The Social World

Category: Politics

  • The Dallas shooting was a political act

    The Dallas shooting was a political act

    Although we are still learning the details of the lethal assault on the ICE facility in Dallas, we already know some important things, thanks to transparency from the Dallas police and the FBI. We know the shooter’s name; we know he committed suicide as police closed in; we know he fired indiscriminately at the ICE facility, killing at least one detainee but no ICE officers; and we know the assassin had a political motive, encoded on unfired rifle shells. He hated ICE.

    We also know exactly what politicians from each side will say. They’ve said it so many times before. The Republicans have a much stronger, more convincing message here than Democrats.

    Republicans will say, “This targeted violence against law enforcement and immigration officers has to stop. We have to do more than condemn it. We need to understand that the violence is not just a series a unconnected incidents. We have to name the sources behind it. If the violence is organized, we have to find and prosecute the organizers and the funding sources. We think it is fueled by vile rhetoric, a lot of it from elected Democrats and still more from their media allies. Their fulminations inflame passions and fuel violent demonstrations and deadly attacks. We know that some of this violence is organized. We need the FBI to find out who is doing that and who is funding it. And we need the Department of Justice to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.”

    Democrats will respond, “This is just more senseless gun violence. We need to talk with each other, not shoot at each other. All of us condemn this violence. Of course, we bear no responsibility for any of it. So, both sides need to calm down.”

    Democrats are losing this argument. Polls show voters strong favor Republicans on both law-and-order and immigration enforcement. Democrats’ response rings hollow with voters because it ignores their reasonable demand for closed borders, strict immigration enforcement and better protection against urban violence. Democrats are seen as opposing all those.

    If voters support those positions, why do Democratic politicians find it so hard to fall in line? Because the party’s activist base and its left-wing donors would crush them in the primaries, before they reach the wider electorate in November. They would also face the obvious question: why are you changing your positions now, after years of saying just the opposite?

    The Democrats’ milk toast calls for “public calm” and “civil discourse” ring hollow because they come after the party’s leaders lacerated Trump’s border policy and ICE enforcement, after “blue” cities and states have declared themselves sanctuaries, unwilling to cooperate with ICE, after Gov. Gavin Newsom demanded “no masks” on ICE agents (“What are they afraid of?” The answer came in Dallas.), after Democratic leaders repeatedly condemn President Trump as a fascist and dictator, and after their party commits itself to an open-borders, anti-deportation movement. Their cry of “don’t blame us” comes after Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson called “jails and incarceration and law enforcement… a sickness.” They come after months of nightly violence against ICE and federal government facilities in Portland, Oregon, with the city leaders refusing to send police to quell the violence or punish the perpetrators. They come after Senator Chris Van Hollen sat down for drinks with a deported illegal immigrant who is charged with a long string of despicable criminal acts. This week, Van Hollen used a Senate hearing to excoriate Secretary of State Marco Rubio for enforcing a strict visa policy and screamed over Rubio when he tried to answer.

    This deep political divide cannot explain why the shooter in Dallas acted as he did. It doesn’t mean politicians in Washington helped him pull the trigger. But it did shape the context in which he acted and will shape how the public interprets it. They will see the killing, correctly, as a deliberate attack on law enforcement. They will see it, correctly, as a political act, something the gunman made clear by writing anti-ICE messages on his shells. They will connect the latest shooting to other recent acts with political motives, like the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the conviction of President Trump’s would-be assassin in Florida.

    Republicans will emphasize that these recent assaults have come from the left and need to be quashed – firmly and immediately. For now, the Democrats are left with bland platitude, torn between their angry base and the voting public. All they can say is, “Give peace a chance.”

    It’s not a winning message. In a time of political violence, the public is demanding order. The Republican challenge is to deliver on that demand without crashing through the constitutional boundaries.

  • Kamala blames race when it suits her

    Kamala blames race when it suits her

    When Kamala Harris sat across from Joy Behar on The View, the exchange revealed more than just political spin. Behar insisted Harris’ struggles on the campaign trail were largely about racism and sexism – that she “really lost” because of prejudice, not performance. Harris replied, “I’m not naive; race and gender do play a factor… I have never run as a woman or as a person of color. I have run because I believe I am the best to do the job.”

    That answer might sound polished, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Harris has built her career on identity politics. She was polling below four percent in the Democratic primaries in 2019 – a campaign so weak it collapsed before a single vote was cast. Yet when Joe Biden pledged to select a woman as his running mate, the Democratic Party base and the media made clear that race and gender would be central factors in the choice. Harris ultimately benefited from that push for representation – her candidacy revived not because she was leading in the primaries, but because she fit the historic profile many Democrats wanted to showcase.”

    Let’s be honest: without Biden’s pledge, Harris would not be vice president today. She was not propelled to the ticket because she outperformed the competition, but because the Democratic Party wanted to showcase representation. Identity was wielded as power. That’s the plain truth.

