Travis Aaroe

Travis Aaroe

Travis Aaroe is an assistant editor on The Spectator’s World edition.

The growing conservatism of the Democrats

Kamala Harris is destined to be the Democratic nominee in 2028 because the American left is now conservative. Democratic politics is now based on two suppositions: The existence of a “silent majority” and the reflexive defense of even the most unlovely institutions.  The conservative left glorifies the intelligence agencies and praises generals as the defenders of the republic, while insisting

Davos and the showy ruthlessness of the new ‘far center’ 

There has always been a section of the establishment which thinks that the solution to populism lies in a great straightening-out of the populace. Populism is happening because people are bored, they say, so conscript them, get them off their phones, give them things to do – especially the young. It is only through collective

Carney Macron far center

How the ‘deep state’ enabled Epstein to operate

How do characters like Jeffrey Epstein come about, really? One way to find out is to read his emails, 20,000 of which were released by the House Oversight Committee in November. What they show us is that people like Epstein were a product of the second half of the 20th century, their existence more or

Jeffrey Epstein

Teen Vogue and the end of woke

From our UK edition

Teen Vogue published ‘9 Climate Activists of Colour You Should Know’ in January 2020. The article already seems like it belongs to a lost world, which is perhaps why Teen Vogue ceased publishing this month. It is an artefact of those frantic Metternichian years from 2020 to about the end of 2023, when Donald Trump

When Curtis Yarvin met Alastair Campbell

From our UK edition

A video has been doing the rounds in which a woman holds an iguana up to the glass window of an aquarium. A beluga whale emerges from the murk. For a brief moment two creatures whose very existence is incomprehensible to each other – who would never, in millions of years, have met but for

The Mandelson ‘joke’ fell flat in Washington

From our UK edition

Lord Peter Mandelson is to the “Third Way” what Roger Stone is to populism – an alte kameraden from the freewheeling early days. A pinstriped broker and fixer. Whatever ultimately comes of the association with Jeffrey Epstein that has just cost him his job as ambassador to the United States, that such a figure was ever appointed

Iryna Zarutska and the reality of American ‘two-tier’ justice

From our UK edition

Under Trumpism the old certainties no longer hold and are starting to ebb away. Do illegal immigrants really have an inviolable and unlimited right of appeal against deportation? Probably not. Is America honour-bound to defend small nations against aggressors? It isn’t. People don’t really believe in the ruling pieties anymore yet they do not know

Henry VIII turned England upside down

From our UK edition

Henry VIII, who was born on this day in 1491, is the only English monarch other than William the Conqueror who can claim to have destroyed a society and replaced it with a new one. Catholic apologists like Chesterton are right to see in the Henry VIII saga a sort of secular apocalypse; it was,