America

We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number seven: Lionel Shriver’s piece from March on fighting for your country. For many of us war voyeurs watching the news with a glass of sherry, admiration of the little-engine-that-could Ukrainian fighters is underwritten by unease. As families escape to safety, plenty of feisty Ukrainians are remaining behind to battle a far more powerful aggressor, and they’re not all men, either. The question nags, then: in the same circumstances, would we stick around to defend our homelands, or would we cut our losses and get out? Earlier this month, that’s precisely what a Quinnipiac poll asked

Yesterday, a political committee set up in order to condemn Donald Trump condemned Donald Trump. It would have been truly jaw-dropping if the congressional January 6th committee (which consisted of seven Democrats and two Republicans, all of whom thought Trump was guilty as hell) had decided to say that Donald Trump had not criminally abetted the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. As it was, the headlines last night are about as surprising as the news that Donald Trump has released a new set of Trump-themed NFTs. Congress is not the Justice Department. The committee’s ‘criminal referrals’ may sound dramatic, yet the four counts have no legal teeth.

When I arrived in Washington, DC in 2006 to learn about US politics, someone told me that in America, there are two main parties: the party of power and the party of stupid. The latter denoted, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Republican party. And so it continues to prove. The failure of the much-hyped red wave to materialise in the 2022 midterms shows that the GOP has not lost its knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Consider: a day before the election, Biden’s approval rating was 39 per cent. This was a reflection of his poor performance (inflation, gas prices and immigration are just a few of the issues

Over the years, I’ve received my share of green-ink author’s mail. You know, from folks who’ve discovered an exciting variety of textual special effects: lurid colours, freaky fonts, creative insertions of upper case, frenzies of inverted commas around standard vocabulary and lashings of exclamation marks. Calling these letters ‘fan mail’ would be a stretch. They are universally hostile, and their authors are crazy. Rule of thumb: DO NOT ‘respond’! Trump wants to run, but he wants to lose – and throwing the contest should prove a cinch But how do you ignore green-ink communiqués sent to the world at large from a former president of the United States? Especially one

The ‘Twitter files’ Elon Musk released to two journalists have produced a cloud of confusion. So far, we have not seen the files themselves, only what one journalist, Matt Taibbi, has reported about them. The main findings reinforce what we have known all along: Twitter’s former management strongly favoured Democrats and used its powerful platform to aid them. It was far more likely to suppress the speech of conservatives and Republicans than of progressives and Democrats. Twitter’s systematic bias went far beyond its most famous instance, when it killed the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. Freddy Gray makes these important points in his recent piece here

For weeks now, Twitter’s new chief Elon Musk has been promising to reveal what really happened behind the scenes at the social media platform in the run up to the 2020 presidential election.  Well, yesterday, Musk did — through the journalist Matt Taibbi. It’s a big story, one that free speech supporters everywhere should take seriously, especially in the United Kingdom where we are on the verge of passing the Online Safety Bill. What happened at Twitter in 2020 shows how easily concern about ‘safety’ can, under political pressure, morph into corruption and censorship.  Taibbi, apparently directed by Musk, has released a long Twitter ‘thread’ citing company emails which show

American conservatives like to say that the way to stop Donald Trump in 2024 is to hit him from the right. Compared with his own political movement, they argue, Trump has always been something of a squish when it comes to issues such as Covid vaccines, gay marriage, criminal justice, or border control. He never did build that wall – not properly, anyway. Any candidate wanting to take down the father of Trumpism should therefore keep pointing out that Daddy had four years in the White House and never lived up to the hype. Take note, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Yet no one could have anticipated that the Trump 2024

Ye is not in Calabasas anymore. The superstar rapper, designer and now 2024 presidential candidate flew to western Maryland on Monday alongside his new campaign manager, the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous and the de facto leader of the ‘Groyper Army’, Nick Fuentes. The trio landed at Frederick Municipal Airport only to find that their driver was nowhere to be found. The limo company had accidentally sent him to Washington Dulles. Ye, or the artist formally known as Kanye West, was in town to appear on Timcast, the podcast hosted by disaffected liberal Tim Pool. Timcast staff munched on Black Hog BBQ (they ordered it because they heard Ye likes barbecue) and wondered aloud

America could be entering the ‘Great Stagflation’, defined by economist Noriel Roubini as ‘an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions’. Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labour participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times. But the coming downturn could prove a boon overall, if Americans make the choices that restore competition and bring production back to the United States and the West. In the United States, the contours of a new post-pandemic economy are becoming clear, particularly in the Sun Belt and parts of the heartland. That revival could

Some denials are more worrying than their absence. A company insisting that its director will be vindicated by the forensic auditors is unlikely to succeed in calming investors; a sports team insisting it has total confidence in its coach is likely to receive a flurry of speculative applications; and a president insisting that ‘we’re not gonna be in a recession in my view’ is unlikely to do consumer confidence a great deal of good. The major difference here is that the White House has the advantage of being able to mark its own homework. No matter what today’s GDP data shows, Biden’s team will be able to claim the US