After Trump | The Spectator

Enes Kanter on freedom and the bubble

Orlando, Florida The life of an NBA player is defined by constant travel: crisscrossing the country for away games and spending half of the year in dozens of different cities. So it’s always a great experience to play with home-court advantage before the Celtics’ fans, as well as under pressure in away games. The type of experience we were used to having pre-COVID was unparalleled, and nothing could ever replace that. Despite the 140-day interruption to our passion, the NBA has done a tremendous job creating a safe haven in Orlando for the players, coaches, staff and referees. Housing hundreds of players in a sports complex, arranging safe workout settings and creating a home-court experience for games is no easy feat.

Godfrey Elfwick

I was almost the Portland Athena

Portland I am the Portland Athena. What I mean is, I would have been the Portland Athena if everything had gone to plan. I had the idea to give the police a display of naked vulnerability days before that yoga-teaching sex-worker claimed the title. What’s more, instead of passively sitting on my fanny with my mangina out, I would have put on a real show. I wouldn’t just have shown my labia and planted my scrotum on the cold roadway: I would have delivered a frolicking ballet of powerful naked wokeness to dazzle the world and bring a tear to the eye of the most hardened fascist. Alas, ’twas not to be. Let me start at the beginning...

Graham Robb

Our lady of hope

From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier could see the bright yellow plumes of smoke rising into the sky. Notre-Dame de Paris was on fire, and suddenly, in that tourist-crowded, hyper-expensive ‘cradle of France’, nothing was certain — ‘democracy, peace and fraternity’ — anymore. The following morning, children living on or near the Île de la Cité took to school little plastic bags filled with blackened bits of roof picked up from balconies and pavements (as well as probably quite a lot of lead dust) which ‘dated back to the Crusades’.

Jonathan Sacks

We are living in an age of cultural climate change

A free society is a moral achievement. Over the past 50 years in the West this truth has been forgotten, ignored or denied. That is why today liberal democracy is at risk. Societal freedom cannot be sustained by market economics and liberal democratic politics alone. It needs a third element: morality, a concern for the welfare of others, an active commitment to justice and compassion, a willingness to ask not just what is good for me but what is good for ‘all of us together’. It is about ‘Us’, not ‘Me’; about ‘We’, not I’.

Roger Kimball

Reflections of an outgoing President

January 20, 2025 Dear Diary, In a few hours, I’ll be handing the reins of government over to Mike Pence. Good man. Quiet. He can afford to be after the tremendous job I have done making the country great again. It was touch and go there for a while. My whole first term the fake news, the Democrats and even some terrible people in my own party tried to sabotage me. It seems like ancient history now, but the whole Trump-Russia hoax actually had me worried for a while, much more than that the preposterous effort to impeach me for talking to the president of Ukraine. Funny how things happen. When John Durham — I wonder if anyone remembers him? — finally brought in his indictments, a lot of people were shocked. Not me.

Life