Politics Archives

Thursday

September 11, 2025

America’s mask of civility slips again

The FBI has just released an image of a "person of interest" in the case of Charlie Kirk’s killing. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that investigators have found ammunition at the crime scene with pro-trans and "antifa" engravings. But we still don’t know much, if anything, about the killer. Speculation as to motives, or snap judgments as to the historical significance of yesterday’s crime, are therefore futile. On the moronic inferno of X, however, the would-be Nostradamuses of the 21st-century right are weighing in with grave predictions about civil war or revolution or an imminent tide of vengeful justice against "the left." Others are suggesting that Kirk, a Christian Zionist, may have been slain for having raised doubts about Israel’s war on Hamas recently.

Max Horder

Left-wing violence is still being normalized

Six months before being shot in the neck and murdered, the popular conservative commentator Charlie Kirk retweeted our study on political violence in America. Warning the nation that assassination culture was spreading amongst the left, Kirk highlighted our study showing that 48 percent of politically left-wing respondents in a recent poll said it would be at least somewhat justifiable to murder Elon Musk. He noted, too, that 55 percent of them also believed the same about killing President Trump. And, most acutely, he highlighted that this is the natural outgrowth of a left-wing political culture that has tolerated violence for years. Sadly, tragically and unbelievably, we learn that he has become its latest victim. Left-wing violence is still being normalized.

Ben Domenech

Charlie Kirk saw himself as holding back a revolution

Charlie Kirk was, from an incredibly young age, the sort of person willing to try things that seemed impossible. Last night, in his remembrance of meeting Charlie for the first time, my Fox colleague Guy Benson realized that he was probably one of the first conservative speakers Kirk had invited to share ideas to students in Illinois – at the ripe age of around sixteen.

Chris Mondics

When will we learn the truth about Saudi involvement in 9/11?

Will Saudi Arabia ever be held to account for the 9/11 terror attacks? For decades, the Kingdom has successfully parried lawsuits in the United States accusing it of providing logistical and financial support to a network of Islamic extremists who launched a global terror campaign, culminating in the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Those attacks occurred 24 years ago and since then survivors and victims of the 9/11 hijackings have had to counter not only vigorous Saudi denials mounted by their well-funded American legal team but also repeated attempts by the US government to thwart the lawsuits. But there are signs the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. On August 28, US District Judge George B.

Eva Terry

I saw the bullet hit Charlie Kirk

I saw the bullet hit Charlie Kirk, and I saw him close his eyes and slump. I am a reporter for the Deseret News, based out of Salt Lake City. I was sent down to Utah Valley University yesterday morning to cover Charlie Kirk’s Prove Me Wrong tour. At around 11a.m., my friend and fellow reporter Emma Pitts and I walked from the campus library to the outdoor amphitheater with tickets in hand, but there was no need. There was no one scanning tickets; there were no bag-checkers – we just walked in with the other 3,000 people who attended. We were later informed that only six officers total had been assigned to the event. The atmosphere was rowdy.

Joseph D'Hippolito

Flight 93 heroes deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Twenty-four years ago, Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 innocent civilians – the vast majority of them Americans – by hijacking three passenger aircraft and ramming them the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in suburban Washington, DC. But a fourth, United Airlines Flight 93, failed to reach its target thanks to the bravery of the passengers and flight attendants, who sacrificed themselves to save who-knows-how many. Twenty-four years later, those heroes have yet to receive their country's highest civilian award. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, instituted by President John F.

Wednesday

September 10, 2025

Neal Pollack

The ‘recklessness’ of Joe Biden, according to Kamala Harris

The Atlantic published the first excerpt of Kamala Harris’s expensive memoir "107 Days" this morning, leading with a lickspittle editor’s note from Jeffrey Goldberg. According to Goldberg, the Harris we read in this book is: “blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny. As you will see in the following excerpt – and throughout this newsworthy book – she no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.” In this short excerpt we learn that Vice-President Harris repaired our supposedly broken relationship with France, mais oui, and also did a good job as “border czar.” She says so herself, and we have only her to thank.

