America

America’s abortion debate isn’t coming to Britain

Politicians are lining up to condemn the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Activists are warning us that this is the start of a fresh assault on abortion rights in Britain. What starts in the core spreads to the periphery; a new wave of pro-life policies will soon be here. What’s less clear is where this wave is meant to come from, given that every major British party is opposed to the Supreme Court decision. Once again, Westminster politics has mistaken Britain for America. The Conservative party may be in hoc to a blonde tousle-haired populist, but it isn’t quietly stacking the judiciary with pro-life justices in order

It’s time to trust democracy again after Roe v. Wade

Progressive outrage greeted this week’s US Supreme Court majority decision which overturned Roe v. Wade. ‘Extreme ideology,’ thundered Joe Biden. It was ‘a huge blow to women’s human rights’ according to Michelle Bachelet at the UN; a case of ‘back to the Middle Ages,’ in the view of one melodramatic performer at Glastonbury. These are understandable views. But they are still misguided. Some background can help. Before January 1973 abortion in America was a state law matter. Some states were restrictive, some liberal: it all depended on public opinion and local politics. Roe v. Wade changed all that. It determined that the US Constitution implicitly protected the right to abortion almost absolutely up

Is there a British version of America’s attachment to guns?

Now that the horror of the Uvalde school shooting in Texas has begun to ebb away, as it always does, it is easy to think that things have returned to normal. And in America, they certainly have returned to normal. That is to say, the mass shootings continue, at the rate of about 11 a week, with a total of around 300 so far this year. As things stand, America is on course for its deadliest year of gun violence ever (equalling last year). Here are a few details of just some of these slayings. At the beginning of this June, an angry patient in Tulsa, Oklahoma shot dead his

Welcome to the age of post-Covid nihilism

Washington, DC Amid the recent orgy of violence across America, it was the carjackings that finally got me. Lost amid all the mass shootings and gang slayings of late has been another wave of crime: vehicle thefts. In Washington DC, carjackings in 2021 were up by a third over 2019, while in nearby Alexandria a motorist made national news after he shot two boys at a gas station who were trying to lift his car. In Chicago, 1,900 vehicles were jacked just last year, which is eye-wateringly high even by that city’s grim standards. There is an inhumanity at work in this country that’s as stark as anything I’ve seen in

Lionel Shriver on mass shootings, gun control and American carnage

This is an edited transcript of a conversation between Freddy Gray and Lionel Shriver on The Spectator’s Americano podcast, which you can listen to here. Freddy Gray: Lionel, I feel a bit guilty asking you to talk about this, because I know you’ve become a kind of go-to person about mass shootings in America because you wrote a very significant novel – We Need to Talk About Kevin. You’ve written before about how awkward it is that every time there’s a mass shooting in America, people ask you to come on and talk about it. But in your book, the killer was using a bow, not a gun. So you don’t

After Biden, who?

Joe Biden is telling everyone he will seek re-election in 2024 – including those who don’t want him around. After Barack Obama gave him the cold shoulder at an April White House event, sources revealed to the Hill that Biden had told his former boss he planned to go for it in 2024. You get the sense the leak did not come from Obama’s camp. ‘I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,’ Biden said at a Michigan rally in March 2020. ‘There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country’. Every candidate sounds a conciliatory tone in victory, particularly when

How profitable are Britain’s biggest oil companies?

A slip of the tongue George W. Bush condemned a political system where one man could wage a ‘brutal and unjustified invasion of Iraq’ before correcting himself and saying ‘Ukraine’. Some other Freudian slips by US politicians: – In the 2012 US election Senator John McCain, who had been the Republican candidate four years earlier, made a speech in which he attempted to look forward to a Mitt Romney presidency, but somehow managed instead to say: ‘I am confident that with the leadership and the backing of the American people, President Obama will turn this country around.’ – At another event in the same election, Romney himself introduced his running

What is Black Lives Matter?

It’s hard not to admire Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter foundation. Under fire over yet another set of revelations that suggest her world-famous anti-racism organisation is in fact little more than a racket, she has admitted she made ‘mistakes’. But what else could a poor girl do? An organisation of BLM’s size was simply not equipped for the millions upon millions of dollars it suddenly received in the summer of 2020, when the locked-down world went crazy over the death of George Floyd. It was all ‘white guilt money’, says Cullors. She’s absolutely right, of course. In those mad days of 2020, as protests spread and

Douglas Murray

The dishonesty of how we respond to tragedies

It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It is six years since Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency by somebody who appeared to be a sort of aspiring Nazi. Back then, various campaign groups and newspapers in this country had no problems with claiming that guilt for that attack could be liberally spread around. Some said that everybody on the political right bore responsibility. Others claimed that anyone who was leading Britain’s ‘Leave’ campaign in the EU referendum shared the blame. It was different in October last year, when Sir David Amess MP was murdered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 —

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

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

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