Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

November 5, 2025

George Santos’s prison diary

Ten days ago, I woke up in a six-by-nine concrete box. No camera crews. No suits. No applause. Just silence and steel. I was in solitary confinement, locked down 23 hours a day, pacing in circles inside a room smaller than my walk-in closet. The walls seemed to have their own heartbeat. Every breath echoed. Every second felt like an hour. When I entered prison in July, I thought I knew what to expect. I thought humility would come gently. Instead, it came like a storm. You don’t understand loneliness until the lights go out and the only sound is your own heartbeat. I wrote letters to my husband and my sister and prayed to God. In my darkest moments, I even wrote suicide notes. I had to keep reminding myself: this can’t be the end of my story. Solitary confinement stripped me bare.

Heather Mac Donald

The cost of Zohran

William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. New York City is about to be governed by the Columbia University student body. A city that used to think of itself as grown up has just elected a mayor who seems the very embodiment of the American college student: uninformed, entitled and self-important, enjoying a regal quality of life that depends parasitically upon a civilization about which he knows nothing, yet for which he has nothing but scorn. American college students regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of diversity deanlets and associate vice-provosts of inclusion and belonging.

Christopher Caldwell

Is Donald Trump a game theorist?

Is Donald Trump a more sophisticated mathematical thinker than we give him credit for? The other day, on one of the Sunday talk shows, a lawyer named Sarah Isgur explained the logic Trump was following in throwing the book at those who had once done the same to him. Isgur, who served in the first Trump administration, sees in the President’s actions something more sophisticated than mere revenge: “What you will hear from those people in the Department of Justice is: this is what deterrence theory is about. When you’re playing a cooperative game and the other side defects,” Isgur said, “then you hit them back disproportionately to create that deterrence.

Ben Domenech

Why Thomas Sowell still matters

New York socialist Zohran Mamdani is hailed as the social media sensation of American politics. He knows how to talk directly to young people, we’re told. Yet an account called “Thomas Sowell Quotes” has almost twice as many followers on X as Mamdani. Sowell turned 95 this year. He is an unlikely influencer and yet hour-long interviews with him, published by Stanford’s Hoover Institution, have been watched millions of times. In his most popular video, Sowell argues for personal responsibility over dependence on the state and is meticulous in his use of empirical evidence. Black men who read newspapers and own library cards have had the same income as their white counterparts since 1969. Married black couples have the same poverty rate as white couples and have done for decades.

Sam Leith

Prince Andrew finds refuge in video games

Oh God, not that. That’s all we need, I thought, reading in a long account of Britain’s Prince Andrew’s current travails that “according to visitors to Royal Lodge,” he now “spends much of his time playing video games.” Even before all the unpleasantness with the child-rape allegations against Jeffrey Epstein, one of the Prince’s more embarrassing qualities was his appearing as an “ambassador” for this or that – usually accompanied by a helicopter trip to a golf course. Now he’s reduced – no chopper, no putting green; woe is him – to being an ambassador for adults who play video games. As an adult who plays video games, and even writes about them from time to time, I generally welcome news of figures in public life who do the same. Not on this occasion.

Roger Kimball

Time for a reckoning on the 2020 election

Last spring and summer I watched bits of our contemporary gladiatorial contests, AKA congressional confirmation hearings. One thrust that many Democrat inquisitors relied on to soften up their victims was some form of the question: “Do you believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election?” At least one contestant resorted to the parry “I believe that Joe Biden was seated as president,” which of course is not quite the same thing as acknowledging that he actually won. The subterfuge did not pass by unnoticed. Nothing escapes these Democrat Divas of the Dialectic. Having exposed the equivocation, they attempted to pounce. “Aha! So you are an election denier! Now let’s talk about the attempted insurrection of January 6.

Owen Matthews

Putin thinks time is on his side

Very well then – war. That is the bottom line of Vladimir Putin’s response to Donald Trump’s latest attempts at mediating an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In August, Putin rejected the peace deal that Trump lined up in Alaska. Now, the Kremlin has scuttled the White House’s plan for a summit in Budapest by insisting that Russia’s demands for Ukrainian demilitarization and “de-nazification” remain in force. Clearly, the Russian President still believes that he can win the war on the battlefield – and terrorize Ukraine’s civilians. What is Putin’s plan?

