Latest news with #OldWest
CBC
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
Saddle up for a look into the world of mounted shooting
One family's passion binds them in the ways of the Old West, when guns blazed and horses roamed the land. Jim Agapito moseyed to the Double Z Arena near Miami, Man., to learn more about cowboy mounted shooting.
Yahoo
20-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'Stay mad.' Amid immigration raids, Epstein rumors, Trump team ramps up its trolling
Morgan Weistling, an accomplished painter of cowboys and Old West frontier life, was vacationing with his family this month when he got a surprising message from a friend about one of his works of art. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, he said the friend told him, had posted a work he had painted five years ago to its official social media channels without his knowledge. The painting, which looks like a scene from the Oregon Trail, depicts a young white couple — she in a long dress, he in a cowboy hat — cradling a baby in a covered wagon, with mountains and another wagon in the background. "Remember your Homeland's Heritage," the Department of Homeland Security captioned the July 14 post on X, Instagram and Facebook. Exactly whose homeland and whose heritage? And what was the intended message of the federal department, whose masked and heavily armed agents have arrested thousands of brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking immigrants — most with no criminal convictions — in California this summer? That has been the source of heated online debate at a time when the Trump administration has ramped up its online trolling with memes and jokes about the raids that critics have called racist, childish and unbefitting official government social media accounts. The "Remember your Homeland's Heritage" post racked up 19 million views on X and thousands of responses. Critics compared the post to Nazi propaganda. Supporters said it was "OK to be white" and to celebrate "traditional values." Among the responses: "You mean the heritage built on stolen land, Indigenous genocide, and whitewashed history? You don't get to romanticize settlers while caging today's migrants." And: "A few minutes later, an ICE wagon pulls up next to them, agents cuff and stuff them into the back and then summarily send them back to Ireland." Another person, referencing the "Oregon Trail" video game, joked: "All three died from dysentery." Asked about criticism of the post, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email to The Times: 'If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails, forded the rivers, and forged this Republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook. This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage. Get used to it.' On July 11, a federal judge temporarily halted indiscriminate immigration sweeps in Southern California at places such as Home Depot, car washes and rows of street vendors. U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong said she found sufficient evidence that agents were unlawfully using race, ethnicity, language, accent, location or employment as a pretext for immigration enforcement. The next week, the Department of Homeland Security — which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement along with Customs and Border Protection — posted the white-people-in-the-covered-wagon painting. It also posted a meme with a fake poster from the 1982 movie "E.T. The Extra Terrestrial" with the caption: "Illegal aliens, take a page from E.T. and PHONE HOME." Ramesh Srinivasan, founder of the University of California Digital Cultures Lab, which studies the connections between technology, politics and culture, said the mean-spirited posts and gleeful deportation jokes are part of a deliberate trolling campaign by the Trump administration. "The saddest part of all of this is it mirrors how DHS is acting in real life," he said. "Someone can be a troll online but may not be as much [of one] in real life," he said. "The digital world and physical world may not be completely in lockstep with each other. But in this particular case, there's a level of honesty that's actually disturbing." Srinivasan, who is Indian American, said that although the covered wagon painting is not offensive in and of itself, the timing of the Homeland Security post raises questions about the government's intended meaning. The painting, he said, "is being used to show inclusion and exclusion, who's worthy of being an American and who isn't." Srinivasan said mean memes are effective because they spread quickly in a media environment in which people are flooded with information and quickly scroll through visual content and short video reels with little context. "There are hidden algorithms that determine visibility and virality," Srinivasan said. "Outrage goes more viral because it generates what tech companies call engagement." Here in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken a page from Trump's troll playbook, with recent social media posts that include name-calling, swear words, and, of course, memes. Earlier this month, Newsom responded to a post on X by the far-right Libs of TikTok account that showed video of someone apparently firing a gun at immigration officers in Camarillo. The account asked if the governor would condemn the shooting. Newsom wrote: "Of course I condemn any assault on law enforcement, you shit poster. Now do Jan 6." In a post on X, Newsom's press office called White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of many of Trump's hard-line immigration policies, a "fascist cuck." Newsom defended the name-calling in a news conference, saying of the Trump administration: "I don't think they understand any other kind of language." The term is used in far right circles to insult liberals as weak. It is also short for "cuckold," the husband of an unfaithful wife. Even for Team Trump, which