Commentary Culture Investigations

On June 24, two severe earthquakes within the span of a minute shook northern Venezuela, completely collapsing dozens of buildings and damaging others. Families of residents in the Belo Horizonte apartment complex in the city of La Guaira searched for 41 hours through the rubble without official rescue support. “Honestly, there wasn’t a single Civil Guard officer, rescuer or police officer there,” recounted one citizen in a missing-persons WhatsApp group last Friday morning. Only half an hour later did firefighters and emergency personnel finally arrive at the complex. 
For much of the first few days, power outages, loss of water, and jammed roads into the disaster zones slowed the arrival of the heavy machinery needed to reach survivors. Many families and communities were left to dig by hand as the crucial first 72 hours for rescuing survivors quickly closed.
Five days later, the scale of the devastation remains grim. Venezuelan officials currently estimate the death toll near 1,450, with more than 3,000 injured and more than 12,000 displaced. The number of missing remains uncertain, but leading estimates put it in the tens of thousands.
An indicator of the health of a country is whether its response in the aftermath of a natural disaster minimizes or exacerbates the problem.
An indicator of the health of a country is whether its response in the aftermath of a natural disaster minimizes or exacerbates the problem. In Venezuela, the aftermath has exposed the decades-long decay of public institutions and infrastructure under Chavismo.
Former presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro spent years hollowing out Venezuela’s institutions for the sake of making socialism look viable, from the medical system and power grid to state media and public works. But the most relevant failure today is housing. In 2011, Chávez promised to solve “the housing drama inherited from capitalism” through a program that would see two million homes built over the next seven years. In March 2018, Maduro claimed to have fulfilled his predecessor’s promise and pledged to construct an additional three million homes by 2025. Many apartments built under the “Great Housing Mission” were constructed in the state of La Guaira after mudslides devastated the area in 1999.
The apartments were also built. But like so much of the Chavismo platform, it turned a genuine social need into empty political pageantry. Units were distributed through the state, built at speed, and presented as proof that socialism could provide what the private initiative of markets supposedly could not. What went unadvertised by the socialists was the weak oversight and questionable compliance with safety codes and construction in areas noted for soil instability. 
Soft soil in parts of northern Venezuela, combined with the tall concrete apartment model favored by the Great Housing Mission, was always a recipe for disaster. “The risk was known,” said Eduardo Núñez Castellanos, a Venezuelan structural engineer and professor. In 2023, Núñez coauthored a study that found buildings higher than 20 stories and built to minimum code requirements had more than an 80 percent chance of collapse when shaken violently in an earthquake.
The victims of Venezuela’s earthquakes deserve rescue, aid, and mourning. But they also deserve accountability. The Chavista regime spent decades promising to protect the poor. It delivered a system with virtually no functional emergency response and infrastructure riddled with shortages.
Natural disasters test whether a country’s institutions are strong enough to protect its people when things go awry. In Venezuela, the earthquakes revealed in seconds a collapse decades in the making.
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Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

