Sabrina Carpenter Apologizes for Mocking Arabic Call at Coachella by Derrick Bryson Taylor

Published in The New York Times on April 12, 2026

The core disagreement:
We are told that cultural respect requires embracing all its expressions; in reality, tolerating difference has never meant approving of it.

WHAT THEY GOT RIGHT

On the opening night of Coachella 2026, as singer Sabrina Carpenter sat down at her piano, a sound rang out from the crowd: an ululation (the high-pitched celebratory trill found across the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, known in Arabic as a zaghrouta.) Unfamiliar with the sound and unable to see the person making it, Carpenter asked the crowd if someone was yodeling. When a fan called out that it was part of her culture, Carpenter said she didn’t like it. The exchange went viral. Within hours, social media had rendered its verdict calling her “so insensitive and islamophobic.” The following day, Carpenter apologised on X, writing that her reaction was “pure confusion, sarcasm and not ill intended.”

The idea that public figures should carry themselves with care is not new and long predates the age of social media outrage. History offers examples of cultural practices suppressed in ways that caused harm (Irish music and language banned under colonial rule, Indian classical dance criminalised by British administrators, African drumming outlawed under slavery). But these were not hurt feelings; they were institutional attacks on living traditions. What we witnessed in Carpenter’s case is something else entirely: a culture in which an unguarded reaction to something unfamiliar became a moral transgression and grounds for condemnation.

WHERE THEY GO WRONG

The central error lies in equating an instinctive reaction with a moral failing. A moment of surprise is not the same as contempt or discrimination. By immediately framing such reactions as “racist,” critics collapse the distinction between discomfort and prejudice. This is a mistake that inflates minor human responses into ethical violations. It also discourages honest cultural encounters, replacing them with anxiety and self-censorship.

More broadly, this argument rests on an unworkable premise: that all cultural expressions must be equally affirmed. This flattens meaningful differences and turns culture into something performative rather than real. If individuals are not allowed to register genuine reactions (positive or negative), then any engagement becomes artificial. In the long run, this undermines the very diversity such critics claim to defend.

And this is not a defense of dignity; it is a misunderstanding of what dignity requires, since dignity belongs to persons, not to practices.

THE REAL STORY

Every human being commands respect by virtue of their humanity, but cultural expressions, however cherished, are not people. They can be evaluated, questioned, or simply disliked without any affront to the humanity of those who cherish them. To insist otherwise doesn’t protect people, but rather places their traditions above honest engagement, which is its own form of condescension.

What this moment actually exposes is a cultural overcorrection. In an effort to avoid insensitivity, society has begun to demand not just respect, but emotional conformity.

WHY THIS MATTERS

If every imperfect reaction becomes a moral failing, the result will not be greater understanding, but greater fear. Genuine encounters will be replaced with careful performance: everyone saying the right thing, but no one meaning it. When the cost of getting it wrong is social cancellation, the safer choice is simply not to engage.

A healthy society depends on the ability to distinguish between genuine injustice and simple unfamiliarity. Lose that distinction, and we lose the honest dialogue in which real understanding across cultures, tastes, and experiences actually becomes possible.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Respect for people is non-negotiable. But the expectation that we must approve of every cultural expression is neither realistic nor coherent. A mature society makes room for both dignity and difference.

The verdict: Inside the Manosphere raises important questions about masculinity and media, but ultimately avoids confronting a loss of human dignity in how men and women are taught to see one another.

WHY THIS DOCUMENTARY MATTERS

Over the past decade, a new online ecosystem of male influencers has emerged. At its most compelling, “the manosphere” promises a clear path: build your value through money, dating, and social dynamics. In a culture where many young men feel lost, that message is both simple and seductive. But what it actually does is blend genuinely good self-improvement advice with more extreme (and often contradictory and problematic) views. Louis Theroux’s documentary arrives when this shift is impossible to ignore. Young men today are drifting; less likely to marry, less engaged in education or work, and struggling with a loss of direction.

