Politics Archives

Thursday

May 8, 2025

The unforgiving history of student loans

Republicans in the House are considering a bill to make major changes in federal student loans for college, and President Trump is floating the idea of making colleges responsible for borrowers who fail to repay. For decades student loans and their repayment are never far the center of controversy, but it wasn’t always that way. I grew up in the era before massive student debt. Student loans were available in 1971 when I went off to college, but they didn’t dominate the terrain like a Tyrannosaurus rex. They were more like Barney, the joyful purple denizen of PBS, who had a ferocious appetite for public funds but had not yet evolved into the carnivore who preys on the livelihoods of college graduates. But the student-loan monster had already been born.

Wednesday

May 7, 2025

Geoffrey Ingersoll

There are too many podcasters and influencers in the White House Briefing Room

It was around 3 p.m. last Tuesday when I’d finally heard enough. Karoline Leavitt, for the love of your movement, stop bringing podcasters and influencers into the White House briefings. It’s not good for anyone, not the administration, not for conservative nor new media, and it’s certainly not good for all the righteous goals that got Trump elected in the first place. Take TikTok’s Link Lauren, aka “MAGA Malfoy,” who had the opportunity so few get to ask Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt a question in person at the White House.

lucre podcasters influences briefing room

Jacob Heilbrunn

J.D. Vance makes nice with Munich

It was an emollient J.D. Vance who showed up at the Munich Leaders Meeting in Washington, DC. Gone was the Vance who dissed the Europeans in Munich on February 15 by complaining that they were practicing censorship of political views and who met with a representative of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. Gone was the Cerberus who barked at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the Oval Office on February 24 that he had exhibited a dismaying lack of gratitude toward America for its assistance to his beleaguered nation. Gone was the Ohio senator who declared in July 2024 that he didn’t give a fig about Ukraine’s fate and was more interested in pursuing an Asia First policy.

Daniel DePetris

Biden has learned nothing from his foreign-policy experience

Historically, ex-presidents spend their golden years on the speaking circuit, writing their memoirs or planning for the inauguration of their presidential libraries. What they don’t do is lash out at their successors when they disagree with a policy or decision. Joe Biden, however, has no intention of keeping quiet. A little more than three months after vacating the White House, Biden is unencumbered from conventional decorum and feels free to speak his mind. Last month, he gave his first post-presidency speech in Chicago, where he blasted the Trump administration for taking a sharp hatchet to the federal workforce, including the Social Security Administration.

Josh Kaplan

Dave Portnoy, Mohammed Khan and the anti-Jewish horseshoe

Some dumb people made a dumb decision at a bar in Philadelphia this weekend. In a booth at the Barstool Sports-owned Sansom street, a group of guys paid a waitress to hold up a sign that said "Fuck the Jews." In their pisswater beer-soaked joy, they giggled and filmed it and put it on Instagram. In the hours after, professional doxxers StopAntisemitism located the video, identified the young men and blasted their name all over X. Enter Barstool founder Dave Portnoy. Dave, for those unaware of his antics, is what could best be described as a professional beefer. He fights anyone, usually on Twitter, and has threatened to “skullfuck” his adversaries with tweets on multiple occasions. He also happens to be Jewish.

Marc Oestreich

Is Shiloh Hendrix the new Luigi Mangione?

When a white mom called a black kid the N-word the immediate expectation was that she’d be canceled, possibly arrested. It was not that just a few days later she would have $700,000 in the bank.Shiloh Hendrix accused a five-year-old Somali boy of rummaging through her diaper bag in Rochester, Minnesota, last week. “Did you call that child the N-word,” a man who filmed her asked. “Yeah,” Shiloh snarled back, “if he’s gonna act like one.”She didn’t back off. She repeated the accusation, then turned on the man filming her with a string of insults. The video quickly went viral. But Shiloh didn’t follow the usual playbook of hunkering down to weather the online storm. She fought back. On GiveSendGo, Shiloh painted herself as the victim.

