She's with her | The Spectator

Pulling US troops out of Syria will prove to be the right decision

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Whenever neoconservatives and liberals chant in unison about American policy in the Middle East — as when they championed the Iraq invasion, for example, or the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, or the thwarted attempt to topple the Assad regime in Syria — it means we are being told a pack of lies. Par for the course is the hysterical response to President Donald Trump’s ‘betrayal’ of the Kurds in the wake of Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria. Turkey’s goal was to repatriate at least two million of 3.6 million Syrian refugees inside Turkey in a border zone controlled, until the invasion began, by the US-allied, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

Andrew Bacevich

Does Trump have a better idea than endless wars?

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.’ Thus did America’s Commander-in-Chief at long last enunciate a Trump doctrine, his use of all caps suggesting that this time he really means it. Trump had run out of patience. ‘I held off this fight for almost 3 years,’ he tweeted on October 7, ‘but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars… and bring our soldiers home.’ Withdrawing US troops from Syria, a decision he first announced last December but then allowed to lapse, marked a first substantive step toward fulfilling one of the central promises of his 2016 presidential campaign.

John R. MacArthur

Elizabeth Warren is the Hillary Clinton of 2020

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. How did Elizabeth Warren, a left-wing populist, become the candidate of Democrats who dislike left-wing populism? Why is it fine for Warren to menace the rich — but not for Bernie Sanders? With some polls placing her ahead of the former vice president Joe Biden, the Massachusetts senator is suddenly basking in praise from mainstream newspapers as well as ‘progressives’ like Emily Tisch Sussman, a ‘Democratic strategist’ who appears regularly on MSNBC. Led by its star hosts, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, MSNBC functions as the mouthpiece of an official Democratic party still dominated by the Clintons and Barack Obama.

Roger Kimball

Big Squaw E. Warren speaks with forked tongue

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Absent the appearance of a last-minute deus (or dea) ex machina, and always keeping in mind Harold Wilson’s observation that a week is a long time in politics, the bookies are coalescing around the prediction that the Democratic nominee for president will be Big Squaw E. Warren, senator from Massachusetts, purveyor of authentically fake ‘Pow Wow Chow’ which experts reckon are 0.1024 percent Cherokee, the same as paleface Warren herself. It was only yesterday, it seems, that the Democratic field was teeming with candidates. Whither Spartacus Booker and his imaginary friend T-Bone? What price Kamala Harris? Who remembers Mayor Pete?

Paul Wood

The shallow state

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. If Donald Trump is driven from the White House, he’ll blame the Deep State. His belief in ‘the Deep State conspiracy’ was behind the call he made to Ukraine’s president that might now get him impeached. One of President Trump’s former aides, Sebastian Gorka, who’s now a radio talk show host, asked him how the effort to defeat the Deep State was going. Trump said he had already seen off the ‘absolute scum’ at the top of the FBI. ‘With the destruction of the Deep State, certainly I’ve done big damage...I think it’ll be one of my great achievements.

Toby Young

Why are young people so left-wing?

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The French economist Thomas Piketty, who made his name with Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), has another book out next year called Capital and Ideology in which he looks at changing patterns of voting behavior in Britain, France and America. One of his findings is that, until quite recently, the more educated voters were, the more likely they were to vote for right-of-center parties. Now, the opposite is true. Which might explain why Donald Trump declared at the height of the 2016 presidential election: ‘I love the poorly educated.’ Piketty has already published a paper about this and the data he’s accumulated is eye-catching.

Meghan Murphy

Trans rights, voter wrongs

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Donald Trump will probably be reelected in 2020 – not because he is a good president, smart, or has good policies. He will win, I believe, because the Democrats are awful. The party that is meant to be ‘for the people’ has completely lost touch with the people. Rather than address real issues, the Democrats have resorted to virtue signaling. Take, for instance, the recent LGBTQ Democratic presidential town hall hosted by CNN. Candidate after candidate stood up and repeated the words ‘transwomen of color’ as many times as they could manage, hoping that this would win over voters. Have they learned nothing from the last election?

Spectator Editorial

Mass extinction

That the so-called Extinction Rebellion decided to spray Wall Street’s ‘Charging Bull’ statue with fake blood says it all. The protest group, which originated in Britain but whose protests have spread to New York, Washington and Chicago, is fundamentally an anti-capitalist movement. It is merely the latest incarnation of the antiglobalization and Occupy movements. While those groups gained little traction with the general public, Extinction Rebellion has discovered that by mixing up its demands with concern for the environment, it can win support — or at least a passing kind of support — from a much wider band of the population.

Daniel McCarthy

Trump’s economic nationalism is an effort to save capitalism

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Elizabeth Warren looks like a deadly serious prospect for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bernie Sanders may never make it to that promised land, but there is no question that his spirit is still moving the Democrats toward democratic socialism. The party’s activist base and youth wing grow more anti-capitalist by the month. It’s enough to turn many a libertarian or Chamber of Commerce conservative into a Trump supporter, despite the president’s own defiance of free-market orthodoxy on trade. Yet the president might as well be Milton Friedman compared with some on the right who are, if anything, outflanking the left in their critiques of capitalism.

Bridget Phetasy

Keeping up with the sex robots

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The floor is slippery. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I’m taking a tour of Abyss Creations, the factory where the ‘Ferraris of love dolls’, RealDoll and Realbotix, are made. A thin layer of silicone coats almost every surface. A (real) woman in her late twenties, the PR coordinator, Catherine, shows me round. She has the attitude of a hostess at a theme-park restaurant: bored or stoned or maybe both. I’m sure she’s given hundreds of these tours, heard the same dumb jokes a million times and watched us all slap the ass of a doll reluctantly yet instinctively.

Matt McDonald

E-scooters are a wretched species to be introduced into the urban ecosystem

Scattered along the streets of Washington DC are electric scooters. Most have four-letter names: Bird, Lime, Skip, Jump, Bolt. Using one for the first time, you may prefer to employ another four-letter word. I know I did. My first taste of the e-scooter phenomenon was on a visit to Los Angeles in February last year. The Santa Monica company Bird had been up and running for only five months, yet already its scooters were all over the city, like avian excrement. Students at UCLA embraced the Birds. Nobody seemed fazed by the undeniable fact that you cannot look cool on a battery-powered two-wheeler. The epidemic then spread to other American metropolises: Atlanta, Minneapolis, Miami. New York has so far held out, but will likely soon fall.

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