Features

Tuesday

May 6, 2025

Am I too Online?

There have always been “two Americas.” Our country has always reflected deep social, economic and cultural divides. It’s threaded into the fabric of our national identity, with origins dating back to the very beginning: should America exist on its own? Tensions only intensified in the 19th century between the industrial North and agrarian South, which played out in the Civil War and Reconstruction. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “The Other America” speech described two nations. One was prosperous. The other was trapped in poverty, racial injustice and systemic inequality, especially for black Americans.

Blake Neff

‘Dark Woke’ is nothing new

Ever in need of new narratives to feed into the bottomless abyss that is American political analysis, TikTok spelunkers and X addicts have delivered a new concept to be immediately overused and driven into the ground: “Dark Woke.” It’s woke, but dark. Somehow, things get lamer from there. “As liberals try to get their groove back, some party insiders say Democratic politicians have been encouraged to embrace a new form of combative rhetoric aimed at winning back voters who have responded to President Trump’s no-holds-barred version of politics,” writes Jack Crosbie in the New York Times. “It requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.” Crass… but discerning! Rude…but only to a point!

Ross Clark

Is the AI boom already over?

Is artificial intelligence a flash in the pan? Is the boom in tech shares, which exploded with the rise in public awareness of AI, doomed to go the way of other investment bubbles over the centuries? The answer to the first question is almost certainly no, and the answer to the second very likely yes. Investment bubbles do sometimes involve assets which have little intrinsic value, yet it is remarkable how often they begin as an entirely rational reaction to some new invention or development – an invention which outlasts the collapse of the speculative bubble, as if nothing had happened. You only have to look at a share chart and you would assume that railways went out of fashion in the 1840s, when a mad speculative umbrella collapsed.

David Whitehouse

A new map of the universe may turn gravity on its head

Scientists have released the largest map of the universe ever compiled. Millions of galaxies have been surveyed, stretching back 11 billion years, most of the age of the cosmos. According to many scientists, this data, combined with other observations, presages a major reassessment of what we know about the universe: possibly, for the first time, revealing a crack in Einstein’s theory of gravity. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is attached to a large telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Each night it measures the positions of and distances to thousands of galaxies. Galaxies exist in groups and their motions are influenced by other, nearby galaxies.

Matt Ridley

Why won’t western scientists condemn Wuhan?

“I am officially launching my new company: Cathy Medicine. We will eradicate diseases in future generations through germline gene editing.” This is one of several strongly – and strangely – worded tweets sent in recent weeks from the X account of He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist who served a three-year prison sentence for gene-editing two human embryos. Those embryos are now people: seven-year old twin girls living under the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana. “Good morning bitches,” Dr. He wrote on April 16. “How many embryos have you gene edited today?” “Get in luddite, we’re going gene editing,” he added the next day. He also wrote: “I literally went to prison for this shit.” Is it the real Dr. He? The journalist Antonio Regalado, who first broke the story of Dr.

Michael P. Gibson

What happened to the great American IPO dream?

There is a dark but funny one-act play called No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, that gloomy, chainsmoking, wall-eyed French existentialist. The play is about three characters trapped in a room from which they cannot escape. No flames, no pitchforks, no brimstone – it turns out the afterlife isn’t the fourth circle of Hell, but a dinner party you can’t leave. Round and round these characters go, each demanding what the others won’t give. In the end, the worst punishment isn’t torture. It’s just being stuck. “Hell,” goes the famous line, “is other people.” Well, mon Dieu, we now have a sequel.

Wednesday

April 9, 2025

Spectator Editorial

The 👊🇺🇸🔥 presidency

Much has been said and written about the Trump administration’s leaked Signal discussion on bombing Houthis in Yemen, most of it forgettable. Virtually all attention has focused on dull questions of competence and whether any heads should roll for communicating sensitive US matters through a private company’s platform, then ineptly letting a reporter in on the chat. The debate is largely news-cycle fodder. The new administration will not succeed or fail based on what phone apps its members use. Yet the Signal debate has entirely overshadowed what should be a major discussion in its own right. Is the new administration quietly sleepwalking the country back into a costly, dangerous policy of Middle East military meddling?

Curtis Yarvin

My DC bunker

Washington, DC My office this week has been the Starbucks on Capitol Hill. Any random subscriber to my Substack can get a half-hour with me if they book a slot. I do this a lot when I travel and oddly, given the rot of this rotting world, I rarely come away with the feeling that here were 30 precious minutes I’ll never see again. I often want to spend an hour or two. And no one yet has killed or even attacked me. A leftist policy wonk did show up without an appointment, but he just wanted to talk about Ezra Klein. One of this week’s characters was a Russia expert at a foreign policy thinktank, who seems to really know his stuff. He filled in important nuances ofthe Prigozhin coup. Yevgeny Prigozhin never meant to overthrow Vladimir Putin, he said.

Aidan McLaughlin

Can the Democrats rediscover themselves in the age of Trump?

Even on the placid streets of London’s Mayfair, James Carville cannot find peace. “Every five minutes I get stopped and asked about Chuck Schumer,” says the Democratic strategist when I speak to him. “I can’t even enjoy a $30 martini by myself.” Carville’s party is in dire straits. The humiliation of losing to Donald Trump had not yet worn off when the Donald stormed back to the White House with a vengeance, unleashing the chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk on the federal government, assembling a cabinet intent on carrying out even his most radical policies – and scaring the few Republican would-be dissenters in Congress into submission.

