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Thursday

Spectator Editorial

Who’s right in the 2020s?

A decade is an eternity in politics, but some things don’t change. In 2010, the smart people were either thrilled or alarmed by the prospect of an ‘emerging Democratic majority’, created by high immigration, de-industrialization and college education. Ten years on, influential magazines are still warning Republicans to play nice with a newly diverse electorate or go the way of the Whigs. Meanwhile, the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination are all promising to ‘revive the Obama coalition’ as if the popular revolt of 2016 never happened. The Obama presidency, with its low-growth recovery and healthcare fiasco, marked the overreach and collapse of big-state liberalism.

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christian
Samuel Gregg

Burning Christianity

Conspiracy theories aren’t something I take seriously. But when flames engulfed Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris on the evening of April 15, 2019, my mind momentarily wandered down that path. After all, attempts to incinerate, vandalize and rob Christian churches and shrines have become so commonplace in France over the past three years that one could be forgiven for concluding that something even more sinister was afoot. In 2017 alone, according to France’s Interior Ministry, 878 acts of vandalism were committed against Christian places of worship, cemeteries and shrines. That’s an average of nearly two and a half sites being targeted every day. Government officials play down the problem.

Tuesday

Christopher Buckley

Headlines of the coming year

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. January to March ‘Caucasians Are The Best’ Remark By Biden At Iowa Caucus Renews Concerns Over Age Declaring An ‘End To These Endless Security Agreements,’ Trump Tweet Announces US Will Withdraw From Nato ‘Why Do We Need To Defend Germany? Did They Defend Us At Normandy? NINE!’ New Whistleblower Bombshell: $391 Million Military Aid To Ukraine Conditioned On Start Of Construction Of Trump Tower Kiev Trump Tweet Hints At Displeasure With Lawyer ‘Rudy Is A Great Guy But He Is Making Trump Look Evil And Should Stop Going On TV NOW!!!

headlines
progress steele
Lee Smith

A crime still in progress

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Crime in Progress is, inadvertently, the cruelest book ever written about the American media. Its authors, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, are the two former Wall Street Journal reporters who founded the DC-based consultancy Fusion GPS. In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign paid them to use their former media colleagues to push a conspiracy theory smearing her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. The crime is still in progress. To help top-notch journalists market the fantasy that one of the world’s most familiar faces was a secret Russian spy, Fusion GPS co-ordinated with the FBI to forge a series of ‘intelligence reports’.

Saturday

Gil Barndollar

Trump and the troops

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Thanksgiving Day, the most American of holidays, found President Trump performing one of the nation’s few remaining civic rites: supporting the troops. When the President secretly flew to Afghanistan to feed and thank servicemen at Bagram Air Base, he got a cheering hangar full of airmen in return. Those turkey-stuffed troops were a captive audience, of course. Still, enthusiasm for Trump among American servicemen, both active-duty and veteran, seems to be one of the more genuine things about this surreal phase of American politics. In polls, support for the president among veterans far outpaces that among Americans at large.

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Tuesday

Madeleine Kearns

Bowl food: childhood memories have inspired a new craze for cookie dough

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. In Greenwich Village, one block south of Washington Square Park, stands the flagship store of DŌ, ‘New York City’s first ever cookie dough scoop shop’. Opened in 2017 by an American designer with fond childhood memories of baking with her mother, DŌ is now so popular that it requires a special line policy, as in: ‘SINGLE FILE so that pedestrians can still use the sidewalk.’ Often, a line of hundreds of customers can be seen snaking around the block, eagerly awaiting tubs and cones of its buttery, sugary (and uncooked) batter.

