J.d. vance

Chat, how cooked are the Young Republicans leaders?

An unsavory chat thread containing leaders of Young Republican groups nationwide has gone viral. These young (meaning under 40) fellas refer to blacks as “watermelon people," use the slur “faggot,” say “I love Hitler” and make jokes about rape and sending people to gas chambers. “If we ever had a leak of this chat we could be cooked fr,” someone said in a moment of self-awareness. Well, the chat is leaked, and they are cooked. Fr.   Cockburn takes this particular chatgate with a grain of sea salt. It sounds like young men shit-talking after a few beers to him. Yet every boomer lib on Facebook is shocked, shocked at this scandal, taking it as a sure sign that MechaHitler is about to institute The Handmaid’s Reich or some such thing.

Republicans

Is the religious right shifting?

In 2021, for the first time in 1,400-odd years, Britain ceased to have a Christian majority. The United Kingdom, the political entity of which the island of Great Britain has been a part since 1801, has had its share of not-quite-Christian prime ministers over the years, with a handful of agnostics and quiet atheists. But in 2022, for the first time, the UK had a prime minister who practiced a non-Christian religion – and Hinduism had the distinction of claiming the first post-Christian head of state, Rishi Sunak. The West’s ethnic and religious foundations have already shifted in our great cities It may be some time before an American president is Hindu. Already, however, there are several prominent Hindus in the Trump orbit and near the top of the Republican party.

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The sombrero memes will continue until morale improves

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is shocked, shocked, that President Taco Bowl is using memes online to mock his comportment during the government shutdown. Jeffries calls the memes, which depict Jeffries and Chuck Schumer wearing sombreros and sporting handlebar mustaches “racist” and has tough-guyed Trump to “say it to my face.”   Cockburn enjoys a good troll-meme and suddenly finds himself in a world where Republicans are the ones with a sense of humor. House Speaker Mike Johnson told “my friend Hakeem” to “just ignore it.”   “These are sideshows. People are getting caught up in – in battles over social media memes,” Johnson said in the Hill. “This is not a game. We’ve got to keep the government open for the people.

Memes

Why tech leaders are obsessing over Heaven and Hell

Are these the End Times? It certainly feels that way. Algorithmic demons are rewiring our brains. A young father is shot and killed, and people cheer. A woman is stabbed on a train, and no one tries to help her. The horrifying videos of these incidents are then watched millions of times over, often by children. The God in whom America trusts seems nowhere to be found. Can’t you hear the Antichrist knocking? Peter Thiel can. Not so long ago, no public figure outside of the kookier Evangelical universe would have dared admit such a thing, but times have changed.

heaven and hell

Trump leads tributes to Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk’s senseless murder on a Utah college campus yesterday led to an instant and disgusting avalanche of celebration from a small minority on the extremely online left. But Kirk’s friends and allies also rallied to pay tribute to the slain conservative activist. They know what we lost. President Trump gave a four-minute message from the Resolute Desk and Truth Social, “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!

charlie kirk

People really seem to like our Trump drug war cover

It was supposed to be an innocent magazine promotion, announcing how The Spectator was going from printing monthly to twice-monthly in the US. So imagine our editor’s horror when he checked his phone late Friday night and discovered he’d been impounded on X by the Department of Homeland Security. “We have just sent our first fortnightly edition of The Spectator for the US market. And it’s a gem,” US editor Freddy Gray posted earlier that day. “The cover piece, by @bdomenech, is on the military conflict that MAGA wants. It could not be more timely.” The artwork by Pep Boatella depicts President Trump rolling through the desert with masked government officials, headed to crack down on the Mexican drug cartel.

Cockburn

J.D. Vance: proconsul to Britain?

