The Mar-a-Lago face-off

In all the post election danger-to-democracy commentary, one unexpected new peril has emerged: the “nationwide surge of Mar-a-Lago face.”

Best exemplified by demented far-right activist Laura Loomer and former Fox News host-slash-former Donald Trump Jr. squeeze Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mar-a-Lago face is a cosmetic look characterized by immense volumes of cheek filler, heavy eye shadow and enough Botox to petrify the face.

The male version could be seen when Florida congressman and attorney general-nominee-for-ten-seconds Matt Gaetz stepped out at the RNC with so much Botox and foundation that he instantly became a bipartisan meme.

I’d argue that Mar-a-Lago face is not taking over America anytime soon. It’s barely taking over the Republican Party. Most of the women wielding meaningful power in right-wing America these days are attractive and respectably dolled-up, from Attorney General Pam Bondi to first lady Melania and first daughter Ivanka Trump. The most conspicuously overfilled weirdos are marginalized to the undesirable fringes of the party. Gaetz was deposed from the administration before he ever joined it and will instead host a talk show. Laura Loomer had the odd stint on Trump’s plane before he got icked out and never invited her anywhere else.

Guilfoyle, meanwhile, has been banished from the seat of power to Greece, where she will serve as the American ambassador while Donald Trump Jr. struts around town with his new flame, a younger “Palm Beach socialite” called Bettina Anderson. If anything can be divined from the cosmetic habits of the incoming administration, it’s that Mar-a-Lago face and the broader Trumpian artifice represent the national id — not a sweeping trend, but an extreme distillation of the current permissive American attitude toward plastic surgery.

For years, cosmetic treatments were something people did under cover of darkness and politely avoided acknowledging. A subtle nose or boob job was sometimes acceptable but looking suspiciously shiny or incongruously curvaceous was considered gauche, or at the very least something for celebrities and television stars.

Over the past two decades, that has rapidly changed, with plastic surgery accelerated into overdrive by forces such as social media, beautifying filters, the pandemic and Kylie Jenner Lip Kits.

A recent global survey from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery found that both surgical and non surgical procedures are at a worldwide all-time high, having increased by a whopping 40 percent over the past four years. Seventy-five percent of plastic surgeons reported an increase in the number of Gen Z patients — they’re between twenty and thirty years old — who demand cosmetic surgery or injectables.

There was an 18 percent increase over the past year in men seeking aesthetic treatments such as Botox and eyelid surgery. And these results don’t even account for the skyrocketing number of people radically changing their appearances with weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro.

The desired look changes with the times: currently, we’re in a shift away from years of Kardashian-inspired Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs), pillowy pouts and the “distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic” facial features known as “Instagram face,” thanks to its origins in social media, artful photoshopping and celebrity plastic surgery.

Instead, Americans are currently seeking a more “discreet” look, which is achieved through laser skin treatments, spot liposuction, “preventative” Botox and smaller breast implants. The reasons for this shift have a lot to do with our nation’s move away from the hyper edited, meticulously curated Instagram to the less-filtered, more relatable TikTok, where people churn out content far too frequently to micromanage their look.

It may also have to do with another big internet craze, an aesthetic known as “quiet luxury,” which fuels the current trends in everything from minimalistic beige home decor to Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy-inspired clothing. In what feels like a reaction to the filler-and-logo-fueled excesses of the past few years, women are now being encouraged to emulate “old money” by paring back, reining in and signaling their status through subtlety instead of lavishness.

The days of Gucci belts and knock-off Angelina Jolie lips are no more. Women are spending their money on $500 drab gray cardigans and expensive skincare treatments. There are regional exceptions to this — women in Las Vegas, Miami and, of course, Mar-a-Lago won’t give up their fake eyelashes and conspicuous Chanel without a fight — but the continued trend setting power of online influencers means that subtlety is on the rise.

Weight loss is another matter. The body-positivity movement seems to have passed its prime: one in eight Americans report trying a weight-loss drug at some point; the Victoria’s Secret fashion show returned last year after a six-year hiatus to address public criticism of its inadequate inclusivity; and even body-positive influencers are losing dozens of pounds on Ozempic. These drugs appear to offer many non-cosmetic benefits — reduced heart-disease risk and lower blood pressure, and the curbing of addictive tendencies — but the national skinny era is also leading people to the plastic surgeon’s office.

When I talked to Dr. Sheila Nazarian, a leading Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon and medspa owner, she told me that weight loss drugs have been “huge” this year, and that people are increasingly coming in for treatments to address the consequences such as face or neck lifts to fix sagging skin or subtle volumizing filler in now-gaunt-looking faces.

I happen to believe — until a damning scientific study tells me otherwise — that in our famously obese nation, the benefits of weight-loss drugs outweigh the risks, but it’s hard to ignore the voice of RFK Jr., a fervent Ozempic opponent who thinks the medicine is so popular among Americans because “we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.”

He has a point when he says that the semaglutide fad will only perpetuate a cyclical overreliance on pharmaceutical, medical and otherwise unnatural interventions. We may have a historically unprecedented number of ways to fix and correct our flaws, but fixing and correcting doesn’t mean healing from the inside.

When I asked Dr. Nazarian about America’s current preference for “natural” aesthetics, she was quick to correct my wording. “I don’t even think it’s about ‘natural,’” she said. “It’s just about not looking overdone and overfilled.” Her assessment captures something essential about America’s current climate — the cosmetic look might be more intentionally understated than 2018’s BBL boom, but thanks to social media, our broader attitude on changing your appearance has never been more permissive, or less discreet.

Now, people are spending thousands of dollars on “subtle” adjustments, and immediately sprinting to TikTok to telegraph every detail of how everyone else can be this subtle, too. With just a few swipes on your phone, you can watch, in intimately photographed and intricately narrated detail, vlogs of everything from arm liposuction to lip shading with a tattoo gun and male hair transplants in Turkey.

The content is often remarkably informative — I recently saw an “eyebrow artist” recommended by a middle-aged Russian TikTokker — and thereby incredibly popular, yielding an online genre called “looksmaxxing” in which people follow a comprehensive aesthetic and wellness regimen to look as hot as they humanly can. This digital quest for beauty is so alluring that even the influencers who attempt a more guarded approach are forced to admit publicly to something small such as Botox in order to seem relatable.

Gone are the days of losing weight or getting work done in dignified silence — we’ve all spent enough time online recently to know you don’t look like that on your own.

Which brings me back to the Republican Party. Recently, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly released an extensive breakdown of her beauty regimen, helpfully walking her audience through her favorite procedures and concluding with the exhortation, “Ladies, listen to me: get the lasers, get the Botox… but I don’t believe in the filler.”

Her transparency, which may well have sent past generations of Republican women rolling in their graves (imagine Nancy Reagan publicly discussing one of her reported facelifts), shows just how much the national needle has moved towards the normalization of cosmetic work. America is in agreement that it’s OK to try to look your best — might as well get smart about it if you don’t want to be left behind.

The wider spirit behind Kelly’s remarks also underscores yet another reason the Trump family is rolling back into Washington: in all their smoothed, manicured, presidentially over bronzed glory, they make no apologies for wanting to look hot, and their willingness to go to great lengths to make it happen.

They’re a fitting first family for a nation that is equally obsessed with getting hotter and ever less shy about admitting it.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

The Europe of American imaginations no longer exists

Since the United Kingdom left the European Union five years ago, the pair have been in battle to prove who has performed better. But the real story of the past five years is not a stagnant UK falling behind a buoyant EU, but of Britain and Europe being trapped in the same cycle of relative decline. It’s America that has quietly raced ahead of Europe this century.

Following the pandemic it has become impossible to ignore the gulf in economic vitality between the US and Europe, the former growing by 16.3 percent per capita since 2008. There are very good reasons for America’s success, or rather, Europe’s decline. The EU and the UK increasingly treat their industries as pieces of heritage which must be preserved against disruptors and foreign competition. A precautionary principle has been allowed to squash entire industries like GM crops and fracking. European climate policies revolve around stopping people doing things and setting restrictive targets, rather than encouraging low-carbon technologies.

Then there is Europe’s work-shy culture: far from being just a British phenomenon, the average German employee works sixty-seven fewer hours per year than a decade ago.

Regardless of which president has been in the White House, so far this century the country has largely been pro-innovation and growth. This has led to some spectacular results: in a list of the top 100 global companies by market capitalization, sixty-one are US-based. In contrast, only twelve are based in the EU, five in the UK and three in Switzerland. The top European company — French luxury goods maker LVMH — comes in at twenty-fourth, followed by Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, maker of weight loss drug Wegovy, at twenty-sixth.

Europe’s reaction to this is to get angry rather than to get even. Draconian EU regulation of tech, in particular, is beginning to look like envy. Europe doesn’t like it that the tech giants are nearly all American.

Without economic growth, it becomes impossible to sustain that other great claim to the superiority of European civilization: efficient and universal public services. Yes, the US healthcare system seems to Europeans an expensive mess, especially for those who fall through the cracks. Yet Europe’s healthcare systems are increasingly creaking. All have similar problems, caused by aging populations and shortages of qualified staff. We discovered during the pandemic the inadequacies of Italian hospitals: the country has since been forced to borrow doctors from socialist Cuba. In the Netherlands, even before Covid, the shortage of children’s hospital beds was so acute that patients had to be sent to Belgium.

Europeans like to boast about their high-speed train network, which sounds fantastic until you take one — in Germany, a third of long-distance trains run late. Nor is Europe the haven of low crime that Europeans like to believe. Violent crime has exploded in the countries we used to think of as the safest. In Sweden, gangs habitually fight with grenades. In the Netherlands last February, the six-year Marengo trial finally resulted in the jailing of Moroccan drug-dealers — but not before the murders of a string of informers, a lawyer and a TV journalist. The identity of the judge had to be concealed.

Europeans shake their heads at America’s re-election of Donald Trump, a man who is often described by his critics as a “fascist.” But the nice, liberal Europe of their imagination no longer exists (if it ever did). It is the EU which has all the far-right parties — excluding Brexit Britain. Europeans shake their heads over Trump’s fence along the Mexican border and his program to deport illegal migrants.

Yet European countries are following many of the same policies. Hungary has erected a Trump-like fence along its border. Germany, where a decade ago Angela Merkel devised what she called Willkommenskultur, has recently reinstated border formalities with neighboring EU countries. This has happened in spite of the rules of the Schengen Agreement, a 1990s pact to eliminate customs formalities between many European countries.

Europe is becoming a macrocosm of Athens, where past glories look down on the tawdry reality of the present. Many Europeans also proudly hold up the continent as a beacon of liberal democracy, which they see as having been undermined by Trumpism in the US. But Europeans have a very different concept of democracy to Americans. To the former, it means having a permanent legal infrastructure to impose certain social and economic policies which remain in place whoever is in power.

The difference can be seen in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights — which was influenced heavily by US lawyers — and the European Convention on Human Rights — which was drafted by European lawyers a couple of years later, and which still governs European democracies.

While the former declares that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government,” the latter has no equivalent cause. This was because in postwar European minds, democracy was what gave Germany Hitler. That “will” had to be tempered to try to ensure that a demagogue could never again rise to the top. “Democracy,” as it were, is there to protect the people from themselves.

That is the root of so many problems in Europe at the moment, where people are starting to rise up against the political establishment which has kept them in their place for the past eighty years. It was the root, too, of Brexit: the campaign for which was won by the slogan “Take Back Control.”

The trouble is that Britain, so far, has not taken advantage of those freedoms. A few trade deals have been done. There has been a little deregulation, but that has been dwarfed by cases in which UK governments have used their freedoms to impose extra regulations, such as making life even more difficult for employers trying to create jobs.

It was always the case that the disadvantages of Brexit, such as increased friction in trade, were going to come quickly but the advantages were going to come later — and only then if Britain had a government which was prepared to make the right decisions.

With Keir Starmer’s Labour government seemingly determined to turn Britain into just another brand of European social democracy, that looks a long way off. Britain’s first decade outside the EU looks as if it will have similar, disappointing results as its neighbors. It’s America that looks set to keep racing ahead.

Far From EUtopia: How Europe is Failing and Britain Could Do Better by Ross Clark is published by Abacus. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

Elon Musk’s critics are more autistic than he ever could be

I’ve managed to keep most of my liberal family relationships and friendships intact, even after going public about voting for Trump. Most of them shrugged and applied the principle our grandparents taught us — blood is thicker than politics.

That is, until Elon Musk. He has proven to be the straw that broke the liberals’ back. Realizing that they’d rendered calling Trump “literally Hitler” ineffective, many normie Democrats and liberal commentators have redirected this energy toward the “Chief Twit.”

First there was the hand gesture at the post-inauguration rally. Since I’ve come out and said, “I don’t think Elon did two Nazi salutes, I think he is autistic,” I’ve lost old friends, shed hundreds of followers on Instagram — not that I care, I just find it interesting that was beyond the pale for them — and had some tough conversations with family members who aren’t sure they can associate with a “Nazi sympathizer.”

I blame a few things for the acceleration of “everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi.” The first being the internet. Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies is an internet adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990 that states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

The second is media abdication of its duty to maintain objectivity as members instead became breathless pushers of emotionally charged opposition to Donald Trump — much of it indicating that he’s a murderous dictator on the rise. Colloquially known as “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or TDS, it includes the Hitler comparisons that have damaged the trust between these media figures and their audiences.

The biggest problem with using these terms so much they lose all meaning is that you end up giving cover to actual Nazis. If the same media accusing Elon of being a not-so-secret Nazi is not also drawing attention to adults openly performing Sieg Heils at a Free Palestine protest, for instance, people tune them out. It becomes white noise. Actual Nazis thrive and multiply in these conditions.

Left-wing media has poisoned its audience — and the characters driving this trend should be held accountable. They won’t be. But they should be. Many of my friends and family are in a lot of pain and distress, bordering on hysteria. Their media diet is partially responsible for breaking their brains — it’s infuriating and frustrating to see how incoherent they’ve become. The conversations go something like this:

Me: Do you actually think Elon Musk is a Nazi?

Them: No. But that was a Nazi salute.

The stripping of intent from action has been a tactic that, until recently, has been very successful in the power struggle for “the Culture.” It’s how we ended up with “microaggressions” and “implicit bias.” You might not have meant it this way, but this is how I took it.

