This is Laura Loomer we’re talking about, though, not some pundit across the aisle with whom Kristof simply “disagree[s].” She’s the 33-year-old self-styled investigative journalist who, through a combination of incendiary rhetoric and a close relationship with President Trump, successfully polices the MAGA movement. Understandably, she is — or at least, used to be —  a long-time enemy of the mainstream establishment.

Loomer has a history of rhetoric that should disqualify her from any favorable mention from Kristof. On Oct. 9, 2023, she tweeted: “The people in GAZA were given plenty of time to evacuate. Israel is going to burn it to the ground today and it will be uninhabitable, which is the way it should be. Watch today for jihadist sympathizers online who cry about ‘human rights violations’ and ‘genocide.’ Those people are terrorist enablers.… If all of the Islamic neighboring nations care about the people in Gaza so much, then they can open their borders and take them. But not even the neighboring Islamic nations want those people. That’s the elephant in the room, right? Nobody wants them because they behave like barbaric wild animals.”

Her posting habits haven’t changed much since. Last month, Loomer tweeted: “Ban Muslims from holding office in America.” Adding, “this time, make it a Muslim Ban as it was intended to be. Not an Islamic travel ban.” And last week, she suggested that she should become Secretary of Homeland Security. 

“I promise you I will actually make ICE the paramilitary force it should have always been to round up and forcefully remove jihadist invaders and Third World illegal aliens from our country. I will get the job done.” (The job’s current occupant, Markwayne Mullin, is apparently insufficiently anti-Muslim, having met with the Qataris.) DHS Secretary Loomer’s first order of business would be to send Leftist uncle-nephew commentator duo Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker “back to Turkey.” 

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Loomer warned that, should Kamala Harris become president, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Among those who rebuked her for her comment was the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who called Loomer “toxic.” (As it happens, Loomer has reportedly mused about taking up Graham’s role as national uber-hawk in the wake of the senator’s death.) Or take how, two years earlier, she attended a white-nationalist convention and attempted to appeal to them, notwithstanding their hatred for Jews like herself: “I consider myself to be a white advocate.” 

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The uniparty media’s pro-war twins

By Nikos Mohammadi

Loomer used to be vehemently critical of Ukraine and its wartime president, Volodymyr Zelensky. But as the Trump administration has changed its position, Loomer has shifted, too — to enthusiastic endorsement of the war. And so, in the latter half of July, she went on a trip to Ukraine and later released a 45-minute, overwhelmingly softball interview with Zelensky. While she was there, a sequence of “respectable” liberals, center-Left and center-Right alike, forgot their misgivings to loudly celebrate her. 

On a CNN panel on July 23, a day before Loomer released the interview, the network’s anti-Trump but Right-tilting commentator S.E. Cupp argued: “If she’s gonna do propaganda, I’d rather it be Zelensky’s version of propaganda than Putin’s.” Cupp, praising Loomer, additionally intoned, “It’s one thing to be a keyboard warrior; it’s easy to say things from the safety of the patio at Mar-A-Lago. It’s much different when you go to a place.” 

Erin Burnett, who was moderating the panel (and who herself conducted a more-than-flattering interview with Zelensky back in 2023), then turned to former Obama adviser David Axelrod. Burnett noted that Loomer “had these opinions on Ukraine which were based on propaganda and a lack of any kind of experience there” — before rather quickly listing some of her more controversial comments. Axelrod, in response, opined on Zelensky sitting down with Loomer: “My goodness, the things one has to do to save their country.”  

Other prestigious outlets and personalities have also changed their tune on Loomer. Peter Harrell of the Carnegie Endowment said that her ideological shift and her interview with Zelensky were “a powerful reminder of the importance of being open to engaging with people you might profoundly disagree with.” The journalist Eli Lake, writing in The Free Press, hailed Laura Loomer as a “lifelong learner.” Batya Ungar-Sargon, the self-described “MAGA Lefty” who has attacked Trump World racism in the past, amicably interviewed Loomer following her return to the United States. And just this week, Neera Tanden — president of the Center for American Progress, the Clintonian think tank — retweeted Loomer.

Loomer is far from the only unhinged character feted by respectable liberals in recent months. Her coastal-cosmopolitan mirror is Masih Alinejad, another online activist and self-described journalist. Born in Iran but based in New York, Alinejad has made a career, partially bankrolled by the US government, in being an Iranian emigre who says precisely the right thing from a feminist perspective for Western hawks. 

