Greece's National Gallery temporarily closed following arrest of lawmaker after artworks damaged
Nikolaos Papadopoulos, who is a member of the small ultra-religious Niki party, allegedly smashed glass cases and attacked works he considered blasphemous. The gallery has been closed.
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Newsweek
11 hours ago
- Newsweek
Sorority Girls Are the Right's Latest Obsession
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. If you've taken a quick glance at social media over the last few weeks, you'll likely have spotted two things. The first, viral posts of sorority girls dancing, part of the #RushTok trend that's been picking up steam as university life kicks off in August. The second, equally viral posts that the left is mad about it. Social media is inundated with posts claiming that the videos of sorority girls are proof that America is "back," a return prompted by the election of President Donald Trump and a cultural shift toward conservatism. If the narrative online is to be believed, the comeback has come much to the dismay of the left. But how mad is the left really? While posts outlining their outrage in response to sorority girls receive millions of views online, the outrage itself is harder to find. Sorority Girls Are The Right's Latest Obsession Sorority Girls Are The Right's Latest Obsession Newsweek Illustration/Getty/AP Newsroom As the right zeros in on sorority girls as evidence of a changing political culture, they are ushered into the echelons of the conservative hot girl, a new-age political pin-up, that this time comes complete with choreographed dances and coordinated outfits. But are these videos actually having a political impact outside of the right, or is the idea that they are an invented issue to fan the flames of a culture war? Newsweek spoke with experts to find out more. The Viral Phenomenon of the Sorority Girl Standing in front of red, brick buildings, adorned by circular columns and Greek lettering, sorority girls dance in unison. The movements are synchronized, the smiles are wide, and the energy is infectious. And millions of pairs of eyes fall upon the videos. Sororities and fraternities have been a cornerstone of pop culture for decades, in part thanks to movies like Legally Blonde, The House Bunny and Neighbors. Videos like this have been going viral over the past few years, but they have largely been divorced from political conversations, until now. This interest, though, isn't surprising, according to Diana Z. O'Brien, a professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis. "For years, there's been extensive media coverage of how both universities and young women tend to lean left politically," O'Brien said. "Against that backdrop, young women at universities participating in activities perceived as more conservative—such as joining certain sororities—is going to spark the interest of some observers." The direct response to these videos is often positive. The comment sections are filled with fire emojis, compliments on their outfits and replies like "go girls!" But with great virality comes great visibility, and there is a significant amount of negativity in response to this trend. According to a recent report from The Independent, some sorority girls have stepped away from posting, and some sororities have advised against posting, or, speaking to the press. Some sororities regularly going viral include Alpha Chi Omega, University of South Carolina; Kappa Kappa Gamma, Oklahoma State University; Alpha Chi Omega, University of Tennessee; Delta Gamma, University of Tennessee; and Delta Zeta, University of Georgia. Newsweek has contacted these sororities for comment via social media message. Looking at the content, it appears there is little either tangentially or tangibly political about it. But that hasn't stopped it from becoming a political symbol. Joe Kinsey, of the outlet Outkick, wrote in a post on X: "The purple hair lesbians have to be furious that SEC sororities ARE BACK." As of press time, that post has been viewed 37 million times. In an email shared with Newsweek, Kinsey said: "After years of being told that biological males should be in the pool winning national championships over U.S. Olympic female swimmers, and that it was the fair thing to do, this country is back to a place where sorority girls & Sydney Sweeney now run the show, and a huge swath of America seems to love that cultural shift." He continued: "Have sorority girls always been doing their thing since TikTok was invented? Sure, but pop culture narratives were being run by fanatics on the coasts with the help of their sympathetic friends in the left-wing media. This country has clearly experienced a shift in the dominant voices with sororities and Sweeney appearing ready to lead the way." Kinsey's comments reference first the discourse over trans women competing in women's sports, something that has been a hot button issue in online culture wars for years. In February, Trump signed an executive order blocking trans women from participating in women's sports, which has been condemned and criticized by advocacy groups and the LGBTQ+ community. A post on X from Fox News about the phenomenon reads in part: "The viral 'RushTok' trend is making waves once more, with some calling it proof that "America is back," describing sorority girls as "warriors on the frontline of TikTok" pushing back on lockdown-era culture and showing renewed Gen Z patriotism." The post has been viewed more than 450,000 times as of reporting. On the other side of the coin, though, are people arguing that there isn't a real political connection here. One post shared a video of the sorority Texas Aephi, University of Austin, and was captioned "MAGA