It’s also a useful way to soothe your psyche when you’re experiencing cognitive dissonance. Foundationally it must be unsettling. They were all lied to. They were told that Donald Trump is Hitler and January 6 was worse than 9/11 — and this is the end of Democracy.

Then Trump won every swing state. He won the popular vote. The youth voted for him. Minorities broke for him in record numbers. Biden and Obama shook his hand. Every billionaire tech leader scrambled to appear with him on the dais at the inauguration.

How do you regain some sense of control? How do you soothe your ego when reality collides with your worldview? When it turns out most people don’t actually hold the beliefs you thought they did? You have preference falsification on mass levels. It’s like The Truman Show. Instead of taking in new information, it’s much easier to say, “Aha! Elon is the Nazi!”

Now that Elon is sleeping on the floor of the West Wing, with his team of six autists doing a line-by-line audit of government spending, the memo going out is that an unelected shadow government is staging a coup. That is going to be a hard sell after an unelected shadow government just ran this country for four years while hiding the fact that the elected president was barely functioning — and shamed Americans for pointing it out.

Yet here we are again. The media has crafted a storyline in which their audience has to be the freedom fighters. The anti-fascists. The righteous quashers of evil. And when the evil doesn’t exist, they will conjure it out of nowhere.

At root, this is a deeply cynical worldview. Wouldn’t it be better if Elon was not a Nazi?

The media tends to laser-focus on one detail and becomes incapable of reasoning, or applying Occam’s Razor or sensing context. As a result, valid critiques of the Trump administration will get lost or be dismissed as TDS.

In other words, when it comes to discussing politics, Musk’s critics are more autistic than he ever could be.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

Trump’s hundred days of shock and awe

The second Trump administration has begun as it means to go on: moving fast and breaking Washington brains. Firings commenced immediately, from inspectors general to senior FBI officials to workers who refused to go back to the office (for the federal government, the pandemic never ended). The confirmations blasted through the Senate, with even controversial figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rammed through in the first week.

Executive Orders flew out like a flock of war pigeons released from the battlements — forty-five in the first two weeks alone — bearing commands small and sweeping. Some of them were real: withdrawal from climate treaties and the World Health Organization, an end to diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the alphabet soup of genders in government documents — and sending troops to the border. Some of them were framed as a backwards look at government interference — on free speech, leaking, and the “weaponization of federal government.” Others were just because: renaming Alaska’s Mount Denali back to Mount McKinley and the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and the forced declassification of records around the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. That’s what you get for your endorsement, Joe Rogan — enough podcast material for years.

Trump had repeatedly promised that his retribution would be victory and success for the country. But he also knows there’s no better time to kick a man than when he’s down. If you are, for instance, one of the fifty signatories of the notorious Hunter Biden laptop letter, your security clearance was forfeited.

If your name happens to be John Brennan, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, James Clapper or John Bolton, you have the additional ignominy of being banned from federal government buildings. Are you a former high-level official who wants a security detail? Pay for it from your (doubtlessly) ill-gotten gains. The power on display from Elon Musk was apparent from day one, and not just because he took Vivek Ramaswamy out back and put two behind his ear for an ill-thought-through X thread bashing lazy Americans. There was never room for more than one ego at DoGE. The New Yorker cover for January 20, Inauguration Day, showed a laughing Musk with his hand on the Bible, getting side-eye from a sidelined Donald. I showed the magazine to one of the president’s closest advisors, who responded: “I worry that’s more true than I’d like to say.”

Nothing that has happened since would give you a reason to think otherwise. Musk has flitted about DC with his exuberance and manic energy for finding the weak points in decrepit mechanisms. His team of compatriots were roundly denounced as too young and inexperienced to be trusted with any power, even just the power to examine inefficiencies and recommend how to fix them. When WIRED magazine reported the names of several of his DoGe staffers, all under the age of twenty-four, Mike Solana wrote in his Pirate Wires newsletter (a must-read in the second age of Trump):

This much power (auditing government spending) in the hands of men this young (the age of our founding fathers) was unfathomable, we learned… from the same people who played block and tackle for a man with actual dementia. And that really is the question: would you rather have a 22-year-old engineer who designed an AI program that helped decipher one of the 2,000-year-old Herculaneum Papyri working for the government, or a much dumber old person?

The haughty tech-bro energy aside, the problem for the bureaucrats and their lifelong defenders in the Democratic Party is that they are the most unsympathetic figures in this entire storyline. They have brought their evisceration on themselves, having micromanaged the American people to such a degree during the pandemic that the citizenry no longer cares for their sky-is-falling complaints, especially when they’ve all been offered eight-month buyouts if they want to stop working. By the time a judge temporarily blocked the program in early February, more than 60,000 workers had signed up

When the Trump administration announced that every agency would have to go back to the office to work within thirty days, some of the crats took to public radio to complain. Here is one typical tale of woe related to Baltimore’s WYPR, from a federal worker who currently goes into an office twice a week — her middle name “Layne” is used out of “fear of reprisal”:

“The train ride is anywhere from about forty minutes to an hour. I wake up at 4:10, in the morning, and I get to work bright and early, between about 6 a.m. and 6:15,” she said. She leaves the office at 3 p.m. and gets home around 5. Most weeks she works in-person on back-to-back days.

“I’m so exhausted at the end of the day,” Layne continued. “By that third morning, when I’m waking up and teleworking, I am just so brain dead, it’s actually hard to focus… I cannot imagine trying to get in the car and go in a third day.”

Yes, in a time of people taking second jobs in the gig economy just to make ends meet, won’t someone think of the torturous conditions of our federally funded best and brightest, who, after spending years dutifully doing as little as possible while avoiding the attention of Congress and staying home five out of seven days a week, are suddenly commanded to commute for an hour to show up for something approximating a normal work schedule? Oh, the inhumanity.

Nothing is so motivating for elected Democrats as the screams of wronged bureaucrats, and when Musk and his DoGE team turned their sights on the United States Agency for International Development, it was a siren call for the politicians. A highly motivated group of the Congress-critters showed up at the USAID office to decry the “constitutional crisis,” including newly elected Congressman Eugene Vindman (technically of Virginia, but in reality representing the Deep State), who attempted to enter the locked headquarters and were denied.

The whole thing seemed a tad insurrectiony, albeit without velvet ropes for guidance. For Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, it was just pathetic: “To my friends who are upset, I would say with respect, call somebody who cares,” Kennedy told Fox News. “They better get used to this.”

Next up: the Department of Education, a longstanding target of Republican candidates for decades yet one they never had the stones to touch once elected. Referring to his choice for education secretary, Linda McMahon, the president told reporters: “I want her to put herself out of a job.”

What this initial rush signals for the future of the Trump administration is that the lessons he took from his first go-round include the importance of power to drive momentum.

This dramatic surge of force is intended to overwhelm his enemies, giving them so many targets to attack that they can’t afford to give their full attention to any one of them. Doing battle across multiple legal fronts on all the executive orders, firings and steps announced both foreign and domestic leave Trump’s opponents exhausted, just running to stand still.

Susie Wiles, his new chief of staff, has held to a mantra of avoiding drama or delay. She displays an understanding that given the reality of the midterms, they have just eighteen months to get most of Trump’s ambitious agenda into the field before inevitably taking on all the weight of the unexpected that comes in every presidential term, particularly second terms. The narrow majorities in the House and Senate will have to hold firm, and there’s no time for Republicans who want plaudits from the New York Times.

For the moment, those Republicans seem to be keeping quiet. When the nominations of three of Trump’s more controversial choices — Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services, and Kash Patel to head the FBI — arose in the same week on Capitol Hill, Trump, J.D. Vance, and their allies made quick work of any nods toward party opposition. Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Todd Young of Indiana bowed to internal and external threats — sometimes just an Elon tweet — and the nominations rolled forward with party-line committee votes.

This time, everything is different. Mitch McConnell may have been leader of the Senate Republicans for the past eighteen years, but his opposition in his twilight period will be token votes at best. “I expect to support most of what this administration is trying to accomplish,” he told CBS’s 60 Minutes. “So, what happened in the past is irrelevant to me.”

When asked about his comment that January 6 was “evidence of Donald Trump’s complete unfitness for office,” McConnell answered: “I said, shortly after January 6, that if he were the nominee for president, I would support him.” The resistance has gone out with a whimper. For Team Trump, it feels like the only thing that can stop them now is themselves.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

Whatever happened to antifa?

Since the 2024 presidential election, America has been braced for violence from the political far-left — and with good reason. Extremists like antifa, the “anti-fascist” group, are explicitly aggressive. They think looting, arson and intimidation are all acceptable, and until very recently they’ve had the support of the establishment. For a decade their liberal allies gave antifa carte blanche to cause criminal damage in the name of “resisting fascism” or opposing racism. So where is antifa now? What is it planning? It’s an understandable concern.

The citizens of Portland remember all too well the bouts of rioting and violence by Black Lives Matter-antifa in November 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump. More than a million dollars in damage was inflicted on just the first night. In the run-up to the 2024 election, Portland residents assumed the worst and began to board up their shop fronts and leave town. Businesses in San Francisco, Oakland and other liberal cities followed suit. In Washington DC residents recalled 2017 when hundreds of black-clad antifa militants smashed up property and started fires, and prepared for trouble.

But the night of Trump’s victory came and went peacefully and even on inauguration day, there were no serious riots in Washington.

It’s hard to believe that antifa and its idea of violent resistance have simply melted away. But things have definitely changed.

The first obvious difference is that the Overton window on Trump has shifted — the range of acceptable views on him has entirely altered. From 2016 to 2020, far-left extremists could count on mainstream anti-Trump sentiment, and they could use that antipathy as cover for violent protest. Histrionic lies about Trump being a fascist dictator resonated with the mainstream left. Trump was an unknown in politics so ill-informed people were easily misled. Lies and distorted facts flew around on social media and on TV. Democrats who would normally think of themselves as peaceful looked the other way when fellow-travelers committed violence for the right causes.

Some Democrats still try to fearmonger. Claims about MAGA “fascism” were central to the Democrats’ presidential campaign strategy. Kamala Harris unequivocally declared she believed Trump to be a “fascist” in October, and the press shamelessly branded his rallies “Nazi” gatherings. But the strategy ultimately failed at the ballot box because the public knew better. Four years of the first Trump administration and another four years of his being in the public eye had neutralized the most excessive anti-MAGA fear mongering.

Antifa’s decline can also be explained in part by liberal buyer’s remorse. Some who chose to endorse BLM in 2020 were shocked and chastened when several leaders of Black Lives Matter groups were convicted of fraud and money-laundering, and were revealed to have spent millions on luxury homes in Los Angeles and Toronto.

Liberals across America might still call Trump a racist but they remember how their own neighborhoods were occupied and set on fire. They remember what happens when you actually succeed in defunding the police. No one wants another surge in homicides, overdoses and violence. Even states like Washington, Oregon and California have since reversed their once-radical laws, and the politicians who championed pro-crime legislation have mostly been voted out of office.

Crucially, George Soros-funded district attorneys have been fired by voters in favor of more moderate candidates. In Seattle, Republican lawyer Ann Davison defeated Democrat Nicole Thomas-Kennedy. Thomas-Kennedy was a vocal supporter of the violent 2020 riots and some of her social media posts were about looking for land for an antifa autonomous zone.

Former County district attorney Mike Schmidt is a progressive who chose not to prosecute over 90 percent of the hundreds of antifa rioters arrested in Portland during the uprisings. Last year he lost his re election bid to moderate Nathan Vasquez.

Then there’s Elon Musk. Following his takeover of Twitter, now X, in October 2022, many key antifa accounts involved in organizing, recruiting and disseminating propaganda and fundraising were suspended for violating rules against inciting violence. These accounts should have been suspended under the previous regime, but as the Twitter Files revealed, the company had a left-wing political culture and policies were unevenly applied.

In November 2022, after I reported on the violent extremists of CrimethInc., an antifa extremist collective that produces guides on why and how to commit violent crimes, Musk suspended their account. Other accounts escaped suspension but chose to de-platform themselves from X. They feared their private messages could be accessed and turned over to law enforcement. Most of them relocated first to Mastodon, and are now at Bluesky, two smaller Twitter alternatives where leftist violence and death threats are tolerated.

There have also been convictions. Though most of the far-left extremists who violently terrorized American cities four years ago were able to escape accountability with the aid of corrupt prosecutors, enough of them were eventually convicted to act as a deterrent to other potential antifa recruits.

Following years of investigation and a month-long felony conspiracy trial in June 2024 in San Diego County, prosecutors successfully dismantled an antifa cell for the first time in US history. All twelve charged members of SoCal Antifa were convicted through trial or plea deals. San Diego Superior Court Judge Daniel Goldstein sentenced six of them to jail terms, rejecting their attorneys’ pleas for probation or suspended sentences. Five other co-defendants were sent to state prison. One antifa member was spared jail for cooperating in the investigation against his comrades.

The trial, little noticed in the national media, exposed encrypted Signal messages and DMs demonstrating how the cell coordinated and planned to commit violence against Trump supporters and the public at Pacific Beach in January 2021.

Just weeks later, Alissa Azar, an antifa “ringleader” at riots in Portland in 2020 and 2021, was held accountable by a neighboring county’s district attorney. The trial in Clackamas County exposed how Azar had worked with co-conspirators to commit organized violence. And in January of this year, a Pittsburgh couple were sentenced in federal court over an explosives attack on law enforcement at the University of Pittsburgh in 2023 outside an event featuring conservative speakers. Brian DiPippa was sentenced to five years in prison in a plea deal, while his wife, Krystal Martinez-DiPippa, received probation.

This stream of convictions has shattered antifa’s feeling of invulnerability. It now shies away from the online organizing that once attracted so many new recruits.

Antifa may have experienced setbacks, but Americans are right to still be concerned. There’s evidence to suggest that it hasn’t given up so much as changed its tactics. Instead of organizing large riots where it risks being charged with conspiracy, the plan now is for a few individuals to commit unpublicized, targeted attacks. If an attack is successful, antifa will then claim responsibility.

On May Day last year, a Portland Antifa blog post claimed responsibility for destroying seventeen police vehicles in a large arson attack. The perpetrators have still not been arrested. The arson attacks occurred as far-left extremists besieged campuses in support of Hamas and Gaza, but the attempt at starting a mass student uprising fizzled out after days.

