Politics Archives

Saturday

April 19, 2025

Inside Russia’s repression of Ukraine’s churches

Vladimir Putin celebrated Palm Sunday by murdering over 30 civilians in Sumy with two missiles laced with shrapnel to maximize mortalities. But it’s not only rocket fire that will endanger Ukrainians over the Easter weekend. Inside the occupied territories, any worshipers outside of the Kremlin-controlled Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate are in danger. Since Russia’s invasion, more than 67 pastors and other faith leaders have been killed by the invaders. There are over 100 known cases of interrogations, forced expulsions, imprisonments, and arrests, and more than 700 houses of worship have been destroyed or expropriated. And these are just confirmed figures: the censorship on the occupied territories means the real number is likely much higher.

Ben Domenech

El Salvador deportation is just another partisan jump ball, says poll

The barrage of media coverage and political activity surrounding the deportation of an illegal migrant to El Salvador might suggest the story plays to the advantage of Democrats targeting President Trump’s immigration crackdown. But that’s actually not the case according to new poll data provided to The Spectator. Polling this week conducted by OnMessage, one of the top Republican-aligned firms, found that despite the drumbeat in support of the Democratic storyline on Kilmar Abrego Garcia over the past several weeks, American voters are evenly split on the issue overall – reflecting how quickly this case has become a simple partisan divide. Overall, support for the Garcia deportation is dead even at 49-49.

Friday

April 18, 2025

Peter Wood

Harvard against America

This is drumming season. That’s the time of year when the woodpeckers stake out their territories by tapping out tattoos on hollow trees. Road signs or “no trespassing” edicts make an even more impressive racket. I come to Vermont to get away from Midtown Manhattan’s horns and sirens – but this time of year, it’s just a visit to the percussion section. But the real racket isn’t from the birds declaring their sovereignty over the woods. It is from Harvard declaring its sovereignty over American higher education. In a letter dated April 14, the principals of two Washington law firms wrote a brief letter to three officials in the Trump administration telling them they need not worry about antisemitism at Harvard.

Neal Pollack

Luigi Mangione and the left’s warped choice of heroes

Luigi Mangione has yet another day in court. A fresh collection of glamorous perp walk photos will emerge. Sexy orange-jumpsuit clad come-hither glances are forthcoming. This will surely appeal to his many fans – his stans – who’ve been dying to get a fresh look at their alleged murderous dreamboat. Luigi’s re-emergence comes at the end of an extraordinary week where the American left embraced a rogue’s gallery of villains so ridiculous that they almost seem fictional. You have Mangione, accused of shooting a healthcare CEO in cold blood; Mahmoud Khalil, who faces deportation for his role in Columbia's radical protests; and the latest entry into the sinister sweepstakes, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Ben Domenech

Democrats are doing themselves no favors on El Salvador

The political battle over the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he is imprisoned based on a belief that he is a member of MS-13, has taken over the conversation in Washington for weeks. Several Democratic members of the House and Senate have already announced plans to follow Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland on trips to El Salvador – where he met with Garcia. I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return. pic.twitter.com/U9y2gZpxCb — Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) April 18, 2025 Whether they'll follow through, given President Nayib Bukele's trolling, is another matter.

Thursday

April 17, 2025

Jacob Heilbrunn

How much hope did Trump offer Meloni?

In early March Donald Trump said Elon Musk was doing “an amazing job.” Last week he said Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan was doing an “excellent job.” On Thursday it was the turn of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni during her meeting at the White House. Trump declared that she was “doing a fantastic job.” What Trump found so fantastic was never specified, but he tossed a variety of bouquets in Meloni’s direction. Not least was his vow that “there will be a trade deal, 100 percent” with the European Union. It was qualified, however, by Trump’s claim that he’s in no rush to strike a deal with Ursula “the West no longer exists as we knew it no longer exists” von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.

Freddy Gray

What’s going on in the Pentagon?

In the past two days, three senior Defense Department officials have been suspended and one has resigned. Their departures are apparently connected to an internal investigation into "recent unauthorized disclosures of national security information." On Tuesday, Dan Caldwell, who has been working closely with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Darin Selnick, the Defense Department’s deputy chief of staff, were escorted from their office by guards. Then, yesterday, Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, was ousted, too. John Ullyot, a top Pentagon spokesman, also announced he was resigning.All four men are military veterans.

Cockburn

Who should have Elon’s next child?

The Wall Street Journal has published an eye-opening exposé on Elon Musk’s “harem drama,” diving into the relationships the world’s richest man has with his baby mamas – and the labyrinthine system by which he allegedly manages them. Musk is on a mission to help “seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence,” per the Journal’s Dana Mattioli. The White House senior advisor has at least 14 children by four different mothers – though this number is thought to be higher. Conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, one such mother, reveals how after being impregnated by Musk, he offered her “$15 million and $100,000 a month in support,” while encouraging them a “legion-level” of children “before the apocalypse.

David Sypher Jr.