Alinejad’s first New York Times op-ed appeared in July 2018. Bari Weiss, then an opinion editor at the paper, enthused on Twitter: “Her name should be known by anyone who describes herself as a feminist.” Alinejad returned to the paper of record in January 2026 — to make a human-rights case for war with Iran. Lamenting that Trump hadn’t yet bombed her home country, she concluded, “inaction has a body count.”

Regardless of what she’s talking about, Alinejad’s dominant mode is theatrical. We’ve seen her weep with joy on the city streets over the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We’ve also seen her in a bathing suit doing a cold plunge alongside a man to demonstrate that she couldn’t legally do the same in Iran. These are perfectly understandable reactions for a woman who has suffered under the Islamist tyranny of the mullahs. The problem is that her dramatic mode of expression is used to legitimize a massively unpopular war, which has plunged Washington into yet another Middle East quagmire. 

When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in February, she took to Weiss’s CBS News to sarcastically offer him a spot in one of her “safe houses” — she claims to have been targeted by the Iranian regime, and to be under constant threat of assassination. Recently, she threw a fit about her Citi Bike not working, because Mamdani would rather arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than see to basic services functioning. Never mind that the Citi Bike program is privately operated by Lyft and therefore doesn’t fall under the mayor’s purview. And she’s unabashed by her errors: she went on Persian-language media in the aftermath of the US attack on the Minab girls’ school that claimed 175 lives, to recant her support for the war. “It’s obvious I’ll sometimes be wrong,” she said in Persian. 

Despite such incoherencies, Alinejad gets invited to places like the Aspen Ideas Festival, where she broke into song (poorly), supposedly to test whether any men in the crowd would get “aroused.” Women in the Islamic Republic are not officially allowed to sing solo in public. This was intended to be a demonstration of the evil of the Iranian regime, which is understandable, but all Iranian men seemed to fall into the dragnet of her condemnation. “Men are the problem,” she said and pointed to her co-panelist, the Iranian-born Leftist essayist Arash Azizi (an UnHerd contributor). Azizi had suggested that Iran should not be kicked out of FIFA over the country’s restrictions on female spectators at sporting events. “These are the men in my country. My women go to stadium; they get killed,” Alinejad said. 

Both of these activists, Loomer and Alinejad, are often ridiculous in their self-presentation and sketchy on their facts, so why do respectable news organizations champion them, and what does it say about American liberal institutions’ claims to “respectability”?

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How MAGA became the war party

By Sohrab Ahmari

The mainstream is being especially kind to Loomer right now. The AP, which is supposed to be a neutral news wire, spoke to Loomer in a Kiev bomb shelter, a story that made its front page on July 26. “Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged,” was the most critical note in the AP’s report — referring to how, when Loomer initially arrived in Kiev, she posted, “One thing I really love about Ukraine is I haven’t seen a single Muslim here.” 

The AP should have also acknowledged that Loomer’s defense of Ukraine is at least partially on racial grounds: she believes in a “based” Aryan Ukraine in opposition to an Asiatic, Eastern Russia. Loomer’s original tweet about there not being “a single Muslim” in Ukraine made oppositional reference to an old Putin remark from 2015, that “Islam plays [an] important role in Russia.” But the AP left that out, only focusing on the comfortable pro-war-with-Russia crossover.

Ukraine does have a native, Muslim minority in its Tatars, and the drone factory Loomer visited there, pledging to “kill Russians” in honor of Sen. Graham, is owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. Akhmetov, in case his last name doesn’t give it away, is a Muslim. Loomer appeared to be unaware of the connection. 

One possibility is that the people who work for news organizations, all products of America’s liberal class, are either subconsciously or knowingly reinforcing Washington’s overarching view of the world. Loomer is now saying what we like, so let’s boost her. Take, once more, CNN. This was the network that, during Trump 1.0, ran ads about how “this is an apple,” no matter how many people “scream ‘banana, banana, banana’ over and over and over again.” The implication being that MAGA — those low-class news-questioners — wanted you to believe the apple was a banana. 

Nine years on, “banana screamers” who advance US geopolitical aims appear to be better than those who don’t.

