Features

Sunday

February 20, 2022

Peter Boghossian’s fight for freedom

The prospect of my meeting with Peter Boghossian seemed to have angered the gods, so furious was the disruption to road and rail as I tried to make my way from Seattle to Portland. Torrential rain and flash floods summoned a ricochet of mudslides which abruptly terminated my Amtrak journey in Centralia, a middle-of-nowhere town in Washington State. There was no rail in either direction for at least forty-eight hours, no buses and seemingly just one Lyft — which I managed to slip into an hour later with a few other stranded passengers. Or perhaps it was the anger of very particular gods that rule over the Pacific Northwest, that hotbed of wokeness so concentrated you can feel it like toxic humidity in the air.

Breast Milk Enjoyer

Mother’s milk is good for you

I had my first taste of breast milk after a training session at a garage gym. We swap tips and stories and we bond, so when a friend brought a bag of his wife’s frozen breast milk we thought it’d be fun to test the potential benefits to our lifting programs and physiques. I’m not sure whether he ever told his wife that I tried some, and I’ve not had the heart to admit it to her. It was sweeter and more watery than I expected, almost sickly. I didn’t enjoy it, but I was curious. Bodybuilders will chase any small benefit, and we’re always experimenting with our diet and exercise programs. Breast milk is a poor source of protein but it’s abundant in probiotics and valuable micronutrients such as human growth hormone IGF-1.

Daniel McCarthy

How conservatives concede the culture

Conservatives suffer from a short attention span, and it largely explains their defeats in the culture war. They fight every battle as if it’s the only one they will ever have to fight. And so, win or lose, they are unprepared for what happens next. If they lose, they forget how all-important the last battle was, learning no lessons from defeat, nor about what’s vital and what isn’t. Twenty-five years ago, conservatives were adamantly opposed to putting women in combat or admitting them to institutions like the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel. In recent years, conservative Republicans have celebrated the aspirations to office of female fighter pilots like Arizona’s Martha McSally and female graduates from Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel.

James Kirchick

Why Glenn Greenwald backs Putin

Few things are sure in life: death, taxes and Glenn Greenwald advocating whatever position happens to be in the interests of Vladimir Putin. The self-styled civil libertarian rose to prominence during the George W. Bush administration for his withering attacks on American counterterrorism policies. Later, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his role in facilitating Edward Snowden’s leak of government documents. Always a rancorous figure who bristled at attempts to place him in a partisan box, Greenwald started to upset his confederates on the left and develop a fan base on the right during the Trump years. Greenwald was one of the most vocal critics of the narrative positing that the new American president was a pawn of the Russian one.

Grace Curley

Welcome to MSNBC U

By the way the left drones on about disinformation, you would think that Trump-supporting boomer rubes were the only ones falling victim to inaccurate news stories. Alas, it would appear that even the beautiful people inside the Beltway are not immune to bad intel. In the first week of January, during the oral arguments over the Biden vaccine mandate, Justice Sonia Sotomayor spread disinformation from the highest court in the land. “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators,” the justice said. The number of children hospitalized with Covid-19 at the time was 4,464. This level of inaccuracy from a Supreme Court justice immediately garnered attention. Social-media users and Twitter blue-checks were perplexed.

Oliver Wiseman

Asian Americans are leaving the Democrats

Last spring, Yiatin Chu joined a series of protests against the spike in unprovoked assaults on Asian Americans in New York City. Prominent New York Democrats, including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, were in attendance and spoke at the rallies. Senior party figures expressed their solidarity with the Asian community. They drew connections between the violence on New York’s streets and the xenophobic language of former president Donald Trump. And sometimes they blamed the violence on something less specific: white supremacy. After a while, Chu, a politically active Democrat, stopped going to the protests. “I was just really turned off by the messaging,” she tells me.