    And that is what makes her The View comments so hollow. Harris cannot run on her race and gender when it benefits her – and then dismiss questions about competence by claiming she never used identity in the first place. Voters remember the reality. They saw a campaign that leaned heavily on being the “first” – first woman, first black woman, first South Asian woman – without ever answering the more pressing question: first in what vision for America?

    The tired refrain from Democrats that every failed candidate was the victim of racism, sexism, or some combination of both has worn thin. Hillary Clinton blamed misogyny in 2016. Stacey Abrams has repeatedly blamed voter suppression for her gubernatorial losses. Now Joy Behar and Biden himself float racism and sexism as the reasons Harris couldn’t break through nationally. But at some point, the question must be asked: why can’t Democratic leaders admit when a candidate simply ran a poor campaign?

    Harris’ 2020 run faltered not because America is irredeemably bigoted, but because she never offered voters a clear or compelling reason to support her. Her positions shifted constantly – leftward on criminal justice, back toward the middle on health care, then left again on the Green New Deal. She struggled to define herself, and voters noticed. That isn’t prejudice; that’s politics.

    What makes this cycle especially insulting is the implicit message it sends to the electorate. If voters reject a candidate of color or a female candidate, Democrats too often suggest it must be because of bias. But that robs voters of agency. It tells them their decisions weren’t thoughtful or principled – just hateful. And it shields candidates like Harris from honest self-reflection about why they fail to connect.

    The irony is thick. Harris’ defenders weaponize race and gender as a shield against criticism. Yet Harris herself has never hesitated to display her identity as a credential when convenient. She has used it as her elevator to higher office. When it no longer works, she suddenly insists it was never about race or gender at all. That is not only disingenuous, it is corrosive to public trust.

    Black conservatives have been sounding this alarm for years. We understand that tying our worth to identity politics doesn’t elevate us – it reduces us. It reduces the black experience to a talking point, the female experience to a checkbox, and every election outcome to a morality play about prejudice. Booker T. Washington warned against leaning on grievance instead of competence. Shelby Steele has written powerfully about how white guilt sustains this very cycle. Yet Democrats remain stuck in it, because it offers them a convenient excuse for failure and a convenient tool for power.

    Kamala Harris wants it both ways: to be celebrated for breaking barriers, and excused for her failures by blaming the barriers. But leadership requires something deeper. It requires being judged on results, not optics. On merit, not identity. And on vision, not victimhood.

    In the end, what voters want is not complicated. They want candidates who are competent, steady, and clear about what they stand for. They want policies that keep their families safe, grow the economy, and restore trust in institutions. What they don’t want is another lecture that their skepticism of a weak candidate must be rooted in prejudice.

    Kamala Harris’ rhetoric isn’t just old and tired – it’s insulting. It tells the very people she claims to represent that their only role is to cheer her identity, not to question her record. That’s not empowerment. That’s manipulation. And voters are wise to it.

    If Harris truly believes she is “the best to do the job,” then let her prove it on the merits. Stop blaming racism and sexism for every political misstep. Stop reducing voters to bigots for exercising their judgment. Because at the end of the day, America deserves leaders who rise on vision, not excuses.

  • Kimmel makes the case for free speech

    After a few days in politically-induced time out that felt like a decade, Jimmy Kimmel made a triumphant return to late night TV on Tuesday. “I’m not sure who had a weirder 48 hours,” he said. “Me, or the CEO of Tylenol.” Given that Tylenol is a brand name and has no actual CEO, let’s say Kimmel, who Disney/ABC pulled off the air last week under political pressure from station ownership and the chairman of the FCC after he made a bad-taste joke about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. 

    Kimmel suddenly became the most famous man in America not named Donald Trump, and his audience met his return with a roaring standing ovation, chanting “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!” He quickly delivered a tearful apology to the friends, family, and devotees of Charlie Kirk and an equally tearful praise of Erika Kirk’s astonishing forgiveness of her husband’s assassin. Kimmel said he believes in the teachings of Jesus, and that Erika Kirk’s words “touched me deeply.”

    But the majority of Kimmel’s opening monologue was a full-throated defense of himself, and of freedom of speech. He joked that he’d received a job offer from Germany. “This country has become so authoritarian that the Germans are offering me a job,” he said. 

    He thanked Republicans like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Rand Paul who stood up for him. “People who I never would have imagined… said something very beautiful on my behalf… I don’t agree with many of those people on most subjects. Some of the things they say even make me want to throw up. It takes courage for them to speak out against this administration, and they did. And they deserve credit for it.”

    Specifically, he singled out Ted Cruz, who really went to bat for Kimmel in the last week. “I don’t think I’ve ever said this before but Ted Cruz is right,” Kimmel said. “If Ted Cruz can’t speak freely then he can’t cast spells on the Smurfs.”

    Above all else, Kimmel, quite correctly, made one thing clear: “Our government cannot be allowed to control what we can and cannot say on television… This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”

    Meanwhile, the Donald was attacking on Truth Social. “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back,” said the President of the United States about a late-night comedian. “The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his “talent” was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE.”

