Clad in his signature red vest, 6’7” Glenn Youngkin cuts an inoffensive figure. I’ve heard the college-basketball-player-turned-Virginia-governor described as “a stretched-out Brett Kavanaugh”; both men have prep-school roots and friendly-jock demeanours. It’s an aesthetic that shouldn’t be underestimated in explaining …
The many ghosts of Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama has always been surrounded by ghosts of herself, each one a projection of someone else’s fears or fantasies. She was a terrorist fist-bumper. She was a fashion icon. She was a shrill liberal scold or the original girlboss …
Anti-racism attacks my American Dream
What was I — a lifelong Democrat — doing at an election watch party in rural Virginia, surrounded by Republicans? As Ron DeSantis, 800 miles away, filled a huge TV screen with a post-landslide victory speech, he provided part of …
Why I’m voting Republican
The day I received my absentee ballot from the DC government, there was a story in the Washington Post about the DC Council’s imminent vote: “The bill would eliminate most mandatory minimum sentences, allow for jury trials in almost all …
How free should US states be?
Years ago, I visited America’s most dignified factory. A place of noise, dust and heaving trucks. And yet of higher purpose. Granite Industries of Vermont is a principal maker and supplier of headstones for the government.
The factory workers constructed …
Sex strikes won’t win the midterms
American culture will sexualise anything in order to sell it to young people: cars, hamburgers, and for decades now, voting. In 1990, the awareness-raising non-profit Rock the Vote sought to bring youths to the polls with a TV spot featuring …
Clowns have captured the GOP
Only a few short months ago, the Democratic Party looked to be doomed. Joe Biden’s approval rating was scraping historic lows in the mid-30s, Republicans were building a solid lead on the Generic Congressional Ballot, and story after story detailed …
The progressive puritans will fail
Fun has always carried a little bit of danger in its back pocket: there’s something radical, even anarchical, about having too much of it. “We were just having some fun” could be the thing you say to the neighbours who’ve …
Does Jill Biden think you are a taco?
First Lady of the United States Jill Biden is the outrage cycle’s main character this week, after she compared a coalition of Hispanic voters to breakfast tacos. The offence occurred during an event called, and I am not making this …
America needs to calm down
Wherever you look someone is sounding the alarm about how America has been taken over by evil extremists and is going to hell in a handbasket. This sort of talk used to be confined to the fringes: you’d actually have …
Pro-choice Republicans could rescue Kansas
Growing up in Kansas in the Eighties, nobody could have convinced me that the state would one day become the protector of abortion rights in the Midwest. Traditionally a bright Red stronghold, Kansas has been the site of massive, and …
The death of the conservative elite
The Republican Party, from a certain perspective, is in tatters. It is trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with Donald Trump, who, although he ended his term in disgrace and remains obsessed with relitigating the 2020 election, still commands the loyalty …
Why Hispanics gave up on the Left
For just over a month, America’s first Spanish-language conservative radio station has been trying to win over the country’s most-talked about political demographic: increasingly right-leaning Hispanics. It couldn’t have launched at a better time.
When asked about the inspiration behind …