Ben Sixsmith

Fifty years of Fear and Loathing

God bless Hunter S. Thompson’s editors. Imagine paying someone a handsome amount of money to cover an off-road race and getting thousands of words of rambling prose that have a great deal more to do with drugs than with cars. It was a good time to be a writer, I suppose. The manuscript that became Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas appeared in two installments in Rolling Stone in November 1971. (Sports Illustrated passed.) Somehow, this rabid work of “gonzo journalism” spawned a book, a film, a graphic novel and a host of imitators, catapulting Thompson to the higher realms of fame. He never recovered from his own success. Fear and Loathing is easily summarized. Raoul Duke (Thompson) and his friend Dr.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Does Vance have a chance?

Six short years ago, J.D. Vance penned a piece in the Atlantic comparing Donald Trump to opioids. “Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein,” he wrote. “Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.” In the six years since writing those words, it’s Vance, not Trump’s voters, whose mind has changed. Since announcing his run for Senate, Vance has become what he used to chastise: the worst kind of whiny, angry, instinctively hostile, dismissive, dog-whistling troll. Vance first burst onto the scene as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir which told the story of an often-forgotten cross-section of the American public. I loved Hillbilly Elegy.

Benjamin H. Barton

How the Supreme Court lost its real diversity

If you followed the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Merrick Garland, or the news after Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, you might have concluded that the country has never been more divided on what makes a good Supreme Court justice. Kavanaugh’s hearings were among the most divisive and brutal in history, but he at least had a hearing: Garland’s nomination was dead on arrival in the Senate. The selection of justices has become a preeminent political issue.

Bill McMorris

Hunting deer in the DC suburbs

I was driving along in my 2018 Honda minivan when I received a call from a member of the National Symphony Orchestra who has been on leave since March 2020: “Just bagged a doe. If you’re up for it, I’m going to gut this thing.” I regretted taking the call through the van’s speakerphone. A text message followed; thankfully the image did not project onto the dash display. I spent the rest of the drive to school explaining to my four daughters how Daddy had to dissect Bambi for work. My father took me hunting once in high school. He shook me awake at six in the morning, loaded me into the family car, a 1998 Chevy minivan, then drove it straight into a deer. I can still picture the white-spotted fawn’s body cascading across the asphalt. “Thank God it was just a baby.

Christopher Caldwell

What’s in a name?

I used to have a cantankerous old relative who hewed to generalizations drawn from long experience. One of them concerned people named “Adam.” On a Sunday morning twenty years ago, as we sat around reading the papers, I mentioned Adam Sandler — or maybe it was Adam West or Adam Vinatieri. “All Adams are assholes,” he grumbled. “You ever notice that?” I tried to respond with some piety about how these people were not to blame for being called Adam. But I had a nagging sense that that was not how the Wheel of Onomastic Destiny spun. I had spent much of my adult life looking for heroic qualities in people bearing my own middle name, which is Scott. Even before I was fully emerged from childhood, Scott had acquired a bad name.

Monday

January 24, 2022

Spectator Editorial

Joe Biden in the metaverse

Meta is meant to be better — better than Facebook, better even than reality. In the future, a second Edward Gibbon may wonder not just whether it was a good idea for the federal government to encourage Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of talented techies to launch a Revenge of the Nerds coup against the minds and manners of America, but also what it was about reality that made us want to escape it so badly in the first place. There has never been a society more blessed than that of the United States.

Jay Caruso

Can Matt Gaetz survive a real world scandal?

The music blares, sparks fly from the pyrotechnics show, and the star walks out, pumping his fist and soaking in the cheers of the adoring crowd. A WWE wrestling event? No, it’s Congressman Matt Gaetz at AMERICAFEST, a Turning Point USA conference in December in Phoenix, Arizona. Gaetz was not there to deliver a substantive policy speech, educate the crowd about the dangers of inflationary spending or warn about Russia’s geopolitical machinations in Ukraine. Instead, the thirty-nine-year-old MAGA firebrand delivered the goods his audience expected.

Bridget Phetasy

In the valley of the shadow of birth

I was five weeks pregnant when I found out. At that point, it’s nothing more than a little gestational sac of potential. My ob-gyn informed me it wasn’t technically viable and, given my age and history — I’d had an ectopic pregnancy in 2019—not to get my hopes up. “How do I make it stick?” I asked. “Honey, if I knew the answer to that I’d be a billionaire with a private island,” she said. “Yes, yes of course.” I felt stupid. It was seeing that sac for the first time that I felt the stirrings of a longing in my heart that terrified me. It still terrifies me. In fact, it has always terrified me. Still in shock and trying to guard my heart, I kept repeating psychotically, nervously, “Well, we’ll see!

