Succession | The Spectator

Steve Forbes, Nathan Lewis and Elizabeth Ames

The moral cost of inflation

Inflation is about far more than rising prices. In this excerpt adapted from Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad — and How to Fix It, the book’s authors explain how the debasement of money ultimately corrupts society. The scenario is fairly standard: central banks devalue money; prices shoot up. Governments look for ways to tamp down inflation by keeping people from spending. They also respond with price controls, capital controls, higher taxes. Governments grow larger and often impose more constraints. People lose their freedom, and worse.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

The age of American unexceptionalism

Our administration would have us believe that Joe Biden is the leader of the free world. But he isn’t — and our relative inaction on Ukraine should firmly put to rest the idea of “American exceptionalism.” While Ukrainians were heartened by British prime minister Boris Johnson’s April trip to Kyiv, our commander-in-chief has adopted a different strategy for this active war zone: send in the women. Security concerns are ostensibly to blame for Biden being MIA, but sending in three of the country’s most important ladies — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Kyiv, First Lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to neighboring countries in Eastern Europe — seems an odd way to demonstrate that the administration is worried about security.

Eric Hanson

We are failing to curate the present

When I try to write a letter by hand, my hand has forgotten how to do it. I stumble at the end of words. I trip over letters I’ve known since I was five. It’s odd, too, because writing by hand is what I do. I am paid to letter the titles of books and draw offbeat, sophisticated hand-lettering for advertisements. I am a professional handwriter and I am losing my grip. Have I become obsolete or is it the pen? Writing manually has become abnormal. I now think onto my laptop’s screen via an arrangement of letters on a keyboard, an arrangement originally devised to insert a steadying difficulty into the typing sequence to protect the typist from speeds that might be dangerous. At one time it was believed that speed was dangerous, but now speed is the elixir.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Bob Woodward overrated?

In the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, I went to an event at the AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Washington’s Maryland suburbs. The occasion wasn’t a film but an evening with Bob Woodward. He talked about the lessons of Watergate and what it was like to chase down all, or at least most, of the president’s men. He was, however, pretty coy when it came to talking about the big reveals he would make in an upcoming book about the Trump presidency. “Follow the money,” he winked. He intimated that there would be big revelations about Trump and Russia. What they might be he never said. The reverential crowd of several hundred Washingtonians was ready to burn incense at his feet. But the oracle simply refused to deliver.

Melissa Chen

Why tech billionaires love testosterone

Testosterone is having a moment. At once a molecular vector for toxic masculinity and a health-optimizing supplement for middle-aged tycoons eager to project vigor, “T” is perhaps the most discussed hormone around. I blame Jeff Bezos, who has apparently aged in reverse since founding Amazon. After a tight-shirted appearance at the 2017 Sun Valley conference, his transformation from dweeby online-book-salesman to Vin Diesel-clone-with-alpha-swagger was unmistakable. Was he getting some hormonal help? Fast-forward a few years and he has acquired a hot Latina girlfriend and blasted himself into space in a giant metal penis. This left little room for doubt: surely he was marinated to a T, in T.

Karol Markowicz

Canceled for Covid

No one is getting canceled, we’re told. There’s no such thing as “cancel culture.” It’s just consequence culture. People say racist, sexist, mean things and so they deserve to be fired from their jobs, stripped of their standing in society, shunned by their friends. Should Hitler have been able to keep his job after publishing Mein Kampf, huh? If only life were that simple. But mob rule is, by definition, imprecise. The people who get canceled aren’t really Hitler, of course. And somehow, actual criminals find themselves forgiven far sooner than regular folk who say something out of step with the narrow set of guidelines proffered by the worst, wokest people in society. Still, there’s something different about the people canceled for their Covid views.

Jesse Singal

Who needs therapy?

If you pull up Twitter and search for “men will therapy,” you’ll find an endless scroll of jokes, many quite funny, about the things men will do before they go to therapy. There’s one for every current event: “men will buy twitter before going to therapy.” And after Samuel Alito’s draft Supreme Court decision was leaked: “Men will overturn roe v wade before going to therapy.” As with any ironic internet utterance, there are multiple layers here. The (genuinely useful!) website KnowYourMeme.com believes that Tweeter Zero for this meme is someone named @SpencerKlavan, who wrote “Men will literally defend an entire civilization from ruin in two world wars, start and provide for a family, produce masterworks of art and culture, and then just NOT go to therapy smdh.

