The divorce evangelists | The Spectator

The presidency is J.D. Vance’s to lose

Donald Trump has so dominated the news over the past decade that it is hard to imagine American politics without him. Yet now we are in the last 27 months of his presidency. And as this year ends and the next approaches, the national conversation turns toward the looming election cycle of 2028 and the vital question of who comes next. The Democratic nomination seems destined to be a complicated struggle between various factions and candidates. The outgoing Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is a figure of ridicule yet strangely unsquashable. He remains the betting favorite. Senator Jon Ossoff, this magazine’s last cover star, is a contender. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a telegenic and increasingly influential force – and Kamala Harris just won’t take no for an answer.

Michael Tracey

Am I the most hated man in liberal America?

I’ve had hexes put on me by a university professor, had online vigilantes send packages of dogshit to my childhood home in New Jersey and been hounded by the trauma-informed journalists of the New York Times. CNN, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and other estimable sources have credited me with starting a dark new anti-#MeToo movement. Along the way, I have received tens of thousands of rabidly embittered phone calls, emails and texts. “Hope you get held down and raped for seven hours and wake up with a blistered fucking asshole,” is a fairly standard example of the unremitting torrent of vitriol. Naively, I had thought it would be a straightforward journalistic endeavor to seek out, corroborate and publish the identity of “Jane Doe.

Peachy Keenan

Meet the divorce evangelists

American women’s most listened-to podcast is Call Her Daddy. It is hosted by the glamorous Alex Cooper, whose shtick is grilling female celebrities on their sex lives. For example, she made Gwyneth Paltrow rank all her boyfriends according to their sexual skills. I hope her husband and kids didn’t bother listening to that episode. She recently hosted an actress named Sophia Bush. They discussed Sophia’s multiple divorces while Alex declared breathlessly that if a woman is questioning whether she can do better than her current husband, “the answer is always yes.” Sophia agreed. “The answer is always yes, and this idea that it’s too late or you’re too old, or who are you to want more – that’s patriarchy. That is crazy!” Something around here is crazy, yes, Ms. Bush.

Blake Neff

How politics became Jerry Springer

In the fall of 2017, Virginia was going through its quadrennial tradition of giving the nation an electoral check-in on the president by holding an off-year gubernatorial election. The nation’s mood was, to say the least, heated. Four months earlier, at a baseball field in Alexandria, a radicalized and mentally imbalanced left-wing activist had nearly killed House whip Steve Scalise and three others in a shooting. So it was with some recklessness that Latino Victory Project, in an ad supporting Democrat Ralph Northam, ran with the message that his Republican opponent Ed Gillespie (a moderate) wanted to hunt and murder brown children.

Daniel McCarthy

Europe’s right turn is inevitable

The French Revolution remade not only France but Europe, some 230-odd years ago. Even Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo was not really the end of what the rebellious Estates General had set in motion in 1789. The Revolution proved that an ancien régime could be overthrown and, once that was demonstrated, no king anywhere could feel completely safe. The Revolution continued as an ideological struggle long after the shooting ceased. Indeed, the world wars of the 20th century were arguably a late phase of the processes begun by the Revolution. Now France faces a different kind of revolution: the prospect that Marine Le Pen will win next year’s presidential contest. Le Pen is considered absolutely haram by liberals everywhere, not only in her own country but throughout Europe.

Gage Klipper

Leave frat boys alone

I entered college as Barack Obama began his second term. Within a year, two close friends at separate colleges, in separate fraternities, had been accused of sexual assault. They were promptly suspended and expelled. I wasn’t there those nights, and I don’t know the facts of the cases. More importantly, I question whether the colleges did either – I suspect they never cared to find out in the first place. My experience has become all too common for American men under 35, especially those who have joined fraternities. The solution to the purported rape epidemic on college campuses is for men to act more like women: introspective, vulnerable, compassionate.

Damian Thompson

Pope Leo vs the Donroe Doctrine

On November 6, the first pope from the United States will begin a tour of South America that includes some of the most anti-American cities on the planet. He will receive a rapturous reception. Until last year, one of the unofficial doctrines of the Catholic Church was that an American could never occupy the See of Peter because cardinals from the rest of the world – and Latin America especially – despise the US. So how do we account for what seems certain to be the jubilant success of Leo XIV’s 12-day apostolic visit to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru? Let’s start with the obvious. This 71-year-old man had an operation to treat lung cancer as recently as October 13. He has a lovable smile and his Christian witness is memorable for its self-effacing joy.

