Features

Monday

August 1, 2022

Why I joined the college exodus

In the spring of 2020, the pandemic catalyzed a startling personal revelation. As a begrudging student of Zoom University, I came to the realization that a college degree might not be worth it. Pre-pandemic Rikki was a dutiful, head-down student at New York University with a 4.0 GPA and her eyes set on law school. But when the world locked down in the middle of my sophomore year and my university still demanded full tuition for virtual classes, I began questioning everything. Although they certainly made a valiant effort at remote teaching, most of my professors proved too technologically inept to coerce twenty-five despondent teens to attend 8 a.m. Zoom lectures about medieval feudalism.

Daniel McCarthy

Life after liberalism

Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of national politics. Barack Obama should have been the beginning of a generational renewal for the Democratic Party. Instead the Democrats have been prisoners of their past. They looked backward in 2016 and nominated Hillary Clinton. After she failed, they reached even further back to nominate Joe Biden, a man born during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Biden is not simply old; he’s nostalgia personified. He’s a throwback to a time when Democrats were less radical, when the party of FDR and JFK, and even of Bill Clinton, could lay claim to being an everyman’s party.

Art Tavana

Vince McMahon’s final act

Vince McMahon displays a T-Rex skull in his office. It is mounted against blood-colored walls. But is it real? It doesn’t matter, as it’s authentically Vince McMahon to mount such a garish display of masculine bravado on his wall. It’s the kind of over-the-top centerpiece you’d expect from the mogul who built World Wrestling Entertainment into the behemoth it is today. A giant of a man, McMahon has spent four decades laughing maniacally as he feasted on the flesh of his puny competition. “It’s on my wall and symbolic of my voracious appetite for life,” he tweeted. There’s also prophetic symbolism to the dead-dinosaur skull. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that the WWE board was investigating a “secret $3 million hush pact by CEO Vince McMahon.

Ben Domenech

Dobbs has changed America forever

For nearly half a century, American politics has been defined according to the strictures of a single Supreme Court decision: Roe v. Wade. The 1973 case determined abortion policy for the entire nation, striking down state rules and creating a political movement in response which played out in unexpected and completely polarized ways. It drove southern evangelical Christians and northern Catholics into unorthodox political partnerships. It cut across the Democratic Party coalition, leading to constant squabbling even through the passage of Obamacare. It led directly to the creation of the conservative legal movement, the elevation of prospective judicial nominees as of the utmost importance in assessing presidential candidates.

Bridget Phetasy

I apologize for my white baby

I’m here to apologize to my brothers and sisters of color — my white daughter’s pale skin has brought me nothing but shame. I have failed as an ally. For if whiteness is the root cause of systemic racism, then what does that make me for having a white child? How can I extol the virtues of anti-racism and dismantle white supremacy while simultaneously birthing another white person? These two seem incompatible. If I were truly honoring my commitment to decolonizing white spaces, I would have had my tubes tied or had myself euthanized and done the BIPOC community and the planet a favor. I’m such a coward. My therapists will have their work cut out for them this week. “Love is love,” unless you fall in love with a cishet white male.

Bill McMorris

The coldness of K Street

You couldn’t miss him as you strolled down K Street. He wore a fedora and boxy suits, was not afraid to imbibe as he worked, and paced the capital’s most infamous stretch chain-smoking cigarettes. He arrived in Washington in the Nineties as a traveling salesman and would have kept right on traveling were it not for that checkout girl. For three decades, he put the road behind him and went to work erasing any trace of the street from the brogues, Oxfords and, in the final decade of his life, the slip-on monks and bit loafers ubiquitous among the graceless lobbyists of the twenty-first century. K Street may have become too busy to tie shoelaces, but its denizens were never too busy for a happy-hour stop with the self-proclaimed “Godfather of Shine.

Chris Arnade

Walking Hanoi

I let the roosters wake me at 4:30 a.m., since it’s already 88 degrees out, will be 100 by noon and I want to get in my full fifteen-mile walk without suffering heat stroke. My intended route is from my small rented apartment in southwest Hanoi, due east to the banks of the Red River, then back again, or maybe something else entirely. My plans are always rough, the daily walks changing depending on what I see, who I meet and what strikes me. That is why I walk, rather than drive or bike: so I can change stuff up on the fly — and let events, people and things I find along the way determine where I go. The only things that stay constant are aiming for between ten and twenty miles a day, and never using cabs.

