while Weinreb may have seen his success as a trickster (which, for a while, fooled the Germans too) as evidence of his superior talents, I doubt he conned himself. In due course, he saw the game was up and, with his wife and children, went underground. They survived.

Yoshiko, however, may have been caught up in fantasies such as being the "Manchu Joan of Arc." But the fantasies that had been spun about her (whether with her approval or not), including The Beauty in Men’s Clothes, were used as evidence against her at her trial, as a Chinese citizen, for treason. She was executed in Beijing and is buried in Japan, her identity jumping borders, even in death.

The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II

by Ian Buruma

Penguin Press, 320 pp., $30

Andrew Stuttaford is the editor of National Review’s Capital Matters.

The post Occupational Hazards appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

According to Mac Donald, disparate impact—in which any negative or disproportionate outcome impacting black Americans is declared to be a "tool of white supremacy"—has been deliberately developed and leveraged as a cultural tool, targeting "the very fundamentals of a fair society."

Today, she argues, meritocracy, fealty to the rule of law, and even respect for our civilizational inheritance stand in the way of achieving so-called racial justice.

Mac Donald describes 2020 as a potentially "pivotal moment in American history," accelerating the notion that racism defines America. This idea, she believes, is tearing the country apart, with any protest rejected by the same "just believe" mandate used by the #MeToo movement.

Not only that, any roadblock to the achievement of "exact racial proportionality"—with the key to disparate impact being the presumption of racial proportionality with no regard for factors such as behavior and ability—is itself evidence of this same systemic racism.

In When Race Trumps Merit, Mac Donald explores three fundamental areas of American life to support her hypothesis that the country is engaging in a fit of "cultural self-cancellation" that is impoverishing the imagination, stunting the capacity for wonder and joy, and stripping the future of everything that gives human life meaning: beauty, sublimity, and wit.

The first two chapters are dedicated to science and medicine, which were hit "like an earthquake" by the "post-George Floyd racial reckoning" unleashed in 2020.

Mac Donald provides the reader with a deep dive into the racialized nature of today’s scientific community, arguing that American elites have simply moved on from failing to close the academic skills gap by deciding to "break up the objective yardsticks that measure it," including dismantling the system of knowledge underpinning modern medicine. "The result," says Mac Donald, "will be a declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress."

Mac Donald then moves on from the world of science and explores the abstract world of culture. Across 10 chapters she explores the pursuit of racial proportionality across classical music, opera, and art.

The problem with this section—compared with the former and latter sections—is that the bulk of the book is dedicated to subjective expressions of art sandwiched on either side by the comparatively objective areas of science and crime. While the critiques of certain artists under the "rise of mediocrity" might highlight the breadth of the blind pursuit of racial proportionality and the erasure of Western culture, it must be said that by placing such significance upon subjective areas of human expression—rather than objective fields of pure meritocracy—Mac Donald is in danger of diluting the strength of her overarching argument.

The third and final section is an emotionally stunning investigation of the effect of disparate impact analysis on the American criminal-justice system, "where every disparity in arrest or incarceration rates is now attributed to racism."

Presenting the decline of New York City into a haven for criminal behavior as an example, Mac Donald argues that two decades of successful efforts to combat crime have been voluntarily cast aside, with the spread of violence and predation erupting as a predictable result.

"Acknowledging the vastly higher black crime rate is taboo," Mac Donald points out, with Democrats preferring to blame the supposed systemic racism of law enforcement or—if necessary—focus on the insidious (and often imagined) presumption of white supremacy.

Under "anti-racism orthodoxy," if we are unable to discuss the root causes of higher black crime—"above all, family breakdown," Mac Donald adds—then the only way we can achieve racial proportionality regarding crime is to stop the penalization of criminal behavior.

As a result, "elite ‘anti-racists’ absolve blacks from responsibility for their actions," Mac Donald writes. "This patronizing attitude is today’s real racism."

Providing the reader with an almost overwhelming trove of pure data—including a moving account of forgotten black victims of gang violence deemed unimportant by the mainstream media and the Democratic Party—Mac Donald proves that criminal violence is the main problem afflicting urban black communities, and not police shootings.