Lionel Shriver

I’m a slave to my Apple Watch

Aside from streaming on an iPad, when riding a stationary bike one of the few entertainments on offer is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is all to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch. Its heart rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the pulse oximeter function, which a medical technology suit has forced Apple to eliminate in current American models until the litigant’s patent runs out in 2028.

Jonathan Leaf

Humans are more than just apes

Revolutions in science happen like Mike’s bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: slowly, then suddenly. For the past two decades, neuroscientists have been interested in the ways that the human brain differs from those of other primates. The prevailing assertion among primatologists was that our genome is only 1 to 2 percent distinct from chimps’. Then in April, a team of more than a hundred of the world’s top geneticists published an article in Nature revealing that it’s actually ten times as different. This has enormous implications. After all, if humans aren’t just souped-up chimps – as primatologists have often suggested – then many widely accepted ideas about our nature must be reconsidered.

Joseph D'Hippolito

Pope Leo is following in Francis’s footsteps

Since Pope Leo XIV’s election in May, Catholics have wondered whether he would continue Pope Francis’s radical agenda or ignite a more conservative reaction. After five months, the verdict appears clear. Leo will not only promote the principal policies in Francis’s agenda, but work to solidify them. This includes suppressing traditionalist theology and liturgy while bolstering activism on the environment, migration and same-sex relationships. Traditionalists initially viewed Leo with hope. They noted his ability to recite the Latin Mass, his choice of papal livery favored by Pope Benedict XVI and his meeting with Cardinal Raymond Burke, who supports maintaining the Latin Mass. But the new pope refuses to discipline bishops who move against traditionalists.

Daniel McCarthy

Trump is being misled on Venezuela

President Trump is being misled into a regime-change war close to home. Few Americans nowadays find much to celebrate in the Iraq War or the intervention that overthrew Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Regimes were successfully changed both times, but what came after the dictators’ downfall was civil war, regional instability and mass-migration flows that exported many of those nations’ troubles to their neighbors. Now the Trump administration wants to do to Venezuela’s despot, Nicolás Maduro, what George W. Bush did to Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama did to Gaddafi. That will predictably do to the Americas – including the US – what the War on Terror did to the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Why would Donald Trump make such a mistake?

Neal Pollack

Wokeness ended my backroom Jeopardy! habit

In May I got a Facebook message from a guy named Mikey Walsh, who I’d met once at a trivia night at Mister Tramps, one of the diviest dive bars in Austin, Texas. He told me he’d been running a quiz called “Buzz In Buzzed,” which was exactly like Jeopardy!. Several of the regular players had been on Jeopardy! like me, and he was looking for more contestants to play. “This is not a business,” he said. “It’s free to play, and there’s no prizes. It’s just nerds playing trivia for fun.” This wasn’t the kind of offer I turn down. The opportunity to play fake Jeopardy! in the back of the bar for no money? Sign me up, I said. A couple of weeks later, I went to Buzz In Buzzed.

Mary Wakefield

Michael Heath on 75 years at The Spectator

When I joined The Spectator in 2000, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-story Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings with media alpha males. She would soon be married to the publisher Stephen Quinn and having an affair with former British home secretary David Blunkett, but was always looking to widen her portfolio. One floor down was former British prime minister Boris Johnson, then editor of the magazine, mostly immersed in meetings of his own with associate editor Petronella Wyatt. We’d sometimes find him on the landing, staring mistily into the middle distance.

Paul Wood

The return of Erik Prince

Erik Prince, the American mercenary, wants to sell you a phone. His Unplugged phone is aimed at stopping big tech and big government spying on you. It’s available in the United States, and shortly in the United Kingdom too. He tells me: “It’s been troubling for me to see the crackdown on free expression in the UK.” But the phone is a sideline. His main business remains sending private armies to some of the world’s most dangerous places. The Biden years were lean ones, or at least quiet ones; now that Donald Trump’s back, so is Prince. Most people know Prince as the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military company. In 2014, four of Prince’s soldiers got long prison sentences in the US for opening fire on Iraqi civilians, killing 14.

