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Deception by stealth: the scammer’s long game
We all know that life is full of people who try to con us, often starting with a voice on the phone. ‘I’m speaking from the fraud department of your bank.’ ‘I’m your local BT engineer.’ No, you’re not from either my bank or BT. In all likelihood you are speaking from a scam farm somewhere in south-east Asia.
This book, however, deals with the serious con artists, the ones who infiltrate your life over a period of time, using psychological skills, imagination and often charm until they have finessed you into a position where you willingly hand them a large sum of money, often your life savings. Then whoosh! – and neither the scammer nor the money is ever seen again. It happened to the author of this book Johnathan Walton, a successful Los Angeles television producer, who was conned out of almost $100,000 by a beautiful, charismatic woman who, over four years, he had grown to think of as his best friend.
But where most victims of such frauds remain silent out of embarrassment, humiliation or even guilt, Walton went public, writing a blog about his experience. Stories from others who had been similarly victimised immediately flooded in and soon he realised that in all of them there were common factors. Anatomy of a Con Artist, a compilation of them, is written in a conversational style and from an American perspective. Chapters about Walton’s own experience are interspersed with those of others – each illustrating at least one and usually more of his 14 danger signals
For Red Flag No. 3 (Too Kind, Too Quickly) there is the case of Ricky, a young professional American football star earning millions, who needed to furnish his new apartment. While he was searching out stuff in a designer store, a striking, expensively dressed older woman who radiated sophistication and class materialised beside him. They struck up a conversation and when he told her why he was in the store she offered to help him – which Ricky eagerly accepted. Soon ‘Peggy’ was in a quasi-maternal role with the young athlete, showering him and his friends with gifts, love and support, and even hosting his wedding.
But she was playing the long game. When Ricky went through a bad patch, becoming depressed and vulnerable, Peggy, now his trusted friend, seized the chance to whisper: ‘If you had let me manage you, none of this would have happened.’ After a year of such conversations, in 2007 Ricky signed over power of attorney to her, giving her total control of all his finances. For six years she seemed to be managing his wealth well – so much so that several fellow athletic stars entrusted the management of their own money to her. By the time they realised what was going on, she had siphoned off millions.
Diplomas hanging on the wall may be photoshopped and even the voice of a loved one can be copied
A theme emphasised throughout is that, in Walton’s words ‘con artists don’t outsmart you, they out feel you’. That is, it is through working on your emotions – affection, greed, loneliness, love – that they embroil you in their schemes. Building up your trust in them is essential, so that when it comes to the moment of ‘the kill’, you are the one to offer the money. ‘They don’t ask, they get you to offer,’ says Walton. And of course money handed over voluntarily is more difficult to recover.
So what are these all-important red flags? First, says Walton, remember that taken singly they may mean nothing; but the more of them there are, the more you must be on your guard. First on his list is the unsolicited offer of help, often from a stranger. By itself this might just be a kind deed; but for the con artist it could be a way into your life. And if your new friend pours out confidences before the relationship is well established, this could be another sign. Confidences invite confidences and the scammer sees this as a way of building trust between you – vital if the scam is to work.
Two other red flags often found when a con artist is trying to lure you into an investment scam are scarcity and what Walton calls ‘Beak Wetting’. This latter means perhaps the quick repayment of money loaned to the con artist, or the arrival of a generous dividend on a share scheme in which you have been persuaded to make a small investment. Fortified by the knowledge you can now trust this person/scheme, you hand over a lot more money – only for it to disappear for good. Scarcity is what it sounds like: if you don’t buy this discounted new car or piece of jewellery immediately, the opportunity will have gone.
Another warning sign is the constant use of digital technology. If someone is always showing emails or texts to back up whatever story they are telling, remember that these addresses and texts can be faked. The diplomas hanging on the wall may have been photoshopped to appear genuine and – worst of all with AI – the voice of a loved one or business associate can be copied.
Walton, who now devotes his life to helping such victims, and to bringing fraudsters to justice in cooperation with the police, concludes his book with much sensible advice on what to do if you are scammed.
The AI apocalypse is the least of our worries
What is your p(doom)? This is the pseudo-scientific manner in which some people express the strength of their belief that an artificial superintelligence running on computers will, in the coming decades, kill all humans. If your p(doom) is 0.1, you think it 10 per cent likely. If your p(doom) is 0.9, you’re very confident it will happen.
Well, maybe ‘confident’ isn’t the word. Those who have a high p(doom) and seem otherwise intelligent argue that there’s no point in having children or planning much for the future because we are all going to die. One of the most prominent doomers, a combative autodidact and the author of Harry Potter fan-fiction named Eliezer Yudkowsky, was recently asked what advice he would give to young people. He replied: ‘Don’t expect a long life.’
Expressing such notions as probabilities between 0 and 1 makes them sound more rigorous, but assigning numerical likelihoods to one-off potential catastrophes is more like a game of blindfold darts: no one agrees on how such figures should be calculated. Just as no one actually knows how to build an artificial superintelligence or understands how one, if it were possible, would behave, despite reams of science-fictional argumentation by Yudkowsky and others. Everyone’s just guessing, and going off the vibes they get from interacting with the latest chatbot.
The AI doomers are the subject of too many chapters in Tom Ough’s book, which traces the career of one of their godfathers, the philosopher Nick Bostrom and his Future of Humanity Institute, a research unit latterly shut down by the University of Oxford. It also excitedly relates Rishi Sunak’s creation of the UK’s AI Safety Institute, which earlier this year was renamed the AI Security Institute when it was announced that the American AI company Anthropic would be helping the UK to ‘enhance public services’. Presumably the implication that AI might be unsafe was distasteful to the American corporation, currently valued at $100 billion.
Probably AI doomerism as a whole is just another millennarian apocalypse cult. No one mentioned here, at least, seems bothered by the harms that existing AI is causing – from destroying students’ ability to think to helping lawyers plead arguments with reference to made-up cases or decimating the creative class as a whole – inasmuch as what is called ‘AI’ is a set of giant plagiarism machines that are fed illegally acquired artwork and books and simply spit out probabilistically recombined copies of them.
Much more dangerous in the real world are the other classes of ‘existential risk’ – catastrophes that could cause the extinction of the human race, or at least a very bad few decades for billions of people. What about an asteroid strike, for example? A space rock 10km across did for the dinosaurs, and over Earth’s long history the planet has, as Ough amusingly puts it, resembled ‘not so much an island paradise as a coconut shy’. So he talks to the scientists who successfully conducted the first asteroid-deflection experiment, when Nasa crashed a spacecraft into one named Dimorphos in 2022 and successfully altered its trajectory. Not as glamorous as sending Bruce Willis to nuke it but arguably more practical.
In 2022, Nasa crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid named Dimorphos and successfully altered its trajectory
Ough also talks to people worried about solar storms – a big enough coronal mass ejection could bring down power grids and electrical equipment over an entire hemisphere of Earth – and about supervolcanoes, which are like volcanoes but bigger and could cause something resembling a global nuclear winter lasting years. It turns out that there are even people working on ‘defusing’ volcanoes by drilling carefully into their magma chambers – though it is a bit worrying that only 30 per cent of the world’s active volcanoes are monitored for signs they might be getting ready to blow.
Other chapters consider nuclear war, and the potential for saving people in a real nuclear winter by converting the fungi that will flourish in such conditions into a mass food source; or the prospects for reversing some global warming by geoengineering – seeding the high atmosphere with sulphur particles that reflect sunlight. (This one might go wrong.) The dangers of biowarfare, meanwhile, have never really gone away. Indeed they are greater than ever, Ough argues, in a high-tech world of benchtop DNA synthesis of novel pathogens.
The conceit of this book is that all the men and women studying such risks are part of a global society of superhero boffins that the author names the ‘anti-catastrophe league’. And it would indeed be pleasing if they all worked together in a giant spaceship, like the Avengers. Ough’s style is at times misfiringly jokey (I don’t think anyone needs to be told that Hollywood is ‘that ever-reliable purveyor of public collective-consciousness epiphenomena’). But he writes with vim and colour about a lot of interesting subjects. My favourite chapter follows the people who are really interested in drilling extremely deep holes into the Earth, trying to beat the impressive record of the Soviets, who made a borehole 12km down. Do more of this and you’d have lots of cheap geothermal energy to power, er, more AI data centres.
So how worried should we be? After reading this entertainingly dark book, your p(doom) might be very low for the AI apocalypse but much higher for other kinds.
Campus antics: Seduction Theory, by Emily Adrian, reviewed
There is a fine tradition of campus novels that stretches from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) through Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024). Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, her fourth novel for adults, shows the author’s awareness of her predecessors in the genre. One of its main characters even regards Pnin (1957), a campus novel by Vladimir Nabokov, as his comfort book.
Ethan, the character in question, feels he needs comfort because he has cheated on his wife with their secretary. He is married to Simone, and the two are goodlooking creative writing professors at Edwards University in upstate New York. Adrian herself taught creative writing at Sewanee, the University of the South. In Seduction Theory, Simone is the star of the marriage, admired for her bestselling memoir Motherless, as well as for ‘her 54,000 followers, her cheekbones’. Ethan, in contrast, is ‘aware of being a novelist who hadn’t sold a book since he was 26’ and, to make matters worse, his one novel retold the story of Simone’s memoir.