Vice President J.D. Vance’s family vacation in Britain was disrupted by protesters who insisted that he was not welcome in the country. In the Cotswolds, an area northwest of Oxford and the British equivalent of Martha’s Vineyard, ultraliberal white protesters huddled together on August 12 to make their meager numbers look large for the cameras, wielding signs bearing such slogans as “End Genocide!” and “Stop Fascists!” One participant quoted by the Guardian explained: “I’m most worried about his environmental policies. They risk eliminating the whole of humanity, all the creatures on the Earth.

Vance Britain

Patrick Kidd, Madeline Grant, Simon Heffer, Lloyd Evans & Toby Young

From our UK edition

28 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Patrick Kidd asks why is sport so obsessed with Goats; Madeline Grant wonders why the government doesn’t show J.D. Vance the real Britain; Simon Heffer reviews Progress: A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea; Lloyd Evans provides a round-up of Edinburgh Fringe; and, Toby Young writes in praise of Wormwood Scrubs – the common, not the prison. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Give J.D. Vance a glimpse of real Britain

From our UK edition

We’re used to strange sights in north Oxfordshire. The first person I ever met in our small Cotswolds town was a lady who brandished a tin of homemade mackerel pâté at me. It was delicious, but the nature of her greeting gives you an idea of the kind of eccentricity that’s familiar in this part of the world. Yet despite the area’s high tolerance of the bizarre – hardly diminished by the presence of Jeremy Clarkson up the road – I’ve lately witnessed a series of events that have stood out as particularly unusual. I recently took a train surrounded by dozens of confused Americans and their children carrying mounds of luggage bearing ‘VP Vance’ tags.

Britain’s foreign secretary faces fine for fishing without a license

What people on the other side of the pond call "Brand Britain" has taken something of a knock in recent years – especially in the United States, which the British often still view as an errant son. With unnerving speed Britain's reputation has collapsed stateside, especially among the political right, from the country of Brideshead Revisited to a grotty Airstrip One. The symbol of the new Britain in the eyes of many Americans are the ubiquitous licenses (or, in the argot of a London copper, "loicenses") that citizens seem to need for everything – including, most notoriously, owning a TV. Now even the Foreign Secretary has been caught without a loicense. On Friday David Lammy went fishing with the now-Vice President J.D.

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Thomas Skinner JD Vance

Essex-boy Elegy: J.D. Vance meets the Bosh man

Vice President Vance is currently receiving visitors at an 18th-century Georgian manor in the Cotswolds, an implausibly quaint patch of the English countryside. Petitioners so far have included James Orr, the Cambridge academic and right-wing activist, Robert Jenrick, likely the next leader of Britain's Tories, and Nigel Farage, likely the next UK Prime Minister. Also on the list was one Thomas Skinner, a gregarious wide boy from East London turned e-celebrity turned patriotic influencer. After a stint as a pillow and mattress merchant Skinner, 34, found fame as a contestant on the 15th series of the British version of The Apprentice.

South Park is ICE-cool on Trump

In this week’s South Park, the second episode since Paramount paid Trey Parker and Matt Stone eleventy billion dollars to make content, Parker and Stone absolutely and brilliantly rip the Trump administration to shreds. Unlike our late-night comedy hosts, who don’t have the chops for anything other than name-calling and juvenile slap fights with the President, South Park gets to the heart of darkness of the Trump administration, and also to what’s so funny about our new political age. Not only does the episode feature a savage attack on Trump, depicting him as Mr. Roarke at Mar-a-Lago as Fantasy Island, it also shows J.D. Vance as a tiny Tattoo, who Trump literally kicks out of the way when he gets annoying.

South Park

Vance & Farage’s budding bromance

From our UK edition

16 min listen

Nigel Farage hosted a press conference today as part of Reform's summer crime campaign 'Britain is lawless'. He unveiled the latest Tory defector: Leicestershire's Police & Crime Commissioner Rupert Matthews. Amidst all the noise of whether crime in the UK is falling or not, plus the impact of migration on crime, is Reform's messaging cutting through? Would US Vice President agree with Farage's message that Britain is lawless? Vance is in the UK, staying in the Cotswolds, as part of his summer holiday. Tim Shipman and Lucy Dunn are joined by James Orr, associate professor at Cambridge University, and a friend of Vance's to talk us through the dynamics between Trump, Vance, Starmer, Lammy and Farage. Does Farage have Vance's ear?