Analyzing the areas of science, the arts, and criminal justice, When Race Trumps Merit is not only an enthralling account of the reality of so-called anti-racism efforts in the United States, but a resolute warning of the dangers of unfettered disparate impact analysis.

"Western civilization contains too much beauty and grandeur, too much achievement, and too much innovation—from advances in the sciences to the blessings of republican self-government—to be lost without a fight," Mac Donald concludes. "It will be lost, however, if disparate impact continues to be our measure of injustice."

When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives
by Heather Mac Donald
DW Books, 320 pp., $28.99

Ian Haworth is a writer, speaker, and former Big Tech insider. He also hosts "Off Limits with Ian Haworth

The post Prepare for Disparate Impact appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Yet just as the Dude abides, the Dan endures. In fact, Alex Pappademas argues in Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan that we’re in the midst of a Danaissance. Pappademas, whose "liner notes" (as the title page calls them) are accompanied by vivid paintings by Joan LeMay, contends that because younger Americans "grew up … in an age when a grasp of ontological slipperiness became a prerequisite for decoding pop culture," they are primed for the group’s "unreliable narrators and unlikable protagonists." Part of the band’s own slipperiness is its ability to get you singing along to lyrics about unsettling topics and people. The band, Pappademas says, shows "how much you can get away with if you serve up socially unacceptable ideas on a platter shined to perfection by top-drawer session dudes."

Steely Dan’s core duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen began making music together as students at Bard College in the 1960s. They went on to Manhattan’s legendary Brill Building to write songs for other artists before moving to Los Angeles to record their first album as Steely Dan, Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972). Pappademas suggests their debut single, "Do It Again," set the course the band would follow for the rest of its career, "sing[ing] about people who can’t help driving headlong toward one form of destruction or another."

Impatient with touring and uninterested in working with a consistent lineup, Becker and Fagen became perfectionists who’d audition a score of session musicians just for a guitar solo. (A handful of supporting members went on to have impressive careers of their own: guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter and singer Michael McDonald with the Doobie Brothers, drummer Jeff Porcaro with Toto.) Their sound became more refined or, for critics, too fussy and sterile. "Sounds like it was recorded in a hospital ward," wrote one wag. They broke up after releasing their seventh album, Gaucho (1980), resumed touring in 1993, and then won the Grammy for Record of the Year when they returned to the studio for Two Against Nature in 2000. That album’s first single, "Cousin Dupree," is classic Dan: a bouncy account of a loser’s lust for his relative. Against nature, indeed. They released their last album in 2003 but continue to tour, even though Becker died in 2017.

Quantum Criminals is less a biography than a series of idiosyncratic essays about the group’s members and the characters from their songs. Pappademas reacquaints us with Peg, Deacon Blues, Kid Charlemagne, and creepy Dupree, plus guest stars like the crying squonk from "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," White House Plumber G. Gordon Liddy, the model whose profile graces the cover of Aja, and the sex toy from William S. Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch that inspired the band’s name. LeMay’s paintings complement the writing with bold depictions of the often seedy and discomfiting speakers and subjects. Some of these portraits beg to be hung above the orange shag carpet of a conversation pit.

Pappademas’s style is lively and allusive, and his analysis is consistently both surprising and convincing. He has a knack for identifying threads that run through the band’s work and the themes of particular albums. "Most of the characters in the songs of Steely Dan’s ’70s albums," he writes, "are either longing for some vanished past or too busy losing themselves in drugs or crackpot spirituality or grasping sexual neediness to even communicate with each other, much less get it together to try to change the world." Similarly, Pappademas elsewhere refers to "the tension between [Becker and Fagen’s] fascination with contemporary perversion and violence and their conservative yearning for an idealized past," which is indeed an underrated aspect of the band’s creative output. They’re the kinky Kinks, yearning not for little shops and china cups but teenage girls who remember Aretha Franklin.

Of one of the band’s most unsettling songs, "Everyone’s Gone to the Movies," Pappademas writes that it "spin[s] the unspeakable into transgressive comedy" even as it demands "us to formulate an ethical response to what we’re hearing." In short, the moral dynamics of these songs are sometimes as sophisticated as the music. But the band’s irony meter wasn’t always well calibrated. There’s something cruel about releasing a single ("Time Out of Mind") praising the pleasures of heroin barely a year after Becker’s girlfriend died of a drug overdose in his apartment.

