Latest news with #cultureWar
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Two gay dads join HBO's 'Back to the Frontier,' and Bible Twitter melts down
HBO Max's new reality experiment, Back to the Frontier, just premiered, but the show has already become a culture-war flashpoint thanks to the presence of Texas husbands Jason Hanna and Joe Riggs with their 10-year-old twin sons. The series, produced by Magnolia Network's Chip and Joanna Gaines, drops three modern families into an 1880s homestead and strips away every 21st-century convenience. Over the weekend, evangelical heavyweight Franklin Graham called the casting 'very disappointing,' warning that 'promoting something God defines as sin is in itself sin.' — (@) The American Family Association, an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group, piled on, accusing the Gaineses of abandoning 'biblical values' by showcasing what it calls the 'sanctity of marriage.' — (@) Gaines, a longtime darling of Christian viewers from his HGTV Fixer Upper days, fired back in his own thread. 'Talk, ask questions, listen.. maybe even learn,' he wrote. 'Too much to ask of modern American Christian culture. Judge 1st, understand later/never.' — (@) He added that it was 'a sad Sunday when 'non believers' have never been confronted with hate or vitriol until they are introduced to a modern American Christian.' For Hanna and Riggs, visibility was the point. 'We're your neighbors and coworkers,' Hanna told Queerty, 'so it was an amazing opportunity to normalize same-sex couples and families.' The couple, who wed in Washington, D.C., in 2013 and spent years fighting Texas law for parental recognition, say reliving 19th-century hardships was nothing compared to the legal battles they faced back home. While detractors rage online, the inclusion has galvanized queer viewers and stoked fresh interest in the show. The dads' Instagram, @2_dallas_dads, gained thousands of followers after Thursday's premiere, and hashtags like #FrontierDads and #ChipStandsUp trended over the weekend. Beyond the backlash, Back to the Frontier offers a rare snapshot of LGBTQ+ representation in historical-style reality TV. Riggs noted that same-sex couples escaped city ostracism by homesteading together in the real 1880s—a stark reminder that queer families have always existed, even if today's critics refuse to see them. New episodes drop on Thursdays on HBO Max and Magnolia Network. Whether angry tweets help or hurt ratings, the Hanna-Riggs clan is already homesteading squarely in the national spotlight. For many viewers, that's the win that matters. This article originally appeared on Pride: Two gay dads join HBO's 'Back to the Frontier,' and Bible Twitter melts down
New York Times
24-06-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Where does the word ‘soccer' come from?
The word 'soccer' remains at the heart of one of the most enduring, if comparatively low-key and petty fronts of the culture war. At its most basic level, it's a transatlantic disagreement over language, but there seems to be more to it than that. The most basic and probably most sensible point of view is that it's simply one country — America, though there are others — using a word to differentiate one extremely popular sport from a slightly less popular sport. Advertisement But use the word in the wrong context — which is to say, 'in England' — and you can expect paroxysms of disgust from people who seem to think it represents something much deeper. These people are, admittedly, those who are far too easily outraged (check their sent email files and there's a reasonable chance they have also complained to a TV station about a newsreader not wearing a tie), but it seems like these people think of this as somehow chipping away at the identity of the game, and even themselves. It's an Americanism, as everyone knows, and this is apparently something to be suspicious of. If you look on Etsy (surely the great battleground for any sporting culture war), you can find merchandise on either side: in one corner, a T-shirt with the slogan, 'It's football, not soccer', in the other a hoodie proclaiming, 'It's called soccer', complete with suitably patriotic Star-Spangled Banner. It's a curious thing. As Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck wrote in their book It's Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa), 'In general, transatlantic relations have remained peaceful when it comes to sweaters and jumpers, trucks and lorries, boots and trunks, or pants and trousers. Americans get to marvel at the