Features Archives

Sunday

October 23, 2022

Have we finally reached Peak Pride?

Have we reached Peak Pride? As a gay man, I suppose I should feel gratified by the fervor with which seemingly every entity across the Western world declares its solidarity with the LGBTQIAA+ community every June. But this year, the omnipresence of the rainbow flag — the latest iteration of which resembles a testing of the Emergency Broadcast System on acid — has gone a tad too far. Lounging poolside at a Las Vegas resort for my younger brother’s bachelor party, I casually reveal to the bikini-clad young woman lying next to me that I am gay. “Happy Pride!” she enthuses, in a way that a gentile wishes me a “Happy Chanukah” upon discovering, at Christmastime, that I’m Jewish.

Ben Domenech

Pat Buchanan and thirty years of culture wars

It was a relatively cool 85 degrees in Houston on the August evening thirty years ago when Republicans gathered at the Astrodome to renominate George H.W. Bush for the 1992 presidential election. The opening session’s speakers included Senator John McCain, Stanford professor Condoleezza Rice, and re-election campaign co-chairman Ken Lay, later to gain fame as a major figure in the Enron scandals. But the speech that would be the most memorable by far was delivered by a television commentator, syndicated columnist and former Richard Nixon hatchet man — the fifty-four-year-old Irish Catholic Pat Buchanan, who delivered what came to be known as “The Culture War Speech.

Bill McMorris

The deep sleep state

America may be falling behind in manufacturing everything from household goods to textiles and semiconductors, but there is one sector of innovation where these United States will never be surpassed: defrauding the federal government. Sure, Beijing’s Machiavellian overlords may steal some missile or naval tech here or there — more often than not here and there — but they couldn’t come up with deploying fake concrete in public works projects or, say, building the Middle East’s largest women’s studies department in the name of defeating terrorism. We Americans cannot be topped in our capacity to fleece the taxpayer. I witnessed one such act on summer vacation and marveled at its creativity and simplicity.

Chris Mondics

Will the opioid enablers ever pay?

More than two decades into America’s catastrophic opioid epidemic, the demographics of this unprecedented tragedy are clear. By far, the brunt of the harm has been borne by America’s poor and working classes. Multiple studies show a strong correlation between lack of employment, economic distress and overdose fatalities. Indeed, a 2021 study by the National Academy of Sciences concluded most of the decline in life expectancy beginning in the mid-1990s among working-age men and women was attributable to drug poisonings of people with a high school education or less. Standing in sharp relief to portraits of its primary victims are its perpetrators. Those most responsible for this epidemic are part of America’s best educated and economically privileged classes.

Sunday

October 16, 2022

Emmet Penney

Nuclear power is the answer to our energy woes

America is about to spend $126.9 billion on renewable energy thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. When this is added to the already existing production tax credits, the total is $240 billion. Greens everywhere are rejoicing. Paul Krugman took to the New York Times to wonder if the Democrats had just saved the world from climate change. And why not? America has seen emissions drop to 4.8 trillion tons a year since 2000. That’s a one-trillion ton decrease. In fact, since America has embarked on building out wind and solar, the country has returned to 1949 levels of emissions. But are renewables really to thank? After all, wind and solar only accounted for about 12 percent of our electricity supply in 2021.

Tuesday

October 11, 2022

Spectator Editorial

The Biden ultimatum

Toward the end of the summer, Republicans found themselves with a severe case of pre-midterm jitters. This ailment is prone to flare up every four years, as the opposition party frets over whether it can deliver the incumbent president and his party the clobbering that has come to be expected. A common symptom of this nervousness is for the out-of-power party to wonder if it might fare better with the voters if it set out a substantive policy agenda, rather than simply relying on anger at the other side’s overreach.

Patrick Ruffini

Here come the Hispanic Republicans

A coveted working-class demographic that has been loyally Democratic for generations stands poised to vote Republican in record numbers. Its voters are upwardly mobile, having risen from the deep poverty of their immigrant ancestors to a decent middle-class life. Their incomes are rising quickly and are soon expected to reach the national average. They start businesses at rates that exceed the native born. Recent government data shows them moving into the suburbs from ethnic enclaves in the cities. All of this has coincided with their political shift to the right. This demographic is family-oriented and deeply religious.

