Features Archives

Monday

June 17, 2024

Meet Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s anti-Trudeau

An extreme form of mental gymnastics is required to believe that a pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ, pro-immigration philosemite in an interracial marriage is also Canada’s beachhead for an invasion of American-style white nationalism. Then again, Canadians have extremely flexible imaginations. There are armies of politically literate Canadians who earnestly think that Pierre Poilievre would be comfortable among the members of the Republican Party — even in the Freedom Caucus that comprises its rightmost flank. Not a few of them — grown adults who can tie their own shoes and read without moving their mouths — genuinely believe that Poilievre is something other than a mild-mannered, ideologically malleable, Ottawa-tempered functionary.

xi jinping wang huning wargame militarizing IP china

Dennis Unkovic

Explaining China’s IP problem

Since man’s early origins, the desire to possess gold has been a universal obsession. Gold was once viewed as the ultimate symbol of power and wealth. Governments amassed vast quantities of gold to finance their economies and political ambitions. Until the mid-twentieth century, leading national currencies were directly tied to how much physical gold was housed in national treasuries. But 500 years ago, Sir Thomas More got it right when he described gold as something “which in itself is so useless.” Today, rather than gold, what truly represents a nation’s strength is its ability to innovate and control technologies.

Oliver Jia

Why Japan won’t repeat the West’s mistakes on immigration

Japan has become another piece of fodder for the West’s culture wars. After a recent visit with his family, talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel praised the country for its clean toilets and lack of litter, only to be lambasted by right-wing pundits such as Ben Shapiro, who accused the comedian of having leftist beliefs that are completely at odds with what makes Japanese society so safe and orderly. Namely, Shapiro argued, Japan is a closed-off nation, unpersuaded by arguments to allow mass migration, and its homogeneity and “unique culture,” along with a strict legal system, help sustain this “package deal.” During the height of the Syrian refugee crisis nearly a decade ago, amid intense international criticism, Japan refused to accept asylum seekers from the Middle East.

Wednesday

May 15, 2024

Spectator Editorial

Why the Gaza protests are worrying

As the weather has warmed, it’s time for that time-honored tradition — protest season. Because everyone knows the plight of the disenfranchised is best solved at 70°F. Setting up winter camp in a college quad seems unpleasant — the revolution will take place at a time, place and temperature that’s convenient for America’s poetry graduate assistants. Campus protests are nothing new in America. They’ve been a feature of university life since at least the Vietnam War and beyond. And sure, it’s fun to get wrapped up in a romantic cause you only just learned about and of which you have only a surface-level knowledge. It might give your life meaning at a time when you’re trying to figure out what the point of all of this is.

James Donald Forbes McCann

A Midwest road trip

The Midwest Notre Dame is not an Ivy League university and, in what I assume is some sort of intentional point, its buildings tend to be ivy-free. Perhaps it is the absence of ivy, perhaps I am just flat after a long day’s drive across Ohio and Indiana, perhaps it’s just winter, but the campus seems more sterile than I had expected. It’s Good Friday, and my friend Margot is studying classical architecture here. She’s showing me around the grounds. I don’t really know what I’d hoped to see. Amy Coney Barrett? Multiracial friendship groups, skipping across the green? As soon as I see the stadium, though, I am transfixed. Margot is visibly disappointed when I say that I adore the stadium above all the other buildings.

Roger Kimball

The cunning of the Democrats’ lawfare

It saddens me to admit it, but the evidence is too overwhelming to dismiss: Democrats are significantly more cunning than Republicans. I say “Democrats,” but that is an imprecise, even a misleading, designation. Party affiliation is not now, if it ever was, a really accurate predictor of ideological coloration. What I mean are those people, most of whom happen to belong to the Democratic Party, who have been bitten by the bug of extremism, who are fired by revolutionary fervor, who regard every opponent, every contrary opinion, as a “by-any-means-necessary” fire alarm. It is an attitude that has stirred their creativity, also their vindictiveness. Hercules had to undertake twelve supposedly impossible labors. Donald Trump is fast catching up.