quaintness of the English, the English get to take joy at the Americans' failure to master basic vocabulary. Everybody is happy. Except when it comes to soccer. Why does this word generate such vitriol?' The quick answer is that some people will get outraged about anything. Perhaps more interesting is to look into the story of how the word 'soccer' came into being, which is a bit more detailed than you might think. You probably already know the basics. These days, it is viewed as an Americanism (and also used in Australia, Canada and a few other countries whose own version of football dominates the collective consciousness) but the word soccer came from England at some point in the 1800s. Then, there were two types of football: rugby football and association football, and 'soccer' comes from a contraction of the latter, to differentiate it from the former. Advertisement But where did that contraction originate? It's hard to say exactly how the word came into being, but the most common origin tale comes, as with many things in England in the 1800s, from private schools. The story goes that a student and amateur footballer called Charles Wreford-Brown (who would go on to be a relatively senior figure at the Football Association) was having breakfast at Oriel College, part of Oxford University. The English have a habit of essentially giving nicknames to nouns by adding 'er' onto the end, or by contracting the word and then adding the 'er', with the colloquial word for a five-pound note ('fiver') acting as a good example. So, as Geoffrey Green, the great former football/soccer correspondent for the Times, the London-based newspaper, wrote in his book Soccer: The World Game: 'He was approached by a friend: 'Wreford, come and have a game of 'rugger' after 'brekker'?'. 'No, thank you, John. I'm going to play 'soccer'.' In that fleeting moment, a new word came into being. Little could Wreford-Brown, who was to grace the game for so long afterwards, have realised how the word would finally ring around the world.' It's not clear exactly when this was, but Wreford-Brown was born in 1866, so would have attended university at some point in the mid/late 1880s. Of course, much like many of these neat stories where something has a definitive beginning, there's every chance it's apocryphal: arguably, it's more likely that the word started being used in those circles at around that time, and that the Wreford-Brown story is just a neat peg to hook it on. Indeed, it seems to have been mentioned in print for the first time in 1885, in an edition of The Oldhallian, which was a periodical for Oxford alumni. An unsigned letter to the Oldhallian said: 'The Varsity played Aston Villa and were beaten after a very exciting game; this was pre-eminently the most important 'socker' game played in Oxford this term…' Advertisement It took a little longer to enter more mainstream discourse. The first mention of it in the Manchester Guardian newspaper (now the Guardian) came in 1905, while its first appearance in the Times came in 1907, presciently enough in a letter to the editor about hooliganism. Football gradually became the more prevalent word for the game in England as its popularity grew and became the sport of the working class, but soccer was still routinely used, most often by more highbrow newspaper columnists to differentiate it from rugby, until the 1980s. One of the most popular football entertainment shows in the country was called Soccer AM. Anyone who pretends that soccer is purely an Americanism and football always has been the term used in England is simply incorrect. But of course, despite this, the word soccer is the one that has always been used in America, right? 'Football' is the one with the oval-shaped ball and the helmets, and always has been. Well, sort of. The first mention of soccer in the pages of the New York Times came on October 22, 1905, in a report of a game involving a team known as the Pilgrims, who had come over from England to promote the game in America. 'English socker (sic) team won football match,' read the slightly confusing headline (above), followed by an account of the game at the Polo Grounds in New York that ended 7-1 to the English touring team, declaring it to be a 'clean, well-played contest, bristling with clever passing, intricate dribbling, capital dodging and exceptionally hard kicking'. Capital dodging! Exceptionally hard kicking! Sounds like a jolly old show. You have probably noticed the incorrect spelling in the headline — that may have been the work of some wisecracking members of that Pilgrims team, who told people present at the game that the term came from the thick woollen socks that the players wore. But New York Times reader Frances H Tabor picked up on the snafu, writing a letter to the paper that was published a few weeks later, upbraiding them for their mistaken use of the word. 