In addition, last summer, a police vehicle at the University of California, Berkeley, was destroyed with six homemade explosive devices. Indicted suspect Casey Robert Goonan, an African studies PhD and antifa activist, allegedly sent a claim of responsibility to a radical antifa-linked blog before authorities identified and caught him. Goonan pleaded guilty to the attack in January 2025.

Though election night 2024 came and went without the feared mass unrest, antifa did, in fact, try to commit violence. In Seattle, several dozen black-clad antifa gathered in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, the same area they besieged for weeks as “CHAZ” in 2020. But this time they were shut down and arrested by police as soon as they began vandalizing property. In Portland, an even smaller group gathered and then dispersed after failing to build enough momentum for a rampage through the city center.

On inauguration day, Portland Antifa launched its best efforts at three smaller-scale violent direct actions in Portland. It smashed up the Multnomah County Elections building, tried — and failed — to start fires outside the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office and, finally, participants were arrested while spray-painting downtown property.

On its blogs and Bluesky accounts, antifa extremists continue to discuss how to mobilize for the second Trump administration. Their efforts appear to be focused on sabotaging federal attempts to remove illegal foreign nationals.

“If we play our cards right, we should be able to force Democrat-controlled local and state governments and agencies to refuse to cooperate with at least some of Trump’s programs,” CrimethInc. declared in a November 2024 blog post. To that end, it will mobilize propagandists to try to capture a photo or video, accompanied by misleading details or lies, to manipulate the masses. This tactic has worked many times.

In 2018, the image of a crying Honduran child at the US-Mexico border was falsely reported as a child being ripped from her mother by racist border agents. The photo inspired mass numbers of people to donate millions to open-border groups, and to occupy and even attack Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities across the country.

In 2020, the video of George Floyd dying was used as the spark for months of deadly riots. “[Donald Trump] lost the 2020 elections as a consequence of disruptive protests, and he won the 2024 election in part because those died off,” CrimethInc. claims. Some on the far left are even quietly excited about a second Trump administration as they believe it could be their opportunity to re-radicalize liberals in the streets.

Antifa today is not the same as it was in 2016 or 2020 but neither is Trump. He has this time surrounded himself with loyalists who share his agenda. In 2020 Trump declared that his administration would treat antifa as a “terrorist organization.” But his then-attorney general, establishment Republican Bill Barr, appeared to have disagreed.

The Department of Justice at the time did not pursue any RICO or federal conspiracy charges against violent antifa suspects. In fact, it moved to dismiss many cases or even gave sweetheart deferred resolutions to some of the most violent convicts who attacked federal property and injured federal officers in Portland. Similarly, FBI director Christopher Wray appeared to downplay the seriousness of antifa criminal organizing by describing it as just an “ideology” in 2020.

Pam Bondi, the new attorney general, has a long record in law enforcement in Florida. She served in Trump’s last administration and stood by him even as Barr and other Republicans abandoned Trump over the January 6 riots.

If Trump stands by his prior conviction that antifa is a domestic terrorist organization, Bondi, with the aid of FBI director nominee Kash Patel, can be expected to follow through. Antifa hasn’t disappeared, but this time, Trump is altogether savvier about it, and more serious.

Andy Ngo is a senior editor at the Post Millennial and is the author of the New York Times bestseller Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

Americans should feel uneasy about the new Archbishop of Washington

For an eighty-eight-year-old man who has spent only five days in the United States and doesn’t speak English,

Pope Francis is a surprisingly partisan observer of American politics. For most of his life he was, like a typical Argentinean, viscerally but vaguely anti-American. By the time he became pope in 2013, he and the Democratic Party had embraced the ideology of the globalist left. And so they forged an alliance — one the Pope may soon regret, now that Republicans in the White House and on Capitol Hill are beginning to grasp the scale of the Vatican’s corruption.

In 2016, Francis gave his blessing to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Catholic front organizations, motivated not just by their shared obsession with anti-racism and climate change but contempt for Donald Trump.

On January 20, 2021, just before Joe Biden was sworn in as America’s second Catholic president, the Pope publicly undermined Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, who as president of the US bishops’ conference had drafted a statement praising Biden’s piety and social conscience but deploring his hardline support for abortion. The bishops’ statement was mysteriously spiked until after the ceremony, reportedly on the orders of the Vatican.

Naturally, the Pope is horrified to find Trump back in the Oval Office. In 2024, the Vatican didn’t try to harvest votes for his opponent. There was little point, given Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s history of baiting Catholic judges, her embrace of gender ideology and her decision to boycott the Al Smith dinner, the major charity event in the US Church’s calendar. In November, Trump extended his lead among Catholics from five points in 2020 to fifteen.

But if Francis could do nothing to stop increasingly conservative US Catholics from supporting his arch enemy, he could at least punish them. On January 7 he announced that Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the retiring archbishop of Washington, would be succeeded by Cardinal Robert McElroy, the current bishop of San Diego.

This Pope is one of the most relentless score-settlers in the history of the papacy. It’s a character trait he shares with the 45th and 47th President of the United States — an unpleasant one, to be sure, though sometimes it’s hard to keep a straight face at the sight of such old men taunting their enemies like schoolboys.

Making Bob McElroy the archbishop of the nation’s capital, however, is more than an act of petty revenge. It’s a disgrace. No one in the American church has benefited more from Francis’s vengefulness than McElroy, who will be seventy-one when he moves to Washington in March. Since 2015, he has been the bishop of San Diego, a suffragan see of the metropolitan Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Unlike José Gomez, therefore, he does not have the title of archbishop.

There’s nothing unusual about a pope promoting a middle-ranking bishop to a major see such as Washington, which includes the District of Columbia and parts of neighboring Virginia and Maryland. The oddity is that since 2022 Bishop McElroy, who ministers to 1.3 million Catholics in San Diego, has been a cardinal, while his boss in Los Angeles, the Mexican-born Archbishop Gomez, shepherd of 4.3 million Catholics, has failed to receive a red hat in any of Francis’s ten consistories.

As a result — incredibly — the Catholic Church in the United States has still to acquire its first Hispanic cardinal.

The elevation of Robert McElroy shows Francis at his most petty-minded and authoritarian. McElroy is the most left-wing member of the US hierarchy. His nickname among Catholic conservatives is “the Wicked Witch of the West.” He detests Trump, opposes immigration reform, supports women’s ordination, cancels Latin Masses and opposes “dividing the LGBT community into those who refrain from sexual activity and those who do not.” He also thinks the Church focuses too much on abortion.

He is, however, careful to express his opinions in the dad-dancing jargon of “synodality” — a kitchen-sink catch-all term for ideas about greater lay and clerical interaction in the Church — adopted by ambitious clerics under Francis. Amusingly, he claims that Harvard taught him to write with “more clarity and elegance.” One shudders to think what his prose was like beforehand: his recent lectures on “radical inclusion” remind one of Mark Twain’s description of the Book of Mormon, “chloroform in print.”

Interestingly, although McElroy has always been conspicuously pro-Francis, he nearly didn’t get the Washington job. According to the Pillar, an American Catholic news website to which high-ranking clerics in Rome leak stories, the Pope had decided last autumn against appointing McElroy after his nuncio to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, advised him that he would be too “polarizing.”

But in December Trump announced that he had selected Brian Burch, founder of the uncompromisingly pro-life (and pro-MAGA) organization CatholicVote, to be his ambassador to the Holy See. At which point Francis made the tit-for-tat appointment of McElroy to Washington.

Non-Catholics understandably feel that the Church, by electing Francis to a position of supreme authority, only has itself to blame. But in fact there is a reason why all Americans, including the Trump administration, should feel uneasy about the nomination of Cardinal McElroy.

Washington is the nation’s most corrupt diocese, thanks in part to its for- mer archbishop, ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a serial abuser of seminarians. After McCarrick’s retirement in 2006, Benedict XVI, having heard about the bed-hopping “Uncle Ted,” ordered him to keep a low profile.

McCarrick was spectacularly rehabilitated by Francis, who sent him around the world as an unofficial emissary. During these years he helped negotiate the Vatican’s notorious pact with Beijing; only when he was charged with child abuse did the Pope laicize him. Now aged ninety-four, he is too senile to stand trial.

Many bishops and two popes were warned about McCarrick, though the Vatican has kept all the most sensitive details secret. What we do know, however, is that in 2016 America’s foremost authority on clerical sex abuse, the late Richard Sipe, wrote to Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego, with whom he had previously discussed the matter, telling him that, “I have interviewed twelve seminarians and priests who attest to propositions, harassment, or sex with McCarrick.”

To quote the Pillar: “After he received that letter, McElroy declined to meet with Sipe again. Even when Sipe hired a process server to hand-deliver a letter, McElroy turned down a meeting — saying later that Sipe’s apparently desperate behavior indicated he was untrustworthy.”

McElroy later claimed that Sipe’s “information” was passed on to Rome, but we still do not know whether that information consisted of the letter, or who was responsible for sending it on. At any rate, there was no “radical inclusion” for Uncle Ted’s victims until the Vatican was forced to remove him from public ministry in 2018.

Cardinal McElroy’s responsibility for this state of affairs is impossible to assess because he has said so little. And that, rather than any point-scoring between Francis and Trump, is why his appointment to Washington is a disgrace.

It’s also a dangerous move for an increasingly isolated Pope Francis, who bases his decisions on a cursory reading of left-wing newspapers and the opinions of a few pathologically anti-American advisors. As a result, he understands neither US politics nor the American Catholic Church, which is not — as Francis likes to hint — being manipulated by neofascists but, rather, utterly sick of being forced to listen to drivel about “synodality” while the Vatican continues to protect sex abusers and money-launderers.

Recently American Catholics were horrified to see that the Pope still keeps in his apartment a piece of art by his friend Fr. Marko Rupnik, expelled from the Jesuits after he was credibly accused of raping religious sisters in a community he founded. Unbelievably, Francis has yet to laicize him. And there are several other disturbing cases in which the Pope appears to have intervened personally to protect suspected and even convicted clerical abusers.

Until recently, the Vatican press corps suppressed these stories in much the same way as their White House counterparts tried to hide Joe Biden’s dementia. But some of Francis’s most loyal propagandists have now left Rome, and the flow of new scandals continues.

We still have no idea, for example, why the Pope’s chief of staff, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, last year tried to restore to ministry a defrocked Argentinian priest, Ariel Príncipi, who had been twice convicted of child sex abuse.

Something else we don’t know is what happened to ex-cardinal McCarrick’s “Archbishop’s Fund,” from which Uncle Ted disbursed hundreds of thousands of dollars to friends and allies from 2001 until 2018, when he surrendered it to the Archdiocese of Washington. His immediate successor, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who was forced to resign after being accused of lying about what he knew about McCarrick, has not been forthcoming. Nor has Cardinal Gregory, another McCarrick ally.

Will Cardinal McElroy clear up the mystery? It seems unlikely, but perhaps he will be forced to. He knows he is unpopular with priests and laity in the diocese, who include some of America’s most influential conservative Catholic thinkers. They have been keeping a close eye on the Vatican scandals and are also increasingly alarmed by the wretched China deal brokered by McCarrick. Put simply, it gives the Communist Party total control over the appointment of Vatican-sanctioned bish- ops in China. Even Nancy Pelosi thinks it is a disaster. As she put it last December: “Let me say it this way: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ Every bishop has sprung from that rock. And now, the Chinese government?”

Is there a connection between the Vatican’s surrender to Beijing and McCarrick’s slush fund? Pope Francis has been extremely lucky that the legacy media, still gushing over his pronouncements on climate change, has declined to investigate the matter.

If that changes under Trump 2.0, it is likely to have more to do with the vice president than the President. J.D. Vance is a Catholic convert who, at the end of January, took the US bishops to task for encouraging the influx of criminal migrants.

Someone needs to brief Vance about the threat to America’s security posed by the smallest state in Western Europe, which in addition to turning a blind eye to sexual scandals worthy of the Borgias is now thoroughly infiltrated by far-left spies who happen to be valid bishops. That’s not an excuse for trying to manipulate the outcome of the next conclave, but it is a reason to subject the Vatican and its criminal associates in the United States to the scrutiny they deserve.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

The irony of the backlash against the DEI rollback

It was only a matter of time before the rollback of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies in the workplace provoked a backlash. Following an ongoing reversal on the matter in recent months, seen on a global scale at Google, Facebook and Amazon, and here in Britain at BT and Deloitte UK, the head of the Co-op group has spoken of her alarm at this development.

As reported in the Guardian over the weekend, Shirine Khoury-Haq, the CEO of the retailer, warns of the grave implications of this turnaround:

Rolling back on DEI isn’t just an internal business decision, it has real-world consequences. It deepens inequality, weakens trust, and risks undoing decades of progress’

Her concern is echoed by the equalities minister, Seema Malhotra: ‘Your race should never be a barrier to your progress,’ she also told the newspaper. ‘This is not just about fair access to opportunity, but ensuring how we grow our economy.’

The arguments marshalled here to defend DEI policies – and the words employed to do so – are striking in that they could equally and quite legitimately be used by those who see DEI itself as unjust and unfair. Critics of the policy have long argued that it does indeed hinder people’s progress on account of their race, insofar as it actively discriminates against potential or actual employees who happen to be white. Affirmative action policies in the US have for years also punished high-achieving Americans of East Asian ethnicity.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

What Trump got right in his State of the Union address

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s reality-show State of the Union speech

Blake Neff

The unfathomable depths of blue-state fraud

The Co-op’s head regrets that the current pushback ‘weakens trust’ in the workplace. Again, this has been a persistent objection to a DEI philosophy that pursues a policy of positive discrimination. Such a strategy will weaken and undermine a sense of trust and cooperation in the office and factory, exacerbating a suspicion among workers that their colleagues, superiors or they themselves have not been appointed or promoted according to ability. This has potentially devastating consequences for morale, while further entrenching a mood of resentment among those who suspect that the game is rigged.

We saw the other week one example of how a practice of treating people preferentially or disadvantageously according to racial categories is having poisonous outcomes, when the Health Secretary Wes Streeting spoke of his alarm in discovering one NHS staff member boasting of their ‘anti-whiteness’ stance. This racialised thinking is embedded in the public sector. The Times reported on Saturday that Imperial College Trust’s DEI team was offering a 49-slide ‘micro-aggressions toolkit’ which tells staff that ‘white people, as a collective group, have unearned advantages over other races or ethnicity groups’. That sweeping term ‘collective group’ condemns an entire set of people, many of whom will be diligent, working-class or underprivileged, to a life of undeserved prejudice.

