cleek: yup. It's a salutary reminder (like Roe v Wade) that just because rights are won, it doesn't mean they'll stay won. Also, I sort of think misogyny might be a bit like antisemitism: that there is a latent reservoir always waiting to erupt if the circumstances are right. I remember, in The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer said ""Women have very little idea of how much men hate them", and it was shocking, and something that was kind of hard to believe. Not so much any more. And no, for the avoidance of doubt, not all men!
The war on Iran and in the Middle East, the situation regarding American electoral procedures, it's all bad and depressing news. So to add to the misery, and as a warning to anyone who still needs one, here is a piece from June's Atlantic on misogyny on the right:
WTF? Grok eventually issues the correction, but only after the police officers have had to go into hiding, and huge public pressure on Elon Musk and X. I have rarely said anything about your Grok usage, but FFS why do you imagine that Grok's analysis or answers have any relevance here?
Thanks for link, Charles, but not for the Grok element. I wonder if you know that two police officers have had to go into hiding after Grok wrongly identified them as part of team that handcuffed Henry Nowak?
Ah, interestingly (for anyone still interested!) this is Fraser Nelson's column in the Times about the Nowak murder. Here, the right-wing journalist in him is more noticeable, but the clarifications of certain of the facts are worthwhile:
Facts are sidelined in dangerous digital courtPrevailing narrative over Henry Nowak’s murder bears little relation to truth but its inflammatory proponents don’t care
Fraser Nelson
There have been too many harrowing videos this week. The sight of a teenage boy being handcuffed even as he was dying; then footage of riots on our streets. Then the young policemen protecting their station as crowds gathered to abuse them. “Have you all been trained to kill white boys?” shouted one. “All trained the same?” Nigel Farage later described it as anger simply spilling over. It struck me as proof of another point: the power of social media to twist narratives to incendiary effect. That a dying teenager was mistakenly handcuffed by police was appalling enough when the murder of Henry Nowak was first reported. Seeing the video makes the horror visceral. I debated Reform’s Zia Yusuf on Monday and he asked if I thought the video should be released. No, I said; the facts of the case are not contested so video evidence adds nothing but outrage. And there’s a bereaved family to consider. Why expose their son’s dying moments for the benefit of social media? A few hours later it was out, and shared the world over. Aged 62, Nigel Farage understands the dynamics of the digital world better than his rivals. He understands its power, now that far more people get their news from social media than any newspaper. He understands the opportunities; the old constraints, what establishment types refer to as restraint, no longer apply. He also seems worried about being outbid in this digital-outrage auction by Rupert Lowe’s Restore, which is calling for Vickrum Digwa to hang. The emergence of the video allowed, in effect, a new digital court case, with the police in the dock. This case has four parts. First, that police rushed to the scene because they thought they were investigating racism, which they prioritise above murder. Next, on arrival they “uncritically” believed the killer’s claim that Nowak had been racist. Thirdly, that Digwa was carrying the 21cm knife thanks to a legal exemption for Sikhs. And finally, the famous “two-tier justice”: a shorter sentence because Sikhs are allowed to carry knives. But the 999 transcript shows police were called out not to a woolly accusation of racism but an assault, where an injured assailant was being held captive. The cuffing, now seen by the world via the bodycam, was horrific. Digwa’s family, in short, lied. But the judge said Nowak was “handcuffed for about a minute” before the arresting officer tried to save his life. That wasn’t shown in the leaked bodycam footage. In any case the judge said Nowak could not have survived his wounds however quickly he received first aid. The careful erasure of such context allows the story to be transformed into one about anti-white racism. JD Vance, the US vice-president, now holds up Nowak’s death as an example of the “way a civilisation dies”. His State Department speaks of “two-tiered policing” and the general accusation is that Digwa was legally carrying a knife because he was a Sikh. But in most of the western world, Sikhs are allowed to carry a “kirpan” knife, often small, as part of their faith. The killer had one around his neck. But, as the Sikh Federation has pointed out, he was in the habit of walking around with a second knife, a 21cm dagger. Even if it was religious, said the judge, it would make no difference to the verdict. That’s what he was convicted of: possession of a bladed weapon as well as murder. And the length of the sentence? In his letter to the attorney-general, Farage protests that “murderers are punished more leniently if they use religious weapons as instruments of murder”. No such discount exists. Murder sentences carry a starting point of 25 years if a weapon is taken to the scene in order to kill; 15 years if not, as here. For Digwa, the judge added eight years for ten aggravating factors, among them that he had “abused the privilege extended to Sikhs” and “dishonoured” his religion: with mitigation, that became a 21-year minimum. Religion made his sentence longer, not shorter. The facts are there. But who would point them out in so febrile a mood? Even the home secretary didn’t: an inquiry is under way, she said. Sensible. Dangerously so. In the current era, ambiguity is exploited to create incendiary accusations. “The message from the establishment is clear: white lives don’t matter,” says Farage. “White suffering doesn’t count.” So we can see racial politics becoming a core part of Reform’s message. A big step — and one Farage may come to regret. Politicians have always picked facts to suit. It’s 60 years since Hannah Arendt’s Truth and Politics, arguing that modern media has made facts surprisingly fragile, easily erased. Even bullied out of the debate. “Factual truth that opposes a certain group’s agenda,” she wrote, “is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before.” Facts about progress have, oddly, become unsayable. Which minister, for example, would dare mention that hospital A&E records suggest stabbing and assault incidents have halved over just 20 years? A senior police chief recently told me they have all but given up trying to correct the record on social media. A dangerous decision. Rightly or wrongly, this is the public square. If the terrain is left to those selling narratives of racial or religious conflict, our debate will be shaped accordingly. Standing up for the small points may be hard; politically costly. Especially when the mood is febrile. But if lies are let slip then bigger lies are built on top of them. We end up with an inverted pyramid of deceit, usually pointed at a minority. There are many serious points here. Positive discrimination has undoubtedly eroded the sense of people being treated equally before public institutions. Too often accusations of racism, no matter how spurious, can stifle debate. The police investigation needs to be unsparing in how far Digwa’s claim of racism was believed, and why Nowak was breezily dismissed when he said he’d been stabbed. The kirpan law needs clarifying. Sikhs themselves have raised concerns that young men are exploiting confusion by carrying knives for no religious reason, as Digwa seems to have been doing. Robust action is needed. But a paralysed government risks letting problems and ambiguity linger, while false narratives grow. When the facts and the appalling mistakes of this case are properly considered, they show a mixed picture. Which of us really believes that, if we called 999 and said we were restraining an assailant, officers would not come quickly? Or that initially, for the first minute or two, they would not believe the account of those who made the call? The US State Department had one thing right: there is such a thing as civilisational decline. A national debate that cannot defend truth when facts are distorted will eventually find itself governed by whichever outrage spreads fastest. “This is not a case about Sikhism,” said Nowak’s family. “This is not a case about racism. This is about murder.” It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of what was lost amid the noise.
Oh, the following info got lost in my edit: Fraser Nelson is the ex-editor of the Spectator, a very right-wing magazine. Just to show the difference between "right-wing" and "populist right".