Pappademas traces the band’s influences—jazz musicians, novelists, peers—as well as admirers and spiritual heirs like Minutemen, Rickie Lee Jones, LCD Soundsystem, The Hold Steady, and Eminem. A remarkable aspect of the band’s influence is how many artists sampled their catalogue, including De La Soul, Joe Public, Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz, MF Doom, Super Furry Animals, and Kanye. Pappademas’s notes on this element of the band’s legacy—including how merciless the band could be with sampling deals—are especially good.

Although the book is expansive, there are some notable omissions. I would have loved an essay about "Only A Fool Would Say That," the anti-utopian song from 1972, perhaps accompanied by a painting of John Lennon, who subjected us to "Imagine" the previous year. And where in the world is "Barrytown"? Does Pappademas hear this number, which bears the name of a place near Becker and Fagen’s college, as a snarky put-down of the speaker’s hipster neighbors, or is it a denunciation of the speaker’s provincialism? He could have had fun with the song’s remarkable afterlife, too. Roddy Doyle set a trilogy of novels in a section of Dublin he called Barrytown, and Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity features a band with the same name. The 2000 film adaptation of that novel omitted the reference, but another 2000 film, Me, Myself, and Irene, featured popular artists covering Steely Dan songs—including "Barrytown."

As for Pappademas’s claim that Steely Dan’s point of view is especially suited for Zoomers and Millennials, older fans will hear history’s rhyme. In an essay for the band’s 1993 boxed set, Chris Willman proposed that Steely Dan deserved "the title of ‘Band of the ’90s,’ … so fluently does their oeuvre fit the temper of the times." Fagen and Becker’s "brilliantly veiled sarcasm and revolutionary lack of sentimentality," Willman wrote, "anticipat[ed] the contemporary irony craze." Pappademas seems to hint as much when he identifies Larry David as torch-bearer of the "Dan-like spirit of cultural dyspepsia and deliberate anti-charisma." (It’s a shame he doesn’t point out that the subject of another essay, the actress Jill St. John, appeared in "The Yada-Yada" episode of Seinfeld.)

Whether you count the current Danaissance as something entirely new or another turn in a recurring cycle, and even if you’re among those who find the band too weird or jazzy, it’s undeniable the Dan endures. Quantum Criminals is an entertaining and insightful account of why.

Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan
by Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay
University of Texas Press, 280 pp., $35

Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The post Any Major Dude Will Tell You Steely Dan Rocks (in a Creepy, Jazzy Kind of Way) appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

This remarkable sentence, uttered by a panicked press aide after his boss, the seven-fingered Sen. Jon Tester (D., Mont.), relieved himself in an organic pea field during an interview with Washington Post journalist Ben Terris, hardly stands out among the array of mind-boggling details recounted in Terris's new book, The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind.

Tester's rogue member is merely an aside in this collection of profiles highlighting the unelected power players who survived, thrived, and failed in national politics since Donald Trump annihilated the status quo, violating precious "norms" left and right. Washington may have "felt different" during the Trump presidency, Terris writes, but The Swamp proved as resilient as ever. Rather than being drained as promised, it simply "filled up with new creatures." And, boy, are they something to behold. The Big Break is not for the faint of heart or stomach.

The book opens in December 2021. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, the 38-year-old granddaughter of billionaire oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, is throwing a holiday party at her $2.2 million Victorian mansion in a trendy Washington neighborhood. Her beloved Maltipoo, named after Malcolm X, roams the living room floor scrounging for crumbs. Ryan Grim, editor of The Intercept, is wearing a Harriet Tubman T-shirt and chatting with the half-brother of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The host is trying to gin up support for Mandela Barnes, the left-wing Wisconsin Senate candidate she met at a pool party in Miami around the same time he accused the her grandfather's industry of "destroying the world." He was "riding in one of those inflatable unicorns."

This is normal.

