‘Winning Battles, Losing Wars’

 

It seems more and more to be the case with those who call themselves conservatives in the United States and the broader West that they will vigorously support a cause only to find that, in the end, their victories bring about an increase in evil rather than less.

This is playing out for everyone to see right now with the Sydney Sweeney uproar.  Many on the ‘Right’ have convinced themselves that her soft porn American Eagle blue jeans commercial is delivering people from the woke virus (One podcast went so far as to claim in its title that ‘Sydney Sweeney’s Boobs Are Saving America’).  There is no shortage of commentary to this effect on conservative web sites.  This one from Lauren Smith at The European Conservative is typical:

 

Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign is the antithesis to the progressive dogma that briefly dominated the advertising industry. This is partially because Sweeney as a figure has long provoked the ire of the woke crowd. For starters, she is an unapologetically hot girl-next-door, who seemingly enjoys and plays up to male attention in a way that many actresses now shun. She’s also largely apolitical—she’s certainly no Rachel Zegler or Jennifer Lawrence, who regularly berate and lecture their own fans for having the “wrong” politics. All this makes her a target for leftists who hate beauty and fun. In 2022, they tried to cancel Sweeney for appearing to have Trump-supporting family members who she hadn’t yet publicly disavowed. And she has been turned into a sort of symbol of the Right, as men who find the conventionally attractive star beautiful are accused of being “obsessed with a toxic ideal of womanhood.”

 

The inescapable reality is that most of us enjoy looking at people who look like Sydney Sweeney. The numbers bear this out—polling apparently shows that around 70% of a surveyed audience liked the American Eagle ad. In fact, the collab with Sweeney saw American Eagle’s share price increase by 15%, adding around $400 million to the company’s value. By contrast, people don’t love having unnecessary diversity rammed down their throats, or having to pretend they find the objectively unattractive attractive. The week Bud Light made the disastrous decision to partner up with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in 2023, the resulting boycott cost the company a 21% drop in sales. The week after that, sales were still down 11%. It cost them around $1 billion overall. Similarly, Jaguar’s weird, gender-bending ad did virtually nothing to entice consumers. Nor did its pivot towards electric vehicles. Sales are down by a whopping 97% in Europe since last year.

 

In many ways, the backlash against Sweeney and her jeans/genes is the last gasp of the old woke order.  . . .  In a post-Trump-reelection world, Sweeneygate feels weirdly old-fashioned and out-of-place.  . . .  Women are allowed to be blonde, busty, and beautiful again. Long may it last.

Another conservative writer, Dr Steve Turley, repeats a lot of those points and adds these thoughts:

 

Here’s the takeaway: the pendulum has swung, and it’s not swinging back. Corporate America has finally realized that pandering to 3% of the population while alienating the other 97% is bad business. The companies that succeed in 2025 and beyond will be the ones that return to basics—selling products to normal people who want to be inspired, not lectured. Sydney Sweeney didn’t just save American Eagle’s stock price; she proved that American consumers crave authentic, aspirational advertising that celebrates success, beauty, and traditional values.

It is the last words of both of these writers that are most curious and most disturbing.  Pro-family, Christian groups like Focus on the Family waged a veritable crusade against Abercrombie and Fitch several years ago for dressing up their models in skimpy, suggestive clothing.  But now, because we live in TrumpWorld, when women dress up in, forgive us, slutty-looking clothes, we are to celebrate that borderline pornography as ‘busty’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘traditional values’.

We can already hear the reactions so far:  ‘Walt, you old prude, you need to relax a little and just celebrate a win over the woke Left.’  That’s fine; we can take the arrows.  And there is a certain amount of truth in such criticism.  A change in corporate advertisements away from transgender models, effeminate men, etc., is certainly welcome.

But to end one’s analysis at that point is to make a critical error.  It assumes that a political/cultural victory over wokeism via the exaltation of a woman’s shapely breasts and buttocks is tantamount to ‘salvation’ for the US/West.  It is not.

Mankind may be a political animal, but he is not solely that.  He is also, and primarily, a spiritual being, and everything must be judged by spiritual criteria, not by the approval or disapproval of the latest popular influencer on X.  That being so, what do the leaders of the Church have to say about women exploiting their beauty?

The Holy Apostle Peter couldn’t be more clear in his directions to women in his First Universal Letter (3:1-5):  Don’t flaunt the physical beauty of the body but downplay it, and work instead to adorn yourselves with the spiritual beauty of the virtues –

 . . .

The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/winning-battles-losing-wars/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Redistricting Battles a Prelude to a Real Civil War?’

 

The War between the States from 1861-1865 is often called the Civil War, but that is incorrect.  A civil war is a war fought by factions whose goal is to take control of a national government.  That is not what the Southern States were seeking to do when they seceded from the union; they were not interested in conquering Washington, DC (That city isn’t even a national government; it’s a federal government.  And, yes, the difference between the two is significant.).  Southerners only wanted to do what their forefathers had done several decades earlier in 1776:  Separate from a people and a government that they felt was threatening their way of life, in their case, a Christian, agrarian way of life.