And, on an entirely different subject (but still just within the heading of liberalism), I don't know how much non-Brits know about the awful case of the recent murder of Henry Nowak. Briefly, he was a young man who was stabbed several times by a Sikh man, whose brother then called the police to allege that the perpetrator had been the object of a racist attack. When the police arrived, although Nowak was on the floor and kept telling them he had been stabbed and couldn't breathe, the police didn't believe him and handcuffed him while he was dying. It will not amaze you to hear that Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, J D Vance et al have been making much hay on this subject.
“We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension… This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.”
- Family of Henry Nowak, 1 June
“Henry Nowak died the same way a civilisation dies. Abandoned. Handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”
- JD Vance, X, 5 June
I tried to post the link, but that doesn't really work, and copying and pasting as below loses the graphs and supporting evidence links, which is too bad. But I thought it was still worthwhile to show ObWi this:
The problem is not just the exploitation of a tragedy — it is the fictional picture of Britain that American populists increasingly rely upon. Fraser Nelson Jun 05, 2026
The Nowak family’s wish was never going to be respected: the brutal truth is that his death was just too politically rich not to exploit. Elon Musk had long been demanding the release of the police bodycam video shown to the court of Henry’s last moments. It would be Twitter dynamite, as galvanising for the digital right as George Floyd was for the BLM-left. Nothing solicits a more visceral human reaction than seeing, hearing a dying man cuffed by police. Certain politicians will always seek to exploit and direct such emotional reactions: JD Vance very much included.
Vance, the algorithm and the British Gotham To frame the murder in racial terms - the result of immigration, rather than criminality - is precisely what Henry’s family begged politicians not to do. But his case is vital for JD Vance’s overall message: that British civilisation is somehow under attack because “the mass invasion of migrants” means streets full of murderers and a civilisational threat posed. The problem is that Vance and those on the populist right who promote “Britain is Broken” narrative cannot point to actual crime figures because they show that crime has actually halved - while immigration has doubled.
JD Vance is a smart guy who knows Britain and holidays here - so what’s he up to? Building a domestic MAGA narrative. His style of politics relies on building a narrative of conflict, keeping a rage (and fear) alight. A glance at the US government website, Aliens (‘they walk among us’) gives a sense of this vibe. The MAGA tribe that Vance seeks to lead want to know that “London has fallen” and Europe is ablaze. And Britain, with its Hindu Prime Ministers and Muslim mayors, is now a dumpster-fire of a country with civilisation being “erased” - all because of immigration, enabled by leftists. The target this time is Sikhs, who had until now been spared the treatment reserved for Muslims.
Britain, Vance is saying, is a cautionary tale for America. The barbarians are inside the European gates, and Henry Nowak’s death is an example of what happens when they get in. Pete Hegseth was at it in his D-Day speech - comparing migration to D-Day. Reform UK also draws this ‘invasion’ analogy. A media ecosystem has arisen to promote this narrative 24/7: Twitter nativist accounts like the one Vance cited. They scour Europe for examples of migrant crime and push them out to fuel the narrative of racial conflict or migrant vs native clashes.
The UK version of this is the “Broken Britain” narrative of Reform and you can see the overlap with MAGA (and, in James Orr, their advisers). Vance calls for “righteous anger;” Nigel Farage for “cold rage.” Both tell of racial tension, the attack of the white majority by the criminal minority. The ‘broken’ country Reform speaks of, the dumpster-fire that JD Vance points to, bears no more resemblance to the UK than Gotham City does to New York. But these gentlemen and their media allies are forever building up this picture of British Gotham with fake narratives, fake stats, made-up think tanks and books with concocted quotes.
Social media also craves this material. The more incendiary the post, the greater ‘engagement’. Musk has become a circus-master seeking to lay on a show: that’s why he was baying for the Nowak video. Even without him, the algorithms crave civil-war material. The populists and media networks both work by selling people a worldview, and saying you’ll only get this dope from them. Politically, it’s powerful. But it depends on deceit.
I have written my Times column about the lies being told about the Nowak murder - and the industrial-scale attempt to concoct fake narratives. I’d like to expand some of the points and share the data I researched in my column (all in my data library, here).
If what JD Vance said about Britain and migration was even halfway true, the post-2000 immigration surge would have sent our crime through the roof. Instead, crime has halved. So let’s look at the Britain that exists, and how it contrasts to the Vance caricature. Each of these charts have links to source data, so anyone can verify and replicate. This is the actual story of our country: it matters.
Henry Nowak’s murder was tragic, harrowing, sickening - but not part of a rising trend. In fact, in this country where immigrants make up one in five of workers, murders are hovering at a 40-year low in absolute terms and a 50-year low when population-adjusted.
Some argue that the decline of murder is a technicality: that medical advances means they don’t die. When I debated Zia Yusuf on Monday, he paraphrased me as saying [16 mins in] “come to London, you’ll be stabbed but thanks to our amazing emergency services you have a better chance of surviving.”
First, here are the figures for London murder: at the lowest in decades. Probably centuries, when you think of what came before.
And to Yusuf’s point - you’re not dying because the NHS is stitching you up? Well, the NHS keeps records of those admitted for knife crime (‘assault by sharp objects’). I updated it to take in the latest. It shows knife casualties at the lowest level since records began 27 years ago. Again, the opposite to the picture that Vance paints:-
It’s not just knife crime. When someone is assaulted and admitted to hospital, the NHS records it. The UK’s NHS model means we have very good data on this: you can mine it from their website. Again, we see hospital admissions for assault hovering at a multi-decade low.
You can click on the above to get ‘injury by bodily force’, by ‘blunt object’ etc: same trend. And let’s remember that one in four NHS staff who serve the country’s sick and injured are immigrants. The period of mass migration has coincided with an unprecedented drop in violent crime. Never have our streets been more racially mixed, it’s true. But seldom have they been safer to walk down. Surveys show women, in particular, say they feel markedly safer walking the streets than they did 30 years ago.
And yes, most crimes are not reported to the police. That’s why the Crime Survey of England & Wales asks 35,000 households to talk about their experience of crime: to give a gold-standard answer. Once again, it makes a mockery of the JD Vance caricature.
Click on the ‘police recorded’ tab and you’ll see a different picture - and here’s the paradox. Better policing means a greater share of crimes are reported. As the situation improves there are more interceptions, people are more confident in reporting crime. If more people were actually being stabbed, assaulted or killed, we’d see it in the hospital or murder figures. These figures show what the crime survey shows: violence roughly halving over the 20 years where the migrant population has doubled.
The switch from immigration to race Vance is highly intelligent and strategic: unlike Trump he chooses words carefully. Nowak, he said, would still be alive today “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”
This is not a complaint about today’s immigration. Vickrum Digwa was born here. Vance, like Farage, has switched the criticism to those already here. Both seem to be anticipating how to keep the fight going when migration is under control - as it now is in the UK.
So Vance talks about the threat to the country of migrants’ children. As the father of a migrant’s child, it’s unusual for Vance to take this line: was his Indian wife granted citizenship by nation-hating elites? But set that aside. The narrative switch from immigration to the children of immigrants - portraying them in this case as lethal threats to the white majority - deserves our attention.
