36 min listen
From the decline of meritocracy to the rise of anti-Western ideology, author Heather Mac Donald joins Freddy Gray to discuss race, merit, and victim hierarchy. Why is the West so desperate to self-cancel? And is now a moment of reckoning considering we’re five years on from the BLM protests?
Overnight three federal judges on the United States Court of International Trade ruled that Donald Trump’s worldwide tariffs are unlawful and blocked them from going into effect. A group of businesses had taken the President’s administration to court, successfully arguing that the tariffs announced on ‘Liberation Day’ were beyond the powers of the presidency. The ruling made clear that the US Congress has sole authority on passing legislation affecting cross-border trade. The White House immediately appealed and argued that the court does not have the right to rule on the matter. The effect of the ruling will be to dismantle the entire tariff regime announced on Liberation Day The effect
Nobody wants to buy his cars anymore. He has been too distracted to pay any attention to his companies, and his fortune has been shredded. As Elon Musk brings his short spell in government to an official close today, and gets back to the day job, his many political opponents will take a malicious pleasure in noting that getting mixed up with President Trump has been a financial disaster for the billionaire. But hold on. As so often, their maths is more than a little wonky. In fact, public service has been very lucrative for Musk. He will leave the government richer than ever, and remains one of the most
On the night of 26 May, Kyiv came under another large-scale Russian drone and missile attack, with explosions and machine gun fire rattling the city. I lay on the floor of my narrow hallway, listening to the furious cacophony outside the window. Two thin walls stood between me and the war, hardly an invitation to philosophical reflection. Nevertheless, I tried, because it helped me banish the more disturbing thoughts. We Ukrainians now rely on smartphone apps to warn us of incoming Russian drones and missile launches. They don’t tell you which building will be hit or where the wreckage of a downed Shahed might fall. This deprives you of sleep.
Donald Trump did not get to where he is today by taking no for an answer. Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, could scarcely have been clearer when he visited the White House earlier this month that the President’s notion of Canada becoming America’s 51st state was not even being entertained. ‘Canada is not for sale,’ he said bluntly. When Trump chided him that he should never say never, he mouthed silently, ‘Never, never.’ Undaunted, President Trump has tried a new tack: the proposed Golden Dome, a missile defence system covering the United States which Trump initiated by executive order in January. He announced on his Truth Social platform
Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is being lined up for one of the world’s most powerful humanitarian jobs: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. With Emmanuel Macron’s backing, she hopes to swap the Hôtel de Ville in Paris for Geneva, taking charge of a $10 billion global operation that defines who counts as stateless, who deserves protection, and indirectly who gets to enter countries like Britain. Now the very policies that have fuelled Paris’s dysfunction could be about to be exported globally Anne Hidalgo ruined Paris. She has destroyed its ancient heritage, dug it into a giant financial black hole, and left the city choking on traffic, crime, and
Charleston, South Carolina H.L. Mencken, long a hero of mine, wrote: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.’ That surely explains the apparent surge of Americans who have been enquiring into the possibility of emigrating to Britain. I wish them well. I have no wish to leave America myself, but fully understand the motivation causing this surge. It is, of course, because the common people wanted and are receiving Donald Trump good and hard. Years from now, probably when I am gone, a fortunate historian will describe the Trump era in the detail and with the skill
It is 60 years since William F. Buckley said that he would ‘rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University’. Yet even the godfather of American conservatism would be surprised at how much more attractive the folks in the phone directory appear today. Harvard is currently having a major row with Donald Trump’s administration. It results from the way in which the university responded to the 7 October attacks in Israel. While the Hamas massacres were still on-going, more than 30 Harvard University student organisations signed a letter which claimed to hold the ‘Israeli
Confusion abounded this week when the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that Ukraine could use western missiles to hit targets deep within Russia. ‘There are no more range limitations for weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither from the Brits, nor the French, nor from us. Not from the Americans either,’ he said. The problem was twofold. Firstly, that is not the official policy of western allies. Secondly, Germany has not provided Ukraine with any long-range missiles. Partly that is a political choice by Germany, but there is also the fact of the inherent weakness of the Bundeswehr itself. Merz’s new government has recognised the limited nature of his military, vowing
Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced that ‘more pensioners’ would qualify for winter fuel payments, but did not say how many or when. Nigel Farage of Reform said he would scrap net zero to fund things like abolishing the two-child benefit cap and reversing the winter fuel cut in full. Millions of public-sector workers such as doctors and teachers were offered rises of between 3.6 and 4.5 per cent. From July, typical household energy costs will fall by £129 a year, still higher than a year earlier. South Western Railway was renationalised. Thames Water was fined £122.7 million by Ofwat for breaching rules on sewage and shareholder dividends.