The medium-term consequences for institutions that employ DEI policies are already proving deleterious. The long-term consequences for a society which continues to determine the future of people according to indiscriminate, arbitrary categories will be catastrophic. A mood of resentment will continue to fester unless our thinking changes for good.

The equalities minister uses the language of ‘fairness’ to defend DEI. Yet that, too, is the ultimate clincher for those who resent a policy that doesn’t reward people for their talent, industriousness or hard work. This policy is intrinsically unjust and unfair.

Or at least it is when treating people as individuals. But when it comes to appreciating a society at large, those of a progressive and left-leaning persuasion seldom see individuals, only groups or ‘the system’. This is why they believe the status quo to be ‘unfair’.

Because women and ethnic minorities are under-represented in certain strata of society, they conclude that there must be injustice afoot. As Pavita Cooper, the UK chair of the 30% Club, a body that campaigns globally for gender equality in corporate leadership, also told the Guardian: ‘If I thought we had a completely meritocratic system then I would be less worried.’ She added: ‘It’s about making sure everyone gets that same chance, rather than a small group of elite people getting to the top of British institutions.’

What fundamentally separates conservatives and liberals on this matter is that the former treat people as individuals who happen to inhabit a society, whereas the latter apprehend a society composed of groups and constituent parts, one to be engineered and fixed accordingly. Treating human beings as components of a larger whole has always been the hallmark of left-wing ideologies. It’s the source, too, of their often immoral and callous treatment of people, a treatment that grows more injudicious and pitiless the further leftwards that ideology drifts.

While conservatives and classic liberals regard human beings as ends to themselves, modern-day liberals see them as means to an end. This is why the battle against DEI, and the cold-blooded utilitarian philosophy it embodies, needs to be pursued with unrelenting determination.

Rome is ready for its close-up

Rome

Like a Parioli matron shedding her curlers, pins and hairnet in anticipation of a major family celebration, Rome’s monuments are emerging from shrouds of cladding and scaffolding ready for their close-up. The angels and river gods of the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and the Piazza Navona shine as blinding white as the day they emerged from Bernini’s workshop. The ancient granite basins of the Piazza Farnese fountains shimmer with an ethereal bluish light. The big occasion is the Papal Jubilee year of 2025, expected to draw a whopping 32 million visitors. That’s more than ten times Rome’s population, and half as many visitors again as in a normal year. If you’re planning a visit, do it soon before the city is entirely swallowed by crowds.

The Jubilee kicked off on Christmas Eve when Pope Francis knocked (from his wheelchair) on the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica, which is opened only once every quarter century. Any pilgrim who passes through this portal — or the Holy Doors of the three other Papal basilicas, plus an extra one in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison — has a chance of a plenary indulgence with “the remission and forgiveness of sins” including “suffrage to the souls in Purgatory,” according to the Jubilee Penitentiary Guide. Those wishing to take the Church up on this four-times-a-century-only special offer will be relieved that the rules have relaxed considerably since the first Papal Jubilee in 1300. Back then, pilgrims had to go through every Holy Door every day for fifteen consecutive days. This time round just the once will suffice, with bookings available via a special pilgrims’ app.

Hostile observers — for instance Martin Luther, who spent some time in Rome in 1510 during his career as an Augustinian monk — have claimed that Jubilees were invented as a Papal money making exercise designed to boost the pilgrim trade. “The Church of Rome has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death and hell,” wrote Luther, who seems not to have enjoyed his stay in the city he referred to as the Synagogue of Satan. “Not even Antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.” Though much has doubtless changed since Luther’s day, Rome’s entrepreneurial holy spirit still runs strong. Special pilgrim centers sell a wide selection of Jubilee merch — including fetching green pilgrims’ capes. And the hit show of the year, advertised on billboards all over the city, is Bernadette de Lourdes: The Musical.

Rome is a company town, and the Catholic Church is Italy’s most globally influential institution. Small wonder, then, that the Italian state has opened its purse strings to the tune of €4.8 billion and counting to restore, rebuild and generally scrub up the city in a program dubbed Roma: Caput Mundi, or Capital of the World. Four major squares have been completely remodeled, along with thirty underground stations. A whole new metro line is under construction, a new underpass built under the Tiber embankment, along with 600 other major urban improvement projects. “It’s a miracle,” says Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri. But for many Romans the true miracle is the appearance of stylish column-shaped rubbish bins on every city street corner which are emptied with stunning regularity by a fleet of mini rubbish-carts. At a fiscal controller’s keystroke, Rome’s famously awful litter problem has been banished like a bad dream.

Are the Romans happy at all these furious improvement programs? Of course not. One Roman prince complains bitterly that a new cycle lane has banished a whole street’s worth of parking spaces. His family home is one of several in town that boasts both a Papal throne and a Caravaggio, and he can park in his own courtyard. But where will his guests and staff now leave their cars? Rome must be one of the last capitals in Europe where residents of the historic center still expect to keep their cars in front of their houses — and for free. From the window before which I write these words I can see the Tiber, the Castel Sant’Angelo — and our battered old BMW, imperfectly parked right on the Embankment.

Friends in low places as well as high are also discontented. Our local tramp Fede, the very smelly and opinionated inhabitant of the Piazza San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, is annoyed at the great program of relaying all of Rome’s cobblestones. These handknapped black stones, known as sanpietrini (a witty play on the double meaning of pietro, both Peter and stone), were mostly laid during the reign of Pope Pius V (1566-72). Which means that one is walking literally on the same stones as Caravaggio, Goethe and Garibaldi. The sanpietrini are not being replaced but merely re-laid on new sand and gravel beds to erase their current ankle-breaking dips and divots. This is done painstakingly by hand. Fede’s objection is not so much to the process as to the personnel making their laborious way down Via Giulia, who are from Puglia. These hardworking fellows, like all Italian workmen, conduct shouted conversations with each other, keeping up a running commentary in guttural and incomprehensible dialect all day long without pause. Fede abuses them as porci stranieri — foreign pigs.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

Keep your paws off our cats!

It’s open season on cats. Last month the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission (SAWC) floated the idea of ‘compulsory containment of cats in vulnerable areas’, and added that in some new housing developments felines could be banned altogether. 

The report prompted a deluge of what I am going to call catphobia, for no other reason than that I’ve always wanted to coin a new word. There is an existing word for fear of cats (ailurophobia) but this isn’t that. What’s emerged since the SAWC report was published has, rather, been more like what I might call, if I were woke, a form of anti-cat racism. But that would be silly, and I’m not woke, so I’ll just call it cat hatred.

Take Zoe Strimpel, in this very magazine: ‘In my view, the SAWC recommendations don’t go nearly far enough in curbing the shocking antics of these loutish and numerous creatures.’ Loutish? I have to wonder if Zoe has ever actually encountered a cat. 

When cat hatred rears its head, it’s always accompanied by a paean of praise for dogs. Dogs are – I have to wheel out that tired, meaningless old cliché – man’s best friend, loyal and intelligent, while cats are selfish, cold predators. What rot.

I have lived with Louie since he was a kitten in 2016. He has seen me through a divorce, through Covid, through shielding, through cancer and through everything else that life has brought me, the good as well as the bad. And I could have asked for no more loving and affectionate a companion. Louie is a character – a beast, as the vet calls him. He is huge – over 35 inches from his nose to his bum, with a long tail on top of that – and, yes, he throws his weight around (but he isn’t overweight, unlike his owner). He makes it very clear when he wants to eat, which is pretty much all the time he is awake, and when he wants to play, which is some of the rest of time – and then when he has had enough of both of those, he will sleep. 

Most popular

Roger Kimball

What Trump got right in his State of the Union address

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s reality-show State of the Union speech

Blake Neff

The unfathomable depths of blue-state fraud

I know I am often in his shadow. I work from home and have some regular video meetings. Louie has come to be part of them. I long ago came to realise that people on the other end of the call are waiting not for me to impart my words of wisdom but for Louie to jump on the desk and wander in front of me, in front of the camera, and wave his tail. 

It’s not all plain sailing, especially when Louie decides to walk over my keyboard, as he has just done. I set my computer to save every two minutes, as he has more than once managed to delete everything on the screen. But living on my own for most of the week, I have come to regard Louie as my closest friend, at least in the sense that I see more of him than anyone else, and he is usually pleased to see me. I love it when I put the key in the door and he is sitting at the top of the stairs looking down at me. (I will never understand how cats know when their owner is about to come home, before they are actually back.) So I really won’t have this rubbish about dogs being special and cats as some ‘skulking, disobedient’ predator, as Zoe put it.

It’s been so rewarding seeing how much more affectionate Louie has become over the years. He is a British Shorthair – his formal, pedigree name is, rather gloriously, Albalou Bojangles – and they are typically even more standoffish than most cats when they are young. In the past few years, however, he has taken to following me from room to room. If I go to make a cup of coffee, he comes with. If I go to the loo, he waits outside. And when I am sitting on the sofa, he jumps up either to sit on my lap or alongside me, pushing himself as close to me as he can. Honestly, it’s wonderful. I don’t let him in my bedroom at night, not least because he starts getting frisky when he is hungry. But when my daughter stays here, Louie is in heaven: he spends all night tucked up on her bed and it hasn’t yet occurred to him that she might be able to feed him.

But when I’m not well, Louie knows, in the way all cats do. It’s that sixth sense which tells them you need a cuddle. I was looking at some silly video the other day on social media about ten things your cat does if he loves you, and the sneer was wiped clean off my face when I realised Louie did eight of them, such as sitting with his bum towards me, showing he isn’t worried I will attack him. Similarly, we have a ritual every morning when I get dressed – he leaps onto the bed and turns over, waiting for his belly to be stroked. As for his purr; there really is no more comforting, uplifting sound than a cat’s purr. 

I long ago realised that it’s not just cats that are misunderstood and maligned but their owners – especially in comparison with dog owners. The received wisdom is that dogs are more intelligent and their owners more involved, whereas we cat owners have little more to do with our pet than feeding them and providing a home. But while a dog needs its owner, not least for a walk, there is something especially rewarding about being loved by a creature that doesn’t actually need you. Cats grow close to you, but they could do without you. That they chose to like you is an honour. They don’t need to please you. So when they sit with you – when they show you they want to be in your company – it feels even better. 

I’ve nothing against dog owners. If it makes them happy, great. But they don’t come close to cats – or cat owners.

Ofsted’s chief is wrong about WFH parents

The Chief Inspector of the schools’ watchdog Ofsted, Sir Martyn Oliver, has said he thinks the change in working habits that came about after the Covid pandemic is substantially to blame for the skyrocketing rates of children being absent from school. In 2018-19, persistent absence of pupils from state secondaries ran at about 13 per cent. The most recent figures put it at one child in four.

Sir Martyn told the Sunday Times that, as he sees it:

Suddenly people were used to working from home and, in many cases, I don’t think there was that same desire to have their child in school whilst they were at home. They had been used to it for the best part of a year and a half, on and off, during lockdown. That changed something. If my mum and dad were at home all day, would I want to get up and leave the house, knowing that they were both there? I would be tempted to perhaps say, ‘Can I not stay with you?’ 

He went on to reminisce about the character-building effects on him of seeing his potato-merchant father leave early for work every day:

There’s an expectation: put your shoes on, put your school uniform on and go out the door and go to school, go to work […] I think developing good social habits of getting up in the morning, putting your shoes on instead of your slippers, going out to work, going to school, expecting to complete a full day’s school, a full day’s work, clearly that’s habit-forming. 

His suggestion, then, is that a significant influence on the prevalence of absenteeism is kids catching sight of mum or dad, in an egg-stained dressing gown, settling down to a day’s work at the kitchen table and thinking: ‘If they can WFH, why the hell can’t I?’ That suggestion may be catnip to people who like to think (as people have since the Sunday Times appeared in cuneiform) that kids these days just need a bit of discipline – but it’s wholly unevidenced.  

Most popular

Roger Kimball

What Trump got right in his State of the Union address

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s reality-show State of the Union speech

Blake Neff

The unfathomable depths of blue-state fraud

With all respect to Sir Martyn I think his diagnosis is not just speculative but callow; a diagnosis more interested in shaming parents who work from home than in understanding what’s going on with the kids. It also – and I’m surprised to find this from a professional in education – undersells the seriousness of the situation. It’s not just a culture of skiving off we’re looking at here.  

As a parent of school-age children, I have lost count of the number of people I know whose children refuse school or otherwise exhibit signs of being very much not okay. Not one of them dodges school for the reasons given, still less is encouraged to tacitly or otherwise by his or her parents’ example. Anyone who has tried to access NHS mental health resources for children and adolescents knows how profoundly overwhelmed those services now are.  

The jury remains out on what has caused the epidemic of psychological difficulties that blight today’s adolescents. The pandemic may well have something to do with it; though not in so straightforward a way as Sir Martyn suggests. It certainly can’t have helped that just as they were cresting the beginning of secondary school, children of my daughter’s generation found themselves confined to quarters for the best part of a year and a half, didn’t socialise properly at that crucial age and will, in some sense, have been aware that this disturbing weirdness that came over the world was associated with many millions of people dying. And a year and a half is a long, long time when you’re ten.  

Other factors are plausibly suggested, too. Screen addiction is probably in there somewhere. Our children live, as no previous generation has, half in and half out of a digital world in which you are surveilled, judged and rated constantly and in real time. There, you can be bullied by people you’ve never met, and in it you find an intense and vicious simulacrum of real human interaction with none of the genuine connection of the real thing.  

I don’t doubt, further, that this generation has absorbed through its skin, even before it’s old enough to articulate it or weigh the evidence, that the world in which it is growing up is immeasurably less stable, welcoming and safe than that in which its parents came of age. They know that they will be poorer, that if they go to university they will emerge groaning with debt and with no certainty of a job and still less certainty of a home; they know that the world is being swept with small war on the heels of small war. They know – and have perhaps indeed been told too forcefully and bluntly – that the world itself is burning. (It probably doesn’t help, either, that there’s a neverending supply of attention-seeking boomer loudmouths to tell them that they’re snowflakes who’d benefit from a good war, and that this climate-change stuff is woke nonsense.)  

