The third season of “The White Lotus” began with gunfire bursting through a lush resort in Thailand. But viewers with affection for a certain region of the United States perked up a little later in the episode, as a privileged, preppy family from North Carolina arrived by boat.

“We flew over the North Pole!”

Right then, Victoria sent an unmistakable signal: “The White Lotus” was taking on the Southern accent.

Or at least that’s what many viewers assumed, judging by the intense response — including many, many memes on social media — that has only grown with each episode. The commentary has focused on whether the accents concocted by Ms. Posey and the actor playing her husband, Jason Isaacs, credibly passed as those of well-to-do (and entirely self-absorbed) tourists from Durham, N.C. — or whether this was yet another atrocious attempt by Hollywood to replicate a Southern dialect.

A torturous track record of accents in movies and television has fostered a reflexive skepticism. Some viewers from the South have said that, at least initially, “The White Lotus” had just that effect on them. But it largely didn’t last, especially when it came to Ms. Posey’s performance. Viewers delighted over her pronunciations — “tsunami,”

“What was that?” her character asks. “That was a convention for con men and tax cheats.”

Was her accent a knowing and loving tribute to colorful Southern women? Perhaps. Campy? Undoubtedly. The performance was nevertheless hailed as a work of modern art. “Hang her accent in the Louvre!” one person suggested on social media. Another said Ms. Posey’s ties to Laurel, Miss., came shining through.

“If you were to put a bunch of lorazepam in the food at the country club in Laurel at lunch, that’s exactly what everybody would sound like an hour later,” said Landon Bryant, a resident of Laurel who has sought to demystify the South on Instagram and in a book, “Bless Your Heart: A Field Guide to All Things Southern,” released this week.

Accuracy and authenticity are very much judged by the ear of the beholder and are difficult, if not impossible, to rate by an objective standard. Even so, plenty of Southerners have been eager to give it a shot.

“Everybody has a right to be an expert about how they speak,” said Elisa Carlson, a dialect coach in Atlanta. “Your speech is personal. It’s intellectual. It’s social.”

The discussion around “The White Lotus” has brought out how accents are quite malleable, reflecting how new generations and new residents can bend dialects in unexpected ways. It has also been a reminder of how hard it can be to hear how you sound — or how others think you sound — played back at you. Southerners are painfully aware that the way they speak often conjures negative connotations in pop culture, like ignorance or prejudice.

“It’s not about the Southern dialect, per se — it’s what the Southern dialect represents for Southerners,” said Walt Wolfram, a linguistics professor at North Carolina State University.

Of course, Southerners do not have a monopoly on feeling sensitive and even defensive about how their accents are portrayed (People from Bah-ston, for instance, have been known to have similar reactions).

But portrayals of Southerners have a particularly long and gnarled track record. Many from the region can instantly name a performance they remember as especially egregious.

In promotional interviews, actors on “The White Lotus” said that Mike White, the writer and director of the series, had encouraged them to draw inspiration from “Southern Charm,” a long-running Bravo reality series based in Charleston, S.C. Mr. Isaacs has said he had studied Thomas Ravenel, who appeared on the show for five seasons, as the actor shaped his character, Timothy Ratliff, a scion of a prominent political family who unravels while vacationing with his wife and children.

Timothy dips into his wife’s lorazepam supply, unable to face the potential fallout from financial misdeeds that his family apparently knows nothing about.

“I am a pillar of the community,” he tells two strangers, wallowing in self-pity. “My grandfather was the governor of North Carolina. My father was a very, very, very successful businessman.”

Mr. Ravenel said in an interview that he was unaware of this when he started watching the third season.

“This sounds very familiar,” he said, recalling watching Mr. Isaacs’s performance. “But once everyone started making a big to-do about it, then I said, ‘That’s not me.’”

Advertisement

Jason Isaacs as Timothy Ratliffe

Oh just – just a few months in prison?

Thomas Ravenel

As a part of the plea agreement, I had to resign from office.

He said he thought Ms. Posey’s muse was much clearer: “More so she sounds like Pat than he sounds like me.”

Pat is Patricia Altschul, a socialite who is the soul, if not the star, of “Southern Charm.”

She was not entirely thrilled by the comparison to Ms. Posey’s Victoria.

“I was flattered at first,” said Ms. Altschul, who credits her own lilt to an upbringing in Virginia. “But now, you know, she’s on pills and he’s a sketchy businessman with a gun. So, I’m not quite sure to what extent we should be flattered.”

Parker Posey as Victoria Ratliffe

You’re all gorgeous and you come from money.

Patricia Altschul

… well educated, charming, attractive …

Ms. Posey has talked about why the accents of Southern women are irresistible to her as an actress. An “emphasis on feeling,” she has said. A musicality. An ability to make the mundane sound dramatic.

