The Social World

Author: JP4

  • The battle for Anna Wintour’s Vogue empire

    The battle for Anna Wintour’s Vogue empire

    When Anna Wintour announced she was stepping down as editor-in-chief of Vogue in June, it appeared to be the end of the ice queen’s reign. Yet Wintour retained her large, chintzy corner office as well as her two other roles – as Condé Nast’s global chief content officer and Vogue’s global editorial director.

    If you looked closely, you might have seen a steely determination lurking behind her trademark sunglasses, the look of a generational editor intent on more power – and perhaps even revenge.

    The Condé Nast Union naively regarded Wintour’s move as that of a then 75-year-old drifting into quiet retirement, the old guard surrendering to youth. The union, formed in 2022 and seemingly run by the most radical young left-wing journalists in the company, has quickly grown in power and influence. But various Condé Nasties have informed The Spectator that the union has become a parasite which threatens to consume its host.

    When Wintour decided to close down Teen Vogue by folding it into Vogue.com – officially to consolidate resources – it was no surprise that a dozen angry young Jacobins from the union confronted the head of HR, Stan Duncan, about the layoffs of six staffers. However, instead of leaving with Duncan’s head in a basket, it was the four most vocally aggressive employees – lionized now as the “Fired Four” – who were guillotined: fired immediately and without ceremony. They learned the hard way that Condé is still a monarchy.

    And, according to insiders, Wintour is only just getting started. Condé has filed a grievance against the union with the National Labor Relations Board. Insiders believe Wintour and CEO Roger Lynch are planning to throttle it with litigation after finally making “a business decision to face down the union.” This is a fight the company must win, sources say, if it is to have a future.

    Those sources believe Condé has, “against its better judgment,” played ball with the union for too long. When the union threatened to form a picket line at last year’s Met Gala, the highlight of Vogue and Wintour’s social diary, Condé caved on the day of the event. The union, which represents more than 500 staffers at publications such as Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest, won a $61,500 starting salary floor, $3.3 million in total wage increases and a host of benefits. Rather than assuaging the union, the agreement only emboldened its leaders. “The way the union won its settlement gave the members a sense of undue power,” one source said. “Some union members now go to work and they do their jobs – but only just.”

    Part of the problem is that members of the union are not given an incentive to work hard. They are only meant to carry out their precise job descriptions rather than earn a promotion or pay raise, as the union now negotiates pay raises en masse. However, its members found enough time to compile a union “zine,” a highly produced pamphlet which provided advice on how to navigate “difficult conversations with managers.”

    “Some people behave in the office as if the company owes them and their jobs are protected, they don’t seem to understand they work for a business,” another Condé Nast source said. “Teen Vogue was a great example of what staffers wanted to write about rather than what the magazine should have been writing about. The traffic had started to crater on Teen Vogue and it had become unsustainable as a business.”

    The magazine hasn’t been in print since 2017 (its final issue featured Hillary Clinton on the cover, the kiss of death), but its website continued to churn out content that insisted to young girls and they/thems that woke political views were each season’s must-have accessories. The attitude of its staff was one of entitlement: they seemed to see journalism as a noble calling, not a business, therefore subscriptions had nothing to do with their salaries.

    Among the union’s grievances, including that the publication is disproportionately firing “BIPOC, women or trans” employees, is that it no longer has any writers covering politics. Maybe that’s the point. Teen Vogue’s venture into Great Awokening-style politics has run well past its expiration date as the publication finds itself out of step with readers, advertisers and even some employees. Insiders say the dogmatic left-wing politics at Teen Vogue created a hostile workplace. “Internally, Teen Vogue will not be missed by a number of staffers who were tired of how inhospitable it was to staff who were not aligned politically. The way they wrote some articles about October 7 deeply upset some Jewish staffers, who questioned their ability to continue working for the brand,” says one insider.

    Teen Vogue’s anti-Israel bias was called out last year by Vogue entertainment director Sergio Kletnoy in an email to Wintour and Lynch. While Wintour has not commented on Teen Vogue’s stance, it contrasts markedly with her own actions: she immediately parted company with Vogue contributing editor-at-large Gabriella Karefa-Johnson for an anti-Israel rant the day after October 7. Other brands at Condé are struggling to turn the smallest of profits – could they be on the chopping block next? Some staffers wonder whether the decay has already gone too far to save the business. Condé Nast is reportedly on target to miss its $1 billion revenue target this year. Global advertising revenue is down, and so is web traffic. While “go woke, go broke” holds true, Condé’s search traffic has also been hit hard by AI overviews.

    Defeating the union is only part of the solution if Condé is to survive. Talking about an influx of British editors to the US, Wintour said Americans tend to think of British journalists as “cutthroat” and turn to them “when American media companies feel they need to fight to stay relevant, or profitable.”

    We will see if Wintour still has that flintiness to her. The editorial shake-ups at CBS and the Washington Post are signs the age of liberal consensus in the media is over. Tough decisions are in store for publications if they want to stay competitive. When Americans can get their news for free from podcasts and social media, traditional outlets have to offer them something they’re willing to pay for. It turns out that teen angst and student politics don’t sell – even to teenagers.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket is transcendent and exhausting

    Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket is transcendent and exhausting

    And just like that, after an excruciating 12-year hiatus, the literary world’s answer to Harry Houdini is back. Thomas Pynchon, that notorious recluse, has resurfaced with Shadow Ticket, a tricksy Prohibition-era detective caper that is by turns exhilarating, exasperating and inimitably Pynchonian.

    A new Pynchon novel is simultaneously a reviewer’s wet dream and feverish nightmare. There’s so much to unpack, you’re never going to do it full justice after a single reading. This is, after all, the writer famous for Byzantine, convoluted plots which zigzag their way across entire continents, ideologies and historical epochs, brimming with mysterious entities and delightfully nutty characters.