The “centrist respectability” was always a lie. Because their interests now align, Loomer, like Alinejad before her, gains the endorsement, however uneasily or cheekily, of the US liberal establishment. It would be difficult to provide a better example of unquestioning adherence to dogma. Geopolitics trumps all.

The interview went viral in 2012. And the final line, shortly after it was uttered, became culturally ubiquitous, particularly on social media where it proliferated as a reaction GIF — it was also, crucially, the subject of a fierce debate about whether its popularity was racist. Did we love Sweet Brown for her story and her screen presence, or was it because she was a walking, talking stereotype of the archetypal sassy black woman?

That debate has waxed, waned and evolved over the years, but the one thing it stubbornly refuses to do is die. Five years after Sweet Brown’s original interview, it was given new weight with the coining of a phrase. In a Teen Vogue essay, Lauren Michele Jackson described the act of non-black people using reaction GIFs featuring black Americans as “digital blackface”. And so, a trend was born: The New York Times weighed in, followed by The Guardian, followed by the mommy bloggers and the service journalists. Just when it seemed like the internet had squeezed the concept dry, it returned again, last weekend, in the form of a clickbaity banner on the front page of CNN: “What’s ‘digital blackface’? And why is it wrong when White people use it?”

For those who remember this argument in its original iteration, the immediate reaction is probably best encapsulated by a meme from the pre-social internet — not one of the ones that allegedly constitutes digital blackface, but the one from Mean Girls, in which an enraged Regina George hisses: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” We do not need to do this again. This argument was transparent, racebaiting, outrage fodder even when it was new; now, it is all of that and tired.

If anything, the notion that, as CNN’s John Blake insists, employing reaction GIFs featuring black people represents “one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism” is illustrative of just how badly the discourse is foundering in the wake of the massive racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. All that momentum, all that money, all those marches and protests and pleas for real change end up being squandered again and again on luxury beliefs: galaxy-brained takes that circulate like wildfire among members of the coastal media class while being utterly bewildering to any normal person. The absurdity of Blake’s argument seems obvious even for those who think America is a long way from being a post-racial paradise. This is a country where black citizens remain underrepresented in key positions of power, and disproportionately suffer from poverty and violence. How terminally online must one be to think that the “most insidious” form of racism comes in the form of some 60-year-old Facebook grandma in Des Moines who feels that her emotions are best represented by a GIF of Stanley from The Office rolling his eyes?

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The narcissism of America's race politics

By Tomiwa Owolade

But then, one gets the sense that no one does think this. Not even the people who are earning a living — or at least, a few hundred freelance dollars a pop — by arguing as much. Every writer who tackles this topic has dutifully attempted to connect the mimetic phenomenon of reaction GIFs to the atrocious (and happily defunct) practice of minstrel shows featuring performers in actual blackface. But given the integrated state of contemporary society, and the substantive difference between posting a video of a black cultural icon and doing a mocking impression of one yourself, that’s a tough argument to sell.

Often, those recycling it don’t even seem to be trying. Women’s Health claims that using the wrong reaction GIFs isn’t just upstream from minstrelsy, but also from murder: “[As] it has been proven throughout U.S. history, a Black man can be killed for demonstrating aggression, confusion, or even indifference. Popular GIFs of Kanye West looking serious, Nick Young with question marks around his face, and others, show Black men expressing themselves which, while technically be harmless [sic], can oftentimes be fatal.”

This isn’t just unpersuasive; it’s practically incoherent. Does anyone believe this argument? Does anyone even believe that the writer believed it? The whole enterprise feels so convictionless, more like a simulation of an opinion than the real thing.

If anything, the concept of “digital blackface” reads like an attempt to meme more racism into existence by claiming that it’s already everywhere. Like the too-credulous coverage of outrageous hate crimes that turn out to be hoaxes, stories about the hidden racism of reaction GIFs suggest the need for constant vigilance, which in turn fuels perpetual mistrust. The overarching narrative, as I wrote last year, is one of a deep and roiling river of racial conflict running beneath the surface of American society. The moral of the story is that we can only ever relate to each other through the lens of power, privilege, resentment, and loathing — that, as Robin DiAngelo instructs, there can be no question of racism’s presence in any given interaction, only of how the racism manifests.

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Is it racist to like big butts?