Yes, it was right of the police to announce quickly that they did not think terrorism was the motive in Monday’s Liverpool horror, thus heading off potential riots. The police also said the person arrested was a white man. If he had been a black man, would they have said that? If not, why not? Watching film of the incident, I felt uneasily reminded of the scene in Belfast in 1988 when two British soldiers in civvies drove out of a side road and found themselves in the middle of a Republican funeral cortege. The suspicious crowd began to threaten the car. The soldiers lost their nerve, one drawing his
France will increase its surveillance of all critical infrastructure after saboteurs wrecked two electricity sub-stations in Nice and Cannes last weekend. The arsonists deprived nearly 200,000 homes on the Cote d’Azur of electricity, disrupted traffic lights, interrupted the Cannes film festival, shut down cash distributors and brought Nice airport to a temporary standstill. Addressing parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Francois Bayrou declared that the attacks are ‘an extremely serious threat to public order, designed to impress and terrify those who organise such events.’ An extreme-left group claimed responsibility for the attacks in a statement published on the internet. The sabotage was ‘aimed not only at disrupting the [Cannes] festival, but
Germany’s new interior minister, Alexander Dobrint of the Christian Social Union (CSU), has made quite a stir with his proposals to end family reunification and ‘turbo citizenship’, which allowed people to become citizens after as little as three years in Germany. However, as usual in Germany, under the outrage is a more prosaic reality. Only those without official refugee status will be barred from bringing family members to Germany, and it won’t even apply to those who have already come to Germany to claim asylum. It’s a strange irony that freedom of movement across Europe could end up being curtailed because of the EU’s collective failure to tackle migration. You
It’s time for Marine Le Pen to quit and spend more time with her Bengal cats. More importantly, it’s time for the third of French voters who support her to face the reality that her programme is incoherent and unachievable. Her election to the presidency in 2027 would be a disaster for France and a missed opportunity to repair what ails the French republic. That Marine Le Pen is called ‘far-right’ is a testament to the laziness of journalists This may be a counterintuitive argument at a time when all opinion polls show that Marine Le Pen is the most favoured candidate for the French presidency in 2027. It’s true
King Charles III and Queen Camilla are in Canada for a two-day visit. It’s their first trip to my country since the coronation. They’ve enjoyed touring parts of the nation’s capital, Ottawa. They’ve met with dignitaries and political leaders, and been greeted by large crowds that, in the words of the Ottawa Citizen, would be described as ‘exuberant.’ The main reason for King Charles’s visit is of historical importance and relevance to both Britain and Canada. His Majesty was invited by Prime Minister Mark Carney to deliver the throne speech for his Liberal government. It’s only the third time in Canadian history this has ever occurred, and the first time in decades. Charles is also the
27 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to writer and author Karen Hao, whose new book Empire of AI looks at a new, ominous age of empire with OpenAI. On the podcast they discuss the impacts of artificial intelligence on society and democracy and how Open AI founder Sam Altman has become a controversial figure.
What happens when you repeatedly defy President Trump’s direct orders? Or lie to his face, again and again? How about when you break promises made to Trump, or slyly mock him publicly? Not many people on the planet are in a position – or possess the cojones – to put that question to the test. Other than Vladimir Putin, of course, who this week launched his biggest missile strike on Kyiv, even after assuring Trump repeatedly that he was serious about peace. That’s the same Putin whom Trump exhorted just weeks ago to stop bombarding Ukraine’s cities with a hard-to-misinterpret, full-caps instruction: ‘VLADIMIR, STOP!’ Turning fully on Putin and blaming
Following years of requests, pleas and false starts, Ukraine has, it appears, definitively been given permission to fire missiles deep into Russian territory. Since the start of Moscow’s invasion in 2022, Kyiv had been banned from attacking military targets on Russian soil with western-made weapons. Now, after three years of war, it appears Ukraine’s allies have indeed decided to allow it to retaliate as it sees fit. The news of the change of tack by Ukraine’s allies came yesterday from Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new chancellor. Speaking at an event in Berlin, the Chancellor revealed that ‘there are no longer any range restrictions on weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither by the
British taxpayer funds, earmarked for humanitarian aid in Gaza, may have passed through Hamas-controlled structures, according to a report on Israel’s Channel 12 over the weekend. The core of the allegation is not that the UK sought to support terrorism, but that its aid strategy operated in concert with the very machinery that sustains Hamas’s rule. If that proves accurate, what does it say about the integrity of our government’s foreign assistance and the sincerity of its professed commitment to international law? A British Consulate-General policy plan warned that ‘UK Aid can be linked directly or indirectly with supporting the de facto authority (Hamas) in Gaza which is part of a
Some are scandalised that Brigitte Macron was seen to slap her husband in the face as they prepared to disembark from the presidential Airbus, Cotam Unité, in Hanoi this week. Unité? Not so much. The Elysée is asking us to ignore the evidence and pretend it didn’t happen. Still others may say, someone had to. The slap was seen around the world or was it a shove, a roundhouse punch or just horsing around, disinformation spread by crazy people, as the president himself claims? The detail hardly matters. Denial notwithstanding, we saw what we saw and lovie-dovey it wasn’t. So what does it tell us about the relationship between the president