This is why we see papers like the Jewish News now defend Muslims: they see where this trend leads, and has always led. First it was the Muslims. Now, the Sikhs. Who do we think might be next? Rupert Lowe, the Reform pace-setter, has already started on Kosher meat. How long until Judaeo is dropped from the demands to protect Europe’s ‘Judaeo-Christian heritage?’.
Even on racial grounds, Vance’s narrative collapses. If you look at the arrest rate by ethnicity - a poor proxy for crime as it doesn’t adjust for social factors - it shows Indians significantly below whites.
What Henry Nowak’s murder reminds us is how far we still have to go. His attacker should never have been allowed to walk around Southampton with a massive knife: the law needs to be clarified so police know to reject false claims of religious exemption. Snatch crime is surging, as is shoplifting: if Vance wanted to talk about rising acquisitive crime he’d have a point. Sexual offences are not experiencing the same trend: there is no surge, but no collapse either.
Vance needs to tell his MAGA base that Britain is a migrant-addled criminal hellhole - and if they’re not careful, America will be too. MAGA politics means selling a worldview, rather than solutions. A dystopia needs victims and villains. This non-stop media circus needs recruits: new people to be angry at. More causes for the currency Vance incites:
Imagine if a UK Prime Minister had issued a statement after George Floyd’s death demanding Americans take to the streets over policing. Or after Rodney King. Or Michael Brown. Or Eric Garner. It would be seen as extraordinary overreach - a foreign leader attempting to promote domestic unrest on a false basis. The Swedes now have a ‘Psychological Defence Unit’ to deal with foreign powers who use fake news to sow internal division: it recognises that these fake, viral claims are assaults on the national fabric. And need to be responded to quickly with the cold, hard truth.
Vance is attacking a Britain that does not exist. Our islands are not seething with racial tension; polls show only one in four buy Farage’s ‘two-tier policing’ line. I suspect his departure this week from anti-migration politics into racial politics will prove a misjudgement. Yes, they won Twitter; by playing the race card they won attention. But I suspect lost most of the country,
Britain is not a place where people who look affrighted or askance at colleagues, neighbours and countrymen who have different faiths or skin colour. My own hunch is that MAGA is obsessed with Britain because we are living rejection of this thesis: a country that has, in Britishness, a unifying theme that people of all faiths, ethnicities and skin colours can unite around. Britain’s story is the opposite of what JD Vance says it is.
I’d like to close with the final paragraph of my Times column:-
Vance has one thing right: there is such a thing as 'civilisational decline’. A national debate that cannot defend truth when facts are distorted will eventually find itself governed by whichever outrage spreads fastest. “This is not a case about Sikhism,” said Nowak’s family. “This is not a case about racism. This is about murder.” It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of what was lost amid the noise
I know a lot of you take the Guardian, but for anyone who doesn't and is interested I thought this is very relevant to many of the discussions we have here:
In his case, of course, it's not for anything like humanitarian or rational geopolitical reasons, it's to do with his power and popularity (or the diminution thereof). But yup, when he's right he's right.
They haven't just ruined it, the present bunch have literally no conception of what fraternity even means. This is David Frum (an example of an almost extinct type of Republican) in the Atlantic on the "celebration":
Trump’s 250th Celebration Is a Fiasco The president has turned a solemn occasion into a Day of Trump.
By David Frum
May 31, 2026, 11:09 AM ET
“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”
That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people. The only thing he had to do was—for once in his life—not act like an insane egomaniac.
He couldn’t do it.
As things are developing, we’ll remember the story of America’s grandest commemorations as follows:
One hundredth: a giant industrial exposition in Philadelphia. Two hundredth: a tall-ships regatta in New York harbor. Two hundred and fiftieth: a Trump flop in Washington, D.C. Trump knows he has botched the anniversary. He says so himself. Last night, he posted the following indictment of his own program on his Truth Social platform:
We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, actually, far greater than it ever was before! It would have also been nice to see a Republican/Democrat union bring it back to life. The Kennedy Center is broken, unsafe, and $busted, and has been for many years! Judge Cooper also stated that the highly prestigious Board of the Center was not authorized to add on the name “TRUMP” despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money will be necessary for its successful reincarnation. So now, the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper and his wife, Amy Jeffress (obfuscation anyone?), should be ashamed of themselves. Judge Cooper, like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Translated into plain English, the president was complaining that seven of the nine acts scheduled to headline the July 4 weekend musical program canceled within 48 hours of one another because they realized that the event was degenerating into a hyperpartisan salute to Trump personally. His proposed solution? Replace the canceled acts with a Trump rally speech! A speech that will focus on Trump’s outrage that a judge blocked him from renaming the Kennedy Center after himself!
On July 4, 1776, Congress declared not only the severance of the political tie between 13 British colonies and their former homeland but also the end of monarchical government in the United States. For 150 years before 1776, the American colonies were ruled by a sequence of queens and kings. The names of those monarchs were inscribed on the American map: Virginia, Jamestown, Charleston, Annapolis, Georgia, and in innumerable King Streets and Queen Streets. Then, on one parchment, the new nation repudiated its political origin, and declared that “all men are created equal.” Whatever those words meant, however much slaveholder hypocrisy attended them, they promised a republican future for the people of the land.
The man who assumed responsibility for organizing the 250th commemoration of those words instead decided to make the day a royalist celebration of himself: seeking to emblazon his face on coinage and currency, displaying his image on banners in downtown Washington, and scheduling the central event of the celebration—a televised cage fight—for his own birthday on June 14. A cage fight may seem to some a barbarous way to honor Thomas Jefferson’s great manifesto. But many Americans will enjoy it, and on an occasion such as this, there’s room for a wide range of activities. There’s no room, however, to elevate the presidency created by the revolution of 1776 into a gaudy cult of personality. Trump’s drive to transform July 4, 2026, into a colossal national Day of Trump instead has triggered a rebellious update of the “Spirit of ’76.”
The Americans alive in 1776 shared and read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” That pamphlet denounced, 250 years before the event, the pretensions of Trump’s version of America 250: Government by kings, Paine wrote, “was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones.”
Trump’s effort to rebrand the semiquincentennial as the Day of Trump left no time, budget, or effort available for the true purpose of the anniversary. As his own self-celebration has fizzled, a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. The Reflecting Pool will be repainted too blue by an overpaid no-bid contractor. The statues on the Memorial Bridge will be gilded too brightly by another overpaid no-bid contractor. There’s a project to erect an Albert Speer–style triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac. But Trump has failed to deliver the victories that the arch might have memorialized—and as the war in Iran has stalemated, so the plans for the arch have stalled. Most symbolic of all, the White House is flanked by a stop-start construction site where the East Wing used to stand. Trump shook down government favor-seekers for enough money to begin work on a presidential ballroom complex, but he did not shake enough to finish it. Now the taxpayer is being asked to pay the balance. A federal judge has ordered work paused pending a vote in Congress, and Trump has whittled down his majorities in the House and Senate to the point where he apparently cannot pass a funding bill. If he loses control of either house in November, construction is unlikely to resume. Instead of a Trump Ballroom, the most conspicuous feature of the Trump White House in 2026 is a gaping Trump Hole.
