Economy

The end of the 27-year marriage of Bill and Melinda Gates looks tidier, so far, than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s parting from his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, but will no doubt turn into another fee fountain for Seattle’s legal fraternity. Melinda French was a manager at Microsoft, the software giant created and driven by Bill, when the two met in 1987 — and is widely credited with turning him from a hardcore techie and ruthless competitor into a mellower, more admirable human being. The $50 billion charity they created together has become the flagbearer for ‘venture philanthropy’, which is the application of large-scale private funds to address global problems, particularly in healthcare, that governments and market forces fail to solve.

What the stupidest thing you will hear today? Here’s one way to improve your odds at an accurate answer: who is the stupidest television commentator currently polluting the airwaves? If you said 'Don Lemón™’, you are hot on the trail. When I first encountered the CNN talking head, I thought he was just the latest embarrassing affirmative action hire. How could anyone take this unpleasant, unremittingly partisan hack seriously? But it soon became clear that Lemón (accent on the 'o’) was something special. It was partly the brittle touchiness, partly the steady emission of self-satisfied entitlement. Mostly, though, it was the stupidity, unwritten by ignorance and fired by adamantine self-certainty. The latest instance is one of the best.

In December 2016 I was speaking at a conference in London. Much of the discussion, unsurprisingly, gravitated toward Donald Trump’s recent election as president. It meant, I noted, that an outspoken free-trade skeptic would be in the White House. At that point a bright young French economist turned to me and said, ‘Mon ami, I thought that free trade was a done deal on the right. Apparently, it isn’t.’ As it turns out, it wasn’t just free trade that much of the American right was on the brink of rejecting. A systematic questioning of the central place assumed by free markets in conservative thought and policies since the 1970s, in the United States and the broader Anglosphere, was well underway.

A regular column by an anonymous whistle-blower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. To any would-be Edward Snowflakes out there: leak your woke-culture war crimes to wokeyleaks@protonmail.com. We promise to protect our sources. A friend of mine who knows about my secret double life as a woke whistleblower for The Spectator asked me the other day how I became so right-wing. I answered that it wasn’t me that changed, it was the left.

The Spectator and The American Spectator are pleased to announce the settlement of the recent lawsuit between the parties. The Spectator and The American Spectator are independent publications and have been available in the United States for many decades. Historically, The Spectator has focused primarily on UK politics and affairs while The American Spectator has focused primarily on US politics and affairs. This arrangement has worked well and the publishers have even considered each other to be more friends than competitors. The Spectator has recently decided to launch new publications with a focus on US politics and affairs.

The American Recovery Plan Act: $1.9 trillion. The American Jobs Plan: $2 trillion. The American Family Plan $1.5 trillion. It’s fair to say that the Biden administration’s attempts to transform the country are adding up. We keep being told, by the very enthusiastic pro-Democrat press corps, not to underestimate the radicalism of the new president, and Joe Biden is eager to prove the point. He really is proposing to remold the American economy and his government is wasting little time. He and his advisers clearly take the FDR comparisons seriously. But the trouble with gargantuan government spending is that, even in the topsy-turvy world of pandemic economics, the people of the country eventually have to foot the bill.

Billionaire soccer club owners are being accused of self-interest and greed — and I for one am shocked. News of the proposed European Super League stunned sports fans worldwide this weekend. Twelve of Europe’s most historically successful clubs are proposing the formation of a 20-team league to become the new top tier of European competition, superseding the UEFA Champions League and Europa League. The ‘founding members’ of the ESL cannot be relegated — which the British press has dubbed an ‘NFL model’. That doesn’t seem like a fair comparison — the NFL is much more egalitarian. The American sports leagues may not have relegation, but they do operate a draft system which helps keep the rosters even over a 15-year period.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2021 World edition.  Ron DeSantis was smeared by the media. He was never going to take it lying down. When 60 Minutes aired a laughably dishonest report implying he’d operated a pay-for-play vaccine distribution scheme in Florida, America’s most pugnacious governor fired back. The ‘smear merchants’ at CBS News were pushing ‘horse manure,’ he said. ‘That’s why nobody trusts corporate media. They are a disaster in what they are doing.’ That a major news outlet blatantly lied about a conservative governor isn’t surprising. Far more interesting is DeSantis’s choice of words there: ‘corporate media’. A departure, that.

