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This week, the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated a law from 1864 that bans nearly all abortions in the state. But where do Trump and Biden stand on abortion, and will it be a deciding factor in the 2024 election? Freddy’s joined by Inez Stepman, Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and Daniel McCarthy, Editor of Modern Age Journal. Produced by Megan McElroy.
46 min listen
This week: will Biden support Ukraine’s attacks on Russia? Owen Matthews writes the cover piece in light of the Zelensky drone offensive. Ukraine’s most successful strategy to date has been its ingenious use of homemade, long-range drones, which it has used to strike military targets as well as oil refineries and petrol storage facilities in Russia. The strikes are working but have alienated the US, who draw a red line when it comes to attacks on Russian soil. Owen joins the podcast alongside Svitlana Morenets, author of The Spectator’s Ukraine in Focus newsletter to debate what comes next. (01:44) Next: Will and Lara take us through some of their favourite pieces in
Ben Wallace has confirmed the worst-kept secret in Westminster: he’s the likely UK candidate for the Secretary General of Nato. Speaking in Berlin on Wednesday he told reporters: ‘I’ve always said it would be a good job. That’s a job I’d like.’ It’s a position that falls vacant in October and Wallace has a good claim, having been defence secretary for nearly four years, one of the few to emerge with credit from the Kabul evacuation, and has won plaudits for fighting the Whitehall machine to equip Ukraine before Putin’s invasion last year. Mr S learns however that a surprising obstacle is standing in his way: the First Lady of
Joe Biden has promised to bring Brazil and America closer together. ‘Both of our democracies have been tested of late’, Biden told reporters last week as he met with president Lula da Silva for the first time. The two leaders were on the ‘same page’, Biden said. But that feeling isn’t entirely mutual. When Lula was sworn in as president on New Year’s Day, he promised ‘dialogue, multilateralism and multipolarity’, and there’s good reason to believe he’ll deliver it. In Lula’s first two terms, he was key to founding the Brics, an economic grouping with Russia, India, China and South Africa. In the post-Cold War era, Brics was important in
Davos this year marked the start of a great economic divorce of the United States and Europe. Katherine Tai, the US trade chief, said that globalised capitalism is not working anymore. It leaves workers behind and gives fuel to populists, she said. Really, the Biden administration wants reassert US dominance in the world, and is using the country’s economic weight to do it. The Europeans, meanwhile, seem happy to become more protectionist too, with France’s Europe minister Laurence Boone calling the new US stance a ‘wake-up call’ and saying that Europe should respond in kind. Europe’s leaders are reacting to the reality that, with high energy prices, their manufacturing cannot remain competitive
China’s President Xi Jinping opened the CCP’s 20th party congress by doubling down on four key issues: no let up on zero-Covid; no renunciation of force when it comes to Taiwan; a promise to build up China’s military strength; and no tolerance of any opposition to his rule. As he enters his third term, the most important new challenge he has to address are the export controls announced by the US on the eve of the congress that threaten to undercut China’s ability to develop semiconductors and supercomputers. Xi remains defiant: he promised to ‘resolutely win the battle in key core technologies.’ Yet Xi must be worried that the US
The chip war between China and America is heating up, with an increasingly assertive Joe Biden battling with Xi Jinping as he enters his third term as Chinese leader. The US last week further restricted China’s access to advanced American know-how, in what were some of the most stringent export controls for decades. Xi didn’t mention semiconductors in a speech on Sunday marking the opening of the Communist party’s twice-a-decade congress in Beijing, but he did pledge that China would ‘resolutely win the battle in key core technologies’. To compete with the US, China will need better tech. These new export controls will make Xi’s vision much harder to achieve. Joe
Joe Biden, ice cream in hand as so often, yesterday pronounced on Liz Truss’s tax reform disaster. ‘I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,’ said Joe Biden, sounding every bit the wise old man of global politics. ‘I think that the idea of cutting taxes on the super-wealthy at a time when… I disagree with the policy, but that’s up to Great Britain.’ That concession at the end is the President realising he’s just breached the normal rules of diplomacy – by giving his opinion on an ally’s domestic difficulties. But he just can’t help himself. Biden has probably forgotten, but he has proposed increasing the
In Europe it is handouts to help pay our energy bills – even for people who could easily afford to pay them. In the US, it is student debts being written off. With remarkable speed the West is emerging into a new age of big – no, make that huge – paternalistic government. Today, Joe Biden announced that graduates who earn less than $125,000 a year, and who live in a household whose joint income is less than $250,000, will have $20,000 worth of student debt written off. For those who work in the non-profit sector, the military, or federal or local government, the write-off will be 100 per cent.