    Kimmel had not yet seen this post. Even as Trump was ranting about him after an eventful day at the UN, Kimmel started taking digs at Trump, showing a clip where Trump said Kimmel had “no ratings.” 

    “Well,” Kimmel smirked triumphantly. “I do tonight. He tried to cancel me, and he instead forced millions of people to watch my show. That backfired bigly. He might have to release the Epstein Files to distract from this.“

    Kimmel pointed out that Sinclair and Nexstar, who own 20 percent of ABC affiliates, were currently keeping him off the air in Seattle, Portland, Washington, DC, and his wife’s hometown of St. Louis, “so I guess they’ll have to watch this on YouTube or whatever.”

    He said “I never thought I’d be in a situation like this,” but the one thing he learned from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and other childhood heroes is that “silencing a comedian is un-American.”

    After a commercial break, Kimmel aired a meh skit where Robert DeNiro played an anonymous tough-guy mob boss type who was now running the FCC. Those jokes didn’t really land, but then Kimmel got in some good jabs about Trump’s weird visit to the UN, calling him “Ramblestiltskin.” He had special fun with Trump’s press conference yesterday where the President went on an all-time rant against Tylenol. “Follow the medical advice of Donald Trump,” Kimmel said, “and you too can look like a glazed ham with deep vein thrombosis.”

    Just like that, America was great again.

  • How António Guterres wrecked the UN

    How António Guterres wrecked the UN

    As the world’s leaders and foreign ministers meet in New York for the UN General Assembly this week, recognition of a Palestinian state is expected to be paraded as progress towards peace. In reality, it will be nothing of the sort. It will confirm what has become increasingly obvious to anyone watching the UN over the past eight years: that the organization is in a state of malaise, and its Secretary-General, António Guterres, is the embodiment of the decline.

    The UN is no stranger to dysfunction, which I saw first-hand as a Security Council Counterterror Coordinator for five years. Every secretary-general has faced allegations of irrelevance, hypocrisy or incompetence. But Guterres stands out for having presided over an organization that is now derided by its own staff. It is not the usual frustrations of understaffing or the griping of a bureaucracy that has never been known for efficiency. It is the weary recognition that the institution has lost its way, and that its leader appears more interested in burnishing his progressive credentials than in delivering results.

    Guterres presents himself as a statesman, but in truth he is an old-fashioned European socialist with all the expected traits: endless preaching, no moral courage, and a fondness for rewarding loyal friends with plum jobs they seem unqualified for. The result is a hollowed-out organization where personal loyalty and national patronage count for more than competence.

    The UN has always had its share of cronyism – but under Guterres, it has become the organizing principle of appointments, in contravention of the current imperative to make cuts. High-caliber officials with relevant experience are sidelined while mediocrities from the Secretary-General’s inner circle are parachuted into high-profile posts. There was particular disquiet among UN staff earlier this year, when Guterres promoted fellow Portuguese national Miguel Graca to Assistant Secretary General in March, making him a director in Guterres’s own executive office. Critics observed that a sideways move could have been made at zero cost, rather than incurring the salary burden of creating a new ASG at this time of austerity. 

    Guterres is an exceptionally poor leader. I will never forget the sense of vacuum at the top during and after Covid, when the UN became the laughing stock of New York for its excessive attachment to working from home. Instead of leading the calls to get staff back into the office, he devolved decision making down to middle management who ultimately had to bear the brunt of staff complaints about returning to Turtle Bay. As one senior UN manager said to me: “Guterres gets to sound like the one who cares about staff welfare, while we have to impose operational necessity on them.”

    The charge sheet does not end there. Equally glaring is an inconsistency in his loud campaign for gender parity in senior appointments. This has sometimes extended to throwing carefully compiled interview shortlists back at his top aides and demanding a woman be selected. When his own re-appointment was at stake in 2021, all talk of female empowerment conveniently evaporated. There was no question of stepping aside to support a woman candidate; equality, it seems, was good enough for the bureaucracy but not for him. This hypocrisy is noticed, and it corrodes morale. In the case of the new Portuguese ASG, this particular “Global North” male was allowed to buck the trend of promoting “Global South” females wherever possible.

    Guterres’s crusade for fashionable causes does not end with gender politics. However noble his dogged progressivism may seem in the West, such an approach has proved catastrophic in conservative host countries. I am no fan of the death penalty, but when three of the five permanent members of the Security Council have it (China, the United States and technically Russia) what justifies the UN in adopting such an inflexible stance against it in Iraq? When UN overreach leads to expulsion, it leaves the host country and its citizens without the support and protection they desperately need. In recent years, we have seen the UN effectively forced to leave Mali, Sudan and DRC; and to abandon its work in Iraq on securing justice for the victims of ISIS.

