The Social World

Category: Culture

  • Splitsville defends monogamy

    Splitsville defends monogamy

    The new comedy Splitsville amusingly diagnoses several urgent social ills. The film mocks those who treat marriage not as an expression of solemn vows but as a ticket to unfettered happiness to be discarded at the first sign of discontent; it also excoriates those who view the institution as so meaningless – just a piece of paper – as to persist in the midst of openly acknowledged affairs, romances and one-night stands.

    In its own coarse, fumbling way, Splitsville has an instinctive sense of how human beings long for monogamy and order even while they court freedom and licentiousness.

    Splitsville stars Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona as Carey and Ashley, a young couple who, 14 months after getting hitched, find themselves with different notions about the success of their union. Carey, a go-along-to-get-along pushover, yearns for fatherhood, while Ashley, a life coach bent on her own ever-changing self-actualization, finds herself restive. After Ashley hastily announces her intention to separate while on a road trip, Carey – whose androgynous-sounding name suggests something of his lack of moxie – abandons their car and, in comic fashion, treks through a series of geographically questionable dirt roads, byways, marshes and lakes toward his destination, the paradisal home of his seemingly well-off best friends, marrieds Paul (played by director and co-writer Michael Angelo Covino) and Julie (Dakota Johnson).

    Paul and Julie are presented as the picture of wedded contentment, but when pressed as to the secret of their success, they insist it is because they maintain an “open marriage” – in other words, theirs is a judgment-free zone in which each is free to gallivant with others. “Do you know why people break up? Guilt,” Julie asks, setting up one of the most pitiful philosophies for life imaginable: “But if you make the bad thing OK, then there’s no guilt.” In his vulnerable position, and as a full-fledged member of the fallen human race, Carey quickly takes advantage of this laissez-faire environment of permissiveness by initiating a liaison with Julie. After Carey glibly confesses this rendezvous to Paul, however, the two men find themselves mugged by reality, so to speak: there is no chance a husband would not be jealous of an unfaithful spouse and angry toward her lover. The two men then engage in one of the lengthiest and most robust movie fights since the one between Roddy Piper and Keith David in John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). A table is smashed; a child’s fish tank is drained of its contents. The scene is not only a comic tour de force but also an expression of the total unworkability of an “open marriage.”

    Carey is soon to find this out for himself when, exiled from his friends’ home, he returns to the residence he once shared with Ashley, who is living with a man named Jackson (Charlie Gillespie). Unlike Paul, Carey keeps a lid on his temper, but his façade of nonchalance is just that: a façade. At one point, Carey badly paraphrases a line from Vanilla Sky – something Cameron Diaz said about when you sleep with someone, your body makes a commitment. Although the moment is played for laughs (he quotes the line without attribution at first), the movie underscores its wisdom. Carey feigns friendliness with Ashley’s lovers, but only so as to annoy his spouse. For his part, Paul is revealed to have been less than fully committed to his own “open marriage” program: Late in the picture, he reveals that he proposed such an arrangement because he was not confident that his wife would stay with him and therefore wanted to bake infidelity into the marital cake. It is hard to imagine a more confused coterie of characters.

    Splitsville presents a grim, almost apocalyptic vision of modern people trying and failing to free themselves from society’s strictures. This inclination for rebellion has even spread to Paul and Julie’s son, Russ (Simon Webster), who, when attempting to explain away his participation in a fight at school, says, “The school system is broken” – as though a sociological cliché would excuse his bad behavior.

    The film’s characters change partners with great ease, yet it will be obvious to any student of screwball that Splitsville is hurtling toward a familiar finish. Ashley sees the error of her ways and reunites with Paul, while Julie reaches some sort of détente with Paul that is short of a full-scale reunion – she seems to permit him to hang around their house in perpetual pursuit of her.

    Like No Hard Feelings, the Jennifer Lawrence vehicle from 2023, Splitsville is part of an earnest effort to revive R-rated, non-woke comedies. Its humor is crude; its pieties are few. This is relatively refreshing, but by my lights, it elicited far fewer laughs than The Phoenician Scheme or the Naked Gun reboot, the funniest films of the summer. Instead of laughing, I found myself grimacing in a shock of recognition at our depraved manners and mores. Yet Covino deserves credit for not reveling in but exposing his characters’ faults and for acknowledging that what ails these couples can only be resolved by the restoration of their vows.

  • Is Antifa a terrorist organization?

    Is Antifa a terrorist organization?

    One side of the political aisle can only accuse the other of “fascism” so many times before a young, impressionable person subsumed within a social-media echo chamber takes matters into his own hands. This seems to be exactly what transpired in the case of Tyler Robinson: bullet shell casings found at the scene of Charlie Kirk’s assassination were reportedly etched with the words “Hey fascist! Catch!” Robinson seems to have been influenced by Antifa or Antifa-adjacent ideology. In response to the killing, Congress and commentators have renewed calls to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. But this would have little effect.

    Antifa is a collaboration of autonomous cells with the ostensible goal of opposing fascism and racism. Described by former FBI Director Christopher Wray as “more of an ideology than an organization,” the group and its nodes operate secretly and communicate via dark-web platforms. And while Antifa has adherents around the world, it appears to be based primarily in the US. It is this lack of formal structure and domestic status that makes dealing with Antifa such a challenge.

