Convenience Big Store: I’m with Obama on race

12 July, 2021

In the headlines

Racist abuse of England's players has been condemned by Prince William, Boris Johnson and Gareth Southgate. A mural in Manchester honouring Marcus Rashford was defaced after he, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho missed penalties against Italy last night, while online trolls attacked their social media accounts. Richard Branson successfully reached the edge of space in his Virgin Galactic plane for the first time on Sunday. "I was once a child with a dream looking up to the stars," said Branson, 70. "Now I'm an adult in a spaceship." Thousands of people took to the streets throughout Cuba yesterday to demand the end of the country's dictatorship in the biggest protests seen for decades.

Comment of the day

Barack Obama greets supporters in 2008. Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images

I'm with Obama on race

When Barack Obama's own pastor, Reverend Wright, called America endemically racist, Obama rejected his argument in his 2008 speech A More Perfect Union: "He spoke as if no progress has been made; as if this country … is still irrevocably bound to its past." The former president believed that way of thinking "elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America".

Today, the left would see even "Obama as an enabler of white supremacy", says Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish. America was born bad, built on slavery. White supremacy is baked in. In a popular new theory, "the successor ideology", there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence – and you are either fighting this and "on the right side of history", or you are "against it and abetting evil". Companies pump millions into staying uncancelled. It is the "greatest radicalisation of the elites since the 1960s", and wholly illiberal. Liberalism will let you do your job and let you keep your politics private. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. It compels you to confess, repent or be ostracised. People ask what's made me "so far right"? I'm still an Obamacon. What I want to know is: what happened to you?

Why it matters The danger is that the radical left in America is driving people to support "an increasingly nihilistic cult" on the right. We should fight the successor ideology, says Sullivan is to save liberalism.

And Britain beware… "In America, I can't even put Democrats and Republicans in the same focus group," says the US pollster Frank Luntz in The Mail on Sunday. That's not true of the Tories and Labour yet. But my polling suggests the same "bitterness and division" is coming to Britain.

Read the full article here.

A bright future for jihadists

A "wind of optimism" is sweeping through the global jihadist community, says Raffaello Pantucci in the Financial Times. The West's retreats from Afghanistan and Mali are seen as jihadi victories, while Isis-affiliated groups are gaining ground in Nigeria and Mozambique. In Idlib, northeastern Syria, an al-Qaeda-linked group is rebranding itself as an "acceptable government". As the West tries to turn away and focus on great power conflict with China and Russia, a "narrative of victory" is gaining momentum among jihadis.

The September 11 deadline for the Afghan withdrawal highlights the ambivalent results of the West's war on militant Islam. After 9/11, President Bush swore the Taliban would "hand over the terrorists" or "share in their fate". Two decades later, the Taliban have not handed over any terrorists, broken with al-Qaeda or shared their fate. From the perspective of the jihadist community "the overall trajectory looks positive". A 2018 report by US think-tank CSIS showed the number of jihadi groups had almost tripled since 2001. The US retreat in Afghanistan shows many wannabe martyrs their struggle is winnable "if they just stick at it for long enough". Whitehall and Washington may have tired of the war on terror, "but those we are fighting have not".

Read the full article here (paywall).

Tomorrow's World

The waters around the chichi peninsula of Cape Cod (the location for the movie Jaws) are becoming "very, very sharky", says The Atlantic. A highly successful project to protect seals, which had previously been hunted nearly to extinction, has attracted booming numbers of great whites, one of the main predators of seals. "There used to be one or two sharks every summer," says a local who has been surfing off the Cape's Atlantic coast since the 1960s. Now, between July and October, during "peak shark season", the waters have become host to one of the greatest concentrations of great white sharks anywhere in the world.

Sport

England's players were superb but their management was clueless, says Maurice Glasman in UnHerd. "Sending out two players who had not kicked the ball in open play and a 19-year-old to take penalties was a cruelty that none of them deserved." England, once again, shrank from victory. What they needed was courage from the top, not conservatism. As usual, we tripped ourselves up.

Noted

Novak Djokovic, winner of the men's singles title at Wimbledon for the sixth time yesterday, swears by some perplexing "rituals", says Jack Rivlin in The Upshot. His two poodles, Tesla and Pierre, sit at his dinner table every evening on chairs and eat from bowls "like they are people". A spiritual man, Djokovic once hired a coach, Pepe Imaz, who is thought to have taught him about telepathy and levitation – his techniques include "extremely long hugs". Djokovic is also opposed to vaccination and learnt he had a coeliac allergy after a doctor asked him to hold a slice of white bread against his stomach while the doctor pressed on his outstretched right arm.

Snapshot

Zeitgeist

James Gillespie's High School in Edinburgh is banning Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in an effort to "decolonise" the curriculum. Surely teenagers are smart enough to see the book contains racist language "precisely to expose the racism of its society", says Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail.

Snapshot answer

It's Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO and second-richest person in the world recently sold almost all his properties and moved into a 400 sq ft flat-pack home. Musk got his new pad from Boxabl, a start-up that retails tiny houses for $50,000 a pop. "It's kinda awesome", tweeted Musk.