    Shadow Ticket is no different. Set in the frenetic years leading up to World War Two, it hurtles from Midwestern speakeasies to Central European hinterlands, scooping up along the way a rogues’ gallery of occultists, double agents, Soviets, Nazis and swing musicians all orbiting a plot that, at least nominally, involves a private investigator searching for a runaway heiress named Daphne Airmont, daughter of “the Al Capone of Cheese.”

    All the old tricks are here: sing-songs, slapstick, the author’s encyclopedic obsession with old movies (“the Talkies”), culminating in a dense historical pastiche stuffed with more references than most writers manage in a career. Yet at 292 pages, this is a slimmer, ostensibly more accessible novel than the great works Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day or Mason & Dixon. In theory, that should make Shadow Ticket tauter. In reality, it often feels like a sprawling Pynchon epic Ozempic’d into a thinner dust jacket and bursting at the seams. With a gazillion characters to keep track of (at least a hundred, before I lost count), it’s definitely an adventure, even if it wants space to breathe.

    Our hapless guide through the madness is the Chandler-esque gumshoe Hicks McTaggart, a former strikebreaker turned private eye whose résumé is, by his own account, “one high-risk Orangutan job after another, always in the service of someone else’s greed or fear.” He is hired to track down the AWOL heiress – “or at least that’s what the ticket says, but I keep hitting detour signs” – and promptly finds himself drugged, shanghaied and bounced around a world that seems to have lost its mind.

    What starts in 1930s Milwaukee tumbles into a delirious trans-European chase involving outlaw biker gangs, hired assassins, vampires, female robots (“Robotka”) with crushes on golems, “rogue nuns in civilian gear two-stepping with bomb-rolling Marxist guerrillas,” Hungaro-Croatian terrorist training camps and enough incestuous love triangles to make your head spin.

    It’s gloriously absurd, of course, but also occasionally exhausting. Some chapters read like a series of Pynchonian vignettes as if the author, now in his late eighties, is simply following his own fascinations wherever they lead without much attention to pacing. One minute we’re in a Nazi bowling alley dubbed the “New Nuremberg Lanes,” the next we’re told of pigs in sidecars and dogs flying autogiros. It is, admittedly, heaps of fun, but at times the novel seems driven by a single, anarchic principle: why stop there? If there’s a risk of losing readers along the way, Pynchon doesn’t seem to care.

    It doesn’t help that Hicks is a weak narrative anchor. If Doc Sportello, the weed-hazed private investigator of Inherent Vice, embraced coincidence and absurdity with curiosity, Hicks is his more apathetic descendant, seemingly incapable of just going with the flow. That said, he certainly has his charms – he likes bowling and is an improbably good dancer; he has a sweet relationship with his protégé, Skeet, and has become so sentimental he’s gone off punching Bolsheviks for cash-money altogether. While likable, our protagonist remains an oddly passive (even gooey?) center to what is otherwise a riotously overactive storyline.

    Yet amid the cacophony, Pynchon’s magical prose still gleams. There are moments of lyrical transcendence – the kind of sentences only he could write – such as when a character’s laughter “streams across the altitudes like a white silk aviator’s scarf,” or when he muses, with deceptive simplicity, that “objects are open to every vibration that comes their way… if a human soul can be defined as a structure of memories, if to ‘read’ an object is somehow to gain access to what it remembers, then how can we begrudge it a soul?” These flashes of grace remind us that Pynchon handles questions of existentialism and metaphysics with a lightness of touch (not to mention humor), not to be found elsewhere in contemporary American fiction.

    If Shadow Ticket is indeed the last ever Pynchon novel, it’s a zany and unapologetic capstone. Wide-ranging, clever, funny and full of the author’s eccentric obsessions, it’s anything but a slog. For readers coming to Pynchon for the first time, this one may leave you scratching your head but that’s no reason to avoid it. It’s worth reading for its sheer inventiveness and unhinged energy alone. Who knows if this sly, enigmatic fox has another, more bombastic last hurrah up his sleeve? Fans can only hope. One thing’s for certain, there is nobody, nor will there ever be, quite like Thomas Pynchon.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Can Spanberger offer Virginia more than vague platitudes?

    Can Spanberger offer Virginia more than vague platitudes?

    Abigail Spanberger’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election should come as no surprise. In the last 50 years, the state has only once elected a governor who belongs to the same party as the president. While the outcome might not be out of the ordinary, it doesn’t bode well for the Republican party in next year’s midterms – Spanberger won by a 15-point lead, much wider than the two-point margin of the 2021 race.

    Spanberger is a former CIA officer who served three terms in Congress. Her opponent Winsome Earle-Sears has served as Virginia’s lieutenant governor since 2021, but failed to connect with voters in the way that Virginia’s incumbent Governor Glenn Youngkin did. Sears’s slightly chaotic, unconventional style of debating and campaigning gave her a reputation for being unpolished and perhaps too “Trumpy” for comfort. 

    It’s the first time Virginia has had two women running for governor, but the state’s Democrats framed this election as a referendum on a man: Donald J. Trump. They pointed to the impact of the President’s tariffs on the price of consumer goods and pinned the blame on him for government shutdown-induced economic pain. The high concentration of government employees in the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington, DC, means that many voters will have lost their jobs due to OMB layoffs, or to DoGE cuts earlier this year. 

    Sears tried to return to the culture wars issues that saw Republicans voted into the top three state offices in 2021 (governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general). Glenn Youngkin has spent the past four years successfully implementing policies banning critical race theory in schools, rolling back mask mandates and requiring students to use locker rooms and bathrooms according to their sex. If these policies are no longer as salient as they were four years ago, it’s down to the fact that state Republicans carried out their mandate.

