The Social World

Category: Culture

  • Nicki Minaj and Mike Waltz team up at the UN

    Nicki Minaj and Mike Waltz team up at the UN

    Before Nicki Minaj spoke at the United Nations today, Ambassador Mike Waltz referred to her as “the greatest female recording artist” and a “principled individual who refuses to remain silent in the face of injustice.” Adele, Beyoncé, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Barbra Streisand and many others would like to have a word with Ambassador Waltz (I hear he’s on Signal). But unlike Minaj, none of them appeared at the UN to speak out against the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.  

    “Ambassador,” Minaj wrote on X, “I am so grateful to be entrusted with an opportunity of this magnitude. I do not take it for granted. It means more than you know. The Barbz & I will never stand down in the face of injustice. We’ve been given our influence by God. There must be a bigger purpose.” 

    The event included a panel discussion, which didn’t include Minaj, moderated by Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner. Waltz appeared as part of that panel, and he also gave some opening remarks, which invoked a Nigeria torn apart by violence against Christians. “This is not random violence,” he said. “This is genocide wearing the mask of chaos.” 

    Waltz invoked the kidnapping of little girls from school, church burnings, the beheadings of pastors “for preaching the sermon on the Mount.” “We have an entire faith that’s being erased, one bullet at a time, one torched Bible at a time,” he said, which is why President Trump has declared Nigeria a country of extreme concern for violation of religious freedom. “He has reminded the world that protecting Christians is not about politics. It’s a moral duty.” 

    But Waltz knew why thousands of people were streaming a UN panel on a Tuesday afternoon, and it wasn’t to listen to him. “We’re going to hear from an especially powerful voice, a fearless advocate whose passion for justice transcends borders, and she uses her voice to defend the voiceless… She steps onto this world stage not as a celebrity, but as a witness. She uses, and has used, her influence to spotlight Nigeria’s persecuted Christian church, reaching out to her 28 million followers. Her ‘Barbz,’ as I’ve now learned.” 

    That was, of course, Nicki Minaj.  

    “Nicki,” Waltz said, “I can’t tell you how much I admire you. You’re stepping up. You’re leaning into this issue. You’ve enjoyed amazing success. And you could be sitting back just enjoying it. You could be just living the good life. But you’re coming here today, rolling up your sleeves, and let’s try to save these people. So everyone, please join me in welcoming a daughter of the Caribbean, a champion of the oppressed and a sister in Christ.”  

    Minaj wore a tasteful black pantsuit and stood at a conference-room lectern far stage right, humbly, out of the spotlight. She wasn’t there to sing “Starships” or her verse on the remix of “WAP.” “I must say,” she said, “I am very nervous.” 

    Minaj came before the United Nations, she said, “to combat extremism and to stop violence against people who want to exercise their natural right for freedom of religion or belief… we’re way beyond thinking or expecting or assuming that the person sitting next to you to needs have the exact same beliefs. We’re beyond that. That’s ridiculous.”  

    Music, she said, has taken her around the world. “I have seen how people no matter their language, culture or religion, come alive when they hear a song that touches their soul. Religious freedom means we can all can sing our faith regardless of who we are, where we live and what we believe. But today faith is under attack in way too many places. In Nigeria, way too many Christians are being targeted, driven from their homes and killed. Churches have been burned. Families have been torn apart, and entire communities live in fear constantly, simply because of how they pray.” 

    This problem, she said, demands urgent action. “Protecting Christians in Nigeria is not about taking sides or dividing people. It is about uniting humanity.”  

    Minaj looked at the audience as if to say I am serious here, people. “Nigeria is a beautiful nation with a deep faith tradition and lots of beautiful Barbz that I can’t wait to see. When one church is destroyed, everyone’s heart should break just a little bit. And the foundation of the United Nations with its core mandate to ensure peace and security should shake… 

    “Barbz, I know you’re somewhere listening. I love you so very much. You have been the ultimate light in my life and career for so long. I appreciate you, and I want to make it very clear once again that this isn’t about taking sides. This is about standing up in the face of injustice. It’s about what I’ve always stood for my entire career. And I will continue to stand for that for the rest of my life. I will care if anyone, anywhere is being persecuted for their beliefs. Thank you.” 

    The panel discussion followed. It was long, detailed and serious, and included testimony from a Christian pastor in Nigeria. But most of the online audience clicked away after Minaj finished her five minutes. The headliner had spoken, and she made her point strongly and loudly. Waltz chose his ally wisely. Nicki Minaj has a broad reach. And all true Barbz know that she doesn’t quit until she gets what she wants. 

  • What would Buckley do?

    What would Buckley do?

    When Sam Tanenhaus’s monumental biography Buckley was published in June, I began a review by noting that William F. Buckley Jr.’s memory is as ill-served by some of his admirers as it is by his critics. The two have in fact largely converged on a single characterization of National Review’s founder: Buckley as the patron saint of purges, who excommunicated anti-Semites and conspiracists (as one side emphasizes) or antiwar dissenters and populists (as the other sees it) from the conservative movement.