The greatest of all Fourth of July orations was delivered in 1852, on the 76th anniversary of American independence, by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. In the opening passages of that speech, Douglass observed ominously: “The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times.” Yet even as Douglass foresaw the coming Civil War and lamented the nation’s flaws, he still expressed hope that “high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny.” Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment. But the nation honored by the glorious moment still retains the power of recovery and renewal praised by Douglass. As we contemplate the farce of Trump Day, we can turn our imaginations to what yet might be for America at 300.
We as individuals may or may not live to see it, but we can believe in it all the same. We can believe in it all the more fervently for this experience of living through a chapter of American history that so flagrantly betrays the Founders’ hopes and so arduously tests the Founders’ legacy.
ps That wow was shock depending on who the "folks" and "them" mentioned could include. We certainly know that sympathy with Israel is declining steeply in e.g. the US and UK, but I'm really hoping that someone who has been an open and consistent opponent of Netanyahu would be credible enough for "the benefit of the doubt", at least among informed and unprejudiced people.
Harari has been a consistent opponent to Netanyahu, but he’s Israeli. it’s getting to the point where I don’t think folks are prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Wow.
Moving on to the Adam Tooze Wang Hui discussion, it reminded me how much I prefer transcripts, especially accurate ones; the simultaneous (I assume) one had "tutu" for "total" and "pip" for "people"! Luckily I am quite used to Chinese accents in English, so could mainly keep up, although I had to work quite hard to know who "Lucian" was (Lu Xun) since I was not familiar with him!
And Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair's spin doctor, and the model (in In the Thick of it) for the immortal Malcolm Tucker of blessed memory. A propos of which, Tony Blair's unbelievably unhelpful intervention into UK politics today shows how out of touch he is with our reality....
Oh, wonkie. That is beautiful as well as sad. Thank you for your honesty and your pure soul.
I cut almost all contact with the GLOML many decades ago - he had made me unbelievably unhappy for years. After that, and after a Iull of a few years, I spoke to him about once a year - he always tried to get me to come and see him but I knew he was dangerous to me, so I always said no. When he was dying in hospital in the early 2000s (one of his friends let me know) I spent three days sitting with him (he was only compos mentis enough to recognise me the first day) and was with him when he died. Just before, I told him I loved him. I was and am glad to have been there.
This is from a depressing piece by Tina Brown (whom I find reasonably astute about US electoral politics, and I like her turn of phrase) which she ends like this:
Don’t expect House members to return emboldened when Trump has just gone four for four in the primaries, whacking, not just Cornyn, but his Epstein Files Transparency Act foe Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Brad Raffensperger, who committed the ultimate crime of failing to “find” 11,780 more Trump votes in Georgia in the 2020 election. Sorry, not sorry about Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana also hitting the bricks. He’s the physician who oversaw a nationally-recognized vaccine campaign in his home state, but later revealed his inner worm by casting the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. Trump punished him anyway for having voted in 2021 for his second impeachment. So long, mofo.
Every liberal commentator now bangs on about an assured mid-term shellacking for the POTUS party over rising gas prices, thanks to the Trump-created catastrophe of the Strait of Hormuz closure and the universally unpopular Iran war. I suspect they and the polls are wrong again. It’s not just the creeping success of Republican redistricting creating more seats than Democratic efforts to do the same. Trump has found a diabolical way to separate his personal charisma from the destruction he perpetrates and the corruption he normalizes. He’s the angel of sabotage, freed from the shackles of his own malign deeds by the Supreme Court, the GOP’s moral turpitude, and the universal glint of greed from the Wall Street honchos, Silicon Valley bros, and Palm Beach plutocrats who see that the presidency is open for business. As last week’s Brennan Center newsletter put it, “There is a zone of lawlessness around the Oval Office.” In Trump’s first term, he was restrained by the need for a second, and by advisers schooled in the now-quaint ethos of governing by accepted norms. But then, he learned something transformative. Speaking to the NYT in January about prohibiting his family from profiteering overseas from proximity to official business in his first term, Trump said that, “he got no credit for it.” He then added a killer kicker that made less news at the time but has stayed with me as a rare moment of truth: “I found out that nobody cared.”
If there is any message that crystalizes the 250th anniversary of the U.S., it is not that America has changed but that Trump has changed America. There will be no snapback when he’s gone. Even as his approval ratings tank and the country is hurting, it feels as if his base has become wider and deeper and represents a new national state of mind. Tuned out on our phones, mesmerized by money porn, high on the idolatry of the big flashy win, we are getting used to the erosion of the rule of law, the threats to free speech, the banishment of government watchdogs, and the chasm of inequality. After ten years of Trump bludgeoning the first principles of the American experiment (ten because I don’t count the disappearing ink of Biden’s lame tenure when every headline was a new Trump indictment, scandal, or toxic blast from exile in Mar-a-Lago), Trump has refashioned the country in his image.
And, on the subject of liberalism, and Israel, and to spare lj from having to link to Ezra Klein again, this is EK interviewing Yuval Noah Harari yesterday in the NYT (with transcript):
I can't disagree with anything you say there! But I still think not considering Harris to be the lesser evil compared to Trump, on this and so many other issues, was wrong and has been proved to be so. However, it goes without saying that you too can believe what you want!
At that point in time the Democrats were not the lesser evil because they were enabling the indiscriminate mass slaughter of Palestinians and the wholesale destruction of their homeland. Is that really so hard to understand?
novakant, that was not the situation to anybody who had been paying attention to the candidates, their statements and views, for any decent period, and who were not at the time prevented from rational thought by personal bereavement and trauma. As Donald said (and I don't think ObWi has ever had a sterner critic of Biden and the Dems' actions with regard to Israel and the Palestinians) even he voted for Harris on the basis of "the lesser evil".
I must say, I too did not think cleek was displaying contempt, or whatever the noun is from "despising". I thought he was displaying his impotent rage at how people had been so deceived, despite their avowed values, that they could ignore the evidence of their own eyes and blindly follow a lying, murderous charlatan.
This article has been on my mind, in a melancholy sort of way. I have long realised that new friends seem (almost by definition) insubstantial compared to old friends, and as the ranks of old friends thin out I think often and with resignation about Christopher Hitchens saying you can't make old friends. Such is life, I guess.
By the way, reading some of the comments, various people seem to be convinced it is written by AI, with many of the tell-tale signs. I have already gathered in the past that I am not any good at spotting when that is the case - does anybody here with experience of this phenomenon have an opinion on whether this is indeed AI generated?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Thread”
cleek: yup. It's a salutary reminder (like Roe v Wade) that just because rights are won, it doesn't mean they'll stay won. Also, I sort of think misogyny might be a bit like antisemitism: that there is a latent reservoir always waiting to erupt if the circumstances are right. I remember, in The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer said ""Women have very little idea of how much men hate them", and it was shocking, and something that was kind of hard to believe. Not so much any more. And no, for the avoidance of doubt, not all men!