“It has this power,” she said in a recent television interview, “and you can’t knock it down.”

In truth, there is no single Southern accent, but rather a regionwide buffet of twangs and drawls. In an interview, Mr. Isaacs said he went for a precise accent from Durham — “It’s not just North Carolina,” he told Esquire — which stumped quite a few people in the city who weren’t aware there even was a Durham accent. (Dr. Wolfram, the linguistics professor at N.C. State, said there was not.)

Some in Durham pointed out they are as likely to hear Spanglish or Hindi as a classic Southern drawl.

“Hell, half your neighbors are from Ohio or New York or New Jersey,” said Garrett Dixon, a native North Carolinian who lives in Durham and works in sales.

Yet some argue that “The White Lotus” has not simply repurposed a tired, clichéd perception of Southerners. Instead, they say, it has captured what in many ways feels like a real Southern family in 2025, one confronted by the tensions between past and present that grip the region as a whole.

The fact that the Ratliffs’ three children don’t seem to have accents rings true, for example, as in-migration and the connectedness brought by technology have diminished accents across the South and in other parts of the country, too.

Ms. Altschul thinks the show has exquisitely nailed Southerners of a “certain elevation” — “the way they look, the way they talk, what they talk about,” she said.

The swagger, the shorts, the sunglasses with the Croakies worn by the oldest son, Saxon, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger: That all checks out. Then, there’s the conniption that Victoria has over her daughter, Piper, announcing her plan to move to Thailand to study Buddhism, during which she refers to Thailand as Taiwan and fears her daughter is joining a cult.

“Don’t look at me like I’m crazy!” she said. “It happens all the time — sheltered girls like you are constantly getting brainwashed and turned out!”

That felt real, too, Mr. Bryant said.

“Very small town, very ‘all that matters is where we are,’” he said. “That’s an attitude you see and feel.”

As the finale nears and viewers spin all sorts of predictions about how it will end, Ms. Altschul doesn’t have a theory so much as a wish: that Victoria turns out to be a villain, but a brilliant one.

“I’m hoping that she ends up being kind of savvy,” Ms. Altschul said. “Sometimes there’s the equation that if you sound Southern, you sound stupid. I would like to think that that’s not the case.”

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free

Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world

Republican senator Ted Cruz warned of a potential “bloodbath” for his party in the 2026 midterm elections if Donald Trump’s tariffs send the US economy into recession.

The senator from Texas also predicted a “terrible” fate for the world’s largest economy should a full-blown trade war erupt and Trump’s tariffs, as well as any retaliatory measures on US goods, stay in place long-term.

Typically a Trump ally, Cruz’s comments on his Verdict podcast on Friday were the starkest warning from a member of the president’s party since his “liberation day” levies kicked off the global market rout.

Republican lawmakers have begun to worry about the effects of Trump’s tariffs on the economy and their party’s prospects for keeping control of both chambers of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. Their concerns grew as Americans watched about $5.4tn of stock market capitalisation evaporate over a two-day Wall Street rout.

On Thursday, Republican Chuck Grassley introduced a bill in the Senate, alongside a Democrat, to reassert Congressional control of tariff policy. Under the proposed law, new levies would expire in 60 days unless approved by Congress, and there would be a mechanism for lawmakers to cancel tariffs at any point.

Support for the bill grew on Friday as Republican senators Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis signed on as co-sponsors. The bill is likely more symbolic than anything, but points to increasing discord within the Republican party as lawmakers worry about the effects of the trade policy on constituencies reliant on exports — and on re-election hopes.

There were already signs of voter discontent this week, when an Elon Musk-backed conservative lost a state supreme court seat in Wisconsin to the liberal candidate. Republicans also underperformed their 2024 results in two special House elections in Florida.

If Trump’s and any retaliatory tariffs remain in place long-term and push the US into “a recession, particularly a bad recession, 2026 in all likelihood politically would be a bloodbath. You would face a Democrat House, and you might even face a Democrat Senate,” Cruz said.

Despite the 53-47 Republican majority in the Senate, “if we’re in the middle of a recession and people are hurting badly, they punish the party in power”, Cruz said.

The Canada-born Texan did not share the president’s assessment that the tariffs would usher in “a booming economy”. Instead, Cruz said there could be “an enormous economic boom” only if the US and any retaliating countries slash their duty rates.

But if “every other country on earth” hits the US with retaliatory tariffs and Trump’s so-called reciprocal levies remain in place, “that is a terrible outcome”, the senator warned.

If the confrontation between the US and its trading partners escalates into a full-blown trade war, “it would destroy jobs here at home, and do real damage to the US economy”, Cruz said. It would also “have a powerful upward impact on inflation”.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday sided with the Trump administration, at least for now, in a dispute over the Department of Education’s freeze of DEI-related grants. The administration has taken several grievances to the high court recently, but this was the first of its legal theories to stick.