Eli Lake

What John Durham has proved

In May, when a federal jury acquitted former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann of one count of lying to the FBI, the cadre of politicians, pundits and activists that comprise what they consider a “resistance” to Donald Trump’s presidency were brimming with indignation at the insult of its having gone to trial at all. The Sussmann prosecution was the first case from special counsel John Durham to go to trial. Durham was appointed in 2019 to investigate the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. And it took only a few hours for the jury to rule against him.

Matt Purple

Inflation is the great destroyer

In the summer of 1981, the American air traffic controllers’ union PATCO rejected a salary and benefits deal that had been put forth by the Reagan administration. What happened next lives on in the annals of Republican lore and in labor movement horror stories: PATCO opted for an illegal strike. More than 12,000 air traffic controllers walked off the job, and in one of the most successful union-busts in history, Reagan fired almost all of them. That’s the official account anyway. But there’s much more about the strike that’s less known, or at least misunderstood. For example, did you know that PATCO had actually endorsed Reagan for president in 1980, finding Jimmy Carter too intransigent?

Birdie Hall

How LSD helped me find God

The first time I took LSD was alone on Christmas Day in a snowed-in Montana cabin. I watched my skin crawl and the walls melt. It was the first time since childhood I didn’t hate my own body, and a nice break from the depressing bioethics I was studying in school. I took deep breaths and stretched. As the effects took hold, I watched illustrations fly out from a gorgeous, tattered copy of Mark Twain’s biography of Joan of Arc. Four hours later, after smoking an entire pack of cigarettes, I was convinced I was descending to hell. I watched fake flames lick the yellow wallpaper. It was miserable and listening to Nick Cave didn’t help. At dinner with friends later that night, the elk roast resembled human meat and the bread rolls made to commemorate St.

Roger Kimball

The great White House replacement

I like it when I can endorse the other side. It makes me feel like I’m part of the big happy family of man instead of just another snarling partisan. So it was with gratitude that I absorbed David Axelrod’s recent observation about Joe Biden on CNN. Pay attention now: Axelrod was the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and what he doesn’t know about the emotional weather of the left is not worth knowing. “There is this sense that things are kind of out of control,” quoth Axelrod when asked about the Big Guy™, “and he’s not in command.” Right you are, Dave! My only question is: what took you so long? Of course, Axelrod’s devastating admission was not a disinterested or impartial judgment. Nothing Obama’s main men say is that.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Asking a rabbi about abortion

When the Roe news broke, my thoughts — myopically — turned not to the millions of Americans who were rejoicing, or the millions of Americans who were mourning, but to a social engagement I had coming up a few days thereafter. The intimate dinner would be populated by a few friends and family on both sides of the aisle, with very different perspectives on abortion and, obviously, very different reactions to the news. I was dreading it. Imagine my surprise when, over steaks and haricots verts, the conversation was productive, the rhetoric thoughtful, and the passions cool... most of the time.

Rafael A. Mangual

The cost of decarceration

As grown up as I felt at nine, whenever my parents let me walk to school, the corner store or Prospect Park with friends, I’d have been lying through my teeth if I denied sometimes feeling afraid — even in the little slice of Brooklyn I called home. But it wasn’t the New York Police Department or endemic racism that made me anxious. In the 1990s, getting mugged or beaten up in my own neighborhood always felt like more than a remote possibility. That sense of wariness was dull and could easily be forgotten if I was distracted. But it was always there, just under the surface. That anxiety disappeared when we moved to a mostly white town in suburban Long Island. At school, no one looked like me.