    Even staff who still believe in the essential role of the UN despair of the Guterres effect. Speaking of his attendance at the Brics summit in Russia last October, where he was photographed sharing what looked like a very deferential handshake with Vladimir Putin, one official said: “Nato wouldn’t put Guterres in a difficult position by inviting him to their summit, but even if they did he wouldn’t attend.” What this conveys is not just frustration, but a recognition that the UN under Guterres has lost its way. He, however, remains deaf to these warnings, apparently more interested in applause from the lowest common denominator of the General Assembly than in preserving access to make a positive difference in Baghdad or Bamako.

    For all the malaise inside the organization, the UN still enjoys reverence among the wider public, and an annual budget of $3.72 billion for day-to-day running costs. To many people it remains the arbiter of legitimacy in world affairs, a sort of secular Vatican whose pronouncements carry moral weight simply by virtue of being made. That misplaced deference is precisely what has allowed various UN Special Rapporteurs to make wild assertions that Britain and other western allies are serial human rights abusers.

    While conflict has spread in many regions in recent years, Guterres has done precious little to stop it. The Gaza war has exposed the rot most starkly. From the moment Hamas launched its 7 October massacre, murdering families in their homes, raping women and abducting children, Guterres has struggled to say plainly who was responsible. His initial reaction to the terror attack? It “did not happen in a vacuum”.

    His interventions since have been framed almost entirely in humanitarian terms, with little mention of the hostages, and endless calls for ceasefires that made no demands of Hamas. Despite several countries voicing their concerns, the aggressively controversial Francesca Albanese was reappointed as Special Rapporteur for Palestine. The UN has turned a deaf ear to increasingly forceful objections from the US to its Palestinian refugee operation, UNRWA, which is hopelessly compromised by its long association with Hamas. And it is also alienating the US by refusing to work with the American-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

    The durability of the UN brand meant that last week’s “genocide” report on Gaza landed with the authority of scripture rather than the polemic it truly was. The fact that the chair of the “expert panel” which put the report together has a long history of anti-Israel bias was glossed over once her findings bore the UN stamp. The enduring illusion of UN sanctity allows the institution to launder prejudice and pass it off as impartial judgment. But this illusion of sanctity fools nobody in Washington, DC, where the UN’s most powerful member state and largest donor is sharpening its knives for an organization in which it has lost all confidence. President Trump’s UNGA speech on yesterday was full of scorn for the organization’s contribution to meeting international challenges.

    Into this fog comes the great folly of statehood recognition. At the time of writing, 156 of the UN’s 193 member states have already recognized Palestine and achieved nothing. Ordinary Palestinians remain no freer, no safer and no more prosperous than before.

    At best, recognition lends a sheen of legitimacy to Mahmoud Abbas and his corrupt Palestinian Authority, a body so discredited that it has lost control of large parts of the West Bank to Iranian-backed groups. At worst, recognition teaches extremists that massacres work. To grant statehood in the aftermath of 7 October is to confirm that pogroms pay. Applause in the General Assembly will only underline the message received on the ground.

    Member states that still care about the UN should be under no illusion. An organization that cannot call Hamas what it is, that loses missions by imposing western social agendas on skeptical hosts, and that breeds contempt among its own staff, all while somehow managing to maintain the gloss and credibility of an internationally renowned arbiter of diplomacy is not merely failing. Some of its perversities are making the world a more dangerous place.

    The UN was founded to defend peace and security, and it is still needed to do just that. I have seen too many conflicts in which individual member states either have no interest or refuse to take responsibility, and we will always need the UN or something similar to step into that kind of breach. But under António Guterres the UN has become a theater of platitudes, a showcase for hypocrisy and an institution starved of resources and hollowed out by malaise.

    I hope the UN survives and even thrives beyond Guterres’s tenure. It has many excellent, dedicated staff and the world still needs its services. But the organization needs reform and new leadership. Until then, recognition of Palestine will be yet another empty gesture in a UN increasingly defined by them.

  • No, Trump has not changed course on Ukraine

    President Trump has once again played the global foreign-policy commentariat for fools. They have taken a startling statement from Trump’s Truth social-media account on Tuesday as a sign of a new policy – or at least a new attitude – toward the Russia-Ukraine war. Yet what Trump actually wrote says nothing of the sort. 

    If Trump really were newly committing himself to Ukraine, why would say, as he’s so often said before, “I wish both countries well”? One country has invaded the other; wishing one of them well means wishing defeat on the other. Wishing them both well indicates indifference.

    At a stretch, one might choose to believe Trump meant his kind regards to both sides as a mere pleasantry, or perhaps he meant that sub specie aeternitatis he wishes the people of both nations well. His record belies that interpretation. So does the rest of what he wrote Tuesday.

    Trump’s Truth statement came on the heels of a meeting with Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy in New York. The Ukrainian leader accentuated the positive: “Trump is a game-changer by himself,” he said. Yet Trump’s words describe a very familiar game, played by the rules Trump has followed all along.

    If anything, he has reiterated more forcefully before that Ukraine is Europe’s affair, not America’s. Look closely. “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”

    That means if Ukraine falls short of that optimistic conclusion, it will be the EU’s fault, along with Zelenskyy’s – but not America’s.

    “With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option.” 