By a 5-4 vote, the justices allowed the administration to keep frozen $65 million for teacher training and professional development, halting a lower court order that had temporarily reinstated the grants.

The court’s unsigned opinion comes about a month after a similar dispute in which the justices left in place a lower court order to pay USAID contractors for services already performed.

This time, however, with education grants on the line, the court majority ruled that even though Congress had already appropriated money for the programs, the Education Department could stop funding them while the case is litigated in the lower courts.

The Education Department had frozen the grants in anticipation of trying to claw back unspent funds that had been appropriated by Congress.

A federal district judge had issued two consecutive 14-day temporary restraining orders to consider the question of the frozen funds. While such 14-day orders are rarely appealable, the Supreme Court majority viewed this case differently, and granted the administration’s request to block the lower court order from going into effect. In an unsigned 2-1/2-page opinion, the majority wrote that the lower court may actually not have had the authority to issue its order in the first place.

Justice Elena Kagan dissented, saying that the Court had made a serious “mistake” when it intervened too swiftly, effectively changing the court’s rules with only a “barebones briefing, no argument and scarce time for reflection.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, noted that it was exceptional for the Court to intervene when the temporary restraining order would expire in only three days, and that that the administration had not presented a convincing enough argument as to why such an extraordinary intervention was necessary.

While Chief Justice John Roberts noted his disagreement with the majority, he did not join either dissenting opinion.

Universities accused of violating civil rights law

The Education Department funding went to two grant programs targeting teacher shortages. Recipients included “high need” institutions, nonprofits, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities.

The Department of Education cut nearly all of the existing grants in February, notwithstanding the fact that Congress had already appropriated the funds to be spent for these specific purposes. The administration said it eliminated 104 of 109 grants because they “fund discriminatory practices–including in the form of DEI.”

The Department also sent letters to the recipients stating that their programs violated federal civil rights laws by discriminating based on race, sex, or other protected characteristics.

Eight states whose universities and nonprofits had their grants terminated–California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York, and Wisconsin–sued in federal district court. The challengers argued that the Department of Education’s decision to cancel the grants violated federal law. In response, the government argued that it was well within its broad regulatory authority to cancel the grants because the so-called “DEI initiatives” were no longer aligned with government policy.

A federal judge in Boston issued a temporary restraining order, which reinstated the funding for up to 28 days while he considered the states’ claims. After a failed attempt to overturn the order in the federal court of appeals, the Department of Education asked the Supreme Court to stop the lower courts from reinstating the grant money, at least for now.

The Department insisted that it should not be forced to continue funding millions of dollars in “taxpayer money that may never be clawed back” while the lawsuit plays out in the courts. It pointed out that, even if it eventually wins this case, it would have a hard time getting the millions in federal dollars back once the “federal funding spigots” had been turned back on.

The eight states that are part of the lawsuit against the administration countered that it would make little sense for the Supreme Court to intervene at this stage, given that the grant reinstatement would expire soon anyway. And, they pointed out, the order’s limited shelf life gave grant recipients little time to continue receiving government funds.

In that sense, the schools would be getting a drop in the bucket compared to the government’s image of a “funding spigot.” And that would still be less than they were promised in their five-year grant.

The Supreme Court didn’t see things that way, and instead sided with the Trump administration, delivering a major win to an executive branch trying to amass greater power as it continually clashes with the lower federal courts.

More cases in the pipeline

Friday’s case is only the latest of what is expected to be a tsunami of cases that the Trump administration is bringing to the Supreme Court. Among those already in the pipeline at early stages of litigation is a lower court order that reinstated roughly 16,000 previously terminated federal employees.

Another court stopped the administration from denying birthright citizenship for some children born in the United States, a case in which the government complained at length about the use of universal injunctions, a wide-reaching order that applies to everyone impacted across the country. And most recently, the administration asked the court to allow it to continue deporting U.S. residents, without a hearing, who it alleges are Venezuelan members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

Bubbling under the surface in these cases is the government’s ongoing critique of sweeping court orders that bind the administration’s actions beyond the confines of the courtroom. Judges’ grants of nationwide relief have been a thorn in the administration’s side since Trump took office in January.

They were also a thorn in the side of the Biden administration. But as frustrated as that administration sometimes was, it rarely complained of unfair treatment. In contrast, the Trump administration, and President Trump himself, have cried foul repeatedly and loudly over these lower court decisions.

Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement said Friday’s ruling “vindicates what the Department of Justice has been arguing for months: local district judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of taxpayer dollars, force the government to pay out billions, or unilaterally halt President Trump’s policy agenda.”

—NPR’s Ryan Lucas contributed to this report.