Last year, I wrote on the “myth of magic soil,” an idea blithely trotted out by anti-American leftists — and even many on the more moderate of the political spectrum’s right wing — and hammered into the minds of citizens ad nauseam. According to the myth of magic soil, anyone can become an American just by coming to America. Doesn’t matter if you come from a high-trust Anglo-Saxon community steeped in Christian morality and born from the profound courage and towering thought of the Western tradition or if you crawled out of some impoverished, crime-ridden, backwards Third World Muslim country, the Left declares that you can be just as American as the man whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower and whose family has served in the U.S. Armed Forces every generation since 1776. (RELATED: The Myth of Magic Soil)
Amongst those ostensibly on the political right, the only amendment to this idea would be requisite acceptance of some American “creed.” What that creed is, no one has yet been able to articulate, and questioning the particulars of the creed often ends with the inquisitor being labeled something like “intolerant,” “bigoted,” or “racist.”
Obviously, this idea of “magic soil” is patently false. Americans are a unique and specific people with a unique and specific culture, a unique and specific history, and a unique and specific set of values.
What’s equally erroneous, however, is the leftist notion of what I call “cursed soil.” In the leftist’s warped imagination, America has “magic soil,” which somehow bestows upon even the most un-American of newcomers the title of American, along with the American dream and all the benefits of American law.
The myth of magic soil is invoked when attempting to usher unwashed hordes of foreign insurgents, almost none of whom assimilate and nearly all of whom espouse and promote values and ideals antithetical and even hostile to the American people and American culture. The myth of cursed soil, on the other hand, is just the inverse, and is invoked when attempting to ensure that the refuse of the Third World — who obstinately decline to speak English and aggressively set about transforming whatever bejeweled metropolis or charming small town they’ve been dumped upon into the streets of whatever dump they escaped from — back to their places of origin. (RELATED: Munich and the Fate of the West)
Simply put, the Court clarified that the “T” in TPS means “temporary.”
Here’s a good example: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled late last week that President Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary has the legal authority to terminate temporary protected status (TPS) for a host of foreign nationals, including some quarter million Haitian nationals, some of whom have been living in the U.S. under the auspices of TPS for nearly two decades, but many of whom were ushered into the country by former president Joe Biden and his right-hyena, Kamala Harris. Simply put, the Court clarified that the “T” in TPS means “temporary.”
In response, Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) lamented that thousands of Haitians will likely be repatriated to Haiti. “This is cruelty, this is inhumane, and this is a death sentence,” the congresswoman intoned, her hysterics punctuated by the gaudy, sequined cowboy hat she wears for some reason. “In Haiti, there’s open warfare and rape, there’s ravaging violence against women and children.”
This is an example of the myth of cursed soil. Just as America’s magic soil weaves a spell or enchantment to make those who set foot here into dyed-in-the-red-white-and-blue-wool Americans, so Haiti’s cursed soil afflicts all who arrive with madness, violence, rape, and poverty. What is never acknowledged is the fact that Haiti is the way that it is because it’s full of Haitians. (Obviously, not all Haitians are murderers, rapists, pet-snatchers, etc. Some are extraordinarily lovely people. But the country is in the shape that it’s in largely due to the management of its native population, who do happen to commit violence and rape and other crimes at fairly high rates.)
Extracting Haitians from Haiti and planting them in the U.S. does not make the extracted Haitians suddenly no longer Haitian. It does not magically transform them into model American citizens. Instead, it simply takes large numbers of people accustomed to violence, rape, and other crimes and places them in an environment where such things are illegal, and where the native population is thoroughly unaccustomed to such behavior. Well, was thoroughly unaccustomed to such behavior — they’ve gotten one hell of an introduction over the past several years.
Likewise, returning Haitian nationals who have no right to be in the U.S. to Haiti is not a “death sentence,” it is not the same as rounding up law-abiding American citizens and airdropping them into a Third World war zone. It is simply returning Haitian nationals who have no right to be here to their country of origin, to their home. It is shameful and repugnant that Biden and his former boss, Barack Obama, continually extended Haiti’s TPS designation and the unnecessary sojourn of Haitian nationals in the U.S. But the imprudent (at best — at worst, malicious) decisions of two of the worst presidents in recent history should not damn the American people to suddenly living their lives alongside the same people who made Haiti the way that it is — full of “open warfare and rape” and “ravaging violence,” to quote Rep. Wilson’s description.
There is no magic soil. There is no cursed soil. There are people — with their blood, their spirit, their culture, their history, their faith, their values, their ideals — who built the greatest nation on the face of the earth, and there are other people — with their blood, their spirit, their culture, their history, their faith, their values, their ideals — who have created a country which even the multiculturalist Democrats describe as a “death sentence.” As President Trump observed in a Truth Social post, “Sadly, if you import people from Third World Countries, you quickly become a Third World Country — And there’s not a thing you can do about it.” The White House’s X account summed up the maxim more succinctly: “Import the Third World, and you become the Third World.”
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Image licensed under Attribution 2.0 Generic.

