American Spectator

One wife posted her husband’s private notes to their child on TikTok, and instead of praising the gesture, she criticized him for not meeting her expectations. This is one piece of a bigger phenomenon of spouses going on social media to demean and complain about their significant other, making the internet involved in an otherwise private marital conflict. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 241: TikTok Moms Are Defending and Normalizing Lindsay Clancy’s Behavior)  One day this woman will receive

Welcome back to the world of Mike Holman. If this is your first stop, here’s what you need to know: Mike Holman is the independent journalist, podcaster, and inveterate maker-of-enemies at the center of Scott McKay’s bitingly satirical thriller series — four novels (so far) chronicling one man’s habit of ending up in the middle of the very stories the rest of the media is too scared, too compromised, or too incurious to tell. Catch up on the whole series, read past episodes, and find links to ev

On Sep. 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people from many nations, including 24 Canadians. On the 25th anniversary, the people might recall the U.S. agency that failed to stop the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor in 1941. “At the CIA, our mission is to preempt threats and further U.S. national security objectives,” claims the secretive agency, whose budget is classified. Consider this acco

Thirty-four network shows premiered in the fall of 1966. Three became iconic — The Monkees, Mission: Impossible, and a science-fiction series unlike anything previously seen, and it wasn’t The Time Tunnel. The premise of the show was repeated every week in the opening narration by its lead character, Captain James T. Kirk, specifically his portrayer, the brilliant actor William Shatner. “These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to se

In 2023, I warned in The American Spectator that a new far-left dictatorship was closing in on Europe, referring to the extremist drift of Pedro Sánchez’s government in Spain. Beyond being bombarded with insults from social media trolls (three years earlier, I had revealed in the newspaper ABC that more than 40 percent of Pedro Sánchez’s social media followers were fake; draw your own conclusions), centrists and many right-wingers obsessed with moderation, the sort who always end up complicit in

You’ve heard this narrative out of Ohio over the weekend, right? That the Democrats’ candidate for governor of that state, Amy Acton, who’s in a close race with Vivek Ramaswamy at the moment, was attacked by a right-wing lunatic? Of course you have. It’s a really big deal — if you listen to the legacy corporate propaganda press. For example, The Hill… An armed man lunged at Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton (D) during a Canfield, Ohio, fair on Sunday, injuring

It has been a week since the announcement of the death of feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem, thus allowing plenty of time for reactions to pour in. Liberals have predictably gushed over the woman, while conservatives have taken their shots. I’ll resist sharing my strong disapproval of her views on abortion and the unborn. (READ: Scott McKay, “You Must Not Question Gloria Steinem. But I Do Have Questions.”) Amid all the remembrances, however, I was surprised to see reports on something I’ve persona

A new study found that 31 percent of Gen Z regrets casting their vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Consequently, Gen Zers are the most pessimistic about America’s future compared to previous generations. (READ MORE: From DSA to Fishback: Why Young Voters Feel Disenfranchised) The Spectator P.M. Podcast hosts Lyrah Margo and Madelynn McLaughlin discuss the attitudes of Gen Z and whether or not they agree with the study’s findings. Lyrah and Madelynn explain how Gen Z’s craving for insta

People have always been suspicious of the wealthy — from the Medicis in Renaissance Italy to modern tech titans in Silicon Valley. Over the past two decades, the combined net worth of the world’s 100 wealthiest individuals has surged from roughly one trillion dollars to over five trillion (though as we have seen with Elon Musk, these wealth estimates can fluctuate dramatically). Yet fears that this unprecedented accumulation translates to unchecked social control are fundamentally misplace

UNIONTOWN, Pennsylvania — Scott Dunn did not get a call from Washington. Instead, he received calls from his constituents. The chairman of the Fayette County Board of Commissioners had watched the March announcement like everyone else: a $17 billion natural gas generation hub somewhere in southwestern Pennsylvania, with 4.3 gigawatts of capacity, financed through Japan’s investment commitment under the U.S.-Japan trade agreement, with NextEra Energy Resources as developer. The federal gove