By Kat Rosenfield

It’s a pessimistic and profoundly superstitious mode of thinking — racism, the devil lurking in every room — and one that has spawned a particularly fervent adherence among millennial white women, for whom self-help and self-hatred have always been inextricably intertwined. Blake’s essay quotes a young woman named Elizabeth Halford who narrates her use of reaction GIFs with the ecstasy of the confessing sinner: “I’ve appropriated Black trauma as punchlines and peeled their faces off to put on my own and say what I can’t say, to make you laugh, or just because it went viral.”

It’s hard to imagine who or what is served by this confession, apart from Halford’s masochism. It is also hard to imagine that any GIF could represent a greater affront to black people than the idea that selecting said GIF is akin to peeling their faces off.

But more discouraging than the pessimism (and bizarre Hannibal Lecter comparisons) inherent to this worldview is its racism — and not the insidious, subtle kind. The original Teen Vogue essay introducing the concept of digital blackface bemoaned that “black reaction GIFs have become so widespread that they’ve practically become synonymous with just reaction GIFs”, as if the ubiquitous presence of black people in American culture is a bad thing.

Blake’s CNN piece calls out specific, seminal memes: an outraged Tyra Banks on America’s Next Top Model shouting, “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!”, or Michael Jordan crying at his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Maybe these are “black reaction GIFs”, in that they are reaction GIFs featuring black people. But surely what they capture is something bigger. These are American celebrities. This is American culture.

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Race was invented by liberals

By Sohrab Ahmari

But lately, an impulse has found a regrettable level of validation in American media, academia, and cultural institutions — an impulse to fracture and resegregate society along racial lines. American colleges hold exclusive, separate graduation ceremonies that segregate students by racial background. Lizzo, a multiple Grammy winner and one of the most famous musicians in the country, is forced to defend herself against allegations that her music is too popular among white people. An influencer goes viral for urging white moviegoers to stay away from the new Black Panther movie. Media institutions fret over race-matching the authors of book, theatre, and film reviews to the content they’re critiquing.

All of this is great, of course, if you have an economic stake in keeping Americans at each other’s throats. But for the rest of us, it only fuels polarisation and mistrust. The most incisive response to the latest “digital blackface” article came from Wilfred Reilly, a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, who tweeted: “This stupid article is important in only one way: it illustrates that, as actual racism continues to decline, new varieties will simply be invented/’promoted’ and used to make us fight one another.”

In a diverse, thriving, integrated society that includes people of multivariate backgrounds, of course non-black citizens are going to engage with, appreciate, and relate to cultural products created by their black countrymen — and vice versa. Not only could it not be otherwise — culture, in our highly mimetic species, has long proven itself impossible to contain — but isn’t it what we want? The popularity of these GIFs stems from the fact that they represent events, emotions, and cultural touch points that millions of people recognise and relate to; in many cases, they speak to something not just specifically American but deeply human. That something like the Crying Jordan meme has become a global visual shorthand for conveying our feelings — the fact that people of every age, shape, colour and creed feel represented by the raw emotion captured there — should be seen as a triumph of common humanity over identity category. It is, at the population level, exactly what an inclusive society should strive for.

In this context, it seems not just absurd but grotesque for our national news media to argue that we should wall off these memes from the American mainstream, or make it so fraught for non-black people to engage with them that it becomes effectively taboo. The idea that black culture, whether it’s memes or music or slang or style, needs to be kept separate for its own protection is indistinguishable in practice from the racist ghettoisation that once sidelined black artists and athletes from the mainstream, lest they pollute the spaces where white people gathered. At its root is the notion that black culture is not American culture, that black people are somehow other. And, well, you know, there’s a word (and a GIF) for that.

But I always interrupted. I shouted over him to say things like “When I grow up, I will be a doctor”, or “Maybe I’ll go into engineering”, or “I will be President!”. I fantasised about becoming an army general so I could set my father free from prison, where he was being held as a political prisoner. Every time I saw a plane fly overhead (which was not as frequent back in those days), I would declare that I would grow up to be a pilot. I thought I had limitless options. I was a dreamer.

The response from most adults, both men and women, was always the same: “If God wanted you to be anything other than a wife and mother, he would have created you a man.” My kinder relatives would at least attempt to base their prejudice against women on something more than “God’s will”. They would say that women were not designed to do certain jobs, that it went against the natural order. My uncles and cousins would explain that every woman they knew who attempted to take a man’s job had failed. They insisted that it was actually a blessing to be a female and I should be happy since they had to work, while I got to enjoy the fruits of their labour and protection.

