Taki's Magazine

Dear Loyal Readers of Taki’s Magazine, After 17 years as editor of my father’s eponymous online rag, I have decided to resign for personal reasons as well as for the health of the website. I took over from Richard Spencer, whom you may remember from his subsequent role as the soi-disant leader of the alt-right, only to end with his spectacular failure to Unite the Right.

"Daredevil Lindbergh" in a re-engined Standard J-1, c. 1925 When browsing the sports pages of the New York Post, a tabloid hard to find nowadays at even-harder-to-locate newsstands, I always read up on the tail end of some sports hero’s interview. I said the tail end because the rest is too embarrassingly banal even for my 7-year-old grandson. The last question is always whom the star would like to have a dream dinner with.

Americans today are justifiably angry about the price of rents and mortgages. Home prices have roughly tripled over the last 25 years, and the median home price is now $415,000. The 30- and 40-somethings are having a tough time buying a first home. Young families may need to pay a whopping $75,000 on a down payment. Democrats and some populist Republicans have convinced the Trump administration to pin the blame on institutional investors, including large banks, private equity firms and hedge funds.

Minneapolis, Minnesota In early January 2026, Minneapolis once again rediscovered its true civic vocation. Not commerce. Not culture. Not even ice fishing. Riot rehearsal. Once known as Prince’s hometown and briefly famous for the Vikings’ annual postseason collapse, the city has spent the past half decade rebranding itself as America’s most reliable supplier of moral tantrums, ever since the death of George Floyd turned a Midwestern police blotter into a global morality play.

“Replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism!” says my new socialist mayor. Sounds so nice … No more greedy capitalists hoarding wealth. People share. It’s the socialist dream. What will replace capitalism and individualism? One model is the commune – that socialist system where people share, rather than greedily chasing money. In my new video, TikTokers claim capitalism is “ending.” They sing about the beauty of communes.

It is all too easy to claim analogies with Nazi Germany whenever you want to decry something.

Painting of a scene from Plato's Symposium Good old Plato, he was a hell of a fellow. I’ve been reading up on him, and boy, do we ever need people like the ancient one nowadays.

Ryan Field, 2007 Here’s a recent story from the Chicago Tribune that jumped off the page when I read it. Northwestern University is finishing up the construction of a new $800 million football stadium. This is supposedly a nonprofit “educational” entity. Uh-huh. Northwestern — an “institution of higher learning” located outside of Chicago — is flush with cash. It has an endowment of nearly $15 billion, and the tax-free donations keep flowing in.

Last weekend, while the foreign-policy priesthood was still arguing over footnotes in President Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), American special operators were busy writing history in Caracas.

Going through great piles of aging printed detritus in my study the other day, I came across an unopened copy of The Spectator dated 13 December 2008. It is sometimes instructive to look back into the distant recent, or recent distant, past (distant or recent according to one’s perspective), for we are apt to suppose both that there is nothing new under the sun and that we live in times without precedent, veering crazily from one extreme belief to the other.