Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Exclusive: Republicans condemn Biden’s role in anti-white conference

Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Rep. Matt Gaetz are rebuking President Joe Biden for his participation in a conference that elevated anti-white and anti-police rhetoric. The Spectator reported last week that Biden delivered the opening address at the Root Institute 2021, an annual virtual conference hosted by the Root, an online media outlet that primarily covers the black community. During the conference, panelists espoused prejudiced ideas against white people and condemned policing. A Rutgers University professor called white people 'corrupt’, 'morally and spiritually bankrupt’ and 'committed to being villains’, while other participants said that police 'actively make our communities less safe' and that their primary goal is to control and oppress black people. Rep.

blackburn
fiscal responsibility

Republicans’ fiscal responsibility theater

If you think Washington couldn't get any more dysfunctional, think again. On Monday night, Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic attempt to avoid a government shutdown. This raises the temperature in a Congress that’s already had, shall we say, a pretty high fever since being sworn in on January 3. Depending on who you ask, the Republicans’ latest action is either a brave attempt at stopping Biden’s massive spending package — Mitch McConnell’s stated perspective — or a foolish gamble bringing us one step closer to a debt default, as Democrats claim. In a sense, both sides are right. But Washington also needs to remember that refusing to raise the debt limit is akin to cutting up the credit card after maxing it out. It doesn’t solve the actual problem.

hiding

Why Biden is hiding

Have you seen the new variation on the children’s book series Where’s Waldo? It’s called Where’s Joe? and it is taking DC by storm. So where is Joe, leader of the free world, black-belt in political glossolalia, a potentate without power, our version of Nietzsche’s 'Last Man’ who not only blinks but gibbers. When I was a child, some scalpel-happy doctor determined that I should have my tonsils removed. In order to reconcile me to the procedure, I was promised all the ice-cream I could eat. That turned out to be a lie, of course, and I somehow suspect that poor Joe Biden feels the same now. Here he is, after decades of feeding at the public trough, and he is trough master supreme. It was supposed to be all ice-cream and young girls’ heads of hair.

Joe Biden’s history tour from hell

Breaking news from off the wires this morning. Apparently the guy who almost punched out a Detroit factory worker on the campaign trail may not be our most adept of presidents. That Joe Biden's administration is flailing has suddenly dawned on our establishment as though a miraculous epiphany. Think a kind of political Fatima, only instead of the sun moving across the sky it's just that TikTok influencer with the long nails prancing about the clear blue. How bad has it gotten for the White House? Even Chuck Todd thinks Biden has a 'pretty big credibility crisis on his hands.' And Chuck Todd once let Dr Fauci interview him. The abruptness of this realization does seem weird.

biden
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Black Caucus silent on Maxine Waters’s border comments

The Congressional Black Caucus did not respond when asked on Friday whether they agree with Rep. Maxine Waters’s comment that the treatment of Haitian migrants by Border Patrol agents is 'worse than what we witnessed in slavery'. 'What we witnessed takes us back hundreds of years. What we witnessed was worse than what we witnessed in slavery,' Waters said during a news conference outside the Capitol on Wednesday. 'Cowboys — with their reins, again — whipping black people, Haitians, into the water where they're scrambling and falling down when all they're trying to do is escape from violence in their country.

OkCupid’s pro-choice badge is corporate vice-signaling

Cockburn was intrigued to learn that OkCupid, the dating app service, now offers a ‘pro-choice’ badge for its users’ profiles. The feature was introduced in response to Texas Senate Bill 8, a law that could potentially limit abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected at around six weeks.  While dating apps are not Cockburn’s preferred method of wooing the ladies (mystery is everything), he wonders whether this corporate vice-signaling is catching on. In addition to abortion enthusiasm, OkCupid also promotes itself as a platform for the sexually adventurous. On its website, colorful gender-bending models simulate various sex positions and one apparent orgy.

okcupid

Who’s taking the wheel of Trumpism?

