Sophie Night To Celebrate Common Sense. Our ‘Cuss-titutional Crisis.’ Euphemism Dies at Ceuta? Politico ‘Retraumatized’ by Fauci Hearing. Noonan: He ‘Unmasked’ Himself. Cookin’ with RFK Jr. More
Common sense is having a moment.
Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever, a WNBA team, is being recognized for her commonsense approach to men in women’s sports. Make way for Sophie Night:
“Sophie Night” is coming to Democratic strongholds this weekend.
Upcoming WNBA games in Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, will feature rallies outside the arenas in support of Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham — the fan-favorite teammate of Caitlin Clark who has spoken out in defense of women’s sports.
A rally in Portland will be led by Washington-based activist Amy Sousa, who helped organize the Cunningham rally outside Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena on Tuesday. A second rally in Minneapolis will be led by XX-XY Athletics founder and former U.S. gymnastics national champion Jennifer Sey.
Continuing with the commonsense theme, The Free Press celebrates—well—”Sophie Cunningham’s Common Sense.” TFP’s Kat Rosenfield begins:
In the end,” the omniscient narrator of 1984 explains, “the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.”
The gist of the story is that Cunningham (and other good women) are well on the way to shattering the “truth” that the men who claim to be women have the right to compete in sports. Apparently, the WNBA is the last to get the message, as an incident this week made all too obvious:
The Women’s National Basketball Association may claim to put women first, but the league sure has a funny way of showing it.
When its leaders aren’t giving prodigy Caitlin Clark the cold shoulder or turning a blind eye to her on-court mistreatment, they’re telling young female fans to go dribble a football if they insist that women’s sports should be free of male intrusion.
That’s what happened Wednesday when Celeste Keaton, co-owner of the Seattle Storm, publicly exploded at two teen girls for wearing T-shirts reading XX-XY — an implicit message that sports should be separated by sex.
Keaton allegedly called the pair “f–king insane” for their quiet protest at a game between the Storm and the Indiana Fever.
That’s right: This wealthy, influential woman saw two girls seated courtside respectfully advocating to keep women’s sports female — at a women’s basketball game featuring high-profile female stars, no less — and thought to herself, “I should berate them for their bigotry.”
Ms. Must interrupts today’s gleanings to bring you (and Ms. Keaton) a special cultural message: Politics is getting more vulgar, with two presidents leading the way on curse word counts, according to a new study publicized in the New York Post:
Some might call it a cuss-titutional crisis.
Politics is rapidly becoming more profane, with a staggering 87% of swear words from presidents dating back to 1919 coming from commanders in chief within the past 10 years, according to a shocking finding.
President Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden were responsible for 538 profane words— 78% of presidential cuss words used out of the 692 documented since Woodrow Wilson, a researcher in Wales found.
The scenes of thousands of Moroccan migrants storming Ceuta, a North African enclave governed by Spain since the seventeenth century, remind us of our own border during the Biden years. “The invasion of Ceuta must be the final nail in the coffin of globalism,” is Brendan O’Neill’s Spiked Online headline. “The storming of the Spanish enclave by 50,000 foreigners is a testament to the nihilistic cowardice of Europe’s elites,” O’Neill argues. He begins:
Can we say ‘invasion’ now? What other word is there for the rough intrusion of tens of thousands of young men into the sovereign territory of a foreign nation? Surely not even the sappiest leftist in his tattered keffiyeh and ‘Refugees Welcome’ t-shirt would describe the thuggish gatecrashing of an independent nation as ‘asylum seeking’? That might be the one and only upside to the extraordinary events in Ceuta yesterday: the death, at last, of euphemism. The impossibility of any longer dressing up the West’s suicidal abandonment of its borders as ‘kindness’.
“Islamic Invasion of Spain Renewed” is the headline on a Powerline post that recalls Islam’s eighth-century invasion of Spain. Muslims ruled parts of Spain until they finally were at last driven out in 1492. Georgia Meloni, Italy’s Prime Minister, is calling for Spain to be suspended from the EU’s visa-free Schengen travel zone to protect Italy from a similar invasion. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, famously lenient on border policy, has arrived at Ceuta, belatedly attempting to control the border. Babylon Bee: “Spain Turns to Experienced Border Czar Kamala Harris for Help with Migrant Invasion.”
The U.S. could tell Spain that dealing with the ramifications of open borders after the fact threatens to consume the entirety of political life. A Compact magazine story suggests that immigration has created a two-tiered justice system. President Trump’s latest initiative is to deal with illegal aliens who imperil our highways because they can’t read highway signs in English. Dubbed “Freedom Haulers,” the initiative aims at employing U.S. military veterans as truck drivers, replacing the tens of thousands of immigrant drivers who lost their licenses during the administration’s immigration crackdown.
The Iran War is at a crossroads, according to historian of pivotal battles Victor Davis Hanson. VDH’s subtitle: “Iran’s rulers are not playing to win the war today—they are playing to survive long enough to fight another one tomorrow.” Writing in the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen makes similar points, contending that President Trump’s strategy has worked but criticizing Vice President Vance:
Like Lucy and the football, Trump keeps getting told that this time the Iranians are finally ready to make a deal — only to be set up for failure yet again. Indeed, by elevating a deal as the definition of victory, Vance has given Iran a veto over America’s ability to declare victory. All it has to do is refuse to agree — which it is doing.
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal suggests that President Trump should pay more attention to Iran’s nefarious allies:
Support from Beijing and Moscow “may play a decisive role in determining whether the current supreme leader is the last,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s Bradley Bowman Elaine Dezenski and Retired Rear Admiral Montgomery write. “The United States is not—and must not be—neutral on such a question.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. has announced that Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups have agreed to a plan that, if followed, would see the groups disarm and lose power in the Gaza Strip if Israel withdraws from the enclave.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Senate Committee hearing non-testimony was the hot topic this week. Although Fauci took the Fifth 111 times, he nevertheless “unmasked himself,” according to Peggy Noonan. Here’s the damning subtitle of her column:
His diaries make clear that he saw the pandemic less as a historic emergency than a media opportunity.
Left-leaning Politico, on the other hand, was “retraumatized” at seeing Dr. Fauci subjected to the indignity of questions from wicked Republicans.
Ace reporter Catherine Herridge, who was too good for pre-Bari CBS, writes on X that the Fauci pardon may not be bulletproof.
Speaking of CBS, Ms. Must keeps forgetting to note that Ross Douthit is leaving the New York Times to join “60 Minutes.” There are other new hires at “60 Minutes,” and Poynter wonders if they can meet the challenge. Gosh, imagine trying to live up to the giant legacy of Scott Pelley!
Move Over, Martha Stewart. Our versatile Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. is launching a cooking show. It will feature healthy recipes for under $5. Sign me up:
Can healthy eating really cost less than a drive-thru run?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is betting it can with a new government-backed cooking show aimed at proving nutritious meals don’t have to break the bank.
The new program, “The Real Food Show,” makes “healthy, affordable cooking simple and accessible for every American,” according to the Health and Human Services website.
In addition to Kennedy, “The Real Food Show” features a lineup of “incredible special guest” cooks.
The show will be available on YouTube and the HHS website.
In “95 Days and Counting,” Byron York looks to the midterms. The GOP has numerous impediments:
The only Republican upside, and it is a significant one, is that many Democrats seem to have gone completely insane. The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America inside the party — an unwelcome event that has deeply distressed many mainstream Democrats — is an opportunity for GOP candidates to portray the entire Democratic Party as nuts. Worse than nuts — dangerous.