THE STORY

Theroux travels to Miami and Marbella to meet prominent influencers who attract millions of young men seeking guidance on discipline, money, and relationships.As the institutions that once shaped male identity—stable families, vocational pathways, community, and faith—have weakened, the manosphere offers an answer that is often crude, sometimes insightful and frequently contradictory. It combines self-help advice about fitness and entrepreneurship with aggressive commentary on modern dating culture. The result is part motivational seminar, part reality show, and part ideological rebellion against progressive cultural norms. Although Theroux’s documentary captures the spectacle of that world, it struggles to interrogate the crisis beneath it.

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

On the surface, the documentary asks whether the manosphere represents a dangerous radicalization of young men with status, money, and sexual access as the currency of success. What is striking, though, is not just the ambition of this model, but what it leaves out: any serious account of love, responsibility, or the inherent dignity of the human person.

Women are not only objectified within this framework, but also shown as complicit within it, reinforcing a kind of mutual resignation in which both men and women accept a diminished view of themselves, framed instead as liberation, optimization and success.

WHAT WORKS

One of the most revealing tensions lies in the movement’s relationship with the sexually-explicit social media platform OnlyFans. Several influencers openly profit from the very system they claim to despise, benefiting financially from the commodification of women while simultaneously condemning it as a sign of cultural decay. The documentary effectively exposes this hypocrisy. This contradiction is not incidental; it reveals a worldview that critiques moral decline while actively participating in it, exposing not just hypocrisy, but an absence of any coherent moral framework.

WHAT DOESN’T

The documentary repeatedly frames the influencers as provocateurs who profit from controversy, but spends far less time examining the cultural vacuum that created their audience in the first place.

While Theroux briefly acknowledges fatherlessness, trauma, and social isolation as possible drivers, he doesn’t delve into them enough. It leaves the important question largely untouched: what social, economic, and cultural shifts have made this form of masculinity so compelling to so many young men?

THE CULTURAL MOMENT

For those concerned with restoring Western civilization, the task extends beyond criticising the manosphere itself. It requires rebuilding the foundations that once formed young men: family life, faith, education, and community—offering healthier models of responsibility, purpose, and belonging. The documentary captures an instinctive skepticism reflecting a broader collapse of trust, not just in media production, but in these very institutions that have, over time, lost credibility with many.

The film also risks flattening the manosphere into a single, coherent ideology. In reality, it is a fragmented and contradictory ecosystem: part business model, part cultural rebellion, and part sincere search for meaning and masculine identity in a rapidly shifting social landscape.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Inside the Manosphere reveals a culture arguing with itself about masculinity, authority, and truth. But until we address the deeper crisis of meaning facing young men, the voices filling that vacuum (however flawed) will only grow louder.

The challenge is not just to critique this movement, but to offer something better: a shared moral vision of manhood and womanhood rooted not in dominance or optimization, but in dignity, responsibility, and ultimately, love.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Chief Editor of Restoring the West and a leading writer on freedom, religion, and Western civilization. After fleeing Somalia to escape a forced marriage, she built a life in the Netherlands and served as a Member of Parliament. Her journey from Islam to atheism and ultimately to Christianity shapes her perspective on faith, family, and the future of the West.

Drawing on her experiences across continents and cultures, she considers why Western art and culture feel adrift today, how centuries of faith and creativity have guided human meaning, and what it would take to restore a sense of shared purpose, moral depth, and aesthetic wonder back into our society today.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

RtW: Many great works of art seem to wrestle with uncomfortable truths about human nature. Do you think the role of art is to comfort people or to confront them?

AHA: I think it’s both. Some art—especially Christian art—is about worship. If you visit the Sistine Chapel or look at centuries of paintings of Jesus, the disciples, angels, or scenes from Dante, hell, purgatory, heaven, and God’s kingdom, they all show worship. And it’s not just paintings —cathedrals, music, and literature do this, too. Many stories and works put us in moral dilemmas and ask questions about God and suffering. These questions show up in prose, paintings, and statues. Art can comfort us with the hope of salvation and praise, but it can also challenge us. Art deals with times when people have done terrible things, like the Holocaust, and makes us face hard truths about human nature, which Christianity calls the fallen nature.

Read more

WHY IT MATTERS

Recently, the International Olympic Committee announced a new policy to protect the female category in Olympic sport beginning with the 2028 Los Angeles Games. The decision reflects a growing recognition that biological sex differences matter in competition. After years of heated debate, the world’s most influential sporting body is acknowledging a simple reality: fairness in women’s sport requires recognizing that men and women are not physically identical.