is adept at distraction, the heightened online efforts to own the libs, as supporters say, come at a precarious time for the president. He has been embroiled in controversies over rumors about his friendship with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the effects of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which will cut Medicaid and food assistance programs while funding the planned hiring of thousands of new immigration agents. Still, his meme teams are working hard to stoke outrage and brag about immigration raids. Earlier this month, Homeland Security posted a slickly edited video on its social media accounts showing border agents at work, with a narrator quoting the Bible verse Isaiah 6:8: 'Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I. Send me.'' The video uses a cover of the song, "God's Gonna Cut You Down" by the San Francisco rock band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. On Instagram, the band wrote: 'It has come to our attention that the Department of Homeland Security is improperly using our recording of 'God's Gonna Cut You Down' in your latest propaganda video. It's obvious that you don't respect Copyright Law and Artist Rights any more than you respect Habeas Corpus and Due Process rights, not to mention the separation of Church and State per the US Constitution." On July 10, the band asked the government to cease and desist the use of its recording and pull down the video. It added, "Oh, and go f— yourselves." As of Friday evening, the video remained posted on X along with the song. In recent days, White House and Homeland Security social media accounts have shared memes that include: A coffee mug with the words "Fire up the deportation planes;" a weightlifting skeleton declaring, "My body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations;" and alligators wearing ICE caps in reference to the officially named Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention facility in Florida. A meme shared last week depicted a poster outside the White House that read: "oMg, diD tHe wHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHiS?" The caption: "Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can't post banger memes." The White House also shared the Homeland Security covered wagon post. In response to questions about online criticism that calls the posts racist, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson asked a Times reporter in an email to "explain how deporting illegal aliens is racist." She also said in a statement: 'We won't stop celebrating the Trump Administration's many wins via banger memes on social media. Stay mad.' Weistling, the artist unwittingly caught up in the controversy, apparently was surprised not only by the posting of his painting and his name, but also by the Department of Homeland Security using an incorrect title for the artwork. The government labeled the painting: "New Life in a New Land — Morgan Weistling." The actual title of the painting is "A Prayer for a New Life." Prints are listed for sale on the website for the evangelical nonprofit Focus on the Family. Weistling, a registered Republican who lives in Los Angeles County, could not be reached for comment. Shortly after the government used his painting, he wrote on his website: "Attention! I did not give the DHS permission to use my painting in their recent postings on their official web platforms. They used a painting I did 5 years ago and re-titled it and posted it without my permission. It is a violation of my copyright on the painting. It was a surprise to me and I am trying to gather how this happen [sic] and what to do next." He later shortened the statement on his website and deleted posts on his Instagram and Facebook accounts saying he learned about the post while on vacation and was stunned the government "thought they could randomly post an artist's painting without permission" and re-title it. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions from The Times about copyright issues. But a spokesman said the posting of an incorrect title was "an honest mistake." Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Solve the daily Crossword
Washington Post
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
The gritty, unglamorous truth about the antiheroes of the Wild West
I've long been obsessed with the fact that, in 1869, even as the Brooklyn Bridge rose, you could board a train in New York City and some days later disembark into a parallel universe where horse-mounted Comanche warriors still reigned unconquered over the Great Plains. The two worlds coincided for the briefest moment, a time when, under the big skies of that untamed frontier, so too rose that most American icon the cowboy — and his even more heroic alter ego, the Old West gunfighter. I grew up with them; we all did, no matter what year we were born. Even in the twilight of Clint Eastwood's career, you can stream a modern western of one form or another on any given night, among them one of the greatest television shows ever written, David Milch's Shakespearean drama 'Deadwood.' Bryan Burrough's 'The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild,' a history of that era (ideally paired with S.C. Gwynne's fantastic 'Empire of the Summer Moon,' about the Comanche during the same period), is a great debunking, Burrough forewarns. He's not out to prove that those legendary figures of the frontier were purely mythological, but he does set his sights on the way that they were mythologized. Forget facing off in the streets of Dodge City and Tombstone, saloon doors swinging to Ennio Morricone's soundtrack as time slowed and both men reached for their guns. More often than not it was just murder — a sudden, explosive violence, often with a racial component against Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, especially in the earliest years in Texas. People were shot in the eye. In the