American Spectator

Nixon’s 1972 visit to China is widely remembered as one of the great diplomatic turning points of the 20th century. It opened the door between the United States and Communist China, reshaped the Cold War balance against Soviet Union, and seemed to serve American interests. But history has a way of revising reputations. Today, many Americans increasingly view that opening differently. Nixon’s visit helped rescue the Chinese Communist Party at a moment when Maoist rule had pushed the country towar

It starts with a letter in the mail. A dairy farmer opens it to find new requirements from their milk processing plant. Herd data, energy usage, emissions figures. The letter calls it voluntary but if you don’t comply, the plant can’t take your milk. And if the plant can’t take your milk, you’re out of business. That’s Pathways to Dairy Net Zero in practice. Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ) is presented as a voluntary, science-based initiative to reduce greenhouse

With the radio positioned above the refrigerator, WCBS Newsradio 88 was the soundtrack of our kitchen.  For much of the 20th century, AM radio news was the country’s heartbeat. CBS was the gold standard.  It was the home of Edward R. Murrow’s rooftop broadcasts during World War II, Walter Cronkite’s war dispatches, and Eric Sevareid’s reports from a collapsing Paris that defined American news to the present. Radio made a snowstorm, a blackout, a presidential address, a shared experience. The int

In recent years, Americans have become increasingly conscious of the extent to which foreign governments cultivate influence inside the United States. Public debate has focused heavily on Qatar’s funding of elite universities and even the burgeoning influence of the South Korean lobby. China, despite being recognized as America’s primary geopolitical rival, has often been discussed in narrower terms: trade wars, Taiwan, semiconductors, military expansion, and industrial espionage. Far less atten

Reading aloud has become an act of punk rebellion. Something like listening to a recording of The Clash, flirting in a coffee shop at noon, or sitting down to watch John Wayne’s entire filmography. Rich Lowry complains that children no longer read. They say screens and smartphones are to blame. Lowry concludes that this is a major failure of the education system. But I don’t entirely agree. It’s true that the absence of paper books in classrooms is a tragedy. It prevents children from acquiring

From the age of Nero and Diocletian to the days of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and even under the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the Catholic Church has faced persecution and hostility. Most often, these threats come from outside the Church. In recent years, however, the Church has also faced enemies from within: both the prideful schismatics who establish themselves as a higher authority than Rome and the pernicious progressives who seek to undermine, dilute, alter, and abolish

All stories are not equal. But we all equally live in stories. Who we are we know by the story we tell ourselves. We spin the points of meaning we meet into a yarn, and the yarn we weave into a fabric, the fabric we shape into the clothes which we wear when we appear before the world and the people in it. We may clothe ourselves in the dress of a rationalist, a follower of numbers and hard evidence. We may clothe ourselves as a storyteller in complete control of the tales we tell. But we all ali

Writers are now being advised to misspell words, vary sentence lengths erratically, insert small grammatical imperfections, and even draft longhand in order to “prove” that in creating their work they did not use artificial intelligence. According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, students, freelancers, and professionals increasingly fear that prose that appears too polished, organized, or competent may trigger suspicion from editors, teachers, or employers that AI was involved somewhere i

As if The Simpsons weren’t eerily predictive enough, from Trump’s descent down an escalator to the COVID-19 pandemic, things got increasingly spooky with their prediction coming true with the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship. (READ MORE: Hantavirus Aboard the MV Hondius: A Cruise Outbreak Spreads Across Continents)  🛳 The Simpsons are once again looking suspiciously close to reality Amid the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship, users online recalled the 2012 episode A Totally

For much of Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war, the conventional wisdom was that Ukraine couldn’t possibly defeat mighty Russia. That wisdom is changing. Volodymyr Zelensky, once accused of having no cards to play, is quickly proving otherwise. Indeed, it may not be premature to consider what a Russian defeat would mean for Europe and the world. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s expanding drone campaign is imposing real costs on Russia. Long-range strikes are hitting oil infrastructure deep inside Russian territ

