Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Toxic Masculinity is on the Ballot “Toxic masculinity is on the ballot.” That was the accidentally insightful headline of a column on an Ohio news site. Toxic masculinity was indeed on the ballot. But in a whole other way. Gen Z men who had spent much of their lives being told that there was something wrong with them went out and voted for Trump. The cultural seismic shock waves of losing the male half of the youth are still rippling through the leftists who had long written off those same men. The young men who voted for Trump attend high schools with ‘Healthy Masculinity’ classes and clubs which tell them that “the Man Box does not allow us to be fully human” and urges boys “to achieve their full human potential, free from restrictive masculinity.” To be a boy is bad, but to be a man is even worse. College comes with mandatory sessions on consent and equity. White men in any classes less rigorous than math or science are there to be used as bad examples of privilege. Nearly any coll...

Kamala Harris, the former squeeze of a corrupt elderly mayor and ‘second mother’ to a pro-terrorist model famous for not shaving her armpit hair, is accusing Trump of being “weird”. The Harris presidential campaign, which just came into being last week after she deposed the confused senile candidate who actually won the Democrat primaries, found its own ‘Mean Girls’ version of Trump’s insult strategy by matching its candidate’s snickering third grade tone. The media would like to make Kamala into Obama, but where he had the borrowed cadences of black preachers, she has the cadence of an inexperienced preschool teacher. Kamala uses simple words, then reuses them and enunciates them with painful slowness while keeping the subject matter at the level of a not particularly bright child. No one is sure if it’s because she’s very dumb or because she assumes that everyone she’s talking to is very dumb. Or both. While the style has its disadvantages in international forums, major speeches and ...

"Politics is downstream from culture" has long since passed from revelation to cliché. Culture has long since become politics and politics has become culture. All culture serves or pretends to serve political ends. And all politics, outside the nitty gritty of the actual legislative agenda, is culture. Politics has come to be defined by social media influencers. Key cultural figures, like AOC, may have no meaningful legislative clout, but adapted social media celebrity to politics. That they don't really do anything is almost beside the point in a culture war where no one really does anything except build their brand by virtue signaling, trolling, and insulting their opponents. The base for politics has been sharply split between issue voters and culture voters with the former still dominating elections, but the latter dominating narratives. And social media narratives preclude the need for real world results. The internet broke our culture the way that it broke our econo...

The outgoing artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company has announced that from now on only disabled actors will be allowed to play Richard III. In a woke world where vice presidents and Supreme Court justices are chosen based on their skin color and gender, to “prove” a hunchbacked villain, you must be a hunchback or at least have something wrong with you. The RSC boasts that it cast the first disabled actor in the role, Arthur Hughes, a 30-year-old who “has no thumb or radius bone in his right arm” and therefore identifies as “limb different”. The real Richard III had scoliosis, Shakespeare used that to make him appear grotesquely villainous, while the new woke overlords use it to make the long dead king a victim. Next thing you know, actors will need to have syphilis to play Hitler. Now that Richard III is a member of a designated victim group, his namesake play can be reinterpreted as a commentary on social prejudice against the disabled. It may even have to be rewritten s...

After Oct 7, some purple-haired genderqueer activists on TikTok have taken to reading the Koran and are pondering converting to Islam. That may seem like a leap, but once you’re a teenage girl who decides to be a boy for internet clout, changing to Islam is less difficult. Hijabs, like dyed hair and androgynous clothes, have long become just another accessory of restless social change. Commercials that claim to relate to the youth invariably include a woman in a hijab as a progressive marker alongside a purple haired they/them, an ascetic activist type in a t-shirt and random minorities laughing together while having lattes on a college campus. Every generation in the last 60 years has grown up with less of a sense of who it is than the previous one. The intangible sense of being an American that once came from boundless frontiers, a work ethic, a sense of fair play and meritocracy was replaced by cultural programming distributed by daily newspapers, big publishing houses and movie the...