Ben Domenech

The Trump trial tedium

Donald Trump was falling asleep. The former president of the United States was, as we have all been at one point or another, stuck in an interminably long and boring meeting. This one happened to be in a courtroom, one that he protested was being kept too cold — the presiding judge agreed but said that the choice with their limited thermostat was between too cold and too hot, and it was better not to swelter. So the room was cold, the talk was boring, and the former president was falling asleep.

Julio Rosas

Campus unrest is coming to a city near you

It is 10 p.m. at the University of Texas at Austin’s South Mall. The night is quiet, a stark contrast to just the day before when UT Austin became the latest battleground of the culture war on American college campuses. All over the country this spring, anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protesters set up squalid camps on well-manicured quads, blocking and storming buildings. Revolutionaries clad in Covid masks and the keffiyeh favored by terrorists the world over spent the semester hounding Jewish students in libraries, dorms and whatever other structures they could seize. They demanded that institutions cut ties with Israel, topped off with requiring criminal pardons and straight “A”s for themselves, lest their noble impulses hinder their career prospects.

Richard Koenig

Will Cherelle Parker become the next ‘America’s mayor’ in Philadelphia?

So far this year, Philadelphia has seen more than two shootings a day. Among the statistics was a local rapper known as Phat Geez. Here’s the message in his song “No Gunzone”: “Killings all up in my city / Can’t get enough of it / Facing all of these problems / I cannot run from it.” Derrick Gant was his real name. Dead at twenty-eight. So now comes Cherelle Parker, only a few months into her first term as Philly’s Democratic mayor, trying to plug the dike against a flood of lawlessness. Looking across her native city, she says that too much of what she sees is never OK, no matter concerns, including hers, about “root causes.

Teresa Mull

Pennsylvania at the polls

It’s nicknamed “the Keystone State” because, if my memory of junior-year Pennsylvania history class serves me, in America’s early founding it was the arch stone holding together the handful of other young states. Fast-forward forty-eight states and nearly 250 years, and Pennsylvania remains a powerhouse, particularly when it comes to politics. And this year’s elections could very well have it deciding whether the keystone continues to uphold the nation. US News and World Report has ranked Pennsylvania as “potentially the most important swing state in this year’s race for the White House.” The Commonwealth ties for fifth place with Illinois for the highest number of electoral votes — nineteen.

Bridget Phetasy

Dads rock

During the Q&A portion of a Jordan Peterson lecture I recently attended, host Konstantin Kisin presented a question from the audience: “My son was just born. How do I know how to be a father if I didn’t have a father? What makes a great father?” I’ve been thinking about that question ever since. As someone who spends entirely too much time online viewing the virtual culture wars play out on X/Twitter, I’ve noticed no one has more to say about relationships and raising children than the unmarried, childless peanut gallery that occupies the “manosphere.” Like every online genre, the loose collection of blogs, podcasts, forums and websites that constitute the manosphere exist on a spectrum.

Batya Ungar-Sargon

Where to find self-esteem

It’s a month before publication day for my second book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. I start an Instagram account in the hopes of drumming up interest in the book on a new platform. I post a few clips of TV hits from recent weeks and follow a few friends. Instagram immediately recommends an article about how to grow your Instagram following, and I click on it and learn that consistency is key on Instagram. Roger that. Later that day, I find myself arranging my overachiever elder millennial self into an artfully nonchalant pose while stirring a lamb curry I’m whipping up for my regular Shabbat dinner salon. “There once was a Batya,” my husband mutters on his way to the fridge. “Now there’s a content creator.

The Spectator

Letters from Spectator readers, June 2024

The rise of reverse gaslighting Sir — To an otherwise excellent article, I have a small correction. In 1860, the Southern states did not keep Lincoln off the ballot. Unlike today, where voting ballots are printed by the states, in 1860, voters were not presented with official ballots at polling stations that allowed them to check off which candidate they were voting for. Instead, a nineteenth-century ballot or “political ticket” was a slip of paper, provided by each party, listing their candidates for whatever offices were up for election. This allowed voters to easily “vote the ticket” for their party without having to know the names of every candidate and office.