"
The war on Iran and in the Middle East, the situation regarding American electoral procedures, it's all bad and depressing news. So to add to the misery, and as a warning to anyone who still needs one, here is a piece from June's Atlantic on misogyny on the right:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCWbHysHysdvdIZizTv3MLqw&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
WTF? Grok eventually issues the correction, but only after the police officers have had to go into hiding, and huge public pressure on Elon Musk and X. I have rarely said anything about your Grok usage, but FFS why do you imagine that Grok's analysis or answers have any relevance here?
"
Thanks for link, Charles, but not for the Grok element. I wonder if you know that two police officers have had to go into hiding after Grok wrongly identified them as part of team that handcuffed Henry Nowak?
"
Ah, interestingly (for anyone still interested!) this is Fraser Nelson's column in the Times about the Nowak murder. Here, the right-wing journalist in him is more noticeable, but the clarifications of certain of the facts are worthwhile:
Facts are sidelined in dangerous digital courtPrevailing narrative over Henry Nowak’s murder bears little relation to truth but its inflammatory proponents don’t care
Fraser Nelson
There have been too many harrowing videos this week. The sight of a teenage boy being handcuffed even as he was dying; then footage of riots on our streets. Then the young policemen protecting their station as crowds gathered to abuse them. “Have you all been trained to kill white boys?” shouted one. “All trained the same?” Nigel Farage later described it as anger simply spilling over. It struck me as proof of another point: the power of social media to twist narratives to incendiary effect.
That a dying teenager was mistakenly handcuffed by police was appalling enough when the murder of Henry Nowak was first reported. Seeing the video makes the horror visceral. I debated Reform’s Zia Yusuf on Monday and he asked if I thought the video should be released. No, I said; the facts of the case are not contested so video evidence adds nothing but outrage. And there’s a bereaved family to consider. Why expose their son’s dying moments for the benefit of social media? A few hours later it was out, and shared the world over.
Aged 62, Nigel Farage understands the dynamics of the digital world better than his rivals. He understands its power, now that far more people get their news from social media than any newspaper. He understands the opportunities; the old constraints, what establishment types refer to as restraint, no longer apply. He also seems worried about being outbid in this digital-outrage auction by Rupert Lowe’s Restore, which is calling for Vickrum Digwa to hang. The emergence of the video allowed, in effect, a new digital court case, with the police in the dock.
This case has four parts. First, that police rushed to the scene because they thought they were investigating racism, which they prioritise above murder. Next, on arrival they “uncritically” believed the killer’s claim that Nowak had been racist. Thirdly, that Digwa was carrying the 21cm knife thanks to a legal exemption for Sikhs. And finally, the famous “two-tier justice”: a shorter sentence because Sikhs are allowed to carry knives.
But the 999 transcript shows police were called out not to a woolly accusation of racism but an assault, where an injured assailant was being held captive. The cuffing, now seen by the world via the bodycam, was horrific. Digwa’s family, in short, lied. But the judge said Nowak was “handcuffed for about a minute” before the arresting officer tried to save his life. That wasn’t shown in the leaked bodycam footage. In any case the judge said Nowak could not have survived his wounds however quickly he received first aid. The careful erasure of such context allows the story to be transformed into one about anti-white racism.
JD Vance, the US vice-president, now holds up Nowak’s death as an example of the “way a civilisation dies”. His State Department speaks of “two-tiered policing” and the general accusation is that Digwa was legally carrying a knife because he was a Sikh. But in most of the western world, Sikhs are allowed to carry a “kirpan” knife, often small, as part of their faith. The killer had one around his neck. But, as the Sikh Federation has pointed out, he was in the habit of walking around with a second knife, a 21cm dagger. Even if it was religious, said the judge, it would make no difference to the verdict. That’s what he was convicted of: possession of a bladed weapon as well as murder.
And the length of the sentence? In his letter to the attorney-general, Farage protests that “murderers are punished more leniently if they use religious weapons as instruments of murder”. No such discount exists. Murder sentences carry a starting point of 25 years if a weapon is taken to the scene in order to kill; 15 years if not, as here. For Digwa, the judge added eight years for ten aggravating factors, among them that he had “abused the privilege extended to Sikhs” and “dishonoured” his religion: with mitigation, that became a 21-year minimum. Religion made his sentence longer, not shorter.
The facts are there. But who would point them out in so febrile a mood? Even the home secretary didn’t: an inquiry is under way, she said. Sensible. Dangerously so. In the current era, ambiguity is exploited to create incendiary accusations. “The message from the establishment is clear: white lives don’t matter,” says Farage. “White suffering doesn’t count.” So we can see racial politics becoming a core part of Reform’s message. A big step — and one Farage may come to regret.
Politicians have always picked facts to suit. It’s 60 years since Hannah Arendt’s Truth and Politics, arguing that modern media has made facts surprisingly fragile, easily erased. Even bullied out of the debate. “Factual truth that opposes a certain group’s agenda,” she wrote, “is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before.” Facts about progress have, oddly, become unsayable. Which minister, for example, would dare mention that hospital A&E records suggest stabbing and assault incidents have halved over just 20 years?
A senior police chief recently told me they have all but given up trying to correct the record on social media. A dangerous decision. Rightly or wrongly, this is the public square. If the terrain is left to those selling narratives of racial or religious conflict, our debate will be shaped accordingly. Standing up for the small points may be hard; politically costly. Especially when the mood is febrile. But if lies are let slip then bigger lies are built on top of them. We end up with an inverted pyramid of deceit, usually pointed at a minority.
There are many serious points here. Positive discrimination has undoubtedly eroded the sense of people being treated equally before public institutions. Too often accusations of racism, no matter how spurious, can stifle debate. The police investigation needs to be unsparing in how far Digwa’s claim of racism was believed, and why Nowak was breezily dismissed when he said he’d been stabbed. The kirpan law needs clarifying. Sikhs themselves have raised concerns that young men are exploiting confusion by carrying knives for no religious reason, as Digwa seems to have been doing.
Robust action is needed. But a paralysed government risks letting problems and ambiguity linger, while false narratives grow. When the facts and the appalling mistakes of this case are properly considered, they show a mixed picture. Which of us really believes that, if we called 999 and said we were restraining an assailant, officers would not come quickly? Or that initially, for the first minute or two, they would not believe the account of those who made the call?
The US State Department had one thing right: there is such a thing as civilisational decline. A national debate that cannot defend truth when facts are distorted will eventually find itself governed by whichever outrage spreads fastest. “This is not a case about Sikhism,” said Nowak’s family. “This is not a case about racism. This is about murder.” It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of what was lost amid the noise.
"
Oh, the following info got lost in my edit: Fraser Nelson is the ex-editor of the Spectator, a very right-wing magazine. Just to show the difference between "right-wing" and "populist right".
"
And, on an entirely different subject (but still just within the heading of liberalism), I don't know how much non-Brits know about the awful case of the recent murder of Henry Nowak. Briefly, he was a young man who was stabbed several times by a Sikh man, whose brother then called the police to allege that the perpetrator had been the object of a racist attack. When the police arrived, although Nowak was on the floor and kept telling them he had been stabbed and couldn't breathe, the police didn't believe him and handcuffed him while he was dying. It will not amaze you to hear that Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, J D Vance et al have been making much hay on this subject.