    Ghazala Hashmi beat John Reid, a Republican talk-show host, for lieutenant governor. Reid’s campaign was rocked by allegations that he’d been posting gay porn on Tumblr, which he denied. It was the source of disunity among the three candidates early on in their campaign, and at one point Youngkin had been calling for Reid to step out of the race. That dysfunction left voters with a sense that the Republicans weren’t cut out for governing the state together.

    Jay Jones won the attorney general race, despite the “October surprise” revelation of his texts fantasizing about killing another Virginia representative. By then, many Virginians had cast their ballots in early voting, and such a wide margin between the two candidates for governor is likely to have carried him far enough to beat the incumbent AG Jason Miyares. 

    Spanberger refused to call on Jones to step out of the rack and went no further than calling his texts “abhorrent.” In her victory speech, she said Virginians chose “pragmatism over partisanship,” “commonwealth over chaos,” “leadership that will focus on problem-solving, not stoking division.” These vague platitudes might be what voters want to hear, but time will tell whether a ticket which has, by refusing to condemn Jones, all but endorsed violent rhetoric in politics can actually lower the temperature of politics.

    Still, the Republicans might have cause for some hope in the midterms. They will try to frame the 2026 elections as a referendum on the socialist turn of the Democrats and the mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani. Abigail Spanberger had the benefit of campaigning on the basis of what she was not: not Trump, not MAGA. The Democrats’ directionlessness of late has allowed her to not be tied to the Democratic party on a federal level. But it’s unlikely that voters beyond NYC and urban coastal cities will find the socialism represented by Democrats like AOC, Sanders and Mamdani palatable.

  • Dick Cheney dies at 84

    Dick Cheney dies at 84

    Former vice president Dick Cheney died last night aged 84. He arrived in Washington as a congressman for Wyoming, then became secretary for defense under George H.W. Bush and served for eight years as George W. Bush’s vice president. He was considered by many to have pulled the strings behind the Bush administration.

    What is perhaps his most lasting legacy is the “Cheney Doctrine,” which influenced America’s decision to engage in wars in the Middle East. He campaigned for a military response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which drove his conviction that any country, organization or individual that posed a threat to the US, or that might in the future, needed to be taken out. 

    Cheney had something of an imperial mind, a belief that presidential power had to be restored after it had been curbed following the executive crises of the 20th century, like the Vietnam war and Watergate. His will to power earned him comparisons with the Star Wars villain Darth Vader – critically by the left, and admiringly by Steve Bannon: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.”

    Cheney was critical of Donald Trump, especially after the 2021 election. He called Trump a “threat to the republic” and a “coward” who tried to steal the election using “lies and violence.” Yet it could also be said that the Cheney years paved the way for a powerful executive like Trump. Where one president acted in the shadows, the other craves the limelight.

    I grew up in the Bush-Cheney years, with a father who was frequently away from our family on deployments fighting in Middle Eastern conflicts. If circumstances had been slightly different, if my father had not come back, I might easily see Cheney as one of the great villains of American history. I would not be alone in thinking so. Cheney is one of the most unpopular figures in US politics of the 21st century, and the America First movement has arisen largely in reaction to his foreign wars.

    My instinct is still to be highly critical of entanglements abroad, but it is impossible to judge what the world would be like if America had not fought the war on terror. Throughout his life, Cheney held that what he had done was necessary. He believed at the time, and continued to believe, that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

  • How Republicans can win New York?

    How Republicans can win New York?

    Is Maud Maron crazy? Bill Ackman certainly thought the Republican candidate for Manhattan DA was, she tells me, when she asked him for $2 million. While the billionaire hedge fund CEO said he could easily raise the money she needed to fund her campaign in a single night, ultimately he chose not to – and instead focused on backing Andrew Cuomo for mayor.

    Ackman thought “oh, she’s a nice lady, but she’s crazy,” Maron recalls. “She’s running as a Republican in a Democratic city.”

    Fast forward six months and Cuomo is on the brink of losing to Zohran Mamdani – and Ackman has cast a vote for Maron, who he now calls “great.”

    “I’m not crazy, I’m just ahead of the curve,” says Maron, a former public defender “And I am trying to find the least obnoxious way to say ‘I told you so’ to all of the big donors in New York.”

    Maron is fighting an uphill battle of her own against current DA Alvin Bragg. The Democrat is expected to win. But she contends that it is Cuomo’s anticipated loss that should change Republican calculus in the city – and end the failed strategy of always backing the least worst Democrat.

    As a recent candidate herself in two Democratic Congressional primaries, Maron knows about New York Democrats. But her critical view of DEI (for which she was called a “racist”), of trans issues (on which she said “any dude who feels like a woman is supposed to be treated like a woman – that’s absurd”) and staunch support of Jews (over which she was suspended from her post as parent council president for criticizing a letter that defended October 7) put her out of step with the party that has been captured by its progressive wing. She was beaten on both occasions and switched teams.

    Those losses, combined with Cuomo’s expected defeat, augur well, Maron argues, for Republicans.

    “Donors in the past have put in a lot of money to convince Republicans to register as Democrats because they thought the Democratic primary decides the election. But if you felt like your vote would count whether you were registered as a Democrat or a Republican, you would see an exodus from the Democratic party.

    “Cuomo has already started that process by standing as an independent. Once you get people to say ‘I’m not just going to vote straight Democrat, I’m going to go listen to both candidates and see who’s better,’ then there’s a vote to be gotten.”

    That the blue and red tectonic plates have shifted is beyond doubt with a certain New Yorker now residing in the White House and with the very real prospect of a Republican moving into the Governor’s mansion in neighboring New Jersey for the first time since 2013. The most recent polls show a dead heat between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

    “Trump won all seven swing states and the popular vote really just by turning up and talking to people. Republicans win where Republicans show up and fight with some money and some infrastructure, that’s what we see in New Jersey too.

    “And there’s something going on with the Democrat party. There’s a switcheroo happening where working class people are now finding themselves more drawn to and represented by the Republican party. You saw it with Robert F. Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard joining the Trump campaign. There’s a lot of Democrats out there who want something better than what the Democratic party is offering right now, which is far left extremism.”