Joe Biden recalls ‘colored kids’ to be hero of their struggle

In his first public remarks since leaving office, Joe Biden recalled – without a hint of self-awareness – the moment from his childhood he first saw “colored kids” on a bus going by.” It was, in his telling, a pivotal experience, one that sparked his youthful sense of outrage growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania.Let’s stop right there.At best, the speech – billed as his first major intervention since Donald Trump took office – reveals how deeply stuck in the past Biden’s racial worldview really is. At worst, it’s an embarrassing reminder that the Democratic Party continues to view black voters, especially black men, not as equals or thinkers, but as props in white liberal moral storytelling.As a black conservative, I've heard this record before.

Ross Clark

China bans Boeing in targeted trade war shot

“If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going,” goes the old adage, championing the supposed superiority of the company’s planes on safety issues. If you are traveling in China in future that probably means that you won’t be going very far at all. The US aviation giant is emerging as one of the biggest losers of Donald Trump’s trade war. China has not merely applied punitive tariffs on the company’s planes; it has banned imports altogether. Even existing orders of planes appear to be affected by the ban. What’s more, the ban applies to Boeing itself rather than to general imports of US aircraft – it is personal. Boeing, already reeling from the crash of two 737 MAXs in Indonesia in 2018 and Egypt in 2019, lost $11.

Wednesday

April 16, 2025

Neal Pollack

Could this be the last time I ever have to pay my taxes?

Another Tax Day has come and gone. Here I sit, all broken-hearted. The tax-industrial complex has once again swallowed up thousands of dollars that used to be mine. But this year, I found myself legitimately wondering: could this be the last time I ever have to pay my taxes? One of the major pillars of President Trump’s economic platform is the abolition of income tax for all Americans who make less than $150,000 a year. This sounds like a fantasy, an empty chicken-in-every-pot promise, like a student council candidate winking after saying, “If you elect me, I’ll make sure we have soda in the drinking fountains.” But if Trump 2.0 has shown anything this year, it’s a willingness to set into motion seemingly impossible plans.

Ben Domenech

It’s no mystery how Democrats plan to attack Republicans

It's no mystery how Democrats plan to attack Republicans over the coming year and a half: tie them to Elon Musk like a billionaire-sized string of dynamite. They're doing it already, and intend to ramp it up to 11. Yet Republicans don't seem to have an answer for how to deal with it – and saying "Musk isn't on the ballot, I am" isn't an answer.There was a significant portion of time where Republicans struggled to figure out how to defend Donald Trump, but they've solved that problem. Trump's poll numbers and popularity are now solid as a mountain – people love him or they hate him, and moving those numbers is very difficult, especially when there are dedicated well-funded ad campaigns promoting what he's doing on a daily basis.

James T. Fishback

Trump should have the power to fire the Fed chair

The Chair of the Federal Reserve is arguably the most powerful economic official in the United States. He’s also the least accountable. He sets borrowing costs for households and businesses, opens lending windows to banks deemed “too big to fail,” and decides when to tame or ignite inflationary forces. Unlike the Treasury Secretary or even the President himself, he answers to no one. That may soon change. In Trump v. Wilcox, the Supreme Court is weighing whether the President should be allowed to remove the head of an independent agency.

Ben Clerkin

Is Trump killing the American dream for mom-and-pops?

He’s survived an assassination, bounced back from bankruptcy and – so far, at least – avoided all attempts to jail him. But Donald Trump’s most audacious feat is yet before him: to persuade Americans to pay more for their goods as their beloved businesses struggle – and then be grateful to him at the polls. While tariffs threaten to raise prices across the board for consumers, small businesses with lower margins than their larger competitors are struggling. “Whether or not you support tariffs, or whether or not you think certain offices should be cut, I think overall, any kind of economic turbulence is uniquely burdensome for small businesses,” says Molly Day, the National Small Business Association’s vice president of public affairs.

Angus Hanton

J.D. Vance is wrong about Britain and America’s relationship

J.D. Vance told UnHerd yesterday that the United States has a “much more reciprocal relationship” with the UK than it does with countries such as Germany. This is a highly selective assertion. What is more accurate to say is that the US has taken over and squeezed the UK economy. American politicians never allude to the vast number of American enterprises with large, high-margin UK operations steadily extracting profits. Such firms include Starbucks of Seattle, Costa Coffee (owned by Coca-Cola of Atlanta, Georgia) and Boots the Chemist (owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance of Illinois).

Tuesday

April 15, 2025

Paul du Quenoy

Bernie Sanders at Coachella shows time is not on the Democrats’ side

As the Church of England faces an exodus of parishioners, some of its more inventive clerics have rushed to embrace EDM as a new medium to draw young people back to their faith. “Our 90s-themed silent disco will be appropriate to and respectful of the cathedral,” curiously insisted the Very Reverend David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, to much derision over that sacred space’s conversion into a party zone for 3,000 revelers in 2024.

Teresa Mull

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.