“We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension… This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.”
- Family of Henry Nowak, 1 June
“Henry Nowak died the same way a civilisation dies. Abandoned. Handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”
- JD Vance, X, 5 June
I tried to post the link, but that doesn't really work, and copying and pasting as below loses the graphs and supporting evidence links, which is too bad. But I thought it was still worthwhile to show ObWi this:
The problem is not just the exploitation of a tragedy — it is the fictional picture of Britain that American populists increasingly rely upon.
Fraser Nelson
Jun 05, 2026
The Nowak family’s wish was never going to be respected: the brutal truth is that his death was just too politically rich not to exploit. Elon Musk had long been demanding the release of the police bodycam video shown to the court of Henry’s last moments. It would be Twitter dynamite, as galvanising for the digital right as George Floyd was for the BLM-left. Nothing solicits a more visceral human reaction than seeing, hearing a dying man cuffed by police. Certain politicians will always seek to exploit and direct such emotional reactions: JD Vance very much included.
Vance, the algorithm and the British Gotham
To frame the murder in racial terms - the result of immigration, rather than criminality - is precisely what Henry’s family begged politicians not to do. But his case is vital for JD Vance’s overall message: that British civilisation is somehow under attack because “the mass invasion of migrants” means streets full of murderers and a civilisational threat posed. The problem is that Vance and those on the populist right who promote “Britain is Broken” narrative cannot point to actual crime figures because they show that crime has actually halved - while immigration has doubled.
JD Vance is a smart guy who knows Britain and holidays here - so what’s he up to? Building a domestic MAGA narrative. His style of politics relies on building a narrative of conflict, keeping a rage (and fear) alight. A glance at the US government website, Aliens (‘they walk among us’) gives a sense of this vibe. The MAGA tribe that Vance seeks to lead want to know that “London has fallen” and Europe is ablaze. And Britain, with its Hindu Prime Ministers and Muslim mayors, is now a dumpster-fire of a country with civilisation being “erased” - all because of immigration, enabled by leftists. The target this time is Sikhs, who had until now been spared the treatment reserved for Muslims.
Britain, Vance is saying, is a cautionary tale for America. The barbarians are inside the European gates, and Henry Nowak’s death is an example of what happens when they get in. Pete Hegseth was at it in his D-Day speech - comparing migration to D-Day. Reform UK also draws this ‘invasion’ analogy. A media ecosystem has arisen to promote this narrative 24/7: Twitter nativist accounts like the one Vance cited. They scour Europe for examples of migrant crime and push them out to fuel the narrative of racial conflict or migrant vs native clashes.
The UK version of this is the “Broken Britain” narrative of Reform and you can see the overlap with MAGA (and, in James Orr, their advisers). Vance calls for “righteous anger;” Nigel Farage for “cold rage.” Both tell of racial tension, the attack of the white majority by the criminal minority. The ‘broken’ country Reform speaks of, the dumpster-fire that JD Vance points to, bears no more resemblance to the UK than Gotham City does to New York. But these gentlemen and their media allies are forever building up this picture of British Gotham with fake narratives, fake stats, made-up think tanks and books with concocted quotes.
Social media also craves this material. The more incendiary the post, the greater ‘engagement’. Musk has become a circus-master seeking to lay on a show: that’s why he was baying for the Nowak video. Even without him, the algorithms crave civil-war material. The populists and media networks both work by selling people a worldview, and saying you’ll only get this dope from them. Politically, it’s powerful. But it depends on deceit.
I have written my Times column about the lies being told about the Nowak murder - and the industrial-scale attempt to concoct fake narratives. I’d like to expand some of the points and share the data I researched in my column (all in my data library, here).
If what JD Vance said about Britain and migration was even halfway true, the post-2000 immigration surge would have sent our crime through the roof. Instead, crime has halved. So let’s look at the Britain that exists, and how it contrasts to the Vance caricature. Each of these charts have links to source data, so anyone can verify and replicate. This is the actual story of our country: it matters.
Henry Nowak’s murder was tragic, harrowing, sickening - but not part of a rising trend. In fact, in this country where immigrants make up one in five of workers, murders are hovering at a 40-year low in absolute terms and a 50-year low when population-adjusted.
Some argue that the decline of murder is a technicality: that medical advances means they don’t die. When I debated Zia Yusuf on Monday, he paraphrased me as saying [16 mins in] “come to London, you’ll be stabbed but thanks to our amazing emergency services you have a better chance of surviving.”
First, here are the figures for London murder: at the lowest in decades. Probably centuries, when you think of what came before.
And to Yusuf’s point - you’re not dying because the NHS is stitching you up? Well, the NHS keeps records of those admitted for knife crime (‘assault by sharp objects’). I updated it to take in the latest. It shows knife casualties at the lowest level since records began 27 years ago. Again, the opposite to the picture that Vance paints:-
It’s not just knife crime. When someone is assaulted and admitted to hospital, the NHS records it. The UK’s NHS model means we have very good data on this: you can mine it from their website. Again, we see hospital admissions for assault hovering at a multi-decade low.
You can click on the above to get ‘injury by bodily force’, by ‘blunt object’ etc: same trend. And let’s remember that one in four NHS staff who serve the country’s sick and injured are immigrants. The period of mass migration has coincided with an unprecedented drop in violent crime. Never have our streets been more racially mixed, it’s true. But seldom have they been safer to walk down. Surveys show women, in particular, say they feel markedly safer walking the streets than they did 30 years ago.
And yes, most crimes are not reported to the police. That’s why the Crime Survey of England & Wales asks 35,000 households to talk about their experience of crime: to give a gold-standard answer. Once again, it makes a mockery of the JD Vance caricature.
Click on the ‘police recorded’ tab and you’ll see a different picture - and here’s the paradox. Better policing means a greater share of crimes are reported. As the situation improves there are more interceptions, people are more confident in reporting crime. If more people were actually being stabbed, assaulted or killed, we’d see it in the hospital or murder figures. These figures show what the crime survey shows: violence roughly halving over the 20 years where the migrant population has doubled.
The switch from immigration to race
Vance is highly intelligent and strategic: unlike Trump he chooses words carefully. Nowak, he said, would still be alive today “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”
This is not a complaint about today’s immigration. Vickrum Digwa was born here. Vance, like Farage, has switched the criticism to those already here. Both seem to be anticipating how to keep the fight going when migration is under control - as it now is in the UK.
So Vance talks about the threat to the country of migrants’ children. As the father of a migrant’s child, it’s unusual for Vance to take this line: was his Indian wife granted citizenship by nation-hating elites? But set that aside. The narrative switch from immigration to the children of immigrants - portraying them in this case as lethal threats to the white majority - deserves our attention.
This is why we see papers like the Jewish News now defend Muslims: they see where this trend leads, and has always led. First it was the Muslims. Now, the Sikhs. Who do we think might be next? Rupert Lowe, the Reform pace-setter, has already started on Kosher meat. How long until Judaeo is dropped from the demands to protect Europe’s ‘Judaeo-Christian heritage?’.
Even on racial grounds, Vance’s narrative collapses. If you look at the arrest rate by ethnicity - a poor proxy for crime as it doesn’t adjust for social factors - it shows Indians significantly below whites.