    Formal designation as a terrorist organization is intended for foreign actors, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS. It provides for jurisdiction over entities located outside the US, allowing for freezing their assets and barring members from entering the country. It also provides intelligence agencies the go-ahead to conduct surveillance of such groups overseas, without the constitutional guardrails that protect the privacy rights of American citizens.

    As a domestic movement, Antifa cells and individuals are already subject to federal and state laws criminalizing intimidation, violence and other forms of terrorist activities. Existing federal law also prohibits providing material support such as money and other resources to entities that engage in terrorism. Applying a formal terrorist label to Antifa may grab headlines but provides no new tools for confronting the problem.

    There is the question whether designation would enable the surveillance of domestic actors without obtaining a traditional search warrant. In theory, this could help authorities more quickly monitor Antifa members with fewer judicial impediments. But one can easily see how such power could be abused to spy on American citizens. This would strip Americans the due process guaranteed to them by the Constitution. Once this guardrail goes, it’s hard to see it ever being erected again.

    This is not to say that nothing more can be done. The FBI and other law-enforcement groups should put more energy and resources into locating and infiltrating Antifa cells. They should be looking for money trails moving to these groups to fund violent attacks. They should be online to find Antifa working groups on the dark web. The real work will be in funding and staffing resources, making sure federal and state law enforcement and intelligence assets are working together, and bringing aggressive prosecutions against individuals who identify with the movement.

    From a political perspective, the push must be to quarantine Antifa-affiliated groups from social-media platforms. And young Americans must be taught to recognize the toxic nature of the group’s propaganda. While vigorous law enforcement will be essential in the short-term, the war against Antifa is a long one much more about shining a spotlight on this vile and destructive ideology.

    In the aftermath of a national tragedy, there is always an impulse by our leaders to show they are doing something to address the issue. But designating Antifa a terrorist organization is nothing more than low-hanging fruit. The real work lies in toning down the rhetoric and getting young people off the internet.

  • Please let this be the end of Downton Abbey

    Please let this be the end of Downton Abbey

    The third and supposedly final Downton Abbey picture released in American cinemas this Friday. Ominously subtitled The Grand Finale – oh how I wish, given the residual camp elements within the show, that it had instead been called The Final Curtain! – it supposedly wraps up the story of the Grantham family, the privileged idlers who inhabit the eponymous grand house, and their unusually devoted and long-serving staff, all of whom converse with their superiors on easy and intimate terms that bear precisely no relation to how the English upper classes have ever spoken (or been spoken to) by their servants in history.

    Still, if you’re looking for historical accuracy from Julian Fellowes’ Downton, you are not going to find it. However, on the evidence of six seasons of the television series and now three spin-off films, it is not quite clear what you are going to find. Consistent, believable storylines? Decent acting? Any sense of period or genuine interest in life in pre-World War II England? Dialogue that isn’t quotable for all the wrong reasons? I suspect that such things are about as likely to occur as a Joe Biden presidential bid in 2028. Instead, the mixture of amateurishness and cold calculating cynicism epitomized by the Downton formula represents the British costume drama at its absolute nadir.

    When the first series of Downton Abbey came onto British and American screens in 2010, it was essentially billed as Gosford Park for television, and was acclaimed as such. A strong script by Gosford creator Fellowes, engaged and committed performances from an excellent cast led by the ever-superb Maggie Smith and some genuinely interesting shades of nuance in the characterization made for appointment viewing. It nodded to shows and films past – Gosford, of course, but also Remains of the Day and Upstairs Downstairs, which found its own revival comprehensively overshadowed by its glitzier rival – but managed to be sufficiently in tune to 21st century mores to feel fresh and energetic. And, in Lady Mary’s ill-fated tryst with Mr. Pamuk, “the Turkish gentleman,” it introduced an element of deeply black humor into the mix without compromising on the lavish frocks and houses that discerning audiences always want from their historic dramas.

    Fast forward 15 years, and the affection and goodwill that many – including this writer – felt towards Downton initially has long since curdled. Fellowes wrote all the scripts himself, and he could have done with a writers’ room that he oversaw instead. Instead, the plotlines were frequently incoherent and nonsensical, with characters flitting in and out apparently depending on actors’ availability and willingness to commit themselves to a show that most of them knew was bogus. Some of the better stars – Dan Stevens, Jessica Brown Findlay – jumped long before the series ended, fearing that they would become typecast. Others stayed. Between Downton and Paddington, Hugh Bonneville, in particular, has now cornered the market in playing good-natured but exasperated patriarchs. It is a useful, lucrative piece of typecasting, but terribly, terribly boring to watch.

    I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t enjoyed some of the moments and actors in the later, largely wretched, seasons. Jim Carter, who plays the officious but decent butler Carson, can do no wrong in my eyes, and it is notable that he and Phyllis Logan (as the housekeeper Mrs. Hughes) are giving by far the best performances throughout, bothering to act rather than simply appearing on screen. And occasionally Fellowes’ scripts reveal an apparently dormant sense of sly wit, too. I always relished the moment when Carson, castigated by the housekeeper for his apparent homophobia, replied in stentorian voice, “I cannot help it, Mrs. Hughes. I am what I am.”