Paul Wood

AI and the new way of war

What is happening in Gaza now provides a glimpse of how all wars may be fought in the future — with artificial intelligence. In The Spectator last November, I wrote about an Israeli airstrike that brought down a six-story building in Gaza City, reportedly killing more than forty civilians. One of the residents, a man named Mahmoud Ashour, dug through the rubble with his bare hands, trying to find his daughter and her four children, a girl aged eight and three boys of six, two and six months — all killed. The Israeli military would not tell me why the building was hit, beyond saying that Gaza’s armed groups put their military infrastructure amid civilians, but Amnesty International said there had been a single member of Hamas living there.

Daniel DePetris

Is Europe ready for Trump 2.0?

The 2024 presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is a dead heat. At most, a few percentage points separate them in the polls. Thousands of miles away, however, European leaders are operating as if Trump has already won, not wanting to be caught flat-footed yet again. When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, European officials scrambled to establish contacts with the incoming administration. This time, the same wonks are proactively reaching out to Trump-friendly lawmakers and think-tankers, not only to understand what Trump’s foreign policy would look like in a second term but to press their own priorities. The Europeans, of course, are right to be worried.

Daniel McCarthy

Biden’s base rebels over Gaza

Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is a multifront war. Unfortunately for him, the youngest soldiers in his coalition would rather fight Israel than Donald Trump. Biden was elected in the first place as the anti-Trump. In 2020 Democrats were desperate, and the ex-vice president was the most prestigious figure they had to field. He didn’t have to be inspiring or energetic — Trump would provide all the inspiration and energy Biden voters needed. What inspires the voting-age activists on America’s campuses today, though, isn’t aversion to Trump, and it certainly isn’t love for Joe Biden: it’s outrage at Israel. Four years ago, George Floyd became a symbol of injustice that spurred progressives to take to the streets and take back the country at the ballot box.

Fin de Pencier

The fight among the olive trees

Rmeich, Lebanon On October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas massacre further south, Hezbollah started firing rockets into northern Israel, reviving the world’s most dangerous game of chicken. What exactly has been accomplished? Hezbollah’s Shia supporters may be comfortable with their leader Hassan Nasrallah and his Iranian sponsor, head of state Ali Khameini, risking open war. But no one consulted the local Christians, who would never agree to spill Lebanese blood as a supportive gesture to Hamas. “The south [of the country] belongs to Lebanon, and Hezbollah cannot go to war on behalf of the Lebanese,” says Marc Saad, a spokesman for the Lebanese Forces, a Christian political party and Hezbollah opponent.

John Daniel Davidson

The case for cartel wars

Washington makes a fundamental error when it sees the present border crisis as an immigration problem, rather than the national security problem it has become under President Biden. For border states such as Texas, which bear the brunt of the situation, it’s also becoming a constitutional problem. In January, the US Supreme Court vacated an injunction prohibiting the feds from cutting razor wire that Texas had placed across a 2.5-mile stretch of border near the town of Eagle Pass. Governor Greg Abbott responded by asserting his state’s fundamental right to self-defense in the face of federal inaction, citing constitutional authority.

William D. Cohan

Meet Jon Davidson, chief of staff to the stars

Jon Davidson, chief of staff to former president Bill Clinton, seems to enjoy hanging out with superstars. The forty-three-year-old isn’t a celebrity himself, of course. But he doesn’t appear the slightest bit averse to using his boss’s power, fame and resources to make sure he’s able to hang out with A-listers and to enjoy the other benefits of being the guy who controls the access to a former president. For instance, before Labor Day weekend 2016, Bill and Hillary were in the Hamptons, relaxing, just before the final push in Hillary’s campaign against Donald Trump. They were spending their time hanging out with wealthy friends and senior political advisors, trying to figure out the tactics and strategies that would result in victory on election night.

Tuesday

April 16, 2024

Spectator Editorial

Is the West ready to face the challenges of advancing technology?

The theme of this month’s edition is technology. The advancement of space exploration, defense technologies, artificial intelligence and the like should excite us. Yet the geopolitical issues they present are great and Western governments seem ill-prepared to grapple with them. Watch any congressional hearing where a crusty congressman tries to keep pace with Silicon Valley’s top autists if you need further evidence — and read Spencer A. Klavan’s analysis of the high-skill but low-status rejects uniting into a formidable social class on p.12. The Silent Generation and boomers simply cannot keep up. The Space Race is back on, as tycoons seek to cash in on the final frontier.