For many women around the world, a similar, deeply ingrained misogyny remains a part of everyday life. Yet there are also countless examples of women who prove this persistent myth to be wrong. Today, especially in the West, there are women who do — and excel at — all the things I dreamed of as a child and much more.

Nevertheless, there is now a ridiculous campaign in America (which is fast spreading to other countries), that seeks to fast-track the closing of the inequality gap and eliminate all prejudice against women in one fell swoop. The result is a caricaturing of a very complex situation: it is one thing to develop animation characters for Disney that feature girls and women as superheroes or to swap a woman for James Bond, but it is quite another to place women in high-profile positions when they are clearly unqualified for the job. As we are starting to discover, doing so only affirms prejudices.

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Will California ever be safe?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Enter Kamala Harris. When Joe Biden was searching for a running mate, it seems he had just two requirements: black and female. The Democratic Party agreed, pressuring Biden to select a “diverse” candidate for vice president; at one point, he boasted of having to choose between four black women. Biden plucked out Harris from his narrow search field and what did he get? A vice president who is unhelpful in advancing his agenda and unable to connect with the American people.

This week marked the second time Biden slipped up and referred to his deputy as “President Harris”. But don’t be fooled. His mistake says more about his own level of competence than Harris’s. As we approach the one-year mark of Biden’s presidency, it is obvious that Harris was set up for failure from the start. She had neither the experience nor the demeanour to be a successful vice president. Biden’s approval ratings may have slumped, but they have nothing on his Veep’s.

Her failure is so embarrassing that even traditional allies are starting to flee. CNN, which traditionally fawns over black female Democrats, published a blistering hit on her late last year, painting her office as dysfunctional. A former employee described her management style as having destructive patterns. Since her disastrous trip to the southern border last June, at least seven of her close aides have resigned.

While I have never been a fan of Kamala Harris, it does sadden me to see her fail so miserably. I had hoped the first female vice president would prove a success. After all, her failures affect more than just the White House and the Democratic Party; they affect women everywhere. On one level, Harris’s failures affirm the beliefs of misogynists who incorrectly believe that women are not capable of holding such weighty positions. It provides fodder to those men like my uncles and cousins, validating their prejudices against women.

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By MIchael Shellenberger

More depressing, however, is the impact it could have on women: it’s not too difficult to see how Harris becoming the target of ridicule could dissuade young girls from taking such positions in the future. For them to see a woman finally make it to the position of Vice President and then fail so ignominiously is a massive discouragement to every girl dreaming of a big future.

But this is also the problem with quotas more broadly. Equality and empowerment can’t be achieved through bureaucratic box-ticking. It has to be fought for and earned. Harris, however, is a clear example of someone who has acquired her position due to her immutable characteristics, rather than her own abilities and achievements. The consequence of this isn’t hard to discern: any successful woman will wonder if she, too, were hired to fulfil a quota requirement, asking if she earned her position or were handed it.

What today’s activists fail to understand is that the key for any woman to succeed remains the same as it has always been: to prove that she is capable. Simply ticking the boxes of “female” or “minority” and expecting a good outcome might make you feel good about yourself in the short term. But in the real world, it is never enough. In the case of Harris, it is a recipe for incompetence.

I wasn’t wrong to dream of something better when I was a little girl, despite my family’s disbelief. Girls today deserve to do the same, with strong and successful female leaders setting an example. How sad, then, that arguably the most powerful female politician in the world embodies neither of these qualities. All America is left with is a failed black woman. And there’s nothing progressive about that.

Well Mr Trump of course. When it comes to a choice between political or medical approaches to the virus, Americans are overwhelmingly plumping for the politics. They afford, in that choice, the most basic of victories to their self-obsessed President. Whether they love Trump or hate him, it’s the emotional/political response that matters most to them — as it does to him.

Kool Aid has become bleach: and they are drinking it.

Even perfectly rational Americans have been caught up in a politicisation of virus facts. And so, if you know how anyone voted in 2016, you will also know whether they think opening beaches in Florida is a good thing, or whether an earlier lockdown would have saved lives. You think Chloroquine might be a good treatment? You voted to Make America Great Again. You think everyone should wear a mask? You’re a milquetoast San Francisco dreamer.