I know, I know. The first half-dozen comments under this piece will provide the criticism that I shouldn’t use mealy-mouthed words like “almost” in a headline like the above.
Which is another way of saying that among the American Spectator’s readership, there isn’t a lot of dissent to the idea that our educational system, from bottom to top, has gone to seed.
I will defend the use of “almost” only by noting that there are still educational institutions out there providing quality instruction. In virtually every city of size, there are at least a handful of options where kids won’t be indoctrinated into the kind of anti-American woke stupidity that has become virtually omnipresent in the public schools. And of course, there is the burgeoning panoply of resources available to homeschoolers, which stands as the silver lining to the mess we’re in.
So I’ve now provided the justification for my hedge. And we can move on.
To saying that the education system, chiefly in the public sector but certainly not limited to it, is beginning to calcify as a fundamental, existential threat to the American way of life.
I could regale you with polling data and statistics showing the cavernous ignorance that our schools are infecting our youth with, but you almost certainly already know these things.
For example…

“No money for schools.” NYC has a $43 billion dollar school system whose funding has gone up as enrollment has gone down. It has the highest per-student expenditure in the nation of up to $40K a year. 28-29% of students test proficient in math and reading (NAEP). https://t.co/ohjgMMt4eT
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) June 28, 2026

Darializa Avila Chevalier is about as total a poster child for American education as there is, given that she’s 32 years old and has never not been in school, including more than 14 years of post-secondary education, and with every utterance, she demonstrates that she knows literally less than nothing. (RELATED: DAC, the New AOC, Signals Something Communist This Way Comes)
And Chevalier has studied largely at competitive institutions — most notably Columbia — which at one time were known as centers of learning.
Now Columbia produces communist Dominicans with genocidal attitudes toward Jews.
And those lunatics with functionally room-temperature IQs are celebrated by fellow “highly-educated” and privileged urbanites in cities like New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles.
This isn’t a new problem. Joy Reid has a degree from Yale, after all.
But the stupid is one problem. The crazy is another.
How does this draw a salary at an American institution of secondary education?
A radical, Israel-hating California teacher claimed she married a Gaza resident online to help him gain American citizenship — and push her pro-Palestinian agenda.
Laura Pinho, a dance teacher at Canoga Park Senior High School in California, announced her nuptials in a wild June 16 CODEPINK Zoom webinar called “Challenging Zionism In Our Schools.”
When CODEPINK activist Marcy Winograd congratulated her on her marriage and asked her to share details about her life, Pinho, 51, launched into a pedantic monologue about how she only married Salem S.E. Abu Amra to advance “Palestinian rights and freedoms.”
“I have power as an American citizen. I have a passport that I was just born with, and how can I live in this world if I don’t make every effort to equalize the playing field on whatever way that I can,” she said in the webinar, first uncovered by the North American Values Institute.
Englewood New Jersey Mayor Michael Wildes — who is also an immigration attorney and former federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York — told The Post that Pinho is playing with fire.
“She can be prosecuted criminally, brought up on federal conspiracy charges. Marriage fraud is one of the top five crimes you can perpetrate including terrorism and drugs. The fact that somebody would be foolish enough to say they actually did it makes it actionable for the federal government to investigate,” Wildes said.
Marrying someone to obtain a green card is federal crime and can carry a five-year prison sentence and up to a $250,000 fine, according to the Department of Justice.
The odd couple tied the knot April 5 in Utah, which allows marriages to be conducted via Zoom, according to records posted online by the Utah County Clerk and obtained by Israeli nonprofit NGO Monitor.
Utah allows virtual marriages in which both parties aren’t in the same location so long as they have secured a Utah County marriage license and provide valid ID and two witnesses, who also don’t have to be physically present in the state.
It’s fair to allow that high-school dance teachers might not be possessed of the most intellectual rigor on campus, but even so… huh?
And the open advertisement of marriage fraud isn’t even the most shocking piece to the puzzle that is Laura Pinho’s extracurricular life…
The bride has a 5-year-old child with Derek J. Reid, 51, an improv coach who also lives at her address, according to public records.
Reid told The Post that he and Pinho were domestic partners and never officially married, and that they’re currently separated and the two sleep in different rooms at the same address. He said he had no knowledge of her marriage to Abu Amra.
…
“She’s been radicalized — I don’t know anything about that… the crowd she runs with… I’m worried for her,” Reid said.
…
She claimed she first met her husband through mutual friends on Facebook and donated an undisclosed amount of money to him, and he proceeded to message her to say thanks.
…
Pinho heads her school’s Students for Justice in Palestine club and bragged about injecting her virulent anti-Israel politics into her dance curriculum.
She posted video from a school cultural event in which her students performed the “Dabke Dance” — a Palestinian folk dance that has come to be associated with terrorism.
…
She boasts that she steered her students into radical anti-Israel protests.
“Students have rights, powers and abilities…. they do the fighting, they do the protesting, and we are there to guide them…. that is the role that I have found as one of the co-sponsors actually for the Students for Justice in Palestine Club,” she said.
Pinho has a long history of antisemitic posts on social media.
If you don’t like that horrific story as evidence that something is broken, then feel free to make this make sense…