So the kids, to put it no more forcefully than this, are troubled. And who can blame them? One part of their generation’s smorgasbord of craziness – which includes but is not confined to depression, anxiety, self-harm, disordered eating and pornsickness – is what’s called in the trade ’emotionally based school refusal’.

Parents of my generation compare notes about it, simply agog. When we were growing up, it was completely unthinkable that not going to school was even an option. It just didn’t occur to us that you could say no. We knew, at least in the abstract, about truancy – we’d read stories in which pluckier children than us would bunk off school to scrump apples, or solve a crime, or similar. We’d seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But going to school was as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun. 

And, be it noted, in our generation there may not have been so many parents working from home, but there were plenty of stay-at-home mums (or, in my case, dads). If parents being at home was the decisive issue here, we’d surely have seen school refusal at epidemic levels between the 30s and 70s, when it was much less usual for both parents to leave the house to work. But we didn’t.  

Parents are not encouraging this; but they are distressingly powerless to prevent it. You can’t, as once you could, threaten to paddle your child’s behind with a slipper if they don’t go to school. You cannot physically manhandle them out of the house, haul them by their earlobes into the back of the car and shove them with rough violence through the school gates. That way lies a far starchier encounter with social services – and possibly the police – than any amount of school refusal will get you.

The moment that a child realises that it can speak the magic words ‘I refuse’ (or, if it’s a Melvillean, ‘I would prefer not to’) that child’s parents are stuffed – and so, in a deeper sense, is that child. There’s something very serious going on here, and tut-tutting about working from home doesn’t, in my view, begin to account for it.

The donor center is the last bastion of civility

“Braiding Sweetgrass,” she cawed from the other side of the room. “By someone named Robin something. Robin Kimmerer, I think.”

The source of this unsolicited book recommendation was Sandra, an eighty-six-year-old musician and Quaker. Since the 1960s — Sandra later told me — she’d donated “probably about three hundred pints” of blood. She was such a prolific giver, that when President Nixon proclaimed the first National Blood Donor Month in 1970 — which still is January — she was interviewed on TV.

I met Sandra in early January. We were half-sitting, half-lying foot-to-foot in a donor center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Both of us had large needles jammed into our arms and were, as sternly instructed, pumping our fists every five seconds, willing the droplets to fill the still-flaccid blood bags.

I’d come to donate for the same reason I’d been doing so for the past five years: to get out of the house, to speak to humans. I knew as soon as I saw Sandra that she wanted to talk. Her eyes darting — as old people’s eyes so often do, from person to person — in search of a conversation. Robin Kimmerer, she’d determined, was the perfect opening gambit.

“Yes, it’s on my list,” I lied politely. “Well, move it to the top,” she ordered, with a severity that made me wonder whether I was her teenage granddaughter.

Then Sandra talked at me for ten minutes, or a hundred and twenty fist squeezes, without, it seemed, so much as pausing for breath. Our blood bags slowly swelled; too slowly, was how it felt. The nurse who kept checking our veins responded to my help-me eyes with eyes that said, “Sorry hon. I’ve been doing this way too long. It’s your turn.”

Then, mercifully, someone named Marty or Mitch or Mark walked by, the only male nurse in the place that day. “Sandra!” he beamed. “It’s so good to see you.” He then turned to look at me. “Welcome back, lady. I hope those burn scars are doing OK. They looked pretty gnarly last time you were here.”

It was only then that I recalled the conversation he and I had had two months ago — the last time I came in to give blood. It was just after the election. He’d inquired about the white marks on my arm, courtesy — I promise — of hot tea. He’d told me all about his daughters. Their names? Ivanka and Melania.

Despite the lightheadedness and discomfort that might come with donating blood — the occasional jaw-clenching, awkward, one-sided conversations between extroverts and introverts — it’s an utterly delightful experience.

Giving blood is the closest thing to an act of altruism in a world of depravity and selfishness. In a city that’s as grimy and gritty as New York, donation centers might be the last bastion of true civility. People offer up their veins and their time with no expectation of pay. The room and the equipment are clean — clean enough, anyway, that I don’t think twice before lying down. And if all that doesn’t sell it, the experience can be extraordinarily entertaining.

Over the past five years of donating, I’ve overheard break-up calls and make-up calls. Masked up during the pandemic, five of us collectively solved the New York Times crossword as we synchronously bled six feet apart. When I moved to New York City from London in March of 2020 — mere days before Covid restrictions were issued — I thought that joyfully weird conversations with strangers would be a regular delight in the city that never sleeps. Nora Ephron had promised me as much. But a year into my new life, this was the first conversation with a stranger I’d had.

Donating at the Lincoln Center’s blood drive, which happens a few times a year in the grand David Rubenstein Atrium, there’s a vertical garden and a reflecting pool. Musicians — a brass trio or a string quartet — provide an unlikely ambience considering the overpowering smell of rubbing alcohol and the rhythmic beeps of medical equipment. It is, perhaps, the most elite place to bleed. I tend to hang around afterward for a little longer, eating pretzels and pretending to feel just a tiny bit dizzy. In a city in which chronic competitive busyness is an expectation, just sitting, snacking, and listening to smooth jazz on an idle Thursday afternoon is the ultimate New York luxury.

During one donation about a year ago, just as my bag was starting to become turgid, something horrible happened. The seam burst. Blood everywhere. It pooled on the floor and soaked a horrified nurse’s pants. She rushed the mess out of sight, leaving in her wake a scene resembling the aftermath of a small massacre.

A few months later, I mentioned the incident to a different nurse as she was checking my pulse, iron levels and temperature ahead of tapping into a juicy vein. “I thought it was an urban myth!” she gasped excitedly, “I can’t believe that was you!” Fame, at last.

After we’d given our dose, Sandra and I sat and sipped apple juice together. I asked her about her songwriting. She acted unconvincingly demure, then serenaded me. We talked about other books, her husband’s Alzheimer’s, her exercise regime. She told me she’s glad “the gays” can now donate.

Just as I was starting to realize that I sort of adored her eccentricities, she ventured a suggestion. “I’ll be back in exactly eight weeks. See you at 2 p.m.?” I might not read Braiding Sweetgrass but I’m curious what Sandra will come out with next. She might try to convert me to Quakerism. I’m looking forward to seeing how that turns out.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

Trump’s presidency is an ink-blot test for America

Americans are being given a national ink-blot test. Their answers tell us how a divided country sees the political landscape and what they think of President Trump’s bold efforts to reshape it.

The scope for differing interpretations is illustrated by a story about one such Rorschach test. The psychiatrist shows his new patient ink blot after ink blot. No response. Finally, the exasperated doctor pleads with him to say something, anything. “Look, doc,” he says, “I didn’t come here for you to show me dirty pictures.”

That’s exactly how Democrats see Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s one dirty picture after another. A few moderate Republicans share that perspective, but they are outliers in a party Trump has reshaped in his own image.

When Trump’s party looks at the same ink blots, they see the Sistine Chapel. For them, this inspiring vision paints over the graffiti scrawled by the Biden administration. Of course, Democrats think Trump is doing the spray-painting.

It is hard to imagine two more starkly different interpretations of American politics today. Average voters lie somewhere in the middle, but closer to the Republican view, according to recent polls. They are pleased with the opening weeks of the new administration, repulsed by the Democrats’ inflammatory rhetoric, and soured by their memories of the Biden years. Public approval for the Democratic Party has plummeted to historic lows, nearing 30 percent.

The Democrats’ catastrophic numbers and Trump’s strong ones are huge political assets for the new administration. The crucial question is how can the president exploit those assets before the glow fades?

Trump’s answer is to move with dizzying speed, using his discretionary powers and testing their limits. He is issuing a flurry of Executive Orders, appointing loyalists to all key positions, exerting firm control over White House staff and executive branch agencies, and tasking Elon Musk and his DoGE team with conducting line-by-line audits of federal expenditures.

Musk’s discovery of wasteful spending, gross incompetence, hidden stashes of taxpayer money, funding for friendly journalists, and outright fraud makes for stunning headlines. His findings help Trump in several ways. First, they show the president means to bring business efficiency and real oversight to a profligate blob of bureaucrats. Second, they show a president keeping his campaign promises to root out incompetence and ideological bias in government agencies. Third, they show Trump using DoGE to drive a stake into the heart of the Democratic Party, which built the administrative state, filled it with partisan acolytes, and used it to funnel taxpayer money to favored causes. 

Not surprisingly, Democrats have mounted the battlements to defend the edifice they built. Unfortunately for them, millions of voters are screaming, “No!”

Trump knows he has to act fast. But he faces one other formidable limit besides the ticking clock. He can only accomplish so much without help from the House and Senate. He needs them to raise the debt ceiling, keep the government open, pass a budget, and fulfill his campaign promise to reduce taxes. He needs the Senate to speed approval for his executive branch appointments.

He may also need legislation to sustain some actions he has already taken. Whether he does depends on how federal courts interpret the scope of his presidential authority. That contested terrain includes abolishing some agencies, offering buyouts to nearly all federal workers, firing those he considers excess baggage or obstacles to his programs, and impounding money appropriated during the Biden administration for projects Trump opposes.

Passing legislation like this is always difficult. It is even harder when the goals are so ambitious, the House majority so narrow, and the Senate majority so far short of the super-majority needed to kill filibusters.

Those are major obstacles. Trump hopes to offset them with a slew of major advantages:

He needs only a simple majority in both chambers to pass budget bills, bypassing the Senate filibuster.

He is tackling issues on which he campaigned and won.

He is beginning with very popular positions. Call them“80/20 issues,” where 80 percent of voters support his initiatives. Although many are minor and symbolic, they are eye-catching and build public support and momentum.

Democrats are unintentionally boosting Trump by taking the 20 percent side of these issues, partly because their progressive base backs them and partly because party activists seem hell-bent on opposing Trump at every step.

Trump knows how to sell his program to voters, and he’s devoting considerable time to doing it. He’s got an effective Press Secretary to help.

Trump and his team are taking full advantage of the new media landscape, populated with favorable podcasts, to offset predictable opposition from declining mainstream media.

Trump has established firm control over his administration, a dramatic difference from his first term, when he was undermined by opponents buried in the White House staff and Executive bureaucracies, especially the FBI and CIA.

Trump has secured complete control of the Republican Party and can punish most opposition within it, mostly by threatening to back primary opponents.

He is asserting newfound energy in the White House, following four years of a bumbling, inarticulate “basement president” in his dotage.

Finally, he is facing an opposition party without a leader or positive agenda, reduced to singing the old Groucho Marx song, “whatever it is, I’m against it.” It is not a winning tune.

Those are powerful assets, and Trump must capitalize on them quickly if he is to succeed. 

Success means one thing above all: delivering results voters can feel.

Trump knows it. That’s why he prepared so carefully during his four years in exile, choosing both policy priorities and people he can trust for senior positions. Now, he’s acting decisively.

The Democrats are giving him a giant helping hand with their crazed, incoherent responses. Their most reviled politicians stand in front of the most reviled government agencies, striking poses in front of the cameras. They yell, “Trump is a fascist.” Lately, they’ve added a new buzzword: “constitutional crisis.”

Their volume is high but their public support is low. Voters want to give Trump a chance. Not forever, but for now. Polls show Americans favor Trump’s initial actions and are repelled by Democrats’ reflexive opposition, sheathed in crude language. If the president is to retain that support, he must deliver on key issues.

Democrats have compounded their problems by taking the unpopular side of prominent issues, such as immigration. Where Elon Musk finds government waste, they sling mud at him and defend the bureaucrats. They file lawsuit after lawsuit against Trump, even though voters rejected the last lawfare campaign. They are outraged, outraged at everything.

Trump’s avid supporters have responded in kind. They are especially harsh in denouncing court rulings against the Trump administration, which they call “a judicial coup by partisan judges.” It’s bullhorn versus bullhorn, not Lincoln versus Douglas.

Whatever the merits of these early judicial rulings, they pose a political trap for Trump in two ways. First, they block his actions, at least temporarily, and so prevent him from delivering results to voters. Second, and far more important, they tempt him to ignore the rulings.

Ignoring court rulings would be a grave error, politically and constitutionally. Voters rightly believe presidents should respect decisions by federal judges, even when the voters themselves disagree with those decisions and think the judges are biased. Democrats would pounce, saying the president’s actions confirm their basic line of attack: “Trump is a dictator, not a legitimate constitutional leader.” The mainstream media would amplify that narrative.

Americans consider respect for judicial decisions a fundamental presidential responsibility. Presidents are welcome to attack adverse rulings as biased and unjustified. They are certainly welcome to appeal those rulings to higher courts. What they are not welcome to do is ignore the rulings. They will pay a high political price if they do.

The language surrounding all these disputes is nasty. Public forums are polluted with ad hominem attacks: crude epithets masquerade as coherent arguments. Each side labels the other as a danger to democracy and truly believes it.

President Trump’s response to these angry tirades is fascinating. Most presidents would mouth soothing platitudes about compromise, unity, and restoring goodwill. Not Trump. His pitch is that Americans will come together when his policies succeed.

That’s a more honest answer than the usual claptrap. It won’t satisfy his rabid opponents, of course. Nothing would. But it does appeal to the vast middle of the U.S. electorate. They yearn for a more competent government, a growing economy, higher real wages, reduced inflation, a secure border, and fewer fentanyl deaths. They want violent gang members deported, not protected in “sanctuary cities.” They want a president who can deliver those results.

Democrats, sinking in a pit of despair, can only claw back by formulating a positive agenda and promoting it effectively. They need to explain why they oppose some (but not all) Trump proposals. They need to stop positioning themselves as enraged, irrational, immovable obstacles, who take the wrong side of issues most Americans favor. It’s not going well, but that could change.

Those are the ink blots on the walls of our politics today. It’s a Rorschach test, and Americans will take it the next time they go to the polls.

The Great American State Fair could be the best Trump spectacle yet

We mustn’t let the policy whiplash of the new administration’s first few months distract from what could be the best Trump spectacle yet: the Great American State Fair which will descend on the Iowa State Fairgrounds on Memorial Day 2025 and conclude on July 4, 2026, when the United States of America turns 250 years old.

