Identity politics

Wednesday

Matt Purple

Jeopardy! is in trouble

From our US edition

THIS...iiiiiis Jeopardy! And it’s time now for today’s final answer. This pack of gibbering monsters is witlessly tearing down everything that’s good and decent about our society. What is us? All of us. The vicious and grievance-obsessed people we’ve become. Jeopardy! is that rarest of American traditions, one that really hasn’t changed. The quiz show has remained a granite bulwark against the pop-cultural tides: same sober presentation and aesthetic, same challenging questions and unforgiving pace. There are no blazing graphics, no CGI car chases through downtown Montpelier during the ‘State Capitals’ category. There hasn’t even been a crossover with the Real Housewives — ‘Bitch, the largest fossil-fuels producer in Central Asia isn’t Uzbekistan!

jeopardy

Friday

Khalid Mahmood

The Batley and Spen result is a rejection of identity politics

What should we make of the Batley and Spen by-election, won by Labour with a majority of just 323 votes? The victory, slim though it may be, is a credit to Kim Leadbeater who – with a gutsy campaign – has proved her doubters wrong and done her sister, the late Jo Cox, proud. This was by no means an easy campaign to fight. During the most toxic by-election for many years, Leadbeater became a target for two hostile and overlapping groups: aggressive self-proclaimed Muslim ‘leaders’, who with George Galloway tried to prise the constituency’s large Muslim population away from Labour, and the far-left in the party, who tried to use the by-election to breathe life back into Corbynism.

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

Identity politics is ruining children’s books

From our US edition

Here’s a treat for teenagers; there’s a version of Kamala Harris’s The Truths We Hold: Young Readers' Edition in a bookshop near you. It’s one for the same section as Michelle Obama’s Becoming: Adapted for Young Readers, except with next to nothing about boys and first kisses. However, to show willing, our author gives us a little anecdote from the party for her becoming a senator for California, a result that coincided with the election of you know who. Her godson, Alexander, 9, came up to her with tears welling in his eyes. ‘“Come here, little man, what’s wrong?” Alexander looked up...his voice was trembling. “Auntie Kamala, that man can’t win. He’s not going to win, is he?

books

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Kemi Badenoch: The problem with critical race theory

Even now, months after the event, Labour MPs have not forgiven Kemi Badenoch for saying that Britain is one of the best countries in the world in which to be black. It was during the Black Lives Matter protests and many politicians — including Sir Keir Starmer — were ‘taking the knee’ to show fealty to its cause. Badenoch took a different view, seeing within all this a pernicious ideology that portrays blackness as victimhood and whiteness as oppression. In parliament this week, she went further: this, she said, is ‘critical race theory’ — a new enemy for the Tory party and, as equalities minister, one for her to fight.

Thursday

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

The truth according to social justice

From our US edition

We have reached a point in history where the ideas that sustain the liberalism and modernity at the heart of western civilization are at great risk. The precise nature of this threat is complicated. It arises from at least two overwhelming pressures, one revolutionary and the other reactionary, that are at war over which illiberal direction our societies should be dragged. Far-right populist movements claim to make a last desperate stand for liberalism and democracy against a rising tide of progressivism and globalism. They are increasingly turning toward leadership in dictators and strongmen who can maintain and preserve ‘western’ sovereignty and values.

social justice
Lionel Shriver

Hatred is in the eye of the beholder

There’s a broad mainstream consensus on both sides of the Atlantic: Trump’s tweet telling four hard-left minority Congresswomen to ‘go home’ to the crime-ridden countries they’re from, when three of the four were born in the US, was racially inflammatory and staggeringly ill-judged.  But the first question that would be raised in the UK if a British politician committed such a gaffe is the last question raised in the US: was that post ‘hate speech’? The First Amendment to the American constitution guarantees five basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, and these principles ought rightly to pertain in other democracies such as Britain.

Saturday

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Forget White Fragility: here are 10 books America should be reading about race

From our US edition

This extraordinary summer of protest and upheaval has sparked the most pervasive and sustained interest in the question of what it means to be black in the United States that I have witnessed. The American people, it can be said in all earnestness, are finally having that proverbial ‘national conversation’ on racism. And yet, one of the more fascinating consequences thus far has been the emergence of White Fragility, a text written by the Italian-American academic and corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo, and How to Be an Antiracist, by the historian Ibram X. Kendi, as the two most sought after (by a wide margin) explanatory aids for understanding our moment. Both books posit race — and racial difference — as something real and practically essential.

