Features

Monday

Daniel McCarthy

GOP West: could Republicans have an Arizona advantage?

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. November inflicted more dismay on Republicans. Twelve months out from the presidential election, state and local races this year subjected the GOP to another bloodbath. The party lost both chambers of the Virginia legislature and gave up the governor’s mansion in deep-red Kentucky, despite a campaign intervention by the President. The drubbing Republicans received in city and county contests near Philadelphia was the most frightening of all, presaging difficulty ahead for Trump’s reelection efforts in Pennsylvania. Democrats could relax: 2018 was not a fluke after all.

arizona

Friday

Bridget Phetasy

Keeping up with the sex robots

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The floor is slippery. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I’m taking a tour of Abyss Creations, the factory where the ‘Ferraris of love dolls’, RealDoll and Realbotix, are made. A thin layer of silicone coats almost every surface. A (real) woman in her late twenties, the PR coordinator, Catherine, shows me round. She has the attitude of a hostess at a theme-park restaurant: bored or stoned or maybe both. I’m sure she’s given hundreds of these tours, heard the same dumb jokes a million times and watched us all slap the ass of a doll reluctantly yet instinctively.

sex robot

Tuesday

Daniel McCarthy

Trump’s economic nationalism is an effort to save capitalism

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Elizabeth Warren looks like a deadly serious prospect for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bernie Sanders may never make it to that promised land, but there is no question that his spirit is still moving the Democrats toward democratic socialism. The party’s activist base and youth wing grow more anti-capitalist by the month. It’s enough to turn many a libertarian or Chamber of Commerce conservative into a Trump supporter, despite the president’s own defiance of free-market orthodoxy on trade. Yet the president might as well be Milton Friedman compared with some on the right who are, if anything, outflanking the left in their critiques of capitalism.

capitalism
extinction rebellion
Spectator Editorial

Mass extinction

That the so-called Extinction Rebellion decided to spray Wall Street’s ‘Charging Bull’ statue with fake blood says it all. The protest group, which originated in Britain but whose protests have spread to New York, Washington and Chicago, is fundamentally an anti-capitalist movement. It is merely the latest incarnation of the antiglobalization and Occupy movements. While those groups gained little traction with the general public, Extinction Rebellion has discovered that by mixing up its demands with concern for the environment, it can win support — or at least a passing kind of support — from a much wider band of the population.

Monday

Meghan Murphy

Trans rights, voter wrongs

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Donald Trump will probably be reelected in 2020 – not because he is a good president, smart, or has good policies. He will win, I believe, because the Democrats are awful. The party that is meant to be ‘for the people’ has completely lost touch with the people. Rather than address real issues, the Democrats have resorted to virtue signaling. Take, for instance, the recent LGBTQ Democratic presidential town hall hosted by CNN. Candidate after candidate stood up and repeated the words ‘transwomen of color’ as many times as they could manage, hoping that this would win over voters. Have they learned nothing from the last election?

trans

Wednesday

Toby Young

Why are young people so left-wing?

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The French economist Thomas Piketty, who made his name with Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), has another book out next year called Capital and Ideology in which he looks at changing patterns of voting behavior in Britain, France and America. One of his findings is that, until quite recently, the more educated voters were, the more likely they were to vote for right-of-center parties. Now, the opposite is true. Which might explain why Donald Trump declared at the height of the 2016 presidential election: ‘I love the poorly educated.’ Piketty has already published a paper about this and the data he’s accumulated is eye-catching.

left-wing

Monday

Paul Wood

The shallow state

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. If Donald Trump is driven from the White House, he’ll blame the Deep State. His belief in ‘the Deep State conspiracy’ was behind the call he made to Ukraine’s president that might now get him impeached. One of President Trump’s former aides, Sebastian Gorka, who’s now a radio talk show host, asked him how the effort to defeat the Deep State was going. Trump said he had already seen off the ‘absolute scum’ at the top of the FBI. ‘With the destruction of the Deep State, certainly I’ve done big damage...I think it’ll be one of my great achievements.