Daniel McCarthy

Dobbs won’t save the Democrats

Democrats head into the midterms praying that abortion-rights supporters will reward them for failing. If the Democratic Party has stood for anything over the past half-century, it has stood for the right to end a pregnancy. All the party had to do was to defend the status quo established by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. But it proved unable to do that, despite the two-term administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, despite controlling the Senate from 2007 to 2015 and again from 2019 until now, and despite the virtual monopoly Democrats enjoy on the sympathy of the news and entertainment media. With all these advantages, Democrats could not safeguard a right that their voters consider fundamental. Now Democrats expect voters to trust them to regain what they lost.

Roger Kimball

Joe Biden and the Sovietization of America

I write with the clangorous strains of Joe Biden’s speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall still ringing in my ears. By the time you read this, the attendant tinnitus will doubtless have abated. The effects of the speech, however, will be echoing throughout the land for many months if not longer. The commentator Ben Shapiro was, I believe, correct in judging Biden’s brief speech “the most demagogic, outrageous and divisive speech... ever seen from an American president.” In sum, “Joe Biden essentially declared all those who oppose him and his agenda enemies of the republic. Truly shameful.” But what has been true of Joe Biden from before his administration began continues to be true.

Ben Domenech

Where the Tea Party went wrong

In the world of American politics, 2010 feels like a very long time ago. The wave of Tea Party candidates swept into office in response to the overreach of Barack Obama belonged to a party that had as its champions the likes of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney — all people who would ultimately be rejected by its nominee in 2016. The Republican Party of 2010 nominated and elected a swath of candidates bent on changing Washington. They were elected in states as diverse as Kentucky, Florida, Wisconsin and Utah. And they represented a push designed to shift the party, to transform what it did in the capital. They advocated for change that would be long-standing, not just a brief change in personnel.

Matt Purple

Connecticut and the rise of blue-state MAGA Republicans

The year was 2006 and something unprecedented was happening: people were actually paying attention to the state of Connecticut. Senator Joe Lieberman, a long-serving moderate Democrat and Al Gore’s former running mate, had just lost his primary to a left-wing activist named Ned Lamont. Lieberman then jumped in as an independent and suddenly Connecticut had a real Senate race on its hands: two center-leftists plus a plucky yet overlooked Republican named Alan Schlesinger. Lieberman won in a rout. That the far-left Lamont is now governor of Connecticut should tell you everything you need to know about that state’s political drift.

Alexander Larman

Queen Elizabeth II made a difference — to Britain and the world

“The Queen is dead, boys, and it’s so lonely on a limb.” So the ever-provocative Morrissey sang on the title track of the Smiths’ 1986 album. At the time, his wishes were regarded as little more than republican throat-clearing, shot through with satirical wit. In the same song, he imagined an unlikely encounter with the Queen, who remarks caustically, “Eh, I know you, and you cannot sing.” Some of his detractors might agree. But now, thirty-six years on, the Queen really is dead. Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning monarch in British history, died on September 8, 2022 at the age of ninety-six. The second Elizabethan age — one that surpassed the first for both achievement and longevity — has come to an end.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy

So much for #MeToo

Five years have passed since Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey and Ronan Farrow’s Pulitzer-winning reporting on sexual misconduct in Hollywood and beyond. Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo’s Perv Patient Zero, is in prison. Bill Cosby spent three years there as well. Woody Allen — Farrow’s estranged father, one-time accused child molester and husband of his ex-partner’s adult daughter — still walks free (not having actually been charged with anything), but a bunch of A-list actors won’t work with him, and you now have to preface every mention of Annie Hall with a handwringing disclaimer. Donald Trump, well, he wasn’t reelected, which has to count for something. The world, we were assured, would never be the same.