Neal Pollack

Real ID is a legislative wisp from the Bush-era War on Terror

The Real ID moment is here, the Y2K panic of 2025. Today is the deadline to update your driver’s license, leading to frantic predictions of something no one alive has ever seen before – long lines at the DMV. Will the center hold, or will the need to have a digitally embossed star on a piece of plastic finally bring the Republic down once and for all? I predict a quiet day. The fact is, though you now need a Real ID, you technically don’t need one today, unless you do. People must now deploy these enhanced IDs any time they’re entering a federal building, which most people don’t do on the reg, or a nuclear-power plant, which most people never do, and, most significantly in the lives of the general public, if they’re trying to get through airport security.

John Mac Ghlionn

Who is funding Trump’s billion-dollar crypto empire?

By one recent estimate, Trump’s foray into crypto has made his family almost $3 billion in six months and now accounts for up to 40 percent of his wealth.At the same time, his administration has been quietly dismantling guardrails around the crypto industry. Trump has slashed funding for key Treasury initiatives, scrapped proposed anti-fraud rules, and even pardoned crypto felons. Much of the hype – and money – comes from $TRUMP and $MELANIA, two so-called meme coins: cryptocurrencies driven by branding, jokes, or online fandom rather than real-world use. Yet despite having little practical function, the pair has already generated over $140 million in trading volume in just four months.

Tuesday

May 6, 2025

Neal Pollack

Mark Carney rebuffs Trump’s marriage proposal

The White House press conference between President Trump and newly-elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shows that every generation gets the summit it deserves. World War Two had Yalta, the 1970s the Camp David Accords. Barack Obama had a beer with the cop who arrested Henry Louis Gates, Jr. And Trump bragged about the new 24-karat White House gold décor and said, about Canada, “I think we have a lot of things in common.” The half-hour press scrum veered between mutual respect and Trumpian disdain, while Carney struggled to get a word in, flopping his hands in his lap like fish on a deck. He called Trump a “transformational President” and said, “We’re stronger when we’re together.” Trump said, “I have a lot of respect for this man.

Andy Pasztor

Exclusive: FAA issues autopilot warning after major airline crashes

Federal aviation regulators have issued a stark safety warning to airline pilots: think twice before switching off autopilots and other computerized flight controls at the country's busiest airports. The Federal Aviation Administration’s alert cautioned pilots about the dangers of excessive reliance on their own manual flying and visual approaches in congested airspace. The bulletin, issued in response to hazards revealed by recent “notable and high visibility” commercial aviation accidents and harrowing close calls in the US, is couched in technical jargon and was largely overlooked by the national media when it was released in early April.

Spectator Editorial

The reviving of the American mind

In his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom argued that higher education no longer taught US citizens how to think. “We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished,” he wrote. “The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.” Now, almost 40 years later, we’re even more clueless. The rot in academia has spread throughout the education system and can be found all over American life. Rational thinking has now been almost entirely usurped by the baser passions of anger and grievance, as we saw all too clearly in the collective insanity of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

Peter Wood

The Trump administration is giving us excellence, not equity

Americans are not a naturally gloomy people. We don’t necessarily expect things to go our way, but when they don’t, we can laugh it off. In my part of Vermont there’s a place called Hateful Hill, for example, so-named by stagecoach drivers who had a tough time with the steep road. But Hateful Hill is also a beautiful elevation. Today, even those who don’t “get” Donald Trump need to start seeing the upside. He doesn’t always get his way, which is probably a good thing, but he is leading a long-overdue revival of the American spirit and allowing for the return of optimism and the pursuit of excellence.

Amy L. Wax

Wokeism is stifling thought in America’s universities

The American education system needs drastic reform from bottom to top. Our K-12 schools, both public and private, have come to be dominated by radical left-wing ideas. Schools not only indoctrinate students with a one-sided view of history and society, but they also increasingly fail in their core mission of imparting the basic skills needed to function in our advanced and complex society. Likewise, our universities, professional schools and graduate schools are in the grip of a far-left ideology that has compromised their traditional missions of truth-seeking, knowledge creation and the preservation and transmission of western culture and the advanced skills essential to its vitality and prosperity.