Yet while sport is beginning to reassert this very real biological distinction, popular culture continues to blur it. Hollywood action films increasingly portray men and women as physically interchangeable in fight scenes, routinely depicting female characters overpowering much larger male opponents (see Red Notice, Pitch Perfect 3, both Jumanjis, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga for examples). The goal is often to signal empowerment, but the result is a subtle cultural message that equality requires denying biological differences.

To be clear, films do more than entertain; they also shape how millions understand human nature, gender, and social expectations. So when Hollywood repeatedly depicts men and women as evenly matched in physical confrontation, it subtly rewrites basic truths about the human body. When Angelina Jolie easily keeps pace with Brad Pitt in Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s fight scenes, for instance, even emerging victorious in hand-to-hand combat in a typical suburban setting, she isn’t merely amusing filmgoers on a Saturday night—she is instead signaling that if she can do it, other women can, too. But that simply isn’t reality, as science overwhelmingly demonstrates the significant advantages the average man holds over even a highly-trained, fit woman.

That fact is why we must ensure that biological reality is respected on screen, as well as in the boxing ring. In England and Wales, 72.1% of victims in domestic abuse-related crimes were female in the year ending March 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics. When films routinely depict men and women trading blows as equals, they normalize a vision of violence that conflicts with real-world vulnerability. Storytelling that ignores this truth risks shaping perceptions of strength, protection, and what moral behaviour is considered acceptable beyond the screen.

The choreography of these films is entertaining, sure, but it strains credibility. Fans may argue that action films are merely escapist fiction, yet these repeated portrayals weaken a long-standing moral intuition at the heart of Western civilization: that strength carries responsibility. For centuries, societies understood that men’s greater physical strength carried a duty of restraint and protection. The norm that men should not strike women was not an expression of female inferiority, but a recognition of asymmetry, and the civilizing expectation that strength should be used to protect, not dominate. When cultural narratives erase those differences, they also risk erasing the moral framework that once governed them.

The International Olympic Committee’s recent policy highlights the tension. In elite sport, biological difference is now being openly acknowledged again because fairness requires it. Yet outside sport, many cultural institutions still resist recognizing the same reality. Studies of mixed‑gender military training show that female recruits tend to experience higher rates of certain musculoskeletal injuries than their male counterparts during basic training, partly because they are often performing the same physically demanding tasks in integrated units without adjustments for average sex‑based differences in strength and physiology.

Restoring clarity here does not diminish women. On the contrary, it allows female achievement to be recognized within the truth of embodied difference rather than within artificial standards of sameness.Western civilization has historically understood equality in richer terms: equal dignity, equal moral worth, and equal protection under the law paired with an honest recognition that men and women are not identical. Recovering that balance needs to be part of restoring cultural sanity.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The debate over women’s sport is ultimately a debate about truth. Equality does not mean pretending differences do not exist. If the West hopes to restore a culture grounded in reality, our stories (on the screen and beyond) must rediscover the wisdom that dignity and difference can coexist.

WHY IT MATTERS

Sports may seem trivial to busy conservatives—until you realize they’re one of the last places Americans still share a common identity that isn’t political, binding people across generations through loyalty to place and team. Last week, I fell to my knees as Vanderbilt’s Tyler Tanner launched a half-court heave, and suddenly I was homesick for my longsuffering state—Saturday mornings listening to Kent Pavelka on the way to swim meets, windows down, the car filled with the smell of fresh-cut sod. Our hopes hung for 2.2 seconds before the ball clanged out; Nebraska had reached its first-ever Sweet Sixteen, and I could hear my family cheering hours away.

Behind me, my husband watched on, bemused—still faintly carrying the skepticism of the theater kids who shunned college football games, who saw sports as primitively tribal, who mocked the fans on pilgrimage to the Big House. They, of course, fell into affinity groups, political parties, and DEI programs—tribes that deepened the very fissures they claimed to heal. At my alma mater, a campus climate survey showed that as DEI initiatives and staff increased, students reported a declining sense of belonging and fewer interactions across differences over time. Nationally, the dynamic scales: nearly two-thirds of Americans now view their opposing political party as immoral—not just wrong, but downright evil.