'In the first place,' wrote Mr Tabor, 'there is no such word, and in the second place, it is an exceedingly ugly and undignified one.' Advertisement But the letter is instructive beyond the ramblings of a haughty pedant, because Mr Tabor (below) goes on to repeat the popular story about where the word came from, writing that it was 'a fad at Oxford and Cambridge to use 'er' at the end of many words, such as foot-er, sport-er and as association did not take an 'er' easily, it was, and is, sometimes spoken of as soccer'. This indicates that the Wreford-Brown origin story is relatively solid. The word seemed to be taking hold by the following year, particularly when English team Corinthians arrived in New York for a tour of exhibition games. And who should be with them, in the touring party as a player but listed as the referee in one fixture that they won 18-0, but our old friend Charles Wreford-Brown? Alas, history doesn't record how he reacted to the word he coined a few years earlier being used halfway around the world. The natural assumption would be that 'soccer' became the automatic term for the sport in America fairly quickly, but that isn't quite the case. The name of the sport's governing body was called, until the 1940s, the United States Football Association. And even when it was changed, 'football' remained. The Harrisburg Telegraph, a newspaper published in Pennsylvania, reported in July 1944 that: 'United States Soccer Football Association is the new name of the organisation having supervision of the booting game, and conducting annual amateur and professional tournaments throughout the country.' In fact, 'football' wasn't entirely dropped from the organisation's title until 1974, when it became the United States Soccer Federation, the name it is known as today. There doesn't seem to be any more complicated reason for this than a sort of institutional dithering — or, as Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman put it in their book Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, it represented their struggles to 'find a distinct identity for soccer that was American, yet also apart from the behemoth of American football'. These days, the distinction is a little clearer. The word that Wreford-Brown (or at least some of his peers) coined is still used by those who love the game around the world, and irritates those of a slightly pedantic disposition. Surely, we can all just settle on that.
Fox News
03-06-2025
- General
- Fox News
Democrats keep losing the culture war, Seattle Christians face violence and more
JESSE WATTERS - Fox News host Democrats knew that former President Joe Biden's 'brain was fried.' Continue watching... CAMPUS SPIES - President Trump's visa policy thwarts China's spy network on college campuses – and in Congress the president wants is for the university to obey the law. Continue reading... NOT A PRAYER - Seattle says praying in public is 'provocative' and the Trump administration is taking noticecover-up scandal could usher in new era of Republican dominance. Continue reading... LIZ PEEK - Trump must stay strong, US reliance on Chinese minerals and drugs puts Americans at risk. Continue reading... HUGH HEWITT - Why the world should care about Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai. Continue reading… JOE CONCHA - Fox News contributor and media critic breaks down the media's coverage of the antisemitic attack in Boulder. Democrats and the liberal media struggle with the narrative following Sunday's attack. Continue watching... DEMS IN DISARRAY - Trump is winning the culture war while Democrats are still hiring 2008's consultants. Continue reading... PASTOR COREY BROOKS - I'm building hope on Chicago's notorious South Side. Continue reading... NOT ONE MORE DIME - Why it's time to pull the plug on NPR and PBS – for good. Continue reading... DAVID MARCUS - Sens Fetterman and McCormick show Washington how to work together again. Continue reading... HOLLYWOOD HYPE - The celebrity circus is trying to convince Americans to fund Planned Parenthood – and they aren't buying it. Continue reading... CARTOON OF THE DAY - Check out all of our political cartoons...
Asharq Al-Awsat
03-06-2025
- Business
- Asharq Al-Awsat
The One Way Trump Hasn't Changed the G.O.P.
