Remembering
James Robison

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The Brew: Across the Pond and “To Infinity and Beyond!”

Gayle and her mom, Valera, outside of William Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, England on January 27, 2016.

By Gayle McQueary Published on March 18, 2025

The many people who received Joe Biden’s blanket pardons in the final days of his presidency for crimes they “may” have committed are likely in a tizzy today, after finding out yesterday that an electronic signature is not legally binding.

But before we get into those details, we’re traveling across the Pond to find out why Shakespeare is being 1984’d. (Yes, we turned George Orwell’s work into a verb.)

Shakespeare to Be or Not to Be ‘Decolonized’?

The Daily Mail has broken a real news story about the “decolonizing” of playwright William Shakespeare. Apparently, Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, which manages properties in Stratford-upon-Avon, wants to make some adjustments in order to address concerns about portraying Shakespeare as the “greatest” playwright in history because his works “promote white European supremacy.” (You can’t make this stuff up!)

The trust aims to create a more inclusive museum experience by moving away from Western perspectives and intends to add “acknowledgments” on some of Shakespeare’s collections and archives to say they “may contain racist, sexist, or homophobic” content. Never mind that Shakespeare’s works continue to impact the English language today, having given us words such as “fashionable,” “sanctimonious,” and “rant.” Instead, the fashionable thing for sanctimonious leftists to do now is to rant about the fact that Shakespeare was white.

This “brilliant” plan follows the outline of a 2022 research project from the University of Birmingham, which argues that the narrative of Shakespeare’s “universal” genius puts inclusivity in harm’s way by setting “European culture as the standard for high art.” To help with this endeavor, the trust has received funding from Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, which finances projects that boost “diversity and inclusion” and has organized events to celebrate non-Western artists, such as the Bengali poet, playwright and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore.

This follows what The Globe Theatre in London did in 2021, when it began a similar “decolonization” project to rework Shakespeare’s famous plays, issuing trigger warnings for themes like misogyny and racism in productions such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Antiracism” seminars at The Globe have led to labeling the Bard’s works as “race plays,” and highlighting the “problematic linking” of “whiteness to beauty” because they all contain “whiteness.”

As for the United States, some academics and educators are pushing back against teaching Shakespeare in schools, citing problematic themes like “racism, misogyny, and classism.” They advocate for more “modern and inclusive” alternatives.

No wonder the United Kingdom has a censorship problem: They are literally reconstructing historical literary figures. If “history is written by the victors,” as DEI advocates have been saying for the last several years, then what are we “decolonizing”?

Time will tell if “all’s well that ends well.”

The Mysterious Case of Joe Biden and the Magic Pen

Speaking of ending well, here’s something that really isn’t: the litany of preemptive pardons Joe Biden issued to people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, and Congresswoman Liz Cheney in his final hours in office for things they “may have done” between Jan. 1, 2014 and Jan. 20, 2025. Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced he intends to void those pardons, saying they are invalid because they were signed using an autopen rather than by Biden’s hand.

Constitutionally, only the president himself can sign a presidential pardon. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project discovered several weeks ago that Biden signed a “full and unconditional” pardon for his son, Hunter, by hand — but the rest were signed using the autopen, which looks significantly different. That raises a valid concern, as Trump pointed out, that Biden himself may not have authorized or even known about the additional pardons.

If that’s the case, the members of his staff (or Congress, or family, or previous administrations) who did sign them with the autopen have committed a crime. Trump specifically called out the controversial pardons for Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, the January 6 Committee, and other Biden family members.

Oversight Project Chief Counsel Kyle Brosnan emphasized the constitutional concerns. This is especially unsettling when you think about Biden’s obvious mental decline, highlighted in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report.

Brosnan also points to evidence of Biden’s deterioration and White House staffers’ efforts to shield him from public view.

“I think we all saw with our own eyes his mental and physical deterioration over the course of his presidency,” Brosnan said. “There’s article after article that comes out showing how the Biden administration and his staff shielded him from public view, retinkered his schedule throughout the presidency, tried to script even what reporters he was calling on at press conferences, and that volume of evidence shows that President Biden wasn’t really running the White House. It was the staff. So if he’s not hand-signing these legally operative documents like pardons or even bills into law, that raises another question.”

Trump’s decision to void these pardons will probably have significant legal and political ramifications, which will hopefully lead to investigations — particularly for those who received them.

Fire up the popcorn maker. It’s getting real.

Homecoming

Out-of-this world NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore, 62, and Suni Williams, 59, are coming back to Earth, along with Space Force astronaut Nick Hague, 49, and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, 34. They are set to return today aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule Freedom, with none other than Ron Howard directing their splashdown. (We’re of course kidding about Howard being any part of the mission, but you have to admit you just thought about the re-entry scene from Apollo 13.)

Wilmore and Williams were originally launched to the International Space Station last June on Boeing’s Starliner for what was supposed to be a brief 10-day mission, but it turned into a much, much longer endeavor. The pair experienced thruster issues with Starliner that caused them to book a few extra nights aboard the ISS … which then turned into a few extra months.

NASA delayed Wilmore and Williams’s return in order to investigate the thruster issue. The agency ultimately decided to bring the Starliner back unmanned last September over safety concerns. During the investigation period, NASA reassigned the duo to the ISS’s long-duration Expedition 72 mission until they could work out a way to bring them home.

An extended mission, while unexpected, is not unprecedented: a typical NASA mission lasts six months, and the record for the longest U.S. astronaut stay at the ISS is 371 days. NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg shared an insider’s perspective after Elon Musk and Trump suggested the pair was stranded.

“The main thing to point out is that there is no ‘rescue’ mission to get Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home,” Nyberg write in a March 13 Facebook post. “NASA simply made changes to their operational timeline to accommodate them becoming part of the standard crew rotation − the decision to bring them home on a SpaceX vehicle was made LAST SUMMER. And nothing has changed since.”

Weather permitting, Crew-9 will undock at 1:05 a.m. Eastern Time and splash down off the western coast of Florida at 5:57 p.m., completing their 17-hour journey back into our atmosphere. You can watch a livestream of the undocking on Nasa+ at 12:45 p.m. or the re-entry at 4:45 p.m. Until then, we’ll leave you with this touching, hold-your-breath moment from Apollo 13.

Along The Stream…

Since we’re talking about investigating the presidential pardons of Dr. Anthony Fauci and others, check out “Will the Trump Team Investigate the COVID Panic and the Medical Fascism It Unleashed?” coming up shortly from the Discovery Institute’s David Klingenhoffer. An excellent question, if we do say so ourselves.

Curious about the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) — what it is, what it isn’t, and what’s right or wrong about it? Then check out the two-part conversation between Wanda Alger and Stephen Powell. It will debunk myths and give you prayer points at the same time.

 

Gayle McQueary is The Stream’s social media coordinator. She has a background in production and is a scary judge of films about astronauts stranded in space.