    Yet by the time that the first film miserably rolled into cinemas, where the action stopped for moments at a time to allow some piece of mid-budget pageantry to take place, it was clear that Fellowes et al no longer had any grip on the material or any interest in doing anything other than pandering to fans. America has always been a more receptive market to the show than Britain (where a lot of the nonsense was not taken remotely seriously) and so it is likely that The Grand Finale will be well-received in the United States. The inevitable absence of Maggie Smith, occasioned by the death of both character and actress, means that there is a hole at its center, but in truth the entire saga is now so riddled with holes that it represents a kind of cinematic Swiss cheese. Inevitably, there will be cries for ‘just one more film,” and Fellowes and the producers may yet heed them. But this nonsense really has to stop now. And, in truth, it should have done so a very, very long time ago, too.

  • America’s ‘fringe’ has taken over the country

    America’s ‘fringe’ has taken over the country

    Another day, another public execution. The talking heads on television and Twitter tell us not to worry too much: America is still strong. They repeat this sentiment after every waking nightmare. These horrific events are not the norm, they say. They’re just the actions of a few people on the “fringe.” 

    But what is the American “fringe”?

    The “fringe” tried to incinerate the country in 2020. The “fringe” tore down statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The “fringe” control the universities and has spent years indoctrinating kids with discriminatory dogmas. The “fringe” created the policies that let violent, mentally ill men prowl the streets and kill refugees. The “fringe” killed a healthcare CEO at sunrise in December. The “fringe” tried to kill Donald Trump last summer. The “fringe” killed Charlie Kirk on Wednesday. 

    The “fringe” celebrated everything that was destroyed and every life that was taken.

    The “fringe” is a bunch of very normal people I went to high school and college with, who have spent the last three days cavorting and reveling over the death of a man they never met and whose actual beliefs they likely cannot articulate, let alone rebut. These are not incels or idiots; they’re ostensibly educated people with jobs and families and degrees. And yet they’re possessed by an ideology that apparently prohibits them from accepting the sanctity of every human life. 

    The “fringe” is not on the fringes. It’s everywhere. It’s taking over the country. 

    And yet for years, well-intentioned voices have told us that the madness we see online is somehow unreal – that the internet is not real life. It may be true that the internet cannot replace real life, but it can certainly destroy very real, meaningful parts of life. 

    And it’s succeeding, especially in its pursuits to rot the brains of young people. To say that the radicalization we’re seeing is a “fringe” issue is to simply admit you have no idea the scale of the problem; it reveals you do not know what’s happening to young people online.

    If you’re a Boomer, or a “not very online” person, you won’t understand the extent of the problem. That’s not a criticism. It means you’re probably doing something right – you’ve not witnessed the effects of online addiction. You’re not seeing the kinds of vile images and videos and calls to arms that create the world’s Luigi Mangiones and their disciples. But just because you’re not seeing radical, politically insane, very subversive, and dangerously attractive content online all day doesn’t mean others aren’t. 

    More and more of my friends are becoming openly Bolshevist or sympathetic to nihilistic authoritarianism, every month. This isn’t because they’re reading Lenin or Marx or Marcuse. No, they don’t read at all. No one does. Their minds have been captured by algorithms that exist solely to weld their eyes to their screens. Those algorithms feed them craziness to intrigue the scroller, and, with enough time, that craziness starts to feel normal to the addict, who then goes seeking crazier content, which the algorithm gladly supplies. This cycle replays millions of times across the country, every day. And then, before you know it, you have millions of people rejoicing over the death of a civilian who’d broken no laws. 

    Refusing to acknowledge that these screechers are destroying the nation’s harmony is a refusal of duty. The very insistence that these people are fringe has allowed this scourge to grow to the size it has now, where it can take lives and endanger the democratic process. 

    It’s also made social media a more miserable place (which it was always destined to be). That has in turn made social life in America more miserable. Anyone still insisting that these forces are marginal is naïve or complacent, or speaking with their hands over their eyes. Perhaps they’re afraid of what they’d see if they peeked through their fingers.

    Because the “fringe” has already infiltrated real life, real America. They were educated in our schools, and they now teach our children. They tyrannize the public square. They swing clubs when they cannot win debates. They disrespect our gods. They ransack our churches, and, like the barbarians of old, they do not speak our language. They speak only the language of violence and convulsion. And they are not “fringe.”

  • Stephen King, The Long Walk and Charlie Kirk

    Stephen King, The Long Walk and Charlie Kirk

    Under normal circumstances, the author Stephen King should have been feeling pretty good about things and himself at the moment. The latest film of one of his works, Francis Lawrence’s horror-thriller The Long Walk, opened in American cinemas this weekend and has been met with almost unanimously rave reviews, many of which have called it a more socially aware, darker Hunger Games. He recently published a Maurice Sendak-illustrated retelling of Hansel and Gretel, which brings his trademark dark and macabre sensibilities to the age-old fairytale. And his last novel, Never Flinch, was, naturally, a bestseller – as all his books have been since he first published Carrie, over half a century ago in 1974.

    So it says quite a lot for the 77-year-old King that, for absolutely no reason, he decided to offer his opinions about the Charlie Kirk saga. King’s first reaction to Kirk’s assassination was to call it “another example of American gun violence” and to echo Barack Obama’s comments that “this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.” All perfectly normal and (relatively) uncontroversial. And then King decided to say of the recently murdered Kirk that “he advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.”