The novel opens during an aggressively hot summer. At a party given by a colleague of the couple, everyone seems preoccupied by sex. The host even mentions that her dog is named Humbert Humbert, from Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), because ‘we discovered he hates females his own age but loves puppies’. Ethan leaves with Abigail, the secretary whom he shares with his wife, to buy cigarettes. What follows may not be original, but Adrian manages to make the story propulsive. The twist is that Simone is herself having an ‘emotional affair’ with a graduate student called Roberta Green.
Any reader paying attention will have noted that on the novel’s first page we are told we are reading Roberta’s ‘Thesis Submitted to Edwards University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts’. But the story that follows is so engrossing, it is easy to put this to one side. In fact in the final third, when Roberta inserts herself into the centre of the narrative, the novel falters. Even she comments: ‘Maybe I’d mistaken myself for the protagonist when I’d only ever been comic relief.’ Before this meta-literary device comes to the fore, Seduction Theory is a juicy story of how two people in a ‘deeply rewarding’ marriage had separately decided to press the self-destruct button. And Adrian – who presumably understands the febrile nature of campus life better than most – is well-equipped to write it.
The scourge of the sensitivity reader
‘Something strange is happening in the world of children’s and YA [young adult] literature,’ writes Adam Szetela, and his horrifyingly compelling book certainly bears that out. It offers a sobering report from the front lines of how identity politics and online pile-ons against anyone who sins against the latest pieties actually play out in the world of American publishing. Such is the atmosphere that many of the interviewees, who include presidents of the Big Five companies, senior agents, directors of public library districts and award-winning writers, are almost paranoid about preserving their anonymity.
At the heart of That Book is Dangerous! is the comparatively new figure of the ‘sensitivity reader’, who often has no accredited expertise but claims that their ‘lived experience’ enables them to spot ‘authentic Latina voices’ or determine whether the portrayal of a ‘Filipino-American queer’ character is accurate. Szetela trenchantly suggests that white authors are now required to
hire tour guides… to help them understand what happens when a black American walks into the kitchen. If one were to ask a black co-worker ‘What do blacks eat for dinner?’ they might be reported to HR. If they pay a sensitivity reader for an answer, they will be lauded for ‘trying to get the story right’.
The book cites the case of a well-known sensitivity reader who wrote to an author that ‘going to national parks is not a thing we [black people] do’. Authors and editors, Szetela claims, now feel pressure to abide by ‘rules of authenticity’ which ‘will not permit a black character to enter a national park unless they explain why they want to enter a national park’ and ‘do not leave room for a novel about six English-speaking Latinas who met at Boston University’.
The very existence of sensitivity readers, Szetela claims, rests on a form of essentialism which implicitly sees Afro-American life, for example, as both so opaque that it needs ‘cultural ambassadors’ to explain it to white people and so homogeneous that a single person can claim to speak for ‘Black/African-American culture’ across history.
Stringent demands for inclusivity often have a blind spot about class, Szetela argues, citing writing guides and policy statements for literary festivals which sometimes seem to be ‘competing to see who can create the longest identity list that does not mention class’. Yet poor, ill-educated writers miss out because they cannot afford the very well-paid and generally well-educated sensitivity readers that publishers now often insist on. When one unfortunate undergraduate merely stated that she didn’t think a particular bestselling YA author’s books should feature in her university’s Common Read programme, she was savaged by several much more powerful people, including one who called her a ‘RAGGEDY ASS fucking bitch’.
The attitudes of what Szetela calls ‘the Sensitivity Era’ can have a dismal impact on lively writing. One sensitivity reader felt the need to ‘add all the other categories of queerness’ to a book by a gay man clearly aimed at other gay men because she disapproved of ‘the primacy of white gay men at the top of the pyramid’. A recent graduate of a master’s in creative writing made it clear that white participants in a workshop would never give their black colleagues honest but useful feedback, such as: ‘Maybe you need to tone down the political messaging for the sake of your story.’
In addition, according to Szetela, ‘there is no room for even one uncontested thought crime in contemporary literature written for young people’. If a character says something offensive, they have to be challenged immediately and explicitly. Readers are given no chance to work out for themselves that the person is bigoted, or even to accompany them on a journey where they come to see the error of their ways.
There are moments when Szetela is baffled by what he finds. As a former keen wrestler who sometimes got into the ring with concussion or stitches under his eye, he simply ‘can’t imagine a situation in which I would break down crying, like the employees at Penguin Random House, because somebody wrote a book that I’m not interested in reading’. Yet he urges his fellow progressives to realise that ‘there are bigger fish to fry than well-intentioned books written by other progressives’. This applies even within publishing, where commercial houses naturally continue to issue popular and often influential books by conservative authors. As a tool for addressing more serious inequalities, the initiatives he describes are simply non-starters.
Furthermore, he reminds us, ‘most Americans think cancel culture is a big problem’, while prominent liberals ‘deny that it even exists’ or ‘call you a white supremacist for believing it exists’ (even though some occasionally call for ‘more cancelling’). This has proved a spectacular own goal, since the politicians now running the show have been able to attract easy and widespread support by criticising cancel culture.
This is hardly the first polemical book to explore the failings of ‘woke’ cultural crusades. Yet its combination of lively wit and rich detail makes it a particularly rewarding one.
The spiritual journey of St Augustine
When I lived in south London, my Algerian barber used to tell me that he came from Souk Ahras, ‘the home town of Augustine’. I found it strange to hear a forbidding doctor of the early church described as a local boy made good, but Catherine Conybeare shows me that I should not have done. Algerians have remembered what the Church has often overlooked: that Augustine’s thinking owes everything to his birth in 354 in what was then Roman North Africa.
Although five million of his words survive, they come to us from the hands of medieval copyists who were more interested in setting out his doctrines than in recording his life. They cut up his sermons and letters, removing irrelevant or cryptic local allusions. Conybeare resurrects Augustine the African by sifting this heap of words for surviving references to people and places. Although wryly describing herself as a philologist, she is also a perceptive traveller, enlivening her textual work with vivid descriptions of Augustine’s cities in their prime and as they survive today.
These literary devices are hardly new. They have defined the study of late antiquity ever since the 1960s, when Peter Brown first composed a satisfying biography of Augustine of Hippo by reading his theology against the grain. They also bring diminishing returns. Augustine was too intent on spiritual realities to notice the material and urban world around him much. Even the most evocative descriptions of temples or amphitheatres he must have seen may not bring him much closer. Nor are his local observations always revelatory. It is true that his description of humans as caught in God’s olive press must have resonated with African farmers who lived for the olive harvest, but the example seems as slight as an English vicar describing the Christian life as a difficult wicket or a game of two halves.
The test of Conybeare’s book is not whether it generates new information but whether it refreshens and deepens appreciation of Augustine’s thought. Here it succeeds brilliantly, convincingly relating his greatest achievements to his sense of being caught between Rome and North Africa. Although he had viewed his education in Thagaste (now Souk Ahras) and Carthage as just a means of escape to Rome, the city disappointed him. It struck him as London might an ambitious young writer today – filled with politicians trading off past imperial glories and a public that prized cultural polish but refused to pay for it. He preferred Milan, the seat of the powerful bishop Ambrose. But even here he ended up mainly hanging around with people he knew from home. Conybeare neatly points out that what initiated the conversion to Christianity, described in his Confessions, was a conversation with his hometown friend Alypius and an African acquaintance about the impressive piety of Antony – an African monk.
The Romans mocked Augustine as a ‘Punic pamphleteer’ who gabbled in the native language of his country
Augustine was always conscious of an inferiority when dealing with Romans, who made fun not of his race but of his tongue: he tended to mispronounce Latin. When they turned really nasty, they mocked him as a ‘Punic pamphleteer’ who gabbled in the native language of his country. When he returned to Africa, though, becoming a priest, then a bishop, in the coastal town of Hippo (now Annaba), he was impatient with its narrow mental horizons. His new largeness of view explains the cryptic and violent controversy he waged for decades against the Donatists, who ran a rival church in Africa. He had come back home as a proud member of a universal institution, writing that ‘we are the good fragrance of Christ in every place’. Yet the Donatists said that a church’s rites were only powerful if enacted by priests whose purity they had judged themselves – a principle that Augustine mocked as African self-satisfaction run mad.
Caught between two places, he now had no real home. When posh refugees from Rome turned up in North Africa after Alaric sacked the city in 410, he began The City of God to quieten their unsettling whingeing about its collapse. Augustine did not care about the looting or destruction of buildings – a city was its people. But as his giant work slowly progressed, he shifted gear, coming to argue that all Christians should consider themselves peregrini. We now often render that word as the quaint ‘pilgrims’, but it began as a technical term for legalised aliens. Augustine’s life on the outskirts of a disintegrating empire taught him that we are all citizens of nowhere.
Italy ultimately claimed Augustine. Centuries after his death in 430, his body ended up in Pavia, under a pompous monument that makes no reference to Africa. Perhaps he would not have minded. The lesson of this book is also his teaching: even if our origins explain us, they should not limit who we become.
What the Quran has to say about slavery
Slavery is one of the oldest and most persistent institutions of humankind. It was already well established four millennia ago when it was mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Today it has been formally abolished almost everywhere, but there are still reckoned to be some 30 million people living in some form of forced labour. For most of human history slavery was regarded as an economic necessity, one of many relationships of dependence which were accepted as facts of life.