Welcome back to the world of Mike Holman. If this is your first stop, here’s what you need to know: Mike Holman is the independent journalist, podcaster, and inveterate maker-of-enemies at the center of Scott McKay’s bitingly satirical thriller series — four novels (so far) chronicling one man’s habit of ending up in the middle of the very stories the rest of the media is too scared, too compromised, or too incurious to tell. Catch up on the whole series, read past episodes, and find links to ev

Before the advent of television, and now other and far more intrusive forms of mass media, it was hard for slogans to get any traction. Yes, you might see a bit of parroting going on in newspapers, whose writers, under the pressure of daily deadlines, might naturally reach for whatever handy phrases were in the air.  But I have a very large collection of American magazines, in bound volumes of six months each, from about 1870 to 1920, and I am continually struck by the high literary and intellec

Mao Zedong, known as the “Great Helmsman,” was the most important founder of the People’s Republic of China. Nevertheless, after his death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party tolerated criticism of his legacy. Even the CCP admitted that Mao had made mistakes, though it still claimed that he was 70 percent correct. Unfortunately, this minimal honesty in government has since disappeared. Chinese artist Gao Zhen, a 70-year-old permanent U.S. resident who emigrated to America in 2022, has been conv

The folkloric tandem of July and August ends, and relaxing September arrives. The September vacationer hates people but loves the places everyone else visits during the rest of the summer. They hate lines, outrageous prices, and crowded festivals. They like empty beaches, being able to get a table without a reservation, and, when it rains, they always say, “This has its charm, too.” They are less demanding of the locals, more patient, and happy with simple pleasures such as reading on the beach,

By many indicators, American higher education is having its biggest crisis in the two-thirds of a century in which I have been involved with universities as a student or faculty member. The sector is very dependent on resources provided by its primary customers, students, and by state governments, and also federal government and private sector grants, contracts, and student loans. Yet these funding sources are increasingly disenchanted with colleges, most obviously demonstrated by numerous Trump

I have memorized Paradise Lost. When I was a graduate student, one of my professors, the courtly and mild-mannered medievalist George Kane, who seems now to have come from a lost world, told us of a neighbor of his when he was growing up on his grandfather’s farm in Saskatchewan. The man would recite Paradise Lost while he was plowing his fields. That was in the 1920s, so he did not have radio music to distract him, supposing he could have strapped a radio to his ears. Indeed, what was there the

Ukraine’s static war front has gone electronic. Even as news headlines focused on the dynamic U.S. air campaign over Iran, a threshold moment in military history was playing out in the frozen trenches of eastern Ukraine. For the first time, soldiers were surrendering to robots.  Drone footage shows a group of Russian soldiers in white winter camouflage emerging from a trench with their arms raised, surrounded by explosive-laden, remotely operated mini-tanks bristling with machine guns and rocket

Suffice it to say, no one will ever mistake President Trump’s ability to respond on point to way-off-base critics. Take this latest headline from Fox News: “Trump blasts ‘treasonous’ munitions reports, says US has ‘far more than we could ever use.’” Fox reports: President Donald Trump declared Thursday that the U.S. has “virtually unlimited” ammunition and accused those reporting otherwise of being “treasonous,” pushing back against reports that the war with Iran has sharply depleted stockpiles 

The Department of Homeland Security announced 50,925 arrests of illegal aliens for August. The roundup amounts to the largest number of illegal aliens arrested in a single month in U.S. history. Those who headed for the exits included murderers, child molesters, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Has a presidential administration ever fulfilled a campaign promise as thoroughly as the second Trump administration does on illegal immigration? (RELATED: Team Trump Is Touting Its Wins. As It Should.) “The invasi

During the course of researching so many books on Ronald Reagan, I’ve thought to myself numerous times: Wow, that would make a great movie. My colleague Mark Joseph thought the same. One day in 2004, he called about making one of my Reagan books a movie. Twenty years later, the movie became reality, based on my 2006 work, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, starring Dennis Quaid. That film is a deep dive into the life of Ronald Wilson Reagan, with the thread being his long cru