Before moving to D.C., Hunt-Hendrix summered in the West Bank while getting her Ph.D. in religion, ethics, and politics at Princeton under Cornell West. Now she's a professional progressive activist and fundraiser who primarily backs candidates who pledge to abolish the fossil fuel industry. She worries that people are only interested in her because of her family's money, which they obviously are. She's considering adopting a child or writing a memoir about her love life. "I'm pretty anti-elite," the oil heiress tells Terris while sipping a matcha latte.

Hunt-Hendrix is actually one of the more sympathetic characters in the book. That's a low bar, especially when the competition is Sean McElwee, the Democratic messaging guru who cofounded the polling firm and advocacy group Data for Progress. (George Soros is a major donor.) He tells Terris he was "not particularly emotional" about breaking up with his girlfriend of seven years and vows to "have a hot boy summer" with fellow data nerd David Shor. The same girlfriend recalls that while lying in bed with McElwee several weeks into their relationship, he forced her to listen to the eulogy Ted Kennedy gave at his brother Robert Kennedy's funeral in 1968.

Journalists and other liberals hate McElwee now that he's been exposed for gambling on elections—in some cases betting against the Democratic candidates he was also advising—and "consulting" for the brother of crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. But Terris, who followed McElwee from the height of his power all the way through the "I can't comment on advice of counsel" phase of his downfall, notes that McElwee "could get away with this kind of stuff because Democrats in Washington believed that he was a force for good." That included many "bigwig journalists" with whom he chatted regularly on a group Slack channel, and who would thoughtfully decline to quote him in stories when he said something "offensive."

McElwee is hardly the first obnoxious character given a pass by Democrats and media elites for being a political ally. In fact, the pollster's demise had less to do with the obnoxious behavior than it did with the fact that his midterm polling was so inaccurate. The liberal ruling class has been willing to overlook far worse from people they consider allies—fraudsters such as Bankman-Fried and Carlos Watson, or criminal monsters such as Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. Yet the Trump era was supposed to have proved that conservatives were uniquely predisposed to excuse bad behavior.

The Republican-aligned characters aren't especially sympathetic either. Those profiled in the book each embody a certain archetype of a creature struggling to navigate The Swamp since 2016: Matt Schlapp, the lobbyist and CPAC chairman (and broccoliniphobe) who went all in on Trump after the Access Hollywood tape and never looked back, even (or especially) after he was accused of having "pummeled" the "junk" of a Herschel Walker campaign staffer. Ian Walters, the CPAC communications director who fell out with Schlapp and the Republican Party over their embrace of Trump and obsession with "fighting." (Not to mention the fact that Schlapp once mused of Walter's recently deceased adopted father: "Wherever [he] is, he's got access to really know what the real vote counts were, what really happened [in the 2020 election].")

Robert Stryk is by far the most colorful. A high school expellee, college dropout, and failed mayoral candidate, Stryk almost accidentally stumbled into a lucrative career as a lobbyist connecting (mostly unsavory) foreign governments to the Trump administration. He "appreciated the chance to be taken seriously" in Washington, but by the end of the book, Stryk has accused the author of being a child predator and lamented the Biden administration's refusal to grant him permission to lobby for Russian ally Belarus after the war in Ukraine broke out. A hero he is not, but that doesn't mean one can't take some pleasure in the angst people like him caused ruling-class liberals who couldn't stand the fact that such an uncredentialed individual could succeed in The Swamp without their permission.

To his credit, Terris is eminently fair to all his subjects, even if they don't necessarily deserve it. That's a good thing. He refrains from the sort of editorializing some liberal media types insist is necessary when writing about conservatives in particular—so-called enemies of democracy. His own paper—the one that prevents democracy from dying in darkness—published a review of The Big Break that argues the book "suffers to an extent" from the author's "larger commendable commitment to showing and not telling" and trusting readers to draw their own conclusions. (Imagine that!) Liberal outlets criticized Terris in 2015 because his profile of Benny Johnson, the ex-BuzzFeed blogger accused of plagiarism, wasn't overtly mean enough.

Most Americans have no idea how politics works in Washington beyond a vague sense that everything is terrible and corrupt. Good for them. Many would be horrified to learn just how petty and dumb things are in The Swamp. That's why anyone eager to learn anything about the federal government would be better off watching Veep than The West Wing, which no doubt inspired scores of Millennial liberals to go into politics and try to "change the world." Presumably, most of them are lobbyists by now. If books are more your style, and you would like a taste of how "normal" Washington really works these days, The Big Break is a good place to start.