deep state
warren
Roger Kimball

Big Squaw E. Warren speaks with forked tongue

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Absent the appearance of a last-minute deus (or dea) ex machina, and always keeping in mind Harold Wilson’s observation that a week is a long time in politics, the bookies are coalescing around the prediction that the Democratic nominee for president will be Big Squaw E. Warren, senator from Massachusetts, purveyor of authentically fake ‘Pow Wow Chow’ which experts reckon are 0.1024 percent Cherokee, the same as paleface Warren herself. It was only yesterday, it seems, that the Democratic field was teeming with candidates. Whither Spartacus Booker and his imaginary friend T-Bone? What price Kamala Harris? Who remembers Mayor Pete?

Wednesday

John R. MacArthur

Elizabeth Warren is the Hillary Clinton of 2020

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. How did Elizabeth Warren, a left-wing populist, become the candidate of Democrats who dislike left-wing populism? Why is it fine for Warren to menace the rich — but not for Bernie Sanders? With some polls placing her ahead of the former vice president Joe Biden, the Massachusetts senator is suddenly basking in praise from mainstream newspapers as well as ‘progressives’ like Emily Tisch Sussman, a ‘Democratic strategist’ who appears regularly on MSNBC. Led by its star hosts, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, MSNBC functions as the mouthpiece of an official Democratic party still dominated by the Clintons and Barack Obama.

warreh
leaders
The Spectator

Where are world leaders educated?

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Leading minds Where are world leaders educated? According to an analysis by the UK-based Higher Education Policy Institute, the US has just overtaken Britain in the number of world leaders educated at the country’s universities. — 62 world leaders (monarchs, presidents or prime ministers) were educated at US universities. — 59 were educated at UK universities. — Two years ago, the respective figures were 57 and 58. — 40 current world leaders were educated in France, 10 in Russia and 9 in Australia. The burning question Is climate change making wildfires worse? Acres burned in US wildfires: 1928 43.54m 1938 33.81m 1948 16.56m 1958 3.28m 1968 4.

Tuesday

Andrew Bacevich

Does Trump have a better idea than endless wars?

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.’ Thus did America’s Commander-in-Chief at long last enunciate a Trump doctrine, his use of all caps suggesting that this time he really means it. Trump had run out of patience. ‘I held off this fight for almost 3 years,’ he tweeted on October 7, ‘but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars… and bring our soldiers home.’ Withdrawing US troops from Syria, a decision he first announced last December but then allowed to lapse, marked a first substantive step toward fulfilling one of the central promises of his 2016 presidential campaign.

endless wars

Friday

Toby Young

Colleges should be ‘islands of excellence’

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. America’s colleges and universities are in crisis. According to the latest data released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment is down 1.7 percent compared with 2018, following a drop of 1.8 percent the previous year. If you contrast 2019 with 2017, that’s more than half a million fewer students. The brunt of this decline is being felt in New England, the center of America’s higher-education sector. In eastern Massachusetts, eight colleges have either closed or merged in the past four years, while in Vermont three colleges have gone to the wall in 2019 alone. Most experts think things will get a good deal worse.

yale colleges

Tuesday

John R. Bradley

Pulling US troops out of Syria will prove to be the right decision

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Whenever neoconservatives and liberals chant in unison about American policy in the Middle East — as when they championed the Iraq invasion, for example, or the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, or the thwarted attempt to topple the Assad regime in Syria — it means we are being told a pack of lies. Par for the course is the hysterical response to President Donald Trump’s ‘betrayal’ of the Kurds in the wake of Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria. Turkey’s goal was to repatriate at least two million of 3.6 million Syrian refugees inside Turkey in a border zone controlled, until the invasion began, by the US-allied, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