In the very early days of his second stint as president, I listened to Trump lay out his vision for America and was struck with a thought so brilliant, it turns out Trump had already had the same idea himself.

“The golden age of America begins right now,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put America first… And our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous and free.”

“A golden age of America.”

The phrase brought to my mind visions of Gatsby-esque decadence entwined with McDonald’s Golden Arches. And then — a golden lightbulb. Obviously we must bring back the world’s fair. What better way to prove to the rest of the globe that America is back in a Big Way than by making everyone else come all the way to the U-S-of-A so we can rub their noses in our achievements?

That is, after all, what I think world’s fairs were traditionally all about. My mother attended the 1964 New York World’s Fair as a nine-year-old. She recalls taking a bus from her grandparents’ house in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, to the big city because the fair “was a big deal.” She also remembers being “exposed to different cultures” and thinks the event may have even inspired her love of foreign foods — something that forces me to consume way-too-hot Thai cuisine on Mother’s Day and her birthday each year.

“It’s the biggest thing I’d ever seen, coming from a small town,” my mom told me. It was “eye-opening.” The world’s fair “expanded my horizons,” she added, and “inspired me to want to travel in the future.”

Donald Trump is older than my mother by a few years, and a world’s fair memory is, I assume, the reason he promised in May 2023 for “the best of all time… most spectacular birthday party” for the US planned by the “Salute to America 250” taskforce.

Trump pledged to “work with all fifty governors, Republican and Democrat alike” to create “a unique one-year exhibition featuring pavilions from all fifty states.” (Talk about party politics!) The Great American State Fair will “host millions of visitors from around the world” who will come to the heartland of America to experience the glory of every state in the union, he said.

Trump’s vision for the Great American State Fair also includes “major sporting contests for high-school athletes,” “great athletes, wonderful athletes from fantastic high schools” who will compete in the Patriot Games and showcase “the best of American skills, sportsmanship and competitive spirit.”

Trump also promised to sign an executive order to bring back our National Garden of American Heroes, “which we want to build very badly,” and to commission artists for the first 100 statues to populate this new statuary park. He’s also planning to invite citizens and leaders from around the world to visit the United States in honor of our 250th anniversary — “it’s gonna be great” — and advised America’s tourism industry to “get ready” because “we’re going to have a lot of people coming; it will be a record year.”

One of my mother’s most vivid memories of the 1964 New York World’s Fair is the non stop playing of “It’s a Small World After All.” Walt Disney had designed exhibits for the fair and then adapted that mind-numbing song to his “permanent world’s fair” housed in the Epcot Center.

Past world’s fairs have also produced elements that have gone on to become permanent parts of world culture: the Eiffel Tower was constructed for the 1889 World’s Fair; the to-scale replica of the Parthenon hang- ing out in downtown Nashville, Tennessee was built for the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition; and Seattle’s Space Needle is a byproduct of the 1962 world’s fair. The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Chicago, is where the Ferris wheel, the automatic dishwasher, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and the zipper made their debut.

So far this year, America is killing it on the world stage, and it’s no surprise that Trump, the OG influencer who made a name for himself by plastering his brand all over everything, is pushing America to become the international influencer.

“Together we will build it, and they will come,” Trump said of the Great American State Fair. And I hope they do.

Is Starmer about to finally increase defence spending?

There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth. Only three weeks ago, Sir Keir Starmer was considering delaying increasing the United Kingdom’s defence budget until the next decade. ‘Whitehall sources’, a catch-all term of varying reliability, said that the Prime Minister regarded the political costs of cutting public expenditure elsewhere as too great: accordingly, defence, which everyone professes to believe is important but few are willing to prioritise, would have to wait.

Now the mood music has changed. The Sunday Times reports that Starmer intends to overrule Rachel Reeves and the Treasury in their insistence on no additional expenditure. Instead, the Prime Minister will hold to his party’s manifesto commitment to ‘set out the path to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence’. The latest iteration of the Whitehall source said:

In the end, it’s the Prime Minister’s decision on national security… the defence and security review will still do what we needed to do.

If this new steer proves to be accurate, it is welcome. The armed forces desperately need that increase in resources to try to make good a worrying number of capability gaps.

Nevertheless, we should not celebrate riotously. ‘Setting out a path’ to spending 2.5 per cent is meaningless until we know how long that path is. It should also be noted that this amount really is a bare minimum: service chiefs are reportedly pressing for 2.65 per cent, which is still modest.

The readiness of the armed forces is so poor that 2.5 per cent will allow little more than restoring the status quo, letting the Ministry of Defence to fulfil the commitments we have made and deliver the assets we claim to have available. That additional spending must start immediately, because the armed forces are currently stretched beyond endurance in a number of areas.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

What Trump got right in his State of the Union address

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s reality-show State of the Union speech

Blake Neff

The unfathomable depths of blue-state fraud

If Starmer does overrule his chancellor, he will have been prompted in part by the stark messages delivered last week by US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, and underlined by President Trump and Vice-President Vance. Between them, they have made it clear that Europe must contribute much more to its own security and that the ultimate safety net of American military might can no longer be taken for granted. As Hegseth said, the United States will no longer ‘tolerate an imbalanced relationship’ with Europe in defence spending. He added that ‘safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of Nato’.

Donald Trump’s devotees will point to the transformative effect of his bullish, no-nonsense rhetoric and argue that his brutal honesty has forced European countries to confront the uncomfortable truth that they must spend substantially more money on defence. Just like his angry outburst about ‘delinquents’ at the Nato summit in Brussels in July 2018, they will argue, it has taken the shock of Trump’s unapologetic candour to force the alliance to take action rather than simply promise it.

There is undoubtedly a twist of truth to that hypothesis. But even if the Treasury is forced to give the Ministry of Defence more money than it had originally planned, this is not a story of happy-ever-after. America’s announced strategic reorientation was never a tool to nudge the defence budgets of her allies upwards by a few tenths of a percentage point, but a brutally self-interested reordering of priorities.

If European Nato members face not only a significant drawdown of American forces – US Europe Command currently has more than 100,000 personnel deployed – but also the US’s decision to effectively opt out of Article 5’s collective security obligations, they will have to rethink their military commitments from first principles. Trump has spoken publicly of expecting Europe to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence, a number probably snatched impulsively from the ether; but for most Nato members that would mean more than doubling their current budgets.

Privately, European leaders admit that the United States pays for something like half of Nato’s overall capabilities. If Sir Keir Starmer is siding with the heads of the armed forces against the parsimonious, Gradgrindian Treasury mandarins, it is the first step of a very long journey.

Many now believe the world is currently more dangerous than during the Cold War. Before the so-called ‘peace dividend’ was cashed after 1990, the UK spent 4 per cent of its GDP on defence and maintained armed forces of just over 310,000 personnel. Today, the number is less than half that. Technology means that the same kind of lethality could now be achieved with fewer personnel, but it still hints at the quantum we might have to consider.

Rejecting the Treasury’s preferred level of expenditure would be a welcome line in the sand, but the leadership and influence to which ministers have openly aspired needs a transformation in defence spending and effective use of resources by the MoD. This must be the first step with which the proverbial 1,000-mile journey begins.

Europe should listen to America’s uncomfortable truths

The response in Europe to J.D Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday was one of predictable outrage. Media outlets described it as a ‘rant’ or a ‘sermon’, and politicians and diplomats queued up to criticise the vice-president of America. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, accused the Trump administration of ‘try[ing] to pick a fight with us, and we don’t want to a pick a fight with our friends’.

Apparently, there were ‘dry laughs’ from some of the audience when Vance talked about ‘shared’ values. European diplomats have laughed at Trump before, notably in 2018 at the UN General Assembly, when he warned that ‘Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.’

The dry laughs and indignation in Munich soon abated, as news broke on Saturday afternoon of another deadly attack by an immigrant; this one in the quiet Austrian town of Villach, where a Syrian reportedly laughed as he fatally stabbed a 14-year-old and wounded several others. As I wrote hours before the attack, living in Europe has become a lottery: will it be me in the wrong place at the wrong time when a ‘Westernophobe’ goes berserk?

The continent’s disastrous immigration policy was just one of several areas in which Vance ripped Europe apart in Munich. He also highlighted Europe’s failure to invest in its defence, commenting ‘that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence’.

In ‘sermonising’ to Europe about its reluctance to spend money on defence, Vance was continuing an American tradition that began during the presidency of George W Bush.

In a speech in November 2002 in Prague, Bush declared that Nato needed to adapt to new threats and this would require every member to ‘make a military contribution to that alliance. For some allies, this will require higher defence spending.’

This never materialised in most cases, to the regret of Bush who, at his last Nato summit in 2008, said that ‘a strong NATO Alliance also requires a strong European defence capacity. So at this summit, I will encourage our European partners to increase their defence investments’.

When Barack Obama became president in 2009 his administration took a more aggressive line towards Europe. In a speech in February 2010, Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Nato faced ‘very serious, long-term, systemic problems’.

These had been caused, explained Gates, by ‘the demilitarisation of Europe, where large swathes of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with’.

Noting that only five of Nato’s 28 members had hit their target of spending two percent of GDP in defence, Gates warned that Europe’s unwillingness to invest in defence might be a ‘temptation to miscalculation and aggression’ by hostile states.

And how did Europe respond to Gates’ warning? In most cases it decreased spending in the decade that followed. Germany’s spending went from 1.35 per cent of GDP in 2010 to 1.20 per cent in 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected president for the first time.

In the same period, France’s spending fell from 1.96 per cent to 1.79 per cent ; Britain’s from 2.48 per cent to 2.18 per cent and Italy’s from 1.35 per cent to 1.12 per cent. Overall, Europe’s spending from 2010 to 2016 dropped from 1.63 per cent to 1.45 per cent of GDP.

Obama tried to whip Europe into line, admonishing EU countries in 2014 in a speech in which he declared that there ‘is a certain irreducible commitment that countries have to make if they’re serious about NATO and the defence alliance.’

Most popular

Roger Kimball

What Trump got right in his State of the Union address

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s reality-show State of the Union speech

Blake Neff

The unfathomable depths of blue-state fraud

America, which spent 4.2 per cent of its GDP on defence between 2009 and 2013, was beginning to lose patience with Europe, added Obama. ‘We don’t expect every country to duplicate exactly what we do,’ he said, but ‘we can’t have a situation in which the United States is consistently spending over three percent of our GDP on defence, much of that focused on Europe….and Europe is spending, let’s say, one percent. The gap becomes too large.’

That gap has remained large. In the first year after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the USA committed approximately €43 billion in military aid, more than Europe combined. A few European nations have pulled their weight, like the Czech Republic, whose contribution was €566m. France, on the other, despite all the grandstanding of Emmanuel Macron, chipped in with €447m, despite it being five times the size of the Czech Republic.

France and Germany, who like to boast that they are the engine of the EU, embody the lazy, hypocritical, arrogant complacency of Europe in the 21st Century. Their presidents and chancellors like to lecture the world, from America to Africa, while consistently making bad decisions, whether it is migrant policy, Net Zero or defence spending.

Vance’s speech in Munich was neither a rant nor a sermon; it was a heart-to-heart from a concerned parent to their spoiled brat of a teenager. Uncomfortable truths were aired about where they were going wrong in their life. As Vance put it: it is time for Europe to ‘change course’ before it’s too late and they go off the rails for good.

Bill Gates’s memoir offers an oddly revealing look into the Microsoft founder’s psyche

In 2024, a Swiss company called FinalSpark claimed to have built the world’s first computer processor fired by human brain cells. To do this, the company evidently took small samples of living brain tissue, and — so the press release says — “connected them to specialized electrodes to perform computer processing and digital analog conversions to transform neural activity into digital information.”

Frankenstein undertones aside, the whole FinalSpark initiative raises the issue of how far a computer can be humanized, made not only to respond with factual accuracy but with something approaching emotional intelligence. The question has never met with a straightforward answer — and it looms over much of this memoir of the early life and times of Bill Gates, the prodigy (and on the evidence here, no martyr to false modesty) who went on to co-found Microsoft. Gates himself is the computer in this context; Source Code his attempt to render himself fully animate.

He’s partly successful. At times, the book seems like a collage, or a much-altered garment whose new seams don’t quite match up. Gates punctuates his narrative with frequent asides in the form of a potted social history of America of the 1950s and 1960s, touching on standard tropes of Eisenhower-era conformity and Vietnam-induced dislocation. The overall effect is like looking through the pinhole of a souvenir depicting the changing fashions of the day — or watching one of those flickering March of Time newsreels with the strident musical score and bombastic narration. These asides, which interrupt an otherwise fluent narrative, are not well enough developed to be more than a distraction; you sense a somewhat labored attempt to introduce a wider context for the comparative rags-to-extreme riches trajectory that lies at the heart of the story.

On the other hand, some of the dynamics of the Gates family as young Bill experienced it are well done, and the account bears the imprint of a true writer. There is plenty of the depiction of internal struggle by which such a book stands or falls — and Gates’s surprisingly wry humor supplies a welcome counterweight to his growing, less-easily-communicable fascination with programming languages and machine code. Source Code is really a book about perseverance in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds: we tend to forget that there was nothing inevitable about a computer in every pocket when Gates got started. That’s what is most affectingly human here.

Born in Seattle in 1955, Gates was the only son of a successful lawyer father and a fiercely competitive, card-playing mother who served on several corporate boards. His ancestry was a colorful tapestry of English, German, Scots and Irish. Small for his age and bullied as a child, he compensated between rapidly alternating manic exuberance and an introversion that might today land him on the autism spectrum. “I was different,” Gates writes, reasonably enough, of his time at elementary school. “When something caught my attention, I might leap up from my seat, frantically raise my hand, or shout out an answer. I wasn’t trying to be disruptive; my mind simply shifted easily into a state of unrestrained exhilaration… I felt like I didn’t fit in with the other kids.” A few pages further on, we are shown why. One show-and-tell day, most of his elementary-school classmates brought in musical instruments or innocuous mementos from family trips. Nine-year-old Bill produced a recently removed cow’s lung, still dripping in blood, the better to demonstrate the principle of oxygen transfer. “A little girl fainted,” he recalls with unfeigned pride.