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Monday

Luke Haines

Christmas crackers: the tragic soul of Natalie Cole

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. As any Yule fool knows, there’s no Christmas album like an old Christmas album. But there’s not many of them. We’ve had plenty of classic Christmas singles but hardly any classic Christmas albums. In fact, since little Phil Spector went and ‘canceled’ himself and the life of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003, there is only one. Nowadays, a double-sided helping of Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You from 1963 would have the most ardent Wall Of Sound fan hearing sirens, not sleigh bells.

natalie cole
chick-fil-a christian
Rod Dreher

The culture war is lost

Even though American culture warriors of the right are fighting what Tolkien called ‘the long defeat’, surrender in the Battle of Chick-fil-A was a monumental symbolic loss. That’s because the fast-food chain had become what psychology calls a ‘condensation symbol’: a phrase or entity that powerfully evokes a worldview, and usually calls forth strong emotions around it. Chick-fil-A sells fried chicken. When are chicken nuggets not mere morsels of battered and fried chicken? When LGBT activists transform them into sacraments of Bible-thumping wickedness, as they have done with enormous effectiveness since 2012. That was the year that Dan Cathy, CEO of the privately held company and son of its founder, criticized the campaign for same-sex marriage as offensive to God.

Sunday

Benjamin Riley

For duck’s sake: New York’s foie gras ban is classic political posturing

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Drown the Yquem and bury the Burgundy! Cover up the caviar! Abscond with the escargot, and for good measure lock away the langoustines! The class war is coming to New York City. On October 30, the city council, taking a break from doing nothing about the homeless and the garbage, passed a law prohibiting the sale of foie gras — fattened duck or goose liver — beginning in 2022. Of the 51 members, 42 voted in favor and 30 signed on as co-sponsors.

duck foie gras

Wednesday

Dr Sebastian Gorka, DrG, FBE, CPA

Christmas greatness: a Yuletide sermon

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ’Tis the season friends. The season to be merry. But also the season to remember. Especially those who gave their everything. For us. Great Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect the greatest nation on earth. I speak, of course, of the true meaning of Christmas. The Yuletide. The winter festival. The hinge of the Judeo-Christian cultural year. The subject of so much opprobrium from the secular left. Christmas is under attack. It has to be defended. President Donald Trump is fighting back. But we all have a responsibility to stand up. To say ‘No!

sebastian gorka
nativity
Godfrey Elfwick

Godfrey Elfwick’s Nativity drama

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Portland, Oregon How do you survive the festive season when you have a social conscience? Dear reader, allow me to impart to you my experience with this predicament, and some wisdom along the way. Once again, the Chr*stm*s season is upon us. Like a virus, it cares not whom it infects and cannot be completely avoided. I choose not to celebrate this holiday, both as a Muslim atheist and a social-justice progressive. Like Th*nksg*v*ng, Chr*stm*s is a toxic symbol of white heteronormative greed. Like the river of evil slime depicted in Ghostbusters II, it seeps insidiously into the fabric of all our lives.

Tuesday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

American English must be the most carelessly spoken and written dialect on Earth

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Kemmerer, Wyoming Before 1965, when immigrants to the American Republic came almost exclusively from Europe, the largest white ethnic group in this country was of German stock. It may still be so, though I am unaware of recent statistics that demonstrate the fact. Certainly, a linguistically sophisticated visitor arriving here today from Europe might easily arrive at that conclusion. The now ubiquitous ‘Yah!’ is phonetically indistinguishable from ‘Ja!’, and while ‘Yah-wohl!’ has yet to be widely heard in American streets, connoisseurs of the American language in the 21st century would hardly be surprised should it crop up there.

american english ‘OK, here it is, “Brexit” … Apparently it means “Brexit”…’
drugs
Jeremy Clarke

White Christmas: the magic of the festive drugs binge

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. An effective antidote to all this thoughtless zealotry, I find, is to go out for the evening with my friend Trevor. When despair hits total, I know it’s time to ring him up and suggest a small sherry: code for drinking and taking drugs until we’re totally out of our minds, then partying all night. Trevor is a big, strong, hard-working country boy for whom life is invariably a momentous affair. Though he’s a tolerant man, there is a point at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue, and he is an old-school puncher and the man you have to beat if you want the magnetic title of Hardest Man in Town. His catchphrase is ‘Who’s the Daddy?