turkey syria kurds

Monday

Paul Wood

Felix Sater, superspy

Felix Sater is mad at me. He telephones to say that after I called him a ‘mobster’ in The Spectator, his kids were unable to leave the house. ‘Paul, I am not a mobster. Do I know mobsters? Absolutely, lots of them...I was involved with all five [New York crime] families...I’ve known a lot of unsavory characters in my life...I was never a mobster.’ As one of the characters he’s known is Donald Trump — they were in business together — Sater’s life became public property as soon as Trump announced he was running for president. Since then, the labels stuck on Sater include: violent felon, stock fraudster, money-launderer, FBI informant, spy, double agent, triple agent, the Russian Mafia’s connection to the Trump Organization.

felix sater

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Will China meddle in the 2020 election?

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Vladimir Putin, as we all know, has become chief electoral strategist in the western world. When he wanted Donald Trump president, he merely set his army of trolls to action and the American public was fooled into backing a candidate who would never have got anywhere near the White House otherwise. That is what the media has been telling us since 2016, anyway. But the idea that Russia can swing a sophisticated electorate of 300 million people with the aid of a fake-news tweet factory in St Petersburg was always fantastical. Even the Mueller inquiry could not prove it — not for want of trying.

china 2020

Sunday

James Adams

Space is the place — for war

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. You have no phone service, no television, no GPS for the car and no road atlas because you threw it out in 2009. Planes aren’t flying, and that spinning sound you can’t hear is the sound of space hardware floating out of our control. So dependent have we become on satellites for everything from communications to traffic control that a day without them would mean catastrophe. In the new space race, victory won’t mean landing on the moon or sending a rocket to Mars, but developing a new arsenal to wage and win war in space.

space force

Saturday

Daniel McCarthy

Romney Republicanism could never win

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. As Donald Trump strides toward his fourth year in the White House, his enemies have yet to answer the most basic questions of 2016. Why is Trump president? Why not a nice Republican like Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush? Two maps tell the tale. The first is the obvious one, the map of states whose electoral votes Trump won, a map that includes states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that no other Republican presidential aspirant had won since the 1980s. But the second map is even more important — it shows not why Trump won but why the Republican party was doomed to lose without Trump and Trumpism. It’s the map of George W.

romney bush

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Please America, take Meghan Markle back

The great triumph of recent American politics is for the people of your fine country to have elected as president a man who is the precise embodiment of what supercilious Europeans think Americans are really like. Pig-ignorant, arrogant, jingoistic, contemptuous of foreigners, loud-mouthed, badly dressed and irredeemably bumptious. So consuming is the European antipathy toward Donald Trump — he’s never read a book! He eats steak with ketchup! — that it afflicts leading politicians across our continent, people who would be better advised to button it a while and show a little bit of diplomacy to the leader of the free world. But they can’t: the contempt always bleeds through.

meghan harry adult disney person

Tuesday

Julie Bindel

The horror of Big Porn

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. We used to have big tobacco. Now we have big porn. The adult industry has enormous soft cultural power today — just as the tobacco industry once did. Recall The People vs. Larry Flynt, in which the megabucks head of the Hustler empire was portrayed as a free speech hero? We see that trope over and over in Hollywood movies. In most popular entertainment, in fact, it’s only prudes and killjoys who don’t appreciate porn. The tobacco giants once peddled propaganda about how cigarettes were glamorous. They convinced many that smoking could cure a cold or sore throat.

porn

Monday

Will Lloyd

The age of LOLitics

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. One thing is now as obvious as a brick through a window: politics is the new comedy. Who in America believes that the road to 2020 will be paved with prudence, solemnity and fair campaigning? Nobody does. This election season will be defined by below-the-belt hits, salty jokes and juvenile comebacks, all delivered with the subtlety of an air horn blast. Already we have seen doddery Joe Biden challenge the president to a push-up contest on national television, while Bernie Sanders wants to take on Trump at a mile-long footrace. The president, according to the cerebral Andrew Yang, is ‘so fat’. This is not an American phenomenon.