The Prince | The Spectator

Self-righteous vandals

Violent left-wing activists have taken to styling themselves as antifa, short for ‘anti-fascists’, though their street-fighting tactics resemble nothing so much as the Brownshirt thuggery practiced by fascists themselves. This did not stop NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson from likening these hooligans to the heroes of World War Two. On the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, while America’s cities still smoldered after days of riots and looting, Liasson took to Twitter to call the Normandy invasion the ‘biggest antifa rally in history’. Dumb jokes are nothing new on Twitter. For many liberals today, however, it’s no laughing matter.

Douglas Murray

The new inequality

It is a strange habit, the American one of making talk-show hosts into preachers. There is no good reason, after all, why a comedian should be any kind of arbiter of morality or anything much else. Yet in America the court of public opinion accepts the right of the jester to preach the homily too. So it was that, in a period not short on ‘personal takes’ and celebrity messaging, one night in early June on his Late Late Show, James Corden delivered a teary monologue about race relations in America. Lots of people thought he did well, and praised Corden’s talk of ‘white guilt’ and all manner of other sins. But one phrase stood out for being especially bogus. It was a phrase that was widely quoted.

Michael Lind

The rioters and the rentiers

It was inevitable that the wave of destructive rioting and looting that has swept through cities that are almost all governed by progressive Democrats, triggered initially by outrage over the sickening death in police custody of George Floyd, would be compared to the American urban riots of earlier generations. But the parallels miss profound differences in the underlying economic and social dynamics. The Detroit and Newark riots of 1967 and the Los Angeles riot of 1992, for example, took place in cities suffering from the effects of deindustrialization. Los Angeles is not often thought of as a major manufacturing center, but Southern California had a flourishing aerospace industry that went into decline following the Cold War.

Spectator Editorial

No justice, no peace

Who would want to be a policeman in America in 2020? It’s badly paid and dangerous. You might get to be a hero. You are more likely to be despised as a racist. Every day, in crime-ridden urban areas, officers of different ethnicities must make intensely stressful life-and-death decisions as they engage with other people of different ethnicities. That’s the job. It should go without saying that the vast majority of law enforcement officers carry out their duties with admirable professionalism and skill. Watching the news, however, or listening to certain Democratic politicians, we might easily reach a very different conclusion: that cops are vile bigots who target and kill black people for sport.

Chadwick Moore

Bright lights, abandoned city

Joan Didion wrote that New York is a city only for the very rich, the very poor and the very young. That was in her cult classic 1967 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’, in which she created the farewell-to-New York genre. It’s a quote I carried with me through my twenties, from one grim apartment to the next, each smaller, farther out and more expensive than the last. This is simply the nature of the place, I told myself. If you don’t like it, move somewhere else. Many of us emerged from Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s luxury dictatorship in the aughts with a sense of battle fatigue.

Roger Kimball

Is this the end of history?

Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters: ‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”’ The process of civilizational bankruptcy takes a similar course. Casual, seemingly isolated attacks on the fabric of civilization feel at first like so many harmless insect bites. A speaker is shouted down. A statue is vandalized or removed. A college course once deemed essential is rebaptized as offensive: first it is pilloried, then it is canceled. People start quoting Tocqueville’s warning that in a democracy, as large inequalities dissolve, small inequalities are magnified, growing both rancid and rancorous.

Andrew Bacevich

End of empire

The end of World War Two inaugurated the era of American dominion, with the United States politically, economically and militarily the most powerful nation on the planet. Yet throughout the subsequent period of American global ascendency, the American people endured a seemingly endless sequence of domestic crises, upheavals and disasters. Primacy abroad did not insulate them, convinced of their unique place in human history, from the trials and tribulations routinely befalling other, more ‘ordinary’ nations. Yet neither did trials at home undermine the deep-seated belief that history had summoned the United States — and no one else — to lead the world.

Dominic Green

Jared and the Jews

For most Jewish Americans, Jared Kushner is the son-in-law and counselor of a president they didn’t vote for in 2016. He prays with a punctiliousness they romanticize but prefer not to emulate. Jared’s grandparents learned about history the hard way: they survived the Holocaust and immigrated with no money and little English. The typical Jewish American grandparents are boomers who vote Democratic all the way down the card. They believe America is different for the Jews, even if they were raised to believe that difference was un-American and bad for their careers. And here comes Jared, a frum Jew who married the boss’s blonde daughter. It could be a romance from Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. Less romantically, it is a tale from history.

Toby Young

Just-one-knee syndrome

Never in the field of human conflict has so much misery been caused to so many by so few. I’m thinking of the hard-left rage mobs that have been policing the public square since the beginning of June — quite literally in the case of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. I’ve been keeping a list of all the people who have suffered catastrophic career damage because they’ve fallen foul of the Red Guards — and it’s growing ‘exponentially’, as a virologist might say. Like the COVID illness at its peak, it has been doubling every two to three days. Some of the victims have been people you’d expect to lose their heads in this cultural revolution.

Amber Duke

The Kushner conundrum

After a string of broken promises, policy disappointments and sinking poll numbers, the populist wing of the Republican party knows who is to blame. It’s the President’s son-in-law, the prince of the administration, Jared Kushner. ‘Trump has a Jared problem,’ is how one conservative activist who works with the White House on immigration puts it. ‘Jared is a total fuck-up. Everything he touches turns to lead.’ Others groan about ‘four more years of Jared’ should the President be re-elected in November. Various sources in, or connected to, the administration are stunned by the amount of power Kushner wields.

Bridget Phetasy

What we need is social media distancing

Nearly three months into lockdown, 40 million Americans were unemployed. Kids lost out on three months of schooling. Businesses shuttered, many never to open again. Mental health suffered. People lost their homes. Tens of thousands died alone in hospitals, family members were prevented from holding the hands of their loved ones in their final days, and in many cases they weren’t allowed to bury them or hold a funeral. Parents struggled to balance distance learning and work. Teachers worried that their most vulnerable students weren’t logging in to class. People couldn’t receive medical treatment or attend birthdays and graduations. But humans are creative, resilient creatures, and it didn’t take long before we adjusted to living online.

Paul Wood

Prodigal son-in-law

A friend in Washington saw Jared and Ivanka at a couple of smart DC dinner parties in the first year of the Trump administration. Ivanka seemed to want to depict them both as the internal opposition to her father, restraining his worst instincts, nudging him along on climate change or women’s issues. You might have assumed as much from ‘Javanka’s’ public image as a couple of rich young New Yorkers of conventional Manhattan liberal opinions who ended up in the White House by accidents of birth and marriage. (As Amber Athey writes, they haven’t changed.) But my friend was most impressed with Jared Kushner. Kushner had already been questioned in the Mueller investigation.

Godfrey Elfwick

Godfrey’s drag queen story time

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s Picture the scene. It is the middle of the afternoon. The window blinds are closed, the lights dimmed. The eager audience sits cross-legged on a patchwork rug, a frisson of excitement filling the air. Just as enthusiasm gives way to impatience, a captivating vision of womanhood bursts into the room in a glorious blaze of sound and sequins, riding a glittering chariot (a new Pride Ranger 2.0 All-Terrain 8mph Mobility Scooter) to the strains of Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball’. Her hair is a breathtakingly intricate architectural marvel, two-feet high and bedecked with curls. The heels of her knee-high patent-leather boots are an unapologetic six inches long.

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