Category: USA

Suddenly, everyone’s worried about surging antisemitism. Remarkable. In recent decades, antisemitism has been the prejudice that dare not speak its name. The “Israel apartheid weeks” on campus, the blood libels about Israelis wantonly killing Arab children, the high proportion of attacks on Jews by Muslims – no one was allowed to call this anti-Jewish hatred. Anyone who did so was accused of Islamophobia, sanitizing the crimes of Israel by waving the shroud of the Holocaust and so on. Now people are shouting about antisemitism almost every day. Recent events are…

The British political and media class is today poring over the entrails of yesterday’s by-elections. The Tories won an unprecedented victory in Copeland, while Labour defeated the UKIP leader in Stoke. The discussion is over whether Labour’s hapless far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn is finished or will use the victory in Stoke to stagger on, and whether the useless UKIP leader Paul Nuttall made a strategic error in targeting Labour rather than Conservative voters. This all misses the point. The by-elections point to something rather bigger that is now taking place.…

Can you ever believe a word you read or hear nowadays on the media, mainstream or otherwise? Do journalists still uphold the distinction between fact and opinion? Listen to me here discussing fake news with my colleagues Michael Portillo, Matthew Taylor and Claire Fox on BBC Radio Four’s The Moral Maze.

The reason nobody saw the people’s revolt coming is that political correctness is too easily dismissed. Reason has been supplanted by a secular inquisition, complete with an index of prohibited ideas. It is in effect a dictatorship of virtue, drawing upon the doctrine first promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of forcing people to be free. Of course it’s not freedom at all but a form of moral extortion: extracting a free pass for bad or questionable behaviour under threat of character assassination and social opprobrium. My column in The Times of…

Every day we hear of folk who are simply terrified out of their wits by what Donald Trump may do and the terrible things he supposedly represents, amongst them violence and fascism. The London Review of Books is a highbrow literary magazine whose staff and contributors might be assumed overwhelmingly to think President Trump is a menace to humanity. It might be imagined that such sensitively attuned souls are themselves, in stark contrast, blessed not just with an elevated aesthetic sense but also with the highest moral sensibilities commensurate with…