Ben Domenech

How Christopher Rufo is changing American education

As fire-breathing counter-revolutionaries go, Christopher Rufo seems notably mild-mannered. Perhaps it’s his northern California roots and Pacific Northwest home that keep him from embracing the based lifestyle pursued by so many conservatives in the Trumpian era. He doesn’t like sports. He doesn’t enjoy UFC. He allows his four kids to watch Disney movies and admits he was once a vegetarian. Yet it’s also possible that the Georgetown-educated PBS documentarian turned right-wing iconoclast is effective precisely for that reason: he knows the people he is criticizing.

Sean Thomas

Why is intelligence declining?

In 1906, the famous polymath Sir Francis Galton visited a country fair on the edge of Plymouth, England. A bullock had been tethered for slaughter and almost 800 locals were invited to guess its dressed weight: how heavy it would be after butchering. Galton – an obsessive measurer of people, weather and intelligence – gathered the entries, calculated the average and found something remarkable. The crowd’s collective estimate came within a single pound of the ox’s actual weight. This elegant experiment would become one of the founding truisms of modern democratic thought. Galton had shown that while individuals may err, the group, in aggregate, can reason with uncanny accuracy and prescience. He had discovered “the wisdom of crowds.

John Hasson

We shouldn’t downplay the risks of ADHD medication

I was diagnosed with ADHD in my freshman year of college. I’d suspected as much in high school, but I disliked the idea of taking medication. College was different. No matter what I tried, I kept finding gaps in my notes – and therefore gaps in my knowledge on test day. While I was prescribed so-called “smart drugs,” I didn’t delude myself into thinking they would magically make me more intelligent – which is why I laughed when I saw the ADHD research industry perform a volte-face in the pages of the New York Times, in a piece headlined: “Have we been thinking about ADHD all wrong?” The obvious answer is yes.

Christopher Caldwell

The real battle for Europe

Donald Trump hates Europe – that suspicion had grown so widespread by mid-April that J.D. Vance was moved to declare in an interview: “I love Europe.” Even its people, he claims. Of course, Americans have taken sides in European rivalries from the outset: Thomas Jefferson was a France man after the French Revolution, while John Adams preferred England. FDR preferred Pétain, while Eisenhower preferred de Gaulle. But hate Europe outright? The idea is absurd. Though our ancestors are not 100 percent European, our country is. You can imagine President Trump calling for a Wienerschnitzel and a tub of mayonnaise more easily than you can imagine him calling for a bowl of hủ tiều nam vang and a bottle of nưởc mắm.

Kara Kennedy

Has Trump’s Kennedy Center overhaul worked?

When Donald Trump installed himself as chairman of Washington’s Kennedy Center, the progressive arts community reacted with predictable hysteria. Artists threatened boycotts and donors withdrew their support. The Guardian reported the news as “anti-woke MAGA populism on a collision course with America’s progressive cultural scene,” while the usual suspects emerged from their Brooklyn brownstones and Malibu beach houses to decry the “assault on democracy” and predict the death of artistic expression as we know it. But as with most things Trump, the reality has proven far more interesting. Since opening in 1971 as a memorial to John F.

Roger Kimball

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is no martyr

In the matter of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his all-expenses-paid sojourn in El Salvador, there has been a goodly quota of posturing all around. Or, rather, there has been understandable outrage and intransigence on the part of the Trump administration. There has also been wild, almost comic posturing on the part of Democrats and their megaphones held up by the media. There are 195 countries in the world today. It is unfortunate, or at least complicating, that the Trump administration settled on El Salvador as the country to which to deport Garcia, whose wife was granted a temporary protective order against him in 2021, according to Maryland court records. Garcia has admitted to clambering into the US illegally in 2012, though he has never been convicted of any crime.

Richard Johnson

How the Blue Dogs have evolved

In every iteration of the American National Election Studies since 1952, respondents have been asked to name their biggest “like” and “dislike” when it comes to the two main parties. From 1952 to 2004, voters’ biggest “like” about the Democratic party was that it was the “party of the working class,” whereas the biggest “dislike” that voters had of the Republican party was that it was the “party of big business and the upper class.” Today, the parties’ reputations have shifted dramatically, mirroring the changing composition of their electorates. In the 1990s, nearly 60 percent of Democratic voters were white and didn’t have college degrees. For the 2020s, that proportion has fallen to 25 percent.