Features

Wednesday

April 9, 2025

The war on Tesla

“Don’t buy Tesla! Don’t buy Tesla!” protesters were chanting in front of the brand’s showroom in my neighborhood in the northwest of Austin, Texas, at 10:30 on a Saturday morning. The anti-Tesla resistance – “nonviolence division” – was making a stand in the city where the company has its headquarters. Somewhere between 100 and 200 people waved US flags and carried signs. “Elon: You’re Fired,” read one of them. “Deport Nazi Musk,” said another. “When you ride with Tesla, you ride with Hitler,” one proclaimed. I saw as many swastikas as I’d expect to see at an actual Nazi rally. But these were resistance swastikas, I was told, so that made them acceptable. The protesters circled the Tesla dealership but didn’t actually enter company property.

Teresa Mull

Why is America so unhappy?

According to the annual World Happiness Report (WHR), America has dropped to 24th in the rankings, down from 11th in 2011. The study found that Americans are not just disgruntled, we’re not very nice to one another, either. “The impact of caring and sharing on people’s happiness” was the theme of this year’s report, and researchers concluded that following “the golden rule” of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you brings contentment. “Like ‘mercy’ in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,” the WHR authors write in their executive summary, “caring is ‘twice-blessed’ – it blesses those who give and those who receive.

Ben Domenech

The Court of the Sun King

“So Charlie Kirk tweeted about it and Don Jr. shared it, so I think I’m OK,” one presidential nominee told me earlier this year. The important thing, as they say in the City of Brotherly Love, is the implication. The implication here being that he was among the chosen ones, counted upon, trusted, a five-star A-list recruit. Of course Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman, also had the backing of the President’s eldest son and Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA. Kirk spent a day urging a potential alternative for the role of Trump’s attorney general to take the job, only to follow up with: “Can we count on you for Matt?” But Gaetz wasn’t able to cross the line. He is now a host on One America News.

Omid Malekan

Trump has brought crony capitalism to crypto

If you’d asked me five years ago which American party would champion crypto, I would have picked the Democrats. Economic inclusion, censorship resistance and sticking it to Jamie Dimon were the kinds of things they care about. Or used to. Crypto has attracted its share of hucksters and psychopaths, but it’s potentially a fundamentally different and a better way of organizing society. Blockchain can provide services similar to those from Big Banks, Big Tech and Big Government, but without the corruption and grift that has compromised them all. Crypto could – and should – be the great Democratic project.

Andrew Cockburn

Is Anduril Industries building the future of warfare?

Defense contractors tend, on the whole, to be a pretty faceless crew, indistinguishable in their dark suits and hence little known to the world outside the military-industrial complex. Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, strives to be different, invariably sporting a uniform of Hawaiian shirts, shorts and flip-flops – projecting an iconoclastic image attractive to venture-capital investors, somewhat in the manner of former crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried. He beguiles journalists with exciting monologues about the great things his vision can accomplish for US defense, making him, according to a glowing profile in the Financial Times, “arguably the most crucial figure bringing Silicon Valley to the front lines of American national security.

Jennifer Bilek

How trans ideology paved the way for motherless babies

The future is technological, and this includes human reproduction. In Silicon Valley, a very particular sort of technological pro-natalism is emerging – not a movement to try to persuade ordinary people to have families so much as a push to create genetically superior children. The way they see it, the future of human reproduction is – and should be – increasingly technological. There’s a vast amount of money moving into the reproduction industry. Interestingly, the big players here are often the same people who have been ruthlessly pushing gender ideology – the insane idea that you can change your sex at will. Why would this be? What is the connection between the fad of transgenderism and tech-fatalism?

Sam Leith

ChatGPT is destroying creativity

There are two accounts of the negative effects on humanity of the explosion of generative AI: one minatory, one trivial. The minatory – the existential – version is that AI will poison the information ecosystems on which our democracies depend, crash our economies by doing a very large number of us out of a job, give every lunatic and terrorist the means to engineer novel pathogens at home and administer the coup de grâce by sending terminators into our recent pasts and/or overstocking the cosmic stationery cupboard by turning all of us into paperclips. None of these scenarios shows any signs of imminently coming to pass, though, since experts in the field take them seriously, we should, too. But what we’re dealing with now is not the existential, but the trivial.