Gates comes across as a child of his generation, albeit one always more concerned with the material opportunities opening up around him in the 1960s than with any hippie rhetoric about leading a more communal life. The first 200 pages of Source Code constitute an illuminating diversion from its final destination, which the author gives us straight. “I’ve been thinking about MicroSoft [sic] a lot tonight,” Gates, now a Harvard undergraduate, wrote to his childhood friend Paul Allen in May 1976, proposing they enter business together. “If one of us drops off the scene, we’ll work out how to split the income. But I don’t think it will be a problem… by then we’ll be hundred-thousanders anyway,” he predicted.

Along the way, we get vignettes of an intense family dynamic where competition and excellence were the rule, and free- wheeling individualism the exception. As Gates writes of the von Trapp-like Christmas Eve ritual involving Bill and his two sisters, “my mom presented everyone with matching pajamas she had chosen for that year. We all assembled in the hallway, and then we marched into the living room one by one according to age to open stockings that invariably contained one orange and one silver dollar apiece.” There’s surely a lesson there about the merits of thrift, conformity and routine that Gates has applied to good effect in his later life.

Gates’s one youthful relaxation was to go hiking in the dense Twin Peaks-esque country outside Seattle, running sequences of numbers through his head as he walked. There was a tragic upshot to this pursuit when the author’s childhood best friend, Kent Evans, was killed in a climbing accident at the age of seventeen. Gates dealt with the blow by throwing himself into a summer of twelve-hour coding sessions in his high-school computer room, sleeping on an army cot set up on the deserted campus. “I’ve consistently dealt with loss by avoiding it… setting my focus on a distraction that fully engages my mind,” he writes.

That same single-mindedness is much on display here. “I’ve always possessed the ability to hyperfocus,” Gates admits at one point in his story.

But there are also welcome moments of nicely judged comic reminiscence, in which the author’s obsession with accumulating knowledge is juxtaposed with more recognizably adolescent behavior, among them the description of the future co-founders of Microsoft dumpster-diving in the alley behind a local computer shop where they spent much of their free time.

Paul boosted me up and held my legs as I sorted through the dregs of the day — Styrofoam cups and food scraps — [until] I found a thick stack of papers filled with columns of numbers. Taking it inside, we spread it out on the table. Jackpot! It was instructions for portions of the PDP-10 computer’s operating system. Those instructions — the source code — were off-limits to us. That crumpled and coffee-stained paper was the most exciting thing we’d ever seen.

It’s an arresting image: one of the great information-technology entrepreneurs of the twentieth century holding the other one upside down by his ankles over a pile of putrid detritus, and the sheer joy of a kind other youths might have reserved for a half-full bottle of wine or a well-thumbed copy of Playboy.

As the title promises, this is a book about beginnings. Readers hoping for a story about the fledgling 1960s computer industry full of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll may be disappointed by the result. The first two are barely mentioned, and rock comes in only vicariously through Allen, a serious Jimi Hendrix fan. On the other hand, there’s reassuring evidence that the author is quite self-aware enough to see the faintly ludicrous side of a childhood and adolescence largely dedicated to the pursuit of computer code.

At his best, Gates proves a clever, warm, observant, fluent storyteller with an ability to make us simultaneously admire and mildly pity him. Of course he made it big, to say the least, acquiring Croesus-like wealth along the way. But even as a child he was hostage to one of those minds that never leave their owner alone, that distance him from all but a few of the similarly endowed: driven, talented and imaginative, they acknowledge no law but their own.

In the end, Gates proved even more monomaniacal than the relatively freewheeling Paul Allen. For all their shared childhood adventures, there could ultimately be only one winner in the hardheaded business world. When the time came for them to formally incorporate their company, Gates told his guitar-playing friend that he wanted a 64:36 split in his own favor. “I feel bad now that I pushed him,” he writes, “but at the time I felt that accurately reflected the commitment Microsoft needed from each of us.” Don’t pity Allen too much, though: he was worth $20 billion when he died in 2018.

Anyone who’s interested in the origins and genesis of the information-technology revolution, as well as those who are curious about the mindset that makes leaders out of some of us and followers of the rest will profit from reading Source Code. The sequel, or sequels, promise to be even more illuminating.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

Romantasy, the hot new literary genre du jour

A friend recently found himself trapped on a plane next to a young woman reading a Kindle bedecked with stickers of dragons and pointy-eared, hunky men. The font size was so large it was impossible not to see the sexually explicit text. He observed, “I was reading The Lord of the Rings; her book was more along the lines of I’m the Lord of Your Ring. I’ve never felt so uncomfortable.”

Welcome to the cultural phenomenon of romantasy — a newly mainstreamed trend fueled by TikTok, or rather BookTok. It’s a shame there isn’t room in the portmanteau name for “sex,” which is a crucial ingredient in the genre, made clearer in the alternative informal term “fairy porn.”

Romantasy is a blockbuster industry, netting publishers hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and so far, it’s been spearheaded by female American authors. Its leading light Sarah J. Maas, whose 2015 novel A Court of Thorns and Roses is considered the archetypal modern romantasy, has sold nearly 40 million copies.

Theoretically, I am the ideal romantasy reader. Loath to be a book snob, I am an enormous admirer of Jilly Cooper, and aged thirty-one, I regularly reread childhood fantasy classics such as the Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones. What could be better than a marriage of love and magic? But plowing through the oeuvres of Maas and other romantasy practitioners in my quest for the Cooper-Tolkien mashup I yearned for left me deeply disappointed.

The books are uniformly poorly written. “‘Give me everything,’ I breathed. He lunged, a beast freed of its tether,” is a typical Maas passage. Their worst aspects are ubiquitous: the faux-intimate use of the first-person narrative voice and the alternation between simplistic and verbose writing, for instance.

And as for the sex: romantasy novels don’t feature sex scenes; they revolve around them.

Consummation may not happen until the twentieth chapter, slow burn being a key romantasy trope, but the fantasy element is merely a vehicle for love and lust. It’s a far cry from Jilly Cooper, queen of the Eighties bonkbuster, whose sex scenes are clever, insightfully written and never feel gratuitous. In romantasy, however, phrases like “I pumped his length,” from Danielle L. Jensen’s A Fate Inked in Blood, should get medals for unerotic erotica. As a result, despite the exciting and titillating plot lines, I never felt truly immersed in an alternative magical universe, as I do when reading Philip Pullman or C.S. Lewis. I hated the sense that I was being told what to think and especially, to feel (namely, aroused).

Something tells me Spectator readers are unlikely to be making a beeline to their nearest Barnes & Noble to stock up on romantasy, but they may wonder: why are so many women reading it? One friend, who has developed a guilty addiction to the romance reading app Galatea, has an idea. Galatea, sister app of Inkitt, is big business, luring hundreds of thousands of readers to its ever-updating stories. Currently ranking above the New York Times in the Apple app store, it’s packed with basic romantic and erotic fiction, more often than not involving hunky werewolves.

I was initially amused by my friend’s lowbrow taste, but having learned how many women share it, I wondered whether women are seeking out hypermasculine fictional men because dominance and possessiveness have long ceased to be admirable traits in reality. In a post-Fifty Shades society, even fictional alpha men are to be frowned upon: Christian Grey is passé. But make an alpha male half-beast, and suddenly an animalistic, dominant nature is permissible. “If this guy weren’t a wolf,” says my friend, “it would not be OK. But he is, so it’s fine.”

The physique of a dragon rider or an immortal faerie also has a special appeal. Mortal men like to bulk up with protein shakes and post off-putting gym selfies. It’s so much sexier when their bulging biceps are a result of swinging a burning ax at their enemies.

Fantasy romances also contrast with today’s world, where looking for love has become admin, compartmentalized into apps to be scheduled and managed. Dates resemble job interviews, and the (illusion of) endless choice is draining. While people have begun fleeing dating apps like rats from a sinking ship — the stats don’t lie, it’s the end of days for swiping — we haven’t all started chatting to strangers. We’ve quit Hinge, but we’re still on our smartphones.

Romantasy is different: your fated mate appears, you have no choice in the matter, but conveniently, you love him back. “You’re mine and there’s nothing you can do about it,” can be an oddly comfort-ng message.

While I found myself frustrated by romantasy — on a literary level, I hasten to add — it is easy to understand its appeal. Romance plus fantasy is escapism squared, and the genre’s diverting and sensational plots, to say nothing of the beast-men and their rippling muscles, go a long way toward mitigating bad writing.

The televised versions of the series, tailored to appeal to both sexes, will undoubtedly be world-dominating. But until the Jilly Cooper of the genre arrives in a golden carriage, I’ve had enough of romantasy. I have the feeling I’ll be waiting a while.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

Europe cannot be surprised by Trump’s approach to Ukraine

There’s something about Donald Trump that sends Europeans mad. The President and Vladimir Putin agreed last week to commence talks about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine. From the hysterical reaction, you would have thought Trump had handed Putin the keys to Kyiv.

Shrill cries of surrender, betrayal and appeasement are premature; extremely difficult negotiations lie ahead, involving Ukraine, on the precise terms of any deal. And Putin himself has blinked by abandoning many of his pre-conditions for talks set out last year.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

What Trump got right in his State of the Union address

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s reality-show State of the Union speech

Blake Neff

The unfathomable depths of blue-state fraud

The mood among European security panjandrums at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference was fraught. European leaders claim to have been blindsided by Trump’s move, and shocked by the US defence secretary’s statement that ‘stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe’.

These claims are nonsense; Trump’s second-term plans to cut a deal with Putin over Ukraine and for the US to take a back seat in Europe emerged a year ago, not last week, and have been briefed to capitals since last November’s election. Europe didn’t listen or didn’t want to, or thought Trump would resile from his campaign rhetoric.

Europe is now panicking because it has grown accustomed to the US security comfort blanket, underinvested in defence for years, not heeded what Trump has been saying, nor prepared adequately for his second presidency. The consequences of this strategic misjudgement are now becoming clear.

On Nato, as part of its ongoing pivot to Asia, Trump’s advisers made clear that in his second presidency the US would step back from being the primary conventional security provider in Europe while remaining the ultimate nuclear guarantor. They assess that a much-weakened Russia is unable or willing to attack Nato. European manpower should be the primary bulwark of Europe’s frontiers which will end local free-loading and allow US forces to deter China.

Moreover, as part of a ‘Dormant Nato’, they see no further territorial enlargement of the alliance eastwards, which has long encouraged western Europe – including the UK – to disarm, and to become dependent on the US in eastern Europe.

On Ukraine, Trump doesn’t regard a ‘war in the far eastern reaches of Europe’ as being a core US strategic interest. The President, in the words of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, wants to hand the problem to Europe, with it ‘taking overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine’. European soldiers should keep the peace between Ukraine and Russia, and there will be reduced US assistance in the region. There are other demands too: no Ukrainian membership in Nato for the foreseeable future (which in any case is opposed by other European countries); no US combat troops in Ukraine (a US red line since the 1990s); Ukrainian elections; and a monitored ceasefire in place along the current front line. Other steps on reconstruction and restitution will then follow.

Although decried by some as giving unilateral concessions to Russia, Trump’s emerging strategy could still, as a former US Ambassador said, be the basis for a successful if unpalatable outcome. This all assumes that Putin actually wants peace, or can be coerced into it.

It was these approaches – on Nato and Ukraine – that Pete Hegseth unambiguously set out in Brussels. They are linked by a shared demand that ‘safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of Nato.’

Trump’s plans have gone down like a cup of cold sick. Although Europe may, as one senior Trump adviser put it, have already gone through the various stages of grief with Trump from denial, through anger, bargaining and now depression, it still finds itself again having to react, confronted by the results of its previous sloth. Waiting for Trump’s term to end in the hope for a change in direction is also unwise; US shift in focus on China is ‘generational and bi-partisan’.

Shaking off 30 years of cosy post-Cold War assumptions, steady disarmament, and increasing dependency on the US isn’t going to be an easy or popular task. European leaders haven’t explained the very real possibility of US disengagement with their publics, nor set out the likely need for defence spending to increase to rebuild defence capacity, plug US gaps or fill a new, enduring commitment to Ukraine.

Being mad at Trump and accusing him of perfidy may make us feel better but it won’t ensure European security or help Ukraine. President Macron is for once right: describing Trump’s return as an ‘electroshock’, Europe needs to ‘muscle up’ its defences.

The UK is no exception. Our armed forces are in a terrible state. Fraser Nelson wrote that, on defence, ‘Britain has come to specialise in rousing, unfunded words; heroic, undeliverable promises’. This government is no different, with Starmer’s emissaries to Munich still, despite US statements, trotting out its tired mantra about ‘setting out the path’ to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence when ‘economic circumstances’ allow.

Any ploy to kick any increase in defence spending into the long grass is clearly obsolete. Starmer said in Kyiv in January that ‘peace through strength must be more than words, it’s got to be actions’. Trump has called his bluff.

Inside Thomas Pynchon’s most underrated novel

Atop the Almaden Tower in downtown San Jose — the world headquarters of Adobe Systems Inc. — sits a singular art installation. Four amber wheels rotate every few seconds in a seemingly innocuous and frankly nonsensical digital display. The installation, known as the “San Jose Semaphore,” is the brainchild of the data-driven media artist Ben Rubin and first appeared — or began transmitting — in August 2006 to the mass bamboozlement of passersby. What was going on, they cried? Was it that most millennial of things — a sign?

For those less likely to be beguiled by some concealed piece of chicanery, the circles were little more than frivolous decoration, another example of Adobe splashing the cash on some geometric garnishing. But in reality, the whole project — visible throughout the San Jose skyline — was a cipher, a secret code hidden in plain sight. It may not have been a sign, at least not the otherworldly sort, but this carefully worked-out hieroglyphic message did indeed have a deeper and greater meaning.

Two research scientists eventually figured out the puzzle, which took them six whole weeks: the entire text of Thomas Pynchon’s novella, The Crying of Lot 49, a book once described as “a metaphysical thriller in the form of a pornographic comic strip,” was being broadcast across the city. The joke couldn’t have been more apt. Pynchon’s novel, which turns sixty next year, is itself jam-packed with symbols and shibboleths, its plot orbiting around a breadcrumb trail of “gemlike clues.” Although its author, as publicity averse as ever, offered no comment on Adobe’s activities, it is tempting to assume that he may have been rather amused.