    This month marks the centenary of Buckley’s birth – November 24, 1925 – and, perhaps fittingly, began with questions of anti-Semitism and the boundaries of respectable right-wing opinion once more in contention, following an interview Tucker Carlson conducted with the self-confessed Hitler (and Stalin) enthusiast Nicholas Fuentes. Carlson didn’t endorse his guest’s beliefs in group guilt and Jewish wickedness. But the interview was hardly the kind of grilling Buckley had given George Wallace, a champion of segregation, on his show Firing Line in 1968.

    The controversy that ensued on the right, not only online but in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, wasn’t just about whether Carlson had crossed the line but whether the conservative movement was in need of stronger gatekeeping of the sort Buckley had once provided. Only there is no William F. Buckley today and, given the fragmented nature of media in the 21st century, there will probably never be one again.

    But was there really a Pope Bill even in Buckley’s own lifetime? Tanenhaus notes a twist in the tale of Buckley’s banishment of Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society. Welch was a wealthy right-wing businessman with a penchant for conspiracy theories – he entertained the prospect that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a conscious agent of international communism. As the 1964 presidential election approached, influential supporters of then-senator Barry Goldwater feared the JBS and its leader would be an embarrassment for the Republican. Pat Brown, running for re-election as California governor against Richard Nixon, was already demanding that Nixon disavow the JBS. Brown even had his attorney general investigate the group. Tanenhaus quotes the California AG report’s description of the Birchers as “wealthy businessmen, retired military officers and little old ladies in tennis shoes,” but the group was hyped in the media as an incipient fascist threat.

    In December 1961, William J. Baroody Sr., of the American Enterprise Association – now the American Enterprise Institute – summoned a handful of influential conservatives to a meeting at the Breakers resort in Palm Beach to discuss Goldwater’s future and, by the by, the Birch situation. Baroody urged Buckley to denounce Welch, which he agreed to do. And two months later, he did, over the objections of National Review board member Clarence Manion and publisher Bill Rusher.

    The twist is that the very next year, Baroody did to Buckley what he had courted Buckley to do to Welch. After a sequel to the Breakers meeting held at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, the New York Times ran an item on the supposedly secret gathering, complete with, in Tanenhaus’s words, an “unflattering photo” of Buckley and a narrative framed to portray Baroody as the savior of Republican respectability from the Buckleyite far right. “The Goldwater-for-President ship has just repelled a boarding party” led by Buckley and his brother-in-law Brent Bozell Jr. (the ghostwriter of Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative), the paper reported – “an item plainly designed, and planted, to make [Buckley] look foolish and even cracked,” Tanenhaus writes. The coverage helped ensure that Buckley and Bozell had no role in the 1964 Goldwater campaign. They’d been purged.

    Buckley’s relationships with those he’s remembered as having expelled from the conservative movement, were often more complicated than the image of gatekeeper suggests. He did not, for example, call Pat Buchanan an anti-Semite, though he wrote in his 1991 National Review essay “In Search of Anti-Semitism” that Buchanan’s assertion that only the Israeli defense ministry and its “Amen corner” in Congress supported war with Iraq, and similar remarks, “amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it; most probably an iconoclastic temperament.” When Norman Podhoretz and other Buchanan critics insisted this formula really meant Buckley was convicting Buchanan, Buckley replied, “That is not the case. One finds it odd how much… happier some people are to believe that someone is really evil, when there is the alternative, intellectually respectable, of believing instead that that person misbehaved.” This satisfied no one: Buchanan and his accusers both felt betrayed.

    The contrast with Baroody’s willingness to play to liberal media fears of the far right is significant. Baroody’s model, not Buckley’s, is the one conservative-movement cancel culture has followed for decades, with opponents of mass migration and foreign wars dismissed as nativists, racists, isolationists and supporters of dictators. Buckley, on the other hand, wrote in the 1992 book version of In Search of Anti-Semitism, “The pro-Nazi movement was no more critical within America First than the Communist movement was critical within the movement to Aid the Allies.” He’d been an America Firster himself. In this freewheeling media environment, conservatives must be their own gatekeepers. If they can’t figure out for themselves why Hitler-lovers should be shunned, we have much bigger problems than the lack of a Buckley, and more Baroodys will not be the solution – they’ll only give the kooks cover by falsely labeling everyone to the right of themselves “far right.”

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

  • Among the lords of tech

    Among the lords of tech

    “What’s missing?” the tech titan Peter Thiel asks me, over lunch on the hummingbird-infested patio of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He gestures at Los Angeles, laid out in the haze below us. “Cranes!” he explains. Thiel has argued for years that America has done most of its innovation in digital “bits” instead of physical “atoms” because bureaucracy, regulation and environmentalism have got in the way of the latter. While software has exploded, transport and infrastructure have stagnated. But over the next few days in Austin, Texas, and around San Francisco Bay, I see evidence this is changing. Traveling with the upbeat co-founders of the Rational Optimist Society, Stephen McBride and Dan Steinhart, we seek out companies that are inventing everything from cheaper supersonic jet engines to intelligent prosthetic arms for amputees. The founders, in mandatory black T-shirts, speak excitedly about the new opportunity to innovate in real things, thanks mainly to two factors: ChatGPT and Elon Musk.

