America

Wednesday

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

BLM is dying but its legacy lives on

It can be hard to remember just how strange things were during the pandemic. Every day the front pages covered the virus spreading from city to city in minute detail, while politicians and citizens alike excoriated each other for failing to show sufficient concern about the disease. With the benefit of those two years, it’s now – probably – just about safe to say it: the summer of 2020, which was dominated by the Black Lives Matter movement, really was quite strange. In response to George Floyd’s death in Minnesota, politicians in Britain took the knee in solidarity, protesters turned out in force even though pandemic restrictions were still in

Thursday

Andrew Sullivan

The fire and fury of America’s abortion debate

I wonder at times how some of my fellow hacks in America get out of bed in the morning. The leak of a draft of a Supreme Court decision on abortion rights last week prompted what can only be called a collective nervous breakdown. ‘My teeth have been chattering uncontrollably for an hour,’ New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister vented. ‘Bodies/minds are so weird. Like, not euphemistically – actually chattering. Audibly. And full shaking body. Though otherwise wholly, rationally, well and truly expecting it.’ Well, I wouldn’t say wholly rational, Rebecca, but you do you. The terrifying ruling would send the abortion issue back from a single court to democratic debate

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Why progressives can't tolerate Christians

For decades, Christians have talked about feeling persecuted in advanced secular and liberal democracies. They’ve often sounded a bit hysterical. It’s true that governments and societies have moved towards a kind of post-Christianity. The world in which we live has adopted some of the gentler stuff about love and ignored the challenging stuff about sex. Devout Catholics, Anglicans and Evangelicals can therefore be made to feel a bit weird and out of place. But persecuted? Not really. Christians are on the whole free to live according to their faith without harassment, which is very unlike the situation in some Muslim counties — or China. Look at the vicious reaction to

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

The Biden Bust is here

A wave of government spending would reboot the economy. Fairer taxes would pay for restored infrastructure. Skills would be improved, productivity raised, and new digital champions would emerge. When Joe Biden was elected, he promised the most radical programme of economic reform since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, and, to his army of cheerleaders at least, the American economy was about to be completely transformed. But hold on. Only a year into his term, the reality is very different from the promises. In reality, the Biden Bust has arrived. Donald Trump may have been personally obnoxious, but he bequeathed an economy in perfectly good shape The US GDP figures

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Disney vs DeSantis

Bob Chapek, Disney’s CEO, was paid $32.5 million last year. It’s hard to feel sorry for someone on that sort of money. Poor Bob, though. He’s caught in the middle of a vicious fight between Florida’s conservative governor Ron DeSantis and Disney’s LGBTQ+ activists and he’s being pummelled from both sides. It’s nasty. Children probably shouldn’t watch. The story begins with DeSantis’s Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, which passed in March and banned Floridian schoolteachers from discussing sexuality and mutable gender-identities with very young children. America’s progressives despise DeSantis and, it seems, the notion that parents should have more control over what their sprogs are told about sex. They

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

America has betrayed its young

Two articles last weekend made me feel sorry for American young people. We in the anti-woke brigade can be awfully hard on kids. But having been born in the 20th century turns out to have been a stroke of good fortune. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a feature about soaring mental illness in American teenagers. Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among people aged ten to 24 rose by 60 per cent. Between 2015 and 2019, prescriptions for antidepressants for teenagers rose 38 per cent. Between 2009 and 2019, emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries among people aged ten to 19 doubled for both sexes; for girls, they

Douglas Murray

Fractured: can the West fix itself?

There are many ways to fracture a people. But one of the best is to destroy all the remaining ties that bind them. To persuade them that to the extent they have anything of their own, it is not very special, and in the final analysis, hardly worth preserving. This is a process that has gone on across the western world for over a generation: a remorseless, daily assault on everything that most of us were brought up to believe was good about ourselves. Take our national heroes – the people who used to form the epicentre of our feelings of national pride. Twenty years ago, Winston Churchill easily won

Wednesday

Charles Lipson

Will Ron DeSantis run against Donald Trump?

Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis took two big steps to solidify his popularity with the Republican base, not only in his home state but across the nation. First, he won the hearts and minds of conservative voters and many independent parents by passing a law that prevents teachers from discussing the sensitive topics of gender and sexual orientation with young students (grades three and under). Second, he confronted and defeated one of Florida’s largest and most influential employers, Disney World, on a vital issue. He stripped Disney of its special privilege to govern the vast territory it owns near Orlando. Both moves are popular in their own right —

Saturday

Mary Kissel

Joe Biden’s new world disorder

The chaos abroad that has marked Joe Biden’s presidency is accelerating. Russia’s bloody war on Ukraine is rolling from winter into late spring; Iran and its proxies are launching missiles into Iraq and Saudi Arabia; China is menacing Taiwan and other Asian neighbours, and North Korea is preparing to revive its nuclear programme. Meanwhile, long-time US friends like Saudi Arabia and newer partners like India are starting to hedge their bets by cosying up to these regimes. Is the post-Cold War, US-led world order fracturing? It certainly looks like it. America’s enemies no longer fear her — and her friends don’t wholly trust her. Without a sea change in White

Sunday

Gilbert T. Sewall

When cities accommodate lawlessness

A shoot-out in downtown Sacramento, California, at two in the morning on Sunday, April 3 left six people dead and injured at least 12. It might or might not have been gang warfare. The facts are still unfolding. One of the suspected shooters, Smiley Martin, 27, was out of jail on early release against the advice of the Sacramento county district attorney. ‘He poses a significant, unreasonable risk of safety to the community,’ authorities said, opposing Martin’s release from state prison. ‘Inmate Martin has, for his entire adult life, displayed a pattern of criminal behaviour,’ wrote Deputy District Attorney Danielle Abildgaard. ‘His history indicates that he will pursue his own

Thursday

Douglas Murray

How to lose elections XXXX

I have remarked here before about our era’s tendency to accept election results if your side wins but to reject them if they lose. Happily in the UK there is no significant body of opinion which believes that Jeremy Corbyn won the 2019 election. True, there are a few Momentum loons who still think that Corbyn would have won had the Tories not somehow got more votes. But even among the most diehard Momentum-ites few actually come up with stories of ballot rigging, high-level corruption and more. Still, our country is not immune to the ‘I only accept the results if my side wins’ tendency. After all, we had Carole

Thursday

John R. MacArthur

The descent of New York

New York When Will Smith strode to the stage and slapped Chris Rock, I was surprised by how many of my friends thought the violence had been staged to rescue the Academy Awards from its years-long ratings decline. I instantly recognised it as authentic rage, not because I know anything about Hollywood or Will Smith, but because I witness similar ugliness so frequently on the New York City subway. For me, Smith’s outburst was shockingly familiar – emblematic of a simmering, pre-volcanic atmosphere in the country that no one seems to be examining or attempting to explain. As New York emerges from its third wave of Covid, an exceptionally creepy

Thursday

Roger Kimball

Kamala invades Poland

You can tell that the Biden administration is getting serious. They have unleashed their ultimate weapon, cackle diplomacy. The warhead is nicknamed Harris, and it is now in Poland cackling away, endeavouring to assemble the high-level Pierogis before Russia flattens Kiev or Putin decides to go nuclear – and by ‘go nuclear’, alas, I mean ‘go nuclear’. Some observers say that sending Kamala Harris on this mission will give her a chance to ‘burnish’ her foreign policy credentials. Cynical folks – and I would include myself in that group – think it is just another emission of fog by America’s first certifiably senile administration. It is just another emission of fog