The current obsession with British and American involvement has concentrated attention on the Atlantic slave trade. This has masked the involvement of other significant actors. Foremost among them are the Islamic kingdoms of the Middle East. Islamic slavery is poorly documented. Anecdotal evidence is plentiful but may be untypical. Reliable statistics are scarce. But there is little doubt that the slave markets of North Africa and Constantinople were for centuries by far the largest in the world. Justin Marozzi’s Captives and Companions is a successful attempt to fill this gap.
The Quran has a lot to say about slavery. It deprecates the ill-treatment of slaves and attaches a high moral value to their emancipation. But it acknowledges the legitimacy of slavery and of the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. When challenged by European powers in the 19th century, Islamic rulers often cited the authority of their faith. In our own day, the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, have both justified their revival of slavery and forced concubinage on the founding texts of Islam.
The Arabs, like later generations of Europeans, looked down on black Africans as inferiors for whom slavery was thought to be a natural fate. But, unlike Atlantic slavery, which was exclusively sourced from sub-Saharan Africa, Islamic slavery was racially indiscriminate. North African corsairs enslaved Europeans captured at sea and in coastal raids on Europe. The Crimean Tartars trafficked slaves captured in eastern Europe to the shores of the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. There were many thousands of these white slaves, to be commemorated in 19th-century Europe in escape narratives and sub-erotic orientalist paintings.
North Africa and the Levant were not plantation economies. Most slaves sold into the markets of the Islamic world probably ended up in cities, employed in small businesses, public works, domestic households or concubinage. There is some evidence that a majority were women and girls. Theirs was usually a wretched existence. Islamic slavery, however, had some unique features which enabled a few slaves to achieve high status. One route was the harems of the great. Roxelana, the powerful and manipulative wife of the 16th-century sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, was a Ruthenian slave (from modern Poland).
But the main route to social ascent was the army. Turkic slaves fought in the armies of the Abbasid caliphate (7th to 13th centuries), some of whom overthrew their Arab masters and founded local dynasties of their own. The Mamluks, a corps of Turkic slave soldiers, took over Egypt in the 13th century and ruled it until the beginning of the 19th. Between the 15th and the 17th centuries, the Ottomans regularly enslaved Greek children in their Balkan provinces, to be converted to Islam and assigned to the corps of Janissaries or the civil service. Some of these ethnic Greeks rose to the highest positions in the state.
It is easy to understand when one reads Marozzi’s book why the conservative societies of the Middle East proved to be so resistant to the abolition of slavery. Lord Ponsonby, for many years Queen Victoria’s ambassador in Constantinople, reported that when he conveyed his government’s objections to slavery to the sultan, he was ‘heard with extreme astonishment, accompanied by a smile at the proposition for destroying an institution closely interwoven with the frame of society’.
There are still reckoned to be some 30 million people living in some form of forced labour
Slavery in the Americas was different and harsher. The slaves were not ‘closely interwoven with the frame of society’. The plentiful supply of land and comparatively small number of European settlers made the Americas dependent on the forced labour of the indigenous populations and, increasingly, on imported slaves to cultivate labour-intensive crops such as cotton, tobacco and sugar. Although American slavery involved some incidental domestic service and concubinage, the destination of the great majority was the brutal, self-contained world of the plantations.
David Eltis’s Atlantic Cataclysm deals with the trade which supplied this world with slaves. The subject is a minefield for scholars, for much that has been written about it is vitiated by the tendentious selection of material to serve a modern political agenda. Eltis’s book avoids this vice. It is a careful study of the economics of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact on all three continents involved.
The words ‘economic analysis’ will probably cause most general readers to run a mile, but that would be a mistake. For this is a readable and important book. It makes systematic use for the first time of the enormous databases of information about slave voyages, slavers and slaves compiled over the past 40 years. Eltis is certainly not an apologist for slavery or the slave trade. But he debunks many of the influential myths which have grown up around the trade since the publication in 1944 of Eric Williams’s polemical but influential Capitalism and Slavery.
Williams argued that the profits of slavery supplied the capital for Britain’s industrial revolution and made possible its subsequent prosperity, and that slavery was only abolished because it later became unprofitable. He despised Wilberforce and his allies, and denied that abolition was a moral movement. Even given the material available to him, these arguments were hard to sustain. Eltis’s analysis of the plentiful data on English slave businesses convincingly demonstrates that slavery was in fact profitable right up to the end, but that the profits were a tiny proportion of Britain’s trading wealth, far too small to account for her industrialisation. Abolition does seem to have been a moral, not an economic, movement, driven by the evangelical revival of the late 18th century.
There is a corresponding theory about the African end of the trade, which is in a sense the obverse of the Williams argument. It holds that just as the slave trade boosted the economic development of Britain, it exploited the African kingdoms which supplied the slaves, leading to the ‘underdevelopment’ of Africa. The consequences are said to have held back the continent to this day.
This is a more difficult proposition to prove or disprove, because so little can be reliably known about pre-colonial Africa. But it is implausible. The traffic was never large enough to significantly depopulate the African kingdoms. The evidence marshalled by Eltis suggests that the African middlemen who alone could supply the slaves knew their market power and dealt on equal terms with their European counterparts. There are many possible explanations for the under-development of Africa but a trade which ended a century and a half ago is unlikely to be one of them.
Eltis has done an unusual thing. He has reset the agenda in his field. It will no doubt make him enemies in all the right places.
Putin’s summer offensive is gaining momentum
Vladimir Putin is set to arrive at his meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday with additional leverage: his summer offensive has finally reached momentum. In recent days, Russian forces have breached Ukraine’s defensive line near Dobropillia, north of Pokrovsk, pushing up to ten miles deep into the western sector of the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control. The advance, carried out mainly on foot and motorbikes, has yet to crystallise into a full-scale breakthrough, but it ranks among the fastest Russian gains of the past year – and comes at the worst possible moment for Kyiv.
It was not drones, but endless infantry that allowed Russia to penetrate Ukrainian positions this week
The Ukrainian military command denies the reports that Russian human wave assaults have bypassed the recently built fortifications around the village of Zolotyi Kolodiaz and other small settlements close to Dobropillia. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the army chief, repeated his now-routine reassurance, ‘the situation is difficult but under control’, considering that Russia had amassed over 100,000 troops to seize Pokrovsk. The Dnipro operational group, responsible for the eastern front, has called the sudden breach a mapping error:
We must understand that this is not about them taking control of the territory. It’s about a small group of Russians – around 5-10 men – sneaking in. It is absolutely not how it looks on the map.
Yet, for some reason, three brigades – the 92nd, Rubizh and Azov – were pulled out from other sectors of the front to counter the supposed sabotage group holed up in the basement. Several soldiers went public to warn about the deteriorating situation in the Pokrovsk direction, given that Putin is throwing everything he has into the offensive ahead of the Alaska summit. Bohdan Krotevych, former chief of staff of Azov, appealed to Volodymyr Zelensky:
Mr President, I sincerely don’t know what exactly is being reported to you, but I’m informing you: on the Pokrovsk–Kostiantynivka line, without exaggeration, the situation is fucked. And this chaos has been growing for a long time.
During my trip to Ukraine in May, I had a short stop in Dobropillia on my way to Pokrovsk, and even then, moving just twelve miles from one frontline city to another was a deadly lottery. Dobropillia, once home to 28,000 people, has become a military hub full of green-painted trucks and stray dogs, much like other remaining strongholds in the Donetsk region. I set off towards Pokrovsk in the dark to avoid drawing the attention of Russian drones, but halfway there, the soldier driving me hit the brakes: Russia had bombed the building directly ahead of us. It was a weapons warehouse. I reached the front line before first light in one piece, but the same can’t be said for my driver. On his way back to Dobropillia, a Russian glide bomb struck his vehicle. He was badly injured, but miraculously survived.
The warzone looked different from the one I had seen last autumn. Fibre-optic drones, immune to jamming, dominated the skies, and the Russians have used them in overwhelming numbers. When I visited the 25th Sicheslav Brigade stationed near Pokrovsk, their drone unit had just six fibre-optic drones, while the Russians had dozens flying towards us.
Yet it was not drones, but endless infantry that allowed Russia to penetrate Ukrainian positions this week. Ukrainian soldiers often joke that their side of the battlefield is being held by ‘the grandads’ – men in their fifties and sixties getting old in the trenches. Infantry shortages are so severe that a National Guard drone unit I visited was forced to hold empty positions with drones because there were not enough men to fill them. The Russians had more assault troops than Ukraine had drones, allowing them to slip repeatedly behind Ukrainian lines.
With all that said, the Russian breach north of Pokrovsk doesn't come unexpectedly. It is the product of months of accumulated issues in Ukraine’s armed forces, starting from inefficient mobilisation, chronic weapons shortages, chaos in communication between units, misleading reports from the field to senior command and ill-conceived orders to attack for the sake of attacking rather than stabilising the defence. As many soldiers have pointed out, there is also the deeper problem: the absence of a clear strategic vision from Ukraine’s military leadership about what can realistically be achieved on the battlefield. The result is that Russian troops are now tightening the noose around the last fortress cities in the Ukrainian-held quarter of Donbas.
The case for not lowering the drink-driving limit
Labour is reported to be considering lowering the drink driving limit from 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath to just 22 micrograms. This would bring England and Wales in line with Scotland. Does justice for potential victims of car crashes demand this? Although drawing the line on permissible risk is an incredibly difficult moral problem; empirical evidence shows lowering the drink-driving limit will make no difference, and motorists should probably not be required to give up yet more of their liberty either.