Thursday

March 13, 2025

Spectator Editorial

Why abolishing DEI is only a partial revolution

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) continues merrily to chop programs and departments left, right and center. Federal diversity, equity and inclusion officials were suspended on his first day in office, prior to being given their marching orders. Government employees have been ordered to justify their existence by explaining what, if anything, they achieved last week. All of this ought to be a positive influence on how the US is governed. Some will claim it to be an ideological war waged by the Trump administration. Yet it is really just the same process that private corporations undergo constantly in their search for greater efficiency and profits. Yet there is a chink in Trump’s strategy.

John R. MacArthur

The federal-state collisions looming over New York

For New York liberals of a certain age, the term “states’ rights” has long been synonymous with segregation in the South. It’s personified by Alabama governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door,” in June 1963, to prevent desegregation of the state university. Wallace blocked two black students from entering the university auditorium, and the ensuing confrontation between the governor and the Kennedy administration signaled the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow system that followed the Civil War. The governor was partly acting on the not entirely fallacious contention that under the federal system, state prerogative should sometimes supersede federal government edicts, and even rulings by the US Supreme Court.

Christopher Caldwell

What’s in a rename?

As insane as some of Donald Trump’s policy proposals first appear, many acquire a certain logic on closer examination. Greenland, with only 56,000 people, has mineral wealth as essential to the weaponry of the twenty-first century as South Africa’s uranium was to that of the twentieth. The place really may require exceptional treatment, as Trump suggests. Meanwhile, the US Agency for International Development actually did drift so far into propaganda and election interference that zeroing out its budget came to seem sensible. But there are other policies on which the halo of idiocy still burns as bright as it did on the day the President first proposed them. Chief among these is the executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.

Ben Domenech

‘I had two jobs: to run the country and to survive’: an interview with President Trump

From the moment you enter Donald J. Trump’s Oval Office, you are surrounded, not by staff or Secret Service, but by presidents. In his second term, he has chosen to envelop himself in Americana to an unprecedented degree. He faces Franklin D. Roosevelt whenever he sits at his desk. Looking back are Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, McKinley, Polk, Jackson, Jefferson, and alone among them as a non-president, Franklin. Ronald Reagan looks over his shoulder for every decision he makes. “We took them out of the vaults. We have incredible vaults of things,” he tells me. “They have 3,900 paintings.” It’s a roster of the greatest American leaders assembled in an oval around him in their most sterling depictions. They serve as motivation.

Bridget Phetasy

Cut the bureaucracy — and the chainsaw

I retain a requisite amount of contempt for government-run institutions and the bureaucrats with whom I have to deal on occasion. Every interaction with them makes me want to pull my hair out. Government websites function as if they haven’t been updated since dial-up. I would rather go to the dentist than the DMV. It’s as if each employee has been specially hand-picked to make you hate the government more. These are features of the system, not bugs. Take the TSA, the organization which seems to derive the most joy out of making things difficult for parents flying with toddlers. In an effort to thwart these desperate adults chaperoning tiny terrorists, the agency will inexplicably change up the protocol for strollers every single time.

Daniel McCarthy

Landlord Trump, the tenants’ best bet

Donald Trump is the world’s largest landlord — not in his own capacity, perhaps, but in his role as leader of the most powerful nation on earth. He’s the CEO of America, and his development corporation owns the Western hemisphere. It also owns property in Europe, where the tenants are troublesome and are always behind on their rent. There are just a few other landlords on the planet, notably Vladimir Putin, who isn’t a rival, and Xi Jinping, who is. This might sound like a perspective on world politics for someone who rose to prominence in the cutthroat environs of New York real estate. Yet the truth is that government is always about who’s the landlord and who’s the tenant.

