Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator

Is Donald Trump really going to be arrested?

How will it look, for the health of American democracy, if the former President Donald Trump is put in handcuffs next week over charges that he paid ‘hush-hush money’ to the porn star Stormy Daniels?  The man himself seems to be bracing for legal persecution over what he calls ‘The Stormy Horseface Daniels Extortion Plot.’

Is capitalism melting down?

36 min listen

Freddy Gray is joined by Joe Weisenthal, co-host of the Odd Lots podcast at Bloomberg. On the podcast, Joe talks about the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the moral hazard of state intervention. How gloomy should people be?

Why I betrayed my friend over a bottle of rum

There are moments in a boy’s adolescence when he catches a glimpse of the man he will become. Faced with adversity, is he the brave sort – or the sort who runs away and lets others suffer? Aged 13, on a school trip to Portsmouth, I discovered I was the latter. Tom insisted he’d found

What the Tucker Tapes have revealed about January 6

Everybody knows that free speech is protected in America under the First Amendment of the nation’s constitution. It’s quite striking, then, to see the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer demanding that a major television network stop its leading anchor from airing footage he doesn’t like.   ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a primetime cable

Freddy Gray

Don vs Ron: the fight for the American right

When Donald Trump ran for the presidency in 2016, he took on a very well-funded politician who had been a successful governor of Florida. And he destroyed him. Trump humiliated ‘low-energy’ Jeb Bush, son of one president and brother of another, and trashed his family’s legacy so comprehensively that the Bush-era Republican party is now

Who are America’s dissident right?

32 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to James Pogue, writer at Harper’s and Vanity Fair who has written about the dissident right in America: Inside the dissident fringe, where the new right meets the far left and everyone is bracing for an apocalypse.

The great villain of Covid is China. Not Matt Hancock

The Telegraph has a hell of a scoop with its lockdown files, aka Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps. It’s a major public interest story. We see with increasing clarity now how our government flapped and flailed and obfuscated as ministers and senior officials desperately tried to figure out the deadliness of Covid and what to do about

Freddy Gray

Ten handy phrases for bluffing your way through the ‘Windsor Framework’

For amateur talking heads, the words ‘protocol’ and ‘framework’ have always been troubling. Such terms suggest muddling technical detail, constitutional complexity, and the need to actually read obscenely long and boring documents about trade. No thanks.  Veteran bluffers know, however, that confusion creates opportunity. Recall the golden rule of political commentary – everybody is blagging

Fox News’s ‘silent ban’ on Donald Trump

It’s by now well-established that Fox News, the American media behemoth, is no longer on the Trump Train. Trumpworld’s union with Foxworld was never altogether easy and, ever since that fateful election in November 2020, it has fallen apart. Trumpists despise Fox for, as many see it, helping Joe Biden steal the election. And the

Joe Biden’s long history in Ukraine

It was only a matter of time before Joe Biden made a ‘surprise’ visit to Kiev. In the year since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the choreographed walkabout with Volodymyr Zelensky has become the must-do photo-op for western global leaders. It’s the 21st century equivalent of an audience with the Pope – a symbolic news happening

Does race trump merit in America?

50 min listen

Heather Mac Donald joins Freddy Gray for this week’s Americano podcast. Heather is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the book When Race Trumps Merit. Heather breaks down what she describes as a ‘regressive equity epidemic’ in which race overtakes merit in almost all areas of society. 

Who will win the Super Bowl?

12 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to former Ambassador to the UK and owner of the Jets football club Woody Johnson about the rising success of the NFL in Britain; who will win the Superbowl and his own team the Jets. 

Joe Biden does America First

‘There have been so many accomplishments under this administration, it can be difficult to list them in a distilled way.’ So said Pete Buttigieg, America’s Transportation Secretary, last weekend, when asked why Americans don’t share the White House’s sense that President Joe Biden is doing a brilliant job. Well, in his second State of the

Will Biden’s docudrama fade away?

31 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to Charles Lipson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and regular contributor at Spectator World about Biden’s ongoing docudrama. Image designed by Charles Lipson.

What is America doing in Ukraine?

51 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to Professor John Mearsheimer, an American political scientist and international relations scholar about America’s foreign policy on the war in Ukraine.  Produced by Natasha Feroze