Lowering the drink driving limit is all costs and no benefits
In England and Wales today an average man is legally permitted to have around two pints of low-strength beer before driving, which will be cut down to just under one pint if Labour’s proposal is made law. The government believes the proposed policy would increase road safety and help avert the 300 deaths caused by drunk driving annually, or about 17 per cent of all road traffic fatalities. The obvious reply is to say that lowering the speed limit to zero would eliminate all road traffic accidents, so, why not do that? It’s the classic example used to show runaway train arguments have problems. In response, we are told the main reason speed limits cannot be zero is that the cost of this would outweigh the benefits.
Now remember that a human life is not of infinite value, indeed the Health and Safety Executive puts it at £2.1 million. Using this figure, Labour’s proposed policy doesn’t stand up to a cost-benefit analysis. The three academic studies into whether Scotland’s lower alcohol limit compared to England’s helped found there to be ‘no impact on either traffic accident or fatality rates’. One set of authors even found there to be no difference in accidents on those nights you’d most expect to see a change such as Fridays and Saturdays, and, even no difference among young males too. Lowering the drink driving limit is all costs and no benefits.
Even if the number of fatalities did go up though, the cost of death would have to be weighed against the foregone surpluses of drinking more beer. Could additional pints win out? I must confess I wince at writing that because I am not a utilitarian. If putting on a motor race by a right of way had a 60 per cent chance of fatally knocking over a person, I’d take that to be a sufficient reason not to have the motor race, even if all of the benefits of it outweighed the cost of the person’s death. As Robert Nozick once wrote in Anarchy, State and Utopia: ‘No moral balancing act can take place among us; there is no moral outweighing of one of our lives by others’.
Yet it could be argued that it is acceptable to expose people to risk provided said people also benefit enough. Getting absolutely smashed and driving then would not be allowed, as there would be a high chance of a car crash and a small benefit to driving while being that drunk. Many drinkers might accept a three-pint limit, if the benefits of being able to drive were balanced by the small chance of being hit by a young man three pints down. What about teetotal city dwelling pedestrians though, who get no benefit from any drink driving? Should the drink-driving limit be zero to accommodate them?
Against this we could argue that teetotal city dwelling pedestrians are happy to purchase goods delivered by trucks, which also cause traffic accidents. If drivers who drink a relatively small amount are just as risky as normal truck drivers, then teetotal pedestrians should accept this risk.
Drawing the exact line on the question of permissible risk imposition concerning drinking and driving is very difficult. Nevertheless, if you believe Scotland’s drink driving law is fine, then you should also think England and Wales’s current law is fine too – because the evidence overwhelmingly shows its fatality rate is the same as in Scotland. In sum, motorists should remain free to enjoy their two pints and a drive home from the country pub.
Trump was right to deploy the National Guard to DC
The last thing I heard before my ears started ringing was my left turn signal clicking.
I was stopped at a red light on a Saturday afternoon, waiting to glide into my parking lot near the Waterfront Metro stop in Washington, DC when a loud crack suddenly deafened me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bullet-sized wound in my windshield.
Try – if you’re brave enough – walking around DC for a few hours and then uttering the words ‘this is a safe, clean and pleasant place to live’ without laughing or crying
It wasn’t a windy day, and no cars had been passing by to kick a loose stone up at my beloved Camry, so it only took me only a half-second to realize what had happened. When the fight or flight kicked in, I briefly (and foolishly) fled the vehicle before diving back in to take a left on red.
The two Metropolitan Police Department officers my 911 call summoned didn’t show up until a half hour later, even though the nearest station was only a two-minute walk away. Gesturing toward my broken windshield, I asked them for confirmation of what I already knew had happened. Yes, my car had probably been shot with me in it, they agreed before informing me that all they could do was record the incident.
If I wanted, they said, I could ask nearby apartment buildings and businesses for security footage and report back to them. And then they were off; my ears were still ringing.
That was only the most notable of my many experiences with the post-Covid crime wave that made DC such an unsettling place to live during my two years in the district. There was also the time a man on a motorcycle swerved onto the sidewalk to stare me down as my fiancé hid behind me; the time her cousin was mugged; and the time my friend from college was killed in a hit-and-run. On our way home from the grocery store one afternoon, we observed a high school boy beating up a girl roughly his age as their presumed classmates looked on. I called the police and began loudly describing the situation as I approached the culprit and victim, causing all involved to flee. I sat outside for over an hour waiting for the cops to show. They never did.
On Monday morning, President Donald Trump announced that his administration would be taking control of MPD, as well as deploying the National Guard inside of the district. ‘Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs, and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs, and homeless people,’ asserted Trump. ‘And we’re not going to let it happen anymore.’
For those of us who have lived that reality, it was like watching the sun rise for the first time after a half-decade of darkness.
Trump’s critics have portrayed his decision to take action in DC as a thinly-justified power grab. After only a little reflection, though, it’s hard to believe it took this long for a president to do something, anything, about its embarrassing state.
‘But the murder and violent crime rates are down!’ wailed America’s shameless progressive establishment on Monday. Yes, from the historic highs they reached in 2023. It’s only August and the district – which has a population of only a little over 700,000 – has already seen 189 carjackings, 99 homicides, and 2,909 motor vehicle thefts this year. Last year, it had one of the highest murder rates of any major American city. Early Monday evening, just a few hours after Trump’s press conference, a man was shot and killed around the affluent Logan Circle neighborhood. During a visit back to the city last year, I walked to our favorite sushi restaurant near my fiance’s old apartment to make it for happy hour. On the way back, I found a street I had used only an hour earlier had been shut down after a gunfight. Try – if you’re brave enough – walking around DC for a few hours and then uttering the words ‘this is a safe, clean, and pleasant place to live’ without laughing or crying. You’d be lucky if you made it without coming across a crime scene – or becoming a crime statistic.
And as if the ‘But crime rates are down’ argument couldn’t get any more pathetic, there is a scandal brewing over the books being cooked by high-ranking city police officials to downplay the ongoing crisis.
Washington, DC is a city with endless potential should be a point of pride for all Americans. It is a cultural melting pot filled with fantastic restaurants, moving monuments, and stunning museums. It’s also the political centre of not just the country, but the world. Yet for years now, it has been the modern model of corrupt, complacent governance – a national embarrassment that no one seemed to care enough about to try to fix.
Should Trump have activated the National Guard? Could he have possibly used a lighter touch? Such questions pale in importance compared to this one: did something need to be done in the federal district to carry out government’s most basic mandate, the protection of its citizens?
The president answered, ‘Yes’. God bless him for it.
This article first appeared in The Spectator’s World edition.
Is Trump DC’s Batman?
What is Washington to make of the President’s efforts to “make DC safe again?” If you’re only capable of measuring Trump’s actions by how authoritarian they appear, then, sure, his declaration of a state of emergency, seizure of control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilization of the National Guard must seem scary. Cockburn empathizes with the small number of DC residents – and larger cohort in other cities and around the world – who see Trump’s use of the powers granted him by the Home Rule Act as concerning. On his Monday evening constitutional around Northwest DC, Cockburn saw a number of arrests taking place, more MPD cars on the street than usual and heard a chorus of sirens cascading into the night.
Yet Cockburn has lived in this city a while – and therefore knows that in many neighborhoods, the fear of creeping fascism is vastly offset by the sense of lawlessness that has prevailed in the district since the pandemic. Big-brained, extremely serious pundits such as MSNBC justice correspondent Ken Dilanian spent yesterday bleating that “total violent crime” is “down 35 percent from 2023.” You might think that serving as a cable news network’s justice correspondent would require you to be able to read graphs – and acknowledge just how much higher violent crime was in 2023 compared to four years earlier, and how DC was a national outlier that year. Perhaps Ken should report to his colleague Steve Kornacki’s whiteboard for some remedial classes.
Over on CNN, the tenor was sober-minded, data-oriented and measured. “Donald Trump makes himself Batman and the nation’s capital Gotham City,” said DMV native Abby Phillip on her primetime show. Does that make Pete Hegseth Commissioner Gordon and Judge Jeanine Two-Face? There was a minor scuffle on Phillip’s show in her absence last Wednesday, when conservative firebrand Scott Jennings said, “I just know that when we go to CNN in Washington and do a show, they send guards out with us to walk us out 200 feet to the street.” Other guests challenged his claim – but a mole tells Cockburn that CNN changed its security protocol for guests a while back, with a security guard escorting guests to their Ubers for safety reasons.
Elsewhere in the city, the war of anecdotes rages on. “Hey DC, let’s push back against the negative narrative about our city,” posted the ironically named DC meme account Washingtonian Problems on X. “Share why you love our beautiful home and help show the world the real DC.” The responses are… probably not what they were hoping for:
“I got mugged last year by a group of teenagers who should’ve been in school while walking back from donating a trunk of school supplies to that same school.”
“I watched a gang of kids push a cyclist into traffic on 14th St and waited on hold with 911 for 140 seconds until they chased me away.”
“I moved from my previous apartment in NoMa after four people were shot less than a block away, outside King Street Oyster in 2024. The police blamed the restaurant for failing to lock-up their patio at night, saying it ‘contributed to the group establishing themselves and continue to grow, leading to the gun violence that resulted in four people being shot.’ DC chief of police Pamela Smith ordered the restaurant to close for four days after violating a 2019 ‘security agreement.’ Silent killers: open patios.”
