James Kirchick | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

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

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

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

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

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

Diary - 16 May 2019

Diary - 16 May 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ominous political genius of Steve Bannon

The ominous political genius of Steve Bannon

The ominous political genius of Steve Bannon

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

The ominous political genius of Steve Bannon

Who does Bernie Sanders think he is?

Who does Bernie Sanders think he is?

Who does Bernie Sanders think he is?

You have to admire Bernie Sanders’s chutzpah. For almost the entirety of his over 40-year career in politics, Sanders pointedly abstained from joining the Democratic Party. He is a 'democratic socialist', officially registered as an independent, and has never been elected to office as a Democrat, seeing that party as insufficiently collectivist. Sanders only affiliated himself with the Democrats last year, solely for the purpose of trying to capture the party’s presidential nomination. Now that he’s lost that battle, he will return to the Senate as an independent. Given how Sanders has shown absolutely no loyalty to the Democratic Party – indeed, he has run against, and defeated, Democrats at the ballot box – it is the height of hypocrisy for him and his supporters to wail about the Democratic National Committee’s alleged 'favoritism' towards his erstwhile primary challenger, Hillary Clinton.

Who does Bernie Sanders think he is?

Hillary’s left turn

Hillary’s left turn

Hillary’s left turn

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

Hillary’s left turn

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

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

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

How many more civilian planes need to be shot down over European airspace before Europe’s leaders get serious about the threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia? As the smoke clears from Thursday’s horrific downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, many will try to deflect blame from landing squarely where it should: on Russian President Vladimir Putin. ‘Airliner tragedy in Ukraine shows US & EU erred by not pushing to keep Ukr[aine] as neutral buffer state, not potential EU/NATO member,’ tweeted Stephen Walt, a prominent voice of the ‘realist’ school of foreign policy and a leading apologist for the Russian government. RT, Moscow’s 24-hour propaganda news network, has gone so far as to blame the Ukrainian government for shooting down the plane, on the grounds that they thought it was actually Putin’s personal jet.

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

How fascist is Ukraine’s Svoboda?

How fascist is Ukraine’s Svoboda?

How fascist is Ukraine’s Svoboda?

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

How fascist is Ukraine’s Svoboda?

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

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

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

After all the fuss, the billions spent, the calls for boycotts and so on, the Sochi Winter Olympics will begin next week. Given the incredibly low expectations, the Russian Games may even be judged a success — as long as the weather stays cold and no terrorist attack takes place. But Vladimir Putin should not be too smug, because his broader campaign against homosexuality has backfired spectacularly. The Russian President’s decision to sign a law prohibiting ‘the propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors’ last summer probably made sense to him at the time. This measure, along with one that bans the adoption of Russian children not just by homosexuals but also by heterosexuals residing in countries that have gay marriage on the books, is reportedly supported by 74 per cent of Russians.

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

This Town, by Mark Leibovich - review

This Town, by Mark Leibovich - review

Many books have been written about the corruption, venality and incestuousness that characterise Washington DC, but none has been as highly anticipated or amusing as This Town. Written by Mark Leibovich, the senior national correspondent for the New York Times magazine, it has been on the minds of Washington’s chattering classes for at least two years before its release. Sparking that interest was the revelation that a young, ambitious Capitol Hill press aide, whom Leibovich had been cultivating as a source, was secretly forwarding him emails that provided an insight into how Washington really works. That story was broken by Politico, the political web portal founded in 2007 that has revolutionised the way American politics is discussed (if there is anything like a Greek chorus in Leibovich’s tale, it is Politico’s Mike Allen, the mysterious author of a daily email newsletter who serves as Washington’s omniscient narrator).

The British paedophile who’s still on the run

The British paedophile who’s still on the run

The British paedophile who’s still on the run

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

The British paedophile who’s still on the run

When the bloke in the bar turns out to be a paedophile

When the bloke in the bar turns out to be a paedophile

When the bloke in the bar turns out to be a paedophile

To the British tabloids, he was ‘the Pied Piper of paedophiles’, the UK’s ‘most wanted child abuser’. But we all knew him as Willem: the fat, jolly, occasionally lecherous Dutchman who was a mainstay of Prague’s expatriate gay community. If you visited one of the city’s same-sex watering holes before last August, when Czech police arrested him, chances are that you would have seen, if not heard, the Pied Piper of Prague holding court at the end of the bar. ‘He liked his drugs, his drinks and his rent boys,’ one mutual friend, a young man I’ll name Thomas, recalls of Willem. The pursuit of such pleasures is hardly unusual in the Czech capital, which has long been known as the ‘Bangkok of Europe’ for its legalised prostitution and seedy sex club scene, attracting an unmistakable class of northern European gentleman tourist (of both the homosexual and heterosexual persuasion).

When the bloke in the bar turns out to be a paedophile

‘Vote for Romney and I’ll unfriend you’: why I won’t debate politics on Facebook

‘Vote for Romney and I’ll unfriend you’: why I won’t debate politics on Facebook

‘Vote for Romney and I’ll unfriend you’: why I won’t debate politics on Facebook

On July 4, 2009, the day Sarah Palin announced that she would step down from the Governorship of Alaska, the perfect quip popped into my head. As we are wont to do in this age of social media, I immediately logged onto my Facebook account and typed the most famous line from Gerald Ford’s inauguration speech into the status update box: ‘Our long national nightmare is over.' Minutes later, a distant acquaintance (the older brother of a high school friend with whom I had long ago fallen out of touch), posted a comment that I found surprising given what I knew (from earlier Facebook comment discussions) to be his radically left-wing political views. ‘Look, I completely disagree with most of Palin’s politics,’ he wrote in the way of political throat clearing.

‘Vote for Romney and I’ll unfriend you’: why I won’t debate politics on Facebook