    The activist had, of course, said nothing of the kind, and King swiftly deleted his tweet and has spent much of the day of his new film’s release apologizing to various public figures who reacted in outrage his comments, most notably Ted Cruz, who called him “a horrible, evil, twisted liar” and asked ,“Why are you so dishonest & filled with hate?” King, presumably through gritted teeth, wrote “The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes. This is what I get for reading something on Twitter [sic] w/o fact-checking. Won’t happen again.” Yet the reputational damage has already been done. Admittedly, the author has never been remotely shy about his Democratic, pro-Palestinian sympathies, which have never endeared him to the MAGA crowd, but if The Long Walk underperforms this weekend, especially with viewers in the heartland where the film is set, fingers will undoubtedly be pointed in King’s direction.

    Not, of course, that it will make any existential difference to the writer’s popularity. He has been involved in many other high-profile spats, not least when he dismissed James Patterson, saying of his fellow author, “I don’t like him, I don’t respect his books because everyone is the same,” and remarked of Stephenie Meyer, who was unfavorably compared to JK Rowling, that she “can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.” Rowling, of course, came in for her own implied criticism, when an X user asked King what he thought of her political stances, and he replied, “Trans women are women.” And although most people believe Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining to be a classic of the horror genre and an improvement on the scary but schlocky book, King has always despised it, calling it “a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little.”

    The reverse might be said of King himself. His willingness to take to social media and share his opinions, interact with his millions of admirers and discuss matters wholly unrelated to his books is commendable, and there is a reason why he has 6.8 million followers. Yet as his timely dystopian picture arrives in cinemas to shock and provoke audiences, even those who might be well disposed toward this ornery, ever-controversial author might hope that he’ll engage his considerable intellect before pressing “send” next time.

  • After Charlie Kirk, Trump should crack down on campus ‘safetyism’

    An assassin who wants to silence a debate in America’s colleges can’t do it just by killing Charlie Kirk. Although Kirk was an exceptionally effective campus speaker – maybe the most effective since William F. Buckley Jr. in his heyday – he was far from alone in voicing conservative ideas in academic settings where they are generally unwelcome and at times violently opposed. There are others who will pick up Kirk’s microphone. But Kirk’s murderer has allies who can do systematically what the gunman could only do once. His allies in silencing voices like Charlie Kirk’s are university administrators who respond to violence by imposing stifling security costs on the targets of violence and intimidation.

    America’s colleges and universities too often give militants a veto over campus speech. This was true long before Kirk’s murder. A few years ago students at a small Catholic college in Texas invited me to speak on their campus. I’m not exactly a well-known firebrand likely to draw an enraged mob anywhere. But this Texas Catholic college told the students they couldn’t host a conservative speaker without security insurance that they couldn’t afford. This wasn’t a response to any threat: it was a simple act of censorship by administrators too craven to ban a speaker forthrightly. They used safetyism as a convenient excuse.

    My experience was not unique – colleges and universities across the country have long discouraged or completely prevented conservatives from speaking by demanding heavy security expenditures and indemnities against left-wing violence. Instead of imposing the costs of violence on those who threaten violence, institutions of higher education in our country impose those costs on those who are threatened. They impose those prohibitive costs not only on high-profile targets like Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Riley Gaines and Andy Ngo, but also on speakers who aren’t targets at all. This is not a good-faith attempt to prevent violence; it’s a bad-faith strategy for stifling campus debate. Can you imagine a speaker invited to express views approved by a college administration being stuck with the bill for his or her security?

    Most left-wing violence on campuses is far from murderous – it more often takes the form of rowdy mobs shouting down or attempting to intimidate speakers. These mobs do not exist because the violent left is unstoppably powerful on the nation’s campuses; they exist because the administrators in charge of campuses are unwilling to enforce basic rules on unruly children. The intimidation is opportunistic. Cowardice, more than adolescent extremism, is the root of the problem. If administrators really do fear that any conservative speaker will be met with rioting and violence, they have obviously already failed in their duty to maintain a safe environment for their students – they failed by allowing lunatics to amass enough power they could silence their critics without even having to riot.

    Colleges and universities across the country have long discouraged or completely prevented conservatives from speaking by demanding heavy security expenditures and indemnities against left-wing violence

    Some administrators are timid; more are not so much frightened of violence as frightened of having to take a side between freedom and leftism – they pride themselves on their progressive attitudes, yet they can’t admit that the price of those attitudes is deference to censorious radicals. Left-wing bullying is carried out in the name of anti-bullying; it’s cruelty masquerading as compassion. Calls to censor Charlie Kirk were typically framed as if doing so was necessary to protect transsexuals, racial minorities and “democracy” itself. (The scare quotes are appropriate since actual democracy without free speech is well-nigh impossible.) Aggression against conservatives – who are a minority on almost all campuses – gets whitewashed as altruism. Left-liberal administrators who like to imagine themselves as broadly in favor of free speech get their principles put to the test when anyone farther to the left claims that Charlie Kirk or some other conservative is really a purveyor of “hate speech” and indeed that their speech is actually “violence.” With administrators who believe in “trigger warnings,” speech can be killed without an assassin’s having to pull the trigger.

