Politics Archives

Wednesday

September 24, 2025

Kamala blames race when it suits her

When Kamala Harris sat across from Joy Behar on The View, the exchange revealed more than just political spin. Behar insisted Harris’ struggles on the campaign trail were largely about racism and sexism – that she “really lost” because of prejudice, not performance. Harris replied, “I’m not naive; race and gender do play a factor... I have never run as a woman or as a person of color. I have run because I believe I am the best to do the job.” That answer might sound polished, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Harris has built her career on identity politics. She was polling below four percent in the Democratic primaries in 2019 – a campaign so weak it collapsed before a single vote was cast.

Neal Pollack

Kimmel makes the case for free speech

After a few days in politically-induced time out that felt like a decade, Jimmy Kimmel made a triumphant return to late night TV on Tuesday. “I’m not sure who had a weirder 48 hours,” he said. “Me, or the CEO of Tylenol.” Given that Tylenol is a brand name and has no actual CEO, let’s say Kimmel, who Disney/ABC pulled off the air last week under political pressure from station ownership and the chairman of the FCC after he made a bad-taste joke about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. Kimmel suddenly became the most famous man in America not named Donald Trump, and his audience met his return with a roaring standing ovation, chanting “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!

Daniel McCarthy

No, Trump has not changed course on Ukraine

President Trump has once again played the global foreign-policy commentariat for fools. They have taken a startling statement from Trump’s Truth social-media account on Tuesday as a sign of a new policy – or at least a new attitude – toward the Russia-Ukraine war. Yet what Trump actually wrote says nothing of the sort. If Trump really were newly committing himself to Ukraine, why would say, as he’s so often said before, “I wish both countries well”? One country has invaded the other; wishing one of them well means wishing defeat on the other. Wishing them both well indicates indifference.

Tuesday

September 23, 2025

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump admonishes the United Nations

Was there a plot against President Trump at the United Nations? Upon his arrival, the escalator apparently stopped working. Next his teleprompter failed. Small wonder that Trump was in less than a concessive mood as he delivered his speech denouncing the UN itself as a colossal failure. The result was the kind of talk he would give to a political rally – except it was to an unreceptive, if not hostile, audience. Throughout, Trump made it clear that his estimation of his abilities is very different from his view of the UN. “I’m really good at this stuff,” he declared. “I’ve been right about everything.” As for everyone else: “Your countries are going to hell.

Spectator Editorial

Go to church

It’s often noted that American society is becoming ever more politicized and polarized. Those who once imagined themselves uninterested in politics find themselves dragged into America’s culture wars. Small children now carry placards and attend political marches. Max Horder and Danit Sara Finkelstein explain the extent to which social media has played a part in this growing radicalism, not just because of the ideological echo chambers we now inhabit, but due to the mindset online algorithms create: rewarding outrage, encouraging extremism. Nuance and balance are anathema; shock and division set each day’s tone.

Joe Lonsdale

The masses have had enough

Nearly everybody I know has experienced crime in our cities or had a family member threatened. A few years ago, my pregnant wife was walking in San Francisco when a deranged homeless man repeatedly asked her if she wanted to be raped. This is not unusual in America. Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was murdered, aged 23, on the subway in North Carolina just recently. The man responsible had been charged and released 14 times under a broken system. A judge who’d never passed the bar, a city council that ignored public safety and Governor Roy Cooper’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice all made it harder to keep repeat offenders like Iryna’s killer off the streets.

Katherine Dee

Nihilism is destroying young minds

Sandy Hook was supposed to be the tipping point in our national conversation about mass shootings. This wasn’t a shopping mall or movie theater. It wasn’t a high school. We could imagine this happening at a high school. We had seen that before. But we could not imagine anyone shooting six-year-olds. It was so monstrous that it seemed beyond the realm of possibility. Since that day, 13 years ago, the killings have continued and their settings have shifted. Earlier this month, a gunman opened fire at a Turning Point USA event, fatally shooting conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. In the past year or so, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow killed a teacher and a fellow student in Madison, Wisconsin, before taking her own life. Solomon Henderson opened fire in a Nashville school cafeteria.

