Features

Monday

February 17, 2025

Who’s afraid of ghost guns?

Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down by Luigi Mangione in New York City on December 4. Surveillance footage hit the internet within hours. Wild speculation spread about the strange gun in the killer’s hands. The elongated barrel, the chamber movements that signaled repeated gun jams, the lack of recoil. Was it a veterinary euthanasia gun? As it turned out, it was a homemade gun, commonly known as a “ghost gun," printed using 3D technology. And, as the furore over Mangione dies down, it’s his weapon that remains the subject of violent disagreement and debate. Two months before Thompson’s assassination, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the great ongoing ghost gun case — Garland v. VanDerStok.

Daniel McCarthy

How Trump is revolutionizing Washington

Weeks into his second term, it’s clear President Trump intends to be the most transformative force our politics has seen in a century. He seems equally determined to change the course of the world — and perhaps its map, too. Trump’s enemies can blame themselves for making this possible. They showed him that impeachment is nothing to fear: securing conviction in the Senate is nigh impossible and whatever damage impeachment might do to a president’s reputation has already been inflicted on Trump. Two impeachments and a welter of post-presidential criminal prosecutions and even convictions failed to stain Trump in voters’ eyes. On the contrary, they left him more popular than ever and discredited the institutions his opponents employed as weapons of their “lawfare.

Aidan McLaughlin

How the fashion industry is adapting to Trump 2.0

On the night of the inauguration, as revelers filed into the Commander-in-Chief Ball to await the arrival of the new president of the United States, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro was buzzing. Donning a ballgown and speaking on air with Sean Hannity, she marveled at the elegance of Melania Trump. “She is an icon. And it’s about time America — you know the magazines, the designers — recognize she is one of the most magnificent first ladies,” Pirro said. “She’s so far past Jackie O at this point. We’ve got four years of spectacular elegance, class and a real love for fashion.

Ani Wilcenski

The Mar-a-Lago face-off

In all the post election danger-to-democracy commentary, one unexpected new peril has emerged: the “nationwide surge of Mar-a-Lago face." Best exemplified by demented far-right activist Laura Loomer and former Fox News host-slash-former Donald Trump Jr. squeeze Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mar-a-Lago face is a cosmetic look characterized by immense volumes of cheek filler, heavy eye shadow and enough Botox to petrify the face. The male version could be seen when Florida congressman and attorney general-nominee-for-ten-seconds Matt Gaetz stepped out at the RNC with so much Botox and foundation that he instantly became a bipartisan meme. I’d argue that Mar-a-Lago face is not taking over America anytime soon. It’s barely taking over the Republican Party.

Ross Clark

The Europe of American imaginations no longer exists

Since the United Kingdom left the European Union five years ago, the pair have been in battle to prove who has performed better. But the real story of the past five years is not a stagnant UK falling behind a buoyant EU, but of Britain and Europe being trapped in the same cycle of relative decline. It’s America that has quietly raced ahead of Europe this century. Following the pandemic it has become impossible to ignore the gulf in economic vitality between the US and Europe, the former growing by 16.3 percent per capita since 2008. There are very good reasons for America’s success, or rather, Europe’s decline. The EU and the UK increasingly treat their industries as pieces of heritage which must be preserved against disruptors and foreign competition.

Bridget Phetasy

Elon Musk’s critics are more autistic than he ever could be

I’ve managed to keep most of my liberal family relationships and friendships intact, even after going public about voting for Trump. Most of them shrugged and applied the principle our grandparents taught us — blood is thicker than politics. That is, until Elon Musk. He has proven to be the straw that broke the liberals’ back. Realizing that they’d rendered calling Trump “literally Hitler” ineffective, many normie Democrats and liberal commentators have redirected this energy toward the “Chief Twit." First there was the hand gesture at the post-inauguration rally.

Ben Domenech

Trump’s hundred days of shock and awe

The second Trump administration has begun as it means to go on: moving fast and breaking Washington brains. Firings commenced immediately, from inspectors general to senior FBI officials to workers who refused to go back to the office (for the federal government, the pandemic never ended). The confirmations blasted through the Senate, with even controversial figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rammed through in the first week. Executive Orders flew out like a flock of war pigeons released from the battlements — forty-five in the first two weeks alone — bearing commands small and sweeping.