    The US is, of course, part of NATO, but near the end of the post, Trump adds this in clarification: “We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them.”

    That hardly sounds like the United States asserting its leadership role in the alliance to direct greater aid to Ukraine. It’s instead a restatement of an existing policy (“we will continue”) and a reminder that Trump sees Europe’s NATO members as being responsible for their own decisions (“do what they want with them”) and whatever results they get – or don’t get.

    Trump emphasized to Vladimir Putin that his war is a failure and an economic catastrophe, and the administration’s disappointment with Russia’s intransigence in prolonging the war is no secret. Despite what his detractors may believe, Trump did not come back into office intent upon delivering Ukraine to Putin. If a negotiated peace, or at least armistice, is not available, Trump is quite comfortable keeping up military aid of the sort the US has been providing all along. Yet his Truth post suggests even that will increasingly be framed in terms of Europeans’ self-responsibility. This is their war, and theirs to end, where Trump is concerned.

    NATO’s Eurocrats should think twice before popping the champagne. If Trump sounds more sanguine than ever before about total victory for Ukraine, what will he say about Europe, and NATO, if that happy ending doesn’t come to pass? Will he say Europe, including NATO, lost a war that should have been easy to win and thereby proved its uselessness – proved, in fact, the need for regime-change in Europe’s own capitals and for America to slash its underwriting of the Continent’s defense? Trump has now set extremely high expectations for others to meet. You can be sure he hasn’t done so unwittingly.

    Trump doesn’t want to see Ukraine utterly crushed by Russia. Yet he also doesn’t want NATO to be America’s business rather than Europe’s. Business is about profit, and in Trump’s eyes, NATO is unprofitable. For now the president is providing charity; he’s a generous man. But if NATO’s European members can’t realize the returns that Trump says are attainable, he’s going to curtail his giving.

  • Trump takes a pass on brokering peace in Ukraine

    Trump takes a pass on brokering peace in Ukraine

    Has Donald Trump just announced the most consequential foreign policy reversal of his presidency? If so, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and France’s Emmanuel Macron – the last leaders to speak to Trump just before his epochal announcement – should be careful what they wish for.

    In the mother of all flip-flops, Trump on Wednesday posted on Truth Social that “Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.” That’s a position that even Biden, in his most optimistic moments, never dared to take. Trump claimed that Russians were finding it “almost impossible” to buy gasoline (by implication, as a result of Ukrainian drone strikes), that “Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble.” To add insult to injury, Trump also called Russia a “paper tiger” that had been “fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.” 

    Ouch. That’s about as hard a diplomatic gut-punch that Trump could deliver, short perhaps of calling Putin a coward and a liar. Trump also went out of his way to praise Zelensky at a civil sit-down meeting at the United Nations. “Frankly, Ukraine is doing a very good job of stopping this very large army,” Trump said. “It’s pretty amazing.” That’s a very far cry from Trump’s confrontational “you have no cards” speech to Zelensky in the Oval Office in February. 

    On the face of it, Zelensky got exactly what he wanted from Trump, pushing the line that Moscow faces economic collapse and that Ukraine has a realistic chance of expelling Russian forces from its territory. But in truth Trump’s announcement is terrible news for Kyiv and the future of its war effort. 

    Trump’s statement is not a declaration of support for Ukraine, it’s Trump’s resignation from further participation in the peace process. And the sting in the tail of Trump’s announcement is a crystal-clear declaration that he now considers the Ukraine war Europe’s responsibility. A Ukrainian victory is possible “with the support of the European Union,” wrote Trump. All it will take is “time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO.” Except, crucially, that Trump clearly refers to NATO as something distinct from the US, promising that Washington “will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them.” Note the weasel word “they.”

    To be fair to Trump, walking away from trying to make peace in Ukraine was always on the cards. Back on April 18, Trump told reporters at the White House that he wanted to get a peace deal “quickly.” But he also warned that “if for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say, ‘you’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re going to just take a pass. But hopefully we won’t have to do that.”

    Turns out Trump did end up taking a pass, just like he promised – and Vladimir Putin is to blame. Despite a reputation in some quarters for being a master manipulator, Putin utterly failed to correctly read Donald Trump. Defying media criticism and resistance from parts of the Republican party, Trump took a major political risk in inviting Putin to Anchorage, Alaska, giving the Russian leader red-carpet treatment and even repeating some of Putin’s talking points. Trump gave Putin respect, face and made him a supremely generous offer essentially to freeze the front lines in Ukraine and allowing Russia to hold on to the occupied territories. 

    Instead of banking that amazing breakthrough and calling it a day in Ukraine, Putin stupidly did not give Trump an inch. Instead of stopping his missile bombardments of Ukraine – something that clearly angered Trump and prompted his angry message “VLADIMIR, STOP!” – Putin instead doubled down and intensified his attacks on Ukrainian cities to unprecedented levels. Instead of continuing talks with Kyiv, Putin high-handedly ignored Trump’s calls for him to meet Zelensky. And instead of winding down the war, the Kremlin has done the opposite, launching a series of incursions into NATO airspace. Seen from the White House, Putin’s recent behavior has not just been murderous and provocative – it’s been downright disrespectful. And Trump does not appreciate being disrespected. 

