Features

Wednesday

Matt Purple

Please cancel me

Dr Seuss books are getting canceled and I couldn’t be more envious. Earlier this month, the Seuss estate announced that it would discontinue publication of six of the author’s beloved children’s books after consulting with shrieking activists. The reason was that some of their illustrations depict blacks and Asians in offensive and outdated ways. From there, the flimsy dominoes of corporate America began to fall: eBay banished the titles from its online store; Universal Orlando announced it was ‘evaluating’ the theme park’s Seuss Landing area. All this is bad news for one of America’s most imperishable literary icons. Still...have you seen those book sales? In the first week of March, the top 10 children’s books on Amazon were all by Seuss, as were 23 of the top 30.

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cannabis weed
Madeleine Kearns

Big Dope

Young people are now more likely to consume marijuana than to smoke tobacco. The social acceptance of tobacco is falling, just as the popularity of weed is getting higher. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 12 percent of US adults (and 22 percent of those aged 18 to 29) said they smoke marijuana. It won’t be too long, I predict, before we look back in horror at the widespread acceptance of cannabis use. It’s easy to forget that anti-tobacco researchers had to plod on at tortoise pace for years before they were able to prove what they had long suspected to be true (and what we all now take for granted): the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Tobacco was so rich and powerful that its lobbying suppressed the true dangers.

Tuesday

Bridget Phetasy

How to overcome the new fear of flying

Back in another lifetime when I was getting certified to become a yoga instructor, my teacher always asked us, ‘Is this a fear that’s keeping you alive or a fear that’s keeping you from living?’ She would pose this question as we hesitated to try a headstand or a handstand. It was a hard question to answer then. It’s even harder now, in the middle of a global pandemic when your most irrational fears could be justified. In early January of this year I was going insane. We were approaching almost a full year of lockdown here in California, the state with arguably the most stringent lockdown measures in the nation. At the time, all the restaurants were closed. You couldn’t get a haircut. Again.

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Wednesday

Hollie McKay

How China targets Uighur expats in the US

It has been more than two years since Ziba Murat has heard the voice of her ailing mother, Gulshan Abbas, a retired physician who was abruptly ‘disappeared’ in September 2018 in Xinjiang province, China. While exact facts and figures are hard to come by, it is widely reported that at least three million Uighurs in China have been forced into concentration camps, which Beijing calls ‘reeducation’ facilities for stamping out ‘Islamic extremism’. The scale of the ongoing atrocities is bone-chilling: from forced sterilizations and sexual violence to beatings and indoctrination. The Chinese government’s assault extends to Uighurs abroad.

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Monday

Mary Kate Skehan

Is the truth about burn pits too toxic?

In June 2020, while COVID raged and cities rioted, my older brother Pat was promoted to major in the Marine Corps and diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I went down to the base at Quantico, Virginia on a Monday to see Captain-now-Major Pat get ceremonially ‘pinned on’ with the golden oak leaf before a formation of Marines. On Wednesday, Pat ran eight consecutive six-minute miles and went in for minor surgery to remove a suspicious growth on his thyroid. I’d packed my bags for a week to help out with my two- and four-year-old nephews while my sister-in-law drove back and forth to Walter Reed.

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Saturday

Spectator Editorial

How the border crisis could define Biden’s presidency

Joe Biden has spent his first couple of months in office enjoying what his predecessor never had: a presidential honeymoon. Americans have rewarded Biden with early approval ratings of 60 percent or higher. He may be benefiting from the inevitable diminishing of the coronavirus as cases decline and more states reopen. Or the public may simply be relieved to have a president who isn’t perpetually in the spotlight, even if he doesn’t always seem aware of the fact he is president. But no honeymoon can last too long, and Biden’s is coming to an end at America’s southern border, where a crisis is escalating. Eighty thousand people tried illegally to cross the border in January, double the figure of a year ago. In February, nearly 100,000 did the same.

