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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Niko Vorobyov |Roger Kimball |Ben Domenech |Amber Duke
President Donald Trump has pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the cybercriminal mastermind who founded Silk Road and pioneered the drug trade’s move into cyberspace. Ulbricht was serving life without parole after he was found guilty in 2015 of conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking. On Wednesday, after over a decade in the dungeons, Ross finally came home.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Kate Andrews |Ben Domenech |Amber Duke |James Kanagasooriam
We’ve heard more from the forty-seventh president this week than we heard from his predecessor over many months. But Donald Trump has always loved the spotlight: especially when he gets to rile up all his favorite people. This was on full display this week when, rather than winding down from his inauguration speech, the president ramped up his message in a video call to Davos.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Chilton Williamson |Cressida Bonas |Ben Domenech |Amber Duke
Considering the way history has been going for the past quarter of a century, it seems not merely Panglossian but naive and sentimental to the point of bad taste to find grounds for historical optimism now. Nevertheless, positive facts ought to be recognized as well as negative, and without embarrassment.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Christopher Sandford |Roger Kimball |Ben Domenech |Amber Duke
In February 1974, the British prime minister Edward Heath, then facing one of his country’s cyclical economic crises, called a snap general election. The result was close; Heath’s Conservative Party won the popular vote but secured fewer parliamentary seats than the Labour opposition. After power-sharing discussions broke down, Heath resigned from office.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Jacob Heilbrunn |Cressida Bonas |Ben Domenech |Amber Duke
Inscribed on the lid of a two-manual harpsichord in Holy Trinity Church at Hildersham in Cambridgeshire is the Latin tag Musica Donum Dei — music is a gift of God. It was a sentiment I could hardly quarrel with as I listened in the little twelfth-century church to a variety of baroque sonatas for violin, recorder, cello and harpsichord. They were expertly performed by the Azur Ensemble, which is comprised of recent graduates of the Royal College of Music.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Peter Hasson |Cressida Bonas |Ben Domenech |Amber Duke
I’ve been losing all my money sports betting, so I’m selling my car at CarMax so I can get some money and bet on tonight’s Cowboys-Bengals Monday Night Football game,” TikTokker ReeceMoneyBets told his 9,000 followers in early December, gesturing to a faux-gold Ford in the CarMax lot.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Ben Domenech |Roger Kimball |Amber Duke |Freddy Gray
It was nearly 2 a.m. on the East Coast in the middle of election night when CNN’s Jake Tapper stood across from professional virtual-map operator John King and asked a simple question: “Are there any places where Kamala Harris overperformed from where Biden did?”Tapping away from a view of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, King zoomed out to a view of the entire United States and hit a key to show a comparison to the 2020 election.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Roger Kimball |Cressida Bonas |Amber Duke |Freddy Gray
By the time you read this, the first raft or two of Donald Trump’s executive orders will have been promulgated. No one outside the charmed circle of his close advisors knows what is coming down the pike, but all indications are that the orders will be energetic and far-reaching. Colin Powell would probably have pulled out the phrase “shock and awe.”Most observers believe that there will be robust attention to immigration, the border, energy, regulation, taxes and the conduct of elections.
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Jan 4, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Lionel Shriver |Katja Hoyer |Amber Duke |Freddy Gray
I adhere to a pretty iron-clad rule: not only do I avoid the bumper cars of social media, but I don’t read the comments after my columns. Many other journalists avidly lap up reader responses to their work, and there’s certainly something to be said for confronting detractors, thus learning to anticipate counter-arguments and to guard against misinterpretation. But for me — I doubt this makes me unusual — one scornful put-down has a more lasting effect than ten gushing compliments.
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Dec 26, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Amber Duke
My first semester of college coincided with the 2012 presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. I was a conservative from a small rural town at an elite liberal university, and this was not great for my social life. My freshman floormates at Georgetown defaced my political signs, made nasty comments to me in the hallways and on election night my RA dropped by my room to rub it in my face when the race was called for Obama.