    But why should anyone listen to – let alone donate $2 million to – a candidate who is likely to lose on November 4 to a District Attorney so bad that the conviction rate has fallen every year since he took over in January 2022 and now stands at just 35 percent?

    “Far left progressive prosecutors are winning because big donors like George Soros are funding the Democratic Socialists of America. But the backlash has started: Chesa Boudin was recalled in San Francisco and George Gascon was voted out of Los Angeles. When enough voters see what extreme leftism looks like in practice, they’re ready for an alternative.

    “Republicans need to copy the DSA because they did a really smart thing. They invested a ton of money and recruited candidates when nobody took them seriously. You have to show up and you need money and you need infrastructure. In New York, that just has not been happening.

    “As a Republican I haven’t been able to raise the millions of dollars that you would need to have a real fighting chance.” In the end Maron raised $500,000, still four times more than the last Republican DA candidate.

    The further left the Democrats track, Maron says, the greater the opportunity for Republicans.

    “Moderates can’t win in the Democratic primary, that’s why we have Mamdani. Democrats have lurched so far to the left because every single Democrat in office is worried about a challenger from their left. So they all tack left with their loony legalized prostitution, legalized marijuana, safe injection sites, they don’t arrest people for jumping the turnstile or beating up a cop. They are not worried about a challenger from the Republican party.”

    Maron laughs at the thought of standing for mayor herself – “not a job I’m after” – and says the city needs another Michael Bloomberg. “I don’t think Curtis Sliwa will run again. New Yorkers won’t be put off by voting Republican if it’s somebody like Bloomberg who knows how to run things and turn things around.”

    Politics is a contact sport these days, which is perhaps one of the reasons Maron, a mother of four who lives in Manhattan, wouldn’t seek the mayor’s office. Recently her nine-year-old son asked her why people were calling her racist. “It can get kind of nasty sometimes. But it does make the kids a little bit tougher and stronger.”

    Maron predicts that under Mayor Mamdani “New York is about to have a rude awakening.” But, if her analysis is correct, when the contest is held again in four years time the Big Apple will be also low-hanging fruit, ripe for the plucking by Republicans.

  • The logic of Trump resuming nuclear weapons testing

    Donald Trump has exercised the nuclear option, sort of. Sitting somewhere in South Korea, the President launched a Truth Social post on the topic of nukes: “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.” Then he thanked the world for its attention and sallied into a meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping.

    That timing isn’t coincidental. The Red Dragon has spent the last decade hoarding nuclear warheads – almost as if there were a second Cold War raging – and has been rather brazen about this fact. So too has Xi’s pouty neighbor to the north, Vladimir Putin. As Owen Matthews explains in the upcoming US edition of The Spectator, the Russian President keeps popping up on state television to flex his mad scientists’ novel nuclear technologies, including an ICBM nicknamed “Satan II.”

    Those schoolmarms who still believe in international law reacted predictably, claiming that President Trump was exploding decades of peaceful restraint. They are especially concerned that he’s violating the New START treaty, America’s agreement with Russia that limits the number of warheads either country can keep in their back pocket.

    But that treaty is in tatters. Russia called it quits in 2023. Neither country has let the other inspect any nuclear facility in years, and the agreement is set to expire in February, with no option for renewal. More importantly, China, the world’s most nuke-hungry state, has never been a part of this pact – or any other nuclear nonproliferation treaty, for that matter.

    In this context, then, Trump is acting totally sane. His critics are the lunatics. One of two things can happen: either Putin and Xi see Trump’s threat and de-escalate – in which case we get peace – or they ignore him and continue their current nuclear trajectory – in which case it would certainly be good for Americans to know whether those nuclear-launch buttons actually work. It’s all very rational.

    In his best moments, Trump is a peacenik. That’s why he penned love letters to Kim Jong-un. Unlike his predecessors, he’s interested in real peace, not just the appearance of it. That didn’t win him the Nobel Peace Prize, yet, but it could stave off atomic Armageddon for a few more years. Or not.

  • Is Jack Carr behind the Department of War?

    Is Jack Carr behind the Department of War?

    As a Navy SEAL for 20 years, who reached the rank of Lieutenant Commander and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Jack Carr knows about warfare on an expert and visceral level.

    And as the New York Times bestselling author of The Terminal List series and writer of the Amazon hit show based on the books, starring Chris Pratt, he knows the power of words.

    He also has a tendency to succeed at whatever he turns his mind to (see the above). But, still, when he decided the Department of Defense should be renamed the Department of War, it seemed like a very tall order and he was a lone voice. Undeterred, he wrote in op-eds about how the department had lost its way and needed to refocus on warfighting by changing its name back to that it was given in 1789. He urged the vital name change in the pages of his novels, on TV and he even interviewed Pete Hegseth on his podcast just before he was appointed Secretary of Defense by Donald Trump.

    Perhaps, then, it should have come as no surprise when the President signed an executive order last month that the department was to be called the Department of War once again.

    Carr shrugs when asked if he thinks he was in any way responsible. Others believe he was, they say no one else was championing the name reversal but him.

    His latest book in The Terminal List series – Cry Havoc – is itself a throwback to another time: Vietnam in 1968. Think James Bond (but an American) as a Navy SEAL fighting the North Vietnamese at brutally close quarters and also untangling le Carré-esque spy webs in America and Europe. The weapons, the tactics, the events and even the people all feel real – which is because, almost always, they are. Carr’s research is meticulous, his storytelling white-knuckle. Gunsmoke, jungle heat and the fog of communist East Berlin drift from the page.

    In a world where Amazon has stripped James Bond of his guns and spies are either hopeless – Slow Horses – or prioritize diversity – Black Doves – over detecting and dispatching dastardly villains, Cry Havoc is a refreshing blast of undiluted 1960’s masculinity, hard drinking, carnal violence and sophisticated subterfuge.