Monday

Ben Sixsmith

Star Wars: the force a-weakens

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The first Star Wars trilogy enraptured by blending classic drama with science fiction. There was Luke Skywalker the fresh-faced hero, emerging from obscurity to save the day. There was Vader the villain, who had once been good but had embraced the dark side. There was the Emperor, the twisted puppeteer. There was the daredevil pilot Han Solo. There was Leia, the princess who had to be saved. There was even that essential companion on any voyage: a bumbling upper-class Englishman. All of it was familiar from classic cinema and adventure stories, but all of it had the strangeness of science fiction. The villain lurked behind a fearsome mask and choked people by mind control.

star wars
wild
Emily Ferguson

The call of the wild

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. People who go into the wild looking to meet bloodthirsty predators are either a living Xanax pill or some sort of dominatrix version of Jane Goodall. Especially when it’s winter. Save yourself a mauling by a hungry puma, swap your earmuffs for earphones and get wild with The Wild, in which ecologist and award-winning filmmaker Chris Morgan leaps sure-footedly from one wildlife topic to another like a mountain goat. Like Nature itself, The Wild is pretty random but always red in tooth and claw. Morgan focuses on the overlap between animals and humans: something people tend not to consider when they move into areas where the neighbors are bears or cougars.

christmas alone
Bridget Phetasy

The joy of spending Christmas alone

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. I’ve always resented Christmas — because Christmas is a holiday that makes liars out of us all. Let’s not get into whether Jesus was born of a virgin. Suffice it to say, I struggled with this idea from a young age. Back in kindergarten, having no idea what a virgin was, I consulted Anne, my precocious neighbor and classmate at the Convent of the Visitation School. Anne showed me a biology book, which presented in very graphic detail the mechanics of intercourse. Anne explained that being a virgin meant you hadn’t had sex. ‘Mom, how did the Virgin Mary get pregnant with baby Jesus?’ I asked. ‘Oh, God did that,’ she explained dutifully.

Sunday

Bill Kauffman

Let Utah be Utah

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Salt Lake City, Utah Here I sit in a Salt Lake City coffeehouse, wishing I’d donned the uniform (white shirt, black tie, nameplate) of a Mormon missionary. Now that would throw the ambient hipsters for a loop. Last time I buzzed through the Beehive State was the dawn of 1984, when I fled the Imperial City on the Potomac after 30 months legislatively assisting Sen. Pat Moynihan. I went to Washington a left-of-center populist and returned a novice in what Henry Adams called the Conservative Christian Anarchist party, of which he mistakenly thought himself the only member.

utah

Saturday

Digby Dent

Digby Dent on lawn darts in winter

New Haven, Connecticut Greetings friends. Old Digby Dent (BR ’89) here. I’ve been press-ganged by the good folks at The Spectator into sharing a few reflections on living well as the fiery splendor of autumn gives way to the dour cold of winter. The leaves are gone, the days grow short and it’s dark by four in the afternoon in Boston. Worse still, the obvious recreations of warmer days having given way to the inconstancy of the third season, we find ourselves waiting for enough snow to ski, cross-country or alpine. What is to be done in the unsteady interregnum from now until The Game? Sailing is no damned good if you can’t guess how cold it’ll be on the water.

lawn darts
key west
Elisa Segrave

My wild Key West

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Key West was originally called Cayo Hueso (Bone Island in Spanish) either for its bleached limestone rock or because the Calusa Indians used it as a burial ground. The first European here was Spain’s Ponce de León in 1521, on his spiritual quest for the Fountain of Youth. Lt Cmdr Matthew Perry planted the American flag on March 25, 1822. By the 1880s, Key West was the richest town in Florida. I first came on a Greyhound in November 1977. I knew no one. An American boyfriend in London had talked about breakfasting with fishermen, and of the Southern writer who was his mentor.

Monday

Toby Young

The real reason for college food fights

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Oberlin College hit the headlines earlier this year when it lost a high-profile lawsuit against a small business. Staff and students at the liberal arts college had accused a bakery in the local town of racism and organized a boycott after an employee caught an African American student shoplifting. The owners of the bakery sued the university for defamation, infliction of emotional distress and tortious interference. Turned out, the store’s employees were completely color-blind when it came to stopping people stealing — of the 40 shoplifters arrested in the previous five years, 32 were white — and the jury found with the plaintiffs.