Iran Shooting at Ships. What They Wore to Met Gala. Smith Faces Title IX Probe. Hewitt: Can Dems Do ‘Extremist Makeover’ for Nazi Tattoo Guy? How Chic Is Hasan Piker? Very! More
The fragile Iran cease-fire is broken. At least, that’s the gist of a Wall Street Journal editorial. The ball is in President Trump’s court, according to the editors, who have repeatedly voiced support for the Iran war:
President Trump now faces a decision about how he plans to reopen the Strait of Hormuz: Give Iran’s regime what it wants in negotiations or use the U.S. military to get ships through. …
Mr. Trump wields the military advantage, and he can use it to pry open Hormuz and strike to shorten the timeline to those oil-well shut-ins. The Iranians have fired the first shots to end the cease-fire, which is all the reason Mr. Trump needs to use the force to stop them from getting away with it again.
Iran’s Foreign Minister warns the U.S. of being dragged back into a “quagmire,” using a word that frightens Americans far more than “Death to America” chants. The United Arab Emirates is “actively engaging” ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones fired by Iran, while the U.S. guides ships through the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iranian fire. Stock futures were up a bit early in the morning.
Ah, yes—and now for the beauty and creativity of the Met Gala to afford a contrast with the bleakness of war—except that the gala was, as usual, weird. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, the people who attend the Met Gala are different from you and me.
Here, and here, and here photo spreads on the evening. You can see Bad Bunny got up as an old man with a cane (I don’t get it, do you?) and Beyoncé as a bejeweled skeleton.
The Met Gala was underwritten this year by Jeff and Lauren Sanchez Bezos (who came as John Singer Sargent’s voluptuous Madame X). Mr. Bezos must have seen the $10 million price tag as a nice way to make his socially ambiguous wife happy and a cheap penance for firing egregiously entitled Washington Post hacks. Bottles of fake urine were hidden at the Gala to protest Bezos’ mercy killings at the newspaper.
And now for another milestone in the decline of civilization. “The New York Times’s Latte Logic of Social Collapse,” by the great Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal. Ms. Mac Donald writes about the infamous New York Times coffee klatch featuring Hasan Piker and other luminaries of decadence:
Three days before a 31-year-old male stormed the White House Correspondents Dinner, hoping to assassinate President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet, the New York Times published a 35-minute video titled: “‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ Why petty theft might be the new political protest.” In it, a Times editor interviewed two other members of the media aristocracy about the moral code shared by a large swathe of young Americans.
That code justifies theft—and even violence—when harnessed to a fashionably left-wing cause. None of the participants—podcasting celebrity Hasan Piker, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, and Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman—expressed alarm at the glorification of crime. They smirked and giggled through the discussion, betraying a breezy indifference to lawbreaking.
The video’s most memorable feature is the visual contrast between the participants’ studied downtown chic and their professed identification with what Piker calls the “masses.”
For the New York Times gathering, Piker, as they might have put it last night, was in Ralph (Lauren). Chubby Ms. Spiegelman wore only her New York Times affiliation, which was more fashionable than Mr. Piker’s Adidas, possibly made by Asian slave labor.
As long as we’re thinking about civilizational decline, how about the federal judge who issued an apology to Cole Allen, the suspect in the latest presidential assassination attempt? “Whatever you’ve been through, I apologize for the prior week,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui told Allen. What a sorry federal judge.
Something good for civilization? Walter Russell Mead writes about the serious mistakes that Russian President Vladimir Putin has made, including with the Ukraine war, and which could bring him down. Unfortunately, this isn’t an entirely feel-good story:
Russia’s wily president shouldn’t be written off. Whatever one thinks of his morals, Mr. Putin has frequently demonstrated uncanny daring and skill. But unless he can summon the energy and creativity to extricate himself from this predicament, he may be remembered by history as the leader on whose watch Russia’s standing as a serious great power was finally and fatally lost.
Maine Senator Susan Collins has a history of always pulling out a win, no matter the tough competition. Hugh Hewitt asserts that the Dems have handed Collins an advantage for 2028 in the person of Bernie-backed, Nazi-tattooed oysterman, Graham Platner:
Platner is not a “liberal.” He’s not a “leftist.” He’s an extremist. Platner is from that land “beyond the fringe” in American politics that occasionally throws up onto the election beaches a candidate from the wacky left or wacky right after an intra-party primary campaign, a nominee who simply doesn’t play within the “10s,” much less the “40s,” of American political football.
The extremists luck out in the primary for a variety of oddball reasons, and then their parties pretend to be surprised when their oddball nominees get thumped in the general election.
Townhall has a Platner story that contains a delightfully droll X post by Mary Katherine Ham:
I think if one is trying to figure out if a candidate is sympathetic to Nazis, one of the most important tests is whether the candidate knowingly got a death’s head tattoo signifying an elite, brutal group of SS officers and kept it until the second he wanted to run for Senate and someone noticed. It’s an insult to everyone’s intelligence to suggest otherwise. Sorry, his Medicare thoughts from last week are not permanent body art or absolution.
That’s Pratt, not Platner: “Spencer Pratt is running for mayor. Can he save LA?” columnist Nicole Russell asks at USA TODAY:
Two things define Los Angeles today: endless sunshine and the consequences of failed leftist governance….
That is why I’m glad to see Republican-turned-independent Spencer Pratt, 42, former star of reality television’s “The Hills,” entering the Los Angeles mayoral race. On April 29, Pratt released a sharp campaign ad that, in just 30 seconds, highlighted the widening gap between Democratic governance and the daily realities many Angelenos face.
All-women’s Smith College has been hit with a Title IX investigation, as National Review reports:
Smith College, one of the largest all-female colleges in the United States, is facing a Title IX investigation from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights after the college admitted biological male students, granting them access to women-only spaces.
Men admitted to the school were able to access dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams, according to the DOE.
After a momentary confusion, Ms. Must got it: The “women” being admitted identify as “trans women.” The tip-off is “biological male,” a redundancy that is code for guys who claim and/or believe they are women. Says a DOE official:
“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” Kimberly Richey, the assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a news release.
The Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn writes about “Trump’s War With the Pope.” Interesting piece that explores what the Pope, an Augustinian friar, might think of Just War Theory, formulated in its initial stages by St. Augustine. McGurn writes:
The Catholic Church, moreover, claims its teachings are true for everyone, not just Catholics. If, however, Rome wishes its teachings to be so, then it should help people to understand exactly what it’s saying. This is central to one thing the papacy is supposed to offer the world: clarity about the church’s message.
It’s hard to miss that Rubio’s profile is rising. “Marco Rubio’s 2028 momentum is getting impossible to ignore,” according to the Examiner’s Joe Concha. What does that mean for Veep Vance? Read Concha.
May I Take My AI Lover to Next Year’s Met Gala? “How should we think about people having ‘relationships’ with chatbots?” asks City Journal.