    So, why did Carr decide to write an origin story for the father of his Terminal List character, James Reece? What did he say when he was sounded out for a position in the first Trump administration? And do his kids think he’s cool now he hangs out with Chris Pratt?

    Why did you write Cry Havoc?

    I wanted to drop an espionage thriller into the heart of the Vietnam War, specifically into the heart of Saigon. And I didn’t want to just put on some Creedence Clearwater Revival in the background, call it 1968, throw in a couple things that happened that year and then just write a normal novel. I really wanted to capture the feeling of 1968 for people who lived through it.

    And then I wanted to capture, specifically, what it felt like to be a MACV-SOG [special forces] operator in Vietnam going into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. I had some of the guys who served in MACV-SOG on my podcast and as I got to know them I’d reach out to confirm things and get their take on what I was writing. The main thing that I wanted to do was honor them.

    It was the most research I’ve ever done, there were books everywhere, maps from the sixties, I even bought a dictionary from the sixties so I could look up words and definitions because some of those have morphed over the years. I wanted to use the terminology of the day.

    If I’m looking up a street name in Saigon – what is now Ho Chi Minh City – I need to know what it was in 1968. It certainly wasn’t what it’s called now. I had to go back to photos and I had to zoom in on grainy black and white images. It takes a lot of time to do that.

    What were your influences in writing Cry Havoc?

    I thought it was a type of story that hadn’t been told in a long time, so I went back to The Quiet American by Graham Greene, that was 1955, The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry, that’s 1974, and The Honorable Schoolboy by John le Carré, that’s 1977. Those authors were so influential to me.

    Cry Havoc takes a skeptical view at the role the media played in shaping public opinion about the Vietnam war. Do you think reporters influenced the outcome?

    The role of the media was very interesting, specifically highlighted by the Tet Offensive, which was obviously a strategic win for the North Vietnamese but also a tactical loss for them. That was a huge turning point in the war, largely manipulated by how it came out in the reporting.

    American reporters misrepresented a little of what was happening. A lot of them were, and this is a very blanket statement, reporting from Saigon and making it look like they were out in the jungle and then going back to nice hotels for drinks in the evening and really living it up.

    This is a broad generalization, but certain people in the media at the time realized that they weren’t just reporting the news anymore, they had the power to shape the news through opinion. But up to that point, people weren’t seeing it as opinion.

    To really get to know someone, to find out what kind of person they are, you give them power. And I think that happened with certain reporters back then. They realized that they had this power, and it wasn’t just straight up reporting the news anymore. They could influence events. And of course it’s continued to go in that direction today.

    What’s the next project?

    My next book’s going to be a James Reece, but I also have my first co-written thriller that should come out in 2026. I wrote it as a screenplay and then clawed it back. I had this huge outline. I had this mood board. I had the whole thing, probably thirty pages of a PowerPoint ready to go to pitch to Hollywood. And then I was about to do it, and I decided that I was going to turn it into a book first and then option it to Hollywood.

    I spent about a year searching for a co-author, just reading other books that are out there and looking for the right person. We haven’t announced my co-author just yet. But he’s a fantastic guy and he’ll be right there on the cover with me. It’ll be a test case and hopefully people like it. It certainly works very well for James Patterson and it worked for Tom Clancy, so we’ll see.

    Do you think you were responsible for the Department of Defense being renamed the Department of War?

    I don’t know if I talked to Pete Hegseth about it, but I mentioned it multiple times when I was on Fox News after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I put it in my book, and I wrote op-eds on it. Then lo and behold, here we go, the Department of War.

    Precision in language reflects precision in thought. And when you think about a Department of Defense, to me from a language perspective that seems more like border patrol or a means of defense, like defending a fixed position, the United States. There’s something psychological that happens when you use precise language.

    I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that this could change back very easily to the Department of Defense with the new administration. As I read it, this doesn’t seem as permanent as they’re making it out to be.

    Would you ever go into politics?

    I get asked about going into politics all the time. Someone gave me a call actually in the first [Trump] administration and nothing official, but they said, “Hey, I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a nomination for Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Low Intensity Conflict.” It was just someone giving me a heads up test, testing the waters, saying they wouldn’t be surprised, not a “Hey, what would you say if.” I want to be very clear about that. Anyway, never happened.

    But I just love what I’m doing now, and this is all I ever wanted to do, other than serve my country as a SEAL.

    It seems like a horrible time to work in government. I just wouldn’t want to spend my life in this fight or flight. Constant engagement, constant getting arrows and spears thrown at you virtually all day, every day from not just every corner of the country but the world. It’s just a very, very toxic time, I think, to step into that kind of service. I’m glad mine was Iraq and Afghanistan, very basic, very primal. I was very good at it, and I don’t think I would be very good at the other. That’s not my battle space, so I’m going to continue to write and solve problems creatively on the page.

    Would you encourage your children to join the military?

    It’s tough. Our daughter is getting close to that age, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she joins. She’s worked with World War II veterans for the past five years now, taking them back to Normandy, taking them to the Netherlands, taking them to Pearl Harbor. She’s been able to hear stories of Iwo Jima and Normandy from guys who were there.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if that influenced her much more than my service or much more than anything I write or say. Talking to a 100-year-old World War II veteran that isn’t trying to convince her one way or another, but is just telling her what it was like to run off the back of that landing craft on Omaha Beach and run across this open terrain while machine gun positions and elevated positions up top or shooting down from the cliffs and what that was like. And I think that really has made an impact.

    So I will not encourage, probably, or dissuade her, she’s going to make her own decision.

    But I think in life, it’s important to listen to those callings inside, whether they work out or not. At least you don’t look back at 50 and wonder what could have happened if I’d only gone to Hollywood, what could have happened if I’d only turned in that script that’s been sitting in my drawer here for the last 30 years if I’d only worked a little harder to find an agent.