Roger Kimball

Beware the false electoral prophets

As the 2026 midterm election jamboree entered its final days, the punditocracy has been treated to a couple of cathartic and possibly clarifying shudders. As I write, Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic Senator from Michigan, is scrambling to retrieve her standing after she told an interviewer that she favored having the deep state harass people who supported Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda. She didn’t put it quite like that, of course. What she said was: “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration?’ I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message sent.” “Deterrence,” eh?

Gus Carter

Are your old Pokémon cards worth millions?

In the late 1990s, when I was in first grade, a boy in the playground took my Charizard Pokémon card. I remember crying while a teacher told me to relax, it was just a cartoon. Wrong. A 1999 first edition holographic Charizard card has just sold for $1.38 million. What was once a children’s game has become an investment opportunity. A Hong Kong fund called MemeStrategy recently announced that it is seeking to acquire a quarter of the world’s highest graded “Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat” cards, currently selling for about $2,500 a piece. The value of all graded Pokémon cards is thought to be around $9 billion, but those are just the ones sent off for assessment. No one knows what’s hiding in unopened packs and forgotten drawers.

David Whitehouse

The first alien we meet could be a superintelligent AI

October 2026 will go down in history as the month the universe changed, yet most people didn’t notice. The tech company OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, released the solutions to 722 fundamental mathematical problems. Many of these problems had baffled humans for decades but a large language model (LLM) that was just 11 days old toppled them. AI had already solved some mathematical conjectures, but this was off the scale. “This is at least ten times, perhaps 100 times as momentous as the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem,” said Abhishek Saha, professor of mathematics at Queen Mary University of London.

Katherine Dee

What if the internet stopped?

The news of sustained, AI-enabled cybersecurity events pummeling the internet until the whole thing finally clears out like an abandoned mall brings me great relief. To be clear: I don’t particularly love the idea of your bank account or mine being drained by swarms of rogue agents or some infrastructural vulnerability in the supply chain/the electrical grid/grocery stores/hospitals (or, God forbid, all of the above) putting us in mortal peril. I don’t love the new product that Jack Dorsey’s company, Block, has just unveiled: an eerily realistic voice app – replete with the natural lulls, oohs, ums and vocal fry of a human woman.

Geoffrey Cain

The Democrats vs AI

Simon Cameron, the Pennsylvania party boss who served as Abraham Lincoln’s first Secretary of War, has long been credited with the rule that an honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought. His War Department handed out contracts to friends so freely that the House of Representatives censured him for it. By then, Lincoln, fed up, had already named him an emissary to Russia. Cameron was a crook, and his friends at least got their contracts. America’s technology giants have helped pay for Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom and have gotten nothing from it. The Democrats, favored to take the House of Representatives in the midterms, have promised subpoenas.

Philip Delves Broughton

The riots are driving French politics to its extremes

Paris The wonderful thing about electric bikes, if you are fighting with French riot police, is the way they burn. You skid your Lime or Vélib’ into the middle of the Boulevard de Magenta, which leads from the Gare du Nord down to the Place de la République, and set it alight along with a pile of ordinary bikes, and soon you have a conflagration of rubber and battery chemicals. During the weekend’s street protests, the fires provided cover for rioters breaking into mobile phone, vape and jewelry stores and the money-transfer shops which serve the many immigrants who work in eastern Paris. By Monday morning, a vicious guard dog stood outside an Intermarché supermarket, snarling at customers coming in one by one.

Peter Jones

Trump has clearly been reading Seneca the Younger

Donald Trump, who has decided not to allow the televising of the spectacle of a soldier being executed by firing squad, has clearly been reading Seneca the Younger, as he would. After all, Seneca was one of Nero’s advisors. In a letter to his friend Lucilius, to which the modern title “On Crowds” has been added, Seneca gives an account of his day at the gladiatorial games. In between the slaughter of animals (in the morning) and of other gladiators (in the afternoon), there was a midday interval which Seneca decided to attend in the hope of finding amusing and witty entertainment of some sort. Far from it. What he saw were condemned criminals, with no armor, fighting each other to the death and being urged on enthusiastically by the crowd. Not that the winner was released.

Tim Shipman

Is Andy Burnham preparing to call a December election?

What is the purpose of a Budget? To stabilize the national finances? To kickstart economic growth? If you’re John Healey, it may be to show the markets that you’re fiscally responsible and the public finances are safe in your hands. If you’re Andy Burnham, the goal is to show the public that you’re trying to do something about the rising cost of living – and to convince Labour MPs that they were right to give you the job. But Burnham also has big plans to transform the country and this was a Budget more about tinkering than transformation. Yes, defense will get £5 billion more by letting the National Wealth Fund borrow off the public balance sheet to invest in defense companies.