Texas girls are beautiful." The post was shared by an account that highlighted that the sorority is in Austin, which is in Travis County, which voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024. Generally speaking, when it comes to politics, young women tend to identify as liberal. Polling from Gallup shows that an average of 40 percent of young women identified as liberal between 2017 and 2024, an increase from 32 percent for 2008 to 2016, and from 28 percent for 2001 to 2007. Newsweek spoke with pop culture content creator Morgan Harris, aka @Yaptrapped, about this trend. "The schools that are famous in Rushtok and really gave rise to it are mostly located in the South, I think these sorts of videos can act as a sort of advertisement for who conservative young women are even though in reality you have no idea of the political leanings of everyone that is in that video," Harris said. O'Brien echoed this, telling Newsweek that the conversations should center on the sorority members themselves, rather than "just the political meanings outsiders attach to them." New Chapter in the Culture Wars Playbook Amid the disparate online discourse about the trend lies a question: Why are social media trends like this used in online culture wars, and what role do they play? Dr. Mary Anne Franks, Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard professor in intellectual property, technology and civil rights law at George Washington University Law School, told Newsweek via email: "Fabricated controversies are the currency of the online culture wars, and that is why the right tends to win them." "Outrage bait like "liberals HATE this new trend!" doesn't just activate tired stereotypes and trigger negative emotional responses, it also serves to distract us from true outrages and exhaust the psychological resources we need to process and respond to them," Franks said. Newsweek also spoke with Dr. Stacey Kerr, an independent researcher, and Mardi Schmeichel, an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who shared joint responses about the trend. "The political right's framing of sorority videos as "making the left mad," despite no evidence of widespread outrage, is a classic right-wing tactic: manufacturing a fake conflict as a way to signal dominance," they said. "The truth of the claim doesn't matter; in fact, the falsity is part of the point. By claiming that feminists and liberals are furious, right-wing commentators get to perform a win on two fronts: they cast themselves as lighthearted defenders of "fun" and "tradition" and they invite their audience to savor the imagined spectacle of their opponents seething." "Part of why this works so well in the context of RushTok is its sheer popularity: the videos draw huge audiences and have become an easy cultural reference point," they added. Newsweek also spoke with Deen Freelon, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, about the trend. "This seems to be the latest iteration of a broader phenomenon in which conservative individuals accuse left-leaning people of holding views the latter deny holding," Freelon said. "I think it shows how little the right understands the left [although the opposite may be true as well], and how much popularity and money there is to be gained in stoking division around even the most trivial of matters," Freelon added. A Trump supporter wears a MAGA hat outside the Stellantis plant in Sterling Heights, on the outskirts of Detroit on October 16, 2024. A Trump supporter wears a MAGA hat outside the Stellantis plant in Sterling Heights, on the outskirts of Detroit on October 16, 2024. CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images Pom-poms, Pep, and Politics The online obsession with sorority girls comes at a time when conservative politics has become obsessed more generally with women. Whether it's the rise of the conservative hot girl, the proliferation of the trad wife, or the conservative female influencer, the face of right-wing politics is changing. There's a new political poster girl in town, and she's putting on her MAGA cap with a manicured hand. While the actual politics of sorority girls is blurry, the aesthetic plays into the shift and new gendered era of politics that has been unfolding online in recent years. This may be playing a part in why conservatives have latched onto this content. Catherine Rottenberg of Goldsmiths, University of London, told Newsweek: "These images of sorority girls dancing and ostensibly celebrating 'America'—are part of a larger MAGA gendered aesthetic." Rottenberg said that the celebration of these clubs and organizations, and the way they are framed, reinforces a gender binary: "The idea that we need women to be women and men to be men." Rottenberg added that while distraction might be "part of the strategy," with this trend, it is also indicative of a wider promotion of "ideas of gender and femininity." Kerr and Schmeichel echoed this, telling Newsweek: "Women's bodies and choices have always been a political battleground, and the women participating in these hyper-feminized sorority performances are primed to serve as avatars for a "victorious" traditional America, with young, white, conventionally attractive women joyfully embracing old-school femininity in open defiance of what the right paints as liberal efforts to stamp it out." The content creator @yaptrapped highlighted a similar theme, telling Newsweek: "Conservatives need beautiful young conservative women to sell the dream of the traditional family to young conservative men and so I can see how those videos would be a powerful advertisement for that, even though it is a false advertisement based on details you couldn't possibly know about people in an internet video."