    There is possibly another, more calculating hypothesis behind Trump’s reversal. It’s been clear for a while now that the peace process with Putin is dead in the water – which means no great oil and gas deals or multi-billion dollar mineral rights that will help make America great again. So it’s time to open the shop doors wide and allow Europeans to buy hundreds of billions of high-end weapons from the US for use by Ukraine. The bill just for Patriot missiles of the kind that Ukraine says it needs to create an Iron Dome-like air defense system is $100 billion for that system alone. That way the US economy gets a different kind of boost, while Trump washes his hands of any political downside.

    If there’s one thing Trump hates more than disrespect, it’s to be seen to fail. With his peace initiative floundering on Putin’s intransigence, small wonder that Trump chose to walk away from the coming train wreck and leave European allies to sort out the mess – and foot the bill. 

    Essentially, Trump has called Europe and Zelensky’s bluff. You say you can defeat Putin? You go for it, buddy. You say you won’t allow aggression to be rewarded in Europe? Sure, guys, knock yourselves out. Trump also made it clear that he’s walking away from sanctions, too, by pointing out the painfully obvious fact that it’s Europe, not just China and India, which remains a major importer of Russian energy and therefore one of the biggest funders of the Kremlin’s war machine. Trump told the Europeans he would not sanction Russia further until they stopped importing Putin’s oil and gas – which the EU can’t and won’t do, despite all their fighting talk. 

    For the whole duration of the war European leaders have been making fine-sounding promises to Ukraine that it expects the US to pay for. That includes Macron and Sir Keir Starmer’s latest idea of creating a “coalition of the willing” which proposes a “reassurance force” on the ground in Ukraine – just as long as its backed by US air-power. With his flip-flop on Ukraine, Trump has clearly signaled that Uncle Sucker isn’t going to play that game any more. Trump may still be willing to defend its NATO allies – but when it comes to Ukraine, Europe is on its own, militarily and diplomatically.  By the same token, the White House is through with listening to any more of Putin’s bull-crap. In the rich Russian phrase, Putin “doprygalsya” – literally, jumped himself into a bunch of trouble. 

    Ukraine, Russia and Europe have nothing to celebrate and a lot to rue. Thousands more people are going to die pointlessly, with little prospect of achieving a significantly different outcome than the one Trump put on the table and Putin rejected. The dogs of war remain off their leashes, and the havoc will continue until Ukraine runs out of men – or Russia runs out of money.

  • Duchess of York’s email to Epstein spurred by ‘chilling’ call

    Duchess of York’s email to Epstein spurred by ‘chilling’ call

    Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York and former wife of Prince Andrew, has come under scrutiny this week after an email that saw her praising pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed. The Duchess’s spokesperson said that Ferguson had received a “chilling” phone call from the criminal after she gave an interview in 2011 confessing to have made a “terrible, terrible error of judgement” in accepting £15,000 from Epstein and insisting: “I abhor pedophilia” After the phone conversation, Ferguson emailed Epstein to say she “humbly apologized” for criticizing him publicly and described the convicted child sex abuser as a “steadfast, generous and supreme friend.” Good heavens…

    In light of that correspondence with Epstein, the Duchess was dropped as a patron by a number of charities – including a children’s hospice. Defending Ferguson, her spokesperson and adviser James Henderson recalled:

    People don’t understand how terrible Epstein was. I can remember everything about that call. It was a chilling call and I’m surprised anybody was ever friends with him given the way he talked to me. He said he would destroy the York family and he was quite clear on that. He said he would destroy me. He wasn’t shouting. He had a Hannibal Lecter-type voice. It was very cold and calm and really menacing and nasty.

    Henderson told the Telegraph that as a result of the call, he saved Epstein’s number to ensure he would never pick up again if the pedophile chose to make another call. But while her adviser may understand the rationale behind Ferguson’s gushing email to Epstein, the charities she has worked with for decades are not quite as forgiving. After years of philanthropy, the Duchess has had her ties to organizations including the Teenage Cancer Trust, the British Heart Foundation and the Children’s Literacy Charity severed.

    Ferguson’s former husband, Prince Andrew, settled a civil case out of court with the late Virginia Giuffre – who accused him of sexually assaulting her on three occasions when she was 17 years old, accusations he denied. Andrew’s Newsnight interview in 2019 on his friendship with Epstein further damaged his reputation and he no longer uses the title His Royal Highness in an official capacity. More recently, ex-UK ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, was sacked from his role after email exchanges with Epstein were uncovered – showing the diplomat had offered to help the pedophile try and overturn his conviction.

