America

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The transatlantic mask divide

Should we wear our masks? The question has been on my mind as I have been battered that way and this by a variety of people with stronger feelings than mine on the matter. The week before last, while I was walking down Oxford Street, police outriders began to emerge. Like most of the public I stopped with interest and some excitement, wondering who the traffic might be halting for. Sadly it turned out to be neither the Queen nor Matt Hancock. Instead the traffic was being stopped for several thousand anti-lockdown protestors. Those of us who had hoped to catch a glimpse of, or even a wave from, the

Noor Bin Ladin

Being pro-Trump has caused me more grief than being Bin Laden’s niece

Americans are, in my experience, the warmest, most kind-hearted and open-minded people in the world. I have found this to be true for my whole life, despite being the niece of Osama Bin Laden and sharing the same surname (albeit spelled slightly differently — Bin Ladin is the original translation). Americans base their judgment on the content of someone’s character and actions, not on the colour of their skin — or their last name. This was reaffirmed last month, after I voiced my love for America and support for President Trump. The response to ‘My Letter to America’ has been overwhelmingly wonderful, and I am most thankful to all those

Daniel DePetris

What was missing from the vice presidential debate

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris is a former prosecutor. Vice President Mike Pence is a career politician. The debate between them was always going to be less lively and dramatic than the name-calling last week between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But it wouldn’t be a snooze-fest – nothing in this election cycle is. Harris began the night with an impactful opening pitch: the Trump-Pence administration is a dumpster-fire sitting on a wrecked economy, a mountain of lies, and the worst pandemic in a century. Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been the ‘greatest failure of any presidential administration’ in history. President Trump was informed early on about the deadly

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

The US election is Joe Biden’s to lose

Donald Trump is back at the White House after a scary three-day stay at the Walter Reed medical complex. For the President, that’s the good news. The bad news: his bout with the coronavirus hasn’t won him any sympathy points from the electorate. In fact, his numbers have only gotten worse. CNN’s latest national survey saw Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden expand his lead to 15 percentage points. If the polling is any indication, Trump is four weeks away from being beaten like a drum a-la Jimmy Carter in 1980. For Biden, the last nine months have been a wild ride. There was a time not too long ago when

Thursday

The Spectator

Who started America’s presidential debates?

Word for word US presidential debates are often traced back to the first televised debate, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960. But they were inspired by a series of seven debates held between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas while contesting an Illinois senatorial seat in 1858. The debates would have stretched a modern audience — they were each three hours long. It is hard to imagine, too, how modern candidates would have coped with the format: the first speaker was invited to speak for an hour, the second for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate was allowed a further half-hour. Douglas won the seat and, two

The Spectator

Letters: Lessons for Boris from the classroom

Lessons for the government Sir: James Forsyth suggests that the Prime Minister wishes to avoid sounding as if he is blaming voters for the rise in coronavirus infections (‘Lockdown breakdown’, 26 September). Mr Johnson appears to have already crossed that line. In education we recognise that a teacher has lost control of their class and of their own good judgment when they become exasperated with their pupils for not learning anything. Fortunately, we know a great deal about how to help someone stuck in this negative cycle. Good teachers are predictable and consistent; they know that it is futile to claim that a rule is vitally important if it comes

Matt Purple

American meltdown: a democratic disaster

Tuesday night’s debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden was a hopeless mess — a national embarrassment. For 90 minutes, two cantankerous and incoherent old men ignored the rules, shouted over each other and ruined the event. Trump insulted Biden’s intelligence and his children. Biden told Trump to ‘shut up’ and called him ‘a clown’. The debate may prove useful in one sense, however — as a foretaste of the democratic meltdown that is coming America’s way after the election on 3 November. Again, the rules of the contest will not be accepted, each side will accuse the other of cheating and the whole occasion will turn into a

Deborah Ross

One zinger after another – but it’ll leave you cold: Trial of the Chicago 7 reviewed

Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 — don’t worry, you haven’t missed six earlier films — is a courtroom drama based on true events featuring a stellar cast: Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Jeremy Strong. You may be wondering: hang on, no Michael Keaton? But he tips up too! What, no Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Don’t worry. He’s here. But while the performances are ace and the script is one of those Sorkin scripts where the dialogue is one zinger after another — zinger ping pong, I call it — it will leave you cold emotionally. This is a film to admire, in some respects, but

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Sick, puerile, inappropriate and delicious: Amazon Prime’s The Boys reviewed

There’s a delicious scene in the new season of Amazon’s superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys. The chief superhero Homelander (Antony Starr) is introduced by a minion to a potential new member of his elite superhero group, the Seven. Homelander watches this bright new talent performing wonders in a gym-style training zone: the young man is agile, eager, skilled with weaponry; but perhaps his most valuable features, the minion suggests, are that he is disabled and belongs to an ethnic minority. This could play really well with the youth demographic, who are into that kind of woke stuff, the aide suggests. The potential recruit approaches Homelander, sweet, modest and starstruck. Even though

Thursday

Jeff Fynn-Paul

The myth of the ‘stolen country’

Last month, in the middle of the Covid panic, a group of first-year university students at the University of Connecticut were welcomed to their campus via a series of online ‘events’. At one event, students were directed to download an app for their phones. The app allowed students to input their home address, and it would piously inform them from which group of Native Americans their home had been ‘stolen’. ​We all know the interpretation of history on which this app is based. The United States was founded by a monumental act of genocide, accompanied by larceny on the grandest scale. Animated by racism and a sense of civilisational superiority,

Charles Lipson

Who rules supreme in America?