Neal Pollack

Is Kash Patel up to the job?

The morning after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, FBI Director Kash Patel stood in a Utah conference room, the state’s Governor Spencer Cox looking appropriately somber behind him, and uttered these words: “To my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I’ll see you at Valhalla.” A Hindu speaking to a dead Christian in front of a Mormon governor, none of them soldiers, invoking a mythical heaven for Norse warriors: ain’t that America? Yet beyond the absurd and harmless cognitive dissonance, there is a more serious question: does Kash Patel actually “have the watch?

Luke Lyman

Why tech leaders are obsessing over Heaven and Hell

Are these the End Times? It certainly feels that way. Algorithmic demons are rewiring our brains. A young father is shot and killed, and people cheer. A woman is stabbed on a train, and no one tries to help her. The horrifying videos of these incidents are then watched millions of times over, often by children. The God in whom America trusts seems nowhere to be found. Can’t you hear the Antichrist knocking? Peter Thiel can. Not so long ago, no public figure outside of the kookier Evangelical universe would have dared admit such a thing, but times have changed.

Rod Dreher

The inadequate response of Christian leaders to Charlie Kirk’s death

It has been very heartening to see all the clips online of people saying they are going back to church for the first time in ages – or going for the first time ever – because of Charlie Kirk. They’re picking up Bibles, even leaving the left. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Charlie phenomenon is going global. You should also know that in some of the European media, he is being described as a right-wing extremist and freak (strong implication: who had it coming). Felix Nmecha, a Christian soccer player for a leading German team, got in trouble for posting mild, apolitical support for Charlie. “Rest in peace with God. Such a sad day,” wrote Nmecha. He later changed that to: “May the Lord assist the Kirk family with special grace at this time.

Ben Domenech

How does the American right move on?

At the time, it was audacious. Guy Benson, now a commentator for Fox News and Townhall, recalls being approached by an Illinois teenager who wanted Chicago high schoolers to listen to conservative ideas. He offered the same advice to the gangly 6ft 5in youngster that anyone would suggest to a man with a mind on politics: keep hustling, go to a good school, get a degree and an internship at a think tank. But the precocious Charlie Kirk had different ideas. “He was smart enough to completely reject my advice,” says Benson. Neither of them could have known how that decision, and the Turning Point USA organization Kirk then founded, would go on to change the country.

Roger Kimball

Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk have exposed the media’s depravity

“Clarifying.” It seems almost obscene to say that the murders of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk were “clarifying.” But the huge and still-exploding response to those savage events shows that the mournful synergy of murder can be an occasion for illumination as well as for grief. To say that something is “illuminating” is not necessarily to say that it is pleasant. The media yearned for a pro-Trump, heterosexual, white male killer of Kirk. One out of three was a disappointment A picture is worth a thousand words. Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old refugee from Ukraine, was murdered on a commuter train in North Carolina on August 22. The attack went mostly unreported until early September. Then video footage of the incident emerged. That changed everything.

Daniel McCarthy

The blurred lines between politics and common morality

Some 238 years ago Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Charlie Kirk was a patriot and his blood, shed by an assassin’s bullet, is making Americans take their free-speech liberties seriously once again. Jefferson wrote his famous line in response to an insurrection – a real, armed one quite unlike the ugly out-of-control protest at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The author of the Declaration of Independence wasn’t defending the rebels who had risen up under the command of Daniel Shays. His letter was instead a warning against overreaction to the rebellion on the part of the national government.

Bridget Phetasy

I’m done with default illiberalism

It took me far too long to reach the point where I could vote for Donald Trump confidently. I’d been redpilled multiple times. First in 2015, during Trump’s first campaign and the unhinged reaction to it; then again during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings; and most intensely in 2020 while living in Los Angeles. That city under lockdown was chaos. Churches and AA meetings were shuttered. Protests, looting and arson were tacitly permitted. I watched the collapse of society, a grim spectacle of selective enforcement and eroded trust. The grown-ups, I realized, weren’t in charge. Someone had to clean up the mess. I could explain away my reluctance to vote for Trump with January 6 or his contesting the 2020 election results. Those events provided convenient excuses.

