Black lives matter

Tuesday

Cockburn

The worst of Instagram activism

What do veganism, fashion, and architecture all have in common? According to Gen Z, they’re all racist.America’s teens and twenty-somethings have taken up the mantle of civil rights by reposting informative guides to Critical Race Theory on their Instagram Stories. Cockburn’s nieces were kind enough to send him a few links.You might think that these posts inform the zoomers about topics like fatherlessness, abortion, the welfare state and other serious issues that disproportionately face the African American community. However, these guides are almost entirely composed of far-left talking points, creating a social media echo chamber of unabated cultural Marxism and cringe.

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knee
Toby Young

Just-one-knee syndrome

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

Monday

Matt McDonald

Don’t hold your breath for Joe Biden’s Sister Souljah moment

'While Biden was in his basement, @realDonaldTrump had 5.3 MILLION+ viewers tune in to his rally,' wrote GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel last week. It's a variation on a theme for the Republican party of late: take the vacant airwaves left by a subdued Biden campaign and fill them with spurious claims about the whereabouts of the presumptive Democratic nominee. Sure, Biden has been quiet, relative to Trump — who isn't? — but he hasn't been totally basement-bound. The former vice president has been venturing out for socially distanced local speeches. He gave one on healthcare in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on Thursday, stopped off in the Pennsylvania towns of Yeadon and Darby the week before, and hosted an economic round table in Philadelphia on June 11.

sister souljah

Thursday

Michael Tracey

Black Lives Matter is a state-backed religion

'Protest' often feels inadequate as a characterization for the public exhibitions that have erupted nationwide over the past several weeks. The term 'protest' carries a connotation of actions carried out in opposition to existing structures of power; hence, you 'protest' against forces that are arrayed against you (even if some municipal bureaucrat might have reluctantly granted you a permit). However, at least in many jurisdictions, events which were presented as 'protests' should more rightly be labeled as something along the lines of 'state-backed demonstrations.' For instance, in my otherwise sleepy hometown of Caldwell/West Caldwell, New Jersey, high-school students organized what turned out to be an astonishingly large protest march.

religion
Patrick West

Holland Park must not fall

From our UK edition

The latest victim in this summer's mania could be the name of one of London's best-known and wealthiest areas: Holland Park, in the west of the capital. A monument in the park itself, of the 19th-century politician Henry Vassall-Fox, the third Baron Holland, was splattered with red paint on Wednesday. After, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea suggested that the park, underground station and entire district could end up being renamed. The park and neighbourhood was named after Henry Fox, the first Baron Holland. His descendent, the third Baron, technically owned slaves and dozens of plantations in Jamaica through his wife's estate. Hence this weeks' desecration, with a cardboard sign left perched in the bronze statue's arms reading 'I owned 401 slaves.

Charles Moore

Michelangelo’s David must fall

From our UK edition

‘White Lives Matter Burnley’ said the plane’s banner as it circled the club’s stadium just after the teams had ‘taken the knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter. I must admit that my very first reaction on hearing the news was pleasure at the idea that the self-righteousness of Black Lives Matter was being guyed. My second, more considered response is that the banner was bad — and for precisely the same reason that BLM is bad. It takes a statement which any decent person would consider true and turns it into a weapon of race war. Of course black lives matter. Of course white lives matter. The question is: ‘Why are you saying it now?’ The answer, in both cases, is discreditable. It is to make one lot hate the other lot more.

Kevin Hurley

To save black lives, police top brass must face reality

From our UK edition

I was a borough commander in west London and come from a long line of officers — and I can tell you that it’s fast becoming impossible to police the streets. The police are attacked on all sides. They’re told both that they’re too aggressive and too politically correct; too understanding and too intolerant. They’re required to reduce the level of violent crime on the street and yet told they’re racist if they stop and search young black men and ‘put hands in pockets’ to check for knives. As a society we can shout and scream at the police, regulate them, scrutinise them, sack a few, bring in external bosses from industry. We can try to ‘re-educate’ them and have an independent complaints system.

James Bartholomew

Racism, poverty and the ‘controversy paradox’

From our UK edition

It might seem puzzling that we have seen such a furore about racism and racial discrimination at this particular time in our history when all possible measures of racism indicate that there is less of it in Britain than at any time in the past 70 years. A decade ago, 41 per cent of us ‘-strongly agreed’ that we would be content for our children to marry someone of a different race. That has now risen to 70 per cent. In 2006, 55 per cent ‘strongly disagreed’ that you had to be white to be ‘truly British’. That has risen to 84 per cent.

Rod Liddle

The police have become too politicised to function

From our UK edition

Of the many admirable demands made by supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, such as dismantling capitalism and making white people pay for centuries of vile oppression, none commended themselves to me more than the demand that we should defund the police. This is a hugely attractive proposition, I thought, as I watched the chief constable of Kent, Alan Pughsley, ‘take the knee’ in solidarity with people who want him abolished. I felt much the same upon hearing the words of Superintendent Andrew ‘Andy’ Bennett of Avon and Somerset Police, who watched as BLM protestors threw a statue of Edward Colston into the river.

