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The last cowboys

This Memorial Day I found myself at a grassy spot along La Prele Creek, resting my horse and having lunch out of the back of a Ford Explorer, with an eclectic group of new friends who had also volunteered to help the Cross family on their annual spring cattle drive. It was day two of the four-day feat, and John Ralph, one of the Crosses’ neighbors, sacrificed his own pressing chores to reinforce the cavalry. “Is this typical, for neighbors to help each other?” I asked the soft-spoken stockman, his blue eyes accentuated by a grizzled beard, bright beneath the brim of his worn hat. “Yes. Used to be a lot more of it,” he said. “Now there’s a lot less neighbors.” The Crosses have lived near Douglas since 1883.

Spectator Editorial

As goes Florida…

Do you remember Rebekah Jones? Don’t worry, we’d forgotten about her too. At the height of the pandemic, she resigned as a low-level functionary in Florida’s public health bureaucracy and accused her state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, of cooking the books on Covid. There was never much evidence to back up Jones’s claims of data manipulation, but that didn’t stop her becoming a pandemic-era media darling. She was given seemingly endless airtime on cable news while newspaper profiles heralded her as a brave whistleblower. Boosted by this favorable coverage, the kooky data scientist even announced a congressional run. But it is now as clear as could be that Jones was wrong.

Karol Markowicz

A sunshine state of mind

“I thank God for this place.” It might seem a weird thing to say, unapologetically earnest and deeply uncool, but, in Florida, it’s very common to overhear someone saying exactly this. On the beach. By a pool. In a restaurant. At the checkout line at Publix. Some other phrases you hear a lot: “I wish we had made the move sooner.” “I feel like I’ve added years to my life.” “Living the dream.” “Another day in paradise.” It is a unique moment in Florida’s history. The feeling of gratitude is very real. Millions of people seem to have woken up one day and decided they had to become Floridians right away. I am among them. How many exactly is unclear. The US Census estimates 221,000 people moved to Florida between July 2020 and July 2021.

Matt Purple

Undercover in DeSantis’s Disney World

Recently The Spectator sent me undercover inside Ron DeSantis’s Disney World. Allow me to explain. Back in April, Florida lawmakers voted to dissolve the so-called Reedy Creek Improvement District. Reedy Creek, for those unfamiliar with the seamy world of crony capitalism, was a self-governing enclave within Orlando, Florida, run by the Disney corporation. It had been set up to allow Disney World to effectively function as its own nation-state, setting its own rules, levying its own taxes, even administering its own public services. Reedy Creek was established in 1967. It was part of Walt Disney’s original vision for his parks, which was exceedingly ambitious, seeing, for example, EPCOT Center as growing into its own autonomous futuristic city.

Alex Perez

Is Miami really on the rise?

My lunch spot in suburban Miami-Dade County, El Palacio de los Jugos — the Palace of the Juices — is the kind of Cuban joint that specializes in monstrous portions served up by some of the finest mamacitas on the planet. The black beans and rice can be overly greasy and the tropical jugos sickeningly sweet, but one frequents the palace for the only-in-Miami atmosphere; the food is incidental. On any given day there, you’ll run into a construction worker chatting up the gals from the Asian massage parlor next door. Young bros roll up in souped-up Hondas and scarf half a dozen empanadas before rushing off to cook up their next low-level con. The Cuban old-timers sit around, as they’ve done for decades, slamming cafecitos and denouncing los comunistas.

Sal Nuzzo

What Florida gets right

There’s a saying in Florida: “the further south you go, the more north you get.” Those familiar with the state’s geography know this reflects the reality that most of the southern regions of the state — Palm Beach, Miami, Naples, Fort Myers — have large cohorts of migrants from up north. There is even a logic to who moves where. Northerners from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and the other New England states come down Interstate 95 and end up in southeast Florida while Midwesterners from Illinois, Ohio and Michigan travel down I-75 and settle in the southwest part of the state. This migration is not a new phenomenon. Over the past twenty-five years, Florida’s population has boomed unlike anywhere else in the country.

Ben Domenech

Who will stand for free speech?

The primary feeling is a sense of dread. The oily scent of torches set aflame is in your nostrils, and the glint of pitchforks in moonlight appears on the horizon. You have, either accidentally or intentionally, said something that aroused the anger of a mob. Those of your friends who enjoy a good scrum send you laughing messages; those who are born afraid of such things ask quietly if you are all right. Your name is trending nationally and, amid it all, you worry it will never end. This is an experience that too many Americans have had in the era of social media.

Paul Mango

Why Operation Warp Speed worked

On Friday January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phoned Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. With the words, “we have a problem in China,” Redfield broke to the secretary and those of us on his immediate staff news that was about to change the world. At the time, neither Redfield nor anyone else knew much about the characteristics of the virus that would become known formally as SARS-CoV-2, but he knew enough to sense that we needed to respond, and quickly. Thus began an odyssey of pandemic response actions, strategies and regulatory processes that would consume HHS, where I worked, along with much of the rest of the administration, until Inauguration Day 2021.

