Trump

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

The rise of reverse gaslighting

We live now in an age of reverse gaslighting. Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight — describes a process of psychological manipulation whose goal is to make ordinary people question their sanity. Reverse gaslighting, by contrast, aims to convince us that insane realities are perfectly normal. Imagine: practically the entire population quarantines itself because a couple of government bureaucrats tell them to. Everyone starts wearing little paper masks as patents of their capitulation and, secondarily, as badges of their virtue.

gaslighting
Spencer A. Klavan

How ‘woke’ hierarchy created an upper-class underclass

It was an uprising of “retards.” That’s what they called themselves, anyway. When followers of the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets organized en masse to buy shares of the video-game chain store GameStop, they did so in the self-deprecating spirit of very online weirdos. Since digital downloads had taken over the gaming market, billionaire hedge funders had “shorted” GameStop, meaning they’d bet on its brick-and-mortar model to fail. The company’s sudden windfall caused such panic among the good and the great that the ensuing furor ended in a congressional hearing. Impressive for a bunch of dorks who gleefully referred to themselves in meme-laden pep talks as “apes” and “autists.” In January 2021 this was a marquee event.

class
Jacob Heilbrunn

Reflecting on Trumpism in Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh  Over the past few decades, Pittsburgh has become the poster boy for industrial transformation, going from Steel City to shiny hi-tech hub. Butone thing that has not changed is the local argot. “I have landed among the Yinzers,” my friend Damir Marusic, who is an op-ed editor at the Washington Post, proudly texted me when he arrived in Pittsburgh. Marusic is a fast learner. “Yinzer” remains the endonym of preference in Pittsburgh, where it was derived more than a century ago from the second-person plural pronoun by Ulster immigrants and shared with the later blue-collar workers from Central and Eastern Europe who labored in the hulking mills along the Monongahela.

Pittsburgh
Geoff Hill

Modern-day slavery in Mauritania

In April 1864, the US Senate passed a bill that set in motion what would become the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Slavery was to be abolished. Seven months later, Union forces would burn Atlanta to the ground, a year after Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg marked the battle that began the South’s collapse and the April 1865 surrender of General Robert E. Lee and his Confederate army. The Civil War remains the bloodiest and most divisive conflict in American history with at least a million dead, including soldiers and civilians from both sides. You might think that given American history, if slavery had an in-your-face visibility anywhere on the planet, Congress would call for intervention by the UN, perhaps threaten to send in the Marines. Think again.

Mauritania

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

X and the return of the social-media sandbox

Elon Musk’s X, the social media site once known as Twitter, is a wasteland. It consists of uncontrolled pornography, crypto spambots, broken “mentions,” unpaid invoices for subscriptions, a useless search algorithm and unverified accounts spreading baseless conspiracy theories and being financially rewarded for juicing controversial or untrue content. It has become practically unusable as a functioning social media platform. But old Twitter, after what it had become, had to be absolutely and unequivocally destroyed for the sake of the future of open online discourse. The Jack Dorsey-Parag Agrawal iteration of Twitter had become part of an intelligence and corporate media censorship apparatus, which would spring into action against any user it viewed as an ideological opponent.

X

Sunday

Roger Kimball

Kangaroo courts and bills of attainder

I want to talk about two things in this column: bills of attainder and kangaroo courts. The two often go together. What is a “bill of attainder?” We get the term from English law. A person or persons whom the people in charge don’t like is “attainted.” Forget about due process, presumption of innocence, or any such quaint ideas. Bills of attainder worked through the untrammeled deployment of state power. To be accused was tantamount to being found guilty; common penalties included the abrogation of the right to own property, and, not infrequently, the right to life itself.

attainder
foreign policy
Ben Domenech

Where is the clarity in modern center-right foreign policy?

When Ohio senator J.D. Vance arrived at the Munich Security Conference in February, he had a clear message meant for the world: the Republican Party was no longer the party of Ronald Reagan. Standing outside the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, he informed reporters that he did not believe American support for combat against authoritarian regimes should extend to Ukraine — and that he would continue to oppose efforts to “increase the supply of weapons in Ukraine because we’ve already expended so many of our munitions and resources” to achieve a victory that he does not foresee. Vance’s bootstrap story is well-known — he’s a Marine veteran turned Yale Law grad turned venture capitalist made prominent by his bestselling Appalachia memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

butler
Mitchell Jackson

Who’s afraid of Judith Butler?

