Society

For an eighty-eight-year-old man who has spent only five days in the United States and doesn’t speak English, Pope Francis is a surprisingly partisan observer of American politics. For most of his life he was, like a typical Argentinean, viscerally but vaguely anti-American. By the time he became pope in 2013, he and the Democratic Party had embraced the ideology of the globalist left. And so they forged an alliance — one the Pope may soon regret, now that Republicans in the White House and on Capitol Hill are beginning to grasp the scale of the Vatican’s corruption. In 2016, Francis gave his blessing to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Catholic front organizations, motivated not just by their shared obsession with anti-racism and climate change but contempt for Donald Trump.

Everyone in the world, it seems, believes they’re entitled to an opinion on US immigration policy. That includes Pope Francis. The Supreme Pontiff made clear his displeasure with the administration’s resetting of America’s approach to immigration in a letter addressed to the US Catholic bishops, but clearly directed against the new Trump administration’s efforts to enforce existing US immigration laws — with a particular emphasis on deporting immigrants who are criminals or who have committed crimes as well as others judged not to have valid claims to refugee status.

In what could find itself deemed a new “war of Northern Aggression,” West Virginia and twenty-one other states are looking to defend themselves against New York for what they allege are climate-related crimes. A new lawsuit targets New York’s recently passed “Climate Change Superfund Act.” ABC27 reports the law requires polluters “to pay for environmental damage based on how many tons of fossil fuels they emitted during a specific period of time.” States could be on the hook for as much as $75 billion in fines for emissions going back years. At the time of the act’s passage, State Senator Liz Krueger, co-sponsor of the bill, said, “The Climate Change Superfund Act is now law, and New York has fired a shot that will be heard round the world.

It was nearly 2 a.m. on the East Coast in the middle of election night when CNN’s Jake Tapper stood across from professional virtual-map operator John King and asked a simple question: “Are there any places where Kamala Harris overperformed from where Biden did?” Tapping away from a view of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, King zoomed out to a view of the entire United States and hit a key to show a comparison to the 2020 election. The map instantly turned a solid dark gray, without a single county highlighted. “Holy smokes,” Tapper gasped. “Literally nothing? Literally not one county?” “Literally nothing,” was King’s somber reply. The video, shared widely and instantly on X, has been viewed more than 13 million times.

A reporter has been restricted from posting on Elon Musk’s X for thirty days due to an article she wrote which The Spectator published over the weekend. The story itself has also been censored on X — you cannot post it on the site — with the reason given that it is “potentially harmful.” Here’s what happened. For months, there has been a social-media rumor that Elon Musk was operating an “alt account” under the pseudonym “Adrian Dittmann.” A number of users on the site were circulating it to make fun of Musk. Some media outlets — Newsweek, the New Republic, the Daily Mail — wrote up stories covering the rumor. None sought to examine its veracity.  Jacqueline Sweet, a contributor to The Spectator, began investigating the claims in late December.

At the 92nd Street Y last month, an audience paid actual money to watch the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin record her podcast with Lincoln Project founding member George Conway. Admission was $20 — but can you really put a price on watching two deranged NeverTrumpers cope with the reality of a looming second Trump presidency?  In a set reminiscent of Inside the Actors Studio, Rubin began waxing poetic about why the media is so “mamsy-pamsey.”  This is the same woman who went from calling Barack Obama a “boring gasbag” to claiming his “mere presence reminded us of what a dignified, responsible president sounds like.” She has also performed a well-documented back flip on John Bolton that would make your head spin.

Best headphones (and earbuds) Bose QuietComfort Ultra & Austrian Audio Hi-X65 Noise-canceling headphones have gotten pretty great over the past few years, with Sony and Bose neck-and-neck with their various releases. But, to my ear, this year Bose stepped ahead with their QuietComfort Ultra range. They can’t compete with the sound quality of wired headphones — or the ultra-fidelity of the $1,549 Bang & Olufsen H100 — but they have the best sound quality you can get in sub-$1,000 Bluetooth headphones, and the best noise-canceling I’ve ever experienced. Background noise vanishes, and if you’re on a tube or plane, they’re essential.

I got Meta's flagship Quest 3 headset last year. Not only did I love it and use it all the time — as described in my April feature on VR  — but so did my sister, who would play Beatsaber every time she visited. As a good brother, it was pretty obvious what this year's Christmas present for her should be, so I picked up a late-model version of the Quest 2 and a bunch of the most premium accessories. When she opened it on Christmas morning, she had tears in her eyes, so happy to have her own headset and play Beatsaber whenever she wanted — and to do so in multiplayer with me, despite us living countries apart. She put it on and went through the initial set-up, at which point the headset said it needed to download an update, and she left it to install.

Sometime after running for Congress in New Hampshire and before being named President-elect Trump’s White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt was nice enough to fill in for me on The Grace Curley Show during my maternity leave. I wouldn’t claim that those three months led Karoline — whose résumé includes work for Kayleigh McEnany, Elise Stefanik and Trump — to the White House. But I would argue that hosting a talk show is great preparation for the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. First off: she knows that if you lose your temper, you lose. Throughout summer 2023, Karoline heard from listeners about a host of issues, including the Republican primary candidates. A lot of listeners were thrilled at the prospect of former President Trump’s vying for a second term.

“What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment.” So wrote New York Times columnist and Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman in his last column for the former paper of record on December 9. After twenty-five years of gaslighting the reading public with one egregiously false prognostication after another, on December 6 New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury announced that seventy-one-year-old Krugman was stepping down. Alas, he says he will continue to weigh in on social and economic issues in other media.

“Hey guys, some of you have heard the rumors online, and the rumors are mostly true,” Brett Cooper began her YouTube video, posted Tuesday evening, very tactfully. “Today, December 10 will be my last day hosting the Comments Section, and working for the Daily Wire. It is not true that I am being forced out; it was my own choice to leave.” Cooper had frequently been dubbed the "female Ben Shapiro" during her tenure as one of the Daily Wire’s other podcast hosts. She was also set to star in the Wire’s production of Snow White and the Evil Queen, out next year for some reason. The video announcing her exit has garnered over 5 million views on X in the twelve hours since publication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?