Bridget Phetasy

Greetings from the Newborn Bubble

I’m writing this from a place outside time, day, night or sleep. It’s a place filled with magic, milk and boobs on constant display. I’m writing from the Newborn Bubble. My baby, Matilda, was born a month ago and my brain is mush. So if this column ends up being little more than disjointed images and memories, incomplete sentences and trains of thought that get started but never leave the station, know that I am in a postpartum daze. I’ve started to write this piece literally dozens of times: my current view is a baby who passed out looking at her high contrast card. Her onesie is stained with spit-up. Is she breathing? My current view is a sleeping baby in a dock-a-tot, it’s 10:33 a.m. I should be sleeping because she is — but I can’t. Is she breathing?

Josie Cox

Members’ clubs are having a moment

One lunchtime in May, the sixth floor of a restored warehouse on Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue buzzed with the sound of lingering lunch dates, pandemic-postponed reunions and the erratic clatter of computer keyboards beneath the inspired fingertips of creatives and those moonlighting as such. Just beyond the reception desk a gaggle of bespectacled, chino-clad men congregated. In suede sneakers and made-to-look-worn corduroy jackets, they clutched Scandi-chic satchels and laptop bags, poised to pounce on the next available artfully upholstered chair. Even one of the sumptuous velvet sofas would do. Next door, in the dining area, waiters weaved in and among patrons like figure skaters, determined not to risk their precious tips by spilling a drop of Bloody Mary or chai latte.

Mary Kate Skehan

Sheryl Sandberg leans out

There’s a revealing moment at the very end of “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders,” a 2010 TED talk delivered by Facebook’s then-chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. After expounding on her vision of a world in which 50 percent of CEOs and heads of state are women, Sandberg shares a more personal dream: “I want my daughter to have the choice not just to succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.” Now, as Sandberg leaves Facebook’s parent company Meta after fourteen years, she leaves behind a mixed and controversial record in her public life. Sandberg has earned success, but she hasn’t won much public admiration.

Ed Zotti

Chicago is coming apart

There are two ways to think about Chicago. The depressing one is to follow the news. These days it’s pretty bad. In mid-May, two people were killed and seven wounded when a gunman fired into a crowd outside a McDonald’s restaurant on the Near North Side. I know the McDonald’s well. I went to high school nearby, and my three children attended the elementary school across the street. Once scruffy, the area is now affluent. Overlooking the murder site is a seventy-five-story tower where condos sell for up to $6.1 million. The building’s developer described the shootings as “isolated to [that] location.” If only. In fact, it was the tenth mass shooting in the city this year, CBS News Chicago reported.

David Marcus

The culture war over the Middle Ages

There is a war afoot, here in late civilization, over the meaning and legacy of the Middle Ages. Two distinct fronts have emerged from either side of our political spectrum. On the left, in the academy, medievalism is being diversified out of existence, its defining Western characteristics relegating it to a smaller place in a global mosaic. On the right, a certain breed of new conservative is reclaiming the Middle Ages as a keystone period in which order and reason ruled, instead of the swivel-headed “scientism” of pure observation brought on by the Enlightenment. The ground upon which this battle is joined is the traditional Anglosphere understanding of the medieval period, roughly the fifth to fifteenth centuries ad, a period most commonly thought of as the “Dark Ages.

Nate and Thomas Hochman

How to not argue at the dinner table

Family dinners, like almost every area of American life, have become a subject of fierce politicization recently. In the years following Trump’s election in 2016, readers of elite progressive outlets were treated to a long parade of thinkpieces urging Americans, in the words of a 2019 Atlantic essay from Ibram X. Kendi, “to liberate our relatives from their abusive relationship with Trump’s alternative reality.” “This Thanksgiving, It’s Time to Take on Your Conservative Relatives,” declared a headline in the Nation. Molly Jong-Fast called on readers to “Deprogram your relatives this Thanksgiving.” A 2017 GQ article was perhaps bluntest of all: “It’s Your Civic Duty to Ruin Thanksgiving by Bringing Up Trump.

Roger Kimball

Taking a page from Lenin’s playbook

I have often been struck by the number of pithy observations — revelatory, pointed or simply true — that were not said by the person to whom they are attributed. Vladimir Lenin apparently never said (in Russian or in English) that “the way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” Mark Twain, to whom many amusing remarks have been falsely attributed, apparently did not contend that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. Edmund Burke neither said nor wrote that evil would triumph if good men did nothing.

Bill McMorris

The rise of the corporate abortion

More than 650,000 people have fled California since Gavin Newsom took office, many returning to the Dust Bowl homelands their forebears abandoned for the coast. The Democratic governor has called reports of an exodus “greatly exaggerated,” though inaccurate may be the better word: only 600,000 Jews fled Egypt. More than 200 companies ditched California in his first thirty months in office and, much like Newsom’s ex-wife, they’re heading for Trump country. Ever the optimist, Newsom says the solution to population depletion is to guarantee abortion up to the moment of birth. He’s even offered tax breaks to companies that relocate from pro-life states.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Get off the La-Z-Boy this summer

After two and a half years of Covid waves and last year’s elusive hot-vax summer that never was, Americans are depressed, bored and clamoring for something to do. I’m one of them. Yet when it comes to choosing what to do, many of us are paralyzed by an embarrassment of riches. Allow me to be the thorn in your side that says: get off your La-Z-Boy and go do something. Anything. Scrolling through Netflix for your next binge-watch doesn’t count. Give your couch cushions some time to regain their figure. I’m probably the worst person to be penning this advice — I’m five days delinquent on my column deadline, and have been at least as late every month for as long as I’ve been writing in these pages.

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