Anti-Semitism

Friday

Jarvis Dupont

Jarvis’s guide to identity politics

From our US edition

It seems that recent events, from Black Lives Matter protests to J.K. Rowling’s transphobic Twitter rants, have given the wrong sort of people (Trump supporters) an excuse to inject their ignorant negativity like a poisonous bile into the noble veins of identity politics.But what is identity politics? Identity politics is a beautiful way in which we can bring people of all backgrounds together, before labeling them, allocating each of them demographic privilege points according to their place on the oppression hierarchy pyramid, and finally segregating them. Think of it as scratching a societal OCD itch of needing to organize the books on our shelves into alphabetical order. It’s neat. It’s tidy. It makes sense.

identity politics

Wednesday

Damian Reilly

Our collective nervous breakdown

From our US edition

It’s being sold by some as a glorious revolution, but what Western culture is really experiencing is a garden variety nervous breakdown. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it began, but it’s certainly well progressed, wouldn’t you agree? The latest mania for gathering in furious mobs to denounce and expunge reminders of our past is what therapists call transference. We don’t hate our forebears anything like as much or as vigorously as we hate ourselves. How could we? They gave us everything we have. Instead, we are shamed by them. Born into what, statistically, is the easiest time in human history to be alive, what have we done or worked towards relative to the men and women cast in bronze or marble who came before?

nervous

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Is Black Lives Matter a religion for woke white people?

From our US edition

The most memorable footage of the Black Lives Matter protests, and perhaps the creepiest, doesn’t capture any acts of violence, any looting, any chanting of slogans or — so far as I can make out — any black faces.Instead, we see hundreds of mostly young people sitting in the parking lot of a public library in Bethesda, Maryland, raising both pasty-white arms in a gesture that suggests both surrender and worship.An invisible speaker is reciting a list of promises that the crowd repeats. This is what we hear: Speaker: '… about racism, anti-blackness or violence.' Crowd: '… about racism, anti-blackness or violence.

black lives matter religion

Tuesday

Kat Rosenfield

Stephen King and the warped morality of identity politics

From our US edition

As per longstanding annual tradition, Hollywood yesterday woke up early to announce the 2020 Academy Awards nominees — and Twitter, as per slightly more recent annual tradition, woke up to be annoyed when the list of Oscar-worthy actors, writers, directors, and other filmmaking professionals was, as always, not particularly diverse. That this year's nominees could still be so overwhelmingly white and male was a particular slap in the face, especially since the Academy made a highly public move in 2019 to avoid exactly this outcome. July of last year saw the introduction of 842 new members, half of them women, into the Academy's voting ranks, with many spectators anticipating a wave of awards-season recognition for female and minority-led films as a result.

stephen king

Thursday

Toby Young

Colleges should be ‘islands of excellence’

From our US edition

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. America’s colleges and universities are in crisis. According to the latest data released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment is down 1.7 percent compared with 2018, following a drop of 1.8 percent the previous year. If you contrast 2019 with 2017, that’s more than half a million fewer students. The brunt of this decline is being felt in New England, the center of America’s higher-education sector. In eastern Massachusetts, eight colleges have either closed or merged in the past four years, while in Vermont three colleges have gone to the wall in 2019 alone. Most experts think things will get a good deal worse.

yale colleges
James Delingpole

Hell hath no fury like an irate teenage girl

Something troubling is happening to our girls. I noticed it again most recently at this year’s Battle of Ideas — the annual festival of free speech staged at London’s Barbican by Claire Fox. It’s a wonderful event, where ex-revolutionary communists like Claire rub shoulders with Thatcher-ite radicals like me and we’re reminded how much we have in common. I feel right at home among the bright, engaged, friendly crowds and when I speak I generally get a warm reception. But there are always exceptions, aren’t there? On this occasion the trouble came from a bloc of teenage girls in the audience for my panel. Judging by their accents and dress and demeanour I’d say they probably came from one of the more selective London day schools.