The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind
by Ben Terris
Twelve, 352 pp., $30

The post Swamp Freaks: Bizarre Adventures in a Grifter's Paradise appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

And then big-screen comedy just seemed to die. Everybody has a favorite theory about why, but all explanations come back to the fact that gender and identity politics have made it all but impossible for anything to get through the development grinder in Hollywood without being chewed up into agreeable and inoffensive pablum or rejected outright because the risk of reputational damage from political incorrectness is just too great. As a result, Sandler has been churning out massive Netflix hits like clockwork, Rogen is trying out character acting in films like The Fablemans and the upcoming Dumb Money, and Carell has taken his talents to multiple streaming series.

Which is why the release of No Hard Feelings is a surprisingly significant cultural moment. It’s the first comedy of its kind in a long time, a deliberately raunchy R-rated story about a young woman in desperate financial trouble who becomes part of a desperate scheme concocted by rich helicopter parents to make a man out of their incredibly awkward on-the-verge-of-freshman-year-at-Princeton son. Farcical hijinks ensue. With a stupendous central performance by Jennifer Lawrence as a reckless party girl/bartender/Uber driver who’s past 30 and fast running out of options, No Hard Feelings is an often hilarious and surprisingly soulful movie. Co-writer and director Gene Stupnitsky works hard to soften the malice and ugliness emanating from the movie’s plot and instead provide a sweet and winsome sheen to the proceedings. His deep good will toward his characters keeps No Hard Feelings from becoming gasp-inducingly outrageous in the manner of There’s Something About Mary. The question is whether that’s a good thing when it comes to the box office, because its mildness means No Hard Feelings doesn’t launch you out of the theater on a jangly high. Nor does it provide a satisfying love-story conclusion. Instead, No Hard Feelings is a coming-of-age story in which two immature people unexpectedly learn how to grow up from each other.

Make no mistake, a lot is riding on No Hard Feelings. If it triumphs, that will be a signal that there is an audience for sex and mistaken-identity farces again, the way there was for Wedding Crashers and The Hangover trilogy in living memory. And not only that there’s an audience, but that people have been craving the opportunity to have a good life Hollywood has denied them since it went into Trumpocalypse Mode in 2016 and decided that nothing in American life was funny any longer, that we were all going to die, and that the only thing in Hollywood anyone could agree on was that it would be very bad if the Infinity Stones ended up in Thanos’s gauntlet.

I don’t know when I’ve rooted for a movie more. I really liked it but even if I hadn’t, I would be as desperate as Jennifer Lawrence’s character is for it to make lots of money. Enough with the bad, weak, flavorless, cowardly, pointless comedies of the past few years—every one of which has only deepened the slough of despond into which comedy-loving audiences have fallen because they’ve been told they’re not supposed to find things funny that don’t comport with the commissariat’s directives. No Hard Feelings walks a tricky tightrope, and it gets across the correctness chasm with great creative success. May it be rewarded for its labors.

The post REVIEW: No Hard Feelings appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

• The aptly named John Mountain said he was "absolutely done, done, done with vegans" this week after an obnoxious diner at his Fyre restaurant in Perth, Australia, complained on social media about her vegan meal and lamented the lack of vegan options.

What they're saying: "Sadly All Vegans are now banned from FYRE (for mental health reasons)," the restaurant posted on its Facebook page. "We thank you for your understanding."

"Please go find another kebab shop somewhere that's happy to give you that plastic rubbish that you enjoy to eat so much," Mountain said in an interview with CNN.

What happens next: Notorious vegan activist Tash Peterson and others threatened to protest outside Fyre in response to the ban. Mountain was not impressed. "Phone the police and the ambulance, have them on standby, because if they try pulling a stunt with me, good luck," the hero chef said on Wednesday.

Crucial context: A photo of notorious vegan activist Tash Peterson.

Bottom line: John Mountain is done with vegans. God bless this hero.

The post Hero Chef Bans Vegans From Restaurant appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.