No one likes to waste a good crisis, and the digital-payments industry is certainly trying its hardest to spin the narrative that COVID-19 is about to deliver the coup de grâce to cash. Various lobbying efforts culminated in a recent CNBC report claiming we have all switched to payment apps to avoid catching the disease from dollar bills. A ‘cashless customer’, Heima Sritharan, supposedly speaks for the entire millennial generation: ‘Not that I was using cash that much before, but I find that during Covid especially, I just don’t want to use cash as much because of the germs aspect.’ The report quotes a figure from the Pew Research Center suggesting that 34 percent of consumers under the age of 50 went the previous week without making a single purchase with cash.

Multilateralism was supposed to be the great theme of the Biden presidency. No longer would the US plow its lonely furrow. Instead it would engage with the rest of the world on matters of mutual interest. Where, though, does that fit with the attempt by treasury secretary Janet Yellen today to try to set a minimum level of corporate income tax for the whole world to whole world to observe? The US is no longer withdrawing from international agreements, as it did in Trump’s day — it is doing something far more objectionable, by trying to lay down American rules for the rest of the world to follow.

A wave of woke corporatism has been sweeping America. The latest example comes courtesy of CEOs being forced to weigh in on SB-202, a Georgia bill to restructure mechanisms of the state’s voting procedures and laws. Spurred on by President Biden — a man seemingly guided by his Very Online chief of staff, who takes his cues from Twitter hashtag campaigns from the likes of the pedophile-enabling Lincoln Project — celebrities and companies are lining up to demand boycotts of Georgia, labeling the new law inhumane and an abuse of basic human rights. While appearing on CNBC, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey called SB-202 'unacceptable' and 'a step backward'. He said the company would work to remedy the legislation, through both public and private advocacy.

On January 21, a Canadian online news outlet called the Tyee published a hit piece on Angelo Isidorou, a 24-year-old journalist for the Post Millennial, another online Canadian magazine. Isidorou had made himself a target by becoming a board member of the Non-Partisan Association, a municipal political party in Vancouver which, in spite of its name, is center-right. Isidorou’s sin, as captured on the Tyee’s front page, was that he had been photographed ‘flashing a symbol favored by hate groups’. The symbol in question was the thumb-to-index-finger ‘OK’ sign, which according to the Tyee’s reporter is a ‘widely recognized white power signal’.

Just two weeks ago, Alexi McCammond was wheeled out as the new editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, which uses the brand of a teenage fashion magazine to sell Bolshevism and anal sex (please don’t click that) to unmarried 30-year-old white women. Now, McCammond has been laid low before she could even begin. She fell prey to one of the sorriest Twitter cancellations on record, with enemies highlighting tweets she made a full decade ago as a college freshman. ‘Give me a 2/10 on my chem problem, cross out all of my work and don't explain what I did wrong...thanks a lot stupid Asian T.A. you're great,’ said one tweet. ‘Googling how to not wake up with swollen Asian eyes,’ said another. There were a few other archaic remarks of the ‘that’s gay’ variety, and... that’s it!

A regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news-leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. I know this middle-aged fetishist from New York whose preferred pronouns are ‘they/them’. He’s an heterosexual man whose ‘kink’ is to dominate young girls who act as his sexual and domestic slaves.

A brave Edward Snowflake from the Vanguard Investment Management Group (over $6 trillion global assets under management!) has leaked us an image of the badge employees are asked to wear at the company so as to signal their LGBTQ+ allyship and opposition to 'white supremacy’. Confused? Let’s deconstruct this particular piece of Woke Heraldry, or ‘Flairs’ as Vanguard likes to call them. The pink triangle was once the tag used by the Nazis to identify gay men in the concentration camps and the green circle represents a ‘safe space’. Duh. Not too excited about displaying a symbol invented by literal Nazis? Tough. Silence is violence, don’t forget.

Like many Americans, I have a complicated relationship with money. I love capitalism and want to be rich — but I have deeply buried resentments towards a certain type of rich person. Reconciling those two competing feelings has been a lifelong challenge. In ways that are uncomfortable to face, I’m a populist at heart. In other words, I promise I’ll stop bitching about the system when I’m rich. I was confronted with my populist tendencies during the recent GameStop stock market rebellion by self-proclaimed ‘autists, degenerates and retards’. The members of a Reddit group, r/wallstreetbets, wreaked havoc on financial markets by driving up the price of GameStop, a ‘meme stonk’ they realized was heavily shorted by the hedge funds.