    If there is a legitimate reason to charge security or insurance fees, the university, whether it’s a state school or a private institution that receives any taxpayer dollars, must bear the cost. Colleges that are fully privately funded can do as they wish, but if an institution receives public money, it cannot allow only viewpoints that are aligned with the left to have representation. Charlie Kirk’s murder should spur the Trump administration to compel institutions of higher education to live up to their duty to the public and to their own students. And if hosting speakers whose lives may really be in danger seems costly, universities should cut the problem off at the source by making their campuses safe for civil discourse in the first place. The Trump administration has so far made Israel and anti-Semitism the focus of its attempts to change the culture of higher education, with policies that in some cases actually harm free speech. So far as any evidence suggests, Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed for talking about the Middle East. His assassination is about America’s freedom of political speech at home, in the very institutions that are meant to be most dedicated to free inquiry. Sly techniques of censorship, such as pricing conservative speech out of campus discourse, cannot be tolerated.

    There’s danger enough in the risk of further self-censorship on the part of conservatives. The left – in the form of both aggressive activists and pusillanimous administrators – doesn’t need to intimidate the right with violence when it can do so effectively by simply imposing costs, from the cost of providing security for a speaker to the costs to one’s career prospects of being known as a conservative or Trump voter. Make it more expensive to be a campus conservative, at every point along the line, and there’s no need for overt censorship. The economic incentives will do the ideological commissar’s work for him. The safetyists understand this, while conservatives who sometimes have a genuine concern for their own safety increasingly internalize the left’s mentality along with its threats. The left largely exists to make everyone feel vulnerable and victimized, in need of protection not just by metal detectors but by censorship and supervision. The more the right feels besieged and beleaguered, forced to pay for its own basic freedoms, the more it will willingly surrender to the left’s fearful way of thinking and living. Charlie Kirk didn’t die for that – he died, as he lived, to defy it.

  • I’m the heir to Manhattan

    I’m the heir to Manhattan

    I’m owed around $680 billion. Some 77 acres of downtown Manhattan belong to the Carter family, according to a letter written in 1894. Wall Street, Broadway and One World Trade Center – they all sit on a plot that is, by rights, mine.

    Yet here I am, grumbling about what ought to be in the pages of The Spectator. What went wrong? The story goes something like this. Shortly before independence, a pirate called Robert Edwards was licensed by the British to hunt down Spanish ships. He was so successful that the Crown gave him a slice of Manhattan as a reward. Edwards leased the land for 99 years to two brothers and subsequently died, lost at sea. That lease expired in 1877 and was supposed to be apportioned off to Edwards’s heirs. But that never happened.

    “I simply want to know if the Foreign Office is aware that Mr. Harry Wyndham Carter is, by descent, one of the claimants to the alleged Edwards estate in New York,” wrote Lord Clifton to Sir Edward Grey, then a minister in the British government and later ambassador to America. In the document, which I found in the National Archives in London, Lord Clifton says the estate was then worth about £1 million a year. If Harry had received his 77 acres, his income would have been slightly higher than Cornelius Vanderbilt’s. What Clifton doesn’t say is how exactly my cousin, four times removed, had established that he was the rightful inheritor of the estate. The letter has an air of haste, great swishes of black ink underlining facts and names. The reason for the urgency was that poor cousin Harry was in prison.

    As editor and proprietor of the Kennel Review, a magazine dedicated to dogs, he had managed to rack up some debts. His creditors planned to seize his rare books and some of his dogs from the family home in Kent. Outraged, Harry arrived just before midnight with a posse of around 20 men. They barricaded themselves in the house with “cases of champagne and other materials for conviviality,” according to one newspaper report. As well they might, given Harry was soon to be among the richest men in the world.

    After some time, he appeared at the window with a revolver and asked the bailiffs to remove themselves from his garden. “Now I give you fair warning that if you do not get off my premises when I have told you three times to do so, I will shoot you.” “Three,” he counted down from the top of the house; “two,” the bailiffs watched on, maintaining the blockade; “one.” Cousin Harry managed to clip one of them, ever so lightly, somewhere around the eye, and the man promptly took himself off to the local hospital.

    The police decided to get involved, also surrounding the home but not daring to interrupt the party. The next morning, Harry appeared again at the window and managed to negotiate an end to the siege. He emerged, “accompanied by two women, smoking a cigarette.” So began his sorry persecution at the hands of the British state.

    He was locked up for five years. Apparently, women swooned in the court as the sentence was read out. “It was the one topic of every club, inn parlor and bar,” explained another newspaper report, “the general feeling seemed to be that the sentence was too severe… especially among the fairer sex.” A petition to have his sentence commuted was organized. It was even signed by one of the jurors who had convicted Harry. Meanwhile, my cousin “made enquiries as to the allowance of cigars, wine and whiskey during his incarceration.” His imprisonment was less jolly than he’d hoped. Lord Clifton began campaigning for his release, bringing cases against prison officers for mistreatment. An exoneration and compensation committee was set up in his benefit, but it was no good. He was declared bankrupt while in prison. “Five years of penal servitude have made him wholly mad and he is now a pauper lunatic,” read the papers. On his release, he was sent to an insane asylum.

    Yet somehow he managed to escape. He was convinced that a conspiracy had deprived him of his New York inheritance, a conspiracy that went to the very top of the British state. While on the run, he wrote a letter to Queen Victoria’s private secretary, expressing his frustration in colorful language. “I am fully swindled of liberty and money… The Queen’s life is not worth a penny until she treats me properly and meets my demands.” And then he added some slightly unfortunate bits about potentially shooting the Queen.