Gay icon Judy Garland. Folk queen Judy Collins. Now, we have the lesbian saint Judith Butler (as of 2020, they/them saint Judith Butler.) Once resigned to recognition on college campuses for their unreadable 1990 tome Gender Trouble, which posited that gender is a performance, the queer theorist and Berkeley professor took off as a mainstream hero in the past decade. Tumblr kids reposted quotes from their lengthy, poorly written academic work. New York magazine declared Butler a “pop celebrity.” In March, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Butler’s first commercial book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? Its prolonged roll-out aims to credit Butler for “birthing” the nonbinary and trans identities of the twenty-first century. It’s as much a publicity stunt as a book.

Thursday

Bill McMorris

How Covid amnesia spread through the right and left

In August 2020, the US Centers for Disease Control released new Covid testing guidelines, which called for increased vigilance in nursing homes and other hotbeds, while leaving hypochondriacs free to sodomize their noses to their hearts’ delight. The document sought to move away from mass testing for its own sake, which served the dual purpose of, first, generating panic-inducing headlines that could be used to justify lockdowns and drive cable TV ratings and, second, not doing a thing to protect the elderly. The Coronavirus Task Force led by Vice President Mike Pence had signed off on the change a week before in a situation room meeting without any objection from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases lead Anthony Fauci, as White House advisor Dr.

covid
trump
Ben Domenech

What will the new Trump foreign policy look like?

A month after the election shock of 2016, CBS’s John Dickerson sat down with the ninety-three-year-old Henry Kissinger to get his assessment of the incoming president. “Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen,” Kissinger pronounced, noting that many nations would have to weigh “their perception that [Barack Obama] basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessment of their necessities,” along with “a new president who is asking a lot of unfamiliar questions.” Given “the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it,” Kissinger added. “I’m not saying it will. I’m saying it’s an extraordinary opportunity.

Tuesday

Spectator Editorial

The 2024 campaign cage fight

The modern political observer has moved on from the idea that “all politics is local.” In our interconnected world, politics now comes down to sophisticated data analytics, nationwide donor networks and money that’s used to drive the narratives that take hold on 24/7 cable news or social media. “All politics is local” is the type of Rockwell-esque trope that wasn’t necessarily true even when the phrase debuted in 1932, let alone when former House speaker Tip O’Neill made it popular. But last year showed us that even old clichés are subject to a gritty reboot.

2024
Roger Kimball

The course of the American empire

In the 1830s, the English-born American artist Thomas Cole painted an ambitious sequence of five large rectangular canvases delineating “The Course of Empire.” He began with “The Savage State,” which depicts the rude life of humans before the advent of letters, domestication and permanent architecture. “The Arcadian or Pastoral State” is marked by harmony and some early accoutrements of civilization. “The Consummation of Empire,” at fifty-one inches by seventy-six inches, is a third larger than its fellows. Here we see a sun-drenched landscape transformed by a panoply of classical architecture counterpointed by bustling commerce and a triumphal, if overripe, stateliness. Next comes “Destruction.

empire
haley
Ben Domenech

The fall of Nikki Haley’s comet

In the waning days of 2023, the last weeks of the before-time — the moments before the Republican Party would inevitably crown the once and future king who rules upon high from Mar-a-Lago — the billionaire donor class of the Republican Party decided en masse that it would endorse a candidate in a final desperate attempt to block Donald Trump. They settled on Nikki Haley, the erstwhile South Carolina governor turned United Nations ambassador, whose star had risen oh-so-very slightly in early state polling, if you squinted hard enough. She would be their choice for a last stand against The Donald Redux, whose return they publicly claimed to fear and loathe as a threat to democracy while privately admitting they would unanimously support him. The question is: why?

president
Neal Pollack

How to jail a president

Of all the strange political things that may occur in what will be one of the stranger political years in history, one possibility stands out as the strangest. Donald Trump, who will almost certainly be the Republican presidential nominee, is also facing the possibility of a racketeering conviction that could send him to prison. So, how exactly do you jail a president? Trump’s most fervent opponents may find themselves disappointed. No one’s going to toss the Donald into some American equivalent of the Black Hole of Calcutta. And as much as people might want to shut him up, no one is going to hold him captive in a bare, dark cell with a Hannibal Lecter mask over his face. On the other hand, Trump’s most fervent supporters could find themselves disappointed as well.