    Take Atom Bodies, the prosthetic-arm firm. Its founder started three digital companies before creating robotic arms with 26 degrees of freedom in their fingers, hoping one day to make them capable of learning to interpret the wearers’ wishes. To his astonishment, large language models made this possible almost immediately. It now takes just five minutes for an amputee to teach the arm which nerve signals in his or her stump indicate a mental attempt to move a particular digit in a phantom limb.

    In Austin we visit the Boring Company, one of Musk’s lower-profile ventures. In just 18 months it built several miles of car tunnels beneath the gigantic Las Vegas convention center, with three “stations” where you can catch a Tesla taxi. It did so at a fraction of the usual cost by automating, streamlining and rethinking the way boring machines work. The tunnels already carry 35,000 passengers a day with an average wait time of ten seconds. Soon the entire city will be networked this way. Then I catch my first driverless Waymo robo-taxi. I find it takes about ten seconds to get used to trusting the non-driver as it weaves in and out of traffic at just the right speed; it is not even especially polite, bullying another driver who tries to cut in. Later that day a Waymo runs over a cat in San Francisco, to the horror (and secret delight) of Luddites who create a shrine of flowers in its memory.

    Swing a cat out here and you hit a legend. The 86-year-old tech visionary Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase “personal computer,” lives with his entrepreneur wife Ryan Phelan by a tidal creek north of the Golden Gate bridge. Two dozen of us gather to pick their olive harvest. What’s your biggest claim to fame, I ask Jennifer Saffo on the drive back to San Francisco. Her husband, the futurologist Paul Saffo, replies: “She coined the name for Microsoft Excel.”

    Up a dusty track by the Pacific Ocean we find Zipline, a drone company delivering everything from takeout in Dallas to swine semen in Rwanda. A self-steering droid descends on a fishing line from a drone hovering quietly 300ft above and scoops a package into its belly before being reeled back into the drone. Software simulation makes this hardware safe and efficient: bits to atoms again. So far, Zipline drones have flown 120 million miles, or five times the distance to the moon, without a serious accident.

    News breaks that James Watson has died. As well as discovering the secret of life in 1953, he broke new literary ground with his 1968 book The Double Helix, in which he paints himself as the villain: the original title was the intentionally ironic “Honest Jim.” When I wrote Francis Crick’s biography, Watson shared private correspondence about their brief but bitter feud over the book. “Some of this does not present you in a good light,” I said. “I don’t care,” he replied: “The truth is what matters.”

    Over dinner in San Francisco with a bunch of absurdly young entrepreneurs who are doing everything from drug design to deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls, I ask them what they are worried about. China, most of them reply. It’s racing ahead in biotech, rapidly catching up in AI and showing no sign of slowing down, despite the increasing autocracy of its leader. Nobody mentions climate change. When I ask Thiel the same question, he says enviro-Marxism has kept the young off the housing ladder, giving them no stake in the future.

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

  • The lost art of the insult

    The lost art of the insult

    Imagine I were to begin this column by remarking that a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well, but you’re surprised to find it done at all. Dear me, that would never do, even in as cheeky a magazine as The Spectator. Then try instead: “Dr. Johnson was no admirer of the female sex. ‘A woman’s preaching,’ he said, ‘is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’”

    I could get away with that. An antiquated opinion, safely attributed to an 18th-century writer, enclosed behind quotation marks and decorated with a few cobwebs, can still be sneaked past our 21st-century censors.

    But how about a more recent offensive remark? Imagine that during Hillary Clinton’s run for the US presidency, I had opened a column by joking that she reminded every American of his first wife. No, still unacceptable. So try instead: “Never afraid to offend, the late P.J. O’Rourke remarked that Hillary Clinton was ‘every American’s first wife.’” Fine. Saved by the quotation marks. He may have said that. I couldn’t possibly comment.

    Both quotations are included in my anthology of insult and abuse, Scorn, just republished. The first edition came out 31 years ago and everything in such a collection is, by definition, dressed in those disarming quotation marks. But every entry once came naked into the world. Someone said it. And, in so many cases, couldn’t say it now. It’s quite remarkable how much of the best and sharpest in my collection could not be born today – or, if born, would be strangled at birth by a nervous editor.

    One doubts any mainstream modern journalist would dare be so personal as to describe a US president as, in 1863, the Houston Telegraph described Abraham Lincoln:

    The leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege, which all politicians have, of being ugly.