What Henry Nowak’s murder reminds us is how far we still have to go. His attacker should never have been allowed to walk around Southampton with a massive knife: the law needs to be clarified so police know to reject false claims of religious exemption. Snatch crime is surging, as is shoplifting: if Vance wanted to talk about rising acquisitive crime he’d have a point. Sexual offences are not experiencing the same trend: there is no surge, but no collapse either.
Vance needs to tell his MAGA base that Britain is a migrant-addled criminal hellhole - and if they’re not careful, America will be too. MAGA politics means selling a worldview, rather than solutions. A dystopia needs victims and villains. This non-stop media circus needs recruits: new people to be angry at. More causes for the currency Vance incites:
Imagine if a UK Prime Minister had issued a statement after George Floyd’s death demanding Americans take to the streets over policing. Or after Rodney King. Or Michael Brown. Or Eric Garner. It would be seen as extraordinary overreach - a foreign leader attempting to promote domestic unrest on a false basis. The Swedes now have a ‘Psychological Defence Unit’ to deal with foreign powers who use fake news to sow internal division: it recognises that these fake, viral claims are assaults on the national fabric. And need to be responded to quickly with the cold, hard truth.
Vance is attacking a Britain that does not exist. Our islands are not seething with racial tension; polls show only one in four buy Farage’s ‘two-tier policing’ line. I suspect his departure this week from anti-migration politics into racial politics will prove a misjudgement. Yes, they won Twitter; by playing the race card they won attention. But I suspect lost most of the country,
Britain is not a place where people who look affrighted or askance at colleagues, neighbours and countrymen who have different faiths or skin colour. My own hunch is that MAGA is obsessed with Britain because we are living rejection of this thesis: a country that has, in Britishness, a unifying theme that people of all faiths, ethnicities and skin colours can unite around. Britain’s story is the opposite of what JD Vance says it is.
I’d like to close with the final paragraph of my Times column:-
Vance has one thing right: there is such a thing as 'civilisational decline’. A national debate that cannot defend truth when facts are distorted will eventually find itself governed by whichever outrage spreads fastest. “This is not a case about Sikhism,” said Nowak’s family. “This is not a case about racism. This is about murder.” It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of what was lost amid the noise
"
I know a lot of you take the Guardian, but for anyone who doesn't and is interested I thought this is very relevant to many of the discussions we have here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/04/a-good-life-for-the-99-isnt-a-pipe-dream-it-can-be-done-heres-how
On “When he’s right, he’s right”
In his case, of course, it's not for anything like humanitarian or rational geopolitical reasons, it's to do with his power and popularity (or the diminution thereof). But yup, when he's right he's right.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
Vive la resistance Cascadienne!
"
I look forward to your Canadian perspective, wonkie. Best of luck on the move.
Seconded. I'm only sorry that this is something that people like you and cleek, and michael cain, are even having to consider.
"
They haven't just ruined it, the present bunch have literally no conception of what fraternity even means. This is David Frum (an example of an almost extinct type of Republican) in the Atlantic on the "celebration":
Trump’s 250th Celebration Is a Fiasco
The president has turned a solemn occasion into a Day of Trump.
By David Frum
May 31, 2026, 11:09 AM ET
“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”
That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people. The only thing he had to do was—for once in his life—not act like an insane egomaniac.
He couldn’t do it.
As things are developing, we’ll remember the story of America’s grandest commemorations as follows:
One hundredth: a giant industrial exposition in Philadelphia.
Two hundredth: a tall-ships regatta in New York harbor.
Two hundred and fiftieth: a Trump flop in Washington, D.C.
Trump knows he has botched the anniversary. He says so himself. Last night, he posted the following indictment of his own program on his Truth Social platform:
We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, actually, far greater than it ever was before! It would have also been nice to see a Republican/Democrat union bring it back to life. The Kennedy Center is broken, unsafe, and $busted, and has been for many years! Judge Cooper also stated that the highly prestigious Board of the Center was not authorized to add on the name “TRUMP” despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money will be necessary for its successful reincarnation. So now, the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper and his wife, Amy Jeffress (obfuscation anyone?), should be ashamed of themselves. Judge Cooper, like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Translated into plain English, the president was complaining that seven of the nine acts scheduled to headline the July 4 weekend musical program canceled within 48 hours of one another because they realized that the event was degenerating into a hyperpartisan salute to Trump personally. His proposed solution? Replace the canceled acts with a Trump rally speech! A speech that will focus on Trump’s outrage that a judge blocked him from renaming the Kennedy Center after himself!
On July 4, 1776, Congress declared not only the severance of the political tie between 13 British colonies and their former homeland but also the end of monarchical government in the United States. For 150 years before 1776, the American colonies were ruled by a sequence of queens and kings. The names of those monarchs were inscribed on the American map: Virginia, Jamestown, Charleston, Annapolis, Georgia, and in innumerable King Streets and Queen Streets. Then, on one parchment, the new nation repudiated its political origin, and declared that “all men are created equal.” Whatever those words meant, however much slaveholder hypocrisy attended them, they promised a republican future for the people of the land.
The man who assumed responsibility for organizing the 250th commemoration of those words instead decided to make the day a royalist celebration of himself: seeking to emblazon his face on coinage and currency, displaying his image on banners in downtown Washington, and scheduling the central event of the celebration—a televised cage fight—for his own birthday on June 14. A cage fight may seem to some a barbarous way to honor Thomas Jefferson’s great manifesto. But many Americans will enjoy it, and on an occasion such as this, there’s room for a wide range of activities. There’s no room, however, to elevate the presidency created by the revolution of 1776 into a gaudy cult of personality. Trump’s drive to transform July 4, 2026, into a colossal national Day of Trump instead has triggered a rebellious update of the “Spirit of ’76.”
The Americans alive in 1776 shared and read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” That pamphlet denounced, 250 years before the event, the pretensions of Trump’s version of America 250: Government by kings, Paine wrote, “was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones.”
Trump’s effort to rebrand the semiquincentennial as the Day of Trump left no time, budget, or effort available for the true purpose of the anniversary. As his own self-celebration has fizzled, a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. The Reflecting Pool will be repainted too blue by an overpaid no-bid contractor. The statues on the Memorial Bridge will be gilded too brightly by another overpaid no-bid contractor. There’s a project to erect an Albert Speer–style triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac. But Trump has failed to deliver the victories that the arch might have memorialized—and as the war in Iran has stalemated, so the plans for the arch have stalled. Most symbolic of all, the White House is flanked by a stop-start construction site where the East Wing used to stand. Trump shook down government favor-seekers for enough money to begin work on a presidential ballroom complex, but he did not shake enough to finish it. Now the taxpayer is being asked to pay the balance. A federal judge has ordered work paused pending a vote in Congress, and Trump has whittled down his majorities in the House and Senate to the point where he apparently cannot pass a funding bill. If he loses control of either house in November, construction is unlikely to resume. Instead of a Trump Ballroom, the most conspicuous feature of the Trump White House in 2026 is a gaping Trump Hole.
