James Kirchick

Thursday

James Kirchick

Did the Cold War ever end?

From our UK edition

Vladimir Putin turned seventy on October 7, but Garry Kasparov was not in the mood for a celebration. The Russian dissident, author and chess grandmaster had been invited to address the community of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where, seventy-six years ago, Winston Churchill famously announced the descent of an 'iron curtain' across the European continent. Seldom has a phrase so vividly captured a geopolitical phenomenon as Churchill’s clarion call about the looming threat posed by the Soviet Union. As Russia once again threatens European peace, it fell upon the shoulders of an exiled Russian democrat to issue a dire warning about the fate of what used to be called 'the free world'.

Sunday

James Kirchick

Have we finally reached Peak Pride?

Have we reached Peak Pride? As a gay man, I suppose I should feel gratified by the fervor with which seemingly every entity across the Western world declares its solidarity with the LGBTQIAA+ community every June. But this year, the omnipresence of the rainbow flag — the latest iteration of which resembles a testing of the Emergency Broadcast System on acid — has gone a tad too far. Lounging poolside at a Las Vegas resort for my younger brother’s bachelor party, I casually reveal to the bikini-clad young woman lying next to me that I am gay. “Happy Pride!” she enthuses, in a way that a gentile wishes me a “Happy Chanukah” upon discovering, at Christmastime, that I’m Jewish.

gay

Thursday

James Kirchick

A hazy afternoon with Bill Maher

It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Beverly Hills and Bill Maher — stand-up comedian, late-night television host, prophet of the great American silent majority — is ruminating on what the hell has gone wrong with the left: “It all comes, I think, from two terrible sources: bad parenting and insane universities. That’s where the craziness is coming from.” Maher is sitting with me in “Club Random,” the neon-light-festooned, decked-out bungalow he converted into a television studio in 2020, after social distancing requirements forced his weekly HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, to shoot remotely.

jake auchincloss
James Kirchick

Jake Auchincloss and incendiary rhetoric

I can’t claim to know what Jake Auchincloss was thinking when he asked, 10 years ago, why it was acceptable for Pakistanis to burn the American flag but not Americans to burn the Qur’an. But I can make an educated guess. Auchincloss, currently front-runner in the race to succeed Rep. Joe Kennedy in the Massachusetts Fourth Congressional District, was a 22-year-old Harvard student when protests erupted across the Muslim world after an American Christian preacher threatened to burn the Muslim holy book. It was the ninth anniversary of 9/11 and Terry Jones wanted to memorialize that somber event in a way sure to attract attention.

James Kirchick

This Town, by Mark Leibovich – review

From our UK edition

Many books have been written about the corruption, venality and incestuousness that characterise Washington DC, but none has been as highly anticipated or amusing as This Town. Written by Mark Leibovich, the senior national correspondent for the New York Times magazine, it has been on the minds of Washington’s chattering classes for at least two years before its release. Sparking that interest was the revelation that a young, ambitious Capitol Hill press aide, whom Leibovich had been cultivating as a source, was secretly forwarding him emails that provided an insight into how Washington really works.

Thursday

James Kirchick

California dreaming

Stepping off the plane at LAX, the protagonist in Christopher Buckley’s comic novel Thank You for Smoking breezily observes that “arriving there always made it feel like Friday, even in the middle of the week facing a full workload.” There’s just something about LA’s perfect weather, attractive people and sense of living for tomorrow that instantly lifts your spirits. Born and raised in Boston and having spent most of my adult life within the narrow mental and professional confines of the Acela corridor, I used to be the typical East Coast snob when it came to America’s second-largest city. Sure, I acknowledged, the temperature is always a sublime seventy-two degrees. But how can you endure the traffic? Yes, it’s difficult not to stare at every other person.

Los Angeles

Sunday

James Kirchick

Why Glenn Greenwald backs Putin

Few things are sure in life: death, taxes and Glenn Greenwald advocating whatever position happens to be in the interests of Vladimir Putin. The self-styled civil libertarian rose to prominence during the George W. Bush administration for his withering attacks on American counterterrorism policies. Later, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his role in facilitating Edward Snowden’s leak of government documents. Always a rancorous figure who bristled at attempts to place him in a partisan box, Greenwald started to upset his confederates on the left and develop a fan base on the right during the Trump years. Greenwald was one of the most vocal critics of the narrative positing that the new American president was a pawn of the Russian one.

