Features

Wednesday

Tom Switzer

Will Trump bring about World War Three?

One of the enduring myths about Donald Trump is that he is an isolationist: a president bent on dismantling alliances and hauling up the drawbridge on America’s engagement with the world. The reality is more unsettling. Trump’s instincts may incline toward retrenchment, but they coexist with a pugnacious temperament and a visceral conception of American honor. Given that volatile combination, it is easy to imagine an adversary taunting him out of restraint – or a well-meaning but insufficiently sensitive ally, or even an unprovoked emotional spasm, producing the same effect. After that, who knows where events might lead?

Lionel Shriver

No one is safe from a wealth tax

No matter how many jurisdictions discover the hard way that wealth taxes backfire, in California an initiative is collecting signatures to put a "one-time" (ha!) 5 percent tax on the net worth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires on November’s ballot. Hey, those guys are rich. They won’t even notice. But the funny thing about people and money is that even folks with lots like to keep it. The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is slyly retroactive, a variety of pre-crime legislation – applying to anyone resident in California on 1 January this year, looping a bungee cord around the ankles of would-be absconders. Thus billionaires such as Peter Thiel scrambled to establish a presence in a lower tax state before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

The censors are winning

They say you should never meet your heroes, a rule that is not always correct. But I did have a salutary session some years ago when a friend in New York asked me if I wanted to meet a comedian I really do admire. I had been looking forward to the meeting, but unfortunately it took place during the summer of 2020. If you remember those far-distant days, this was a time when America was obsessing over the story of alleged disproportionate police violence against black Americans. One of the cases was that of a woman named Breonna Taylor. Although the case for the police’s actions and the victim’s innocence revolved around a number of issues, the main one was whether officers should have shot when they did.

Monday

Michael P. Gibson

Is there a free-speech defense of Grok’s deepfakes?

There are scenes in blockbuster teen movies from the 1980s and 1990s that wouldn’t fly today. I think of Revenge of the Nerds, that classic raunchy coming-of-age tale about pocket protector-wearing geeks no woman would ever touch with a three-foot slide rule. You might recall the heroes of the story install hidden cameras in a sorority house in order to spy on naked, skinny, blonde cheerleaders. In triumph, the Byronic dirtbag yells, “We’ve got bush!” In our purportedly more enlightened age, Hollywood has forsaken making risqué teen comedies for vulgar imps; instead the vulgar imps have taken their raunch to the lawless internet. The powers of AI have multiplied their mischief. Their latest prank is to tell Grok, an AI chatbot on X.

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Sunday

James Heale

The fight over the future of the Chagos Islands

Westminster, London Donald Trump might be determined to acquire more US land – here in Britain, however, our leaders are determined to give it away. A deal to hand over control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is in the final stages of parliamentary approval. Trump initially backed the deal, yet U-turned after his Greenland overtures were spurned. “The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY,” he declared online. “NO REASON WHATSOEVER.” Bemused, he later asked a British reporter in the Oval Office: “I don’t know why they’re doing it. Do they need money?

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Saturday

Bridget Phetasy

The male Kardashians

Hello, it’s me, your Gen X auntie who spends too much time online. I regret to inform you that I’ve been on a journey and, like Hermes bringing information from the underworld to mortals, I am here to tell you about the poor, unfortunate lost souls I’ve become aware of against my will. They have names like Sneako and Clavicular – and if I have to know about them, you do too. It starts with a livestream and a boys’ night out, although these aren’t your ordinary frat boys or celebrities. They are some of the internet’s most infamous edgelords, caricatures of men, masculinity and fashion.

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Ben Clerkin

US special forces’ secret weapons

By using a sonic weapon in the mission to capture Nicolás Maduro, as Donald Trump appears to have confirmed, Delta Force commandos not only triggered a paradigm shift in warfare, but served poetic justice. When asked whether such a weapon had been used, the President replied: “It’s probably good not to talk about it.” But then added: “Nobody else has it, we have some amazing weapons that nobody knows about.” The following morning, at Davos, Trump said: “They weren’t able to fire a single shot at us. They said, ‘What happened?’ Everything was discombobulated.