Euan Dawtrey

How chess killed Danya Naroditsky

Last month, chess grandmaster Daniel “Danya” Naroditsky started streaming again from his house in North Carolina. He had taken a break from it recently; I was one of at least a thousand viewers to welcome him back that night. But something was off. Danya, normally effusive and energetic, seemed haggard. As the broadcast went on, he began to slur his words. At one point, realizing he’d made a wrong move, he punched himself in the head. It was painful to watch. Throughout, Danya talked about a man whose accusations had allegedly subjected him to torment and abuse over the past year. At times, he was close to tears.

Kelly Chapman

The cruel, cold intellect of DC and San Francisco

New York vs Los Angeles is done to death. Those cities have already captured the American heart on stage and screen. The next great rivalry (or is it an alliance?) is unfolding between the bastions of the nerds: Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Each prizes a different facet of intellect – DC the operator, San Francisco the inventor, functioning as co-architects of a new American order. We tell ourselves SF and DC represent different values: disruption and order, innovation and stability. And yet the cities are locked in a symbiotic embrace. San Francisco builds new worlds in the image of its algorithms; Washington manages those worlds through policy and process. But this is a cold comfort. While both claim to act in the public interest, each sees the human as a problem to be solved.

Margaret Mitchell

Can Spanberger offer Virginia more than vague platitudes?

Abigail Spanberger’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election should come as no surprise. In the last 50 years, the state has only once elected a governor who belongs to the same party as the president. While the outcome might not be out of the ordinary, it doesn’t bode well for the Republican party in next year’s midterms – Spanberger won by a 15-point lead, much wider than the two-point margin of the 2021 race. Spanberger is a former CIA officer who served three terms in Congress. Her opponent Winsome Earle-Sears has served as Virginia’s lieutenant governor since 2021, but failed to connect with voters in the way that Virginia’s incumbent Governor Glenn Youngkin did.

Lance Christensen

California’s Prop 50 passed because grifters were scared of losing their grift

While it's premature for a full autopsy of the No on Prop 50 campaign, the opposition clearly faced structural hurdles that went well beyond Governor Gavin Newsom's thinly veiled presidential ambitions. The pundits are quick to make it a referendum on President Donald Trump, but upon deeper inspection, we’re seeing big government going all in to retain power behind the Sierra Curtain. The grifters are scared of losing their grift The progressive left rallied effectively to boost Newsom’s ego-play because its core supporters, especially government unions and allied special interest, depend on taxpayer resources to sustain their influence, giving them strong incentives to mobilize.

Charles Lipson

Far left is the new face of the Democratic party

If you think America doesn’t permit assisted suicide, you haven’t been watching the New York mayoral election. The city is deliberately killing itself.The country’s largest city, its financial and media capital, had a choice among three truly dreadful candidates: a deeply-tarnished former governor, a Republican who runs in every election except Homecoming Queen and had no chance of winning this one (but refused to withdraw), and a young socialist with a winning smile, dreamy programs, Islamist allies, and zero administrative experience. Predictably, New York voters chose the absolute worst. Zohran Mamdani won handily. Now, they’ll have to live with Mamdani’s socialist programs, which fail everywhere and break the bank in the process.

Tuesday

November 4, 2025

Isaac Schorr

Mayor Mamdani will terrify America

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor-elect of New York City, and the progressive wing of the Democratic party is Champagne drunk celebrating his ascension. But should it be? Mamdani has only narrowly prevailed in a race with a clear spoiler candidate, Republican Curtis Sliwa, lead-blocking for him against a charmless opponent, former governor Andrew Cuomo. With tougher, more honorable competition, it’s possible – likely, even – that he may not have even made it to the general election, much less won it. Only when compared to a corrupt, sleazy, nepobaby with blood on his hands, and a beret-clad, narcissistic cat-man whose own friends begged him to step aside, did voters view Mamdani as a much-needed alternative.