J.D. Vance’s summer plans in the Cotswolds, the ‘Hamptons of England’

Where does a good America First hillbilly like to spend his summer? Cockburn would not have thought the answer was the Cotswolds — that glossy patch of the English countryside where limey aristos and media darlings drink overpriced rose with plutocratic American slebs. And yet your correspondent hears from almost impeccable sources that Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife Usha are looking for properties to rent in the area. Vance is supposedly making enquiries for a country pad, possibly ahead of Trump's state visit to the UK. One Oxfordshire property was unable to help because it is playing host to a literary festival at around the same time. But another filthy rich Anglo is said to be considering offering his own home to the Second Family.

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On the ground at the President’s military parade

Washington, DC “Every other country celebrates their victories, it’s about time America did too,” Donald Trump told a whooping, albeit smaller-than-anticipated crowd on the National Mall tonight. “We’re the hottest country in the world right now,” the President boasted. Temperature-wise, that’s debatable. But he’s right that the whole world has been watching on, as the President turned his plans for a military parade from conception into reality. If you gave a 79-year-old man some say in what he did for his birthday, he’d choose one of two things: nap, or pay a laudatory tribute to the US military that everyone had to watch.

A fireside chat with Usha Vance

Washington, DC Usha Vance is on a mission. This year's low reading scores have shocked the White House into action – so they have placed the Yale-educated Second Lady at the helm of the reading recovery ship. But as well as addressing faltering childhood literacy, Vance has a host of other tasks to complete for the Trump administration. Vance described her role in Trump 2.0 at the annual US-India Strategic Partnership Forum hosted at the Waldorf Astoria in DC Tuesday. It includes reading challenges, the Special Olympics and US-India relations – fueled by her children's interactions with the country's Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The conference followed the launch of the "Second Lady Summer Reading Challenge.

usha vance

Trumpworld’s embrace of crypto should raise suspicion

“It’s been quite a while since I’ve been to a conference with this level of energy… I promise I’m not just saying that to juice my own memecoins.” After dropping this clanger in his keynote speech at the 2025 Bitcoin Conference, J.D. Vance paused awkwardly for an applause which never arrived. Bar a few perfunctory laughs, this was one buzzword the Vice President rolled out which failed to impress the thousands-strong crowd in Vegas yesterday afternoon. To understand the frosty reception, a cursory glance through Trump’s recent dealings in this chaotic corner of the crypto industry is required. On January 17 this year – a mere three days before his inauguration – the soon-to-be president of the United States launched his own memecoin: $TRUMP.

Vance crypto

J.D. Vance makes nice with Munich

It was an emollient J.D. Vance who showed up at the Munich Leaders Meeting in Washington, DC. Gone was the Vance who dissed the Europeans in Munich on February 15 by complaining that they were practicing censorship of political views and who met with a representative of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. Gone was the Cerberus who barked at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the Oval Office on February 24 that he had exhibited a dismaying lack of gratitude toward America for its assistance to his beleaguered nation. Gone was the Ohio senator who declared in July 2024 that he didn’t give a fig about Ukraine’s fate and was more interested in pursuing an Asia First policy.

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Trump rules out a third term

Is Donald Trump forsaking four more years? In an interview today with NBC’s Kristen Welker, Trump indicated that while his MAGA faithful may be hawking hats in support of a 2028 run, he’s not keen on the idea. “I’ll be an eight-year president,” he said. “I’ll be a two-term president. I always thought that was very important.” His current term, he added, was more than adequate to accomplish something “really spectacular.” The interest that Trump’s declaration of non-intention is receiving offers a reminder that he stirs up as much news with what he doesn’t do as with what he does.  The only president to smash the barrier was, of course, Franklin D.

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