This morning Cockburn spotted a couple of women around his age, one of them wearing a “the real criminal is in the White House” T-shirt. This is another line that’s been trotted out: how can Trump be a “law-and-order” leader when he incited January 6? Cockburn is no fan of disorder in the district – including what unfolded at the Capitol in 2021 – but he is at pains to point out that hundreds of the attempted insurrectionists, violent and not, faced legal consequences for their actions that day. Several were in jail for three or so years – and the J6 cases tied up the DC courts for months. That’s more than can be said for the juvenile perpetrators of the post-Covid violent crime spike, most of whom got away with a slap on the wrist.
For the people solely outraged at Trump’s “overreach” this week, Cockburn has to wonder: where was your anger for the many, many people who could have acted before him on DC crime and did next to nothing? For the DC Council, Mayor, police chiefs, judges, housing authorities, the previous attorney general, the previous president… the list goes on.
On our radar
LET’S GET IT ON In celebration of the nation turning 250, Dana White confirmed there will likely be a UFC match on the White House lawn. “Fighters will be warming up in the White House. It’s incredible,” White told the Wall Street Journal.
BOT WARS After alleging that Apple gives ChatGPT preferential placement over xAI in the App Store, Elon Musk announced he will sue for “antitrust violations.”
NEW TRUMP TRIAL A federal court began hearing testimony yesterday to determine if President Trump deployed the National Guard illegally to squash June’s California riots. Trump appears unconcerned, as he deployed the National Guard the same day in DC.
The Picture of Barack Hussein Obama
Another day, another Donald Trump redecorating drama. This week’s outrage comes after a report emerged that Trump has moved portraits of three former presidents – Barack Obama and George Bush Sr. and Jr. – out of view to a “hidden stairwell” where tourists visiting the White House can’t see them. However, they definitely can see a painted rendition of Trump’s “Fight” moment, which has hung in the foyer of the White House since April.
Giant flags, a new ballroom, endless harrumphing from the opposing side. Is this the White House or an episode of Love It or List It? Cockburn thinks Trump should just keep pushing the boundaries. Take down Washington and Lincoln’s portraits and replace them with a meme painting of a muscular Trump wielding a machine gun and flying bareback on an eagle. Let the man posterize himself. He’s the ultimate man of the people after all, and this is the People’s House.
Giacomo Kimmel in Diretta!
On his ex-girlfriend Sarah Silverman’s podcast last week, Jimmy Kimmel announced he has procured Italian citizenship and is considering an exodus because of Trump. Alluding to ICE and deportations, Kimmel said, “I feel like it’s worse than probably even he [Trump] would like it to be.” Kimmel would be following fellow “national treasures” Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres across the Atlantic if he decides to make the switch.
Cockburn was also amused as the talk-show host got sentimental. “Remember when we almost got arrested at the New York airport for making out in the airport?” Then Silverman clapped her hands to her mouth and exclaimed, “Oh my gosh that was very romantic.” Kimmel added, “Yeah, I was thinking about that on the way over here.”
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Top five lowlights from Sturgeon’s memoir
They say good things come to those who wait, but Steerpike will let readers be the judge of that when it comes to Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly. The 450-page account by Scotland’s former first minister was supposed to be hitting bookshelves on Thursday, but some shops decided to release it ahead of time and Mr S has got his hands on an early copy, reading it so you don’t have to. Here are the top lowlights from Sturgeon’s new tome…
Trans U-turn
One of the controversies that, some suggest, prompted her resignation in 2023 was the gender reform bill – and the scandal of double rapist Isla Bryson being housed in a women’s prison. The question of whether Bryson is a man or a woman proved rather difficult for the then-first minister to answer at the time – and Sturgeon still hasn’t managed to square this circle, pointedly calling the rapist ‘they’ in an ITV interview last night.
At the time, Sturgeon first voted down Tory MSP Russell Findlay’s amendment to ban sex offenders from obtaining a gender recognition certificate and later voted against SNP MSP Michelle Thomson’s amendment to pause applications by those charged with rape or sexual assault. While she dismissed concerns from the bill’s critics then, now Sturgeon admits in her book: ‘The question I ask myself most when I reflect on this period is whether I should have hit the pause button when I realised, sometime in 2022, just how polarised the issue was becoming. With hindsight I wish I had.’ Too little, too late…
Salmond fallout
Sturgeon’s infamous fallout with her political mentor and boss Alex Salmond has had books written about it – and so of course the ex-FM had to include at least a nod to it in her own. But she hasn’t held back. She broke down in tears when her colleague Ian Blackford told her Salmond had passed away in October 2024 and confessed she wondered whether she should cut the chapter on him from her book. ‘Would I just be stirring up pain for his wife and family (which I truly don’t want to do)?’ she pondered. Regardless, she went and published it anyway. Charming!
Sturgeon claimed that the former SNP leader hadn’t read the independence white paper, accused him of undermining John Swinney during the latter’s first attempt at leading the SNP and alleged he had planted questions via opposition MSPs on the committee assessing the Scottish government’s handling of harassment complaints. In short, despite her claims of grief on hearing of her former boss’s passing, the SNP’s Dear Leader decided to pull no punches. ‘I have tried not to rewrite history,’ she begins the chapter, later adding: ‘[Alex] was trying to rewrite history.’ Talk about tit for tat!
Cross-party politics
Scotland’s former FM has long been accused of creating a divisive political culture over both independence and the trans debate. Yet in her memoir she claims that her motivation for a deal with the Scottish Greens after falling short of a majority in the 2021 Holyrood election was down to her desire to ‘champion a more constructive style of politics’. Er, right. She goes on:
At the tail end of the last parliament, embroiled in the Salmond saga and worn down by Covid, I had become weary of the opportunism and perpetual game-playing of opposition parties. It was partly a result of electoral frustration, but they had become impervious to any attempts to build cross-party consensus.
And this is the woman lauded for her high emotional intelligence?!
Brexit
The Queen of the Nats wouldn’t ever exploit a democratic result for her own political gain, would she? Not according to her memoir, anyway, in which she writes that, after Britain voted to leave the EU:
The established narrative now, though, is that I went hell for leather for a second referendum immediately after the Brexit vote. It isn’t true. On the contrary, I spent the next nine months doing the precise opposite. I tried hard to persuade the UK government to pursue a compromise option… It was in good faith, therefore, that we published ‘Scotland’s Place in Europe’ in December 2016, mapping out what a different outcome for Scotland might look like and how it could be achieved. I was explicit that this was a solution for Scotland within the UK; in other words, an alternative to independence.
It seems rather odd, then, that in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, Sturgeon told a journalist that the chance of another independence referendum was ‘highly likely’. And since then, the SNP has consistently stood on a platform that advocates for closer ties with the EU – if not rejoining the European Union altogether. How very interesting…
London
The SNP’s Dear Leader has spent most of her life calling for Scotland’s independence from the United Kingdom – but in a rather amusing revelation, it doesn’t seem like she wants to practise what she preaches. In her book, she writes: ‘I am determined to see more of the world. I might live outside of Scotland for a period.’ In fact, she has since admitted to both the Sunday Times and the BBC that: ‘I love London.’ Just one of those nationalists who’ll do anything for their country but live in it, eh?
The White House UFC cage fight
When President Trump said in July that he planned to host a Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn next year as part of the U.S.A.’s 250th birthday celebrations, people dismissed it as a typical piece of hyperbole and bluster. “We have a lot of land there,” Trump said, which is somewhat true, but that doesn’t mean that you can plop down an Octagon, right?
Well, as it turns out, that’s exactly what it means. Trump is like that boy in the old Twilight Zone episode. Whatever he wishes, comes true. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, UFC boss Dana White, one of Trump’s biggest supporters, said that the UFC 250th anniversary (of the U.S.) is definitely going to happen. “Fighters will be warming up in the White House,” White said. “It’s incredible.”
It certainly is, especially when you consider the cultural proclivities of Trump’s two immediate predecessors. On his last day in office, Barack Obama, the ultimate NPR President, had lunch with novelists Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith and Colson Whitehead. Joe Biden spent much of his term hiding, masked and socially distanced. Trump is building a grand ballroom and plans to hold a blood-soaked cage match for the biggest American birthday party in two generations.
The hype possibilities would make the late Don King drool. As it turns out, the current UFC men’s heavyweight champion is a British fighter named Tom Aspinall. Assuming he’s still up top when next summer rolls around, you’d be crazy to not pit him against a scrappy American challenger who has a chance to pull an upset. It would be like recreating the American revolution – in a cage. Maybe mixed martial artist Curtis Blaydes would be a good choice. He’s currently fourth in the world, and is definitely a bad dude. The number two fighter in the world is Cyril Gane, from France. In the spirit of the American Revolution, he could provide financial support, or tag in when Blaydes gets tired.
On the women’s side, there’s no better choice than Bantamweight division champion Kayla Harrison, who’s so American that she’s from a place called Middletown. She’s an absolute beast. Everyone would love to see her take down her number-one challenger, Julianna Peña, “The Venezuelan Vixen.”
