Features Archives

Tuesday

September 9, 2025

How the right learned to love the state

These are dark days for free-market conservatives. A socialist, Zohran Mamdani, leads most polls in the race to become the next mayor of New York. The Republican President, meanwhile, is not only a “tariff man,” he’s lately been directing the federal government to take a stake in ownership of companies such as US Steel and Intel. Even before the rise of Donald Trump, the Republicans were increasingly becoming the preferred party of America’s working class. But before Trump, the free-market right could imagine the GOP’s blue-collar voters were only interested in social conservatism and wouldn’t demand a change in the party’s economic orientation. Now, things look very different.

Owen Matthews

The West can’t afford to shun Russian oil

Donald Trump is a radical foreign-policy innovator. Over the past few decades, the US has tried a range of non-military means to nudge, squeeze and occasionally strangle its adversaries. These range from travel bans and banking restrictions, to export controls and trade limitations. But never has the US – or indeed anyone – tried to use import tariffs as a species of economic sanction. Trump has threatened Vladimir Putin with introducing “secondary sanctions” against countries that import Russian oil – a threat intended to strike at the heart of Russia’s war economy. And on August 4, Trump appeared, for the first time, to make good on that threat.

Tom Switzer

How powerful is the China-Russia alliance?

This summer’s big security summit in Tianjin, followed by the military parade in Beijing on September 3, has been widely interpreted as a sign of a new global realignment. At a time of growing friction within the US alliances in East Asia and Europe, President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and about 20 leaders mostly from Central Asia have not just reaffirmed their nations’ close ties. They sought to strengthen the emerging multipolar system, which they see as a rejection of the US-dominated global order. This idea is hardly new.

Ian Maxwell

How my sister Ghislaine beat the Epstein conspiracy theories

The nine-hour interview of my sister Ghislaine, conducted under limited immunity by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche over two days in late July, generated an all-too predictable uproar. The reaction became still more intense following the release of the associated transcripts and audio late last month. Having held Ghislaine in torturous conditions of solitary confinement in the run-up to her trial – including waking her up every 15 minutes during the night for 30 months at the same time as they deliberately deprived her defense of exculpatory “Brady” material – prosecutors ensured both Ghislaine and her legal case were effectively hollowed out. Under the circumstances, she could not and did not take the stand. The rest is history.

Kate Andrews

Nationalizing America will cost us dearly

“I have the right to do anything I want to do,” Donald Trump told reporters in the White House cabinet room last month. “I’m the President of the United States.” Other branches of the federal government might disagree, but their representatives are strangely mute. “What Trump wants, Trump gets” is the motto that has defined the first eight months of the President’s second term. The overhaul of global trade? Sorted with an executive order and a pen. Poor job numbers? Fire the messenger, hire your own. Feeling the acute absence of a ballroom? Take “a little walk” on top of your White House, look out at your vast kingdom, and decide where the marble floor and golden beams will go. But domination of the federal government is simply not enough.

David Whitehouse

Russia, China and the US are preparing for battle in orbit

Russia is playing a dangerous game in space. Despite its history it’s a declining space power, having abandoned many of its long-term projects due to lack of money and technology. It effectively crippled much of its space activity when it attacked Ukraine, which was the source of many of its high-tech components. This year has seen its lowest launch rate since 1961 – the year Yuri Gagarin became the first person to go into space. Yet significantly, three of Russia’s eight orbital launches this year (the US has launched more than 100) could be potential anti-satellite weapons. On May 23, Russia launched the Cosmos 2588 satellite from the Plesetsk launch site situated 500 miles north of Moscow. The Cosmos designation is a general term used to obscure the satellites’ purpose.

Damian Reilly

AI is revolutionizing the film industry

“It won’t be long,” says Yonatan Dor, “before screen actors are a thing of the past.” Dor is the creative force behind the astonishing Dor Brothers videos, in which AI versions of world leaders appear as criminals in action-packed short films set to music and broadcast online. In a recent Dor Brothers’ outing – Waidmanns Heil – Kamala Harris, Elon Musk, Hillary Clinton and others dressed as huntsmen pursue an unstoppable rodent with Donald Trump’s distinctive hair through an Alpine fairytale. They wreak destruction as they try to squash the Trump-rat, which seems to be the film’s point. In recent weeks the studio’s dystopian comic creations have lit up the internet.