USA Today
3 days ago
- USA Today
Divided opinions on Michigan sign-stealing scandal just part of college football tribalism
From the moment the Michigan sign-stealing scandal spilled into public consciousness roughly 21 months ago, it has served as the ultimate Rorschach test for college sports tribalism, for the pettiness of longstanding rivalries, of our voracity for social media conspiracy theories and how quickly controversy can turn into celebrity. Just imagine if you had told anyone with a working knowledge of Michigan's football program August of 2023 that they'd win a national championship and the person who got a Netflix special out of it would be … Connor Stalions? I rest my case. And now, as Michigan braces for the findings and penalties stemming from its NCAA infractions case on Friday, we will hear all of it again regardless of the outcome: Complaints from Ann Arbor over selective enforcement, complaints from Columbus (and perhaps points beyond) that the NCAA didn't hit hard enough, half-baked justifications for Stalions' behavior and eye rolls from the sports nihilists who think all of this is silly because rules were never meant to be followed in the first place. We undeniably live in a more permissive culture than at any time in NCAA history. The Overton Window on what we consider a college sports scandal changed forever on Nov. 5, 2011 when Jerry Sandusky was arrested are charged with 52 accounts of sexual abuse. Things that used to shock people, like agent involvement in a recruitment or payments to college athletes, no longer registered the same way - and that true even before the NCAA made that stuff legal. So the impulse now is to shrug our shoulders at all of it. If you don't like Michigan, you probably want them punished. If you root for Michigan, you probably think this was all a ridiculous witch hunt. And if you have no skin in the game, you probably are just laughing at the NCAA for trying to punish anyone for anything at this point. But I'll propose a radical thought here: Maybe, just maybe, the way all of us experience sports would be better if we simply pushed back a little harder on the idea that cheating – even in the ridiculous world of college sports -- isn't a big deal. A couple months before I ever heard the name Conor Stallions, I was having a phone conversation with Shawn Klein, an Arizona State philosophy professor who has extensively written about and studied ethics in sports. At the time, I was working on a project that became an award-winning 10-part series about the history of cheating in sports, which human beings have grappled with dating back to chariot races in Greek and Roman antiquity. When I asked Klein why people tended to view cheating in sports differently than, say, cheating on their taxes or cheating on their significant other, his explanation forever changed how I thought about this stuff. The gist is that while we live in a world of rules that have been put in place to help us make our lives better and organize society, we'd still a society in some form even if there were no rules or laws. Sports don't work that way. If there were no rules, the game itself wouldn't exist. 'The point isn't to get the white ball in the hole with a stick,' Klein said. 'It's doing it given the constraints you've all agreed to, which is what creates the game. By going outside that, you're not playing the game anymore in some way. So the process is maybe more important in sports than in other parts of our lives. What we actually care about is the doing of the thing, not just that we get there first.' Let's apply that to Michigan. If Stalions' in-person scouting allowed the Wolverines to obtain higher quality information about their opponents than they would otherwise have been able to obtain by following the rules, this wasn't a gray-area issue. It was cheating, and we should be honest about that and treat it with a level of seriousness that discourages others from similarly tainting a sport they profess to care about. The hard part, though, is what that means in a practical sense. Would it feel right to strip away Michigan's title when we all saw that, sign stealing or not, the Wolverines were by far the best college football team in 2023? Would it be fair to tell Michigan's current players who had nothing to do with the actions of a low-level analyst that they aren't eligible for postseason games? Does suspending current head coach and then-offensive coordinator Sherrone Moore for a few games look like a just punishment or symbolic fluff? There are no great answers, and it's symbolic of why the NCAA's enforcement model ultimately failed. As much as schools knew that cheating was culturally corrosive and wildly prevalent in college sports, they never truly trusted themselves with the instruments to manage it. Michigan will most likely be hit with a potpourri of penalties that won't hurt much, and perhaps that's the right outcome. Stalions is back in obscurity and Jim Harbaugh is in the NFL, the latter being a far bigger penalty than anything the NCAA could come up with. But whether Michigan cheated on its way to a national title shouldn't be up for debate. Thanks to an enterprising staffer who was so desperate to impress his bosses that he crossed every line imaginable, the Wolverines were playing a different game than their opponents. And if you can't acknowledge that, they played you too.
Associated Press
3 days ago
- Associated Press
Rival leaders in Cyprus agree to refurbish cemeteries to help foster reconciliation
In the five decades since a Turkish invasion, vandalism and the ravages of time have transformed hundreds of Cyprus' cemeteries into evidence of the geographic and political rift. But even as chances for bilateral talks to end the divide appear bleak, Greek and Turkish Cypriots have teamed up to mend mistrust and push for peace, one grave at a time. Restoration is underway at 15 civilian cemeteries on each side of the so-called Green Line cutting across the Mediterranean island. Expansion of the roughly 700,000-euro project ($815,000) to more cemeteries is being considered.