Scandal is such a wonderful driver of human emotions. Just think of the number of things you get to feel in one go: horror, disgust, relief, superiority, guilt and glee, to name just a few. All these flooded through a portion of the American public again this week when a new video emerged of Hunter Biden. Hunter is the sole surviving son of President Joe Biden and it is uncontentious to say that he is a tortured soul. His mother and his one-year-old sister died in a car crash in 1972. Hunter and his older brother Beau were injured but they survived. Beau died of cancer at the age of
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
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
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
‘I want your point of view, Joe,’ Barack Obama once told his vice-president Joe Biden. ‘I just want it in ten-minute increments, not 60-minute increments.’ Obama understood Biden’s biggest flaw – his mouth runs away with him. He’s a verbal firebomb always threatening to go off. Last night, oops Biden did it again. As he rounded off his fiery speech in Poland against Vladimir Putin and autocracy, he concluded: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.’ The onset of senility had reduced the dangerousness of Biden’s loquacity The White House, in what is now a familiar routine, issued a quick clarification. The President was not demanding ‘regime change’
Did Joe Biden mean to threaten Russia with a chemical weapons attack? That seemed to be what he implied at yesterday’s Nato summit when he said Russia using chemical weapons in Ukraine ‘would trigger a response in kind’ from the US. To respond ‘in kind’ means to respond in the same way – i.e. by firing chemical weapons back at Russia. Given that the US committed to destroying its remaining stockpiles of those munitions when it signed the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993, it would seem very unlikely that this is what Biden meant. Or indeed, that he would have any chemical weapons to unleash in the first place. There
There was a picture taken on Tuesday that says more than just a thousand words. The photograph was snapped in Sharm el-Sheikh and shows Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett seated either side of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. According to the Egyptian president’s office, they met to discuss ‘the repercussions of global developments, especially with regard to energy, market stability, and food security’ but ‘they also exchanged visions and views on the latest developments of several international and regional issues’. That’s a very wordy way of saying ‘Iran’. Obama and Biden’s foreign policies are indistinguishable Iran is what this meeting
It’s now a familiar pattern – a sensational news story is dismissed by serious journalists as bogus right-wing agitprop. You’d have to be a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist to believe that. You don’t want to be one of those. Then, a year or so later, the same important media organs, the same authorities who made you feel crazy for thinking that the story might be credible, turn around and tell you that, yep, it was true all along. It was just politically awkward to say so at the time. We saw it in the Covid years with the Wuhan lab-leak theory. We saw it to some extent with Jeffrey Epstein. And
You can tell that the Biden administration is getting serious. They have unleashed their ultimate weapon, cackle diplomacy. The warhead is nicknamed Harris, and it is now in Poland cackling away, endeavouring to assemble the high-level Pierogis before Russia flattens Kiev or Putin decides to go nuclear – and by ‘go nuclear’, alas, I mean ‘go nuclear’. Some observers say that sending Kamala Harris on this mission will give her a chance to ‘burnish’ her foreign policy credentials. Cynical folks – and I would include myself in that group – think it is just another emission of fog by America’s first certifiably senile administration. It is just another emission of fog
Is Saudi Arabia shunning Washington? Mohammed bin Salman has reportedly been refusing to phone Joe Biden, who wants the kingdom to turn on its oil taps as the West desperately seeks alternatives to the Russian energy market. Riyadh – the world’s largest oil exporter – has so far failed to accommodate Washington’s pleas. Ahead of the Russian invasion in mid-February, the US asked the Opec+ cartel – of which Saudi Arabia is the most important member – to produce more oil to slow the already rising prices. Opec+ stood firm, and said they would increase production by 400,000 barrels a day in April, a rise agreed before the threat of a
‘He has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.’ So once said Robert Gates, the former US defence secretary, of the now president Joe Biden. We don’t yet know if Biden is wrong about the current Ukraine crisis. We may be about to find out. His speech on Tuesday was at least competent, if not entirely coherent. ‘Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called ‘countries’ on territory that belongs to his neighbours?’ asked the president, in one of his now all-too-familiarly infirm attempts to sound firm. Yet Biden said his administration,
