Here comes Kamala! | The Spectator

Wokeyleaks does Davos

The second in a regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news-leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. Thank you! We have been completely overwhelmed by the huge number of brave Edward Snowflakes out there that have messaged us on our encrypted email (wokeyleaks@protonmail.com). Of all the Wokeyleaks we’ve received, perhaps the most jaw-dropping is from an employee at one of the largest arms companies in the world — Northrop Grumman.

Paul Wood

Stop the real steal

If you want to get rich, start a religion. L. Ron Hubbard said so and he should know. Failing that, start a political party. No one would take Donald Trump seriously as a religious figure (would they?), but it’s no surprise that the most grasping president ever to occupy the Oval Office has thought about forming his own political party, the ‘Patriot party’. Trump being Trump, he changed his mind almost immediately. Creating a new political party is hard work:there are lots of rules to follow, legal requirements that can’t be ignored if you’re going to get your big payday. The main one — perhaps most discouraging for Trump — is that the political party actually has to exist.

Michael R. Auslin

The Sino-American War of 2025

Washington DC, 2030 The reasons why the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) avoided total war, let alone a nuclear exchange, during their armed conflict in the autumn of 2025 remain a source of dispute. What is clearer is why the Sino-American Littoral War broke out, and what course it took. The United States lost part of its position in Asia, while China found its gains an unexpected burden. The resulting cold war between the United States and China became the defining feature of geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific in the middle of the 21st century.

Spectator Editorial

Foreign entanglements

Anything President Trump can do, President Biden can undo better. On his first day in office, Biden issued 17 executive actions, nine them simply reversing a prior Trump order. The Paris Climate Agreement returned like a ghost, revived to save the world from climate disaster with vague good intentions. The border wall was canceled. Critical race theory was re-enshrined as America’s state religion. In the weeks since the inauguration, dozens of additional orders have appeared. In most cases this administration’s stated principle is ‘what the Orange Man did, but the opposite’. But in trying to construct a foreign policy that maintains America’s status as a global superpower, Biden will find that simply repudiating Trump is not enough.

Kate Andrews

Kamalamania: prepare for President Harris

Kamala Harris was always going to be a most prominent Vice President. When Joe Biden’s campaign called a midmorning ‘lid’ — ending his working day before it really began — Harris would stay out on the trail, addressing car rallies in Pontiac, Michigan; going viral on social media by dancing in the Florida rain. She is significantly younger and more energetic — traits the Biden campaign capitalized on in the campaign. Her fanbase considers her to be a political celebrity: when she’s getting bad press, they rally the #KHive on social media — an online community ready and willing to defend the VP — a spin-off of the #BeyHive hashtag used by Beyoncé’s loyal fans worldwide. The media is overwhelmed by Kamalamania.

Bridget Phetasy

Now make me rich

Like many Americans, I have a complicated relationship with money. I love capitalism and want to be rich — but I have deeply buried resentments towards a certain type of rich person. Reconciling those two competing feelings has been a lifelong challenge. In ways that are uncomfortable to face, I’m a populist at heart. In other words, I promise I’ll stop bitching about the system when I’m rich. I was confronted with my populist tendencies during the recent GameStop stock market rebellion by self-proclaimed ‘autists, degenerates and retards’. The members of a Reddit group, r/wallstreetbets, wreaked havoc on financial markets by driving up the price of GameStop, a ‘meme stonk’ they realized was heavily shorted by the hedge funds.

James Jeffrey

The Ethiopian question

Tigray is the Donald Trump of Ethiopian politics. If you don’t criticize Ethiopia’s most northern region or its main party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a lot of people get mighty riled mighty quick — especially among the Ethiopian diaspora in the US. From the end of 2015 until Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed emerged in 2018 to break the TPLF’s decades-long grip, Ethiopia was rocked by protests and ethnic clashes that displaced millions and left hundreds if not thousands dead. I spent four years trying to report objectively on these upheavals. The abuse I got on social media was impressively creative in its use of metaphors and similes. Extend that Tigray-Trump parallel: just when Trump was losing his Teflon coat, so the TPLF seemed to be losing theirs.

Daniel McCarthy

Death by debt

The US national debt is now in the neighborhood of $28 trillion. Some of that is money the government owes itself, but the publicly owned portion of the debt, some $21 trillion and counting, is roughly equal to the nation’s entire pre-COVID-19 domestic output for 2019 ($21.4 trillion). Republicans in Washington have already begun to sound the alarm over these figures — though, of course, far fewer of them were so outspoken about the debt when President Trump was the one running up the numbers. Is the mounting debt a threat to America’s way of life or just a convenient stick with which to beat a Democratic administration? Republicans tie the debt to spending. This crushing burden on the taxpayers of the future, they say, is a testament to the uncontrolled growth of government.

Peter Savodnik

Kamalafornication

We keep hearing about the end of California. The cost of living, the homelessness, the public schools, the shoddy roads and bridges have prompted a decades-long exodus that has accelerated dramatically in the Age of the Pandemic. The progressive canard — but everyone wants to be here! — is a canard, and it’s being used to sidestep an uncomfortable truth that conservatives love to drone on about: in California, there is no political marketplace. Which is true. It’s not just that Democrats enjoy a monopoly. It’s that the state GOP, which used to produce presidents and statesmen, has morphed into a risible adumbration of its former self.

Ed Zotti

Who killed Chicago?

‘I wonder if you might do a “notebook” on living in Chicago at the moment,’ my London-based editor inquired via email. ‘The latest crime figures are quite shocking.’ I asked which shocking crime figures he had in mind. We have quite a selection. More than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2020 and a few dozen short of 800 were murdered — an increase of more than 50 percent on 2019’s tally. For the past few years almost as many people have been slain in Chicago as in New York and Los Angeles combined, although those cities taken together have four times the population. Then again, perhaps my editor was thinking of carjackings, up 283 percent in January compared to a year ago.

Roger Kimball

There’s no equality in equity

It’s hard to keep them all straight, but among the many diktats emitted by the Biden administration during its first days in office, one deserves special commendation for its brazen mendacity. I mean the ‘Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’. The key word, as we’ve heard over and over again these last few weeks, is ‘equity’. The diktat (a more accurate term for what is happening than ‘Executive Order’) promises ‘a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all’ by ‘affirmatively advancing,’ well, ‘equity’. If you think you discern a little whiff of tautology, you’re right. You are also right if, on second sniff, you catch the acrid scent of contradiction.

Mary Kate Skehan

The Enneagram: a remarkably efficient way to handle a room full of people

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy people are alike but every unhappy person is unhappy in one of exactly nine ways. Thus contends the Enneagram, a personality-typing system popular among millennial Christians and lifestyle bloggers. Bestselling books and popular social-media accounts clarify and affirm each of the Enneagram’s nine ‘types’. There are Enneagram coaches, consultants and devotionals, and podcasts ranging from the whimsical (Say Enneathing) to the vaguely mystical (The Wisdom of the Enneagram). The Enneagram is frivolous, self-indulgent and indefensible before science or theology. But I would say that: a Type 6 is skeptical. The truth is, I love the Enneagram.

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