back. In the hands. No trick shooting required. They were shot through doors, and they were shot through walls. They were shot with pistols, and they were shot with long guns, and they were shot holed up in hotels, brothels, ranches, trains and banks, or out in the open on the streets, everywhere and anywhere. Of the legendary John Wesley Hardin — memorialized by Rock Hudson in a 1953 film, by Johnny Cash in two songs and by Bob Dylan on a whole album — Burrough writes: 'Hardin ranged the Texas backcountry shooting men in the face. … He killed just about anyone who irked him in any way, from Black men he found disrespectful to white men who beat him at cards or jostled him in a crowd; most famously, he probably killed a man for snoring. He may have been the first 'great' gunfighter, but it's also clear he was a maniac.' The story — and death — of Wild Bill Hickok, one of the most famous of them all, is typical. His early legend was fantastically exaggerated and his denouement (by which time he was an alcoholic and arthritic gambler not yet 40) came as he played poker at a saloon (in Deadwood, of course). When 'a drunk named Jack McCall was losing big,' Hickock encouraged him to take a break and McCall left the table, only to return the next afternoon. He circled behind Hickock and 'placed a Colt .45 beside his temple, and with the words 'Damn you! Take that!' Pulled the trigger. Hickock died instantly.' There was no gunfight at all, which 'Deadwood' the show seems to have gotten right. This is no weighty, soporific tome of history, but a gallop through the years 1869 to 1901, when a specific set of conditions aligned: the end of the Civil War and the expansion of the railroads and open range cattle ranching, which sent large numbers of Southerners, particularly Texans, driving herds west and north into territories that had little government or law enforcement. 'If you think of postwar Texas masculinity as a bubbling cauldron,' Burrough writes, 'its roux was the Southern honor code, but other ingredients were crucial as well: the tumult of war, the persistent and ongoing risk of Mexican and Native American raiders, the rigors and isolation of frontier life, the searing hatred of northern dominance. … From this combustible brew rose a stridently martial way of experiencing the world, tribal, heavily armed, hypermasculine, hyperviolent, and acutely sensitive to slight.' Oxidizing this simmering explosion was the introduction of the Colt revolver, the first mass-produced, easy-to-carry handgun able to fire rapidly. In this lawless landscape of frail masculine egos clinging to cockeyed, and often booze-fueled, notions of honor, the bullets fly, the bodies pile up, the pages turn fast and easy, and other places and other ideas come to mind: how these glorified American icons aren't so different from other men in other cultures and times much more readily vilified — young men who nowadays fill our prisons. Or of honor cultures everywhere — the Pashtuns of the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, for instance — who have never been celebrated in film, television and popular music. Indeed, Burrough makes clear that there wasn't a whole lot to celebrate in these men and their stories, and at the time it was happening, 'the gunfighter wasn't really a thing.' 'Though they fought in the nineteenth century, the fame of men like Earp and Hickok mushroomed during the twentieth, thanks to modern media, especially Hollywood films.' It is a reminder that we are selective about our heroes. And that American history was made not just by the Founding Fathers but also by the messy rascals and gamblers and liars and killers who have long filled out its more sordid chapters. Our nation has always been shaped by the latter, too, it turns out, and reading about them years after the fact, antiheroes though they may have been, is still a hell of a good time. Carl Hoffman is the author of five books, including 'Liar's Circus,' 'The Last Wild Men of Borneo' and 'Savage Harvest.' How Texas Made the West Wild By Bryan Burrough Penguin. 430 pp.
Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- Wall Street Journal
Summer Books: The Best Reading for the Season
Fortune-seekers and former soldiers arrived in the small towns of the Old West, carrying pistols and a taste for violence. Review by Richard Snow Read the review
Indianapolis Star
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indianapolis Star
Easy Rider Diner in Fountain Square to close, pivot to bar service
After two and a half years in Fountain Square's Murphy Arts Center, Easy Rider Diner will fry up its last breakfast May 24 and then pivot to bar service only. The American Southwest-inspired diner, which the owners of the HI-FI Indy music venue next-door opened in October 2022 as a greasy spoon-style hangout, announced the closure May 16 on Facebook. The closure coincides with the construction of a new 1,200-square-foot indoor music venue, set to open in early 2026, to permanently house the temporary outdoor HI-FI Annex inside the Murphy Arts Center at 1043 Virginia Ave. Open from breakfast time until as late as midnight on weekends, Easy Rider has offered a blend of classic brunch fare, Southwest flavors and Americana comfort food. Pop art and Old West imagery lining the restaurant's pale pink walls lent Easy Rider an atmosphere like few others in Indy. Per Easy Rider's Facebook post, the HI-FI Annex's concession stand known as the Snack Shack will remain open, as will the Easy Rider bar as "part of the expanded HI-FI experience." "As we prepare for construction on our new venue in the Murphy Arts Center, we're shifting operations and have made the difficult—but necessary—decision to close the restaurant," the closing announcement read. "We're proud of what we built — from unforgettable meals to meaningful moments with our community," the post read. "Thank you to everyone who pulled up a chair and made it special."