    But will the intervention of Ferguson’s adviser earn her much sympathy? Cockburn wouldn’t be so sure…

  • Trump admonishes the United Nations

    Trump admonishes the United Nations

    Was there a plot against President Trump at the United Nations? Upon his arrival, the escalator apparently stopped working. Next his teleprompter failed. Small wonder that Trump was in less than a concessive mood as he delivered his speech denouncing the UN itself as a colossal failure. The result was the kind of talk he would give to a political rally – except it was to an unreceptive, if not hostile, audience.

    Throughout, Trump made it clear that his estimation of his abilities is very different from his view of the UN. “I’m really good at this stuff,” he declared. “I’ve been right about everything.” As for everyone else: “Your countries are going to hell.”

    Presumably his dire verdict does not apply to close allies such as Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, who is depleting the country’s financial reserves to prop up the peso. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has vowed to lend Argentina up to $30 billion, presumably in the hopes of shoring up Milei’s political fortunes on the eve of midterm legislative elections on October 26. Milei, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, is a favored son.

    When it came to Europe, Trump had nothing but scorn. “We have an ocean in between. Europe has to step it up. They’re buying oil and gas from Russia while they’re fighting Russia.” True enough. But Europe has been stepping it up. The suspicion in Europe that Trump will concoct excuse after excuse to avoid fracturing his bromance with Russian president Vladimir Putin is not an unjustified one.

    After vowing to reassess the relationship should Putin remain refractory after the Alaska summit meeting in mid-August, Trump has done nothing to up the pressure on Russia. Instead, he has watched passively as Moscow bombards Ukraine and sends drones and fighter jets into NATO’s eastern flank. When all the world is a hopeless jumble, Trump wants to pretend that somewhere over the rainbow the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

    Indeed, as he hectored the assembled heads of state, bellowing about his own greatness, Trump’s aim wasn’t to dwell on conflict but to portray himself as the true peacemaker. He, not the UN, is creating a new pacific era – a golden age, if you will. According to Trump, “I ended seven wars and in all cases they were raging with countless of thousands of people being killed.” The claim that he, and he alone, terminated the conflict between Pakistan and India is likely to further sour relations with President Narendra Modi, whom Trump has steadily driven into the arms of a receptive China.

    By the end of his speech, Trump struck a friendlier tone. His teleprompter, after all, had begun to function again. “Let us all work together to build a bright, beautiful planet,” Trump said, “a planet that we all share, a planet of peace in a world that is richer, better, and more beautiful than ever before. That can happen. It will happen.”

    Hmm. For all the enmity his earlier rebarbative remarks may have created, they at least had the virtue of reflecting Trump’s true convictions. As always, Trump is least persuasive, or least believable, when he adopts the saccharine language of more conventional politicians. The more credible Trump at the UN was the one who warned drug cartels that he would “blow you out of existence.” Yeah, baby!

  • Go to church

    Go to church

    It’s often noted that American society is becoming ever more politicized and polarized. Those who once imagined themselves uninterested in politics find themselves dragged into America’s culture wars. Small children now carry placards and attend political marches. Max Horder and Danit Sara Finkelstein explain the extent to which social media has played a part in this growing radicalism, not just because of the ideological echo chambers we now inhabit, but due to the mindset online algorithms create: rewarding outrage, encouraging extremism. Nuance and balance are anathema; shock and division set each day’s tone.

    Now, however, we have become so used to seeing events through the prism of politics that, when news of an atrocity breaks, Americans of every stripe scour the internet for evidence that the other side is responsible. There are still those on the left who insist Tyler Robinson, who allegedly murdered Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, was far right – a “groyper” or follower of the alt-right commentator Nick Fuentes. After every shooting, Democrats blame the guns. Republicans blame the DEI insanity.

    The good news, perhaps, is that times are changing

    But as Katherine Dee explains in our cover story, there’s another conflict playing out across America, more significant than MAGA versus antifa or the progressive left versus the GOP. The culture war has become a spiritual war. A nation built on faith in God has become nihilistic and lost its way.

    In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis conjures a young devil, Wormwood, sent from Hell to secure the damnation of a man known as “the patient.” His uncle, Screwtape, a senior devil, sends him a letter of advice. “Dear Wormwood,” he writes. “Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing.”

    If America is particularly in the Devil’s sights right now, the signs of his progress are, in the first place, this fixation on politics and in the second, the terrible absence of inner peace, particularly in our children. Consider the trans shooter Robert Westman. A few days before his attack on Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, he reportedly put a gun to the head of his girlfriend, (who was said to identify as a “furry”), and felt an icy revulsion, no pity or remorse at the thought of murdering her.

    Lionel Shriver presents the reasonable view, that we should not obsess on the motives of young shooters; that they’re simply psychotic anomalies. But these were once normal children, raised by loving families. In a letter to family and friends, Westman says: “I feel I was raised to be a good person… I was corrupted by this world and have learned to hate what life is.”

    What American children are being corrupted by is not just progressive ideology, but exposure to diabolical horrors via the internet. By his own mother’s account, Tyler Robinson was chronically online from an early age and what he experienced there may have been what eventually led him to kill.