    You’ve just finished filming series two of The Terminal List with Chris Pratt in Morocco. You took your family with you – just how cool do your kids think you are now?

    I’m cool for maybe a minute and a half, then I just go back to being dad and they’re completely unimpressed with any of this. My youngest son, who’s 14, was just in a tent with Chris Pratt in the Atlas Mountains having a conversation, and they’d also met at the premiere. I was cool for a brief moment and then I went straight back to being just a goofy dad.

  • Trump’s World Series wind-up

    Trump’s World Series wind-up

    It’s thanks to good old Yankee bravado that baseball’s most important fixture is called the “World Series,” even though it’s a thoroughly North American affair.

    Yet Major League Baseball, like the National Hockey League, is not restricted to the US – Canada joins in, too. Tonight, for instance, the Toronto Blue Jays will compete against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of what should be a thrilling World Series, and the now-familiar Canadian-American sporting rivalry has been given added spice thanks to a certain man who happens to be President of the United States.

    Last night, Donald Trump, who relishes abrupt announcements, abruptly announced that he was suspending trade negotiations with Canada. The reason? He was deeply annoyed by a television advertisement, paid for by the Province of Ontario, which replayed some old footage of Ronald Reagan condemning tariffs as a recipe for economic catastrophe.

    “TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A.,” Trump replied on his Truth Social platform. “Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.”

    In another post, Trump declared that the ad was fraudulent. He said it had been broadcast in order “to interfere with the decision of the US Supreme Court,” which is currently pondering a big legal challenge to the President’s tariff agenda.

    The advert has clearly been troubling him since at least Tuesday, when he said “I see foreign countries now, that we are doing really well with, taking ads ‘Don’t go with tariffs!’ They’re taking ads. I saw an ad last night from Canada. If I was Canada, I’d take the same ad also.”

    It’s always hard to tell if Trump is ever truly enraged or merely playing mind games for headlines and leverage. But he seems oddly determined to wind up America’s second biggest trading partner – and neighbor. He has said, repeatedly, that he thinks Canada should become America’s 51st state, and his blustering on that front helped Mark Carney, the impeccably globalist former governor of the Bank of England, win an election and become the country’s prime minister. Carney’s victory was widely put down to the “Trumplash,” the global reaction to the Donald’s obnoxious tariff agenda.

    But the relationship between the United States (the superpower) and Canada (its more European neighbor) is more intimate and complicated than mere policy. Trump’s dismantling of NAFTA – the free trade agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico – and his replacing it with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is one of the important and under-discussed aspects of his two-terms as Commander-in-Chief. USMCA is still mostly in effect, despite Trump’s tariffs on Canadian steel, automobile parts and lumber.

    Will Trump continue to use tariffs as a tool in his push for full annexation? Or is he just toying with the sporting hype around the World Series? We’ll probably never know. The Dodgers are favorites to win, by the way, and – despite what Sean Thomas says about American sports – I think we should all tune in.

  • Is J.D. Vance really the president-in-waiting?

    Is J.D. Vance really the president-in-waiting?

    As Donald J. Trump flew to the Holy Land on October 12 to declare peace, his Vice-President took to the airwaves to address the rumbling civil conflict on the home front. J.D. Vance did not rule out invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act in order to quell the violent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in several American cities. “The problem is the fact that the entire media in this country, cheered on by a few far-left lunatics, have made it OK to tee off on American law enforcement,” he told NBC News. “We cannot accept that in the United States of America.”

    This is now Vance’s familiar role. He’s not the bad cop to Trump’s good, exactly, more the administration’s favorite pitbull. Trump plays the grand old statesman, smiling benignly on a world that has learned to love him. Vance is his terrier, who jumps the fence to growl at the opposition on their turf. “Here’s, George, why fewer and fewer people watch your program and why you’re losing credibility,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in another interview on the same day. “Let’s talk about the real issues… I think the American people would benefit much more from that than from you going down some weird left-wing rabbit hole.”

    Trump fans lap up these controlled yet vicious performances from Vance. His ability to sound calm as he OWNS, DESTROYS, NUKES – choose your favorite viral-clip descriptor – the FAKE NEWS elevates him in the public eye. And his powerful media profile makes him stand out as the obvious president-in-waiting – more so, arguably, than any US politician in recent history. 

    “There is very little to be said about the vice-president,” observed Woodrow Wilson 140 years ago. “His importance consists in the fact that he may cease to be vice-president.” Yet Vance’s prominence is such that, as things stand, he defies hoary quips about the dispensability of a “veep.” Still only 41 years old, he now appears the natural successor to a 79-year-old, second-term Commander-in-Chief who, for all his strengths, does have a tendency to ramble.

    If Vance avoids a spectacular implosion, if he doesn’t fall out with Trump, it’s hard to see anybody successfully challenging him for the Republican nomination. And if the Trump presidency doesn’t end in disaster, it’s difficult to imagine Vance not going on to win the White House, given the disarray of the Democratic party.  

    The next presidential election is a long way away, of course, and those ifs are, as Trump would say, yuge. The President may not be entirely joking as he toys with the idea of overriding the 22nd Amendment and running for a third term. He enjoys handing out “Four More Years” caps to White House visitors and boasts to other world leaders that “everyone wants me to run.” Someone who knows the President well even tells me that he is “very focused on Trump 2028 – [he] hates even the mention of his successor.” 

    But in August, asked publicly if Vance was his “heir apparent,” Trump replied: “Most likely, in all fairness. He’s the Vice President… it’s too early to talk about it but certainly he’s doing a great job and he would be, er, probably be favorite at this point.” That’s a highly qualified endorsement. There are persistent whispers from the West Wing that even though Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., is an ardent Vance backer, his father has never been quite so keen. “There is zero chemistry between J.D. and Trump,” says one source. “Folks that know Trump talk about it all the time: J.D. is just not Trump’s type of guy.” 