In any case, Adobe’s elaborate digi-homage was a far cry from The Crying of Lot 49’s analog origins. Excerpts of the novel first appeared in the men’s style magazine Esquire in 1965 and the following year in the racier, Playboy-adjacent publication Cavalier; a playful reminder, perhaps, to bespectacled armchair theorists that cerebral literature need not exclude a certain level of va-va-voom. The book in toto is tremendous fun. Its heroine, Oedipa Maas, is a young California housewife who admirably tries to “coquette her way out” of trouble: a lesson to us all there, frankly. One day, to her surprise, she is named executrix of her shady ex-boyfriend’s estate following his sudden death. Confronted with myriad riddles which may or may not add up to reveal a centuries-old conspiracy surrounding an underground postal system depicted only by a mysterious muted post-horn symbol and the initials W.A.S.T.E, Oedipa embarks on an increasingly paranoid quest of discovery. Unsurprisingly, it all gets pretty existential: “here would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth… the truth’s numinous beauty or only a power spectrum.”

If a mystery involving literary discrepancies, a Jacobean revenge play, a thermodynamic thought experiment known as “Maxwell’s Demon,” and the study of philately sounds like your kind of divertissement, then Pynchon’s your man. As he once declared, “Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.” If you have yet to encounter this wildly entertaining, if baffling, story, I urge you all, freaks and geeks, to pick it up immediately, and not just because it’s a stylistic triumph.

Pynchon’s merits as a writer have long been debated, in large part because his reclusiveness has meant that he refuses to bang the publicity drum his peers so ardently thwack. To some he’s a glissading exhibitionist whose entire oeuvre is one big pat on his own back for being so smart. You suspect that the invention of Wikipedia back in 2001 was positively orgasmic for such a cross-allusive figure.

Part of the pleasure of reading Pynchon is discovering the way his expansive prose hinges on intense historical, theoretical and scientific complexities, yet still feels as though it’s a product of a dream blunt rotation. He’s an intellectual omnivore made accessible to his readers through a diet, as his friend once put it, of “pot, coffee and Kools.” He’s as philosophical as Borges and as street as Shaggy Rogers. No wonder he’s been a three-time guest on The Simpsons. An oddball who understands the everyman, he once valiantly refused to voice a fat joke about Homer Simpson. Instead, he faxed them a polite note saying, “Sorry, guys. Homer is my role model and I won’t speak ill of him.”

The Crying of Lot 49 is often hawked by Pynchon fans, a tad optimistically perhaps, as the gateway drug to Pynchon’s peculiar universe. Running at a slim 140-or-so pages, it’s considered Pynchon-lite, a digestible tease of what’s to come in 1973’s seriously mammoth Gravity’s Rainbow, 1997’s Mason & Dixon and 2006’s Against the Day.

In reality, Pynchon’s later medium-sized detective novels, 2009’s Inherent Vice and 2013’s Bleeding Edge, are far more palatable places to start: by then, he’d taken pity on his readers. Inherent Vice follows a hippie private investigator looking into the disappearance of a real-estate magnate while the latter centers upon the crash of the dot-com bubble and the events of 9/11. Inherent Vice was even filmed by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2014. Both are more accessible than The Crying of Lot 49 which adds a dash of Hitchcock to its Big Lebowski vibe. But don’t let this put you off. Crying may be Pynchon’s shortest work to date, but the lines of inquiry pursued in the novel benefit from being far more serpentine and conceptual than his later works. “Shall I project a world?” Oedipa ponders at one point, inverting Prufrock’s anxiety: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” Increasingly consumed by the strange evidence before her, Oedipa’s descent into paranoia is as affecting as it is disturbing. As readers, we’re disposed to be on her side, even when “she’s lost her bearings” and we’re told her “isolation is complete.” This is partly because we too believe in the power of conspiracy. Perhaps it is human nature to hope an idea, no matter how ludicrous, might just be real after all. It couldn’t be “just some whim,” could it?

Such probing questions are all the more relevant today. Contemporary American life is basically a pick ’n’ mix of conspiratorial thinking: QAnon, Pizzagate, lizard people, AI takeovers, subliminal advertising, Elon Musk in excelsis. Without taking on weight it cannot bear, the book expertly teeters on this philosophical knife edge. Which way lies madness? And which lies truth? Where is the line between intuition and delusion? And can elegant, philosophically rich playfulness vie with — let us be frank here — the higher bullshit to make for an unforgettable jeu d’esprit?

Its composition befitted the finished result. Pynchon drafted the majority of the book while in Mexico, later saying he was “so fucked up while I was writing it that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can’t figure out what I could have meant.”

In the introduction to his 1984 short-story collection, Slow Learner, he expressed disappointment with his output, and suggested that it was wrong to market The Crying of Lot 49 as a “novel,” since at the time of writing he’d “forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up until then.” Writers are, of course, their own harshest critics; the novella is now taught in universities as a postmodern classic. He is unlikely to make any public comment but it is tempting to wonder whether Pynchon has changed his mind about the book. British literary critic Frank Kermode said it was “the best American novel [he’d] read since the war.” Pynchon had in fact intended his hefty 770-page epic, Mason & Dixon (focusing upon the eponymous surveyors of the line separating the historical North and South), to be his paean to America.

Most would agree, however, that The Crying of Lot 49 outshines its sibling on this front; it’s more than an offbeat period piece. And its unique and bizarre afterlife shows the legacy of Pynchon’s America in motion. Glance around and you may just spot its iconic W.A.S.T.E symbol plastered on a toilet cubicle or lamppost. Fans of the alt-rock band Radiohead will recognize the acronym as the name of their mailing list and web store. No doubt it’s lurking elsewhere in digital code.

Very few fictional worlds end up seeping into our real one, and those that do tend to echo an era’s hopes and fears in some fundamental way. All Pynchon’s work vividly possesses this prophetic quality, articulating anxieties about the internet age.

Sixty years ago, when word processors were only just hitting the shelves, Pynchon’s time-machine fiction lyrically predicted that ultra modern feeling of information overload, of “walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above… right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless.”

As Pynchon warned in a tongue-in-cheek 1984 essay for the New York Times, “Is it OK to Be a Luddite?”, “If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come — you heard it here first — when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology, and robotics all converge. Oboy.” That age, it would seem, is upon us. The cybernetic cacophony hasn’t abated, it’s only grown louder. Just ask all those monkeys with chips in their brains.

If Oedipa’s tantalizing odyssey teaches us anything, it’s that there might always be “another mode of meaning behind the obvious.” Pynchon’s greatest legacy, especially true in America, is perhaps that paranoia isn’t just a trap; it can also be a map. Decipher it and, as with the San Jose Semaphore, you might just uncover a whole new world of meaning.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.

David Lodge, the master of Anglo-American campus humor

“Literature is mostly about having sex and not about having children.” So said the British novelist, occasional screenwriter and literary critic David Lodge, who died at the beginning of 2025 at the age of eighty-nine. Lodge, who had suffered from encroaching deafness for several decades, had not, in truth, been a major literary figure for a considerable period before his death.

This retreat into obscurity had not been helped by a trio of memoirs, beginning with 2015’s Quite a Good Time To Be Born, which perplexed critics — including this one — with their dour, downbeat and decidedly un-humorous tone. Few would have known, from reading them, that their author had once been regarded as one of the late twentieth century’s most accomplished comic novelists.

Yet if Lodge gave up novel-writing, the industry gave him up, too. With the noble exception of Paul Murray, and to some extent the British novelist Jonathan Coe, contemporary publishing now shies away from the kind of risk-taking, provocative and funny writing that Lodge specialized in throughout his heyday. This began in 1965 with his third novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down, and continued until 2004 with his last significant fiction, Author, Author, in which he fictionalized Henry James’s failed attempt to stage a play in London’s West End.

Forty years as a successful bestselling writer is a considerable achievement — then as now — but Author, Author was compromised by the near-simultaneous publication of Colm Tóibín’s more successful James novel The Master, and a disappointed Lodge made his feelings of frustration clear: even those disposed to be sympathetic to him murmured about sour grapes.

However, for an American readership, Lodge’s greatest reputation lies in two distinct, not unrelated, directions. The first was that he was, like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, a Catholic novelist par excellence. The major difference among them was that Waugh wore his Catholicism with the arch zeal of the convert, and Greene used the literary (and autobiographical) complications of his faith as a kind of “get out of jail free” card when it came to questions of purgatory, damnation and the rest. Lodge, by contrast, took his Catholicism deeply seriously, and it is no exaggeration to suggest that it was as important for his writing as Philip Roth’s Jewishness was for his.

Lodge’s first novel, 1960’s The Picturegoers, established the then-twenty-five-year-old writer as an unusually perceptive and compassionate observer of Catholic values — he himself had observed a long, chaste courtship with his wife Mary, and remarked, “I had no prospects, no job, little money but it never bothered me. We didn’t really want children at the point they came along, but we got on with it” — and also as someone who specialized in serious comedy. His humor was rich, often dark and laugh-out-loud funny, but it was also based in matters of the heart and the spiritual, rather than on slipping on figurative banana skins.

He would refine this viewpoint in what many consider his masterpiece, 1980’s Souls and Bodies, which won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction. It dealt with the travails and religious difficulties of a group of friends, tracing their lives from university into middle age. There are relatively few comic novels that seriously consider the effects of Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae, which famously forbade contraception as against the teachings of the Church, but Lodge managed to absorb the moral and social complications of the papal edict in a wise, funny and deeply affecting book that should be better known than it is today.

For sheer entertainment value, though, it is Lodge’s “campus trilogy” of Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work that can hardly be bettered. American readers, especially, should take enormous delight in the first book, which is half a century old this year and still feels as fresh and hilarious in its satire on both British and American academia as when it was published. It revolves around the academic and sexual shenanigans that ensue when two professors, the ever-so-British Philip Swallow and the none-more-American Morris J. Zapp, swap places at their respective universities for six months.

Swallow hails from Rummidge (a thinly disguised caricature of Birmingham University, the red-brick institution where Lodge spent his academic life) and Zapp is a leading light of Plotinus in Euphoria, a dead-on parody of Berkeley in California. Swallow is bumbling, bewildered and bespectacled; Zapp — based on the literary critic and professor Stanley Fish, author of The Trouble with Principle — is a cynical and far more sexually assured figure. His prowess is stated early on when Lodge writes of him, “‘Jehovah…’ he would murmur out of the side of his mouth to girls who inquired about his middle name. It never failed; all women longed to be screwed by a god.” This prowess is furthered when Zapp successfully seduces Swallow’s wife, Hilary. However, by that point, Swallow has thrived at the aptly named Euphoria; he has (accidentally) slept with Zapp’s liberated daughter Melanie and, more intentionally, had carnal relations with Zapp’s frustrated, infuriated wife, the equally aptly named Désirée. Hilarity, genuinely, ensues.

The campus novel, as it became known, was a relatively recent innovation when Lodge wrote Changing Places. In Britain, Kingsley Amis’s great Lucky Jim more or less popularized the genre in 1954, but he was pipped to its invention by Mary McCarthy, whose 1952 book The Groves of Academe took a more somber approach to the lives and, indeed, loves of faculty members. Somehow, McCarthy, Amis and various other exponents of the campus novel made it seem de rigueur for all academics to be having wild and passionate affairs with one another, something that has continued in literature ever since. Novels as eclectic as Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys or J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace have all taken it as read that, if you specialize in the study and meaning of literature, you will be a shameless horndog who is unable to resist the considerable temptations that students and fellow academics alike appear to offer.

As someone whose time in academe ended a couple of decades ago, I am ill-placed to testify as to the verisimilitude or otherwise of these fictitious representations of university, which often arrived laden with the taint of wishful thinking, but Changing Places offers considerably more sophistication than simple bedroom farce. Lodge himself spent a year at Berkeley in 1969 as an associate professor, allowing him to observe the tail-end of the Sixties from an American perspective, and his depiction of Euphoria is in equal parts affectionate and satirical, as the buttoned-up Swallow becomes progressively, happily undone by the opportunities and indulgences that California offers, from free love to outsized portions of deeply unhealthy food.

Still, if Swallow has found an earthly paradise of sorts, Zapp is less enamored by Rummidge. Lodge finds great comic capital in examining his home city and milieu from the perspective of an outsider. In one of my favorite moments in the novel, he brings together an academic’s detached insightfulness and mid-Seventies British broadcasting with hilarious results:

Waking early in his Rummidge hotel, he had flicked on his transistor and listened to what he took, at the time, to be a very funny parody of the worst kind of American AM radio, based on the simple but effective formula of having non-commercial commercials. Instead of advertising products, the disc jockey, pouring out a torrent of drivel generally designed to convey what a jolly, amusing and lovable guy he was, also advertised his listeners, every one of whose names he seemed determined to read out over the air, plus, on occasion, their birthdays and car registration numbers.

Now and again he played musical jingles in praise of himself or reported, in tones of unremitting jollity, multiple accidents on the freeway. There was almost no time left for playing records. It was a riot. Morris thought it was a little early in the morning for satire, but listened entranced. When the program finished and was followed by one of exactly the same kind, he began to get restive. The British, he thought, must be gluttons for satire: even the weather forecast seemed to be some kind of spoof, predicting every possible combination of weather for the next twenty-four hours without actually committing itself to anything specific, not even the existing temperature.

It was only after an authentic four successive programs of almost exactly the same formula — DJ’s narcissistic gabble, lists of names and addresses, meaningless anti-jingles — that the awful truth dawned on him: Radio One was like this all the time.

In person, Lodge was a severe, even stern presence. If students had signed up to his literature courses at Birmingham in the expectation of riotous laughter, they would have been disappointed. Yet he was also the man who invented, in Changing Places, the literary parlor game Humiliation, in which academics are invited to name the most famous book that they have never read. (The winner, a senior faculty member who comes forward with Hamlet, is duly fired.)

This tension between rigor and ribaldry, high moral ideals and the low comedy of human nature, makes Lodge’s novels not just entertaining period pieces but endlessly compelling and hilarious examinations of transatlantic mores. He loved academia, for all its flaws, and must have been horrified by its headlong rush to late-period, end-of-days wokery. He once said, “Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn’t have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.”

At a time when individual thought and free expression are more threatened than ever, Lodge’s novels, looking back to a happier, more open-minded time, seem a wishful encapsulation of a vanished Eden — in Rummidge as much as Euphoria. We can laugh at them — and we should — but we can learn from them, too.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.