Cowboys & Indians | The Spectator

How conservatives concede the culture

Conservatives suffer from a short attention span, and it largely explains their defeats in the culture war. They fight every battle as if it’s the only one they will ever have to fight. And so, win or lose, they are unprepared for what happens next. If they lose, they forget how all-important the last battle was, learning no lessons from defeat, nor about what’s vital and what isn’t. Twenty-five years ago, conservatives were adamantly opposed to putting women in combat or admitting them to institutions like the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel. In recent years, conservative Republicans have celebrated the aspirations to office of female fighter pilots like Arizona’s Martha McSally and female graduates from Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel.

Spectator Editorial

Biden fails to fill his office

"The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Fitzgerald wrote that in 1936 in an essay called “The Crack-Up.” At the time, the US economy was coming out of the Depression. A Democratic administration was expanding the reach and influence of the federal government, notably into areas of the economy where it did no good, and war was on the horizon. On the bright side, inflation in 1936 was 1.46 percent and GDP was growing at 12.9 percent per year, which is even higher than the capitalists of the CCP have recently claimed for China.

Brahma Chellaney

The US and India in a new world

The world’s center of gravity is shifting to the Indo-Pacific. The new global order will be shaped by developments in a sprawling region where interstate rivalries and tensions are sharpening geopolitical risks. Building a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific has become more important than ever, but China’s territorial and maritime revisionism, and its heavy-handed use of economic and military power, are causing instability and undercutting international norms. Against this background, the expanding strategic partnership between the world’s most powerful and most populous democracies — the United States and India — has become pivotal to equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific.

Bridget Phetasy

#Wanderlusting

I’m twenty-seven weeks pregnant, which is technically the last week of my second trimester, and shit is getting real. Apparently, this is also the “longingly and obsessively scroll through Instagram travel pages” phase of pregnancy, so of course Facebook took it upon itself to remind me that nine years ago today I was in Sri Lanka. The algorithm is tormenting me. I’m wanderlusting. Wondering if I’ll ever travel again. Reminiscing about the good ol’ days. As I scroll through my photo albums on Facebook, I am reminded of how often people would comment, “You’re so free!” The people who said this to me over the years had “real” jobs and mortgages and pets and kids.

Tunku Varadarajan

The quiet rise of the other Asians

You don’t have to be obsessed with racial calculations to consider the possibility that the next presidential election in the United States could be fought between two American-born women with roots in India: Nikki Haley in the red corner and Kamala Harris in the blue, the Republican Sikh and the Democratic Tamil Brahmin (on the side of the sainted mother who raised her), duking it out for leadership of what’s left of the Free World. The probability of this happening dwindles by the day, of course, as Vice President Harris makes it ever clearer that she’s too lightweight for the White House, and that nominating her for president would be electoral suicide for the Democrats. (Besides, hubris may drive Joe Biden to run again.) As for Ms.

Kapil Komireddi

Can the India-US relationship last?

India and the United States have rediscovered each other after the cordial hostility of the Cold War. Those years of isolation have made India’s political and financial elites susceptible to flattery. America’s courtship of India, lubricated by the economics of globalization and the post-9/11 zeal to spread democracy, is now being consummated in the American search for a democratic counterweight to China. But India is a chaotic democracy in a volatile neighborhood. Can it hitch itself to America without forfeiting its autonomy? Foreign strategic experts exhort India, which is non-interventionist to its marrow, to act like a global power.

Matt Purple

Man flu is real

Over New Year’s, I came down with the Omicron. Or as I put it to my wife, civilization as I knew it almost came crashing down around me. Why are men so bad at being sick? I ask that fully aware that even saying the word “men” is enough these days to get you tossed off a college campus by a mob of tots screaming about how they identify as Chevy Impalas. The fun and flirty battle of the sexes has given way to an assault on the very concept of sex itself. And patriarchal oppressors versus birthing people just doesn’t have that same snappy “Summer Nights” ring to it. Yet even allowing for the ongoing abolition of gender, the difference between how men and women get sick is one of the few sex distinctions we’re still allowed to notice.

Zoe Strimpel

Peter Boghossian’s fight for freedom

The prospect of my meeting with Peter Boghossian seemed to have angered the gods, so furious was the disruption to road and rail as I tried to make my way from Seattle to Portland. Torrential rain and flash floods summoned a ricochet of mudslides which abruptly terminated my Amtrak journey in Centralia, a middle-of-nowhere town in Washington State. There was no rail in either direction for at least forty-eight hours, no buses and seemingly just one Lyft — which I managed to slip into an hour later with a few other stranded passengers. Or perhaps it was the anger of very particular gods that rule over the Pacific Northwest, that hotbed of wokeness so concentrated you can feel it like toxic humidity in the air.

Breast Milk Enjoyer

Mother’s milk is good for you

I had my first taste of breast milk after a training session at a garage gym. We swap tips and stories and we bond, so when a friend brought a bag of his wife’s frozen breast milk we thought it’d be fun to test the potential benefits to our lifting programs and physiques. I’m not sure whether he ever told his wife that I tried some, and I’ve not had the heart to admit it to her. It was sweeter and more watery than I expected, almost sickly. I didn’t enjoy it, but I was curious. Bodybuilders will chase any small benefit, and we’re always experimenting with our diet and exercise programs. Breast milk is a poor source of protein but it’s abundant in probiotics and valuable micronutrients such as human growth hormone IGF-1.