But there are other possibilities for the undercard. Why not stick Jake Paul in the ring? He gets ratings. Maybe have him fight Mr. Beast, who’d better start training now. Conor McGregor must appear. Maybe he can fight Jake Gyllenhaal, an enactment of their epic duels from the Road House remake. The political realm has us imagining other fights: AOC versus Nancy Mace. J.D. Vance versus Pete Buttigieg. Collin Allred versus John Cornyn. Of course, RFK Jr. needs to fight a bear, and win. And we know that Trump is going to get into the ring and grab the microphone, but who wouldn’t want to see him go a few rounds with Gavin “Tough Guy” Newsom, or even, better, Vladimir Putin? Let’s settle this Ukraine issue once and for all, not with Alaska diplomacy, but with mano-a-mano bare knuckle combat.
We no longer live in NPR America. NPR is dead. No novelists will be visiting the White House unless Ted Nugent writes a novel. This is Donald Trump’s America, UFC America, let’s get ready to rumble America. Mike Judge’s Idiocracy has come to vivid life. Not Sure will monster-truck duel in the pits with Beef Supreme while President Camacho shoots a flamethrower into the air. UFC. It’s what plants crave. It has electrolytes.
“I don’t give a shit if there’s only one seat at this thing,” Dana White told the WSJ. “This is so monumental and historical and just such a cool thing. All I care about is the Octagon on the lawn and the fight happening with the backdrop being the White House and the Washington Monument.”
It’s so stupid and crazy, it just might work. The ratings will the huge, the biggest ratings ever. Happy birthday, America. It’s time.
Why I don’t pity short men
I couldn’t help sniggering when I read in the Guardian that Tony Robinson, the diminutive (5’4) droll most famous for being in Blackadder, is venting his miniature wrath over the tendency of women on dating apps to desire men taller than them: ‘Nowadays, you don’t pick on people’s looks, do you? It’s like kind of a new understanding over the last ten or 15 years, you don’t deride people for what they look like’ he scolded on Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail podcast, admitting he had seen his shorter than average height as ‘a problem in life.’
You’d think having a gorgeous young wife would have rendered Sir Tony totally uncaring about what the youngsters get up to
A quick peek at his Wikipedia shows that Sir Tony (a long-time member of the Labour party, knighted in the 2013 Queen’s Birthday Honours) has been gainfully employed as an actor since the age of 13 in the theatre, radio, television, films and as an advertising voice-over for cleaning products, including Vanish. But far from vanishing, at the ripe old age of 78, he’s still going strong. To say he’s had a successful career in a profession where around 90 per cent are out of work at any given time is to utilise classic English understatement somewhat. Because of this, he is a wealthy man with homes both here and abroad.
Sir Tony has been no slack in his private life, either. Three times married, his current wife Louise Hobbs is some 35 years younger than him. I’m not pointing the finger, as Mr Raven is some 13 years junior to myself, but it’s one of those amusing situations comparable to Stephen Fry and his spouse in that when you see a photograph of them together, you do initially think ‘isn’t it lovely to see someone that close to their adult child!’ before looking a bit closer and thinking ‘Ah…but not that close, perhaps. Silly me!’
You’d think having a gorgeous young wife would have rendered Sir Tony totally uncaring about what the youngsters get up to. But he gets in a right kerfuffle about the girls on Love Island: ‘Look at Love Island, every woman who is asked what bloke they want will always start by saying “I want a tall man” and then everyone else will laugh in collusion.’
Why is a 78-year-old man watching Love Island – and would he watch it if the bikini-clad babes doing all that mugging and hugging were of his vintage?
Of course, the Guardian is keen to back up the miserable old leftie:
‘Studies over decades show heightism leads to bias, yet it appears even today to be more socially acceptable than other forms of physical prejudice. The term “heightism” was first coined by the sociologist Saul Feldman in 1971. Dr Erin Pritchard, a senior lecturer in sociology and disability studies at Liverpool Hope University, believes much heightism is subconscious, but that it is ingrained. It has also not benefited from widespread acceptance movements. “You had the fat acceptance movement, and while there’s still issues, you would never go, ‘Well, how much do you weigh?’ But it’s perfectly acceptable for people to go, ‘How tall are you’?”’
But also recently in the Guardian – or the Good News Gazette, as I think of it – there was a fat girl having a moan about models being thin, so it’s basically any poor-me in a storm.
‘Live and let live’ used to be a popular liberal tenet before liberals decided that telling everyone else what they should be doing and thinking was a lot more fun. I’d bring it back and add a new one; like and let like, or even love and let love. Don’t try to push your way into dating groups that don’t fancy you; go and find a dating group that’s keen on your kind. It’s going to save a lot of aggro and hurt feelings all around.
Just as some people are going to be better runners – or writers – than others, some people are going to be more physically attractive. Babies smile at photographs of conventionally attractive people more; are we going to start re-educating them about beauty before they can count to two? Besides, very few apparent gifts are free in this life; with beauty comes the curse of witnessing its loss, either by natural decay or unnatural injections of plastic which invariably rob the most fantastic face of what made it special in the first place.
Before I was in a wheelchair, I was 5’9. I loved being tall. It suited me; I was a swaggering, swashbuckling show-off. Sometimes I used to actually pat my shorter friends on the head. I’m about four feet tall now; it’s weird seeing life from a child’s point of view. But I’ll have to grin (and occasionally) grizzle and bear it. I don’t believe for a moment that anyone should have to find people in wheelchairs as attractive as those striding along on their long healthy legs. I don’t see many public figures in wheelchairs – but I don’t believe for a moment that if I did, it would make being in a wheelchair any less annoying. In my opinion, the phrase ‘If you can’t see it, you can’t be it’ is one of the silliest of modern sayings. Rosa Parks never saw someone do what she did; neither did Barack Obama. Looking to others for approval (unless it comes in the obvious shape of getting paid) is one of the surest ways to court under-underachievement, self-loathing and mediocrity.
But if ‘Sir’ Tony really does ‘need’ to see an example of a rich, successful shorter man date/bang/marry a taller woman, there are many to choose from. The tall young starlet with the short mega-millionaire is a long-standing cliche, from Bernie Eccleston to Rod Stewart, who far preferred girls who towered over him. As he gamely chortled in ‘Blondes Have More Fun’: ‘You can keep your red heads/ You can keep your brunettes too/I wanna girl that’s semi-intelligent/Gimme a blonde that’s six feet two.’ The blonde he finally settled for, the ex-model Penny Lancaster, has been vice president of the Royal National Institute of Blind People and a fully-qualified Special Constable with the City of London police. She’s the catch, as much as him; when you can’t tell the difference, I guess they call it love.
So contrary to what Dr Prichard says – ‘We need more voices like Tony Robinson coming out and saying it, to show this is not all woke nonsense, [to] just sort of sit down and listen to what they have to say and go, OK, these are their lived experiences’ – we need, in the sexual arena, more people who don’t feel outraged at not being found attractive by those more attractive, and taller, than they are.
Am I ‘vulnerable’?
I needed to speak, briefly, to my car insurer regarding breakdown cover. After undergoing the usual roster of DNA testing, fingerprinting, recitation of ‘familiar names’, the woman on the other end of the phone said this to me: ‘I need to ask this as well. Are you vulnerable?’ It is now six hours later and I’m still not sure what she meant. I suppose I assume it was a euphemism for: ‘Are you either mental or too thick to tie your own shoelaces?’
But it is difficult to know for sure, largely because of the shape-shifting ‘vulnerable’ has performed in recent years. When news reports, or the police, identify someone as being ‘vulnerable’, it usually means they are pig-thick or doolally. On the other hand, when it is used about whole communities it usually just means that they are not white. Sometimes it is a stand-in for ‘female’. Children are always vulnerable, of course. In short, because we are unable to articulate the truth these days, vulnerable has been forced to step up to the plate and cover a multitude of sins.
Anyway, I told the woman that I wasn’t, at that moment, terribly vulnerable. But there was soupcon of doubt in her voice when she said ‘OK, Mr Liddle.’
Keir Starmer should smash the gig economy
No Frenchman has been as critical as the recent ‘one in, one out’ migrant deal than Xavier Bertrand. A grandee of the centre-right Republican party (and also the president of the Upper France region), Bertrand has denounced the treaty as ‘bad’ for France.
He added that the small boats crisis is ‘the fault of the English’ because the migrants ‘know they’ll end up getting work there’. The only way to end the Channel migrant crisis, says Bertrand, is for the British government to ‘put an end [to] illegal labour immigration’.
Bertrand has been banging this drum for a decade. In the summer of 2015, he wrote to David Cameron, then the prime minister, about the 3,000 migrants massed on the French coast, most of whom were young men from Afghanistan, Sudan and Eritrea. ‘Let’s put an end to the hypocrisy of pretending that we don’t know that most of them want to go to England, where it is much easier to work without papers than in France,’ said Bertrand.
Cameron did promise that year to crack down on the phenomenon, announcing his determination to introduce an immigration ‘taskforce’, the main purpose of which would be to make ‘Britain a less attractive place to come and work illegally’. ‘The truth is’, Camerons said, ‘it has been too easy to work illegally and employ illegal workers here.’
That never happened. On the contrary, it was on Cameron’s watch that Britain’s ‘gig economy’ exploded. Companies such as Deliveroo, Uber and Just Eat were regarded by the PM and his chancellor, George Osborne, as the exciting future of the British economy.
The companies portrayed their workers as students or mums and dads looking to make some cash on the side; for years they vigorously fought attempts to have their drivers and deliverers recognised as workers. That would give them rights.
