America

If you’re tired of hypochondriac journalists’ takes on January 6, then try Thomas Jefferson’s. He delivered his judgment on events of that sort back in 1787. ‘I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,’ he wrote to James Madison, ‘and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.’ Unlike the riot at the Capitol last year, the rebellion that Jefferson had in mind was a genuine armed insurrection. The Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays and his followers, furious over taxes and debts, forced state courts in Massachusetts to shut down in the late months of 1786. By early 1787, Shays commanded

One of the West’s great foreign policy failures of 2021 was the Iran nuclear negotiations, which remained bitterly unresolved as the clock passed midnight. Having spoken to a number of diplomatic sources on different sides in recent weeks, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the process has been woefully inept. Not only has there been a dramatic failure to extract any concessions from Tehran – even a meaningful freeze on progress towards the bomb has remained elusive – but western negotiators have become enveloped themselves in an Asterix-style dust cloud of infighting, competing agendas and tension. All of this, of course, is a gift to the Iranians, who

Donald Trump famously boasted that he could ‘stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody’ and still not lose voters. That was back in 2016 and the following years proved his point. We are now in the winter of 2021, however, and the 45th president may at last have stumbled across a way to alienate his fan base — by endorsing vaccines. Covid is today the most hostile frontline in America’s all-consuming culture war. Resistance to the national vaccination drive has become the stickiest point. You are either pro-freedom or in bed with the Great Globo Pharma Conspiracy. Trump has adopted a more middle-ground position: encouraging people to take the vaccines while

The actor Jussie Smollett has been jailed for 150 days after staging a hate crime against himself. Freddy Gray wrote about the rise of hate hoaxing in December… So Jussie Smollett, the world’s most notorious hate hoaxer, has at last been found guilty of lying to the police.  Smollett, you may remember, was the actor who wanted to get even more famous so badly that he hired two brothers to put on ski masks and pretend to be Trump-supporting racists who spotted him in public. They then fake attacked him with bleach and a noose that they just happened to be carrying around, as racists do. The US vice president and

Crowds gathered outside of the Supreme Court this week as the Court prepared to hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most consequential abortion case in a generation, which will decide if a 2018 Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks is constitutional. Pro-life groups rallied outside the Court, holding signs to ‘love them both’ while chanting ‘we are the pro-life generation and we will abolish abortion.’ The pro-abortion group Shout Your Abortion stood opposite them, allegedly swallowing abortion pills while chanting ‘abortion pills forever.’ Inside the court, the atmosphere was more serene. Stepping forward to open the arguments, Mississippi solicitor general Scott Stewart framed his

Plummeting polls are sending a clear message to the Biden administration, but the President is deaf, dumb and blind to it. And it’s not just the polls. Take congressional retirements. Democrats who chair congressional committees, reading the grim poll numbers, figure life will be a lot more comfortable as highly paid lobbyists than as powerless minority members. They are retiring in droves. Historically, retirements by well-informed insiders are strong predictors of the next House majority. Local elections are sending the same message. They tell Democrats they have moved too far left and that voters’ quality of life is suffering. Voters are especially troubled by inflation, Covid and crime. They are

A victim of revolution, King George III’s statue was toppled almost 250 years ago in New York. Now the statue of his most bitter critic, Thomas Jefferson, is to follow in his footsteps – after the founding father’s likeness was removed from New York City Hall this week because he was a slave owner. Jefferson’s statue will be moved down the road to the New York Historical Society, after the city’s public design commission unanimously voted to remove him from his plinth. His statue had been in the city council chamber since 1915, but as councilwoman Adrienne Adams explained in a presentation: ‘It makes me deeply uncomfortable knowing that we

At least five people were killed and more than 40 injured on Sunday night when a driver drove his SUV into attendees of the annual Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The driver has been identified in news reports as Darrell Edward Brooks Jr. The horrific attack immediately made national news in America because of the death toll and brutal nature of the crime. Videos surfaced online showing the driver veering towards members of the parade and narrowly missing many others. Sunday’s incident appeared eerily similar to the 2016 Berlin terror attack, where an Isis member killed 12 people by ramming his truck through a Christmas market. However, it seems probable

Kyle Rittenhouse is innocent. We knew that anyway, but the simple fact of something being true in no way guarantees that the legal system will recognise it. In this case, we are fortunate that law and reality have decided to agree with one another. Kyle Rittenhouse is innocent, but the state remains on trial. There will be a great deal of commentary after the Rittenhouse trial about ‘what this verdict says about America’. You can see the first green shoots beginning to emerge even now; news outlets are talking about the ‘racial justice protests’ in Kenosha and how the verdict demonstrates the fundamental racial inequities of American society, or even

With Biden sliding to 38 per cent approval in the polls, it’s finally time for everyone to stop calling him ‘the new FDR’. That preposterous moniker was always misplaced. Biden’s ambition for ‘transforming’ the country has never extended beyond removing Donald Trump from the White House, inserting his patronage picks into important jobs and, most importantly, crushing the intra-party insurgency led by Senator Bernie Sanders. He has been spectacularly successful in all three of these goals given his meagre talents. But comparing him to Franklin D Roosevelt — America’s most transformative president since Abraham Lincoln, and a man of immense energy — has always been downright absurdity. Mercifully, the media’s

Two consequential trials are currently underway in America. Both in some way relate to the events of last year surrounding police and the public debate about racism. One trial is driving most of the media coverage online. One has been all but ignored. So why is the national media almost singularly focused on what appears to be fabricating racial components in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three rioters in Wisconsin, killing two, and not at all in the trial of Travis McMichael and his two accomplices, who stand accused of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was gunned down while jogging last February? We are

When a Republican wins in a reliably Democratic state, it’s big news. That’s exactly what happened in Virginia, where newcomer Glenn Youngkin defeated former governor Terry McAuliffe. The Republican won even though McAuliffe had a well-oiled political machine and high name recognition, and was campaigning in a state Joe Biden won by ten points only a year ago. All those advantages were for nought. The Commonwealth will have a Republican governor for the first time in over a decade. It is likely Republicans will win the other two state-wide races for the lieutenant governor and attorney general and could win the House of Delegates, which had been under firm Democratic

Less than a year into the Biden presidency the world suddenly is a very chaotic place. The hasty and botched US exit from Afghanistan has created a terrorist-led state. Iran is ploughing forward with its nuclear plans. Russia has leverage over European energy supplies. Communist China is no longer hiding its totalitarian nature and global ambitions. And yet the US, UK, Germany and other major democracies seem more concerned about climate change and what may or may not happen 100 or more years from now than tackling the very serious threats to the free world’s national security today. This dangerous moment is what the late George Shultz dubbed a ‘hinge