It went virtually unnoticed in April when Donald Trump recruited Susie Wiles to oversee his fundraising operation and create a system for issuing endorsements. Wiles is a veteran political consultant in Florida, having worked for Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis and helped with Trump’s campaigns there. 'The president tells everyone around Mar-a-Lago that Susie is now in charge,’ an adviser told Politico. Despite media narratives of Jared Kushner’s withdrawal from Trump’s affairs, one source with knowledge of Mar-a-Lago’s inner workings said Wiles serves a 'buffer to give Kushner distance’. Wiles currently works with Kushner confidant Bill Stepien on endorsements. According to broadcaster Stew Peters, Wiles isn’t taking a paycheck for her work.

trumpism afpi trump

Chris Cuomo is a symptom of CNN’s disease

Chris Cuomo won’t give CNN, or his very concerned social justice warrior colleagues, a break. Cuomo is arguably the face of the network. That’s a serious problem for Jim Acosta’s anti-Fox News jihad, Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy’s Media Matters rip-off gig, Jake Tapper’s 'last honest man in Washington' act and Wolf Blitzer still trying to pretend he’s just the straight news guy. Cuomo has eclipsed them all. Hence his magical COVID basement Lazarus miracle last year. Hence also the circus act with his now-humiliated brother and all the special favors that come from that kind of family connection.

chris cuomo
cuomo

Andrew Cuomo doesn’t deserve a second chance

In The Dark Knight, the only Batman movie I’ve ever watched and therefore the best one, Harvey Dent says, 'You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.' At this point in the Andrew Cuomo saga, most Americans have realized that the disgraced former governor of New York is just that — a villain. Just don’t tell Cuomo or his amen chorus of sycophantic dead-enders. This week, the suburban tabloid Newsday published an article by David H. Pikus headlined, 'Ousting Cuomo disenfranchised NY voters'. Thankfully for Pikus, Cuomo approved of his obsequious ass-kissery. The ex-Emmy award winner retweeted the puff piece and added, 'This was politics. Every step of the way.

hunter biden nudes

Are any of the Hunter Biden emails fake?

Oh, those Hunter Biden emails? At least some of them are real, according to a new book. Politico staffers casually smuggled a ‘revelation’ from their colleague Ben Schreckinger’s The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty Years of Tragedy into Tuesday’s edition of the Playbook AM email. By sheer coincidence, Schreckinger’s book was also released on Tuesday. Schreckinger independently verified both the ’10 held by H for the big guy?’ email and a 2015 email ‘from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden’. Politico further confirms that ‘emails released by a Swedish government agency also match emails in the leaked cache, and two people who corresponded with Hunter Biden confirmed emails from the cache were genuine’.

SCOOP: Gaetz requests meeting with Israeli ambassador after extortion plot

Rep. Matt Gaetz is requesting a meeting with Israel's ambassador to the US, Gilad Erdan, to discuss the alleged extortion plot of the Gaetz family, according to a letter obtained by The Spectator. As previously reported, days before news broke that the FBI was investigating the Florida congressman for sex trafficking allegations, Jake Novak at the Israeli consulate in New York told Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams about the probe. 'I come as a friend to Israel. Supporting the US-Israel relationship is very important to me and to my constituents,' Gaetz writes in the letter. 'Jake Novak is the Broadcast Media Relations Director at Israel's Consulate in New York.

gaetz
biden ok agenda

Why Biden’s domestic agenda is in big trouble

The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, delivered another major blow to President Joe Biden's domestic agenda this week, ruling that Democrats may not include a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants in their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. The parliamentarian's decision was based on the 'Byrd rule', proposed by Sen. Robert Byrd and adopted by the Senate in the 1980s, which limits what can be passed under the reconciliation process. Under the Byrd rule, laws must be 'more than incidental' in their impact on spending or the budget in order to be included in a reconciliation package.

Biden speaks at conference filled with anti-white, anti-police rhetoric

President Joe Biden had a busy week at the United Nations, and as the media focused much of its attention on his first address to the General Assembly, another interesting presidential public appearance slid under the radar. On Tuesday, Biden delivered the opening address for the Root Institute 2021, a virtual conference put on by the Root, a blog 'covering the Black community' whose tagline is 'The Blacker the Content the Sweeter the Truth’. For those unfamiliar, the Root publishes opinion pieces that specialize in aggressive race-baiting.

biden root
smoker

A lament for the overtaxed smoker

There is a spot of Washington DC, a few blocks of downtown not far from the White House, where a cigarette is your only hope. The buildings are garish blocks of glass — 'like someone overturned a giant ice cube tray,' as one wag put it — while the color palette runs from charcoal gray to navy gray. The place can feel like ennui embodied, and all the worse when rain darkens the air and the streets fill with the soulless din of tires swishing through puddles. It can wear on you, this drab slice of middle-managerial noir. But at least for me, there is one thing that can brighten it up: cigarette smoke. I might catch it off a passerby or light up a Marlboro myself. But either way I feel paradoxically improved. I think, at least someone here is having a good time.

