Black lives matter

Wednesday

Leo Thuman

Trump’s Burkean moment

President Trump surprised some on Saturday when he shared a video from Business Insider explaining that billionaires have amassed half-a-trillion dollars during the coronavirus pandemic as millions face unemployment. A conventional, supply-sider Republican president of the past would have never harped on about income inequality, especially not in an economic recession. But Trump bucks conventions. He voiced his approval of the video in his usual exclamatory style: ‘I actually agree with this. Too much income disparity. Changes must be made, and soon!’ Inevitably, that tweet drew criticism from free-market fundamentalists within the Republican party. Some compared his statement to the socialist rhetoric coming from the American left. But Trump is right.

burkean

Thursday

Lee Child

The brilliance of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan

From our UK edition

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 told my friend C.J. Box, the great Wyoming writer, that I was moving, and where. ‘We’ll be neighbours,’ he said. ‘Really?’ I replied. I thought I must have misread the map.

Christopher Sandford

Tear gas Ted: the mayor manning Portland’s barricades

From our UK edition

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.

Tuesday

Daniel McCarthy

The mock revolution of the elites

‘Protesters in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified,’ ABC News recently tweeted. The wording was perfect — better than any satire as an illustration of the corporate media’s biases. These biases have lately come at cost for CNN and the Washington Post, both of which have paid to settle the suits brought against them by Nick Sandmann, a Covington Catholic High School student whose life they nearly destroyed last year. But the corporate media cannot be embarrassed into mending its ways, neither by its own risible tweets nor by lawsuits from the people harmed by its misreporting.

elites revolution

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Putin plans to make the West destroy itself

From our UK edition

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.

Lionel Shriver

Open letters have become ransom notes

From our UK edition

In the States, the ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary genre exhibit striking similarities to the ransom note. During June’s riots following George Floyd’s murder, a beloved independent bookstore in Denver called The Tattered Cover posted online that the shop would be politically impartial, the better to remain a neutral space for customers. Cue local outrage. Cue the store’s immediate volte-face: fulsome support for Black Lives Matter. The reversal proved unsatisfactory. Signed by miffed patrons and authors, an open letter to the owners listed ten demands.

Friday

Amy Holmes

Do all black lives matter to BLM?

‘I understand black lives matter. But that’s not my movement, right now. My movement is to let them know that was my son. Horace Lorenzo Anderson was my son.’ And his son is dead. In a gripping, gut wrenching, heartrending, half-hour interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Horace Lorenzo Anderson, Sr tearfully beseeched social justice warriors and anyone watching that his son’s black life mattered, too. Horace Jr. was just 19 years old when he was shot and killed at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Ongoing Protest (CHOP), the police-free, six-block city encampment created with the blessing of Democratic officials.

lives

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The vanity of ‘white guilt’

From our UK edition

When I was about ten, on return home from church I ate a peach, the juice of which dribbled down my new pink frock. I scuttled to my room to change, bunching the dress under the bed. I emerged the picture of innocence, but I felt guilty. For weeks, the garment pulsed with accusation. Going to sleep, I always knew it was there. Sure enough, my mother discovered the wad while vacuuming, and she was furious. She could have scrubbed out the juice had I told her about it right away. To this day, I’m mindful that you can only expunge stains while they’re still fresh — and somewhere in there lurks a metaphor. I’m not prone to remembering the ingestion of individual pieces of fruit. That small memory looms as a touchstone for the experience of culpability.

Toby Young

Does the curriculum really need ‘decolonising’?

From our UK edition

Layla Moran, the Lib Dems’ education spokesman, has written to Gavin Williamson urging him to do something about ‘systemic racism’ in schools. ‘Changes to the history curriculum, such as learning about non-white historical figures and addressing the darker sides of British history honestly, are a vital first step to tackling racism in our education system,’ she wrote. ‘This chasm in information only serves to present students with a one-sided view of the events in history.’ I’m not sure Moran knows very much about how the education system works. For one thing, Williamson cannot dictate how history is taught in free schools and academies — they don’t have to follow the national curriculum.

Tuesday

Nate Hochman

Uncle Tom shows another side of the African American story

Although it finished production months before George Floyd was killed, the documentary Uncle Tom, produced by Larry Elder, has been released bang in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protest explosion. But in the face of this unrest, Uncle Tom — which bills itself as 'an oral history of the American black conservative' — shows a side of the African-American community that is often overlooked by the media. The title is part tongue-in-cheek. As an epithet, 'Uncle Tom' is often used to pejoratively describe black Americans who diverge from the political left, which has long been seen as the natural home for the African American vote.