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Tuesday

Roger Kimball

Justice for Derek Chauvin

As I write, jury selection for the murder trial of Derek Chauvin is about to begin in Minneapolis. You remember Derek Chauvin, right? He is the (former) policeman charged with the murder of St George Floyd, race martyr (also drug addict, woman abuser, and career criminal). Chauvin and his three colleagues disgusted civilized opinion last spring when a bystander’s video clip of Officer Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck was released. Nine minutes. Chauvin kept Floyd pinned to the ground for some nine minutes. ‘I can’t breathe,’ Floyd can be heard crying. An ambulance eventually came to whisk Floyd off to hospital. Too late. Floyd died, murdered by the brutish policeman who cruelly, gratuitously, asphyxiated him by kneeling on his neck, cutting off his air supply.

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Friday

Mary Kate Skehan

The Enneagram: a remarkably efficient way to handle a room full of people

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy people are alike but every unhappy person is unhappy in one of exactly nine ways. Thus contends the Enneagram, a personality-typing system popular among millennial Christians and lifestyle bloggers. Bestselling books and popular social-media accounts clarify and affirm each of the Enneagram’s nine ‘types’. There are Enneagram coaches, consultants and devotionals, and podcasts ranging from the whimsical (Say Enneathing) to the vaguely mystical (The Wisdom of the Enneagram). The Enneagram is frivolous, self-indulgent and indefensible before science or theology. But I would say that: a Type 6 is skeptical. The truth is, I love the Enneagram.

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Tuesday

Roger Kimball

There’s no equality in equity

It’s hard to keep them all straight, but among the many diktats emitted by the Biden administration during its first days in office, one deserves special commendation for its brazen mendacity. I mean the ‘Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’. The key word, as we’ve heard over and over again these last few weeks, is ‘equity’. The diktat (a more accurate term for what is happening than ‘Executive Order’) promises ‘a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all’ by ‘affirmatively advancing,’ well, ‘equity’. If you think you discern a little whiff of tautology, you’re right. You are also right if, on second sniff, you catch the acrid scent of contradiction.

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Monday

Ed Zotti

Who killed Chicago?

‘I wonder if you might do a “notebook” on living in Chicago at the moment,’ my London-based editor inquired via email. ‘The latest crime figures are quite shocking.’ I asked which shocking crime figures he had in mind. We have quite a selection. More than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2020 and a few dozen short of 800 were murdered — an increase of more than 50 percent on 2019’s tally. For the past few years almost as many people have been slain in Chicago as in New York and Los Angeles combined, although those cities taken together have four times the population. Then again, perhaps my editor was thinking of carjackings, up 283 percent in January compared to a year ago.

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Saturday

Peter Savodnik

Kamalafornication

We keep hearing about the end of California. The cost of living, the homelessness, the public schools, the shoddy roads and bridges have prompted a decades-long exodus that has accelerated dramatically in the Age of the Pandemic. The progressive canard — but everyone wants to be here! — is a canard, and it’s being used to sidestep an uncomfortable truth that conservatives love to drone on about: in California, there is no political marketplace. Which is true. It’s not just that Democrats enjoy a monopoly. It’s that the state GOP, which used to produce presidents and statesmen, has morphed into a risible adumbration of its former self.

kamalafornication

Thursday

Daniel McCarthy

Death by debt

The US national debt is now in the neighborhood of $28 trillion. Some of that is money the government owes itself, but the publicly owned portion of the debt, some $21 trillion and counting, is roughly equal to the nation’s entire pre-COVID-19 domestic output for 2019 ($21.4 trillion). Republicans in Washington have already begun to sound the alarm over these figures — though, of course, far fewer of them were so outspoken about the debt when President Trump was the one running up the numbers. Is the mounting debt a threat to America’s way of life or just a convenient stick with which to beat a Democratic administration? Republicans tie the debt to spending. This crushing burden on the taxpayers of the future, they say, is a testament to the uncontrolled growth of government.

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Wednesday

James Jeffrey

The Ethiopian question

Tigray is the Donald Trump of Ethiopian politics. If you don’t criticize Ethiopia’s most northern region or its main party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a lot of people get mighty riled mighty quick — especially among the Ethiopian diaspora in the US. From the end of 2015 until Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed emerged in 2018 to break the TPLF’s decades-long grip, Ethiopia was rocked by protests and ethnic clashes that displaced millions and left hundreds if not thousands dead. I spent four years trying to report objectively on these upheavals. The abuse I got on social media was impressively creative in its use of metaphors and similes. Extend that Tigray-Trump parallel: just when Trump was losing his Teflon coat, so the TPLF seemed to be losing theirs.