    Offline, the culture that surrounds young Americans offers little alternative. The institutions which should affirm the value of Christian civilization instead pump out neo-Marxist ideas and glorify violence.

    But the good news, perhaps, is that times are changing. Increasingly, people who aren’t ideologically opposed to religion understand that it’s the language of faith, not politics, that best explains what is happening in the hearts and minds of young people such as Robinson and Westman. Until very recently, it would have seemed strange, even in America, the West’s most explicitly Christian nation, for public figures to talk in metaphysical terms of Good and Evil; Christ and Satan. But in Silicon Valley, among the people who create the spaces of the online universe, it’s become normal for the most powerful men on the planet to discuss the reality of demons and of actual evil. Luke Lyman explains how and why Peter Thiel, one of the richest and most influential men in the world, has become obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist.

    Earlier this month, protesters actually dressed as demons gathered on the steps of the Embarcadero building in San Francisco to protest a series of lectures given by Thiel on the subject of the Antichrist. He will comment on “theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist… drawing on René Girard, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Carl Schmitt and John Henry Newman,” says the advertisement for the lectures.

    But the remedy for America’s spiritual decline isn’t more discussion or engagement online. Screwtape ends his letter to his nephew like this: “Ensure that the patient continues to believe that the problem is ‘out there’ in the ‘broken system’ rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself.”

    The right answer, is to actually practice, not just preach, Christianity. Charlie Kirk, a devout young man, understood this well. The Trump administration should encourage not a fiery MAGA response but a return to church.

  • The masses have had enough

    Nearly everybody I know has experienced crime in our cities or had a family member threatened. A few years ago, my pregnant wife was walking in San Francisco when a deranged homeless man repeatedly asked her if she wanted to be raped. This is not unusual in America. Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was murdered, aged 23, on the subway in North Carolina just recently. The man responsible had been charged and released 14 times under a broken system. A judge who’d never passed the bar, a city council that ignored public safety and Governor Roy Cooper’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice all made it harder to keep repeat offenders like Iryna’s killer off the streets. “America will never be the same,” posted Charlie Kirk, hours before he was murdered, as he shared the picture of the frightened woman looking up at her attacker. As the man walked away, he boasted, “I got that white girl.”

    Iryna is now a symbol, and incensed citizens have created murals of her around the country. President Trump called for a swift trial and the death penalty for her killer. This has the potential to be a George Floyd-style turning point – but for the right. BLM built its movement around the death of a convicted felon. It took positions against the nuclear family, taught high-potential youth to think of themselves as victims and led to the release of violent criminals like Iryna’s killer. The new movement wants to make our cities safe again and protect the innocent. 

    It also protects free speech. For years, even mentioning that Floyd was a felon, or that he had meth and fentanyl in his system when he died was taboo in polite American discourse. That has now changed. Charlie did more than almost anyone to break the censorial spell. His murder may signal the death of the moderate right in the country. As thousands of leftists mocked his death online – teachers, firefighters, news contributors and even elected officials (some of whom lost their jobs as a result) – the nation reeled. Charlie was a friend. I was and am furious. Yet even this new angry American right does not torch cities in response, as the left has done. Out of respect for Charlie – who modeled engagement with opponents through reasoned debate – many are seeking to channel their outrage productively. I’m a fan of policies that echo Trump’s success in Washington – where carjackings have dropped by 83 percent – to fix other cities’ corruption and dysfunction. But we are on edge. The Department of War is back, its original name chiseled on the wall. Do not fuck with the USA right now.

    The new movement wants to make our cities safe again and protect the innocent

    I turned 43 this month. The world is more complicated in some ways than when I was younger. It is also simpler. There is truth and beauty. There are lies and ugliness. There is good and evil. The Book of Genesis teaches that discernment is fundamental to being human. When man ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it marked the passage from innocence to moral responsibility – the birth of our capacity to judge. To live fully human is to embrace that divine gift of discernment. Yet a generational leftist phobia of judgment – an aversion to giving offense or calling out what is plainly wrong – has corroded much of our civilization. In Britain, the legal system failed to prevent thousands of its young women from being raped by “grooming gangs.” George Abaraonye, the incoming president of the Oxford Union – an institution supposedly devoted to dialogue – celebrated: “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s fucking go.” One member of the British rap duo Bob Vylan said on stage just days after Charlie’s killing: “The pronouns was/were. Because if you talk shit, you will get banged. Rest in peace Charlie Kirk, you piece of shit.”

    Crowds in British cities openly rally for the death of Jews. But when the comedy writer Graham Linehan made a joke about trans people he was arrested. Is the naive bubble of the British elite finally cracking? Will the UK come to its senses? There are signs that it might. A huge “Unite the Kingdom” march in London on September 13 – instantly branded “far-right” by most of the media – suggests the masses have had enough. Here in America, the masses are ready to rally around what is good, even if it’s a bit crass, and to stand firmly against what is dangerous and broken. Expect further symbols of resistance. What comes next, I cannot tell you. But, to borrow from President Reagan, the expectation is simple: “We win, they lose!”