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The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Anyone waiting for a reckoning — the equivalent of the public enquiry we expect in the UK; blame apportioned, defences accepted or rejected, the results widely disseminated and accepted — will be waiting a long time. No proper accounting for these mad months will ever be possible. However many die. Whatever the long-term economic impact of lockdowns. Coronavirus, in America, has mutated from pathogen to political event. The media won’t help. That the virus has been so politicised is in large part thanks to the intellectual laziness of a class of commentators, fat bottoms sitting on CNN stools, who like nothing better (and know nothing more) than to chat about who’s in and who’s out and who’s hot and who’s cold.

But wait: there is hope. Hope of a vaccine. Not for Coronavirus but for this political and social disease. The extreme nature of the malady is revealing something about how it strikes and how it might be repelled.

The coronavirus pandemic has given students of American society the opportunity to watch, in real time, a giant psychological experiment taking place. They are seeing something much more interesting than the relatively banal stuff about facts not mattering any more or being chosen at will. No: at a molecular level a much more interesting and deeper dysfunction is being revealed.

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Who controls the Covid-19 narrative?

By Douglas Murray

A simple question serves as our microscope. Why are Left-wing Americans more afraid of the virus than Right-wingers? As the writer Ezra Klein has pointed out on the Vox website, this feels odd given what we know about the psychology of being on the Right: fearing threats, being more sensitive to them, and on the Left: welcoming contact with the world, seeing progress everywhere.

“Here we are,” Klein writes, “in the midst of a pandemic, and it’s conservatives seemingly dismissing the danger, opening states and counties prematurely, refusing to wear masks, waving off the deaths of older people as a small price to pay. And, more often, it seems to be liberals who’re locked in their homes, who are warning the worst is yet to come, who are shaming anyone who dares step foot on a beach or forgets to don personal protective equipment.”

Klein talks to psychologists who express a range of views entirely explained — of course — by their own biases. He gets nowhere. Until he turns to a paper written in 2018 which still serves as one of the foundational pieces on Trump and the world he inhabits.

The paper, by political scientists Jeremy Pope and Michael Barber of Brigham Young University, is little short of revelatory. It is, or should be, the central text of modern US politics 101. Here is the conclusion: “group loyalty is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.”

Alright, it needs some additional colour. What they did, Pope and Barber, was an extraordinary first in the annals of academic endeavour: they used Trumpism as a heuristic device. They noted that The Donald has taken a range of ideological positions on policy issues in the past, so they divided 1,300 conservative voters into two groups and asked them about those different positions, liberal and conservative; one of the groups was told Trump’s view and the other was not. The revelation was that the more strongly ideologically conservative the voter (as self-identified) the more likely he or she was to go in the direction, any direction, that Trump went in. Bingo!

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Can British media steer clear of the American sewer?

By Douglas Murray

To repeat: “group loyalty is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.” They are loyal to Trump. They want him to win every battle. Identity groups want to further the causes of the group: in the complex real world they may care about science, or income tax or anything, but in their gut they know who they are, where they belong, and only this matters.

So if Trump wants the borders closed: cool. If he wants the shops open, amen. If he thinks Xi Jinping is doing fine, attaboy. If he decides the virus is a Chinese plot to destroy the world: makes sense to you.

But here is why the Coronavirus might allow the Pope and Barber paper to be freshened. It concentrated on Trump and his people. Perhaps the authors rather assumed — as political science professors at major American universities tend to — that on the Left, in the moderate centre, no such identity trap exists.

Well Hello Coronavirus Times! While Joe Biden sits largely un-noticed in his basement trying to work out how to use his autocue, Americans on the Left have binged on disaster, to the extent that the comedian Bill Maher was forced to issue a warning to his natural pals: “Trump calls you Fake News: don’t make him right!”

He had in mind the ‘panic porn’ of the mainstream media. Headlines declaring ‘war zone’ conditions next to a picture of a person buying eggs. A news story in the New York Times about how things had been turned round in that city, but with the headline, ‘Braced for apocalyptic surge, New York avoids worst so far.’

Maher had done some research. As he saw it:

“The media also seems obsessed with finding young people who’ve died of COVID-19. The Washington Post says there were 759 under 50 years old. Horrible, of course. Then I looked up how many under 50 died of the flu last year, almost 3,000. So, all this misery from distancing did some good, can I be happy about that?”