Greenwald

Monday

James Kirchick

The other Camus

Nearly two-thirds of French citizens say they fear that Muslim immigrants threaten white Christians with “extinction.” That bodes well for Éric Zemmour, France’s ubiquitous right-wing polemicist, candidate for its presidency — and prominent popularizer of the concept of le grand remplacement, the conspiracy theory that a cabal of Jews and globalist elites are conniving to “replace” Europe’s native population with Africans and Arabs. This paranoid thesis has inspired white supremacists across the world, and is an increasingly popular import on the American right. The man who coined le grand remplacement is the seventy-five-year-old novelist and travel writer Renaud Camus — no relation to Albert, but a kind of philosopher nevertheless.

camus

Thursday

James Kirchick

Black tie in NYC

Visiting New York for my first black-tie dinner since the onset of the pandemic — a benefit for PEN America, the writers’ organization dedicated to free expression and the promotion of literature — I open my suitcase to discover I am sans black tie. I hit the streets, slaloming through crowds of unflappable Manhattanites who have surely witnessed stranger sights than a frazzled man in a mulberry tuxedo, desperately searching for a cravat. To my shock, Neiman Marcus is out of bowties. I purchase a black necktie. On my way out the door, another customer comes in. “Where are your bowties?” he asks aloud. “You won’t find any here,” I volunteer.

PEN

Saturday

James Kirchick

What did Diane Abbott make of my comparison between Corbyn and Bernie Sanders?

From our UK edition

Fourteen years ago, while studying at Yale, I spent a summer working for David Lammy. Office drudgery aside, it was a fantastic experience, nurturing an obsession with British politics, culture and journalism that continues to this day. Over dinner, I mention to David the MP my weekend spent at the home of David Starkey. He grips my arm, laughs and marvels at my penchant for accumulating such a disparate collection of friends and acquaintances. My mother says I lead the life of Forrest Gump, which I take as a compliment. David the MP takes me to the premiere of Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic, where I am introduced to Diane Abbott. What better place to encounter a member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet than this timeless indictment of American capitalism?

Thursday

James Kirchick

Diary – 16 May 2019

From our UK edition

There are many places where a gay Jewish couple wearing yarmulkes wouldn’t feel comfortable walking down the street. I didn’t think west London was one of them. Ambling along Edgware Road to a wedding at the West London Synagogue, however, my partner feels something land on his jacket. At first, he believes it is bird dropping. Closer examination reveals the white gob to be human spittle. Later, we tell a friend, Harry Cole of the Mail on Sunday, who tweets about it. The Sky News presenter Adam Boulton replies: ‘No excuse but it is a Middle Eastern quarter.’ He later apologises. Perhaps we should have known better than to don yarmulkes on a street with so many kebab shops, hookah bars and women in chadors.

Thursday

James Kirchick

Was Gary Hart the best president we never had?

The dumbest assertion ever issued in the history of American politics was purportedly uttered by Gary Hart to The New York Times magazine in 1987: ‘Follow me around, I don’t care.’ The Colorado senator, then the front runner for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, was responding to rumors that he was a womanizer. ‘I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored.’ What followed, at least in popular memory, became the paradigmatic cautionary tale for American politicians in the age of modern media. The press accepted Hart’s challenge, investigated his personal life, and quickly produced evidence of an extramarital affair: a photo of the senator sitting on a dock with Donna Rice, a much younger woman, straddling his lap.

hugh jackman gary hart the front runner

Thursday

James Kirchick

Treason – not racism – is the only legitimate reason to pull down a statue

From our UK edition

Donald Trump has a point when he asks, with respect to the tearing down of Confederate statues: 'Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?'. The reason he has a point is the rationale being advanced by many advocates for removing such monuments: that the individuals depicted were racist or, in some cases, slaveholders. 'Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the CUNY hall of great Americans because New York stands against racism,' New York Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted. 'Confederate statues are all about racism,' declares Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. Karen L. Cox, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, insists that, 'The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy.

