Donald Trump lands in Britain on Tuesday, and no doubt Ed Davey will be waiting at Arrivals to perform a citizen’s arrest. This is how Americans see us now, a culture war ground zero of murderous migrants and authoritarian liberals. An American journalist, here for the Trump visit, told me where she’d be staying and asked, “will I be safe?” Readers, her hotel is in Knightsbridge. The most dangerous thing there is the ghost of Al-Fayed.
The brilliant Charlie Kirk, who was murdered last week, visited the UK in June and acknowledged the consensus that “British politics were where America’s would be in five, ten or 20 years.” He had come to see the future and to refute it. At Oxford Union he debated woke students – most of them dressed for bed, reading speeches that might be composed by ChatGPT.
One of them was a black undergrad called George Abaraonye, and a (very selective) clip has since surfaced of him stumbling through a rebuttal. When Kirk was killed, Abaraonye, president-elect of the Union, posted on Instagram: “Charlie Kirk got shot loool”. A campaign has been launched to have him booted out of the Union, maybe the university. It’s been a welcome opportunity for pundits to remind us that they, too, went to Oxford (if only for a day trip) and thus take this personally.
In Abaraonye’s defence, his message was vile but legal, and he said sorry. Nor, I think, is he only at Oxford thanks to affirmative action, as some suggest based upon his reportedly sub-par A-levels.
Watch the whole exchange with Kirk and he turns out to be intelligent, even charismatic. As for a clip from a separate debate in which he calls reactionary institutions “cancers... which must be taken down by any means”, watch the whole speech and you’ll see him develop an argument against violence, citing Martin Luther King Jr.
The discussion about how to handle Abaraonye is messy. Some say “don’t expel” him because that would be the antithesis of what Kirk, a free speech fan, wanted. Yet Kirk himself ran an organisation that named and shamed Left-wing professors, effectively trying to cancel them.
Why? Because he believed there is a war afoot for the soul of America. He was not, for example, an admirer of King, whose legacy of civil rights legislation he regarded as anti-liberty yet drilled into kids by far-Left teachers. While Kirk mastered the art of debating, he didn’t do it for its own sake; he wanted to convert the world to capitalism and Jesus, and was convinced that “Trump’s revolution is coming to the UK.”
It’s already here. On Saturday, thousands marched through London to express their British identity, holding pictures of Kirk, addressed via video-link by Elon Musk. Many, not all, were fans of Tommy Robinson, regarded as a marginal figure in the UK yet flattered by US attention and cash. Nigel Farage doesn’t know how to handle him, though they have friends in common. Reform’s recent conference was recognisable to anyone who has been to a Republican convention, much as GBNews is familiar to viewers of Fox.
Farage’s big pitch to voters is a “Doge UK” to cut spending. The American revolution is coming home to Britain, where an elected senate is proposed by the Left and the Union flag venerated like the Stars and Stripes. Pretty soon we’ll be reciting to it a romantic pledge of allegiance.
Journalist Adam Boulton said he “can’t believe all this media coverage of Charlie Kirk. It’s America’s issue not the UK’s”. It quickly emerged that Mr Charming had himself promoted a documentary about the killing of George Floyd, in 2020. That’s the Floyd that Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner, policemen and football players, all took the knee for, importing a foreign discourse on race that dangerously muddles historical memory (Britain had slavery but abolished it sooner and never practiced de jure segregation).
Abaraonye’s Oxford speeches contain US jargon - he was debating “toxic masculinity” with Kirk – a linguistic invasion akin to the 1950s, when British trendsetters started calling people “cat” and telling them to “cool it”. Then there’s his Trumpian shamelessness. Abaraonye caveated his apology with the remarkable observation that “my words were no less insensitive than [Kirk’s] – arguably less so; the difference is I had the humility to recognise when I strayed from my core values.”
For that sentence alone – pious, vain, tasteless – Abaraonye ought to resign from his post. Had he been born 50 years earlier, and raised in Victorian values of modesty and shame, he surely would.
But Christianity has been replaced with secularism, tradition with novelty, deference with equality. It can be hard to tell because we retain the institutional shells of our past, but we have changed as a society, and if Trump comes here and detects an identity crisis, it’s because of economic stagnation and mass migration, no doubt, but also because we have become more American in opinion and behaviour.
The trial of Abaraonye is part of that process: in past times, we’d shake our heads and move on, let an arrogant youth learn from a mistake and not ruin his life over it.