No of course not. Because the American Left is as subsumed by identity group needs — mostly the need to be the opposite of Trump and his people — as is the Right. The myopia is cross party. There might be talk of ideology, of the policies that spring from deeply held beliefs about how life should be lived and a modern nation governed, but none of that matters much any more. Beat Trump. He has talked the virus down so talk it up. That’s it.

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Covid-19 can't spoil America's appetite

By Justin Webb

The vaccine for this virus — the political one — will almost certainly take longer to develop than for coronavirus. But we understand at least what the process of infection is: the challenge will be to find a serum of balm that might be injected into the body politic that allows that inflamed identity protein (sorry) to be blocked or reduced, and healthier political instincts encouraged. The post Trump world needs to think about civic education. About a properly just society which works for all Americans. About a return to due process after the horrors of the campus culture that destroys on a whim.

It will take two women: Joe Biden’s successor (his vice president will be a woman) and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina Governor and ambassador to the UN who I think is likely to be the Republican best positioned for the delicate task of rescuing the GOP from Trumpism. Is it too much to hope that they might be able to disagree agreeably and to persuade the nation to do that much missed bipartisan stuff again?

Cards on the table: I am enormously optimistic. America’s ability to put ideas to good use is one of its central features. So is its ability to produce the sort of people who rise the task. Many presidents have been great and visionary: FDR, JFK, Reagan, Obama. Again and again America makes a mess but it clears it up. Or clears up the messes created by others. In that vein, it may well provide the first vaccine for coronavirus and inoculate the world.

Then (post Trump) it can get on with the job of curing itself.

As seen and heard from abroad, that essentially means the BBC World Service. Given its impressive figures, any government, not just one facing the uncertainties of Brexit, would see the potential.

The BBC World Service currently broadcasts in more than 40 languages to a global audience — across radio, television and internet — now estimated at 426 million a week, with a target of 500 million. But the television audience for English-language programmes has overtaken the English-language radio audience worldwide, and — along with digital — it is growing faster. So far as international broadcasting is concerned, the present and the future are television.

But how well equipped is BBC World Service television — now, after various name changes, officially called BBC World News — to spearhead a UK “soft power” offensive? Having regularly viewed both the BBC and its competition during frequent travels in recent months, I would sadly submit: not very.

With its global reach, its glorious history, and the advantage that the UK is home to the English language, the broadcaster is lauded as unique to “brand” Britain. Times have changed, though, since the BBC World Service (then radio only) ruled the airwaves, and the now 30-year old BBC World Service television looks distinctly unimpressive from abroad.

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How Lefty luvvies lost the plot

By Gareth Roberts

So why did the BBC’s global television service lose its edge? A more pertinent question would perhaps be whether it was ever the world-beater it claimed to be in the first place. Since its creation, in 1991, it is probably fair to say that a large part of its reputation was borrowed: it was automatically identified with the BBC World Service radio and allowed to bask, to an extent, in reflected glory.

But there were always big differences between the radio and television services. Where the radio had a long and distinguished history, and was funded until recently by a grand-in-aid from the Foreign Office (while running itself editorially), the TV arm was denied either government or licence-payer funding. It was set up, instead, as a commercial proposition, relying largely on advertising and subscriptions.

Because it uses many of the same correspondents and resources and benefits from the BBC brand, it has generally been treated with the same respect as the BBC World Service radio. But this respect hasn’t always been warranted. There have been questions, for example, about sponsored programming. But it has bred a certain complacency about the competition. For years, BBC World Service TV has been comparing itself favourably with American international broadcasters, such as CNN — which is not hard to do; the bar is not high —  while ignoring the growing appeal of European stations.

From what I’ve seen, the chief competition to the BBC today comes not from the US, but from the two premier European services: France 24 and Germany’s Deutsche Welle. While not a national broadcaster, the Lyon-based Euronews is up there, too.

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All three broadcast internationally in English (often with native English-speaking presenters) as well as in other languages. France 24 has French, Arabic and Spanish, and a combined audience of 61 million; DW has Arabic as well as German, and a combined audience of 135 million (compared with 101 million for BBC World Service television which broadcasts only in English). Both are growing fast.

Taking these stations as the competition, then, BBC World News falls down on a host of comparisons, starting with the absolute basic: timely and worldwide news coverage. BBC World News boasts that it breaks more stories from more places than any other channel. How much of a recommendation that is, however, depends on what those stories are and how they are treated.