Gallagher china ccp confucius institutes china
Daniel DePetris

How will the 2024 election impact US-China relations?

There was a time when the relationship between the United States and China had a bright future. While bilateral relations have never been particularly rosy since the two countries formally established diplomatic ties on January 1, 1979, US and Chinese leaders have long worked on the assumption that they had much to gain by deepening their cooperation and, if possible, expanding it to new heights. This was a widespread sentiment in Washington, reflected in speeches given by presidents from both parties. “I know there are those in China and the United States who question whether closer relations between our countries is a good thing,” President Bill Clinton told students at Beijing University in June 1998.

Wednesday

Spectator Editorial

The fight ahead in 2024

Are you desperate for a deal? Usually the start of a new year provides the patient ones among us the chance to snag a bargain in the January sales. Good things come to those who wait, the old adage goes. Yet 2024 seems set to offer us more of the same. The usual stalls are at the market — all of them trying to hawk shoddy wares to Americans. Take the primary process for our presidential elections, which kicks off in Iowa and New Hampshire this month. If the prognosticators are to be trusted, we are set for a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump. Biden’s approval rating doesn’t seem to be improving and the cries for him to drop out and let a younger candidate step in are still sounding — and they come from more and more prominent people every day.

2024
regime
Daniel McCarthy

The 2024 regime referendum

The 2024 election will be a referendum on Joe Biden, but it’s also a referendum on a regime. This is how both sides see it. Liberal democracy itself is at stake according to progressives. For Trump supporters, the question at issue is legitimacy of the Deep State. These are different names for the same thing: a leadership caste and its ideology of government. In practice, liberal democracy means a democracy in which liberals never lose power.

Tuesday

Bill McMorris

Was 2023 the year of the labor union?

It is only fitting that the low point of the American labor movement occurred in 2009, the Year of the Rat. The Great Recession may have started with Wall Street speculation in the housing market, but your average American had most likely never heard of Henry Lehman or his siblings until the day Dick Fuld drove the 150-year-old bank bearing their name into the ditch. But General Motors, Chrysler? Cars, even more than Hollywood, jazz and the semi-automatic rifle, are the quintessential American business. How could those get driven into the ground? As soon as freshly evicted homeowners finished packing the remains of their subprime split-levels into the backseats of their battered Tahoes, they went looking for culprits. They settled on the United Auto Workers.

labor

Friday

Roger Kimball

The changing season brings a change in politics

If you are paying attention, you know that nature is full of inklings and adumbrations. I am writing in New England in mid-September — and it was just about a week ago that a subtle change in the atmosphere proclaimed the advent of autumn. It was not just that the weather listed cooler; it was also that the entire sensory gestalt shifted. The world suddenly bristled with different smells and colors and sounds. Browns and yellows and reds were edging out summer greens in the leaves. The roads were carpeted with acorns. You knew that the world was confronting you with different prospects and expectations. Something similar happens in the world of politics. For a long time, a certain narrative reigns.

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woman
Bridget Phetasy

The new wave of woman hate

It was in the late 1990s, during then-President Bill Clinton’s scandal, when I first concluded that neither major political party actually cared about women. I watched — in horror — as the Democrats downplayed the allegations and defended Clinton’s actions rather than fully supporting Monica Lewinsky. Republicans exploited her testimony in order to discredit and weaken the president. Both parties used her to advance their own agendas at the expense of Lewinsky’s dignity and well-being. While the adults around me were concerned with the political fanfare, I only saw a young woman caught in the crossfire, enduring public scrutiny, humiliation and personal trauma while the media feasted on the spectacle.