🚨Women who identify as men are not allowed to attend Smith College, but men who identify as women are allowed. Make it make sense, America. It’s jaw-dropping report from @SarahPPerry and @DefendingEd She was on my podcast today 👇 pic.twitter.com/62kEFfSY48
— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) June 29, 2026

There was a time when Smith College was considered a good school. I’m not sure how that could still be true if they can’t get the most basic things right.
You might ask how it’s possible for formerly respected institutions to go so badly wrong, and this is a fairly wide window into why…

American taxpayers spend $150-$200 billion a year on salaries for Dem college faculty members.
Today’s Dems are Communists.
Communist college faculty members are turning the youth into Communists.
So…
American taxpayers are paying for the Communist Revolution.
It must stop. pic.twitter.com/FOLFljBnET
— C3 (@C_3C_3) June 29, 2026

Bringing this back to Miz Chevalier, there is a line of correlation — I would argue causation — between the graph above and the subject on everyone’s mind, namely the communist takeover of the Democrat Party.
And it’s this: the Gramscian long march through the institutions, in which committed Marxists have invaded everything from university administrations to scout troops and then corrupted them like viruses or cancer cells infecting a host, has now penetrated to the heart of the Democrat Party.
And at no point during that march, at least since the early 1960s (I’d argue even that isn’t true), were liberals ever willing to stand effectively against the Hard Left. (RELATED: Where Are the Bill Kristols and Michael Steeles on the Democrat Side Today?)
Conservatives allowed liberals to run institutions like schools, the arts, publishing, and the like because liberals were, at least nominally, willing to keep those institutions open to people of diverse intellectual and philosophical viewpoints.
Then came the Marxists, who pushed the liberals around. And when the liberals sided with the Marxists, the conservatives simply went elsewhere. That’s why you can’t find conservatives in education — or if you do, they’re on the fringes and alternate institutions.
Now the liberals are finding themselves without homes at places where they’re now discriminating in their appeasement of differing sorts of the transgender confused.
And we wonder, when the moral and intellectual rot infects every level of a system which should have become a marketplace, if not an industry, 100 years ago or more, why we’re setting record levels of money on fire to produce armies of Darializa Avila Chevaliers and Laura Pinhos.
The answer is obvious. When you put the worst people in the country in charge of basic, fundamental institutions through which we run most of the population, you will reap very predictable results.
Which begs the most important question: when will we stop throwing good money after bad?
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AVERY COUNTY, North Carolina — If there is such a thing as the classic Appalachian success story, the rise in popularity of the outside-the-box band Cigarettes @ Sunset would be that story.
But nothing comes easy in Appalachia.
The five-member band, which includes Garrett Dellinger, Ryland Bagbey, Sarah Vann, Wells Whitman, and Ethan Moore, was born in the winter of 2022, practicing their music in the cold, unheated seats of the EDGE of the WORLD Snowboard Shop in Banner Elk, North Carolina.
Four years later, they have amassed over 225,000 monthly Spotify listeners with a unique sound that blends lyrics about small-town grit with an irresistible, undefinable beat that band members call “Possum Rock.”
Dellinger, the lead vocalist, explains that they were playing at a bar one night when a drunk patron walked up to their merchandise table. “He said, ‘Do y’all play possum rock?’ I just kind of shrugged and thought, ‘I’ll go with that,’ and the label stuck,” he said.
Bagbey jokes that he hopes the “very drunk guy” doesn’t come back looking for royalties.
As for the unique name of the band, Dellinger admits it was pretty impulsive: “I was enjoying a smoke at sunset on the mountain and thought it would make a great name for a band.”