Andy Ngo

Whatever happened to antifa?

Since the 2024 presidential election, America has been braced for violence from the political far-left — and with good reason. Extremists like antifa, the “anti-fascist” group, are explicitly aggressive. They think looting, arson and intimidation are all acceptable, and until very recently they’ve had the support of the establishment. For a decade their liberal allies gave antifa carte blanche to cause criminal damage in the name of “resisting fascism” or opposing racism. So where is antifa now? What is it planning? It’s an understandable concern. The citizens of Portland remember all too well the bouts of rioting and violence by Black Lives Matter-antifa in November 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump.

Damian Thompson

Americans should feel uneasy about the new Archbishop of Washington

For an eighty-eight-year-old man who has spent only five days in the United States and doesn’t speak English, Pope Francis is a surprisingly partisan observer of American politics. For most of his life he was, like a typical Argentinean, viscerally but vaguely anti-American. By the time he became pope in 2013, he and the Democratic Party had embraced the ideology of the globalist left. And so they forged an alliance — one the Pope may soon regret, now that Republicans in the White House and on Capitol Hill are beginning to grasp the scale of the Vatican’s corruption. In 2016, Francis gave his blessing to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Catholic front organizations, motivated not just by their shared obsession with anti-racism and climate change but contempt for Donald Trump.

Owen Matthews

Rome is ready for its close-up

Rome Like a Parioli matron shedding her curlers, pins and hairnet in anticipation of a major family celebration, Rome’s monuments are emerging from shrouds of cladding and scaffolding ready for their close-up. The angels and river gods of the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and the Piazza Navona shine as blinding white as the day they emerged from Bernini’s workshop. The ancient granite basins of the Piazza Farnese fountains shimmer with an ethereal bluish light. The big occasion is the Papal Jubilee year of 2025, expected to draw a whopping 32 million visitors. That’s more than ten times Rome’s population, and half as many visitors again as in a normal year. If you’re planning a visit, do it soon before the city is entirely swallowed by crowds.

Josie Cox

The donor center is the last bastion of civility

“Braiding Sweetgrass,” she cawed from the other side of the room. “By someone named Robin something. Robin Kimmerer, I think.” The source of this unsolicited book recommendation was Sandra, an eighty-six-year-old musician and Quaker. Since the 1960s — Sandra later told me — she’d donated “probably about three hundred pints” of blood. She was such a prolific giver, that when President Nixon proclaimed the first National Blood Donor Month in 1970 — which still is January — she was interviewed on TV. I met Sandra in early January. We were half-sitting, half-lying foot-to-foot in a donor center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Teresa Mull

The Great American State Fair could be the best Trump spectacle yet

We mustn’t let the policy whiplash of the new administration’s first few months distract from what could be the best Trump spectacle yet: the Great American State Fair which will descend on the Iowa State Fairgrounds on Memorial Day 2025 and conclude on July 4, 2026, when the United States of America turns 250 years old. In the very early days of his second stint as president, I listened to Trump lay out his vision for America and was struck with a thought so brilliant, it turns out Trump had already had the same idea himself. “The golden age of America begins right now,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put America first...

Friday

January 24, 2025

Spectator Editorial

The California fires and the reckoning on liberal governance

Fires in Los Angeles are raging and still barely contained as we go to press, with estimates of the rebuilding costs rising beyond $150 billion. By the time you read this, they’ll be under control and there will of course be plenty of time for finger-pointing — but The Spectator likes to be ahead of the curve, so we’re starting now. What we’re seeing in California is the complete failure of an experiment in one-party Democratic rule, a state level encapsulation of a party taken over by the fringe elements of its base. Given the pile-up of scandals, Californians might finally have had enough. But of the lot, which is the most ludicrous?

Roger Kimball

How will Trump take on the administrative state?