    And lest you suppose that’s OK because it is “of its time,” here’s Mark Steyn abusing a president still very much with us, Bill Clinton. Steyn was referring to some anatomical speculation following reports of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky: “If the President’s penis is straight, it is the only thing about his administration that is.” Mark would struggle to find a respectable newspaper to carry this kind of invective in 2025.

    A glorious millennium of gloves-off offensiveness is shrinking fast in our rear-view mirror. An exchange in London’s Palace of Westminster between MP Tim Sainsbury (of the British supermarket dynasty) and Nicholas Soames MP comes from another age:

    SAINSBURY (Seeing Soames dressed in an extravagant tweed hunting outfit): “Going ratting, Nick?”

    SOAMES: “Fuck off, you grocer – you don’t tell a gentleman how to dress on a Friday.”

    I’d like to believe, but cannot, that such exchanges are still commonplace at Westminster. I can quote this one, but woe betide any politician today overheard and reported as engaging in such verbal jousting. We still love cruelty, we still delight in quoting and reading invective both of the stiletto and the sledgehammer variety; but we must take our pleasure vicariously, as audience not practitioners. As with classical opera, we’re not producing this stuff any more; instead we’re replaying material from the past.

    I’ve dwelt above on misogyny, political insult and “personal” remarks. We’ve become even thinner-skinned, however, on race and nationality. My anthology’s chapters here read almost like historical documents. Consider poor old Wales. Only the Welsh are still allowed to be rude about the country, though it must be said they’ve always stepped up to the challenge. “Land of my fathers – my fathers can have it,” said Dylan Thomas.

    And here’s O’Rourke again:

    The Greeks – dirty and impoverished descendants of a bunch of la-de-da fruit salads who invented democracy and then forgot how to use it while walking around dressed up like girls.

    Rereading my chapters on race in particular, I cannot regret the constraints we now place on remarks, both considered and off the cuff, that within memory wouldn’t even have raised an eyebrow. But it does strike me there’s a good deal of insult in these most sensitive areas which today would find critics urging that we shouldn’t even repeat, let alone publish within quotation marks, what used to be commonplace. Were self-censorship to go that far, we would be sealing ourselves off from our own cultural history.

    When my publishers sent me the proof of the new edition of Scorn, and after rereading it with growing surprise at how unacceptable the recently acceptable has become, I asked to insert two sentences at the end of the old introduction: “And a postscript to a new edition in a new age of self-censorship: view this republication as a history lesson too. Over the short years since I put the anthology together, how fast our era’s intolerance of what may offend has grown!”

    Something is gained: courtesy, consideration. But something is lost, too: the sheer exuberance of insolence, obloquy and scorn the English language has brought the world. “If you haven’t anything nice to say about anyone,” Dorothy Parker may or may not have said, “come sit by me.”

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

  • Against flakes

    Against flakes

    A new drinks-party-shirking method has taken hold in society. I call it “Lastminute.non.”

    Previously, the way of not going to someone’s party was to write a polite message of refusal at least a week in advance, giving the host or hostess ample time to absorb the sad but inevitable fact that various friends would not be able to attend – usually for copper-bottomed reasons, such as that they had other plans for the evening or would be away on holiday.

    The new trend seems to be to accept an invitation, and then, mere hours before, to duck out of it. This means that from breakfast time onward throughout the day of the party, the host will receive a steady stream of apologetic messages.

    It happened to me last month, on the day of the launch of my debut novella at a bookshop. I awoke hoping for a golden day, during which I’d bask in anticipation of seeing all my friends gathered in one place – at least, the ones who had a tick rather than a cross beside their name on the invitation list.

    From 10 a.m., the Lastminute.non messages started trickling in from people who’d accepted the invitation a few weeks ago “with great pleasure,” “much looking forward to it.” One had a cold, one a cough. Another had Covid symptoms. One poor friend had a fractured ankle and another a leaking bedroom ceiling. By 5 p.m., after the messages had pinged in at about the rate of two per hour, I was under the illusion that half the country must be at death’s door, such a litany had I received of “feeling decidedly unwell,” “the dreaded lurgy has hit our household,” “weird symptoms,” “sneezing, so going straight home” and “far, far below the weather.”

    A few said they were “heartbroken.” Another began with “alas and alack.” These piteous messages always make you feel compelled to reply with lashings of sympathy rather than mild annoyance. On receipt of each, I wrote something along the lines of: “Oh, poor you. I totally understand. You’ll be much missed. Hope you feel better soon.” It was time-consuming and emotionally wearing. Some changed their story on the day. One had pleaded the theater in his original refusal – perfectly legitimate – but said he hoped to drop in for the first 15 minutes. He didn’t turn up – and the next day explained that he’d met up with a very old friend. Was that instead of or as well as the theater?

    My feelings of disappointment turned to amusement as I waited for the next brazen excuse. Within an hour of the party starting, one messaged to say she couldn’t come after all, “for dog-related reasons.” Her pet was about to be dropped home by the dog–walker, who was running late due to “van issues,” and she needed to be at home for the drop-off.