“Do you expect me to talk?” No, I expect you to go woke.” Earlier this year word came that Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, which controls the rights to the deceased author’s novels, hired sensitivity readers to go through his books and purge anything that might offend sensitive woke souls. The newly republished novels warn that, “this book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.” Now that old Bond is dead, a new woke Bond can safely rise. Even though Ian Fleming has been dead since 1964, the estate turned to other authors to prime the giant money pump. Initially new Bond novels were written by prestigious writers like Kingsley Amis or former military men like John Gardner, but in more recent years turned the books over to wokes. The latest of these come from Kim Sherwood, a University of Edinburgh lecturer who is interested in “women’s stories” and was authorized to write a feminist James Bond trilogy. How do ...

Florida has been falsely accused of “book bans” for pulling graphic pornography and racism from schools. A Florida school district was sued for keeping, “All Boys Aren’t Blue”, which features lines such as “he reached his hand down and pulled out my d____”, away from kids. The Biden administration claimed that it was “incomprehensible” that the DeSantis administration had rejected a black history AP course featuring the works of Amiri Baraka whose poems included lines such as “we are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of s__t)” and “Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.” But now the Left has discovered educational materials in Florida schools that it wants to ban. Outrage, condemnations, petitions and threats greeted the revelation that Florida had allowed schools to use PragerU materials if they wanted to. After months of accusing Florida of banning books, the media and leftist activists mounted a crusade to ban PragerU fr...

In 2021, 62% of Americans opposed men in dresses playing on female teams while 34% supported it. In 2023, a sizable 69% majority is opposed and only 26% are in favor. Within two years, support for ‘transgender female athletes’ fell from a third to a quarter. While those numbers are important, the real turnaround in the latest Gallup poll has come among Democrats. While majorities of Republicans and Independents were always opposed to men who claim to be ‘transgender’ usurping womens’ sports, Democrats supported them. But now no more. In 2021, 55% of Democrats supported men playing on female teams and in female competitions while 41% opposed it. Now 48% of Democrats are opposed and only 47% are in favor. These are not isolated numbers. They’re part of a pattern that shows how the Democrats are losing the transgender debate not only nationally, but among members of their own party. Transgender fanaticism led the Democrats to embrace positions too extreme for their party. A Washington Pos...

Wokeness rules America. In the last three years every element of public life from governments to corporations has been conditioned to impose a radical social agenda on the nation. Women have ceased to exist and the government is forcing schools to sexually indoctrinate children. A new Gallup poll suggests that this culture war has backfired. Badly. This year the largest number of Americans has come out of the closet as social conservatives since 2012. Biden has taken us back to Obama’s first term in more ways than one. That’s all the more remarkable because even last year the country was nearly tied between social conservatives and the socially liberal. This year the number of socially conservative Americans shot up from 33% to 38% while the socially liberal fell from 34% to 29%. That’s a massive inversion from 2021 when 34% claimed to be socially liberal and only 30% were socially conservative, and the end of American values seemed to be here. The shift is driven by Republicans. By 2...

Bertelsmann has been censoring and rewriting children’s books by Roald Dahl and altering the “unacceptable prose” of P.G. Wodehouse in the Jeeves and Wooster books. The ex-Nazi publishing giant which operates under such names as Penguin Random House and Puffin Books, took a red pencil to Roald Dahl long after the author’s death, cut any references to “fat”, “ugly” or “crazy”, along with “mothers and fathers” and other un-woke terms. It is the publisher for Dr. Seuss books, a number of which were banned and are being replaced with new “inclusive” books by “diverse” authors that Theodor Geisel never actually wrote. Jeeves and Wooster books now come with “trigger warnings” cautioning readers that “language, themes and characterisations” are “outdated” and some have been edited out. But while Bertelsmann is purging classic adult and children’s literature, it’s waging a war on parents trying to keep graphic pornographic content out of schools and away from their children. Penguin Rando...