    People who work for Vance scoff at such talk. “Their relationship is extremely strong on a personal level,” insists one. “The President likes him. He likes the President. D.J.T. appreciates talent. He recognizes that Vance is a really good communicator.” Vance has learned a lot from Trump, add his admirers – not least the art of being funny online. Earlier this month when Elizabeth Warren, or “Pocahontas” as Trump calls her, announced on social media her joy at the release of the Israeli hostages, Vance replied: “The President told me he did this on Indigenous Peoples Day in honor of you.” 

    Vance’s wit helps distinguish him from Mike Pence, Trump’s last vice president, who spent four years being dog-loyal to the Donald, at least in public, only to fall foul of him in the controversial wake of the 2020 presidential election. Compared to multimedia-savvy Vance, Pence is a political dinosaur, a plonking figure from the Grand Old Party which Trumpism left behind long ago. Yet Vance’s supporters also recognize that Pence’s failure provides a lesson in how to stay ahead in Trumpland. Never cross the boss. Never let your agenda depart from his. 

    The people most likely to run a Vance 2028 campaign understand these rules. That’s why they won’t talk about a Vance presidential bid, at least not on the record, until the 2026 midterm elections are out of the way. “What’s clear is that Vance’s ambition is best served by facilitating the success of the administration,” says one of his more forthcoming advisors. “If the President is successful, it’s very likely that J.D. will become president. If the President is not successful, he will not be elected president. Their interests are aligned.”

    Vance’s backers, who include some major party donors, are less reluctant when it comes to dismissing other 2028 Republican hopefuls. Ted Cruz, the Texas Senator and failed 2016 candidate, has been widely mocked for daring to put his name about. Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia Governor, is considered far too conventional a politician for the age of Trump. Spencer Cox, the bald-headed Utah Governor, may be applauded in more liberal-minded journals as a good man who could “heal” a divided country – but that sort of praise is toxic to many Republican voters. 

    The most realistic post-Trump alternative to Vance is Marco Rubio, 13 years older and currently Trump’s “Secretary of Everything.” Rubio leads the State Department as well as serving as National Security Advisor, acting administrator of the US Agency for International Development and acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration. Between them, Rubio and Vance do much of the administration’s high-level gruntwork, the complicated policy stuff that Trump prefers to avoid. 

    Both men were harsh Trump critics in 2016 who now assiduously display their fealty to him at every turn, even as they build their own power bases inside his administration. Yet their rivalry is softened by the fact that they work closely together. “When the time comes they’ll have an honest conversation,” says one source. “My sense is that if J.D. faceplanted and Rubio thought he [Vance] didn’t have a path, then he’d run.” Others suggest that if Trump’s domestic agenda thrives, he will endorse Vance, whereas if he enjoys more success on the international stage, he’ll elevate Rubio. In his speech to Israel’s Knesset after his peace deal was signed earlier this month, Trump predicted that the man he once dissed as “lil’ Marco” will “go down – I mean this – as the greatest secretary of state in the history of the United States.” 

    Yet Trump’s America First movement is by definition not internationalist. Rubio, for all his zealous disavowals of his earlier never-Trumpism, remains more of a neoconservative and globalist figure in the eyes of the most influential MAGA voices. Vance, by contrast, is somebody who became famous after Trump’s 2016 victory and has a more natural affinity with the nationalist and post-liberal consensus that increasingly dominates conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. For now, then, Rubio is usually talked about as Vance’s most likely running mate. The bigger threat to Vance’s ascendancy might come from the wilder fringes of Trumpism, which will start to assert themselves as it becomes clear that King Donald is on his way out. Vance has been careful in the past to applaud Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Representative, but she represents a part of the Trumpian coalition that is breaking away from the Trump-Vance agenda. MTG, as she is known, is increasingly outspoken in her criticism of Trump’s foreign policy, the impact of his tariff agenda on lower-income Americans and Team Trump’s subservience to the tech oligarchs and “crypto bro” donors. 

    Vance’s political career was first boosted by the support of Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, the data intelligence company, which is the subject of many dark conspiracy theories. Nick Fuentes, the loudest voice of the controversy-mad Gen-Z right, regularly attacks Vance as a shill for the Mossad-run “deep state” of Big Tech. The hard-right racialists are also preoccupied with the fact that Vance has an Indian wife, Usha, and three mixed-race kids. 

    For more “normie” Trump supporters, Vance remains a darling figure. He’s the man who overcame a barrage of negative publicity following his nomination in last year’s election. The Democrats castigated him for being “weird,” a suspiciously pious Catholic who insulted female cat-owners. Yet it turned out that Vance, who wrote Hillbilly Elegy about his difficult upbringing, had far more regular-guy appeal than Kamala Harris’s nominee, the erratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. In the vice-presidential debate, Vance won over independent voters by combining good manners and a firm grasp of detail when it came to complicated subjects such as immigration and healthcare. “J.D. has got this tremendous capacity to speak to normal people,” says one advisor. “That’s partly because he’s just a very normal person, like fundamentally. He comes from a very American tradition of intellectual pragmatism… for him it’s about what works and what doesn’t work.”

    A lot of senior Republicans wanted Trump to pick Rubio as his running mate. But Vance had the support of Don Jr., the TV star Tucker Carlson and, perhaps most importantly, the late Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point, the most powerful conservative youth organisation in the country. After Kirk was assassinated in Utah last month, Vance escorted his friend’s body home aboard Air Force Two. At Kirk’s memorial in a football stadium in Arizona, Vance seized on the evangelical passion of the moment. “Charlie would tell me to put on the full armor of God and get back to work,” he said. “For Charlie, we will remember that it’s better to stand on our feet defending the United States of America and defending the truth than it is to die on our knees.”

