Politics Archives

Tuesday

April 15, 2025

The Blue Origin lady spaceflight was desperate, sad and tasteless

I was determined to write something positive about Blue Origin’s “historic all-female spaceflight.” The spectacle was an all-American underdog story. Jeff Bezos worked his way up from dorky book salesman to buff billionaire who can launch his busty bride-to-be into space alongside some celebrities — because hey, why not? Then I saw the group photos of the girl gang, and I just couldn’t. My resolve dissolved faster than the lip fillers in Khloé Kardashian’s fake face. All I could think was, “Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!

Neal Pollack

Mahmoud Khalil is not the victimized cuddlebear the media would have you believe

A federal immigration judge ruled on Friday that the government could deport Mahmoud Khalil, not a student, but a “Columbia University graduate.” Judge Jamee Comans, a former Mississippi police officer and a Biden appointee in 2023, said that Khalil’s political activities posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” for the United States, which is claiming that Khalil is undermining “US policy to fight anti-Semitism.” Khalil supporters talk about him like he’s Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, Dr. King writing letters from Birmingham jail or Oscar Wilde staring wistfully at the moon from his cell in Reading Gaol. But anyone looking to ding the Trump administration on its deportation policy could find a better example of injustice.

Monday

April 14, 2025

Roger Kimball

What the left calls ‘chaos,’ the rest of us call ‘winning’

They never learn, the libs. Back in 2016, they provided hours of entertainment assuring themselves that Donald Trump would “never be president” (“take it to the bank,” said Nancy Pelosi, who in another galaxy, long, long ago was speaker of the House). Patriotic citizens, eager to instruct the public about the dialectic of hubris and nemesis, stitched together many joyful compilations of Hollywood celebrities, ditto-head news readers and Democratic politicians intoning that party line. Then, after the impossible mutated into the inevitable and Trump was elected, the narrative shifted to “the walls are closing in on Donald Trump.” If it wasn’t Russia, Russia, Russia it was Stormy Daniels, putatively shady business deals or putative efforts at insurrection.

Kara Kennedy

Is Kamala Harris turning into Meghan Markle?

Somewhere atop the sun-drenched hills of coastal California, failures go to rebrand themselves, and rebrand their rebrands as "pivots." There, Kamala Harris and Meghan Markle are busy writing the next chapter in the book of blaming the system for the personal failures of wealthy and powerful people. Harris, fresh from discovering that Democratic strategists had invented the America that was enthusiastic about her, now contemplates her political afterlife. She does so from the same region of the same state where Markle, having learned that royal traditions don't yield to Instagram aesthetics, crafts multi-million-dollar deals to explain why it's everyone else's fault. Welcome to the Golden State, where yesterday's rejections become tomorrow's empowerment memoirs.

Charles Lipson

How to deal with the student mob

Last week’s violent anti-Semitic protest at Stanford is yet another sign of a pernicious climate on many campuses. The immediate targets are Jews and Israel. The larger targets are many of the values we prize in the West. At Stanford, students broke into the university president’s office using hammers and crowbars. They proceeded to barricade themselves inside, destroy the furnishings, and scrawl noxious graffiti there and on the building outside. Some estimates say they caused $700,000 in damages. Twelve students were arrested by local police. The Santa Clara District attorney announced that the break-in had been carefully organized in advance, caused enormous damage and warranted criminal charges. But, he said, it did not warrant severe punishment.

Sunday

April 13, 2025

Lee Cohen

Security-consumed Prince Harry chooses war-torn Ukraine as latest backdrop

Prince Harry’s clandestine dash to Ukraine this week, trailing last year’s faux royal tours to Colombia and Nigeria, lays bare a brazen hypocrisy. He bangs on about the UK being too perilous for his family, waging legal crusades over security provisions, yet here he is, swanning into war zones and countries with travel warnings, trading on his fading royal luster to clutch at relevance – all while dodging the duties he willingly jettisoned. Bereft of official standing in America or Britain, his quest to play maverick royal smacks of pantomime, one that jeers at his claims of craving a secluded, secure existence. Take his Ukraine jaunt to Lviv’s Superhumans Center, where he mingled with wounded soldiers and civilians.

Friday

April 11, 2025

Ross Clark

Who knew about Trump’s flip-flop?