Within hours of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Democrats and Republicans began fighting over how to fill her seat — and when. The stakes are high because the Supreme Court is so important. It can invalidate any federal, state or local law by ruling that it violates the US Constitution. And its decisions set precedents that lower courts must follow. Its rulings are final, made by judges with lifetime appointments. Donald Trump intends to fill Ginsburg’s seat as quickly as possible. He will announce his nominee by the end of the week. That nominee will then face hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by the Republican Lindsey

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Case takes over civil service, Zoom profits rocket and Ocado adopts M&S

Home Simon Case, aged 41, the private secretary to the Duke of Cambridge 2018-20, was appointed Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, in succession to Sir Mark Sedwill. A civil servant since 2006, Case had been Permanent Secretary at Downing Street since May. Six days earlier, Jonathan Slater was dismissed as Permanent Secretary at the Department of Education. Piers Corbyn, the elder brother of Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour party, was given a penalty without trial of £10,000 for his part in organising a rally in Trafalgar Square calling for the repeal of the Coronavirus Act, passed in March, which gave the government sweeping powers.

Andrew Sullivan

My run-in with the New York Times

It’s never a good sign when you’re watching a scene of street terror in yet another gut-churning YouTube video and you find yourself thinking: ‘Hang on a minute, that’s around the corner from my apartment!’ But there’s a now infamous video from last week where a mob of enraged millennials with their fists pumped in the air surrounded a lone young woman sitting outside a Washington restaurant where I often eat. Like a scene from the Cultural Revolution, the crowd demanded she shout certain slogans and raise her clenched fist in solidarity — or be damned as a racist. Most of her fellow diners took the path of least resistance.

Philip Delves-Broughton

As New Yorkers flee, the suburbs are under siege

New York ‘Land of the Flee’, screamed the New York Post front page this week. Moving vans are lining up in Manhattan. Residents have had enough. It had been ‘another bloody weekend in Gotham’ with 21 people shot, and a rising wave of non-gun violence. At 11 a.m. on Saturday, a man leapt on top of a young woman on a subway platform in midtown and began grinding against her until a group of bystanders forced him to stop. You can watch the whole thing on video and decide never to take public transport again. Living in New York has always felt like walking on a very narrow beam. The

Toby Young Toby Young

The best leader we never had

I spent Monday afternoon with The Wake Up Call, a new book by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge that lambasts the West for its grotesque mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis. Despite an upbeat chapter towards the end, in which they dust off the standard menu of reforms, it makes depressing reading. They contrast the cack-handed response of the authorities in countries like America, Britain and Italy with those of China, Singapore and South Korea and conclude that, absent a political miracle, the world will soon resemble the 17th century again, with Europe beset by war and corruption and Asia in the ascendant. There’s a good deal in the book to

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The Trump show: he could just win again

‘Keep America Great’ is President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election slogan and it sounds off. The phrase doesn’t have the same ring as Make America Great Again, the mantra that Trump pinched from Reagan and repeated to victory in 2016. As an acronym, KAG is uglier than MAGA. The words particularly jar when America’s cities are burning, homicide rates are spiking, almost 180,000 Americans have died of or with Covid, and the country is reeling from the largest economic shock of all time. You call that great? Then again, 2020 is an even crazier year than 2016, and the maddest news is that Donald Trump might be about to defy the

Douglas Murray

Protestors are clearing a path for Trump

‘This city is not going to stop burning itself down until they [the protestors] know that this officer has been fired.’ Thus spoke Whitney Cabal, a leader of the Kenosha chapter of Black Lives Matter, in response to the latest police shooting in Wisconsin. The use of the passive in that sentence is revealing. As Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out (see ‘The knife went in’) it is common for people to assign motive to inanimate objects when they are loth to admit to being in the wrong. I suspect that the suitably named Ms Cabal knows that the state of Wisconsin did not auto-combust this week, as Krook does at

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Wholesome, intimate and suspiciously vague: The Michelle Obama Podcast reviewed

Back in March, I made a long-odds bet that Michelle Obama would be the Democratic party’s vice-presidential nominee. I knew that in her memoir, Becoming, she had said that she wasn’t interested in high office. But political candidates always claim they aren’t running — until suddenly they are. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, had already said he’d take Michelle as his VP ‘in a heartbeat’, which struck me as funny since, if Biden’s heart stopped beating, his VP would become commander-in-chief. Since Biden had been Michelle husband’s running mate, the idea of a 2020 Biden-Obama ticket had a fairytale symmetry that would thrill the public. Strategists crunched the numbers

Thursday

Tom Slater

Cancelling Kindergarten Cop is a step too far

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s late-Eighties to early-Nineties comedies have not gone down in history as great triumphs. Films like Junior and Twins – in which he played a pregnant man and Danny DeVito’s unidentical twin respectively – are movies only arch nostalgists could love. But now we learn that Kindergarten Cop, another product of that strange period, is not just a bit crap, but basically white supremacist, too. This is the news that Northwest Film Center (NWFC) in Portland, Oregon, has pulled the 1990 action comedy from its summer drive-in series after woke complaints. In it, Schwarzenegger plays a cop who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher to apprehend a drug dealer.

Deborah Ross

Heavy-handed satire and schmaltz: American Pickle reviewed

American Pickle is a comedy based on a short story by Simon Rich, originally published in the New Yorker, and I was sold on the synopsis alone: ‘An eastern European Jew falls into a vat of pickles and is brined for 100 years before emerging in modern-day Brooklyn.’ It’ll be a fish-out-of-water film like Crocodile Dundee, I thought. But more Jewish. And it felt like I’d been waiting all my life for a film like Crocodile Dundee, but more Jewish. In fact, where have the more Jewish versions of Crocodile Dundee been until now? You think: an entire factory left un-redeveloped for 100 years? It’s prime real estate, isn’t it?