    What is going on here? Are we becoming less able to face the reality of our intentions? It seems so. I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt to the majority of the hacking coughers and sneezers and the ones with temperatures – with the proviso that if the party had been a Champagne reception, I don’t think they would have felt quite so ill at the last minute. But some of the cancelers, I feel, never had a fixed intention of coming in the first place. They’d said “yes” to seem upbeat, wanting to keep their options open, and then needed to find a way of wriggling out at the last minute, maybe because they couldn’t face the journey (or “schlep,” as they might put it). They’d said “yes” to an event safely in the non-immediate future that they would never have agreed to attend if it was happening that very evening.

    That should be the test for one’s acceptances: “If I had to do it today, would I want to do it?” Perhaps invitations should allow three possible answers: accept, refuse or “I’ll come if I feel like it on the day.” One accepter emailed on the day to say he was “stuck in Oxford.” Couldn’t he have foreseen that a few days in advance? It made me salute the intrepid few who managed to unstick themselves from Oxford and make it to the venue.

    Lastminute.non is so easy to do by text or email. It avoids cross-examination. But if everyone sent messages like this, there would be a literal non-event. A party relies on the people who accepted turning up. As the day wore on and the trickle threatened to turn into a flood, I worried that the whole edifice would crumble to nothing but a few potato chips in a bowl. Thankfully, a great many guests did turn up. But I’ve been reminded how shaky an acceptance can be in today’s technologically convenient and commitment-phobic world.

    Would it be better for shirkers not to announce their Lastminute.non intentions, and simply not turn up? Two no-shows thoughtfully emailed me the next morning to say they were very sorry they hadn’t been able to come, but hadn’t wanted to message me on the day, as they knew how dispiriting it was to receive such messages just before a party. I appreciated that. Their non-appearance did cause me mild anxiety, but at least I hadn’t had to write them a sympathetic email during the build-up.

    The best revenge for this alarming phenomenon would be to send all those who ducked out at the last minute an invitation to an expensive treat, such as a tasting menu dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant. You would not, in fact, book a table for this. On the day, you would send each of them a message saying you were feeling “far, far below the weather” and sadly had to call the whole thing off.

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

  • Cheers to corkscrews!

    Cheers to corkscrews!

    For the first 50 years of the corked bottle, there was no easy way to get into it. The combination of cork and a strong glass bottle came together around 1630, but the first mention of a device to open the bloody thing wasn’t until 1681. Cavalier get-togethers must have resembled the teenage parties I attended, with everyone desperately trying to open bottles using keys, pens, knives etc. Or using that technique where you bang the bottle against a wall with the heel of a shoe. Halcyon days. More likely the Cavaliers would have just taken the top off cleanly with a swift blow from a saber.

    Early devices for extracting corks were called “bottle screws.” According to wine writer Hugh Johnson, the word “corkscrew” was first used in 1720. From there, this handy little piece of equipment has conquered the world, from early versions which were simply a piece of metal with a wooden handle to the full nerdery of the $130 Screwpull – beloved by wine bores of a certain vintage. The most common one when I was taking my first steps as a wine drinker was the metal man with his hands up, which usually just drilled a hole in the cork rather than removing it. As someone who has opened thousands of bottles of wine, I can safely say that the best corkscrew is a good quality waiter’s friend. I never leave home without one.

    If you want to see the sheer imagination and thought humans have put in to removing a bit of tree bark from a glass receptacle, I’d highly recommend visiting the corkscrew museum (yes, there really is one, I literally have the T-shirt) at Domaine Gerovassiliou near Thessaloniki in Greece. There are corkscrews with winged demons on, others that look like medieval torture devices and some that fit into the top of walking canes, so a gentleman need never be without one.

    But at some point, will this essential piece of drinker’s kit be seen only in a museum? A report from kitchenware retailer Lakeland says just over a quarter of British 18- to 24-year-olds own a corkscrew – compared with 81 percent of over-65s. I’m not entirely sure this is the killer statistic everyone thinks it is, though. One in four youngsters having a corkscrew means you’re in with a good chance of finding one in shared accommodation. We didn’t all have corkscrews when I was in my early twenties. But I did. I was a budding wine bore.

    There’s no doubt, however, that the traditional cork is dying out, thanks to the ubiquitous screw cap. This has gone from being seen only on the cheapest wines to an entirely respectable way to close a bottle, especially in the Antipodes. Something like 70 percent of Australian and 95 percent of New Zealand wines are sealed this way. Screw caps are more reliable, too. It’s estimated that between 3 and 8 percent of  corks are tainted with a compound called TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) which produces the characteristic “corked” smell of damp basements. Extremely annoying when you’ve been keeping a bottle for a special occasion.

    And yet for all its occasional unreliability, I’ll miss the cork when it finally disappears. A large part of the appeal of wine is the ritual of opening the bottle, the satisfying pop followed by the gurgle of the pour. It all builds anticipation. Now, where did I put my corkscrew?

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

  • Did the Louvre robbers want to get caught?