Thursday

July 7, 2022

Spectator Editorial

As goes Florida…

Do you remember Rebekah Jones? Don’t worry, we’d forgotten about her too. At the height of the pandemic, she resigned as a low-level functionary in Florida’s public health bureaucracy and accused her state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, of cooking the books on Covid. There was never much evidence to back up Jones’s claims of data manipulation, but that didn’t stop her becoming a pandemic-era media darling. She was given seemingly endless airtime on cable news while newspaper profiles heralded her as a brave whistleblower. Boosted by this favorable coverage, the kooky data scientist even announced a congressional run. But it is now as clear as could be that Jones was wrong.

Karol Markowicz

A sunshine state of mind

“I thank God for this place.” It might seem a weird thing to say, unapologetically earnest and deeply uncool, but, in Florida, it’s very common to overhear someone saying exactly this. On the beach. By a pool. In a restaurant. At the checkout line at Publix. Some other phrases you hear a lot: “I wish we had made the move sooner.” “I feel like I’ve added years to my life.” “Living the dream.” “Another day in paradise.” It is a unique moment in Florida’s history. The feeling of gratitude is very real. Millions of people seem to have woken up one day and decided they had to become Floridians right away. I am among them. How many exactly is unclear. The US Census estimates 221,000 people moved to Florida between July 2020 and July 2021.

Matt Purple

Undercover in DeSantis’s Disney World

Recently The Spectator sent me undercover inside Ron DeSantis’s Disney World. Allow me to explain. Back in April, Florida lawmakers voted to dissolve the so-called Reedy Creek Improvement District. Reedy Creek, for those unfamiliar with the seamy world of crony capitalism, was a self-governing enclave within Orlando, Florida, run by the Disney corporation. It had been set up to allow Disney World to effectively function as its own nation-state, setting its own rules, levying its own taxes, even administering its own public services. Reedy Creek was established in 1967. It was part of Walt Disney’s original vision for his parks, which was exceedingly ambitious, seeing, for example, EPCOT Center as growing into its own autonomous futuristic city.

Alex Perez

Is Miami really on the rise?

My lunch spot in suburban Miami-Dade County, El Palacio de los Jugos — the Palace of the Juices — is the kind of Cuban joint that specializes in monstrous portions served up by some of the finest mamacitas on the planet. The black beans and rice can be overly greasy and the tropical jugos sickeningly sweet, but one frequents the palace for the only-in-Miami atmosphere; the food is incidental. On any given day there, you’ll run into a construction worker chatting up the gals from the Asian massage parlor next door. Young bros roll up in souped-up Hondas and scarf half a dozen empanadas before rushing off to cook up their next low-level con. The Cuban old-timers sit around, as they’ve done for decades, slamming cafecitos and denouncing los comunistas.

Sal Nuzzo

What Florida gets right

There’s a saying in Florida: “the further south you go, the more north you get.” Those familiar with the state’s geography know this reflects the reality that most of the southern regions of the state — Palm Beach, Miami, Naples, Fort Myers — have large cohorts of migrants from up north. There is even a logic to who moves where. Northerners from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and the other New England states come down Interstate 95 and end up in southeast Florida while Midwesterners from Illinois, Ohio and Michigan travel down I-75 and settle in the southwest part of the state. This migration is not a new phenomenon. Over the past twenty-five years, Florida’s population has boomed unlike anywhere else in the country.

Ben Domenech

Who will stand for free speech?

The primary feeling is a sense of dread. The oily scent of torches set aflame is in your nostrils, and the glint of pitchforks in moonlight appears on the horizon. You have, either accidentally or intentionally, said something that aroused the anger of a mob. Those of your friends who enjoy a good scrum send you laughing messages; those who are born afraid of such things ask quietly if you are all right. Your name is trending nationally and, amid it all, you worry it will never end. This is an experience that too many Americans have had in the era of social media.

Paul Mango

Why Operation Warp Speed worked

On Friday January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phoned Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. With the words, “we have a problem in China,” Redfield broke to the secretary and those of us on his immediate staff news that was about to change the world. At the time, neither Redfield nor anyone else knew much about the characteristics of the virus that would become known formally as SARS-CoV-2, but he knew enough to sense that we needed to respond, and quickly. Thus began an odyssey of pandemic response actions, strategies and regulatory processes that would consume HHS, where I worked, along with much of the rest of the administration, until Inauguration Day 2021.