As a piece of financial punditry, it could hardly be bettered. “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY”, screamed a post on the platform Truth Social on Wednesday morning. Hours later, the S&P 500 surged by 9 percent – its biggest percentage rise since 2008. The only trouble is that the tipster handing out this invaluable advice was the same man whose announcement caused the surge in the stock market: Donald J. Trump. Unsurprisingly, it has raised questions about who knew that Trump was about to do an about-turn and delay tariffs for 90 days – and whether any of them used the information to their personal advantage. Insider trading has long been treated as a serious issue among corporations.

Thursday

April 10, 2025

Paul du Quenoy

What’s in a pronoun?

“I am Kamala Harris. My pronouns are ‘she’ and ‘her.’ I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.” That embarrassing exercise in self-parody was how the former vice president of the United States chose to introduce herself at a July 2022 roundtable on how the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade could affect disabled people. Harris’s pandering indulgence in radical gender ideology barely attracted notice at the time. But two years later, just after she took the mantle of the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination from the addled Joe Biden, a video of her awkward self-presentation resurfaced and went viral as evidence of her intellectual vapidity, poor public speaking skills, and display of a sensibility that most Americans reject.

Charles Lipson

Trump’s ‘on-again, off-again’ presidency

To win elections in a two-party system, the victor needs to erect a big tent. He needs to persuade all kinds of voters in the general election, including many who disagree with each other (but disagree with the other party even more), to vote for him. Experienced politicians call it, “the politics of addition, not subtraction.” The rest of us call it “big tent politics.” What can poke holes in that tent? What will allow the rain to come pouring in? Those questions loom over Republicans, looking for an umbrella amid tariff disagreement, a volatile market and whispers of a possible recession. The skies were clear when the big issue was illegal immigration. The party base loved it and so did voters.

Wednesday

April 9, 2025

Daniel McCarthy

Will a new era of tariffs really stop China’s rise?

If free trade and globalization enabled Communist China to become a superpower, will a new era of tariffs and trade war halt China’s rise? The Trump administration is betting the opposite of the policies that turned China into America’s most formidable rival will strengthen us and weaken them. Even before the President announced his sweeping new tariffs – including cripplingly high ones on China – the State Department was indicating that nations from the Caribbean to Europe faced a choice between doing business with Washington and doing business with Beijing.

Spectator Editorial

The 👊🇺🇸🔥 presidency

Much has been said and written about the Trump administration’s leaked Signal discussion on bombing Houthis in Yemen, most of it forgettable. Virtually all attention has focused on dull questions of competence and whether any heads should roll for communicating sensitive US matters through a private company’s platform, then ineptly letting a reporter in on the chat. The debate is largely news-cycle fodder. The new administration will not succeed or fail based on what phone apps its members use. Yet the Signal debate has entirely overshadowed what should be a major discussion in its own right. Is the new administration quietly sleepwalking the country back into a costly, dangerous policy of Middle East military meddling?

Curtis Yarvin

My DC bunker

Washington, DC My office this week has been the Starbucks on Capitol Hill. Any random subscriber to my Substack can get a half-hour with me if they book a slot. I do this a lot when I travel and oddly, given the rot of this rotting world, I rarely come away with the feeling that here were 30 precious minutes I’ll never see again. I often want to spend an hour or two. And no one yet has killed or even attacked me. A leftist policy wonk did show up without an appointment, but he just wanted to talk about Ezra Klein. One of this week’s characters was a Russia expert at a foreign policy thinktank, who seems to really know his stuff. He filled in important nuances ofthe Prigozhin coup. Yevgeny Prigozhin never meant to overthrow Vladimir Putin, he said.

Aidan McLaughlin

Can the Democrats rediscover themselves in the age of Trump?

Even on the placid streets of London’s Mayfair, James Carville cannot find peace. “Every five minutes I get stopped and asked about Chuck Schumer,” says the Democratic strategist when I speak to him. “I can’t even enjoy a $30 martini by myself.” Carville’s party is in dire straits. The humiliation of losing to Donald Trump had not yet worn off when the Donald stormed back to the White House with a vengeance, unleashing the chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk on the federal government, assembling a cabinet intent on carrying out even his most radical policies – and scaring the few Republican would-be dissenters in Congress into submission.