Travelling in Italy over Christmas, and in East and Central Europe during the autumn, I found the BBC to be slower on fresh news than the competition, and to have less hard news in the overall output than soft-ish and often repeated features. If I wanted to switch on and know what was happening, France 24 was a much better bet.

A specific example was coverage of the Russia-Ukraine end-of-year prisoner exchange, which on the BBC lagged far behind the actual news and was given little context. US shootings took precedence – even though the service was billed BBC World News Europe.

There was a qualitative difference, too, in the content and tone of features. The ratio of relatively timeless features to news seemed greater, sometimes much greater, on the BBC than on the other channels. A striking proportion of the BBC’s output also seemed too focused on aid projects of various kinds, with a fairly obvious, but unspoken, didactic streak. Even more striking, compared with France24 and DW, was the paucity of features about life in Britain. Both European stations gave substantial glimpses of how life is lived in their countries and looked — sometimes critically — in the mirror.

To be fair, BBC World News did relay some of the crucial parliamentary sessions live, during the Brexit debates. Then again, so did most other international stations, as events in the UK were seen as having global significance. It was a pity, then, that BBC World News did not make a bigger effort to interpret what was happening for the benefit of non-UK viewers.

There are two other points that might be more important for viewers abroad than BBC HQ in London might think. First, quite a few of the presenters and reporters could do with smartening up. Some look downright scruffy, compared with their French and German counterparts. You may object on the grounds that sartorial negligence never harmed anyone. But when you switch from DW to BBC World News and the BBC guy’s shirt is unironed and the trousers don’t fit, I’m sorry, but authority is lost.

Which leaves my final point. The service doesn’t capitalise sufficiently on what could and should be one of the BBC’s greatest strengths vis-a-vis the competition: a wealth of native speakers to choose from. If you watch the BBC abroad, you might expect presenters and reporters to speak comprehensible English. Of course not demanding that everyone should speak the Queen’s English c. 1930, old Etonian or extreme RP. Nor am I saying that English shouldn’t be accented. But the presenter should be understandable. Someone who isn’t shouldn’t be reporting in the name of the BBC.

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Both France 24 and Deutsche Welle employ fluent English speakers for their English-language channels. So why can’t the BBC, with all the advantages that come from being the home side linguistically, do the same?

Perhaps, then, the top brass should set aside a few hours to view the competition in real time (I wonder if they ever have). That should focus minds.

But tweaks to the programming and a decent wardrobe consultant alone will not do it. These are pretty cosmetic fixes. BBC World Service television is not going to be an effective instrument of “soft power” unless there some rather more fundamental changes.

The first would be to bring World Service radio and televison under the same funding structure and editorial direction, so that it functions as one. At the moment, they are separate, with the radio and its foreign language services funded by the licence-fee and World Service television a commercial entity, funded by advertising and subscription, as it was when it was first set up.

The argument against bringing World Service television in-house was always the cost. But this could be changing. Five years ago, the then Government agreed to a BBC request for more money for its international services — to the tune of £89 million a year — to be spread across World Service radio, television and digital. This would suggest that World Service television is not quite as separate or self-sufficient as it was. With a government that is loosening the purse-strings generally, the time could be ripe for this change.

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The second would be to define the mission of this new unified service more clearly – as entailing the projection of a distinct view, or views, from London. This would have to be handled carefully, as it could encounter staff resistance.

While France 24 and Deutsche Welle are both directly state-owned and their staff well understand that they work for a state broadcaster, I suspect many BBC World Service staff — and I say this as a World Service staff member myself long ago — do not see themselves in the same way. I suspect, too, that they would take a dim view of the idea that the prime purpose of the BBC’s international services was to promote UK “soft power” as a potential threat to their much prized independence.

This could be an obstacle, but it is not insurmountable. The BBC is both aware of, and takes a certain pride in, being seen as a flagship of the UK’s “soft power”. But it regards this as a product of its quality and editorial standards, rather than the reason for its existence. There is no reason to alter this. What could and should be changed is to ensure that those standards are coonsistently upheld across all its international services — radio, television and digital — and that the voice of the BBC abroad is one that comes identifiably from the UK.

International broadcasting, especially television, is highly, and increasingly, competitive. The UK, through the reputation of the BBC World Service had a head start. It cannot afford to rest on its laurels.