The fact is, the theater kids were right—sports are tribal, and that’s a good thing. Sports are less violent surrogates of the basic human need sought in politics and racial identity: to belong to a group that feels like an extension of oneself, a need so fundamental that research on the “tribal roots of team spirit” shows humans are neurologically wired for group affiliation and collective identity. “Fans assign themselves to a team, a tribe, a culture,” said Kent Pavelka, Nebraska’s own play-by-play announcer since 1974, “and people who refuse to experience that are not going to understand tribalism in its best sense.” Sports give us a socially constructive way to belong to something bigger than ourselves, transforming collective struggle into we won instead of me against you.

And struggle we have. Year after year, Nebraska sports fans have watched their teams (volleyball not included) find new and creative ways to lose at the buzzer. Nebraska basketball has made the NCAA Tournament just nine times in its history—and until this week, had gone 0–8, the only major conference program to never win a game. “I’ve lived through so many missed chances, missed shots that crush you and send you crawling back home,” said Pavelka. Yet, we keep showing up. In fact, Nebraska fans are the most loyal in the nation: an estimated 69% of tickets for the Oklahoma City Session 1 were purchased by Nebraskans, who turned the Paycom Center into a sea of red—setting a noise record and cheering louder for Coach Fred Hoiberg and his humble team than when the Oklahoma City Thunder closed out Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals.

“I think it has to do with deep roots,” said Pavelka, whose great-grandmother was the inspiration for the titular character in My Ántonia. “There’s something special about the Plains. We have fortitude. We endure winters and hardship. All of that contributes to our identity.” Last night, as I listened to Pavelka call the battle against Iowa, I pictured my dad at seven, eight, fifteen, twenty—sitting next to his father at the kitchen table on a cold winter night, listening to that same voice on a transistor radio, a common thread running through one multigenerational story. This is the inheritance the West is in danger of losing.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The real problem isn’t our tendency toward tribal instincts—it’s that we have politicized them. Sports, and the decades of collective heartbreak suffered for the sake of a single moment of transcendent success, redeem our tribal instinct, binding one generation to the next and watering roots that grow deeper than our politics. In the end, this is what we’re all seeking—theater kids and athletes alike.

Grace Salvatore is Senior Editor of Media, Arts, and Culture at Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Follow her on X @grace_daley_s.

WHY IT MATTERS

Sasse’s December 25 op-ed began, “Friends … Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.” But his model of hope in the face of death stands out because it presents such stark contrast to the hopelessness of our day. We live in a uniquely cynical age—one marked by conspiracy, institutional distrust, and the reflexive mocking of goodness as naïveté. In such a world, news like Sasse’s can feel like proof of Macbeth’s verdict: life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

When cynicism becomes a cultural default, the shared story that once bound the West together begins to unravel. Centuries ago, Jonathan Edwards described much the same phenomenon in his work Charity and Its Fruits: “Immediately upon the fall, the mind of man shrank from its primitive greatness and expandedness, to an exceeding smallness and contractedness.” This is cynicism—the soul compressed around the very narrow dimensions of the self.

Nowhere is this incurvatus in se clearer than in the face of death. We’ve all seen it: family and friends who, when confronted with the prospect, knot inward like tree roots in a sandbox. They trade every warm, renewing rain for the cold comfort of safety. They start waiting to die. This spiritual contraction terrifies because we feel it happen in ourselves. We know it’s our natural posture, our human inertia—unless, with “gravelly-but-hopeful voices,” as Sasse penned, we fight, soldiering through tears. What can rouse us to struggle against this smallness of soul?

When I open a new book, I read the last page first, much to my husband’s dismay—as if knowing the ending somehow strips the journey of its joy. Not at all. It helps me marvel at the Author’s plan through pages of exposition: to notice the details, savor the days, and follow the map He has woven. It answers my nagging questions: What will our protagonist’s life amount to? Will she make it to the end? In the same way, Bunyan’s Pilgrim drowning in the River of Death cannot help but feel the silty bottom and know that “it is good”—cannot escape the stubborn, insistent, inevitable hope that endings are not truly the end. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.” In other words, when we know the ending, we can live.