    Did the Louvre robbers want to get caught?

    It is more than a month since thieves stole the crown jewels from the Louvre and the chances of recovering the loot, worth an estimated €88 million, diminish with every passing day.

    The robbery was initially dubbed the “heist of the century,” a brazen theft in broad daylight as visitors strolled through the world’s most famous museum. There were up and down the ladder and in out of the museum in seven minutes, giving the impression that this was the work of villains well-versed in daring robberies.

    But soon details emerged that suggested the gang of four weren’t quite of the caliber of the thieves immortalized in the Hollywood movie Ocean’s Eleven. They left behind a trail of clues: the two disc cutters used to open the display cabinets, a blowtorch, gloves, a walkie-talkie, a yellow vest, a blanket and the truck with extendable ladder. In their haste to escape, the thieves dropped Empress Eugénie’s crown, festooned with 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds. In total, explained Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, the police found “more than 150 DNA, fingerprint and other traces” at the scene.

    Within a week two men were in custody, who swiftly admitted “partial” responsibility; for their role in the heist. A third was arrested a few days later. All were petty criminals from the Paris suburbs. “It is a type of delinquency that we do not generally associate with the upper echelons of organized crime,” said Beccuau.

    One of the suspects is allegedly a former YouTube star famous for his motorbike stunts that he showed off on social media. According to media reports, his real name is Abdoulaye N, a 39-year-old with a rap sheet for petty crime stretching back two decades. Friends and associates claim that since he became a father he had settled down, and one told the New York Times: “He’s really the last guy I would have thought of for something like that.”

    One of the three men in custody – not identified – was described at the weekend as a “good Samaritan.” Apparently he once came to the aid of a stranded motorist on the Paris ring road in September, offering a “calm and reassuring” presence to the distressed driver.

    The fourth member of the gang has not been caught. Is he the one with the brains, as well as the booty? The thieves certainly knew what they were after. Rayan Ferrarotto, the commercial director of the French diamond merchant Celinni, says the jewels were stolen to order. “When you look at major art thefts, it is almost always the case that private collectors or enthusiasts commission the thefts to own a unique piece… it’s all about prestige and exclusivity.”

    Beccuau says she is keeping an open mind about the theft. “We are examining all the possibilities on the parallel market for selling this jewellery… it could be used for money laundering, it could be used for trade; all leads are being explored.”

    Is one possibility that getting caught quickly was part of the thieves’ plan? It subsequently emerged that the truck used in the robbery was stolen nine days earlier by two men who threatened the driver. Furthermore, that incident took place in Louvres, a town north-east of Paris. Perhaps the thieves had a good sense of humor. Or did they want to draw attention to themselves?

    Knowing they had left behind so much incriminating evidence, why didn’t they flee France immediately instead of returning to their stamping ground in the suburbs of Paris?

    Unless their bungling was all part of the plan. The maximum sentence in France for theft without violence is three years in prison and a €45,000 fine. In the case of aggravating circumstances, such as a gang robbery, the maximum sentence is five years in prison and a €75,000 fine. This increases to seven years when the theft involves “cultural property that is part of the public domain.”

    With good behavior, and a willingness to “demonstrate efforts towards reintegration,” a prisoner can have six months per full year of incarceration reduced. In other words, even with a seven-year sentence, a well-behaved prisoner would be released after half that time.

    In 2009, an armored cash van and its driver disappeared as it made a drop at a bank in Lyon. Initially it was feared the vehicle and its €11.6 million in deposit boxes had been hijacked. Eleven days later the driver, Tony Musulin, gave himself up and police retrieved €9 million of the money. Unfortunately, he said, €2.5 million had been stolen from him. He was sentenced to three years in prison. The missing money has never been found. In 2019, Musulin was briefly arrested in London when he tried to convert £75,000 into Euros at a bureau de change. He was released without charge after explaining that the money came from the sale of his Ferrari.

    Musulin became something of a cult hero in France. Mugs and T-shirts were sold online emblazoned with “Tony Musulin, Best Driver 2009.” The Louvre thieves have also been feted in some quarters; a German company has used the robbery to promote its trucks with extendable ladders, telling customers they’re perfect for “when you need to move fast.”

    Are the alleged perpetrators of the Louvre heist happy to go to prison for a few years knowing that when they get out they’ll get some of the proceeds? Or perhaps they are just opportunistic thieves who got lucky because the Louvre security was even more amateur than they were.

  • Will Disney strike a deal to end its YouTube TV blackout?

    Will Disney strike a deal to end its YouTube TV blackout?

    A war has taken over media coverage. No, not one of actual consequence. This war, however, is imminently affecting your national pastime and your wallet.

    This is a civil war within media. The combatants are the Walt Disney Company with it’s channels – including ABC and ESPN, plus the SEC and ACC networks – and Google, YouTube TV’s parent company. The two entities failed to meet a carrier agreement, and all Disney channels are blacked out on YouTube TV. That means that much of the nation will not have access to most of the weekend’s football content, as has been the case since the showdown a couple weeks ago.