By general consensus, if the policies of President Trump's first administration were a compromise between his impulses and the doctrines of the pre-Trump Republican Party, then Trump 2.0 is Trumpism in full. The old order is dissolved, the Bush and Reagan Republicans are exiled or subjugated, and Trump alone sets the agenda for the G.O.P. There are clearly areas where this is true. Trump's foreign policy can be described in various ways — as a form of Jacksonian-inflected realism, as a deal-making blitz, as an immoral attempt to promote a more authoritarian world order — but in each description you can see the outline of something coherent and clearly specific to Trump himself. Likewise the Trumpian culture war, which began with internal bureaucratic battles and now seeks to humble Harvard University, may be reckless or punitive or dubiously legal, but it's easy enough to tell a coherent story in which crushing the strongholds of cultural liberalism is a uniquely Trumpist goal. But the budget battles that delivered the passage of a House tax bill last week feel like a notable exception to this rule. Here the old Republican Party is still powerful, the old ideas still dominant. Here Trumpism as a transformative force is relatively weak, in part because Trump himself doesn't know exactly what he wants. And here it's hard to make the way the Republican majority intends to tax and spend cohere with other elements of the administration's agenda, on trade and immigration above all. In its broad strokes, the House tax bill could have been passed under any Republican president of my adult lifetime. Prioritizing low top tax rates and corporate tax cuts? That's the old song of supply-side economics. Combining those tax cuts with cuts to Medicaid and discretionary programs? That's Paul Ryan's Republican Party. Finding that your spending cuts don't pay for your tax cuts? That's the familiar deficit-financed conservatism of the Reagan and Bush presidencies. Of course, there are aspects of the tax bill that are specific to Trump and his coalition. The Ryan-era G.O.P. was open to trimming Medicare and Social Security; the Trump-era party won't go there. Now, one could counter that since Trump supports the 'big, beautiful' bill, it's Trumpist by definition. Maybe he just is an old-guard Republican on taxes and transfers. But I don't think that's quite right. Trump has lots of economic instincts that differ from the old consensus. That's why he pushed the party leftward on Medicare and Social Security. It's why he recently warned congressional Republicans not to mess with Medicaid. That default, in turn, does not cohere with the other elements of Trumpism. It doesn't cohere politically with his populist appeals because it offers relatively little to the president's downscale base. And it also doesn't cohere as economic policy because it doesn't match with the priorities implied by the president's big trade and immigration moves. Both of those big moves reject the logic of 1990s and early 2000s globalization, the assumption that the freest possible movement of goods and people would necessarily benefit the United States. On trade, for instance, the Trumpian idea that there is a particular interest in building up the American manufacturing base, whether for the sake of increasing blue-collar employment or the sake of national security, strongly implies that the government should be trying to act comprehensively to boost American industry and innovation in at least partial imitation of the Chinese model. The Trump administration has ideas in this area, and its deregulation strategy. My suspicion is that in the next year we'll get some talk about a Trump infrastructure or industrial policy bill but that, as in the first term, it will founder because House Republicans aren't interested and Democrats don't see any upside in bipartisanship. On immigration, similarly, the Trump theory is that America can prosper with much lower rates of low-skilled immigration, thanks to some combination of tech breakthroughs (maybe the robots are finally coming) and higher wages that coax male work force dropouts back to factory jobs. But in the longer run, if you have a much lower immigration rate, you need a higher domestic birthrate. Of course, it's possible that the Trump administration and America will be fortunate, that deregulation alone will clear a path for technological breakthroughs that happen independently of government support, that cultural ferment will yield a more rapid renewal of family formation than any program of baby bonuses or child tax credits. But in the realm of fiscal policy, amid debt and inflation risks, there will never be a Republican agenda oriented fully toward populist goals without a Republican president willing to break a conservative taboo that Trump has mostly left in place, by finding some way to be right-wing and also tax the rich. The New York Times
Washington Post
27-05-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Can universities survive this?
Can universities survive this? President Trump, under the cover of the culture war, is attempting to pull billions of dollars in funding from universities unless they agree to his ideological demands. After Harvard refused and sued the Trump administration, Trump tried banning all of its 27 percent of international students last week. Dana Milbank, Catherine Rampell and Jason Willick discuss why the president is so obsessed with attacking universities, and what the consequences might be for future students.