    Royal residences across the country were put on high alert. Harry was hunted down – and found having lunch in a restaurant with a young woman. He was sent to Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane and, after serving 43 years, died in 1938. And with him went the proof that the Carters are the rightful inheritors of much of New York.

    But Harry wasn’t the only person seeking the Edwards estate. Over the years, thousands have claimed they are the descendants of that British pirate, and thus rightful heirs to his 77 acres of Manhattan. There was the Pennsylvania Association of Edwards Heirs which in the 1990s crowdfunded $1.5 million for a suit to reclaim the land. The courts rejected their case and the association eventually collapsed amid accusations of embezzlement and fraud.

    Historians today say the Edwards estate was a hoax. But of course they would. The great swindle of Harry Wyndham Carter continues to this day. His patient records will be declassified in 2038 and I’m confident that when they are, the world will know that I’m rightfully the heir of Manhattan – and I’ll shoot anyone who disagrees. You can join my posse if you like. I’ll bring the champagne and revolvers.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • Inside the cult of Equinox

    Inside the cult of Equinox

    Scratch the surface of Silver Age Rome and what do you find? Most likely, a tight subterranean vault built as a meeting room for the followers of Mithras. This Persian mystery cult was everywhere in the early Anni Domini, coming to prominence between the decline of Hellenism and the rise of Christianity, filling that gap between the gods of Olympus and the God of Moses. The cult’s dark temples, the Mithraea, squeezed devotees into opposing benches designed to make them uncomfortable, all while in communion with their fellow initiates. Today, sociologists might call a Mithraeum a “third place.” Here was the kind of space where Roman men who had become disillusioned with Jupiter Stator could go between work and home to be purified together in a shower of bull’s blood.

    The modern gym is one of our own ubiquitous third places, but only the urban fitness chain known as Equinox has positioned itself as an upscale mystery cult. “COMMIT TO SOMETHING,” beckons the gnostic advertising campaign of this self-described “high-performance lifestyle leader.” When presented with the accompanying outsize images obstructing the gym’s windows, we might well wonder: commit to what?

    In truth, the ‘something’ to which one mainly commits at Equinox is a mid-four-figure annual fee

    Launched in 1991, the gym now has more than 100 outposts spread across New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Houston and Washington, DC, as well as London, Toronto and Vancouver. The Equinox campaign started by the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy in 2016, diverged notably from the standard gym appeal of “improving lives through fitness” or “member-friendly memberships that won’t break the bank,” as the bargain-basement New York Sports Club might say. First shot by Steven Klein – whom the New Yorker described as creating “fashion photography with a pistol and a pulse” for his images that “teetered between the seductive and the sadistic” – the Equinox campaign was far from mens sana in corpore sano. It wasn’t even about going to the gym at all.

    Instead, we saw a model etching a tattoo over what remained of her preemptive double mastectomy. “Scars aren’t ugly,” she said in the video component. “Scars are really just beautiful badges reminding you what you chose to go against; not just the size of your opponent but the size of your commitment.” Other materials presented a young man with a paralyzing stutter. “Your commitment tells your story better than you ever could,” he eked out. In another, three deaf cheerleaders signed in unison. In another, a model cut her hands practicing the harp as blood ran down her instrument. In another, a naked man received a haircut and manicure-pedicure as a small mirror covered his pudendum. In another, a woman breastfed two babies at her table at a restaurant. In yet another, a shirtless man was soon covered in bees.

    At the time, Equinox promoted its campaign as an “intimate, provocative and deeply moving exploration of personal identity” that “confronts current cultural issues and asserts that commitment has the power to define who we are in the deepest sense.”

    This year, Equinox updated the approach with a shoot by the British fashion photographer Charlotte Wales that extended these themes: a model licks a leather boot; a woman lies on a bed of nails as a robotic arm sticks her with a hypodermic needle; another model (this time transsexual) walks side by side with an AI version of their likeness covered in metallic parts. “Commitment is obsessed,” reads Equinox’s latest ad copy. “It’s now. It’s relentless. Always one step ahead. Abandon half-measures. Surrender to your urges. Sacrifice for obsession. Commitment isn’t a choice. It’s an awakening. Let desire drive you. Commit to something.”

    Abandon all hope, ye who enter here? To hammer home the infernal message, Equinox throws extra shade on those who make that naive New Year’s resolution to get in shape. “If you waited for the ball to drop, you dropped the ball,” advises the gym. “On January 1, we blocked new membership sign-ups. Because commitment doesn’t start when the calendar resets. It’s for those who are all in. Not when the ball drops, the clock strikes, or the calendar flips – but always.”

    So what if you can’t commit to the gym, the message goes. You should really be committed to an intensive-care unit. Or a mental asylum. Or you should receive a felony charge. But in truth, the “something” to which one mainly commits at Equinox is a mid-four-figure annual fee.

    The real mystery of Equinox is what you get for the expense. In June, New York attorney general Letitia James won a $600,000 judgment against the company by arguing that its contractual agreements were too hard to break. The award of a mere $250 to each of the plaintiffs – which equaled less than a month of dues, to say nothing of the initiation fee – left members less than impressed. “Tish gets ripped!” ran the New York Post headline. “New Yorkers not impressed with AG Letitia James’s crackdown on gyms.”

