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1 week ago | 
thespectator.com | Ella Dorn |Christopher Caldwell |Alex Castellanos |Alexander Larman
For the first half of the 2010s, any teenage girl in her room had a chance of amassing more political influence than a junior government advisor. She could define political terms and concepts, blacklist undesirable elements and argue for a different kind of society. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of other teenage girls would be following her, reading and engaging. These were the days of Tumblr, a youth blogging website that functioned like a dysfunctional think tank.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Ben Domenech |Matthew Foldi |Juan P. Villasmil |Christopher Caldwell
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s failed fiscal gambit last week proved as obvious as it was predictable. Yet Schumer’s flub has had an outsized impact in prompting open conversation among Democrats about whether they need to move on from the New York Senator.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Juan P. Villasmil |Charles Lipson |John MacArthur |Christopher Caldwell
“We strongly support your right to determine your own future. And if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America,” President Donald Trump told Greenlanders from a joint session of Congress earlier this month. And determine their future they did, as Greenland voted in a parliamentary election Tuesday. The results might not be as bad for Trump as NBC’s headlines imply. That’s the takeaway of Tom Dans, a man Greenlandic media calls Trump’s sande mand — true man — in the island-nation.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Roger Kimball |John MacArthur |Christopher Caldwell |Ben Domenech
I have to begin this column with a glass of Pol Roger cuvée Winston Churchill. It’s fancy stuff, and — according to some — it’s a bit early in the day to be quaffing Champagne. “How early is too early?” I’ve often wondered that. The jury is out but most of the best authorities say that any time before actually awakening is too early. Why the shampoo (as David Niven was wont to denominate the beverage)?
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Benedict Kiely |Charles Lipson |John MacArthur |Christopher Caldwell
David Lammy, the UK Foreign Secretary, and Marco Rubio had rather tellingly different responses to the latest wave of violence in Syria. Lammy deplored the “horrific violence” but failed to address where that violence was coming from. Rubio, by contrast, stated clearly that “radical Islamist terrorists” were targeting minorities in Syria, including Alawites, Christians and Druze. Rubio is right.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Charles Lipson |John MacArthur |Christopher Caldwell |Ben Domenech
At a summit meeting in Moscow, Ronald Reagan was asked about his basic approach. He famously answered, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.”Vladimir Putin has the same strategy for Ukraine. That is certainly his first response to President Trump’s offer to mediate an end to the war and bring a reluctant Ukraine to the negotiating table. If “we win, they lose” is Putin’s final response, then the war cannot end without Ukraine’s surrender or Russia’s collapse.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Peter Watson |Charles Lipson |John MacArthur |Christopher Caldwell
With President Trump spending so much time away from Washington at his home and club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, there are good spin-offs and not-so-good spin-offs for Palm Beachers. One of the good ones is for the local hotels: his security guard is of such a size that they are being billeted all over town. Less good is the sheer cost of security.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Ian Williams |John MacArthur |Christopher Caldwell |Ben Domenech
For Republican voters sick of “deep-state” shenanigans, Kash Patel, the new head of the FBI, seems an ideal appointment. He and his new deputy, the former police officer turned podcaster Dan Bongino, look and sound like exactly the right men to disrupt a bureau that has at times in the past eight years acted as an investigative arm of the Democratic party in its attempts to thwart Donald Trump through the legal system.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Lionel Shriver |John MacArthur |Christopher Caldwell |Ben Domenech
Whatever you think of the blizzard of executive orders howling from the White House, at least the new President doesn’t succumb to the seductive gravitational pull of the status quo. This is therefore a fitting juncture at which to not simply think outside the box, but in some cases to chuck the box. For example, Donald Trump wants to chuck the Department of Education. Yet can’t he set his sights higher? Like, set an example for the rest of the West: chuck the asylum system.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Daniel McCarthy |John MacArthur |Christopher Caldwell |Ben Domenech
Donald Trump is the world’s largest landlord — not in his own capacity, perhaps, but in his role as leader of the most powerful nation on earth. He’s the CEO of America, and his development corporation owns the Western hemisphere. It also owns property in Europe, where the tenants are troublesome and are always behind on their rent. There are just a few other landlords on the planet, notably Vladimir Putin, who isn’t a rival, and Xi Jinping, who is.