Sunday

Leon Hadar

The Lebanonization of America

From our US edition

Identity politics has long been the cornerstone of Lebanon’s constitutional system. Seats in parliament and jobs in the government bureaucracy are divided between Christians and Muslims, with a Maronite Christian serving as president, a Shi’ite Muslim as the speaker of the parliament, and a Sunni Muslim as the prime minister. Despite a long and bloody civil war, not to mention major changes in the demographic balance of power, this system has survived more or less intact since 1943.

lebanonization

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Economics is having an identity crisis

It has become commonplace for news reports to refer to almost any civic unrest, or even unusual patterns of voting, as evidence of ‘resurgent nationalism’ — implicitly suggesting a visceral hatred of foreigners and a desire to set the clock back to the glory days of racial homogeneity and casual homophobia. We should be wary of accepting this media trope: for one thing it may arouse far more fear than is warranted. But apart from the needless fear it generates, it is also slightly dubious to suggest that it is the gilets jaunes or the Five Star Movement or the supporters of Brexit or even Donald Trump who are acting intemperately.

Friday

Godfrey Elfwick

The Winterfest Carol of Godfrey Elfwick

From our US edition

Last night, as I was safely tucked up in bed with a kale smoothie, I was visited by three apparitions, each one determined to change my outlook on the toxic nature of Chr*stm*s. The first ghost appeared at midnight, a shimmering androgynous specter floating in front of my window. ‘Godfrey Elfwick, I am here to show you the error of your ways. Come with me on a journey into your past...’ they said, proffering me a semi-transparent hand. ‘Erm, excuse me, what are your pronouns?’ I inquired respectfully. ‘I’m sorry what?’ was the answer. ‘Well, do you prefer to be referred to as he, she, they, xe, xie, ze, ve, yo...’ As I listed all 592 currently available pronouns, I could see the spirit’s eyes begin to glaze over, and so I took hold of their hand.

godfrey elfwick

Saturday

Samuel J. Abrams

The dangerous silence in higher education

From our US edition

It’s well known that the question of who can speak and on what topics has become a flashpoint for controversy on our nation’s college and university campuses. I experienced intimidation firsthand after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times in which I questioned some of seemingly liberal, lopsided programming at Sarah Lawrence College (one of the most proudly progressive schools, where I am a tenured professor). I suggested that more balance was needed given our polarized times and reiterated my concerns about collegiate ideological echo chambers. Within hours, my office door and surrounding corridor was vandalized. Pictures of my family were taken and bumper stickers that I had placed on the door to create a welcoming environment for students were stripped off.

sarah lawrence college higher education

Friday

Damian Reilly

The woke go broke

From our US edition

It could just be, two years on from the election of President Donald Trump, liberal America is finally arriving at the fifth of the seven stages of grief, the one characterised by guilt. I realised this over the weekend as I watched Bill Maher, self appointed voice of the liberal conscience, delivering some hard to hear home truths to the faithful from the pulpit of his primetime chat show. Citing a recent survey, Maher told his audience: ‘Eighty percent of Americans find political correctness to be a problem, including 75 percent of African Americans, 74 percent of Americans under thirty, 82 percent of Asians, 87 percent of Hispanics and 88 percent of Native Americans.

eminem woke

Thursday

Toby Young

The BBC’s anti-white rhetoric

Cassian Harrison, the editor of BBC Four, told the Edinburgh International Television Festival last week that no one wants to watch white men explaining stuff on TV any more. ‘There’s a mode of programming that involves a presenter, usually white, middle-aged and male, standing on a hill and “telling you like it is”,’ he said. ‘We all recognise the era of that has passed.’ I’ve been puzzling over this. Why would one of the Beeb’s most senior executives, himself a white, middle-aged man, say something likely to antagonise such a large number of the people who pay his £170,000 salary, i.e. licence payers? After all, 87.

Douglas Murray

Antipodean notebook

Whenever I visit a country I try to pitch high and meet the president or prime minister. In Australia this proves tricky. At the start of the week Malcolm Turnbull and I are on for lunch, but commitments force me to call off. By the end of my visit he is no longer prime minister. One of his excellent predecessors comes to see me at my hotel. At first I marvel at the ease with which former prime ministers can move about in Australia. But I soon wonder if people are unfazed because they reckon it might be their own turn to run the country next. I am here for ten days. First to do a day-long event in Sydney with Maajid Nawaz, Sam Harris and others. Then a multi-city tour across Australia and New Zealand alongside Harvard’s Dr Cornel West.