    Members don’t converse. Most employ monastic silence as they move from station to station

    Equinox positions its membership as fast-track admission to the cosmopolitan faith. At the root of such modern urbanism, of course, is masochism. High taxes, crowded subways and filthy streets appeal to the broken-window theory in reverse: that our souls will only get better if our city lives get worse. Professional sadists such as New York’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani therefore thrive in the same way as that Equinox spin instructor who comes around to crank up your bike’s resistance. It’s all about abnegating the flesh and globalizing the intifada to a techno beat. In one early Equinox advertisement, a screaming, shirtless woman holds up her fist in front of a classical building surrounded by a night-time security detail. Just what she is protesting does not matter so much as the appearance of her consequence-free LARPing. (She is portrayed by the fitness model Bianca Van Damme, daughter of the “muscles from Brussels” Jean-Claude Van Damme.)

    Equinox members may not be true basement-dwelling “Brooklynites for Gaza,” but they are content to go along with the latest thing as long as the towels are stocked and the steam room stays open. We all signed up to be in this Paul Verhoeven-movie of a place, and that’s life in the big city.

    “A manic attempt to make the posthuman sexy,” is how one agnostic member explained it to me. “I have the distressing sense that I am beholding another stripe – or, heaven forbid, chevron – on the ghastly and vexillologically metastasizing ‘progress flag.’ The clientele strikes me as being finance and finance-adjacent bros plus gay men for whom human growth hormone, rather than Ozempic, is still the lifestyle supplement of choice. As for the women, I’d have no idea. I don’t notice.”

    Not noticing is a big part of the Equinox culture. Members don’t converse. Most employ monastic silence as they move from station to station, carrying their water bottles and iPhones upon which a small dog must be featured on the lock screen. No grunts. Little sweat. The chilled eucalyptus towels see to that. After reports a decade ago of problems in the steam room, the facility posted signs of a “zero-tolerance policy regarding inappropriate, sexual or lewd behavior. Our staff is on notice.” The closest most come to catching a sexually transmitted disease at today’s Equinox is when a form of athlete’s foot requires an oral course of fungicide (I now wear shower shoes).

    And yet, past the many cult symbols that line its entry, Equinox tends to be well-maintained and almost always uncrowded. Bottles of four different soaps and lotions line each shower stall: a shampoo and conditioner of rose, pepper and sage; a facial cleanser of aloe, geranium and rose; a body cleanser of chamomile, bergamot and rose. Additional bottles of face and body cream are available in the locker rooms. So too are Q-Tips, deodorant, mouthwash, razors, even a container of black hair ties to maintain one’s man bun. The only recent controversy here occurred a year ago, when Equinox switched out its Kiehl’s line of products for Grown Alchemist, a brand that can also be purchased at (gasp) Target.

    My Equinox membership grants me access to all the spin classes and boxing sessions my heart desires. There is a mobile media library showing the proper use of every exercise machine – something I found particularly useful as I recovered from a suite of orthopedic setbacks. With my level of membership, I can visit the Flatiron location across from my office, the Upper West Side location next to my apartment, the Columbus Circle location with the saltwater pool and just about every other location save for the nirvana that is the new Equinox Hudson Yards, which would cost me another $50 a month. Perhaps one day I too will join this “most spacious, thoughtful, and connected Equinox ever… the purest expression of high-performance living yet. The 60,000-square-foot luxury destination spans two floors and includes a 15,000-square-foot pool and sundeck.”

    Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been spotted in his Make America Healthy Again jeans and hiking boots, lifting at Equinox. At some point we all reach that moment in life when we realize our aging frames must be committed to a daily routine of physical therapy.

    By spending more than $300 a month with a company that advertises personal destruction, many urban professionals may feel they have purchased some progressive blessing on their self-care. For others such as myself, Equinox is simply a very nice gym.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • The truth about the trans school shooter

    The truth about the trans school shooter

    True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit “I Don’t Like Mondays.” But that was a long time ago. Since then, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then, that when the culprit in an attack on young children is a woman, that anomaly would merit journalistic remark. After all, following these baffling bursts of nihilistic animosity, there’s little enough to say. Yet after “Robin” Westman opened fire on kids at mass in a Catholic school in Minneapolis in late August, segments of the media were conspicuously incurious about how “she” came to be consumed by such commonly masculine rage.

    This grotesque incident was, as usual, pointless – and as a longtime commentator on such shootings, I despair there are so few, if any, productive observations to advance. While still exhibiting the classic, seemingly antithetical traits of grandiosity and self-loathing, this killer was, to me, uniquely repulsive. Craving distraction, then, I’ve idly kept track of which media outlets have perversely and pugnaciously referred to Robin (né Robert) Westman as female.

    Naturally, for the New York Times the transgender killer is “she” or “Ms. Westman.” The BBC has also followed its guidelines to “generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question” – even if the “person in question” committed suicide on site and is no longer in a position to have preferences of any kind.