Wednesday

Spectator Editorial

No justice, no peace

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

justice

Monday

Douglas Murray

The new inequality

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

race

Friday

Roger Kimball

Thank goodness for Hillsdale College

Did you go to college? If so, then it is overwhelmingly likely that you have been the recipient of a nauseating communication like this one from 'Maud' (that would be Maud S. Mandel, President of Williams College) explaining how Williams will 'confront and fight racial and social injustice.’ I hope that you are impressed by both Maud’s bravery and her virtue. In an earlier communication, just as the wave of violent hooliganism began rolling over the country at the end of May, she let us know that she is 'disgusted, saddened and angered by ongoing racism in all forms and places’ (every last one!). What a paragon she is! Maud then went on to 'state unequivocally’ (unequivocally!

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Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Was Priti Patel really ‘gaslighting’ MPs?

From our UK edition

Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity’, as the OED defines it. Last week saw it change meaning. In parliament, Florence Eshalomi asked Priti Patel whether she understood the ‘anger and frustration felt by so many people’ involved in Black Lives Matter protests. In reply Miss Patel gave some of her experiences of racism, such as being called a ‘Paki’. (Some news reports blanked out Paki.) Next day 32 black and ethnic-minority (BAME) Labour MPs declared in an open letter that the Home Secretary had ‘used your heritage and experiences of racism to gaslight the very real racism faced by black people’.

Laurence Fox

The pitfalls of wrongthink

From our UK edition

First they came for the statues, then Basil Fawlty got ‘cancelled’ and three spoiled millionaires turned on their creator. So it was with J.K. Rowling’s woke progeny. Harry Potter, it would seem, is deathly shallow. Rupert Grint looked for a moment like holding firm, but he too quickly succumbed to the growing pressure to slip his golden dagger between Rowling’s shoulder blades. Surely these rich list regulars are perfectly placed to say what they actually think, protected from the ever-tightening vice of censorship? Apparently not. Fearing for their virtue or their future or both, the three children rounded on their mother. We must hope for better from Neville Longbottom.

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Black mass: the Georgetown Lecture Fund’s odd diversity campaign

The New York Times’s opinion editor resigned in disgrace earlier this month following a newsroom revolt over the publication of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton. The op-ed 'put black New York Times staffers in danger', the newspaper's reporters lamented in nearly identical tweets, because it called for using the National Guard to put down the riots in nearly every major American city. The incident perfectly framed what happens when weak-minded college students who are seldom exposed to opposing or controversial viewpoints graduate into the nation's top newsrooms. The campuses themselves aren't faring much better. Members of Generation Z are thought to be more culturally conservative than their millennial counterparts, but Georgetown students must have missed the memo.

Georgetown University's Healy Hall

Tuesday

Nick Tyrone

What are Black Lives Matter’s actual policies?

From our UK edition

The effect of George Floyd’s death in Minnesota upon Britain has been remarkable. We have had waves of protests, in London but also other large British cities, that look set to continue. Statues have fallen; long-loved television shows have been removed from digital platforms. An assumption has been made by many that the protests have at the very least been necessary. But there is a question few are actually asking about the Black Lives Matter protests in Britain: what do the protestors actually want? Some will say the answer is obvious. The protests are about ending racial inequality in Britain. If so, how do the BLM protests seek to correct this problem in real, practical terms? Think about other large protests from the past that linger in the memory.

Sunday

Freddy Gray

Society isn’t systemically racist. It is systemically woke

Structural, systemic, systematically — we’re hearing these words a lot at the moment. Racism isn’t individual. It is structural or systemic. So are poverty or injustice. People aren’t just oppressed or tortured; they are systematically oppressed or tortured. This is the language of Black Lives Matter and some of the noisier Democrats, and it’s telling. It comes from Marxist academia and the Black Power activism of the 1960s, and it evokes the radicalism of that time, which is generally now regarded as having been on ‘the right side’ of history. These words are also helpfully vague — nobody knows precisely what they mean — which means you can stress them without being contradicted.

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Saturday

Claire Fox

How a serious issue with racism was reduced to a tick-boxing exercise

From our UK edition

Who needs statue topplers when the state will do it for you? Some bright spark in authority has decided the way to defend the statues on Parliament Square is to board them up. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has taken his lead from protesters and started a national trend, with councils setting up posses of the unelected to assess whose statues might survive the great 2020 cull. Meanwhile, the BBC, so terrified of bad PR, has pre-emptively removed from its i-player an iconic episode of Fawlty Towers, written as a satire on Little Englander mentality. Own goals all round. What started out as a genuine, furious, international reaction to the brutal killing of George Floyd seems to be turning into an institutional nervous breakdown.

Thursday

Toby Young

The protestors have brought down the lockdown

From our UK edition

I wasn’t surprised to see that a woman whose father died at a care home in Bicester in April has decided to take legal action against the government. If I had an elderly relative in a nursing home whom I hadn’t been able to visit in the last months of his life because of the lockdown, I too would be angry. And I can imagine that anger turning into incandescent rage as I watched pictures of the Black Lives Matter protests on the nightly news. Why are police officers, who were so zealous about enforcing the social distancing rules until last week, now getting down on one knee to genuflect before the protestors?

Douglas Murray

In defence of liberalism: resisting a new era of intolerance

From our UK edition

It has become fashionable in recent years to talk of the death of liberalism. But as crowds high on the octane of generational self-righteousness rampage through major cities, the evidence mounts. The growing intolerance of freedom of thought, the inability to talk across divides, the way that most of the British establishment, police included, feels the need to pledge fealty to the cause — as though all terrified of ending up on the wrong side — points to a crisis of more than confidence. It is evidence of an underlying morbidity. Each day the cultural revolution is picking up a pace, with the iconoclasts who attacked the Cenotaph and the statue of Winston Churchill looking for new focuses for their rage.