On March 20, 2026, 70-year-old Leo and 69-year-old Mirjam Schilperoord from Haulerwijk, Netherlands, boarded the MV Hondius in Ushuaia, Argentina, for a 46-day cruise from Antarctica to the west coast of Africa. The purpose-built cruise ship, the first Lloyds of London-registered Polar Class 6 cruise ship in the world, carried a complement of 88 passengers and 59 crew. After various excursions to Antarctic destinations, the ship returned to Ushuaia on March 31, where the couple booked a tour to

The esteemed editor of this journal, Paul Kengor, wrote a fitting R.I.P. for Ted Turner, the billionaire media mogul who died recently at the age of 87. He was a man of many contradictions, as Kengor pointed out — “an innovator, an entrepreneur, a free-market pioneer,” a southerner, who called himself a socialist, and an atheist to boot who was apparently downright hostile to Christianity. Kengor rightly credits Turner for creating Turner Classic Movies (TCM), but he omitted one more worthwhile

One of the biggest names in news has gone silent. So has one of the biggest mouths on Earth, as I can attest. Cable News Network founder Ted Turner passed away Wednesday in Florida, at age 87. Doctors diagnosed him in 2018 with Lewy body dementia, a degenerative neurological disease. Long before Fox News Channel or MSNBC/MS Now, CNN became Earth’s first 24-hour TV news service on June 1, 1980. The Big Three broadcast networks’ evening news programs — “at the dinner hour,” as the family-friendly

Any left-winger worth his salt will cringe at the words “the great replacement,” supposedly a racist, extreme right-wing conspiracy theory. Jean Luc Mélenchon, the radical left-wing French presidential hopeful, begs to differ. “We represent the New France, the country of the great replacement, where one generation has replaced the other since the dawn of mankind,” he told supporters before announcing that next year he will again run for president. It was a remarkable choi

Karl Marx: The Divine Tragedy By Robert Orlando TAN, 2025, 448 pages , $23  “To hell with both of them!” So thundered Karl Marx in reference to his two sons-in-law, both of whom the miserable Marx considered useless morons, as he did most people he met. The two sons would ultimately sign suicide pacts with Marx’s daughters. Yes, two of Marx’s daughters committed suicide, as did many of the so-called “pale maidens” in Marx’s ghoulish poems and plays — consumed as Marx was with Lucifer. Marx had a

After more than a decade of chaos, confusion, and pseudo-progressive politics under the pontificate of the late Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV is restoring some sense of stability to the Vatican. The clarity of the pontiff’s words, however, would be greatly aided by a corresponding clarity in his actions. As our own Paul Kengor pointed out recently, Pope Leo has rejected the progressive, globalist call for open borders, instead reaffirming the Catholic Church’s longstanding support for national sove

Islam turned away from the natural philosophers for a valid religious reason. The triumphant Ashari school believed that the trend of philosophy to see the world primarily through chains of cause and effect, as science and logic do, rules out an omnipotent Creator. How could the source of the world and its natural laws be ordered about and restricted by His creations? This, they ruled, is idolatry — worshipping a created thing, either the laws of nature which God created, or worse, worshipping h

An uneasy evening at the Danube Institute. Two days after the Hungarian elections and the decisive defeat of the fifth Orbán government, the attendees’ poise is rather strained. The auditorium — usually packed to the brim — is half-empty, and the otherwise excellent James Allen’s speech on populism and democratic representation seems almost ill-timed. There is good reason Allen’s aperçus do not quite land: A presentation titled “Elections Have Consequences” strikes the wrong chord with an audien

Midterm elections are around the corner, and candidates are gearing up to mobilize their supporters to go to the polls. Run Right: A Complete Election Playbook to Win details the play-by-play of how conservatives can run in these elections, win, and stay the course while standing on principle. (RELATED: The South Moves Right)  Run Right’s co-author and election strategist Cliff Maloney joins The Spectacle Podcast hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay to discuss how conservatives can win electi

So the last time I gassed up, I — like you and virtually everyone else in America — got some ugly sticker shock. A gallon costs about $4.50 where I live, which is something I can’t complain about to my friends in California, where it’s north of $6.00! Energy prices are an issue where Republicans always beat Democrats. However, going into the midterms, gas this expensive is bad for its long-term political implications as well as just short-term pain at the pump for everyone. While (finally) deali