Politics Archives

Tuesday

May 6, 2025

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.

John R. MacArthur

Why Trumpism won’t fix Clintonomics

As a longtime critic of the Clinton administration’s “free trade” agreements, I’ve lately been mocked by liberal friends who suspect I’m sympathetic to the “plan” hatched by Donald Trump and his senior advisor on trade, Peter Navarro, to “ruin” the country with indiscriminate import tariffs. This sort of jokey ridicule goes with the territory when you jab at neoliberalism from the left. Bill Clinton still has legions of fans among the Democratic party establishment and its media acolytes, and it’s hard for them to face up to the fact that the former president’s economic policies have led directly to Trump’s election as president not just once, but twice.

Daniel McCarthy

Why Trump should put himself on the Supreme Court

Legend has it that after subduing Greece, Egypt, Persia, wide swaths of India and what’s now Afghanistan, Alexander the Great wept, lamenting “there are no worlds left to conquer.” Donald Trump is close to knowing how that feels. “I run the country and the world,” he declared in a recent Atlantic interview. Trump’s second term has barely begun, but already the thought must cross his mind: “What next?” Alexander was lucky to die young, at 32 and at the peak of his power. The President is in rude health and leads a charmed life. The grim reaper missed him last year when an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear in Butler, Pennsylvania. As it stands, Trump can look forward to leaving office, aged 82, in January 2029. He’s conquered the world only to lose it to term limits.

Joel Kotkin

Why cities have lost their appeal

Over the past half century, media and academic sources repeatedly suggested that increasingly dense cities would dominate the future. Places such as London, San Francisco and Chicago would dominate an economy. Today, this assessment seems grossly dated. Even in the pages of the urbanista New York Times there are widespread fears of an “urban doom loop.” But this, too, is a stretch. Great core cities will not go the way of post-imperial Rome, but their role is being recast as the urban frontier shifts increasingly to the periphery. What we are seeing mirrors H.G. Wells’s vision. He predicted that most economic life, and most families, would shift to the suburbs and exurbs.

Bridget Phetasy

Am I too Online?

There have always been “two Americas.” Our country has always reflected deep social, economic and cultural divides. It’s threaded into the fabric of our national identity, with origins dating back to the very beginning: should America exist on its own? Tensions only intensified in the 19th century between the industrial North and agrarian South, which played out in the Civil War and Reconstruction. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “The Other America” speech described two nations. One was prosperous. The other was trapped in poverty, racial injustice and systemic inequality, especially for black Americans.

Monday

May 5, 2025

Neal Pollack

A Big, Beautiful Alcatraz is only the beginning

Among the Sunday night demands from King Donald came this bizarre proclamation: “REBUILD AND REOPEN ALCATRAZ!” The latest Trumpian nocturnal emission evoked a time when America was a more “serious Nation…No longer will we tolerate these serious offenders who spread filth, blood, and mayhem on our streets.” Apparently, to return to law and order, all we need to do is restore the glory days of The Rock, which has been closed for 60 years and is currently a museum operated by the National Park Service. To be charitable, our prison system is cruelly overcrowded, and under Trump’s rule, it is fixing to be even more so. We’re going to need facilities to house “America’s most ruthless and violent offenders,” and Arkham Asylum only exists in the imagination.

Sunday

May 4, 2025

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump rules out a third term

Is Donald Trump forsaking four more years? In an interview today with NBC’s Kristen Welker, Trump indicated that while his MAGA faithful may be hawking hats in support of a 2028 run, he’s not keen on the idea. “I’ll be an eight-year president,” he said. “I’ll be a two-term president. I always thought that was very important.” His current term, he added, was more than adequate to accomplish something “really spectacular.” The interest that Trump’s declaration of non-intention is receiving offers a reminder that he stirs up as much news with what he doesn’t do as with what he does. The only president to smash the barrier was, of course, Franklin D.

Friday

May 2, 2025

Alex Castellanos

David Hogg’s reign of terror

A lonely caravan, ambushed on the open frontier, circles the wagons. The settlers bring out their long rifles to fight for survival. They endure the first onslaught, but dusk is falling – and the battle has only begun.It’s a familiar scene in Hollywood westerns. In recent weeks, on Washington’s political prairies, the mainstream Democratic establishment has been living it, too.The Democrats of the old established order are hunkered down behind whatever cover they can find, defending themselves against a rising, radical flank of their own party. The insurgents call themselves "the Resistance" – but they’re not just resisting Republicans. They are contesting normalcy within their own party.

Thursday

May 1, 2025

Neal Pollack

Is America in the grip of Empty Shelves panic?

The morning of President Trump’s 100th day in office brought fresh tariff melodrama with the coffee, eggs and toast, as a report emerged suggesting Amazon was considering listing the exact cost of a US tariff surcharge next to all goods purchased on the site. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately snarled from the podium that this was a “hostile and political act,” though it was really neither hostile nor political. Regardless, Amazon immediately rolled it back, claiming the story had been misreported by Punchbowl News. “The team that runs our ultra low-cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products,” a spokesman said.

Kate Andrews

Kamala Harris is back

Addressing a ballroom filled with Democratic supporters and donors in San Francisco last night, Kamala Harris asked a favor from her audience. “Please allow me, friends, to digress for a moment,” she asked with a slightly mischievous grin. Hallelujah. Here we go: OK, it’s kinda dark in here, but I’m gonna ask for a show of hands. Who saw that video from a couple of weeks ago, the one of the elephants at the San Diego zoo during the earthquake? Google it if you haven’t seen it. So that scene [has] been on my mind. Everyone’s asking "what’ve you been thinking about these days"... here those elephants were, and as soon as they felt the earth shaking beneath their feet, they got in a circle, and stood next to each other, to protect the most vulnerable. Think about it.