Michael P. Gibson

A lack of national identity has killed off the Great American Novel

Is there hope for literature in America this century? The forecast looks grim. One walk through the literary fiction section at a bookstore is a testament to the art form’s cultural bankruptcy. Just about every other book on the new release table is a treatise on your racism masquerading as a tale of collective uplift. Fine, if you want to expiate your sins of privilege – but all in all, a snoozefest. Novels held a central place in America as a vital cultural force; novelists were worshipped as electrifying sages Same goes for most of the books on the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the century so far. The subjects of race, gender and oppression generally dominate.

Kelly Chapman

The pace is quickening in DC

September in DC is the real new year. The heat hasn’t broken, but the air feels heavier. Congress regroups, summer travelers return to the city and the Hill drones descend on the cafés in their blazers and button-ups, sweating through 80-degree weather. A distinct tension hangs in the air, a carryover from late summer. Donald Trump’s declaration of a crime emergency last month transferred control of the local police to federal authorities, and now, as I make my way down 14th Street, I regularly shoulder past protesters and pass clusters of National Guard soldiers milling beside the wine bars and coffee shops where my friends and I still meet. Couples walk past without breaking stride, avoiding eye contact. I, too, avert my gaze.

Monday

September 22, 2025

Charles Lipson

Jimmy Kimmel is back

Jimmy Kimmel’s broadcast has made a lot more news off the air than on it. The latest is that ABC will resume the show Tuesday night and that some 400 Hollywood celebrities have signed a petition supporting their friend. Stop the presses! Today’s celebrities support leftist politics! So does ABC’s corporate parent, Disney, the folks who lost a fortune by remaking Snow White as a progressive wet dream.It would be a cruel joke to add, “If another 53 celebrity’s sign up to support Kimmel, his audience will double.” Actually, he will get a lot of viewers on his first night back. After that, viewers will remember why they didn’t watch. The joke about Kimmel’s small audience may be cruel, but it captures two points.

Neal Pollack

Tyl and error

“DON’T TAKE TYLENOL,” the President advised pregnant women, forcefully, in the Oval Office yesterday afternoon, because his Administration now says that acetaminophen causes childhood autism. Trump said it at least a dozen times. Also, he said, don’t give Tylenol to your children after they get a shot. Speaking of shots, President Trump said, kids shouldn’t get their Hepatitis B vaccine until they’re 12, because Hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease. In addition, he recommends breaking up the MMR vaccine into three separate shots, because that’s a lot of liquid. “It’s a fragile little child and it looks like they’re pumping it into a horse,” he said. It was a typically eccentric Trump event. The main three speakers were Trump, RFK Jr., and Dr. Oz.

Max Horder

Did the Jews kill Charlie Kirk?

Yes, things can always get worse. Within less than a week of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a new conspiracy was in town. Despite mounting evidence of the homegrown nature of Tyler Robinson’s radicalism, social media was ablaze with an explanation so perfect, so fitting, so dazzling that only a stooge could possibly deny it. This was no story about terrorism, they say, let alone the online incubation of extremism. This was a story about – who else? – the Jews.The idea that Israel is responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk continues to clock up millions of views every single day on X, so it's worthwhile explaining what happened to readers sane enough to avoid social media entirely.

Isaac Schorr

Is the Democratic party over the hill?

Call it a dilemma, quandary, or Catch-22 – just pray the aging Democratic party doesn’t pull a muscle trying to argue that it is in anything other than an unenviable position. Eighty-eight-year-old Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, D.C.’s longtime representative in Congress, has repeatedly stated that she will seek yet another term in office. The only trouble is that every time she does, her staff scrambles to assure the world that isn’t actually the case. One must sympathize with their impulse. Norton has been absent from her day job even as the district dominates national headlines, and struggled through what few public appearances she’s made.