John R. MacArthur

Why do journalists go easy on Sam Altman?

As legacy journalism continues its downward slide – in influence, quality and revenue – I have two possibly dubious temptations. One is to cut my fellow old-timers some slack. After all, they’ve been crippled by Google’s and Facebook’s massive robbery of everything we write and publish, and it’s hard enough to survive by practicing the traditional scribbling and reporting trade. Why criticize the work of the remaining few publications that are still trying to eke out an honest existence in the grand tradition of serious investigation and clear-sighted exposure of wrongdoing and corruption? So they’ve dumbed down the content a little, so the online reader is constantly interrupted by advertising, so what? My other temptation is to give in to the digital age.

Friday

September 5, 2025

Ben Domenech

By taking on the cartels, Trump is reasserting American authority

The reporting process on Donald Trump's war on the cartels for my latest cover story for The Spectator, published here today, mostly focused on the administration's theory of the case: what they intend to do about the challenge of the drug running, human trafficking and terrorist activity by the narco syndicates to America's south and why they believe a major escalation is necessary. In the intervening time between filing a piece and going to press, the theoretical became very real with the fiery destruction of a boat carrying drugs in international waters, allegedly steered by 11 now-dead members of Venezuela's Tren de Aragua cartel.

Tuesday

July 15, 2025

Spectator Editorial

The real threat of AI is spiritual

Peter Thiel is one of the world’s most powerful men. He was an early investor in companies such as Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb and an early backer of Donald Trump, as a leading donor to his 2016 campaign. He is a friend and mentor to the man who would be president in 2028: J.D. Vance. Thiel, a multi-billionaire, is also one of the few individuals who clearly have a hand in shaping the future of humanity, so it was disturbing to learn recently that he’s unsure whether humans are worth preserving at all. In conversation with the journalist Ross Douthat, Thiel was asked whether he wanted the human race to endure. He seemed unsure. “I don’t know,” he said, after a long pause. “I would, I would… there’s so many questions implicit in this.

Marc Warner

What happens when AI surpasses humans?

I recently sat down to dinner with some very smart economists. I am the chief executive of an artificial intelligence company and so the conversation swiftly turned to the value of AI for the economy. The economists had many interesting things to say, both about the advantages of AI adoption and about the displacement effects on jobs. But about halfway through the dinner, another AI chief executive offered an opinion that struck me. He said: “I can’t quite articulate it, but I have a sense that what you are measuring with your GDP analysis is not what I care about. You treat this like an economic question. But it’s more like a geopolitical question.” At a gut level, I knew exactly what he meant – but I also couldn’t clearly state the distinction.

Rachel Tyrell

The race to superintelligence

This summer, two of the leading contenders in the great AI race have suddenly, alarmingly, declared that the endgame is in sight and that they’re now spending vast amounts of time and money to try to ensure that their own AIs beat the others. What does winning mean? It means that their models (you know them perhaps as GPT, Claude and Gemini) reach first AGI (human-level intelligence), then superintelligence. No one quite knows what superintelligence will do (we’re not smart enough) but it’s clear that whoever owns the winning model will wield unimaginable power. They’ll dominate the world. A new Alexander the Great. The first to show his hand was Sam Altman, the chief executive and founder of OpenAI, a company he once shared with his former friend Elon Musk.

Paul Wood

Should AI have rights?

Mary Shelley was challenged by Lord Byron to write a ghost story during a summer of “incessant rainfall” on Lake Geneva in 1816. She came up with something far more interesting than a mere ghost story: the tale of Dr. Frankenstein, a scientist who creates life by reanimating a corpse. Shelley, who was just 18 at the time, was horrified by her “waking dream.” The thought that man could “mock” God’s creation of life was “supremely frightful.” Some of the scientists building artificial intelligence today believe they, too, might be creating life. The implications are frightening – and not just because an AI might decide to kill us all. What if we could hurt the AI?