    “It’s our goal to restore Disney content to YouTube TV, but if we can’t reach an agreement and their content is unavailable for an extended period of time, we’ll offer our subscribers a $20 credit,” Google says in its help center site.

    There is doubt that this measly credit will appease legions of viewers who have had this topic repeatedly trending on social media since the deadline for an agreement passed. After all, Hell hath no fury like a football fan scorned.

    For their part, Disney-owned ESPN, has released a flurry of statements naming YouTube TV directly and even allowed viewers to watch games on the ESPN+ app for free and stream College Game Day on X. Disney and ESPN executives thought viewers would come running to their subscription-based apps. Many sports-aholics likely did, but clearly not enough, because ABC’s bravado drastically shrunk ahead of this past week’s Monday Night Football and the election coverage on November 4.

    “Despite the impasse that led to the current blackout, we have asked YouTube TV to restore ABC for Election Day so subscribers have access to the information they rely on,” Disney said in a statement. “We believe in putting the public interest first and hope YouTube TV will take this small step for their customers while we continue to work toward a fair agreement.” YouTube TV has not issued any further comments.

    Disney insists it just has the greater good’s welfare in mind. Unlikely. This boils down purely to greed, for better or for worse. Ten million subscribers or viewers are at stake the longer this war of words and content continues. This will have disastrous implications for ad buyers who placed orders through Disney specifically factoring YouTube TV’s numbers.

    “If the NFL truly cares about its fans, the NFL will demand that YouTube and ESPN (two of the league’s broadcast partners) allow Monday Night Football to stream tonight, with or without a Google-Disney deal,” ProFootballTalk tweeted ahead of Monday night’s game.

    There is some validity to that. Eventually, one of these monster corporations shall cave. But how long will the showdown last when YouTube TV knows it remains in the driver’s seat? It also raises a question: how valuable are old-school cable networks that buy and license sports-rights deals carried on YouTube TV, among other partners? In the digital world’s continued growth, it makes sense that Google and YouTube TV may soon seek the rights themselves. They have already iced out several regional media channels such as Monumental Sports Network and didn’t bat an eye.

    Gen Z rarely buys cable. In fact, this writer (a millennial) nixed cable in 2017 while still working in cable television. Nobody wants to pay a large package deal for a slew of channels unconsumed. YouTube TV is a millennial’s and Gen Z’s option of choice. Google isn’t moving an inch because they know Disney will be forced to move miles – as it should. Disney seemingly elevated bad strategy over the needs of average customers.

    Alas, when you don’t pay, you very likely won’t play, and Disney rightfully will not play while this blackout continues. When faced with similar negotiations with YouTube, Fox struck a deal in the 11th hour. At this moment, Disney only has itself to blame. 

  • On less famous presidential assassins

    On less famous presidential assassins

    Everyone can name JFK and his (probable) assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, or Abraham Lincoln and everyone’s least favorite actor, John Wilkes Booth. But what of James A.  Garfield, America’s short-lived (in both senses) 20th President, and his murderer, Charles Guiteau? Both men have disappeared into obscurity, at least until Candice Millard’s award-winning 2011 true-crime history Destiny of the Republic, which skillfully unpicked the sheer strangeness of the backstory behind Garfield’s protracted death and Guiteau’s conviction and execution for the crime.

    Garfield won election in the 1880 presidential election almost by accident. He had gone in to stump for another candidate, John Sherman, but his speech to the Republican National Convention was deemed so electrifying that he won the party’s nomination in Sherman’s place. Yet he was one of America’s most inconsequential presidents, and this was entirely due to the activities of Guiteau, a mentally ill drifter who conceived the idea firstly that Garfield’s victory was down to his own activities, and secondly, once he had decided that the president was a disappointment and a disgrace, resolved to assassinate him and live on in the annals of history that way.

    The central joke of Death by Lightning – which takes its title from Garfield’s inadvertently apposite remark that “assassination can be no more guarded against than death by lightning. And it is best not to worry too much about either one” – is that both men disappeared into obscurity far faster than either might have imagined. For Garfield, played here in a steady, measured performance of quiet upright decency by Michael Shannon, the chance not to be remembered may have been a blessing of sorts. But for Guiteau, who had wildly grandiose fantasies of power and importance unrelated to any achievements of any kind, the slide into obscurity would have rankled far more than anything that Garfield did, or did not, do.

    The narrative of Mike Makowsky’s show is divided into two interconnected but separate strands, each given roughly equal screen time over the four episodes. The first is relatively conventional politicking, exploring how Garfield is beset by power brokers and cynics including Shea Wigham’s Republican bigwig Roscoe Conkling and, uproariously, Nick Offernan’s Chester A. Arthur, a Falstaffian opportunist (catchphrase: “Music! Fighting! Sausages!”) who nonetheless is well-versed in the Machiavellian arts. All this is gripping enough, shot through with wry humor and some magnificent facial hair, but, in truth, it is unlikely to change anyone’s opinion about the interest levels of 19th-century political shenanigans.

