Everyone knows about the transformation of Che Guevara from a murderous Marxist militant into a T-shirt icon. In recent years, Western elites did something similar to political movements from the Left and the Right, only on a much grander scale.…
How Musk is crashing Tesla
In hindsight, the farts were a giveaway. A few years ago, I was getting a lift in a Tesla Model Y, when the driver (a friend of a friend) offered to show me some of the car’s innovative features. Tesla …
The new dystopian space race
This week, two NASA astronauts stranded in space since June returned to Earth thanks to a craft from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency shutters NASA offices, billionaire space privateers like Musk and Amazon boss Jeff …
Speculative futurism sells us a lie
“The government knows AGI is coming”, the New York Times’s Ezra Klein tells us, “and we’re not prepared in part because it’s not clear what it would mean to prepare”. We’ve all heard of these prognostications by now. On one …
Can ‘abundance liberalism’ save the Dems?
The lessons of the Democratic Party’s painful defeat in November turn on whom you ask. Moderates blame the excesses of wokeness. The party’s Left wing faults a tepid centrism that failed to inspire the base. But while most are happy …
How Elon Musk lost the plot
I once believed that the rise of the Tech Right was going to make conservatism smarter, orienting the Right toward a future of innovation and free-market dynamism. The movement wields great influence on the second Trump administration, most notably in …
The three tribes of MAGA men
In 1989 David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was elected to Louisiana’s house of representatives. At college, he had marched around campus in a Nazi uniform; by the time he was running the Klan in the …
Elon Musk and the return of Anti-Federalism
In 1787, as the United States debated whether to ratify the Constitution, a pamphleteer writing as “Philadelphiensis” complained of the threat that a strengthened federal union would pose to any free citizen: it could demand “immoderate” taxes, seizing land and …
The method in Trump’s mad messaging
Ensuring that lawmakers are “on-message” — dutifully singing from the same hymn-sheet in the daily round of briefings and interviews — has long been key to political communications. In the Nineties, when New Labour began its rise to power, MPs …
Donald Trump is a Dickensian rogue
Just like a Shakespearean villain, Trump seems ready to break all bonds, violate all constraints and transgress all boundaries. He is a rogue on the rampage, tearing up contracts and faithless to all around him, appearing to acknowledge no restraint …
Why DOGE will fail
The thing about a chainsaw is that it’s really great for some tasks — say, chopping up a tree — and really bad for others — say, performing surgery. We don’t “support” or “oppose” chainsaws, we try to ensure that …
Britain’s post-truth politics
“I know something you don’t know” is one of the most elementally effective sentences in our language. It’s a blatant hook for attention, so instantly powerful that even small children set it to a taunting little tune and dangle it …
Steve Bannon is ready for war
“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions.” Steve Bannon doesn’t hold back when I meet him in the basement of …
Not all federal bureaucrats are woke
Several years ago, I quit my post as a professor at a respected state university to join the US federal workforce. This was a painful decision. I thoroughly enjoyed academia. I loved mentoring students, exploring novel ideas, and engaging with …
The rise of Yuppiefuturism
Legions of Patrick Bateman lookalikes, clad in power suits and smoking cigarettes. YMCA plays on repeat. Twenty-five years on from the release of American Psycho, the Yuppies are finally back. And it’s Donald Trump who is responsible.
Yet, this isn’t …