The story began in the rugged Blue Ridge Mountains, where childhood friends Dellinger and Bagbey started writing music in 2021. Moore and Whitman soon joined, but their unique sound wasn’t solidified until classically trained violinist Vann joined the mix.
Vann says her introduction to the group was supposed to be a one-off favor when they asked her to add a fiddle to a cover of the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris.”
That single performance changed everything.
“When Garrett lets me go with it, I like to layer and loop, and make it sound orchestral,” Vann explained. “I think it’s a nice juxtaposition.”
It is that exact intersection — Vann’s intricate, sweeping classical sensibilities weaving through Dellinger’s gravelly vocals and heavy indie-rock riffs — that gives the band its identity. They are young people who shared the same ridgeline, grew up navigating the same cultural independence, and brought those shared roots onto the stage.
When there is less to do, you create. You pick up an instrument.
To understand the music of Cigarettes @ Sunset, you have to understand the lines that blur across the ridges of western North Carolina. It is a place where towns bleed into one another, connected not by superhighways but by two-lane roads, shared hardships, and the quiet resilience and defiance that define modern Appalachia.
The band effectively captures this in their lyrics, using a bluesy, mountain-rock beat to convey both the beauty of the vast, quiet space of mountain life and the isolation and pride that come with it. This is exactly where the music hits you.
Their story is one repeated across the generations in the hills and hollers of the region. When there is less to do, you create. You pick up an instrument. You find others who feel the same pull and are looking for an outlet for their creativity, and you form a community.
Their debut EP, “Possum Rock,” released in March under Lost Highway Records, isn’t a polished Top 40 country product. It is an unruly, riff-heavy and fiercely independent collision of indie rock, gritty blues and traditional mountain fiddle runs. Tracks such as “Pavement,” which has eclipsed 4 million streams, capture love, addiction, and smalltown restlessness. The record sounds exactly like Boone, North Carolina: Local bar venues, gravel driveways and open mountain fields.
For Cigarettes @ Sunset, Appalachia isn’t a marketing gimmick — it is a worldview forged by both the beauty and the brutality of the region. When Hurricane Helene tore through their home region of Boone in late 2024, it altered everything. However, the devastation didn’t break the community — it brought people together.
For the band, living through that recovery underscored a deep commitment to making music that endures, serving as a reminder of the rugged resilience baked into the mountain DNA. It is why their music balances deep sorrow with an absolute refusal to break.
The breakout success of Cigarettes @ Sunset, who went from playing tiny bars around western North Carolina to logging nearly 100 shows a year and packing rooms on a multicity national tour, signals a much larger cultural shift.
America is experiencing a profound awakening to its Appalachian roots. For decades, coastal media dismissed this region as an afterthought, an isolated pocket of the past. But today, every day, Americans are hungry for something real.
In a world filled with manufactured internet trends and artificial perfection, the raw, unfiltered honesty of “y’allternative” and Appalachian music is striking a massive chord. Listeners from Texas to London are singing these songs back to the band word-for-word at their shows. They are looking to the hills and finding comfort in the storytelling, the community, and the timeless truth that the best things in life are grown right from the land they call home.
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Salena Zito is a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the beltway and all places in between. To find out more about Salena and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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