America

Thursday

The Spectator

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

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

Andrew Sullivan

My run-in with the New York Times

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

Philip Delves-Broughton

As New Yorkers flee, the suburbs are under siege

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

Toby Young

The best leader we never had

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

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The Trump show: he could just win again

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

Douglas Murray

Protestors are clearing a path for Trump

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

Thursday

Freddy Gray

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

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

Thursday

Tom Slater

Cancelling Kindergarten Cop is a step too far

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

Deborah Ross

Heavy-handed satire and schmaltz: American Pickle reviewed

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

Bruce Anderson

The difference between American and French wine-drinkers

Is it safe to visit the continent? On the one hand, abroad is likely to be less crowded this August than in normal years. As for the virus, if one miscalculated, could that lead to lockdown in France profonde, or dolce far niente Tuscany? Hardly the worst outcome. Or would it mean cancelled flights, hours in airports, and then house arrest back in London? As government ministers do not appear to know the answer, how should the rest of us decide? While considering the options, I have consoled myself by remembering previous trips, stimulated by some recent tastings. When it comes to claret, I am very much on the left

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Has Trump’s Covid-19 response really been so dire?

The sight of Donald Trump fumbling with charts during his interview on HBO this Monday has provided much ammunition for his enemies. The words ‘train wreck’ and ‘toe-curling’ have been used multiple times to describe how the President insisted that the US has one of the lowest death rates from Covid-19, while interviewer Jonathan Swan quoted figures suggesting the US has one of the worst rates. True, Trump looked ill-prepared, but was he fibbing, as many of his critics have implied? America cannot claim to have a lower death rate than comparable western countries – but neither does it come out especially badly The truth lies somewhere between what Trump

Thursday

Lee Child

The brilliance of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan

Four years ago, I bought a ranch in Wyoming. Not that I was tired of New York, but I’m fascinated by the epic scale of this country, and I wanted to try something different. And different it is. The state of Wyoming is physically larger than the UK, but has much less than a hundredth of the UK’s population. I have to drive ten miles before I see a paved road. I stop there to pick up my mail, from a locked box on the shoulder. From there I have a choice of two supermarkets, one 40 miles north, the other 60 miles south. But distances are relative here. I

Freddy Gray

The real Joe Biden: what would his presidency look like?

It is usually a bad idea for a presidential candidate to leave himself open to the accusation that he is soft on law and order. Yet last weekend Joseph Robinette Biden Jr did exactly that. He attacked the ‘egregious tactics’ of the federal officers trying to control the apparently never-ending riots in Portland, Oregon. Sensing an open goal, President Trump’s campaign promptly accused Biden of ‘siding with the criminals’. In any normal election year, such an exchange would be a major flashpoint. In the Covid-19-riddled anarchy cauldron that is America in 2020, nobody much cares. Joe Biden can say pretty much anything, or nothing at all, and his lead in

Christopher Sandford

Tear gas Ted: the mayor manning Portland’s barricades

Portland, Oregon The federal courthouse in downtown Portland, Oregon, has become ground-zero for the nightly orgy of assaults, looting, arson, and public nudity — and, most recently, a surrealistic duel between protestors and federal agents using leaf-blowers to drive back each other’s tear gas — that continues to enliven America’s so-called Rose City in the wake of the death of George Floyd. It’s a curious thing, this new alignment of some of America’s most high-profile mayors with the very people burning down their towns. In Portland the competent authority figure is 57-year-old Ted Wheeler, who took office three and a half years ago. By law, all Portland mayors are nonpartisan,

Thursday

The Spectator

How many people would refuse a Covid vaccine?

Worth a shot? How worried should we be about people refusing to have a Covid-19 vaccine if one is developed? In a YouGov poll for the Centre for Countering Digital Hate this week, 6% said they would definitely refuse a vaccination, a further 10% said they would probably refuse and a further 15% said they weren’t sure. A better guide, perhaps, is how many allow their children to be vaccinated. According to government statistics, the rate of vaccination among children varies from 86.5% for the MMR2 vaccination at five years to 94.2% for the DTaP/IPV/Hib at two years. Poor third The rapper Kanye West launched his campaign for the US

Owen Matthews

Putin plans to make the West destroy itself

There’s only one person who’ll be genuinely pleased with the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report, finally revealed on Tuesday, and that’s Vladimir Putin. Russia emerges as an amorphous and formidable enemy — all the more so because the inconclusive and much-redacted report contains next to no substantiated allegations. Instead Russia appears as a phantom, unknowable menace, and this will spawn a thousand conspiracy theories far more corrosive and confusing to our politics than any Moscow-generated Twitter-storm or document leak. There’s no smoking gun on Brexit. Yet the government-induced delay in publication allows anyone that way inclined to imagine a cover-up. Even the insistence that the state should do more

Thursday

Michael Moorcock

We’re spending lockdown defending a family of mice

Austin My first Independence Day in the US for many years. Usually I’d be in Paris avoiding Texas heat. My wife and I are self-isolating with much more square feet and wildlife to enjoy. Our garden is lush and green, full of flowers, owls, hawks, possums, squirrels, skunks, armadillos and snakes. Recent wild fires drove more animals into town. Joyously athletic with the recklessness of youth, squirrels and redbirds chase each other through our oaks and pecans and it’s pretty good to sit on the front porch with a cooling drink and the rich scent of magnolias in the evening air. The young hawks are in heaven. They have discovered

Douglas Murray

Trump is taking on the historical revisionists

Ahead of Independence Day last week, CNN went live to its correspondent Leyla Santiago. Here is how she described the upcoming celebrations: ‘Kicking off the Independence Day weekend, President Trump will be at Mount Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.’ She went on to report that the President was expected to focus on efforts to ‘tear down our country’s history’. And where might the President have acquired such an idea? Even a few years ago it would have been unthinkable for a major network like CNN to have described Mount Rushmore in such nakedly

Thursday

Sohrab Ahmari

This ‘revolution’ isn’t what it looks like

America is not in the middle of a revolution — it is a reactionary putsch. About four years ago, the sort of people who had acquired position and influence as a result of globalisation were turfed out of power for the first time in decades. They watched in horror as voters across the world chose Brexit, Donald Trump and other populist and conservative-nationalist options. This deposition explains the storm of unrest battering American cities from coast to coast and making waves in Europe as well. The storm’s ferocity — the looting, the mobs, the mass lawlessness, the zealous iconoclasm, the deranged slogans like #DefundPolice — terrifies ordinary Americans. Many conservatives,

Thursday

James Forsyth

Why Biden might be better for Brexit Britain

At the best of times, US presidential elections require the British government to walk a tightrope. In 1992, a Tory prime minister got this very wrong. John Major’s excessive support for George Bush Sr’s unsuccessful re-election effort alienated Bill Clinton. The damage to the UK’s relationship with the country’s most important security partner was only fully repaired when Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997. This time around, things are particularly tricky for the UK, since Donald Trump doesn’t feel bound by normal diplomatic protocols — just look at his interventions in UK politics since taking office — and isn’t shy about asking for favours from foreign leaders (see the