Having defined our terms more precisely, we may move on to the issue at hand.  What we are witnessing today with the battles being waged in State governments over federal congressional districts could be a preparatory stage for a real civil war.  These redistricting battles are nothing else but a non-violent method of gaining or retaining control of the federal House of Representatives – i.e., taking control of a powerful branch of the federal government.  The heated rhetoric shows how tenuous that non-violence is:

‘Top Democrats are speaking — and acting — in increasingly existential terms over the audacious Trump-backed push to redraw Texas' congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterms.

‘ . . . "This is a war. We are at war. And that's why the gloves are off, and I say bring it on," New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared at a press conference Monday, accusing Texas Republicans of a "legal insurrection."

‘ . . . Outside Texas, key Democratic governors have launched an aggressive counteroffensive to try to neutralize the GOP's redistricting push.

• ‘In California, Newsom is eyeing a November special election that would sideline the state's independent redistricting commission and ask voters to approve a new, legislature-drawn map favoring Democrats.

 

• ‘In New York, Hochul said Democrats have "no choice" but to pursue a constitutional amendment to authorize new maps — though it wouldn't appear on the ballot until 2027 at the earliest.

 

• ‘In Illinois, where the congressional map is already heavily gerrymandered, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has vowed to protect fleeing Texas Democrats and left the door open to further revisions of the state's map.

‘Between the lines: Newsom, who's made no secret of his presidential ambitions, has openly accused Trump of "rigging" the midterms and suggested California could redraw its map to eliminate all nine GOP-held seats.

‘ . . . Hochul, who is running for re-election in 2026, has emerged as an unlikely face of the Democratic resistance.

• ‘She called Monday for disbanding New York's independent redistricting commission and embracing partisan hardball, telling reporters that she's "tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back."

 

• ‘"I cannot ignore that the playing field has changed dramatically, and shame on us if we ignore that fact and cling tight to the vestiges of the past," Hochul said.

‘The bottom line: Both sides are keenly aware that a Democratic victory in 2026 would grind Trump's agenda to a halt and potentially lead to his third impeachment.

• ‘"He knows he's going to lose in the midterms, and we have the opportunity to de facto end the Trump presidency in less than 18 months," Newsom said at a press conference Monday.

 

• ‘"That's what's at stake"’ (Zachary Basu, ‘Democrats go nuclear in redistricting arms race,’ Axios, via msn.com).

This is not the only pressure point in relations between the Red and Blue States:  There are battles over voter ID laws, lawfare, the Electoral College, and ballot removals, as well as Blue State shield laws that protect abortion-pill-dispensing doctors from being prosecuted in pro-life Red States where abortions are illegal.  And the list could go on.

These tensions threaten to eradicate what little remains of the goodwill between the Red and Blue States.  There are not many options to ease them:

1.  One of the sides capitulates.  Not likely in the current political atmosphere.

2.  Both sides take a step back and negotiate to reach a mutually beneficial settlement.  Again, not likely given the brinksmanship we’re witnessing.

3.  The two blocs of States, the more conservative and the more progressive, agree to separate and form new confederations.  Not likely either, because of the falsehoods that have been taught for generations about State sovereignty, secession, etc.

Therefore, the zero-sum political struggle in which the States are engaged seems likely to intensify.  But we have only ourselves to blame.

In Christian history there a number of instances of appeals being made to supernatural arbitrators (i.e., the saints) to resolve intractable disagreements.  . . . 

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/08/garlington-redistricting-battles-a-prelude-to-a-real-civil-war/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

“The Monastic Republic of Arkansas”

 

Rivers and streams of water

Sparkling like clear crystals

Amid rolling hills clothed in grass

And trees emerald-green,

Fountains seeping from solid

Mountain sides, as if struck

By the rod of Moses,

Birdsong alone the hushed

Stillness breaking that rests

Blithely upon the whole –

Some Adamic soul who

Possessed deeper vision

Named the Natural State

Rightly.  Her beauty is

Both pristine and profound,

But she has not yet fulfilled

Her God-given purpose.

She waits for the rhythmic

Sounding of the semantron

Early in the dusky dawn,

The rich voice of ringing bells

Nestled in their towers,

Prayers and psalms read and sung

At every hour of the day,

For Eucharistic bread and wine

Consecrated on holy altars,

Pentecost re-enacted,

The Holy Ghost descending

And filling every mite

Of matter with the flames

Of sanctifying Grace,

For the Jesus Prayer

Whispered and sighed from lips

Of angelic hesychasts

As knees softly touch the floor

Inside of cells or upon

The soft soil of the earth

Beneath the brilliant blue sky,

 . . .

The rest is at https://southernorthodox.org/the-monastic-republic-of-arkansas/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!