Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator and the editor of the US edition. He hosts Americano on YouTube.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Corona wars: will either Trump or Xi win?

From our UK edition

44 min listen

Historian Niall Ferguson writes in this week's cover piece that, even before coronavirus, the Cold War between America and China was already getting underway. With the current pandemic, animosity between the two superpowers has only increased. So when it comes to the geopolitics of the 'corona wars', who will win? Niall tells Cindy on the podcast that it may not be either; that when it comes to pandemics, city-states actually do better than empires. That's the Taiwans, the South Koreas, and the Singapores. He's joined on the podcast by Gerard Baker, the editor at large of the Wall Street Journal.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Is the ‘Clap for Me Now’ video a wind-up?

From our UK edition

‘What did you do in the coronavirus crisis, dad?' ‘Well son, I’m glad you ask. I helped make a very important video, entitled ‘You Clap for Me Now’. It used a technique we call passive-aggression to make people realise what horrible racists they had been towards immigrants. The video was really a poem, set to rousing piano music. The Guardian wrote about it and it got millions of shares. Most of them were 'outrage' shares, from people who hated it, but that's because Britain is racist.' 'Wow dad, you are a hero! Were you a key worker, too?' 'No son, I'm an entertainer and an online 'slacktivist.' 'Oh. Cool.' That, I imagine, is how in the future Tez Ilyas might converse with his progeny, if he has any.

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Trump should shut down his press conferences, now

What do you do when you are in an argument with an impossible child who sees you as the enemy? Do you shout at them until you sound as unreasonable? Do you keep going back to them to hash out the key points? No, you do not engage. You walk away and leave them to stew in their own rage. All parents know this. Donald Trump is often called childish; petulant; irascible — in his press conferences, he often is. His pride takes him over and he ends up ranting. He takes the bait and the media revels in it. But what the media can’t accept or understand is that, in the president vs media conference dynamic, it is the journalists who play the role of teenage brat. They goad Trump until he flips, then gloat about how mad he went.

press

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Confessions of a Covid-19 truther

From our UK edition

According to psychologists, denial is a common defence mechanism. We humans reject truths which we find too uncomfortable to bear. When reality becomes too painful, we refuse to acknowledge it. The more evidence mounts against us, the more we insist that everything is ok. I fear I might be doing precisely that in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic. Every day I watch the global death toll ticking up — that awful exponential growth we keep being told about. I see the images from the hospitals. I read the tweets of NHS frontline staff saying how desperate things are, or the Facebook posts of people mourning the dead. And I think: it can’t be that bad. Isn’t this all hysteria? Aren’t people always dying in hospitals?

Friday

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Bernie lost because he’d already won

So — it turns out there are no socialists in pandemic elections. Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign, which in normal times would be major news. Amid the panic of the coronavirus crisis, however, most people won’t be that interested. The still incomplete Democratic primary already feels like ancient history, a relic of the BC (Before COVID-19) time. Nevertheless, Sanders’s decision is significant. It means that one of the most consequential American politicians of the 21st century will never be president. Sanders has arguably had as great an impact on American politics as Donald Trump. He didn’t ultimately succeed, but his revolution is unstoppable. It was harder for Bernie to win on a tide of economic anger in 2020 than it was in 2016.

bernie sanders

Friday

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Frightened people love their leaders

‘The Trump presidency is over’, said Peter Wehner, in the Atlantic. The great wizards of liberal punditry stroked their beards and agreed. These are suddenly serious times and the president is a joke. He cannot survive, surely.‘The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point,' wrote Wehner, 'when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.’Run that paragraph back through the journalistic ego-filter and it translates as: ‘I told you so! Why didn’t everyone listen to me?’The trouble is, Peter, the public still won’t listen.

g7 leaders

Sunday

Freddy Gray

Let’s applaud mothers — the real key workers

From our UK edition

Our daughter Clementine, 5, has just decided what she wants to be when she grows up. ‘A cleaner .... and a mother,’ she says, in that order. Her mother, my wife Taffeta, winces at Clemmie’s ambition. Middle-class rules dictate that we should try to knock such traditional notions out of little girls’ brains. It’s not feminist and therefore bad. But why? If this health crisis has taught us anything, it is that cleaning is one of the most important things human beings can do. And even in our horridly secular age, we all know deep down that motherhood is sacred. We need mothers now more than ever. The most key workers of all are parents — and mothers especially It’s odd.

Friday

Freddy Gray

Tucker Carlson: ‘We aren’t very good at talking about death’

The media has not covered itself in glory in its response to the coronavirus crisis, it’s fair to say. Yet one well-known journalist who really has excelled has been the Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Not only was he one of the first major TV pundits in the world to take the threat of the virus seriously, he also intervened with Donald Trump by visiting the president at his house in Mar-a Lago to discuss the gravity of the situation. I caught up with my friend Tucker yesterday on my podcast, and we talked about the media’s failings, Trump’s response, how the Democrats are going to junk Joe Biden, and not killing iguanas. Most of all, we talked about death and the theological implications of this terrible problem.

tucker carlson

Wednesday

stimulus
Freddy Gray

Are you feeling stimulated?

Well, at least this isn’t socialism for the rich. The Trump administration’s gargantuan stimulus package — the third in response to the coronavirus crisis and the biggest by far in American history — is not about bailing out the banks. It’s about saving the financial system tout corps — that means you and me. The government is firing a $2 trillion-plus-sized fiscal rocket in the direction of a looming recession and hoping explodes in roughly the right place. The new bill is expected to include direct payments to most adults of $1,200 or less. Small businesses will get $300 billion, hospitals $130 billion and local and state governments $150 billion.

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Why you should subscribe to The Spectator

Dear Reader, There isn’t much to be cheerful about in this world of plague anxiety. Yet one comfort is that, locked down as we all are, we may have more opportunities to read. That’s where The Spectator can help. We’ve got a flash sale on, and there are many reasons you'll want to take it up: We have now put our June edition to bed and it looks great. The subject — ‘how to tame the dragon’, ie China — couldn’t be more important. Get your copy here Each month we produce a similarly stunning print issue. As well as great essays on politics, we have brilliant arts, books and life sections, edited by Dominic Green, with reviews and essays by some of the best writers in the English language.

Friday

Tuesday

Monday

Freddy Gray

How to sound authoritative about COVID-19 on Twitter

What strange creatures we 21st-century humans are. The less informed we are about a particular subject, the more we feel the need to pronounce on it with great authority. This is a well-observed internet phenomenon — nobody has to know anything; everybody can look stuff up. When it comes to a global health pandemic, however, the desperation to sound wise starts to turn to feverish frenzy. In times of panic, bullshit grows, exponentially — check the graphs if you don’t believe me. Everywhere you look on social media now you’ll find amazing numbers of Google-enabled experts on epidemiology, virology, the history of plagues, and so on. Many of these people spend most of their time on Twitter, yet somehow they have mastered vast amount of virus-related literature.

Saturday

Freddy Gray

America has a choice between two kinds of crazy

From our UK edition

‘We are the United States of Amnesia,’ said Gore Vidal in 2004. These days, it’s more the United States of Dementia. In 2020, the country seems determined to choose between two elderly men who, it is fair to say, are some distance from sanity. Joe Biden, the 77-year-old who even aides admit has lost his ‘cognitive fastball’, has somehow emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Assuming that his candidacy or health don’t implode somehow between now and the party convention in July, Biden will face Donald Trump at the ballot on 3 November. America’s choice, then, is between two kinds of crazy.