Ryan Girdusky

The Democrats have a voter problem

Data scientist David Shor has a message for Democrats: “Your problem with young men is worse than you think.” Shor is a respected and highly reputable Democratic data guru. He has released his autopsy on the 2024 election and why Kamala Harris lost. Unlike previous analysis, which primarily used exit polling, Shor’s company Blue Rose Research looked at polls, precinct-level returns and voter-file data to figure out who turned on the Democrats – and why. Democrats comforted themselves in the wake of their election loss by insisting that if more people had voted, Harris would have been sworn in as the 47th president. For decades it’s been true that Democrats win high-turnout elections while Republicans win votes with a smaller turnout.

Daniel McCarthy

The Democratic war machine

To understand what’s wrong with the American left and the Democratic party – two different but entwined things, to be sure – look to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Look also to the work of the historian Sean McMeekin, including his latest book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Earlier this spring I emceed an event in McMeekin’s honor, as he received the award for “Conservative Book of the Year” from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It gave me the opportunity to chat with him about Lenin’s doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism” and much else, including the fairy tale the West tells itself about how communism ended.

Peter Pomerantsev

Play Putin at his own game by ‘nightmaring’ his world order

There’s a delicious Russian verb that derives from the criminal underworld: “koshmarit,” literally “to nightmare someone.” It usually denotes how authorities give criminals, or anyone they dislike, so much relentless hassle from so many different angles they bend them to their will. Vladimir Putin, always keen to bring mafia language into politics, was the first Russian statesman to make use of it in public – he once instructed his authorities to stop “nightmaring” the business community. I keep returning to that word when I think of how Putin’s own foreign policy could be restrained to make real the Reaganite slogan that helped Donald Trump win the election: “peace through strength.

Colin Freeman

Will Trump take a punt on Puntland?

As a man who views the world as one big real-estate portfolio, Donald Trump sees the potential in northern Somalia’s Puntland region. Lousy government, maybe, and definitely more than a few bad guys around. But Puntland has great winter sun and tremendous beaches, folks. It could be just the place to resettle Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Jordan and Egypt have all but refused to rehouse Gaza’s population and according to Israeli diplomats, Puntland has made the shortlist of new Palestinian homelands. The Trump sales pitch is that this will allow Gazans to create “far safer and more beautiful communities” than their homeland could ever offer. The Strip meanwhile, will be rebuilt into a Dubai-on-the-Med.

Christopher Caldwell

How DEI destroyed itself

Those who wonder why more Americans haven’t risen up in rebellion against the Trump administration’s assault on affirmative action, its gutting of university departments, its violation of the neutrality of the American legal profession, should keep in mind the epigraph from the 20th-century philosopher Will Durant that appears in the opening moments of Mel Gibson’s 2006 movie Apocalypto: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” As he promised to do, Donald Trump is dismantling large parts of the government he conquered at the ballot box last November. You don’t have to approve. Roughly half of Americans do not. But the regime he is undoing has yielded diminishing returns for most of this century.

Kara Kennedy

The life of Karoline Leavitt

When Karoline Leavitt, the buxom blonde 27-year-old White House press secretary landed the gig, not everybody was convinced. Scott Jennings, the Bush speechwriter turned TV star, had the resume. Megyn Kelly had the fire. But Leavitt? She was a gamble, at best. But Donald Trump wasn’t concerned about her youth and inexperience. “When I was 21, I was building buildings in Manhattan,” he told her. “I believe you can have this job.” He has been vindicated. Since taking the podium, Leavitt has quieted some of her detractors with a performance that’s part combat sport, part masterclass in messaging. Like her boss, she is combative and spunky. Sometimes she mocks the legacy news reporters she feels are asking particularly bad questions.

Roger Kimball

‘Signalgate’ is another nothingburger

I predict that by the time you read this, the press-fabricated entertainment known as “Signalgate” will be but a memory – a fond memory for those addicted to round-the-clock media frenzy, department of anti-Trump shenanigans. For the more responsible members of the populace, it will seem like an overheard squabble among angry children in some forlorn government-funded schoolyard. What, after all, was “Signalgate?” From one perspective, it was like a piranha-infested pool into which chunks of meat or perhaps a hapless Bond villain had been tossed. The resulting frothy tumult made it impossible to see what was happening. You only knew that the fish were frantic and the half-eaten protein shredded. Such things happen from time to time in America.