#culture-wars

#culture-wars

During the summer of 2020, when protests convulsed cities around the world, one of the most striking scenes took place outside a library in a wealthy Maryland suburb. Eight days after George Floyd was killed, hundreds of white people-masked yet packed together-assembled in Bethesda with banners that read I can't breathe. Then they thrust their hands to the sky and prayed, vowing to renounce the "white privilege" that marked them like original sin.

Happily, The Atlantic's garden bursts with the former and is almost entirely lacking in the latter, and in this new project of daily quizzes, I get to share a bunch of that trivia with you, curious readers. So set down the Snapple cap and stop to smell the blooms-is that geranium?-with questions from recently published stories. To get these questions in your inbox every day, sign up for The Atlantic Monday, September 29, 2025

The lengthy, bizarre political career of New York City Mayor Eric Adams has arrived at its inevitable, ignominious end. On Sunday afternoon-just weeks after insisting he was not dropping out of the race and taking a job with the Trump administration-Adams tweeted a suitably overwrought video from the steps of Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence, declaring that he was no longer seeking a second term,

In mid-July, Pierre Poilievre was apparently feeling very glum. Sources close to the Conservative leader told the CBC that he was deliberately reducing his public appearances. He was doing some self-reflection. One confidant described him as "deflated." The idea that Poilievre-a man whose tight T-shirt chest puffing had become a campaign trademark-was hiding out in a corner like an old party balloon was indeed quite the image to contemplate.

Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL

Conway hosted Friday's Hannity, where she pointed to recent comments by the restaurant's founder, who cast the ill-fated logo change in grim terms. If they don't get back to keeping the country, then it ain't gonna work, he said. Conway's guest went even further, stating that the failed logo change was part of a much larger sinister undertow of our culture led by the radical Marxist left.

T hroughout the culture war flareups of the last fifteen years or so, liberals and conservatives have periodically traded fire over matters that are fundamentally symbolic and often negligible to meaningless at the level of actual political substance. In their own different (and often quite cynical) ways, both factions have been adept at converting cultural issues into the language of political grievance and, in turn, into supposed forms of political engagement-and even activism-that have often amounted to little more than new kinds of shopping

There's a lot of history to our country, both positive and negative, but we need to keep moving forward. We can't just keep focusing on the negative-all that does is divide us," she added. "Like just about every other country in the world, the United States has a checkered past. We should be able to take our kids, our students through the Smithsonian and be proud when we leave.

"If you're coming from these states, you will take a test through the state department to show you're aligned to our standards," Walters said in a press conference in late July. "You're not going to come here and teach that there's 27 genders ... you're not going to undermine American exceptionalism by teaching anti-American and anti-semitic hate."

Donald Trump has been especially attuned to everything happening on social media, engaging in cultural debates, including Sydney Sweeney's jeans controversy and targeting media personalities.

Rand's contemporary disciples, who are many and very illustrious, have not lost sight of the lesson of the mother of objectivism and fertile narcissism.

It's as if we're currently living in a late night commercial for ambulance chasers: did you do something odious or antisocial that has terrible real world consequences? You may be entitled to compensation from your fellow believers.