It has become increasingly obvious in recent years that many of the people working for these companies are illegal immigrants. In 2023, a random Home Office screening of delivery riders found that 40 per cent fitted this description.
Earlier this year, an undercover reporter from the Sun, posing as a small-boat arrival from Afghanistan, was able to sign up as a delivery driver within ten minutes. ‘When asked if having no documents was a problem, one “Deliveroo dealer” told him: ‘You will not be caught, inshallah”’, reported the newspaper.
In France, on the other hand, you will be caught, which is why most migrants looking for easy work, once they have entered France from Spain or Italy, head straight to the Channel coast.
In December last year, Just Eat ceased trading in France, a victim not just of high operating costs but also ‘pressure to improve working conditions for delivery drivers’. Just Eat’s announcement came a month after the Paris Administrative Court overturned its redundancy plan to lay off more than 100 people.
It has become increasingly obvious in recent years that many of the people working for these companies are illegal immigrants
Last month, the Paris Court of Appeal ordered Deliveroo to reinstate a delivery driver who had been fired in 2020 for ‘discrimination on health grounds’. The British company was also ordered to pay the driver €93,000 [£80,000] in unpaid wages.
In 2022, a French court handed two former bosses of Deliveroo suspended one year prison sentences for ‘abusing the freelance status of riders’.
Two years earlier a Paris labour court found the company guilty of ‘undeclared work’ by a delivery rider; his lawyer told the press that paying him as an independent contractor and not a regular employee ‘was an attempt to skirt labour laws’.
In 2022, Joe Carberry, the head of corporate communications at Deliveroo, said that France was ‘the most progressive example’ of gig economy regulation because under its law employees were entitled to social security, pension contributions and unemployment benefits.
Carberry made his remarks at a fringe event at that year’s Labour Party conference; before joining Deliveroo, Carberry worked for the party, first as a special adviser to David Miliband and then as Labour’s head of research between 2015 to 2017.
The event was organised by Progressive Britain, described by the Guardian as a ‘Blairite think-tank’, whose board of directors include Kay Carberry, Joe’s mum; she received a CBE in 2007 for services to employment relations.
The Deliveroo meeting was criticised by Alex Marshall, president of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain. ‘It is quite ironic that Deliveroo points to France as progressive… they have received huge fines and a suspended jail sentence there.’
France has also fined Uber ‘for deceptive commercial practices’, forcing the ride-hailing app in its own words to rethink ‘its business model in light of local expectations’.
There has been no such rethink in Britain, but there needs to be in light of the mounting evidence that this business model is fuelling the migrant crisis. Perhaps smashing the gig economy and not the gangs should be Keir Starmer’s priority.
The truth about Meghan and Harry’s renewed Netflix deal
It is important for any self-respecting writer to admit when they get it wrong. So it is with an element of contrition that I must report that, despite my confident belief that the dynamic duo themselves, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, would not have their lucrative Netflix deal renewed, such an event has, indeed, come to pass. Amidst what must surely be the raucous sound of organic kombucha bottles being opened in Montecito in celebration, it has been announced that Netflix and Hal & Megs will be in business for another five years, giving the haters and naysayers ample reason to weep and gnash their teeth.
Springtime for Netflix and the Sussexes; winter for the rest of us
The treats on offer will include not just a second series of the Duchess’s largely unloved and unpopular lifestyle show With Love, Meghan, but a Christmas special – no doubt filmed about now – and a range of potential projects from Archewell’s hitherto undistinguished film and television production arm. This might potentially include their feature film debut, an adaptation of Carley Fortune’s romantic novel Meet Me At The Lake, and worthy-sounding documentaries, including one about orphans in Uganda, tentatively entitled Masaka Kids, A Rhythm Within. If all goes according to plan, then the schedules will be choc-a-bloc with Archewell programming over the next few years. Springtime for Netflix and the Sussexes; winter for the rest of us.
Certainly, the smug quotes from all parties suggest that this particular fait accompli has worked out very well indeed. Meghan, forever with an eye on the prize, announced that:
We’re proud to extend our partnership with Netflix and expand our work together to include the As Ever brand. My husband and I feel inspired by our partners who work closely with us and our Archewell Productions team to create thoughtful content across genres that resonates globally and celebrates our shared vision.
Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria, meanwhile, gushed that:
Harry and Meghan are influential voices whose stories resonate with audiences everywhere. The response to their work speaks for itself – Harry & Meghan gave viewers an intimate look into their lives and quickly became one of our most-watched documentary series. More recently, fans have been inspired by With Love, Meghan with products from the new As Ever line consistently selling out in record time. We’re excited to continue our partnership with Archewell Productions and to entertain our members together.
So there we are. The wholesome, upstanding couple has been vindicated, sarcastic detractors like me humiliated, and we can expect a happy half-decade of shows ahead. Well, not quite.
Dig beneath the PR carapace and in fact there’s a sting in the tail. The Sussexes have indeed signed a new five-year deal with Netflix, but it’s on considerably reduced terms from the original $100 million (£74 million) handout. Instead, it is trumpeted as a ‘multiyear, first-look deal’, which sounds impressive enough, but in reality means that Netflix are not obliged to make any of the shows that Archewell pitches, simply that they will be the first port of call for their offer.
Should, heaven forfend, they not meet with the streaming service’s interest, they can attempt to flog their wares elsewhere. But given the negligible viewing figures for all the non-Sussex shows – and the unexceptional numbers for the much-maligned With Love, Meghan – this is by no means an inevitability.
Therefore, one cannot begrudge Harry and Meghan a moment of relief after what has been a largely rough and difficult year so far, particularly for the Duke. Yet it is hard to believe that this really does represent the triumphant return to our screens that this has been superficially marketed as. If most of these mooted shows and films do make it to Netflix, I will take pleasure in eating my As Ever-branded raspberry spread (‘with a hint of lemon’) in public, with the smallest spoon I can find. But if they don’t, then this should be seen as a face-saving retreat rather than a progression in an increasingly tarnished media empire.
This Midlands police officer represents true British values
There’s been a tiny outbreak of sanity among British officialdom. Footage emerged on X at the weekend, captured on a doorbell camera in Coventry last Friday afternoon. The householder found a policeman at his door, clutching a small piece of paper.
The footage of this chipper doorstep incident made me snap my fingers and think, ‘oh yes, British values – it’s that’
‘Warwickshire [police] have asked me to come round,’ says the copper, looking affably embarrassed. ‘It’s a load of b******* mate, but it’s about this protest tomorrow in Warwickshire. They’re aware that you might be wanting to attend that planned protest’. The protest in question – outside the town hall in Nuneaton – was called for in response to the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in the town involving two men, reported to be asylum seekers.
The policeman continues, ‘and obviously that’s absolutely fine. You’ve got freedom of speech, and there are no issues at all. I apologise – and it’s really woeful. It’s not something I agree with, but I’ve been asked just to drop a leaflet about being involved in a protest. It sounds bad, but it is what it is.’
The homeowner retorts, ‘Do me a favour. Take it back. Say we will no longer be silenced. And tell them to f*** off from me, with love. Cheers.’
Ahead of planned protests in Nuneaton tomorrow following the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl by two illegal migrants, a visibly embarrassed police officer visits a man on behalf of Warwickshire Police to deliver a leaflet about protest involvement.
— J Stewart (@triffic_stuff_) August 8, 2025
The officer knows this is… pic.twitter.com/h9kmG95BDL
The policeman reacts with cheery mirth and proceeds on his way.
There’s been so much discussion about ‘British values’ over the last few years, so much head scratching and noddle bashing. We never wondered about defining these before about 2010. It would’ve seemed ludicrous even to mention the topic. You just knew; they were woven into the fabric of our lives so innately that you didn’t think about them.
Attempts to define these values have usually felt like trying to catch a cloud and pin it down. Any suggestions have nearly always seemed nebulous or arbitrary. Oftenthe things advanced are something really twee or trivial like a CGI Paddington bear. Or they are banal – the NHS, as if we are the only country with hospitals. Or they are very recent – being nice to homosexuals.
The footage of this chipper doorstep incident made me snap my fingers and think, ‘oh yes, British values – it’s that’. Smiling at nonsense, maintaining a sense of proportion; laughing at spurious nonsense rather than genuflecting – literally kneeling, in the fairly recent history of the British police – to it.
It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve seen this essence in any official representative. I’ve become accustomed to such functionaries having an eerie plasticity, talking in a peculiar language that’s a mix of Apprentice-contestant flannel and Kapo guard. I pray that if I’m ever in a sticky situation it’ll be this officer or somebody like him that comes to my aid.
Naturally the officer is now under investigation, or at least being ‘spoken to’ by his superiors in West Midlands Police. Well, we can’t have a surge of perspective and good humour in the ranks, it just wouldn’t do. Where would it all end? It might inspire other officers – perhaps to say ‘don’t be ridiculous’ when asked to discipline a shopkeeper for describing shoplifters as ‘scumbags’. Or, when dispatched to harass feminists for the possession of ‘offensive’ stickers, a policeman might reply ‘you’re having a laugh’. Heavens to Betsy, the police might even start treating people equally before the law, rather than caving before certain approved ‘communities’ with ‘protected’ characteristics or political views.
In other news, the police are currently seeking the ‘vigilantes’ who restrained and removed a very aggressive naked man on a tube train the other day, with a view to charging them with assault. The cops were nowhere to be seen during the actual incident, hence the public taking matters into their own hands. But they appear afterwards to arrest you, if you are forced to act by their absence.