Charles Moore

Does Andy Burnham really want an ‘honest discussion’ about free movement?

Andy Burnham says in a couple of interviews that he wants an “honest conversation” about free movement, and then Downing Street indicates that perhaps he doesn’t. Many interpret this as poor “message discipline.” I don’t think so. The key to Mr. Burnham’s behavior is to remember two things. The first is that, even after 100 days in office, he still wants to be as different as possible from Sir Keir Starmer. That means he must be seen at all times to welcome open discussion, talking like a human being not a robot. The second is that he wants to keep open the possibility of calling a general election next year. The “breathing space” he says the country needs is really what his party needs.

Louis Sarkozy

Who’s who in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s revolutionary guard

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the chief instigator of the recent riots in France and leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), is currently ranked second in most presidential polls. Marine Le Pen remains the favorite despite her continuing legal problems. But the polls do not reveal Mélenchon’s strategy, his organization, his coherence or his ruthlessness. It has become fashionable to dismiss his chances. He is too radical, they say, too inflammatory. As if that has not benefited other modern underdogs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z44ZraRn35w Born in Tangier in 1951, the former socialist schoolteacher became a senator at 35 and briefly served as a minister under the former PM Lionel Jospin. Mélenchon has spent the past 18 years building a party in his own image.

Douglas Murray

France is a warning – our civilization is not immortal

Could it happen here? I suppose that’s the underlying thought many of us have had as we watch France burn. And the immediate response is, why wouldn’t it? I am old enough to remember in the early 2000s when people used to say France was a model of integration. Then in 2005 the suburbs went up in flames, followed by parts of the center of Paris and other major cities. The Citroën flambé became a national dish and suddenly talk of “the French model of integration” disappeared. That same year, eight home-grown terrorists of foreign origin attempted to blow up the London transport network, four succeeded and a little bit of that blasé British attitude that we know better than the French disappeared too. In 2011 our own cities started burning, but we learned nothing from that.

Michael Simmons

The British middle-class race to go private

Postwar Britain can be defined by a bargain made with its middle class: pay for public services but benefit from them too. Private education has always been the choice of a very small minority; private healthcare was reserved for the wealthiest and those whose employers paid for it. Middle England was content to send its children to the same schools as everyone else and use the same GPs, hospitals and dentists. This is no longer true. State spending continues to grow, yet large parts of the population now pay privately to supplement what their taxes have already provided. Eighty-four years ago, William Beveridge’s Social Insurance and Allied Services set out five “giants” standing in Britain’s way: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.

Angus Colwell

Why are there suddenly so many dessert cafés in London?

Fifteen years ago, if you were eating at 239 Brompton Road in Kensington, just over from the Oratory, you may have been enjoying steak tartare, or grilled rabbit with mustard sauce, or tête de veau, a poached portion of calf’s head with turned potatoes. This was the former premises of Racine, a French restaurant by Henry Harris, which Michael Winner said was “quadruple historic.” Harris now runs Bouchon Racine in Farringdon, rated the best restaurant in the country this year, after closing the Knightsbridge site in 2015. At 239 Brompton Road nowadays, on the menu you’ll find a “cheesecake brownie served with vanilla ice cream, Oreos and warm Nutella and Lotus Biscoff sauce” (£10.95).

Lionel Shriver

Can we be surprised that France has descended into nihilism?

Given its corpulent government and inexplicably entitled populace, I’ve long been in awe of the fact that France functions at all. In the past four weeks, the verdict is belatedly in: it doesn’t. Early estimates of the riots: 1,500 shops damaged, destroyed and/or looted; 1,000 police officers injured; at least 1,800 arrests; innumerable cars burned; multiple architecturally irreplaceable public buildings set alight or vandalized. Two versions of the “unrest” have emerged. For the left-wing press, “mostly peaceful” minors protesting poor educational provision were joined by “mostly peaceful” adults protesting the cost of living – who were then infiltrated by masked outside “agitators” of totally unknown identity who looted and set stuff on fire.

Peter Hitchens

Why is Britain stoking conflict with Russia?

Is Britain becoming an army with a country, instead of a country with an army? Who is actually making national policy on Ukraine and war in general? The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roland Walker, delivered an astounding speech to soldiers last week. He said, as if he were prime minister: “Our citizens have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritize defense and security.” And then he told the soldiers: “Ultimately, we’re going to need them to back us, to back you, to do the one thing that you do, that nobody else gets to do, and that is to take the fight to the enemy.” It was surely not his job to put the case for sacrifices by the voting public. Nor was it for him to tell politicians to explain this to the public.

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