Ryan Girdusky

The Democrats have a voter problem

Data scientist David Shor has a message for Democrats: “Your problem with young men is worse than you think.” Shor is a respected and highly reputable Democratic data guru. He has released his autopsy on the 2024 election and why Kamala Harris lost. Unlike previous analysis, which primarily used exit polling, Shor’s company Blue Rose Research looked at polls, precinct-level returns and voter-file data to figure out who turned on the Democrats – and why. Democrats comforted themselves in the wake of their election loss by insisting that if more people had voted, Harris would have been sworn in as the 47th president. For decades it’s been true that Democrats win high-turnout elections while Republicans win votes with a smaller turnout.

The Spectator

Where did Kamala most underperform in 2024?

Kamala’s car crash By how much did Kamala Harris underperform – and Trump gain – in different county types compared with the 2020 presidential election? County typeHarrisTrumpMajority Hispanic-18%+7%Majority black-12%-4%Urban-12%+3%High-income -9%+3%Highly educated -9%+3%Retirement areas-2%+8% Source: New York Times Minority report Kamala Harris lost important votes from ethnic minority voters in the 2024 presidential election. What was each cohort’s approval of Joe Biden’s actions while in the White House? Black.................................................66% Hispanic............................................42% Asian and Pacific Islanders...............42% White.................................................

Daniel McCarthy

The Democratic war machine

To understand what’s wrong with the American left and the Democratic party – two different but entwined things, to be sure – look to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Look also to the work of the historian Sean McMeekin, including his latest book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Earlier this spring I emceed an event in McMeekin’s honor, as he received the award for “Conservative Book of the Year” from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It gave me the opportunity to chat with him about Lenin’s doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism” and much else, including the fairy tale the West tells itself about how communism ended.

Peter Pomerantsev

Play Putin at his own game by ‘nightmaring’ his world order

There’s a delicious Russian verb that derives from the criminal underworld: “koshmarit,” literally “to nightmare someone.” It usually denotes how authorities give criminals, or anyone they dislike, so much relentless hassle from so many different angles they bend them to their will. Vladimir Putin, always keen to bring mafia language into politics, was the first Russian statesman to make use of it in public – he once instructed his authorities to stop “nightmaring” the business community. I keep returning to that word when I think of how Putin’s own foreign policy could be restrained to make real the Reaganite slogan that helped Donald Trump win the election: “peace through strength.

Colin Freeman

Will Trump take a punt on Puntland?

As a man who views the world as one big real-estate portfolio, Donald Trump sees the potential in northern Somalia’s Puntland region. Lousy government, maybe, and definitely more than a few bad guys around. But Puntland has great winter sun and tremendous beaches, folks. It could be just the place to resettle Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Jordan and Egypt have all but refused to rehouse Gaza’s population and according to Israeli diplomats, Puntland has made the shortlist of new Palestinian homelands. The Trump sales pitch is that this will allow Gazans to create “far safer and more beautiful communities” than their homeland could ever offer. The Strip meanwhile, will be rebuilt into a Dubai-on-the-Med.

Christopher Caldwell

How DEI destroyed itself

Those who wonder why more Americans haven’t risen up in rebellion against the Trump administration’s assault on affirmative action, its gutting of university departments, its violation of the neutrality of the American legal profession, should keep in mind the epigraph from the 20th-century philosopher Will Durant that appears in the opening moments of Mel Gibson’s 2006 movie Apocalypto: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” As he promised to do, Donald Trump is dismantling large parts of the government he conquered at the ballot box last November. You don’t have to approve. Roughly half of Americans do not. But the regime he is undoing has yielded diminishing returns for most of this century.

Kara Kennedy

The life of Karoline Leavitt

When Karoline Leavitt, the buxom blonde 27-year-old White House press secretary landed the gig, not everybody was convinced. Scott Jennings, the Bush speechwriter turned TV star, had the resume. Megyn Kelly had the fire. But Leavitt? She was a gamble, at best. But Donald Trump wasn’t concerned about her youth and inexperience. “When I was 21, I was building buildings in Manhattan,” he told her. “I believe you can have this job.” He has been vindicated. Since taking the podium, Leavitt has quieted some of her detractors with a performance that’s part combat sport, part masterclass in messaging. Like her boss, she is combative and spunky. Sometimes she mocks the legacy news reporters she feels are asking particularly bad questions.

Peter Hasson

A day with a rat catcher

The rat hunter opens the tongs, takes a breath and lunges forward. It takes him a few seconds to get a firm hold on the Norway rat, who claws, bites and shrieks at the wrought iron. Tim wrestles it into the bucket, holding its flailing form underneath the water for several seconds before slamming the top shut. “He put up a good fight,” says Tim, exhaling while he shakes his head. “Supervisor didn’t tell me it was a live one.” Two days earlier, he’d been called to a home of a young woman – a “little girl” as he described her – where a rat had been caught in a trap inside a cabinet. He got to the house. He opened the cabinet. He saw the trap. He saw the rat. There was a problem: the trap was empty.

Roger Kimball

‘Signalgate’ is another nothingburger

I predict that by the time you read this, the press-fabricated entertainment known as “Signalgate” will be but a memory – a fond memory for those addicted to round-the-clock media frenzy, department of anti-Trump shenanigans. For the more responsible members of the populace, it will seem like an overheard squabble among angry children in some forlorn government-funded schoolyard. What, after all, was “Signalgate?” From one perspective, it was like a piranha-infested pool into which chunks of meat or perhaps a hapless Bond villain had been tossed. The resulting frothy tumult made it impossible to see what was happening. You only knew that the fish were frantic and the half-eaten protein shredded. Such things happen from time to time in America.

Neal Pollack

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.