Margaret Mitchell

I made the Epstein cookies

Is it wrong to bake cookies from a recipe addressed to a pedophile and sex trafficker? When I found the recipe for chocolate chip cookies on page 169 of Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book, I read and re-read it expecting there to be some sinister inside joke, perhaps a hidden dash of adrenochrome or instructions to “massage” the dough. The surrounding page contains a woman’s redacted photograph and references Epstein’s “mentorship,” while the other 237 feel like a cross between various expressions of human depravity: part ransom letter, part porn magazine and part teenage girl’s diary. Where does an innocent cookie recipe fit in among this?

Tuesday

September 9, 2025

Jennifer Harrison

Don’t watch the murder video of Iryna Zarutska…

There are precious few people who should watch the video released yesterday of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska slowly dying as she cowered in bewilderment and abject fear on a train carriage in Charlotte, NC, after being slashed three times in the neck by a violent repeat offender. Certainly not rubberneckers on the internet whose depraved interest will only intrude on her family’s private grief. And absolutely not her family, for them it is the worst nightmare they could imagine come alive. A jury will have to. Two other groups who should: Democrats and the media. They created this nightmare so they should be forced to see the uncomfortable truth and direct result of what they have done.

Damian Reilly

Could Epstein’s birthday book trip up the British Ambassador?

In May, Sky News asked Lord Mandelson, Britain's Ambassador to the United States of America, if it was true that he’d stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in June 2009, when the financier was in jail for soliciting prostitution from a minor. He replied flatly that he refused to answer any questions about Epstein. "I wish I’d never met him in the first place," was all he would say on the subject. No doubt Mandelson would rather forget – and that we all now ignore – how he used to lavish praise on Epstein. “Wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!

Margaret Mitchell

Is it really ‘clear’ the Trump-Epstein birthday letter is fake?

The “bawdy” birthday letter from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, which the Wall Street Journal reported the existence of in July, has been released for all to see. The bawdiness is somewhat wanting – the “small arcs” of the naked woman’s breasts which the Journal described are indeed very small. There’s nothing explicit in its imaginary dialogue between the two men, which begins with a pensive “voice over” saying “There must be more to life than having everything.” It’s creepily cryptic, at worst. Trump said in July that the letter was a “fake thing’ and a “fake Wall Street Journal story.

Spectator Editorial

Magnificent – but is it war?

When Donald Trump made building a “big, beautiful” wall along the southern US border a priority in his first term, he was widely derided. There wasn’t enough concrete or steel to build such a structure. Anyway, it was futile because migrants would find some way over or around it. It was a heartless and evil project being promoted to distract from other failures. When shutting off immigration from Mexico became an unrealized project from that first term, Trump’s critics enjoyed themselves. Campaigning for his second term, Trump hardly mentioned the wall. Yet something remarkable has happened. Undocumented migration across the border has all but ceased.

Taki

The day I ate a royal love letter

Our very own Roger Kimball made it possible. I am referring to The Last Alpha Male, the greatest book ever written except for the Bible, as a Greek critic by the name of Taki put it. It is written by yours truly and owes a lot to Harry Stein, himself a terrific writer, whose father happened to write a musical play by the name of Fiddler on the Roof. My problem was how to justify Don Giovanni behavior while married to a Penelope-like beauty. Roger put me in touch with Harry, who came to my rescue. Presto, the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine stopped overnight. Fighters put down their weapons and read about the last alpha male and his ladies. My spies tell me even the Donald asked for a copy thinking it was about him, but then threw it out as Air Force One took off from Palm Beach.