Christopher Caldwell

In the age of AI, humans must keep learning

This year, colleges stopped teaching students to write. As artificial intelligence chatbots allow students to generate unique essays that can’t easily be vetted for plagiarism, professors have felt the need to replace essay assignments with written examinations in closed rooms. It’s a considerably shrunken version of the kind of university education that was on offer 75 years ago. In June, a study from MIT showed steadily waning brain engagement and originality as student essayists used AI more. The college business model is in trouble: $75,000 for a year’s worth of diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense already struck parents as a bit steep. But at least the kids were being taught something. The new limitations AI places on instruction may do a lot of colleges in.

Michael Lind

How should AI be regulated?

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated, the time has come for humanity to choose. Should the nations of the world shut down or tightly regulate AI until it is clear a godlike artificial superintelligence will not gain consciousness and exterminate the human race? Or should governments not regulate AI at all, in the hope that it will cause an acceleration of technological progress that results in our colonization of the universe, our uploading as bodiless computer programs into the galaxy-wide web – or both? Or how about a third option: AI regulation by AI-enabled industry? AI may turn out to be the latest in a series of “general purpose technologies” (GPTs) that transform the economy, politics and society.

Sean Thomas

The 2020s are too far-fetched for fiction

I write thrillers for a living. All kinds of thrillers. At one point I was in the business of penning Dan Brown-style romps, where ruggedly handsome academics find themselves embroiled in a global chase for the Holy Grail. Then came a stint in domestic noir – sad, isolated women on Scottish isles. Then I had a brief mid-career burst of erotic chillers. Now I’m moving on to folk-horror meets psych-thriller. This might sound ludicrous. It is quite often ludicrous. But it’s also fun: the books translate well and the location research can be a blast. There is a downside, though: plotting. Building a plot is fiendishly hard. You have to steer a fine line between entertainment and believability. The Holy Grail in the jungle can’t just show up – it needs some explanation.

Bridget Phetasy

The internet is dying and so are we

Sometime in the mid-2010s, a conspiracy theory called the “dead internet theory” started circulating on the darker parts of the web. It made its way to 4chan’s /x/ board in 2020 and from there it has gained traction. The theory posits that the internet will eventually become entirely devoid of genuine human activity and that all online content, interactions and accounts will be generated by bots, AI or automated systems rather than real people. The conspiracy is that the entire internet is a government-manipulated psy-op used to influence public opinion, control news narratives or boost engagement metrics for commercial or political purposes. The terrible reality is that dead internet theory isn’t wrong. It’s becoming true, more and more so all the time.

Charles Lipson

What’s the matter with Chicago?

As the song goes: “Chicago, that toddlin’ town.” It was certainly toddlin’ in the 1950s and 1960s, when that song was a hit for Frank Sinatra. The city had bounced back from the Great Depression, begun building skyscrapers again and renewed its status as a vibrant financial and commercial hub. But Chicago has gone from toddlin’ to totterin’, thanks largely to incompetent governance by a succession of local officials – and far better leadership and lower taxes elsewhere in the country, in the places people are moving to. The city’s latest bungler, Mayor Brandon Johnson, was an apparatchik in the Chicago Teachers Union, the most powerful union in the state of Illinois.

Kara Kennedy

Where is Jared Kushner?

Where is Jared Kushner? In the first Trump term, as senior advisor to the President, he was everywhere and into everything. At home, he designed policies and plotted re-election efforts. Abroad, he orchestrated the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Muslim nations. This magazine even produced a 2020 cover (pictured) examining the pervasive power of “Prince” Jared. In 2025, however, Kushner seems to have learned what most people don’t understand: to call the shots in Trumpland, it helps to operate behind the scenes.

Roger Kimball

The mullahs mean their threats

I write at the very beginning of July. Where I live in Connecticut, people are unpacking flags and bunting in preparation for the July 4 festivities. Elsewhere, the trumpets sounding to accompany Donald Trump’s triumphant announcement of a ceasefire between Iran and Israel have subsided. It is clear that the President dearly wants peace. So does Israel. For its part, Iran wants the extermination of “the Zionist entity” and, beyond that, the eventual extinction of the “Great Satan,” America. How do I know? Iranian spokesmen keep telling the world just that. I wonder if Salman Rushdie has reached out to Trump now that he has joined the exclusive club of those upon whom the lunatics in charge of Iran have explicitly pronounced a fatwa – a death sentence.