    When Senator Amy Klobuchar bewailed that “this horrific offender… that he… it was all-purpose hate, right?” and called Westman “a madman,” the interviewer from America’s National Public Radio appended: “And just a point of clarification, Senator Klobuchar referenced the shooter as ‘he’. Although police have identified a suspect, it’s still unclear at this time what that person’s gender is or how they identify.” Yet the shooter having been born male had already been retrieved from the public record. The sheep-in-conservative-clothing commentator on the PBS Newshour, David Brooks, repeatedly referred to Westman as female – no big surprise. But when a Wall Street Journal editorial also reported Westman had “changed her name from Robert,” my jaw dropped. Even Fox News reported the killer “had their name legally changed.” (All italics mine.) I’ve begrudging regard for ABC’s militant neutrality. In fastidiously citing “a person,” “Westman” with no title, “the shooter” and “the suspect,” the network boycotted pronouns altogether. That takes semantic discipline. But the right-of-center New York Post’s flat-out “he,” “him” and “gunman” is more courageous, not to mention more factually informative. At long last, the Daily Telegraph in London dared to identify Westman as male – though for years it referred even to preposterous, manipulative fake-female criminals such as “Isla” Bryson as “she.”

    The trans cult attracts the insecure, the lost and ungrounded; the unstable, disturbed and, yes, outright deranged

    For journalists to take a trans-mollycoddling stand in the pronoun wars isn’t merely to default to niceness. Misidentifying the biological sex of figures in news stories is an implicit declaration of support for an incoherent, unhinged ideology. This grammatical loyalty to progressive dogma apparently trumps journalistic integrity – the obligation to report the truth – and even decency. Chronicling the Annunciation Catholic Church and School shooting, the New York Times and the BBC are pandering to the tender feelings of someone who’s 1) a would-be mass murderer (the successful kind, by a rather arbitrary definition, kills four or more); 2) insane; and 3) dead. We alive people resent once-reputable news outlets choosing the occasion of two murdered children and at least 18 seriously injured people to propagandize and yet again defy biological reality.

    Media kowtowing to trans orthodoxy alienates their mainstream audience. Incorrect pronouns drive news consumers nuts.  Alluding to a burly guy in a pink wig with a five o’clock shadow as “she” makes journalists seem like fools and readers and viewers feel mocked. Even the wussy middle course of calling trans people “they” leads to grammatical confusion. Also late last month, the Telegraph reported that another (male) transgender killer, “Joanna” Rowland-Stuart, “stabbed their partner to death with a samurai sword.” The following para refers to Joanna’s attack in “their Brighton home.” Does that mean the couple’s home, or only Joanna’s?

    In that case, the court has deemed the killer Joanna “unfit to plead,” meaning he’s bonkers. Is a pattern developing? Despite multiple cases of trans murderers whose sanity was dubious, I’d not claim, as some conservative pundits do, that trans people are grossly overrepresented in the depressingly long roster of American mass murderers. Yet people who are mentally ill in other respects are consistently the most susceptible to deciding they were “born in the wrong body.” The trans cult attracts the insecure, the lost and ungrounded; the unstable, disturbed and, yes, outright deranged.

    We’ve turned confusion about which sex you are into a reasonable, dare I say normal, source of distress that demands redress, not by curing a delusion but encouraging it. Declaring you’re trans is a moment of self-discovery that we celebrate for its “authenticity” and “bravery.” In the olden days of Psycho, a man wearing women’s clothing sent an ominous signal that there’s something off about them.

    Yet Westman’s transgenderism was so socially acceptable that it functioned as disguise – cloaking a manic mishmash of malice toward Jews, children, blacks, Hispanics, Christians, Donald Trump, doubtless everyone else and, not to forget, himself. Rather than signal there’s something wrong here, Westman’s dressing as a woman actually camouflaged the warning signs that the young man was out of his tiny mind. The seminal mistake in the progression of this demented transgender movement was no longer recognizing gender dysphoria as a mental disorder.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15 2025 World edition.

  • Where did ‘husband’ come from?

    Where did ‘husband’ come from?

    “Am I housebound?” asked my husband as I was discussing with him the complicated history of the name for his role.

    “No, darling,” I said. “You’re the one in the house who just is or lives there.” Only later did I tell him that the word bond, behind the -band of husband, sank in worth with the years, following the same path as boor, churl and peasant.

    Whereas I as a housewife enjoy a comparatively transparent label, any husband’s title is obscure. It is simply a house-bond, but the first element of husband, hus-, no longer seems like house, and the -bond element is often mistaken for a form of bond, to do with binding.

    The bond in husband derives from words in Norse languages with related meanings “to live, dwell, to cultivate, to build.” Old English had a connected word, buan, “to dwell,” and these all came from the ancient Indo-European word that gave us be, as well as the Latin fui and the Greek stem phu- (hence physics). The history of the English word be finds cousins in Persian, Russian and Irish.

    Before the Norman Conquest, bonda in English meant a freeman, like a ceorl (churl), below a noble thane but above a servile worker. After the Normans came, the churl sank from freeman to a tenant bound to a lord, and bonde in Middle English became equivalent to a villein or serf, and then to a slave. It was at this stage that the word became confused with bond as in bondage. In husband, the fossilized -band was insulated from these developments in meaning.

    Husbandry meant at first management of a household, an obsolete sense, of which we retain only husbanding of resources. Husbandry was the task of a husbandman, cultivating the soil. The husband as master of the house came to mean the correlative of a housewife, to whom he’d be married. Strangely, some men in the Middle Ages, such as Richard Husewif (1192), had the word as a surname; perhaps it was taken as a role independent of sex. My husband couldn’t be mistaken for one.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.