The greatest of all Fourth of July orations was delivered in 1852, on the 76th anniversary of American independence, by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. In the opening passages of that speech, Douglass observed ominously: “The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times.” Yet even as Douglass foresaw the coming Civil War and lamented the nation’s flaws, he still expressed hope that “high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny.” Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment. But the nation honored by the glorious moment still retains the power of recovery and renewal praised by Douglass. As we contemplate the farce of Trump Day, we can turn our imaginations to what yet might be for America at 300.
We as individuals may or may not live to see it, but we can believe in it all the same. We can believe in it all the more fervently for this experience of living through a chapter of American history that so flagrantly betrays the Founders’ hopes and so arduously tests the Founders’ legacy.
On “The quiet grief of adult friendship”
wonkie, let's not make comparisons! I did what I thought was right, and so do you. I stand by what I said.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
ps That wow was shock depending on who the "folks" and "them" mentioned could include. We certainly know that sympathy with Israel is declining steeply in e.g. the US and UK, but I'm really hoping that someone who has been an open and consistent opponent of Netanyahu would be credible enough for "the benefit of the doubt", at least among informed and unprejudiced people.
"
Harari has been a consistent opponent to Netanyahu, but he’s Israeli. it’s getting to the point where I don’t think folks are prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Wow.
Moving on to the Adam Tooze Wang Hui discussion, it reminded me how much I prefer transcripts, especially accurate ones; the simultaneous (I assume) one had "tutu" for "total" and "pip" for "people"! Luckily I am quite used to Chinese accents in English, so could mainly keep up, although I had to work quite hard to know who "Lucian" was (Lu Xun) since I was not familiar with him!
"
nous, a lot of what goes on in the world reminds me of The Ones That Walk Away from Omelas.
On “Open Thread time”
And Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair's spin doctor, and the model (in In the Thick of it) for the immortal Malcolm Tucker of blessed memory. A propos of which, Tony Blair's unbelievably unhelpful intervention into UK politics today shows how out of touch he is with our reality....
On “The quiet grief of adult friendship”
Oh, wonkie. That is beautiful as well as sad. Thank you for your honesty and your pure soul.
I cut almost all contact with the GLOML many decades ago - he had made me unbelievably unhappy for years. After that, and after a Iull of a few years, I spoke to him about once a year - he always tried to get me to come and see him but I knew he was dangerous to me, so I always said no. When he was dying in hospital in the early 2000s (one of his friends let me know) I spent three days sitting with him (he was only compos mentis enough to recognise me the first day) and was with him when he died. Just before, I told him I loved him. I was and am glad to have been there.
Life is a very strange business.
On “Open Thread time”
This is from a depressing piece by Tina Brown (whom I find reasonably astute about US electoral politics, and I like her turn of phrase) which she ends like this:
Don’t expect House members to return emboldened when Trump has just gone four for four in the primaries, whacking, not just Cornyn, but his Epstein Files Transparency Act foe Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Brad Raffensperger, who committed the ultimate crime of failing to “find” 11,780 more Trump votes in Georgia in the 2020 election. Sorry, not sorry about Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana also hitting the bricks. He’s the physician who oversaw a nationally-recognized vaccine campaign in his home state, but later revealed his inner worm by casting the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. Trump punished him anyway for having voted in 2021 for his second impeachment. So long, mofo.
Every liberal commentator now bangs on about an assured mid-term shellacking for the POTUS party over rising gas prices, thanks to the Trump-created catastrophe of the Strait of Hormuz closure and the universally unpopular Iran war. I suspect they and the polls are wrong again. It’s not just the creeping success of Republican redistricting creating more seats than Democratic efforts to do the same. Trump has found a diabolical way to separate his personal charisma from the destruction he perpetrates and the corruption he normalizes. He’s the angel of sabotage, freed from the shackles of his own malign deeds by the Supreme Court, the GOP’s moral turpitude, and the universal glint of greed from the Wall Street honchos, Silicon Valley bros, and Palm Beach plutocrats who see that the presidency is open for business. As last week’s Brennan Center newsletter put it, “There is a zone of lawlessness around the Oval Office.” In Trump’s first term, he was restrained by the need for a second, and by advisers schooled in the now-quaint ethos of governing by accepted norms. But then, he learned something transformative. Speaking to the NYT in January about prohibiting his family from profiteering overseas from proximity to official business in his first term, Trump said that, “he got no credit for it.” He then added a killer kicker that made less news at the time but has stayed with me as a rare moment of truth: “I found out that nobody cared.”
If there is any message that crystalizes the 250th anniversary of the U.S., it is not that America has changed but that Trump has changed America. There will be no snapback when he’s gone. Even as his approval ratings tank and the country is hurting, it feels as if his base has become wider and deeper and represents a new national state of mind. Tuned out on our phones, mesmerized by money porn, high on the idolatry of the big flashy win, we are getting used to the erosion of the rule of law, the threats to free speech, the banishment of government watchdogs, and the chasm of inequality. After ten years of Trump bludgeoning the first principles of the American experiment (ten because I don’t count the disappearing ink of Biden’s lame tenure when every headline was a new Trump indictment, scandal, or toxic blast from exile in Mar-a-Lago), Trump has refashioned the country in his image.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
And, on the subject of liberalism, and Israel, and to spare lj from having to link to Ezra Klein again, this is EK interviewing Yuval Noah Harari yesterday in the NYT (with transcript):
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-yuval-noah-harari.html?unlocked_article_code=1.llA.aGWB.W0ivhMj0NMe9&smid=url-share
"
I can't disagree with anything you say there! But I still think not considering Harris to be the lesser evil compared to Trump, on this and so many other issues, was wrong and has been proved to be so. However, it goes without saying that you too can believe what you want!
"
At that point in time the Democrats were not the lesser evil because they were enabling the indiscriminate mass slaughter of Palestinians and the wholesale destruction of their homeland. Is that really so hard to understand?
novakant, that was not the situation to anybody who had been paying attention to the candidates, their statements and views, for any decent period, and who were not at the time prevented from rational thought by personal bereavement and trauma. As Donald said (and I don't think ObWi has ever had a sterner critic of Biden and the Dems' actions with regard to Israel and the Palestinians) even he voted for Harris on the basis of "the lesser evil".
"
Thanks nous. And also for the AI stuff on the other thread.
Speaking as a liberal, I thought this was rather inspiring:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/24/bruce-springsteen-trump-resistance
"
I must say, I too did not think cleek was displaying contempt, or whatever the noun is from "despising". I thought he was displaying his impotent rage at how people had been so deceived, despite their avowed values, that they could ignore the evidence of their own eyes and blindly follow a lying, murderous charlatan.
On “The quiet grief of adult friendship”
This article has been on my mind, in a melancholy sort of way. I have long realised that new friends seem (almost by definition) insubstantial compared to old friends, and as the ranks of old friends thin out I think often and with resignation about Christopher Hitchens saying you can't make old friends. Such is life, I guess.
By the way, reading some of the comments, various people seem to be convinced it is written by AI, with many of the tell-tale signs. I have already gathered in the past that I am not any good at spotting when that is the case - does anybody here with experience of this phenomenon have an opinion on whether this is indeed AI generated?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.