By the time you read this, the first raft or two of Donald Trump’s executive orders will have been promulgated. No one outside the charmed circle of his close advisors knows what is coming down the pike, but all indications are that the orders will be energetic and far-reaching. Colin Powell would probably have pulled out the phrase “shock and awe.” Most observers believe that there will be robust attention to immigration, the border, energy, regulation, taxes and the conduct of elections. There will probably also be orders touching the fate of some 1,500 people charged in connection with the self-guided tour of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I would not be surprised if there were also orders regarding the conduct of some of the prosecutors involved in those cases.

Ben Domenech

How the legacy media became powerless

It was nearly 2 a.m. on the East Coast in the middle of election night when CNN’s Jake Tapper stood across from professional virtual-map operator John King and asked a simple question: “Are there any places where Kamala Harris overperformed from where Biden did?” Tapping away from a view of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, King zoomed out to a view of the entire United States and hit a key to show a comparison to the 2020 election. The map instantly turned a solid dark gray, without a single county highlighted. “Holy smokes,” Tapper gasped. “Literally nothing? Literally not one county?” “Literally nothing,” was King’s somber reply. The video, shared widely and instantly on X, has been viewed more than 13 million times.

Amber Duke

The real housewives of the anti-Trump resistance

It wasn’t easy being a Trump administration staffer in January 2021 as the flock of political appointees were left with a difficult decision to make. They could stay loyal to the president despite the establishment outcry over his repeated claims of massive electoral fraud in the 2020 election and the events of the January 6 Capitol riot. This came at a huge risk, as multiple former Trump staffers over the years have described to me the difficulties of finding a job outside of Trumpworld at that time. Some opted to continue to work for the president in the hope that his political brand would recover — a gamble that would eventually pay off.

Adam 'Lectern Guy' Johnson

I don’t beg your pardon

The government can take away your liberty for moving furniture, I get that now. When it makes you into a liar, well, that’s a step too far. I’d explained to my five children that dad would be spending the next seventy-one days at an all-male retreat, but when I arrived at Coleman Federal Prison they immediately put me in solitary confinement. The punishment is the process, they say, unless you spend any amount of time in solitary. In that case, the punishment is the punishment. The guards no doubt wanted me to spend time in quiet reflection before granting me the privilege of engaging in fellowship with my retreat mates, a hodgepodge of petty-crime white-collar types. I had plenty of time over the next seventeen days to think about how I had arrived in sunny Sumterville.

Casey Chalk

Panama celebrates a quarter-century’s ownership of its greatest asset

New Year’s marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collective freakout known as Y2K, when overwrought tech aficionados joined forces with Luddites to warn the world of the pending apocalypse of computer infrastructure that could run the global economy but was evidently incapable of resetting to “00” in date codes. Those chiliastic projections obviously did not come to pass, which is why we can spend 2025 reflecting on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day’s other Chicken Little situation — consternation over the transition that would, some skeptical parties feared, have catastrophic consequences for infrastructure central to the daily functioning of global markets, the final turnover of the Panama Canal.

Doug Blair

How game developers could kill the industry

In the golden age of video games, developers and players built relationships through a shared celebration of creativity. Many developers were gamers themselves, which helped foster mutual trust and respect with their audiences. Players assumed developers would prioritize their desires and craft experiences centered on their enjoyment. That mutuality is now gone as many creators have grown more concerned with pushing political ideology and show disdain for their consumers. Many game developers now treat their users not as collaborators in a shared passion but as adversaries, accusing them of bigotry and hate.

Jacob Heilbrunn

A pleasant respite from the tumult in Cambridge

Cambridge, England Inscribed on the lid of a two-manual harpsichord in Holy Trinity Church at Hildersham in Cambridgeshire is the Latin tag Musica Donum Dei — music is a gift of God. It was a sentiment I could hardly quarrel with as I listened in the little twelfth-century church to a variety of baroque sonatas for violin, recorder, cello and harpsichord. They were expertly performed by the Azur Ensemble, which is comprised of recent graduates of the Royal College of Music. A particular standout was the French harpsichordist Apolline Khou, who has performed widely in Europe and in a solo concert for King Charles III.