Saturday

James Kirchick

The ominous political genius of Steve Bannon

From our UK edition

In his fateful interview with Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, Steve Bannon’s remarks about taking a tougher stand on trade with China, battling his enemies within the administration, and the futility of military action against North Korea generated the most headlines. But it was a widely overlooked comment about identity politics that offers the most important insight into the brilliant and cynical political mind of President Donald Trump’s now-departed counsellor and former campaign CEO. 'The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ‘em,' Bannon gloated to Kuttner. 'I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.

Wednesday

James Kirchick

Who does Bernie Sanders think he is?

From our UK edition

You have to admire Bernie Sanders’s chutzpah. For almost the entirety of his over 40-year career in politics, Sanders pointedly abstained from joining the Democratic Party. He is a 'democratic socialist', officially registered as an independent, and has never been elected to office as a Democrat, seeing that party as insufficiently collectivist. Sanders only affiliated himself with the Democrats last year, solely for the purpose of trying to capture the party’s presidential nomination. Now that he’s lost that battle, he will return to the Senate as an independent.

Thursday

James Kirchick

Hillary’s left turn

From our UK edition

The centrist Democratic party bequeathed to President Barack Obama by Bill Clinton is not the one he will leave to his successor. By every measure, it is more left-wing, and more populist both in spirit and ideological composition. And this poses serious problems for the campaign of the candidate seen as America’s most likely next president: Hillary Clinton. That she knows it’s a problem is obvious from the way her campaign has begun. ‘Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion,’ she declared in a video released last weekend. Almost a year ago, launching the memoir of her time as Secretary of State, Clinton had begun testing populist themes. The nation, she said at the time, must ‘deal with the cancer of inequality’.

Saturday

James Kirchick

After the horrific tragedy of MH17, Europe must wake up to the threat posed by Vladimir Putin

From our UK edition

How many more civilian planes need to be shot down over European airspace before Europe’s leaders get serious about the threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia? As the smoke clears from Thursday’s horrific downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, many will try to deflect blame from landing squarely where it should: on Russian President Vladimir Putin. ‘Airliner tragedy in Ukraine shows US & EU erred by not pushing to keep Ukr[aine] as neutral buffer state, not potential EU/NATO member,’ tweeted Stephen Walt, a prominent voice of the ‘realist’ school of foreign policy and a leading apologist for the Russian government.

Thursday

James Kirchick

How fascist is Ukraine’s Svoboda?

From our UK edition

 Kiev Ihor Miroshnychenko, a parliamentarian from Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party, is an ‘emotional’ man. That is the word that he and his colleagues use to describe his raiding the headquarters of the country’s state television broadcaster last month. Accompanied by five other Svoboda bully boys, Miroshnyschenko berated and beat the station director before forcing him to sign a resignation letter. So proud were they of this deed that one of the Svoboda members videotaped the whole confrontation and posted it on YouTube. The proximate cause of Miroshnychenko’s anger was the station’s transmission of a Russian news channel broadcast of a victory concert in Red Square celebrating Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

Thursday

James Kirchick

Sochi Olympics: Why picking on gays has backfired so horribly for Vladimir Putin

From our UK edition

After all the fuss, the billions spent, the calls for boycotts and so on, the Sochi Winter Olympics will begin next week. Given the incredibly low expectations, the Russian Games may even be judged a success — as long as the weather stays cold and no terrorist attack takes place. But Vladimir Putin should not be too smug, because his broader campaign against homosexuality has backfired spectacularly. The Russian President’s decision to sign a law prohibiting ‘the propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors’ last summer probably made sense to him at the time.

Friday

James Kirchick

The British paedophile who’s still on the run

From our UK edition

In the current issue of the Spectator, I write about Warwick Spinks, a convicted British paedophile who hid in plain sight in Prague for some 15 years. In 1997, having already been released early from a 7-year (later reduced to 5-year) prison sentence delivered in 1995, Spinks violated the terms of his probation and fled the country. It was not long before he wound up in Prague, 'the Bangkok of Europe', where a series of British newspapers reported he was running sex tourism packages for gay men operating under the alias of 'Willem' and posing as a Dutch national. It was in this guise that I became acquainted with 'Willem', at least by reputation, as a ubiquitous and rather dodgy member of Prague's closely-knit expatriate gay community. Spinks was arrested by Czech police in August.