If there were more officers like our cheerful friend in Coventry, such an investigation would be laughed out before it could even get started.
The shifting of our institutions away from reason since the 90s has been very disquieting, as the New Labour rot percolated through them, but it happened so very gradually that one often didn’t notice until it was too late. There is something perfect about the leaflet in this story; it’s the ideal prop of the petty governing class of our age, who have smashed up so much that was good, and think they can replace it with little signs and notices.
This policeman feels like the last survival of the Britain I knew the dog-end of, growing up. He is a throwback to the days of ‘don’t be daft’, of the assumption that things, generally, worked fine, and that people, generally, had the sense they were born with. He should be treasured, not ‘spoken to’.
Why are schoolchildren making Valentine’s Day cards for refugees?
In Birmingham, schoolchildren as young as five have been reportedly asked to write Valentine’s Day cards to asylum seekers. One group of children were said to have created heart-shaped messages with slogans like ‘You are welcome here!. Let us count the ways that school children sending Valentine’s Day cards to asylum seekers might be misinterpreted or otherwise lead to unintended consequences. Let alone whether it might cause alarm to parents, and generally reinforce the idea that the people in charge in this country are either profoundly naive or politically malevolent.
Firstly – how might a Valentine’s Day card be interpreted by the intended recipients? In most of the world, the celebration of what we used to refer to as St. Valentine’s Day is still a very recent phenomenon; its introduction was largely commercially driven, based around adult conceptions of romantic or sexual relations. As it sadly is in this country nowadays, albeit with its older role as a celebration of more platonic forms of love still lingering somewhere in the folk memory. The journalist David Aaranovitch suggested it was ‘disgusting’ to perceive a sexual connotation in a Valentine’s Day card – but in most of the world, Valentine’s Day has no other connotation.
In many countries there would be uproar if a teacher even mentioned Valentine’s Day to their children
Anywhere in Asia and in most of Africa, Valentine’s Day is regarded as the western import that it is, and is associated with Western conceptions of sex and relationships – or at least, with those places’ imagining of western notions of sex and relations, which they understand to be a complete free-for-all, without any constraints of social or religious propriety.
Outside of the more westernised urban classes in the Middle East or India, it would still be considered a bit racy to mark Valentine’s Day within a marriage. Certainly, no child in those places is making a Valentine’s Day card at infants’ school and giving it to their mother. In fact, in many countries there would be uproar if a teacher even mentioned Valentine’s Day to their children.
Secondly, there’s the question of who exactly the recipients are. As far as we can tell the cards were not sent to named recipients, as opposed to the clients of a particular charity as a whole. This spared the school the trouble of considering these people as individuals with any specific characteristics; names, nationalities, genders or ages.
Much of the outrage to this story has come from people making an educated guess regarding the demographics of the recipients based on those of asylum seekers in the UK generally. That is to say they are likely to be predominantly male, in their twenties or thirties, and from places like Afghanistan, the Middle East or the Horn of Africa.
It’s quite striking that those who encourage us to make asylum seekers ‘feel welcome’ are often very hostile to actually considering specific characteristics that might help us define them as individuals. Even speculating on their nationalities is regarded in such quarters as being slightly conspiratorial. They prefer to think of them generically simply as ‘refugees’.
This brings us to what the actual purpose of the ‘Schools of Sanctuary’ organisation that planned this exercise was. It has nothing to do with refugees as individuals. Instead, it is about instilling in children at a young age the trappings of empathy toward an amorphous, ageless, stateless blob of people for whom they ought to feel sorry, like ‘the sick’ or ‘the poor’. In successful cases, some of these children will retain such simplistic notions into adulthood, and go on to become columnists for the Independent and the Times.
But this is a mockery of real empathy. You cannot truly feel empathy for another human being whilst forbidding yourself from considering them as having an age, being a man or a woman, or as coming from a specific place as you yourself do. But as soon as we start to think about asylum seekers as individuals, we risk running into group characteristics that detract from public sympathy. Only by completely stripping people of their individual characteristics can we hope to remove prejudice, so the reasoning goes.
On the streets of many of our cities, we can see the results of this policy of treating ‘refugees’ as a fungible mass of blank humanity, to be slotted in wherever there’s physical space, and left to mill about aimlessly. Housing of Multiple Occupation with a dozen guys from several random countries, with equally random reasons for making their way to Britain. All they likely have in common with one another is that some Home Office lawyer decided that a rejection of their asylum claim could be challenged plausibly under Article 8 of the ECHR. Perhaps, an anonymous card from a local primary school makes up for any of the normal means by which a human being may find a sense of belonging in this world, and which these men have been convinced to sever themselves from to come to Britain.
We can only speculate as to how baffling the contents of these cards might have been to a lad from Eritrea or rural Syria whose only previous exposure to Valentines Day was when it popped up on the sort of website that he’d now need a VPN to access in this country. I suspect pure bemusement was a more likely reaction than the ostensibly intended one of ‘feeling welcomed’. But the people whose idea it was have no interest in that at all – their interest is in shaping the views and assumptions of young children.
Rachel Reeves’s assault on the British economy continues
There really is no hiding place for Rachel Reeves in this morning’s employment figures. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) release shows that 164,000 payrolled positions have been lost in the 12 months to July, Labour’s first year in office. Those figures are still provisional, but the figures for the 12 months to June show pretty much the same picture, with the number of payrolled positions falling by 149,000. In May alone, 26,000 jobs were lost. The unemployment rate rose to 4.7 per cent. For those who are in work, the figures show a healthy rise in real earnings of 0.9 per cent. The Bank of England said last week it doesn’t expect this to last, but for the moment, those in work are, on average, doing quite well – not that the productivity figures justify any real-terms increase in average pay.
The drop in payrolled employment is all the more stark considering that until last summer there had been strong growth in jobs. And it is not hard to find a culprit, either. Employers had been warning ever since last October’s budget, when employers’ national insurance was jacked up by 1.5 percent and the earnings threshold for contributions dropped from £9,200 a year to £5,000 a year, that they would have to lay off workers. Employment figures for the past few months – the NI rise took effect in April – show that it was no idle threat. Reeves has hit a ceiling, and inadvertently carried out a real-life demonstration of the Laffer Curve – jack up taxes too much and you dissuade economic activity, so you don’t get the revenue you were expecting.
If there is anything for the government to cling to, it is that overall employment did rise modestly to 75.3 per cent. That figure includes not just payrolled positions but also self-employed workers. In other words, it looks as if employers may be dodging the rise in NI contributions by shifting some workers out of regular jobs and into self-employment. The NI rises might not be the only reason for this. The Employment Rights Bill threatens to make life more onerous for employers, too, with its ban on zero hours contracts and the imposition of protections against unfair dismissal from day one of employment. It is about to become much riskier to take on new members of staff because it will be much harder to get rid of them if they prove hopeless at their jobs.
The irony of the trend in the labour market from payrolled employment to casual work is that Labour, you might remember, promised to reverse the growth of the gig economy. It was going to do away with the world of short contracts and temporary employment and give workers much more security in the workplace. From today’s labour market figures it appears that it is achieving the exact opposite.
Will Reeves change course? That is highly unlikely. The shocking borrowing figures and lousy economic growth of the past few months is pushing her further into the destructive cycle of higher taxes curtailing economic growth. Moreover, there is little chance of the government’s drive on employment rights being watered down. No-one should be surprised if the loss of jobs accelerates over the coming year.
Exclusive poll: are you proud to be an American?
With the 250th anniversary of America’s founding approaching next year, the majority of Americans are happy to applaud their country – with 63 percent saying that yes, the birthday of the United States is a moment to celebrate, a new poll from Cygnal released exclusively to The Spectator reveals.
But unfortunately for those who would like such an event to be bipartisan and unifying, that majority is overwhelmingly driven by Republicans, 89 percent of whom say America’s anniversary is a moment of triumph. On the other side of the aisle, only 37 percent of Democrats say there’s something to celebrate at 250 years, with 58 percent of Democrats saying “no, there’s not much to celebrate” or “no, there’s nothing” to celebrate.
The group most likely to find fault in the United States is J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies”: 64 percent of single female Democrats say there isn’t anything to celebrate after two and a half centuries of America, with just 28 percent answering in favor of the country in which they live.
The racial make-up of respondents also illustrate a major divide. White Democrats (of which 37 percent say yes, there is something to celebrate versus 60 percent who disagree) are much more pessimistic than black Democrats, (of whom 42 percent say yes and 50 percent no).
Perhaps the driving element is a divide over the effect of America’s policies on the world writ large. Overall, 58 percent of Americans say that after 250 years the United States remains a force for good in the world, while 36 percent disagree. In the breakdown, Republicans are emphatic that the USA is a force for good, by a margin of 86 percent to 10 percent. But just 31 percent of Democrats say America is a force for good, with 61 percent disagreeing. Democrats are particularly emphatic on this point – three times as many say America is definitely not a force for good (31 percent) as say it definitely is a force for good (11 percent).
Once again, white leftists are the drivers of the anti-American sentiment. Hispanic Democrats say America is a force for good at a 33 percent clip, and 41 percent of black Democrats think, regardless of the propaganda surrounding the ills of American racism, that the United States is a force for good.
Cygnal’s survey encompassed 1500 likely voters, with a margin of error of 2.5 percent.