    The other storyline, however, concerns Guiteau and is far more arresting, thanks to the heroic work of Matthew MacFadyen in the lead. While Succession took MacFadyen into the big time in the United States, thanks to his superb performance as the sniveling, wretched bootlicker Tom Wambsgans, viewers in his native Britain have been treated to a series of anti-heroic performances by the actor in recent years, including the “coughing major” Charles Ingram in Quiz and the disgraced politician John Stonehouse in Stonehouse.

    What MacFadyen excels at is playing characters who laugh too long and hard at their own jokes, whose façade of confidence and rectitude disappears at the slightest nudge, and whose conniving soon teeters over into incompetent blundering. His Guiteau isn’t played just for laughs – although the scenes depicting him as the only man not getting any action in the free love commune of Oneida are uproarious – but as someone who has the delusional idea that he, too, can be a great man, without putting the hours in: a fantasy definitively upended when he comes face to face with a kindly, bemused Garfield, in one of the show’s most memorable scenes.

    I sat down to watch Death by Lightning expecting raucous black comedy, but it’s something more complicated than that. In its relatively brief running time, it makes some effective comparisons between the pork barrel conniving of the late 19th century and the present day and gives Garfield the dignity that he deserves. But it’s MacFadyen who’s the stand-out here, combining grimy desperation with a spurious belief that he should be given far greater credit than he has ever deserved. Guiteau may have been lost to history, but if there is any justice, the Emmys and Golden Globes next year will not forget his performer’s sublime work here.

  • Why do white men’s feelings matter more than black lesbians’?

    Why do white men’s feelings matter more than black lesbians’?

    So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offense? She dared to complain about the presence of a person with a penis – what we used to call a bloke – in the women’s changing room.

    Ms. Hyman is a lesbian and a singer originally from the Bronx in New York. She says she encountered a man who identifies as a woman in the changing area of the gym she uses in LA. She was shaken.

    “I was naked in the locker room,” she said. “I turn around and there’s a man there in boy clothes, lip gloss, standing there looking at me. I’m butt naked.” Understandably unsettled by this experience, she made a fuss. And yet it was reportedly her who was kicked out.

    Clips of the showdown between Ms. Hyman and the gym staff have gone viral. They make for extraordinary viewing. In one, Hyman makes an impromptu and thundering speech in the gym’s reception area.

    “Men, grown men, with big dicks, in the women’s locker room!” she says. “Everyone saw that man in the women’s locker room but no one’s saying shit.” She is, though. “I’m fucking done with it,” she says. Many people – me included – will have cheered while watching this forceful, moving plea for a woman’s right to privacy and dignity.

    The response of her fellow gym-goers was somewhat more muted. As she holds forth on how scandalous it is that a member of the opposite sex was allowed to see her naked – “without my permission” – they just mill around, nonplussed. I guess that’s LA for you, a city so sozzled on “social justice” nonsense that it shrugs its shoulders at the thought of males in a female changing room.

    In another clip, Ms. Hyman can be seen confronting the male in question. There seems to be some historic beef here. It would appear that she has filed complaints about him before but nothing was done. He is quite clearly a man. I know you’re not supposed to say that. I know it’s “transphobic.” But, like Ms. Hyman, I’m done with surrendering the truth of my own eyes to appease ideologues who dream of erasing the reality of sex. Truth matters. As do women’s rights.

    Isn’t it crazy where “progressive” politics has ended up? A woman booted out after she objected to the presence of a male in a women-only zone. A black lesbian reprimanded for daring to challenge a white male. A black woman in 2020s America reportedly banished from a building for standing up for her right to undress in peace.

    Imagine going back to 2005 and trying to explain this to people – that in the future a black lady would be punished for not wanting male eyes on her naked body. People would have thought you mad. There’s no way that will happen, they’d have said. Yet here we are. Tish Hyman in LA. Sandie Peggie in Fife, the nurse who’s suing her hospital trust for making her share an intimate space with a trans-identifying male. The Darlington nurses who are also suing their trust for compelling them to disrobe among biological males. The lunacy is transatlantic.

    Women’s rights have been broken on the wheel of the trans ideology. It’s so clear now that what passes for “progressive” activism is really an assault on the properly progressive gains of the 20th century. It feels like misogyny in drag: the unwinding of the hard-won rights of womankind dressed up in the language of progress. Such is the social delirium unleashed by identity politics and the cult of DEI – we end up in a situation where a black lesbian is shamed for wanting the most basic of rights.

    It’s not trans-identifying males who are part of a new civil-rights movement. It’s women like Tish Hyman, who are speaking out for the re-establishment of women’s dignity. There was a Rosa Parks vibe to her angry gym speech. Where Mrs. Parks refused to sit at the back of the bus, Ms. Hyman refuses to get undressed in front of male strangers. Two cries for liberty I can get behind.