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3 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | James Tidmarsh |Kate Andrews |Derek VanBuskirk |Freddy Gray
A dramatic escalation has happened in the information war between the US and Europe. Ofcom, the British media regulator that fancies itself as a global censor, has made a move. Ofcom sent a formal demand to Gab – an American social media platform with no legal presence in Britain – threatening it with ruinous fines unless it complied with the UK’s Online Safety Act. Gab’s reply to Ofcom was not polite. It was cold, clinical, and lethal.
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3 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Kate Andrews |Derek VanBuskirk |Freddy Gray |Ben Domenech
What’s changed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania? The Republican-leaning district in a purple state has been turned on its head by a surprise win for the Democratic party: for the first time since the late 1970s, a local Democratic mayor, James Malone, will take up a place in the State Senate, after a special election was held on Wednesday this week. This is not just an overturn of decades’ worth of party consensus.
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3 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Jacob Heilbrunn |Derek VanBuskirk |Freddy Gray |Ben Domenech
Maybe the surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump yanked Elise Stefanik’s nomination to become ambassador to the United Nations. It’s that he hasn’t pulled America out of the organization. But perhaps that outcome is in the offing as Trump ponders whether he should nominate anyone to succeed her abortive nomination. Trump decided to leave Stefanik in Congress because of the slender Republican majority in the House – 218-213, plus four vacancies.
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3 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Kate Andrews |Freddy Gray |Ben Domenech |Derek VanBuskirk
What’s changed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania? The Republican-leaning district in a purple state has been turned on its head by a surprise win for the Democratic party: for the first time since the late 1970s, a local Democratic mayor, James Malone, will take up a place in the State Senate, after a special election was held on Wednesday this week. This is not just an overturn of decades’ worth of party consensus.
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4 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Freddy Gray |Derek VanBuskirk |Ben Domenech |Damien Phillips
Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the most annoying of them all? The answer, it seems, is Rachel Zegler, the new Snow White, who has managed to turn herself into an international hate figure because she can’t keep her progressive political views to herself. The upshot is that Disney’s $350 million remake of one of its most famous films is flopping at the box office. It generated $45 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend.
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4 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Derek VanBuskirk |Freddy Gray |Damian Reilly |Ross Anderson
The first Senate hearing on the mid-air collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in January, which resulted in the loss of 67 lives, was held today. The conclusion: it was a miracle it didn’t happen sooner. Senator Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas and chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, reported that between October 21 and December 24, there were more than 1,500 “close-proximity” events between helicopters and commercial airplanes.
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4 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Freddy Gray |Derek VanBuskirk |Ben Domenech |Damien Phillips
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most annoying of them all? The answer, it seems, is Rachel Zegler, the new Snow White, who has managed to turn herself into an international hate figure because she can’t keep her progressive political views to herself. The upshot is that Disney’s $350 million remake of one of its most famous films is flopping at the box office. It generated $45 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend.
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4 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Charles Lipson |Ben Domenech |Derek VanBuskirk |Kate Andrews
Congress has been mulling the future of publicly-funded television and radio. Here’s a spoiler alert: that funding is toast. There is no way a Republican-controlled House and Senate will keep pouring money into networks they believe hate them. They know that hatred is warmly reciprocated. The debate about partisan bias at PBS and NPR is important – the bias itself is obvious – but that’s not the most important point.
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4 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Freddy Gray |Derek VanBuskirk |Max Jeffery |Ben Domenech
Most people use groupchats to share memes, organize brunch or gossip. The Trump administration plans air strikes. After Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently included in the “Houthi PC small group” Signal chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, administration officials were eager to stress that no classified information was included in the unofficial chat. As a result, Goldberg published screenshots of the full conversation this morning.
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4 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Freddy Gray |Derek VanBuskirk |Damien Phillips |Max Jeffery
Jeffrey Goldberg laid a trap and Team Trump has blundered right into it. In Monday’s sensational story, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” the Atlantic editor rather pompously declared that he was withholding some of the information he had received on grounds of national security, contrasting his own propriety with the slapdashery of the Trump administration’s national security operation.