Christopher Caldwell

What’s in a name?

I used to have a cantankerous old relative who hewed to generalizations drawn from long experience. One of them concerned people named “Adam.” On a Sunday morning twenty years ago, as we sat around reading the papers, I mentioned Adam Sandler — or maybe it was Adam West or Adam Vinatieri. “All Adams are assholes,” he grumbled. “You ever notice that?” I tried to respond with some piety about how these people were not to blame for being called Adam. But I had a nagging sense that that was not how the Wheel of Onomastic Destiny spun. I had spent much of my adult life looking for heroic qualities in people bearing my own middle name, which is Scott. Even before I was fully emerged from childhood, Scott had acquired a bad name.

James Kirchick

Why Glenn Greenwald backs Putin

Few things are sure in life: death, taxes and Glenn Greenwald advocating whatever position happens to be in the interests of Vladimir Putin. The self-styled civil libertarian rose to prominence during the George W. Bush administration for his withering attacks on American counterterrorism policies. Later, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his role in facilitating Edward Snowden’s leak of government documents. Always a rancorous figure who bristled at attempts to place him in a partisan box, Greenwald started to upset his confederates on the left and develop a fan base on the right during the Trump years. Greenwald was one of the most vocal critics of the narrative positing that the new American president was a pawn of the Russian one.

Grace Curley

Welcome to MSNBC U

By the way the left drones on about disinformation, you would think that Trump-supporting boomer rubes were the only ones falling victim to inaccurate news stories. Alas, it would appear that even the beautiful people inside the Beltway are not immune to bad intel. In the first week of January, during the oral arguments over the Biden vaccine mandate, Justice Sonia Sotomayor spread disinformation from the highest court in the land. “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators,” the justice said. The number of children hospitalized with Covid-19 at the time was 4,464. This level of inaccuracy from a Supreme Court justice immediately garnered attention. Social-media users and Twitter blue-checks were perplexed.

Oliver Wiseman

Asian Americans are leaving the Democrats

Last spring, Yiatin Chu joined a series of protests against the spike in unprovoked assaults on Asian Americans in New York City. Prominent New York Democrats, including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, were in attendance and spoke at the rallies. Senior party figures expressed their solidarity with the Asian community. They drew connections between the violence on New York’s streets and the xenophobic language of former president Donald Trump. And sometimes they blamed the violence on something less specific: white supremacy. After a while, Chu, a politically active Democrat, stopped going to the protests. “I was just really turned off by the messaging,” she tells me.

Ben Sixsmith

Fifty years of Fear and Loathing

God bless Hunter S. Thompson’s editors. Imagine paying someone a handsome amount of money to cover an off-road race and getting thousands of words of rambling prose that have a great deal more to do with drugs than with cars. It was a good time to be a writer, I suppose. The manuscript that became Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas appeared in two installments in Rolling Stone in November 1971. (Sports Illustrated passed.) Somehow, this rabid work of “gonzo journalism” spawned a book, a film, a graphic novel and a host of imitators, catapulting Thompson to the higher realms of fame. He never recovered from his own success. Fear and Loathing is easily summarized. Raoul Duke (Thompson) and his friend Dr.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Does Vance have a chance?

Six short years ago, J.D. Vance penned a piece in the Atlantic comparing Donald Trump to opioids. “Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein,” he wrote. “Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.” In the six years since writing those words, it’s Vance, not Trump’s voters, whose mind has changed. Since announcing his run for Senate, Vance has become what he used to chastise: the worst kind of whiny, angry, instinctively hostile, dismissive, dog-whistling troll. Vance first burst onto the scene as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir which told the story of an often-forgotten cross-section of the American public. I loved Hillbilly Elegy.

Benjamin H. Barton

How the Supreme Court lost its real diversity

If you followed the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Merrick Garland, or the news after Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, you might have concluded that the country has never been more divided on what makes a good Supreme Court justice. Kavanaugh’s hearings were among the most divisive and brutal in history, but he at least had a hearing: Garland’s nomination was dead on arrival in the Senate. The selection of justices has become a preeminent political issue.

Bill McMorris

Hunting deer in the DC suburbs

I was driving along in my 2018 Honda minivan when I received a call from a member of the National Symphony Orchestra who has been on leave since March 2020: “Just bagged a doe. If you’re up for it, I’m going to gut this thing.” I regretted taking the call through the van’s speakerphone. A text message followed; thankfully the image did not project onto the dash display. I spent the rest of the drive to school explaining to my four daughters how Daddy had to dissect Bambi for work. My father took me hunting once in high school. He shook me awake at six in the morning, loaded me into the family car, a 1998 Chevy minivan, then drove it straight into a deer. I can still picture the white-spotted fawn’s body cascading across the asphalt. “Thank God it was just a baby.

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