Daniel McCarthy

Martyrs win the culture wars

The culture war is suddenly going well for conservatives. Ron DeSantis stripped Disney of some of the woke corporation’s privileges in Florida. Elon Musk is taking over Twitter. Roe v. Wade appears doomed. And a backlash against Critical Race Theory in schools and transsexuals in women’s sports looks set to benefit Republicans mightily in November’s midterm elections. These are crucial battles. But they are not the war. The war is between race and sexuality on one side and traditional religion on the other. At any rate, those are the great causes with which the cultural left and right tend to identify. The progress of the war is seen in the retreat of Christianity and the advance of racial and sexual agendas on all fronts.

Teresa Mull

Puppy privilege

On a recent visit to Nashville, I took my purebred Norwich Terrier, Pitkin, for a stroll. A twentysomething girl toting a yoga mat and an iced coffee squatted on the sidewalk to oblige Pitkin’s pleas for pets. “Oh my gosh, he’s soooo cute!” the girl said between babbles of baby talk. “Where did you get him?” “From a breeder in Oklahoma.” “Oh,” the girl scoffed. “I would never buy a dog.” She took her protein-deprived, sustainably clothed self away. Pitkin and I were left to face facts: we had just been dog-shamed. Buy a dog. Her glare made me feel as if I’d come by my beloved furry friend through the Middle Passage. Pitkin looked up to me and cocked his head. He seemed satisfied, but I was not. Was not even my dog immune from the self-righteous?

Ashley Rindsberg

The Harvard connection

On the morning of Sunday February 2, 2020, Anthony Fauci, then in the middle of putting together America’s pandemic response, received an unusual email with a highly unusual request. The email, revealed as part of a tranche of FOIA documents requested by the Intercept, was from George Daley, the dean of Harvard Medical School. “Alan Garber, Harvard’s provost, and I met yesterday with a team led by Jack Xia, the CEO of China’s Evergrande Company, and Dr. Jack Liu, Evergrande’s chief health officer,” Daley wrote. Addressing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as “Tony,” he asked for “whatever information you are willing to share on your current efforts to coordinate a response.

Roger Kimball

Woke is truly going broke

It looks like Susan Sontag was ahead of her time. Back in 1966, she (in)famously wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” (After her own bout with cancer a few years later she emended that statement, noting that, on reflection, she thought it was unfair — to cancer.) Back then, such statements were “provocative,” a euphemism for outrageously mendacious. But it wasn’t long before lots of white liberals, abetted by sundry black race-hustlers, got in on the game. To accompany its 1993 biennial exhibition, the Whitney Museum of American Art passed out little pins that said, “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White.

James Kirchick

California dreaming

Stepping off the plane at LAX, the protagonist in Christopher Buckley’s comic novel Thank You for Smoking breezily observes that “arriving there always made it feel like Friday, even in the middle of the week facing a full workload.” There’s just something about LA’s perfect weather, attractive people and sense of living for tomorrow that instantly lifts your spirits. Born and raised in Boston and having spent most of my adult life within the narrow mental and professional confines of the Acela corridor, I used to be the typical East Coast snob when it came to America’s second-largest city. Sure, I acknowledged, the temperature is always a sublime seventy-two degrees. But how can you endure the traffic? Yes, it’s difficult not to stare at every other person.

Chadwick Moore

Run again, Hillary!

Joe Biden is a wounded deer and America’s most prolific political assassin is hot on his trail. Speaking to the New York State Democratic Convention in February, Hillary Clinton, a ghoul occasionally photographed stalking the woods near Chappaqua, gave a rousing speech that had little to do with state politics. Instead, she addressed a “deeply and dangerously divided nation.” “The struggle for unity and democracy is far from over,” she told lawmakers in the country’s most corrupt state. “We need to focus on solutions that matter to voters.

Batya Ungar-Sargon

Why progressive politics is like air travel

I was recently flown cross-country on a first-class ticket by a very kind outfit. It was my first time flying up front, and I told myself to make a note of everything in case it proved to be my last. Early in the flight, I noticed that I didn’t want the plane to land. It was a curious feeling and became harder and harder to ignore as the journey progressed. To be sure, the seat was not more comfortable than my easy chair at home. The food was not as good as the food at home. And the wine was certainly nice (it comes in a glass in first class; who knew?), but it wasn’t as good as the wine at home. So why didn’t I want that plane to land?

Spectator Editorial

Embrace the gerontocracy

America is a young nation — and young at heart. Our national ethos is centered on those four words in the Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of happiness.” In order to pursue anything, you need a certain vigor. America had vigor even before the youth culture of the Sixties revolutionized how we thought about age. That decade ushered in the famous slogan “don’t trust anyone over thirty.” We’re not nearly so politically incorrect now, but the mentality still holds. America is forever prodding and poking its young, waiting for some wellspring of Talmudic wisdom to come gushing forth. What does Gen Z think?! Gen Z would just like to finish high school, thank you very much.

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