Sasse is in the middle of the novel, undergoing grueling clinical trials and intense pain, bleeding from his face that causes clotting on his pillows. He’s had to tell his daughters he won’t walk them down the aisle; his parents that they’ll bury their son. Yet, he’s struggling, raging, snorting mad, stunningly joyful. “I have more to say,” he wrote in December. “I’m not going down without a fight.” The process of dying, it seems, has only made him more alive. Sasse models the kind of hope our culture desperately needs—a hope grounded in the certainty that the story does not end in the grave.

THE BOTTOM LINE

“The end of the story,” Sasse said on a recent podcast, “is that the new Adam came from heaven, laid down all of his prerogatives, and swept us up…” —his voice broke. “…raised us and seated us in heavenly places,” his cohost finished. If the West is to renew itself, it must once again believe that death is not the final word.

Grace Salvatore is Senior Editor of Media, Arts, and Culture at Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Follow her on X @grace_daley_s.

Timothy Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey: A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event

Aired on CNN on February 21st, 2026

The core disagreement: Chalamet assumes atrophy is exclusive to older art forms, while the same forces—shortened attention spans and loss of cultural memory—are dragging Hollywood toward similar obscurity.

WHAT THEY GOT RIGHT

Chalamet, unfortunately, isn’t wrong: the high arts are on life support. Opera attendance plunged nearly 68 percent from 2017 to 2022, and ballet fell 36 percent. The Metropolitan Opera’s 2024‑25 season sold just 72 percent of its seats, while New York City Opera collapsed into bankruptcy. Artists outraged over Chalamet’s comments miss the point: these are symptoms of a far deeper cultural illness.

WHERE THEY GO WRONG

Only the aloofness of the A-list celebrity could make Chalamet so critical of the world’s oldest art forms, and so capable of misdiagnosing his own industry completely. Hollywood itself is collapsing. The Oscars are a revealing microcosm: in 1998, 57 million people tuned in to watch Titanic dominate; today the broadcast struggles to reach roughly 20 million viewers, a 65 percent drop from its peak. U.S. moviegoing has fallen just as sharply: annual ticket sales dropped from about 1.3 billion in 2019 to roughly 764 million in 2025 (a 40 percent decline in six years), remaining well below pre-pandemic levels despite blockbuster releases like Barbie and Oppenheimer.

This collapse aligns closely with a shift in how audiences consume media. Between 2015 and 2018, Instagram video, Snapchat Stories, and algorithm-driven feeds began pulling audiences toward endlessly refreshing, bite-sized content. From 2019 to 2021, TikTok accelerated the trend, drawing more than a billion users each month into ninety-second dopamine loops. Combined with pandemic lockdowns and fatigue with celebrity culture, audiences now engage with movies, once a defining American art form, differently. Researchers document a generation craving bright colors, violent CGI, and short runtimes over rich, cultivated craft.

THE REAL STORY

Short-form video is reshaping how people consume and remember stories by weakening our capacity for sustained attention. Researchers at Cornell University found that rapidly changing clips, like those on TikTok, degrade prospective memory—the ability to remember intentions or follow through on tasks—making it harder to track longer narrative arcs. A 2025 study similarly found that heavy short-video use weakens sustained attention and memory. As Matt Damon recently noted while promoting The Rip, streaming platforms increasingly ask writers to reiterate plot points throughout dialogue to compensate for audiences watching while distracted by their phones. The result: a culture capable of watching, but increasingly unable to remember what they’ve seen.

WHY THIS MATTERS

When a culture loses the ability to sustain attention, it loses the ability to transmit meaning. The arts have historically preserved shared memory, moral imagination, and civilizational inheritance, and when audiences abandon sustained forms of storytelling, those cultural functions weaken. The decline of opera, ballet, and even cinema reflects not just changing tastes but a deeper erosion of cultural attention. What’s at risk is more than entertainment: it’s our capacity to converse, to feel deeply, to reflect and draw connections, and ultimately, to make meaning of our own world and our place in it.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The decline of the high arts is not an isolated failure of taste. It is a warning: the same attention economy reshaping culture is already eroding Hollywood’s audience as well. When people lose the capacity to sustain attention, every art form will eventually suffer. The real crisis facing the arts is not relevance, but whether a distracted culture can still sustain the forms of storytelling that once shaped its imagination.

Grace Salvatore is Senior Editor of Media, Arts, and Culture at Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Follow her on X @grace_daley_s.