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Tuesday

Bridget Phetasy

Now make me rich

Like many Americans, I have a complicated relationship with money. I love capitalism and want to be rich — but I have deeply buried resentments towards a certain type of rich person. Reconciling those two competing feelings has been a lifelong challenge. In ways that are uncomfortable to face, I’m a populist at heart. In other words, I promise I’ll stop bitching about the system when I’m rich. I was confronted with my populist tendencies during the recent GameStop stock market rebellion by self-proclaimed ‘autists, degenerates and retards’. The members of a Reddit group, r/wallstreetbets, wreaked havoc on financial markets by driving up the price of GameStop, a ‘meme stonk’ they realized was heavily shorted by the hedge funds.

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Monday

Kate Andrews

Kamalamania: prepare for President Harris

Kamala Harris was always going to be a most prominent Vice President. When Joe Biden’s campaign called a midmorning ‘lid’ — ending his working day before it really began — Harris would stay out on the trail, addressing car rallies in Pontiac, Michigan; going viral on social media by dancing in the Florida rain. She is significantly younger and more energetic — traits the Biden campaign capitalized on in the campaign. Her fanbase considers her to be a political celebrity: when she’s getting bad press, they rally the #KHive on social media — an online community ready and willing to defend the VP — a spin-off of the #BeyHive hashtag used by Beyoncé’s loyal fans worldwide. The media is overwhelmed by Kamalamania.

kamalamania kamala wall street
foreign
Spectator Editorial

Foreign entanglements

Anything President Trump can do, President Biden can undo better. On his first day in office, Biden issued 17 executive actions, nine them simply reversing a prior Trump order. The Paris Climate Agreement returned like a ghost, revived to save the world from climate disaster with vague good intentions. The border wall was canceled. Critical race theory was re-enshrined as America’s state religion. In the weeks since the inauguration, dozens of additional orders have appeared. In most cases this administration’s stated principle is ‘what the Orange Man did, but the opposite’. But in trying to construct a foreign policy that maintains America’s status as a global superpower, Biden will find that simply repudiating Trump is not enough.

Friday

Michael R. Auslin

The Sino-American War of 2025

Washington DC, 2030 The reasons why the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) avoided total war, let alone a nuclear exchange, during their armed conflict in the autumn of 2025 remain a source of dispute. What is clearer is why the Sino-American Littoral War broke out, and what course it took. The United States lost part of its position in Asia, while China found its gains an unexpected burden. The resulting cold war between the United States and China became the defining feature of geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific in the middle of the 21st century.

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Thursday

Paul Wood

Stop the real steal

If you want to get rich, start a religion. L. Ron Hubbard said so and he should know. Failing that, start a political party. No one would take Donald Trump seriously as a religious figure (would they?), but it’s no surprise that the most grasping president ever to occupy the Oval Office has thought about forming his own political party, the ‘Patriot party’. Trump being Trump, he changed his mind almost immediately. Creating a new political party is hard work:there are lots of rules to follow, legal requirements that can’t be ignored if you’re going to get your big payday. The main one — perhaps most discouraging for Trump — is that the political party actually has to exist.

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Tuesday

Andrew Stuttaford

Fascist means, green ends

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2021 World edition. Subscribe here. In ‘What is Fascism?’ (1944), George Orwell complained that the word ‘fascist’ had been applied to so many groups, (including conservatives, socialists, communists and Catholics), beliefs and even species (dogs!) that it had been reduced to something close to meaninglessness. And yet, he observed: ‘Fascism is...a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it?... To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any color, are willing to make.

Wind Turbine

Sunday

They/Them

Wokeyleaks does Davos

The second in a regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news-leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. Thank you! We have been completely overwhelmed by the huge number of brave Edward Snowflakes out there that have messaged us on our encrypted email (wokeyleaks@protonmail.com). Of all the Wokeyleaks we’ve received, perhaps the most jaw-dropping is from an employee at one of the largest arms companies in the world — Northrop Grumman.

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