The Biden border crisis isn’t going away

The record influx of illegal immigrants on the southern border — and the White House's refusal to refer to it as a 'crisis' — was the biggest story of the young Biden presidency at the start of the year. Even though the number of illegal crossings continued to swell, hitting over 200,000 migrants a month, the scandal practically disappeared during the summer. The media distracted Americans with fear-mongering about the new Delta variant of COVID-19 and warmongering about the undeniably disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Biden border crisis has now returned with a vengeance. This week, more than 10,000 Haitians descended on the border town of Del Rio, Texas seeking entry to the United States.

border

The Biden presidency is in free-fall

Eight months in and I am perilously close to employing one of the worst political clichés in existence — Joe Biden’s honeymoon is over. You’re not imagining things — the Biden presidency is in a state of free-fall. This is not a joke. It’s not an overreaction. It’s not about Biden’s opponents pouncing or seizing. Biden’s presidency has a very real chance of completely foundering within its first year. After a promising start where he inherited a vaccination process that was already in progress, albeit briefly, under Trump, his vaccine strategy has stalled to the point of him now demanding mandates on private businesses, a step he assured the electorate he would not take.

free-fall
minaj wrong echo media

Rejecting the media elite echo chamber

If the mainstream media were hoping to learn from the mistakes of 2016, there were plenty of lessons for them to revisit. Unfortunately, the elites that pontificated on network news channels and in Washington Post thinkpieces had zero interest in understanding why they got Trump’s election so wrong. To do that, they would have needed both self-awareness and humility. Because they lack both, nothing improved. In fact, things have only gotten worse. Four years of hair-on-fire reporting about Trump’s tweets, a Russian hoax, two impeachments and dozens of 'anonymous’ sources later, the activists in journalists’ clothing finally got their way. Joe Biden, the basement candidate, was elected president.

The ‘Justice for J6’ rally was a total dud

There used to be an old joke that there were more members of the FBI who were members of the American Communist party than there were actual believers in rule from Moscow. Something like that seems to have occurred with the much ballyhooed 'Justice for J6' rally in Washington DC. Justice, schmustice. Much as I had expected, almost no one rallied to the rally. A grand total of two people were arrested. Seldom has Washington seemed more peaceful. The notion that DC was about to be stormed may have given a lascivious pleasure to those liberals convinced that the enemy is not just at the gates but within them already. But that was never in the cards. Having been caught napping on January 6, there was no way a repetition of those sanguinary events would recur.

rally

J.D. Vance: Biden is unwilling to secure the southern border

All eyes are on the flyover state of Ohio as the fight for the future of Trumpism unfolds. In January, Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced he was bowing out of politics for good. His vacancy has set up a rare primary between two candidates offering two different versions of Donald Trump's amorphous ideology. One believes the former president's rhetoric should assimilate with bygone Tea Party-era politics and contemporary culture war talking points. The other is running on the populist rollercoaster that slung Trump into the White House. Rust Belt boy wonder Josh Mandel, who served in the statehouse and was state treasurer for almost a decade, touts a pro-Trump campaign 'to protect the Judeo-Christian bedrock of America.

nationalist vance
guns

David Frum is wrong: guns save lives and sustain communities

The debate over guns in the United States could, until recently, be divided into two extreme camps: the liberal elites (invariably protected by armed guards) who call for ever-more restrictive control of firearms, the basic functionality of which they cannot even begin to explain, and the uber-conservative right, for whom guns are a way of life and are ofttimes life-sustaining. David Frum is evidently of the first faction, writing in the Atlantic this month about how 'Responsible Gun Ownership Is a Lie.' Gun sales — especially among first-time gun buyers — surged between 2019 and 2020, and continue to smash records. This trend has Frum worried.