Francis Pike

America’s chip war with China

There is a joke in Taipei that if China invades Taiwan the best place to shelter is in microchip factories, the only places the People’s Liberation Army can’t afford to destroy. The country that controls advanced chips controls the future of technology — and Taiwan’s chip fabrication foundries (“fabs”) are the finest in the world. Successful reunification between the mainland and its renegade province would give China a virtual monopoly over the most advanced fabs. Given that Xi Jinping has made clear his intention to take control of Taiwan by 2032, it is no wonder that the American government is worried about the concentration of cutting-edge semiconductor technology on the island.

Bridget Phetasy

I wanted to leave California before it was cool

When I was about eleven years old my favorite Barbie was Midge from the California Dream collection. Barbie’s BFF, she had auburn hair and freckles. Midge came with roller skates and a blue visor and I loved her. My sister had California Dream Barbie and we would pop in the Beach Boys Greatest Hits cassette tape and pretend we were living in California for hours upon hours, day after day. We wore that cassette tape out, screaming the lyrics to “California Dreamin’” on cold winter days in Connecticut. I imagined Midge was me, cruising down the boardwalk with the wind in my hair and the sun on my cheeks. My dreams of being a California girl began in those afternoons lost in fantasyland.

Thursday

October 6, 2022

Hannah Moore

Rupert Murdoch goes west

Each year I return to my native Montana, my English husband and our two small children in tow. We try to explore new parts of the state; this summer we decided to check out Beaverhead County. This happens to be where Rupert Murdoch recently bought a 340,000-acre ranch in the biggest land sale in Montana’s history. On our way south to Beaverhead County we inadvertently took the same route as William Clark on his return journey from the Pacific in 1806. It’s hard not to: there are few options for crossing the Bitterroot Mountains. Lost Trail Pass reaches a height of over 7,000 feet and we stop here to eat our ham sandwiches and Cheez-Its.

Wednesday

October 5, 2022

Bill McMorris

Andrew Yang’s doomed revolution

In 1958, the federal government surveyed the vast plains of the United States for the site that would launch the future of humanity and settled on... Greenbelt, Maryland, which had the advantage of a quick commute from the capital. On weekdays 7,000 people travel to NASA’s Goddard Space Center to work on those telescopes that go viral every few months with their high-definition photos of space. They were off for Labor Day weekend, so only a couple of hundred people were on hand to see the dawn of a political revolution.

Monday

August 22, 2022

Spectator Editorial

Biden’s border blues

When hundreds of thousands of migrants surged to the southern border soon after Joe Biden took office, administration officials urged patience. Donald Trump had “dismantled” the system, homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insisted when asked about chaotic scenes at the border last March. “It takes time to rebuild it virtually from scratch,” he said. Well, the Biden administration has now had plenty of time — and there is no end to the border crisis in sight. Eighteen months on from Mayorkas’s assurances, the numbers are no less staggering. In June alone, Customs and Border Protection reported more than 200,000 apprehensions. So far this year, law enforcement has encountered more than 1.5 million migrants in attempted border crossings.

James Kirchick

A hazy afternoon with Bill Maher

It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Beverly Hills and Bill Maher — stand-up comedian, late-night television host, prophet of the great American silent majority — is ruminating on what the hell has gone wrong with the left: “It all comes, I think, from two terrible sources: bad parenting and insane universities. That’s where the craziness is coming from.” Maher is sitting with me in “Club Random,” the neon-light-festooned, decked-out bungalow he converted into a television studio in 2020, after social distancing requirements forced his weekly HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, to shoot remotely.

Ben Domenech

Shane Gillis is going places

It is a hot summer night at the truck warehouse that is home to Magooby’s Joke House, and 2014’s Baltimore New Comedian of the Year is in need of another cold Bud Light. Shane Gillis, the Pennsylvania man who was nowhere close to a household name until he had the misfortune to be fired by Saturday Night Live in 2019, and then the follow-on great fortune to become famous for being incredibly funny, does not love the impression he gives as the apex predator of beer-drinking. But he is a week removed from leaving fellow comic Ari Shaffir, no lightweight himself, passed out in intense liver pain on the studio floor of The Joe Rogan Experience because he dared come at the T. rex. “So who is your trainer? Your trainer has to be incredible.” “My dad. He’s an alcoholic.