Larry Elder appears in Uncle Tom trailer

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

The gentrification of revolt

Does anyone actually remember George Floyd? What started out as a noble cause to curb police brutality in urban and African American communities has morphed into a corporate crusade of ne'er do wells tossing out woke distractions to keep the Instagram millennial mafia off their backs, as well as the looting for likes and posing for photos on the hoods of police cars, all in the hopes of a viral snap for Instagram, TikTok or Twitter. We’ve seen hordes of entitled white women from Georgetown in Lululemon Yoga gear shrieking at black police officers about their privilege and r/Chapo antifa larpers tearing down statues of Ulysses S. Grant or berating older black people about their history. And let’s not forget that goddamn racist elk statue in Portland.

revolt Friends take a selfie in the the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, Washington
defund Protesters hold up signs on June 3, 2020
Karol Markowicz

‘Defund the police’ just means ‘I’m rich’

Walk along the leafy streets of any neighborhood in so-called 'brownstone Brooklyn' — Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights — and you’ll see 'Defund the Police' in many a home window. Owners of $3 million brownstones proudly proclaim their agreement with a fringe policy, designed to remove resources from police squads, as a solution to police violence. How exactly less funding for police will result in better policing is unclear, but virtue signaling of the kind that has rich people pushing for fewer resources for poor people doesn’t get tangled up in the details. The details are specifically grim. The New York Post reported on Monday that 'between Monday, June 29, and Sunday, July 5, the city saw 74 shooting incidents with 101 victims'.

Brendan O’Neill

Keir Starmer’s bizarre Black Lives Matter re-education

From our UK edition

So now we know what happens if you criticise Black Lives Matter. You’ll be packed off for re-education. You will be sent to have your mind cleansed of foul, dissenting thoughts. You will be reminded of the First Commandment of the strange year of 2020: Thou Shalt Not Question BLM. That’s the lesson of Keir Starmer’s bizarre confession this morning that he will submit himself for unconscious bias training after he dared, ever so mildly, to criticise a few aspects of the BLM worldview. Last week Starmer referred to the BLM protests of the past few weeks as a ‘moment’. That was crime No. 1.

Thursday

William Rosenau

Why is Black Lives Matter praising a terrorist?

In the early hours of May 2, 1973, State Trooper James Harper pulled over a white 1965 Pontiac Lemans on the New Jersey Turnpike near New Brunswick. Inside were three revolutionary desperados: Zayd Malik Shakur, Sundiata Acoli and JoAnne Chesimard. Trooper Werner Foerster, who was patrolling nearby, pulled up behind Officer Harper. Harper approached the Pontiac and asked the driver for his license and car registration. Something didn’t seem right with the paperwork, and the driver and two passengers were asked to step out of the car. Then gunfire erupted.Officer Harper and JoAnne Chesimard were wounded, Zayd Malik Shakur was shot dead and Sundiata Acoli escaped on foot.

assata shakur
Toby Young

We’re facing a tsunami of censorship

From our UK edition

It’s open season on mavericks and dissenters at the moment. If you publicly challenge any of the sacred nostrums of the social justice left and you work in a school, a college, a university, an arts company, a public broadcasting organisation, a tech company, a charity, a local authority or, indeed, Whitehall, you are at risk of being cancelled. How do I know? Because in February I set up the Free Speech Union to protect those being targeted in this way and in the past month we’ve been contacted by people in all of these fields who have either been fired, suspended or are ‘under investigation’ for having said or done something controversial, usually on Facebook or Twitter. And by ‘controversial’ I don’t mean they’re guilty of hate speech.

Sohrab Ahmari

This ‘revolution’ isn’t what it looks like

From our UK edition

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.

Douglas Murray

What a leaked NHS memo tells us about White Fragility

From our UK edition

Of all the people who have made cash in the past month, few can have raked it in like Robin DiAngelo. Since the death of George Floyd, the white American academic and author of White Fragility has been absolutely milking it. A term I probably shouldn’t use, since Peta last week declared milk a symbol of white supremacy. I might say she is absolutely creaming it, though by the time you read this ‘cream’ might be racist too. In which case it will join the British countryside, which was designated as racist by the BBC’s Countryfile last week. A fact that I learned after opening Google’s homepage, where I was educated about the late black American drag queen Marsha Johnson.

Alexander Pelling-Bruce

The Black Lives Matter movement is re-racialising society

From our UK edition

Every day I thank God for the British Empire. Without it I wouldn’t exist. My Gold Coast-born mother would never have met my English father. She herself is the descendant of a Scottish merchant called Bruce. Now she lives happily in rural Perthshire. She’s the only black in the village. Growing up in the 1990s, I faintly remember debate over whether non-whites could be British. Certainly the question had receded by the time Monty Panesar made his England cricket debut midway through the following decade. Meanwhile, however, Britain quickly became one of the best places for cultural entrepreneurs to promote the pernicious fallacy that we are best understood through the prism of race and culture.

Wednesday

Matt Mayer

Trump’s African American ‘silent minority’ could swing the election

Donald Trump’s efforts to broaden his appeal to the African American community are bearing fruit. Rasmussen polling noted in early June that Trump’s approval rating among African Americans stood at 41 percent, far above the 8 percent of votes he received from that community in 2016. While approval ratings don’t necessarily translate to votes on Election Day, it mathematically would be very hard for Joe Biden to win in the key battleground states should Trump double his vote to 16 percent of African American voters. Trump’s opponents are convinced that his record as president and his response to the Black Lives Matter protests mean his popularity with black voters will go down. But the truth may well be the opposite.

african american
kushner
Amber Duke

The Kushner conundrum

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