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Energy is the most important issue in the world

One issue more than any other will dominate airtime and influence policy in 2022: energy. Americans are seeing the highest prices at the pump in seven years. Since Biden took office, average gas prices are up by more than $1 a gallon. In November, gas prices in Mono County, California hit more than $6 per gallon, forcing some residents to drive to Nevada (where gas taxes are lower) to buy fuel. The price of natural gas in the US is at its highest in seven years, and up more than 180 percent in the last year alone. In Europe, the situation is even worse. Europe’s gas reserves are at record lows. In Germany, which already had the EU’s highest energy prices, bills are up 30 percent in a year.

Stephen L. Miller

The tragic kingdom of Anthony Fauci

Neither the political left nor the political right understands Anthony Fauci. To the left, Fauci is a patron saint to be thanked and worshipped. They fashion candles, hymns and magazine covers after him. They canonize him much the same way they canonized Ruth Bader Ginsburg, though I suspect that if you stopped them on the street and asked for details of a Ginsburg opinion, they would come up empty beyond screaming “Notorious RBG.” Anthony Fauci is venerated much the same way. The right has compared Fauci to Nazi ministers of information, a Luciferian demigod drunk on pandemic power, a liar and hypnotist willing to do anything to retain his newfound celebrity and near-total grip on pandemic messaging — a grip that only solidified after Joe Biden’s presidential election.

Rupert Darwall

Biden’s big energy bust

"For too long, we’ve failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis,” President Biden declared in his presidential address to Congress in April 2020. “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.” Investments in jobs and infrastructure, the president pleaded, have often had bipartisan support in the past. In November, he got nineteen Republican senators to vote for his $1 trillion infrastructure bill, but the main planks of Biden’s climate plan were in the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better Act. The House passed it in November, only for it to fail in the Senate, thanks to opposition from the most powerful man in Washington, at least when it comes to passing legislation.

Peter Jones

Twitter has taken the place of the ancient curse-tablet

Twitter and other easily accessible means of online communication have encouraged the public to believe that Their Voice Will Be Heard. When it isn’t, they express their frustration through abuse and threats or by blocking roads. In this way, the mentality of the ancient curse-tablet lives on. In the Ancient world, the purpose of the curse was to “bind” the person you disliked — i.e. frustrate them from achieving the end they wanted and you did not. It was written on a thin lead plate, rolled up tight, sometimes twisted (to “hobble” the victim) and pinned (to constrain him), then placed into the tomb of someone who had died before his time. The belief was that the dead man, resentful of his early demise, would be happy to enact the curse against the named victim.

Roger Kimball

New Rome, new home

I believe that Maximinus Thrax, whose brief reign ran from 235 to 238 AD, was the first Roman emperor never to have set foot in Rome. The Thracian brute started a trend. As the years went by, more and more Roman emperors gave the city a miss. Diocletian (284-305), who brought the crisis of the third century to an end, hated the city. Some later emperors settled on Ravenna as the seat of power for the Western empire. Constantinople emerged as HQ for the East. Rome retained a certain ceremonial significance but was increasingly irrelevant to the business of empire. The turn away from Rome happened for many reasons.

Charles Lipson

Does the Orange Man have the juice?

The Democrats face so many problems that it’s hard to remember the Republicans face a big one of their own. Donald Trump is not just a problem for Republicans. He’s a problem for the Republic. The problem is not Trump’s policies, whether you agree with them or not. Their populist/nationalist thrust differs from traditional conservativism, but his policies are coloring within the traditional lines of American politics. Many of them — tax cuts, immigration enforcement, increased military spending, credible threats against foreign adversaries — worked well and received enthusiastic popular support. Trump’s emphasis on state and local solutions over centralized ones was a welcome return to standard Republican practice.