Matt Purple

DEI another day

Conservatives’ loathing for diversity, equity and inclusion is easy to understand. DEI’s very mission — junking Thomas Jefferson’s natural aristocracy of talents in favor of race- and gender-based advancement — runs against everything the American right is supposed to stand for. They watched with chagrin during the Biden years as DEI offices spread across the nation, into corporate C-suites and government departments and, of course, universities. Conservative heroes in the early 2020s were those like Florida governor Ron DeSantis who pushed back against DEI in their home states. Then Donald Trump returned and all that seemed to change. Upon taking the Oval Office, he shut down all DEI initiatives throughout the federal government.

Kara Kennedy

The ubiquitous Lara Trump

"Sorry, super busy,” replies someone from Lara Trump’s media team, after I texted to ask for an interview. "I’m working on her music stuff.” The Trumps love to multitask and, in the President’s first 100 days, King Donald’s favorite (that is, only) daughter-in-law has been showing off how hard she can work. Since the inauguration, and now free from the burdens of campaign politics, Lara has released a song called “No Days Off” with the rapper French Montana; a Saturday night show on Fox News; and an activewear collection in the color “MAGA red,” alongside her already established podcast, The Right View. Unfortunately, she has a different press person to dodge questions over each venture.

Steve Hsu

America needs talent

Before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk caused a huge controversy within the MAGA movement by advocating increased high-skill immigration. As head of the Department of Government Efficiency he wanted, for example, to expand the H-1B visa program, which many Trump supporters are against. The angry debate over the visa issue still rages on social media and both sides tend to talk past each other. The MAGA movement is against any increase in immigration, whether high- or low-skill. Musk has acknowledged that the existing H-1B program was subject to abuse by employers and especially by IT firms that rely on outsourcing: the workers they import are often no better than the Americans they replace.

Roger Kimball

Vance Derangement Syndrome

Bret Stephens has come a long way in his estimation of Donald Trump. Back in 2016, when Trump was first running for the presidency, Stephens wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism.” As the election season progressed, Stephens mostly dropped the sewer talk, sliding into its place evocations of Trump’s “darker antipathies” and warnings that his “candidacy is manna to every Jew-hater.” A “Trump administration,” he explained,“would give respectability and power to the gutter voices of American politics.” At one point he giddily announced that Trump’s chances of victory were “next to nil.

Scott McConnell

Neoconservative moment

In younger MAGA circles, “neocon” is a term of derision. It’s not always clear what twenty-somethings understand by the word, though its rough connotations are plain enough: “globalist” (often paired with “neocon”) and “forever wars.” The latter is what the US has fought continuously since the Soviet Union stood down thirty-five years ago — at great cost with no victories. Neoconservatism was the dominant strain of elite conservatism in the US from the Reagan era until fairly recently. So the new MAGA outlook might seem like a decisive turnabout in political and intellectual fashion. In some ways it is. Donald Trump mocked the neoconservatives’ most infamous project, the Iraq War, during his 2016 campaign and won nonetheless.

Joel Kotkin

The climate has changed on climate change

Like the Marxist dialectic, or the predictions of the Gospels, the green movement has long seen its triumph as preordained. Yet sometimes the inevitable turns out to be not so. Over the past few years green policies — notably the drive for “net zero” — have been failing. Both markets and politicians have seen the light. WhatJoe Biden’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen once called “the greatest business opportunity of the twenty-first century” has revealed itself to be something of a disaster. The new American President is likely to be blamed for the implosion of the green agenda, but its collapse long pre-dates his re-ascension.

Teresa Mull

What would it take to make America healthy again?

The Executive Order establishing President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again Commission presented some big, fat, sobering truths. “Six in ten Americans have at least one chronic disease,” the order says, “and four in ten have two or more chronic diseases.” It also notes that our people don’t live, on average, as long as those in other developed nations: 78.8 years in the US compared to 82.6 years in our cousin countries. How did this happen? How did the world’s most powerful nation ever get to the point where 77 percent of its youth can’t qualify for military service and we need a commission to stop us from spiraling faster and faster down the Doritos Loco Tacos-Ozempic highway? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.