Ben Domenech

Inside Trump’s war on the cartels

To deal with big problems, the second presidency of Donald Trump adopts a three-step approach. First, the declaration of authority: in this case, the designation announced in February of multiple Mexican and South American cartels as international terror organizations, opening up new avenues for legal, intelligence and potential military responses. Next, eye-popping kinetic action: this came with SOUTHCOM’s deployment in August of eight warships to the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans, including three Aegis guided-missile destroyers parked off the coast of Venezuela along with a landing dock, amphibious assault ships and a fast-attack nuclear submarine.

Neal Pollack

Elon Musk is in exile

Elon Musk is in exile. He’s forgotten by friends, embattled by enemies. He now quietly (for him) goes about his business, fighting non-government battles after those strange few months he spent standing behind the President’s desk with his toddler son X, who punched Musk in the face while he was seemingly running the country. Musk’s fate is a case study in what happens when Donald Trump rolls up the red carpet. Trump operated his first term as President more like a season of The Apprentice and less like an administration. It was a revolving door of exile. Reality-show worthy characters like Omarosa Manigault Newman and Anthony Scaramucci came and went with drama that fell just short of an episode-ending boardroom ceremony.

Christopher Caldwell

Liberalism is a lost cause

The worst book title of the modern age actually belongs to a superb work: The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, which the English sociologist Colin Crouch wrote in 2011. The title was meant to play off the historian George Dangerfield’s 1935 book about the politics of the United Kingdom before World War One, The Strange Death of Liberal England. Alas, after almost a century, not many people remember Dangerfield. A larger problem is that it is hard to say what liberalism is, neo- or paleo-, dead or alive. In Europe, it mostly means the free market. In the United States, it mostly means various movements for social betterment pushed by those skeptical of the free market. Liberalism thus comes to mean every political tendency and its opposite.

Gavin Mortimer

What is Charles Kushner doing in Paris?

When Charles Kushner took up his appointment as American ambassador to France this summer, his first official visit was to the Shoah Memorial in Paris. As a child of Holocaust survivors, he tweeted, “fighting anti-Semitism will be at the heart of my mission.” So it has proved. Last month, Kushner published a letter in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused Emmanuel Macron of insufficient action in the face of soaring anti-Semitism in the Republic. The ambassador was summoned for a dressing down. He didn’t attend as he was on vacation Kushner also castigated the French President for his imminent recognition of Palestinian statehood.

Andrew Cockburn

The defense industry and the US government are inextricably linked

Fresh on the heels of news that the government will take a 10 percent stake in failing chip company Intel, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has floated the possibility of commanding a direct stake in Lockheed Martin and other large defense corporations. Speaking on CNBC, and extolling the “exquisite” proficiency of Lockheed products, he claimed “my Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense are thinking about it.” The proposal obviously fulfills a key requirement, which is to appeal to the transactional proclivities of the boss. Donald Trump had greeted the Intel arrangement as a “good deal” criticized only by “stupid people,” and suggested that there will be more such investments.

Roger Kimball

Trump’s battle against the tyranny of lawfare

A buzzword of the moment is “lawfare.” What is lawfare? It’s one of those portmanteau words that Lewis Carroll taught us about. A combination of “law” and “warfare,” “lawfare” is distinctly less clever an invention than “chortle” – one of Carroll’s coinages, my beamish boy, which combines the words “chuckle” and “snort.” The word “lawfare” apparently dates back to the late 1950s, though the phenomenon – using and abusing the law in order to conduct political warfare – has come into its own only in the past couple of decades. The fact that there is now an eponymous website devoted to the subject is but one patent of its currency.

Daniel McCarthy

How the right learned to love the state

These are dark days for free-market conservatives. A socialist, Zohran Mamdani, leads most polls in the race to become the next mayor of New York. The Republican President, meanwhile, is not only a “tariff man,” he’s lately been directing the federal government to take a stake in ownership of companies such as US Steel and Intel. Even before the rise of Donald Trump, the Republicans were increasingly becoming the preferred party of America’s working class. But before Trump, the free-market right could imagine the GOP’s blue-collar voters were only interested in social conservatism and wouldn’t demand a change in the party’s economic orientation. Now, things look very different.