James W. Carden

This is what liberal war fever looks like

In a private letter written in 1918, the recently deposed German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg admitted that in the run-up to the Great War, ‘there were special circumstances that militated in favour of war, including those in which Germany in 1870-71 entered the circle of great powers’ and became ‘the object of vengeful envy on the part of the other Great Powers, largely though not entirely by her own fault’. Yet Bethmann saw another crucial factor at work: that of public opinion.’How else,’ he asked,'[to] explain the senseless and impassioned zeal which allowed countries like Italy, Rumania, and even America, not originally involved in the war, no rest until they too

Bryan Appleyard

A compelling, if flawed, example of the new American noir: Red Rocket reviewed

Mikey (Simon Rex) first appears striding down a road in utterly wrecked jeans and shirt. He is carrying nothing and seems to be going nowhere until he walks up the pathway to the house of the wife he abandoned and her venomously disapproving, chain-smoking mother. Sean Baker’s Red Rocket is a movie set in Texas City in Galveston County. It’s basically an oil town and almost all the action in this film takes place on the perimeter of a vast refinery. Everything is very grainy, especially the dark interiors. This is because the film is shot on 16mm film, a medium which, on the big screen, produces a lively, speckled

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

Why would the Saudis bail out Biden?

Is Saudi Arabia shunning Washington? Mohammed bin Salman has reportedly been refusing to phone Joe Biden, who wants the kingdom to turn on its oil taps as the West desperately seeks alternatives to the Russian energy market.  Riyadh – the world’s largest oil exporter – has so far failed to accommodate Washington’s pleas. Ahead of the Russian invasion in mid-February, the US asked the Opec+ cartel – of which Saudi Arabia is the most important member – to produce more oil to slow the already rising prices. Opec+ stood firm, and said they would increase production by 400,000 barrels a day in April, a rise agreed before the threat of a

Thursday

Douglas Murray

What the right gets wrong about Putin

A fracture on the international right may seem small fry given everything that is going on right now. But it is worth loitering over. Because in recent years an interesting divide has grown among conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. On one side are the Cold War warriors and their successors who have continued to view Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a strategic threat. Meanwhile, a new generation has arrived at a different view. While the West has deranged itself with assaults on its own history, on biology and much more, an assortment of conservatives have come to see Putin as some kind of counterweight. A bulwark – even an

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Russia bombs Ukraine, MPs get a pay rise and Tube staff strike

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia: ‘Never in all my study or memory of politics and international affairs have I seen so clear a distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil, between light and dark.’ He was speaking during a visit to the Ukrainian Catholic cathedral in London, where he lit a candle. He flew off to visit Poland and Estonia, and said he was worried that Vladimir Putin might ‘Grozny-fy’ Kiev, which would be ‘an unalterable moral humanitarian catastrophe’. Britain might take in 200,000 Ukrainian refugees after a scheme for close relatives of Ukrainians in the UK was widened

Tuesday

Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

Has Putin’s invasion changed the world order?

Is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ‘a turning point in history’? Does it spell the end of the American era, and the beginning of a new Cold War between the West and a Russo-Chinese axis of authoritarians? Some invoke the image of 1939. After assuring the world that he was interested only in protecting his fellow Germans in the Sudetenland, Adolf Hitler annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, setting off world war two. Are the Russians in the Donbass the modern equivalents of the Sudeten Germans? Where will Putin stop? Others draw an analogy to 1948 and Stalin’s drawing of an Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe, followed by

Thursday

James Walton

For all its absurdity, it delivers the goods: BBC2’s Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America reviewed

In the latest episode of Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, Louis asked a rapper called Broke Baby if ‘it’s important to keep it real’. ‘You have to play your role,’ replied Broke by way of apparent agreement. Given how stoned he was, this neat paradox — that you keep it real by pretending to — mightn’t have been wholly intended. Either way, however, it was hard not to apply it to Louis himself. More than 20 years into his TV career, does anybody know for sure whether his familiar schtick is genuine or faked? Certainly not, I’d suggest, Louis — whose elaborate stage-English courtesy, wide-eyed bemusement and spectacular naivety are now