Friday

Rod Liddle

The true villains of our TV crime dramas? The creators

Idly watching the first episode of a TV crime drama series recently, I found myself in a slightly troubled frame of mind. We were already 35 minutes in and no probable villain had shown their face. We had seen black people, Chinese people, lesbians, the disabled, the impoverished and powerless, Muslims, the young and idealistic… yikes, I thought to myself, it simply can’t be any of them, can it? Surely not. And then, as if the scriptwriter had heard my private worries, for lo, a very rich, marble-mouthed white woman emerged and was shown being beastly to some young and idealistic people and I thought: bingo! We have our villain. There is no need to watch the remaining five episodes. She did it, the rich cow. The only slight surprise is that it was a woman rather than a bloke.

Blake Neff

How Trump’s Greenland strategy could imperil his legacy

President Trump has returned home from Davos, Switzerland, basking in the glow of his latest diplomatic Houdini act. For weeks, the President made Europe shudder with fear and sputter with rage as he abruptly escalated his demand for a total US takeover of Greenland. He said he was ready to launch an invasion or reignite a trade war to do it, even in the face of threats that such an act would destroy NATO. On Truth Social, the President shared a post suggesting NATO was a greater threat to America than Russia or China, along with AI slop depicting not just Greenland but also Canada under US dominion.

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Mickey Down

New York, I love you, but I need to get home

I reached New York for the premiere of the fourth series of Industry in a mild state of delirium. I was traveling from Lamu, and it had taken four flights and 20 hours in the air to reach the US. Lamu is so beautiful that it briefly makes you consider whether to bother with western civilization at all. On the rickety flight to the island from mainland Kenya, I had sat next to a German count I vaguely knew. ‘You looking to get a little fucked up?’ he asked. I mumbled something about ‘family time’. He nodded and wished me luck. On New Year’s Day I ran into him again, by which point he had abandoned all pretense of dignity. It felt fitting, then, that I should follow this holiday with a work trip to New York to party with abandon.

Spectator Editorial

Are you long on America?

Donald Trump has completed the first year of his second presidency – and remains a truly divisive figure. He may have pulled back, after an absurd escalation, from his apparent threat to annex Greenland by force. But European leaders continue to berate him for his turbulent behavior in international affairs, and a growing number of Republicans are turning against his erratic foreign policy. Last week, the cry on global markets was “Sell America,” after the President ratcheted up trade hostilities with long-standing US allies by announcing yet another round of punitive tariffs on several European countries for refusing to agree that America should own Greenland outright.

Virginia Blackburn

AI marketing is driving me to distraction

For years, retailers have been behaving like needy friends. My phone would ping. “Hi there!” an email would read, “We’ve missed you.” Who could this be? I would wonder happily, before realizing that the warm and loving message was from someone in the marketing department of the emporium from which I’d once bought a couple of pairs of expensive shoes. Emma usually, or Olivia. With the advent of artificial intelligence, though, personalized, over-the-top PR is getting much, much worse. At least in the past you’d needed an actual Emma to send these emails, some girl who’d gone into marketing, typing enthusiastic nonsense all day. There was at least a human who had “reached out” – they always “reach out.” AI is just so needy.

Robert Bryce

The drive toward electric cars has been a disaster

Just two years ago, Mary Barra, chief executive of General Motors, declared: “We believe in an all-electric future.” She went on to claim that the challenges her company was facing in the EV market were merely temporary bumps on the road to net zero. But as Bob Dylan famously observed, things have changed. On January 8, GM announced it would take a $7.1 billion hit in charges against its earnings, of which $6 billion is due to Barra’s failed EV strategy. In a filing with the SEC, the company also warned that it would take more write-downs this year as part of a “strategic realignment of EV capacity.” The car companies made 5.4 million EVs in three years – and incurred an astonishing $20,887 loss on each one GM’s move came less than a month after Ford Motor Co.