    Addressing the next generation of Trump revolutionaries, with tens of millions watching worldwide, he sounded more than ever like the next president of the United States.

  • How Alex Jones won

    How Alex Jones won

    One of my favorite Walt Whitman stanzas goes like this:

    I’m a pioneer! I’m an explorer! I’m a human, and I’m comin’!

    I’m animated! I’m alive! My heart’s big! It’s got hot blood goin’ through it fast!

    I like to fight! I like to eat! I like to have children! I’m here! I got a life force!

    This is a human! This is what we look like! This is what we act like!

    This is what everyone was like before us! This is what I am!

    Just kidding. That’s Alex Jones, the voice of our time. Nobody in media has won more in the past 20 years than Jones. He’s lost a lot along the way, of course, including the largest defamation suit in American history and access to every mainstream media platform. But those were only temporary slowdowns. They may even have been accelerants.

    In 2018, a bunch of nervous Silicon Valleyites overestimated their control of the web and deplatformed Jones. Today, he’s back on Twitter with 4.4 million followers. Pressure is mounting to reinstate his YouTube channel. His app was recently allowed on the Apple Store again. It’s currently ranked 13th in the news section – higher than Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the AP, NPR, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and CNN. His shows pull in millions of streams every week. He’s not fringe. I’m watching InfoWars as I write this. His guest is Senator Tommy Tuberville.

    All you really need, Jones has proven, is a mic and an internet connection. In fact, he’s proven that only having a mic and an internet connection might be better than having, say, a primetime slot on Fox. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens – hosts of the first and third most popular news podcasts in the country, respectively – certainly learned this lesson from Jones. So did Joe Rogan and Steve Bannon.

    Jones also changed what these voices dare speak about. Owens is obsessed with proving that Brigitte Macron was born a man, Carlson with UFOs and 9/11 trutherism – such topics would fit right into a Jones segment, but would have been unthinkable subjects for the biggest names in media to cover a few years ago. Carlson just brought Jones onto his broadcast for an episode titled “Alex Jones Warns of the Globalist Death Cult Fueling the Next Civil War and Rise of the Antichrist.”

    More important than that, however, is that Jones has shifted the way regular Americans think, even those who’ve never listened to him. It’s totally unsurprising to go to a party and hear someone say the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles – a theory that he’s been incubating for decades.

    “Globalism” has become a dirty word; populism is in; no one likes Bill Gates; Christian nationalism is on the upswing. Jones has been screaming for all this for the past two decades. He was doing so when no one else with a major platform would. Everyone – on the left and the right – has a pet conspiracy these days, because the average American thinks a lot more like Alex Jones than most people are willing to admit.

    Still, he’s nuts. For every one thing he gets right – for example, that George Soros is flooding the country with bad prosecutors – he gets 99 things wrong, such as his theory that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was an inside job. Given his nuttiness, journalists have a hard time accounting for his popularity. This is because journalists, as a rule, tend to lack imagination.

    A mixture of Martin Luther King Jr. and L. Ron Hubbard, Jones combines biblical diction with sci-fi bunkum

    There’s a discomfiting but simple explanation for Jones’s popularity: he is America’s greatest living orator. (Sorry, Obama.) His Texas voice growls like a souped-up semitruck engine; his monologues burn with Christian fire and swinging fists; you can smell the whiskey on his breath and hear him fire Colt .45s skyward before raising his arms and proclaiming, “Praise Jesus, amen!”

    This puts him in the same tradition as Whitman, Cotton Mather and William Jennings Bryan. A mixture of Martin Luther King Jr. and L. Ron Hubbard, Jones combines King James biblical diction with science-fiction bunkum. “Get behind me Satan!” he yells into the microphone during a sermonette on the New World Order before describing interdimensional systems beyond our imagination and declaring that “Humanity is going interstellar!”

    Soothsaying and calls to repentance spill from him as if against his own will – the Large Hadron Collider opened a portal to hell; death-worshipping, third-world hordes will fall upon the American promised; the Devil is building a machine to impersonate God; men must stop watching football. It’s all very prophetic-sounding.

    Sometimes he adopts the persona of Jeremiah weeping over his people. “People are ugly now,” he laments. “They’re stupid. Their IQs are dropping. They’re dying all around us. I feel like a failure. God, if I ruled the planet, I’d feel like I ruled a pile of cockroaches or something. I mean, who the hell would want to rule this?”

    But most of the time, his prophesying is a rallying call against the forces of evil in his cosmology: Democrats, globalists, Justin Bieber. His monologues are often uploaded to Instagram and TikTok and backed by rousing music. One such speech sees him shouting, “I’m so full of life and so full of resistance to these murdering pedophiles who want to get in the way of God’s plan! And let me tell you, I’ve been taken up to the third heaven. I’ve been jacked into the big plan. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it and I can’t even compute all of it, it’s so fantastical.”

    He goes on, “Anybody that tries to get in the way of the incredible plan the big guy’s got for us has got me pissed and I’m just begging to stay on the team man. Just put me in the game coach, whatever you say coach, I know I’m weak, I know I’m pathetic. Man, you’re amazing. I’m so lucky you made me. What do I need to do boss!?” Then he starts panting like a dog and growls, “I’m like a hunting dog man, just take me out of the house, just turn me on them!”

    For a religion-starved population – which American zoomers and millennials certainly are – this is water in the desert. (Is the water safe to drink? That’s another question.) Jones’s audience skews young. It’s composed largely of people who grew up in a secular world. Most of these young people probably didn’t go to church growing up, and if they did, they were exposed to the milquetoast Protestantism so common across the country. But it’s human nature to want a prophet, and a few decades of secularization can’t change that. For these listeners, hearing Jones for the first time must be like hearing thunder for the first time. Pollsters insist that America’s young men are turning back to religion. That’s a hopeful idea. But what if Alex Jones is the nation’s highest prophet?

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.