A few days before the Lunar New Year, and barely a week into the new Trump administration, China dropped a bombshell. With most of the West completely transfixed by the promise of AI, and stock market valuations now completely tethered …
How small dick energy gave us Trump
Lou Reed was right. It’s hard being a man. In my mid-Twenties I spent three months living with my family in the mountains of Kabylia. As an analytical tool, that period was incredibly useful. Algeria, by comparison to the West, …
Meet the original MAGA imperialist
Amid all the hand-wringing about Donald Trump Making Greenland Great Again, it’s worth noting that #47 was hardly the first president to envision America as one great swath of global real estate, rightfully his. For as it turns out, imagining …
Can Trump make William McKinley great again?
If America’s 45th presidency was founded on the promise of Making America Great Again, Donald Trump’s priorities appear to have shifted for its 47th. Now, in part, it’s about Making McKinley Great Again.
It’s been more than 120 years since …
TikTok: weapon of mass distraction
For thousands of years, humans sought to subjugate their enemies by inflicting pain, misery and terror. But as our understanding of psychology has developed, it has become easier to evoke other emotions as a method of control. As such, even …
Donald Trump is the end of Hilarity
With hindsight, Covid was a high-water mark of elite idealism: an apparently widespread belief that you could simply decide what was real, then make it so via a combination of fiat declaration and media censorship. And whatever else Trump brings, …
Donald Trump’s second coming
The Donald Trump who will begin his second term today is a bigger political bruiser than the neophyte who arrived in Washington after his shocking 2016 upset of Hillary Clinton. The White House he has assembled is a more formidable …
Europe is clinging to yesterday
And so, farewell to the last of the trans-Atlantic US presidents. Donald Trump’s inauguration marks the end of an era: Zeitenwende as the Germans call it. And no, the Europeans won’t be alright.
Over the weekend I was re-reading The …
Border hawks need the labour Left
My grandfather Jesús came to the United States to work on the railroads and harvest crops at the tail end of World War II. He arrived through the bracero programe, the first legal guest-worker system in American history. Designed to …
Why Europe fears free speech
We all know the old joke: when a European referendum delivers the “wrong” outcome, the country votes again until they get it “right”. The EU thought this would be the case after Brexit. But so far, no one’s laughing.
If …
Is Elon the new Enoch?
In the opening of E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, there’s a lovely metaphor of the work of an historian. History, he writes, is like a bottomless well stretching into eternity, visible only by human recollection falling …
Annexation has always haunted Canada
“It is her own soul that Canada risks today.” Rudyard Kipling’s cable to a Montreal newspaper was an explosive intervention in the country’s 1911 election, which turned on a familiar question: should Canadians submit to the “economic force” of the …
Is Trump the most libertarian president ever?
It’s unusual to have a single figure, Donald Trump, dominate the political life of a country for a decade — and for nobody, really, to have any clear definition of his core political philosophy. For much of that decade, Democrats …
Trump is starting an oil war
Has Donald Trump been reading Don Quixote? Last week, the incoming President warned the UK that it was making “a very big mistake” by raising tax on North Sea oil. His solution? “Get rid of windmills.”
It was classic Trump, …
Liberalism won’t survive 2025
It is an odd feature of America’s political system that the drawn-out handover of power from one ruler to his successor takes place over the Christmas holidays: the liminal moment when the waning year gives birth to its successor, a …