Thursday

Neal Pollack

Meet Katie Miller, MAGA’s Oprah

When Trump administration figures want to do a warm, humanizing interview these days, they can’t depend on the mainstream media. It’s often adversarial or downright hostile. Chatty bro podcasters such as Joe Rogan give them room to talk, but also challenge them on policy positions. Their best bet is The Katie Miller Podcast, a show hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief policy advisor. She’s quickly emerged as the Barbara Walters, or Oprah Winfrey, of the new American conservatism.

Ben Domenech

Will Trump face a domestic backlash over his Greenland caper?

It began, as most things do under Donald Trump, with an idea that struck outside observers as a lark. An interested party – in this case, billionaire Ron Lauder – suggested to the President during his first term that the United States should acquire Greenland, a move that would represent the largest expansion of US territory since the purchase of Alaska from the Russians more than 150 years ago. The notion was reportedly considered and then left on the shelf, like so many ideas in Trump’s first term. Yet time away from the presidency gave it more resonance. Now the President is back on the case – and he seems very committed to the move, to the shock and horror of European observers who never took his Arctic ambitions seriously.

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Gavin Mortimer

Why EU farmers would object to a South American trade deal

It was a weekend of mixed emotions for the European Union. There was the news from Donald Trump that he will impose a 10 percent tariff on eight European countries in retaliation for their opposition to his plans to take control of Greenland. But on a brighter note, the EU finally signed the Mercosur trade agreement with several South American countries. The European Commission hailed it as the creation of ‘a free-trade zone of roughly 700 million people’, one which they promise will save EU companies more than €4 billion a year in customs duties. Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission president, said: ‘We choose fair trade over tariffs, we chose a productive long-term partnership over isolation.

Ian Williams

Inside the Cambodian cybercrime compounds run by Chinese gangs

The scrappy Cambodian border town of Poipet, long associated with vice and criminality, was shaken shortly before Christmas by the sound of F-16 fighter jets screaming overhead. The Thai Royal Air Force was, astonishingly, bombing a series of casinos. At least five fortified compounds were damaged, which were part of a vast industry that has conned millions of people across the world out of billions of dollars. This was “a war against the scam army,” Thailand’s army said. Scamming is a mainstay of Cambodia’s economy. The country earns an estimated $12 billion annually from online scamming alone, around half the value of its formal economy. Poipet is just one small outpost of a Chinese organized crime network, many elements of which have links to the Chinese Communist party.

Daniel McCarthy

Did the American Revolution ever really end?

We Americans celebrate July 4, 1776, as our national birthday, and this year, of course, marks our 250th. But the American Revolution began before that. And when did it end? Maybe it never did. In 1812, warhawks in Congress and president James Madison – the man known to posterity as the very father of the Constitution – launched an invasion of Canada in the hopes of completing the American Revolution. Canada was unfinished business. We had invaded Québec in 1775, but that was a disaster. And even though the 13 colonies that became the United States succeeded in winning their independence from Britain, the newborn US was not altogether free.

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Kelly Chapman

Enough with the woman-loathing sex-confessionals

The first thing you learn as a young woman, without anyone telling you a word, is that men love sex. Men want to have sex with you and men want to have sex with every woman. They love sex so much they will do anything to get it. They will trick you into having sex with them. They will flatter. They will lie. They will do whatever they can to get you into bed. This is the foundational myth on which the fantasy of male vitality is built – the red-blooded American man, always on the verge of losing control. Now it may be true that our late-liberal order has neutered this impulse. Blunted it. We may be seeing a new generation of dysfunctional, BlueChew-popping eunuchs.

Roger Kimball

The deep-state vampire

To get a preliminary sense of how deep and how entrenched the deep state is, consider the State of Virginia. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, did not control either house of the state legislature. Nevertheless, he managed to get immense reforms accomplished in his four years as governor. But the Dems didn’t mind, not really. Why? Because they knew they could instantly roll back Youngkin’s initiatives as soon as they retook the governorship. That just happened. And it took Abigail Spanberger, the new Governor, about 15 minutes to return Virginia to la-la land. She had campaigned on “affordability” but rejoined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a climate-change scam that will raise everyone’s utility bills. She introduced a 3.