But the internet, dominated by US companies, creates a spectacle of outrage to generate clicks, driving us all to be unBritishly intolerant. I have seen British Right-wingers alleging that Kirk’s death was as fake as the moon landing; Left-wingers, many of whom seem to believe that the overturning of Roe v Wade threatens women in the UK, that he was an evangelist for Gilead.
A “friend”, i.e. someone I don’t know, wrote on Facebook: “Normally the USA murders the good ones.” That person is a former Anglican vicar. I guess we’re all little Trumps now.
Please don’t read this column as anti-American. I’ve devoted a significant portion of my life to studying that country because I love it. I just think it makes better sense in its own context.
Let Mark Twain, Jack London, Archie Bunker or Homer Simpson flourish where they belong: over there. Or, if we cannot resist US politics, let’s at least import the best of it. When Governor George C. Wallace, a racist candidate for president, was shot in 1972, congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, a black liberal, made a point of visiting him in hospital. Her staff was furious with her. She told them: “sometimes we have to remember we’re all human beings.”
That meeting encouraged Wallace down the path of reconciliation and he later apologised for his racism. Debate is about scoring points, but hearts are actually changed through compassion and conversation.
Donald Trump lands in Britain on Tuesday, and no doubt Ed Davey will be waiting at Arrivals to perform a citizen’s arrest. This is how Americans see us now, a culture war ground zero of murderous migrants and authoritarian liberals. An American journalist, here for the Trump visit, told me where she’d be staying and asked, “will I be safe?” Readers, her hotel is in Knightsbridge. The most dangerous thing there is the ghost of Al-Fayed.
The brilliant Charlie Kirk, who was murdered last week, visited the UK in June and acknowledged the consensus that “British politics were where America’s would be in five, ten or 20 years.” He had come to see the future and to refute it. At Oxford Union he debated woke students – most of them dressed for bed, reading speeches that might be composed by ChatGPT.
One of them was a black undergrad called George Abaraonye, and a (very selective) clip has since surfaced of him stumbling through a rebuttal. When Kirk was killed, Abaraonye, president-elect of the Union, posted on Instagram: “Charlie Kirk got shot loool”. A campaign has been launched to have him booted out of the Union, maybe the university. It’s been a welcome opportunity for pundits to remind us that they, too, went to Oxford (if only for a day trip) and thus take this personally.
In Abaraonye’s defence, his message was vile but legal, and he said sorry. Nor, I think, is he only at Oxford thanks to affirmative action, as some suggest based upon his reportedly sub-par A-levels.
Watch the whole exchange with Kirk and he turns out to be intelligent, even charismatic. As for a clip from a separate debate in which he calls reactionary institutions “cancers... which must be taken down by any means”, watch the whole speech and you’ll see him develop an argument against violence, citing Martin Luther King Jr.
The discussion about how to handle Abaraonye is messy. Some say “don’t expel” him because that would be the antithesis of what Kirk, a free speech fan, wanted. Yet Kirk himself ran an organisation that named and shamed Left-wing professors, effectively trying to cancel them.
Why? Because he believed there is a war afoot for the soul of America. He was not, for example, an admirer of King, whose legacy of civil rights legislation he regarded as anti-liberty yet drilled into kids by far-Left teachers. While Kirk mastered the art of debating, he didn’t do it for its own sake; he wanted to convert the world to capitalism and Jesus, and was convinced that “Trump’s revolution is coming to the UK.”
It’s already here. On Saturday, thousands marched through London to express their British identity, holding pictures of Kirk, addressed via video-link by Elon Musk. Many, not all, were fans of Tommy Robinson, regarded as a marginal figure in the UK yet flattered by US attention and cash. Nigel Farage doesn’t know how to handle him, though they have friends in common. Reform’s recent conference was recognisable to anyone who has been to a Republican convention, much as GBNews is familiar to viewers of Fox.
Farage’s big pitch to voters is a “Doge UK” to cut spending. The American revolution is coming home to Britain, where an elected senate is proposed by the Left and the Union flag venerated like the Stars and Stripes. Pretty soon we’ll be reciting to it a romantic pledge of allegiance.
Journalist Adam Boulton said he “can’t believe all this media coverage of Charlie Kirk. It’s America’s issue not the UK’s”. It quickly emerged that Mr Charming had himself promoted a documentary about the killing of George Floyd, in 2020. That’s the Floyd that Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner, policemen and football players, all took the knee for, importing a foreign discourse on race that dangerously muddles historical memory (Britain had slavery but abolished it sooner and never practiced de jure segregation).
Abaraonye’s Oxford speeches contain US jargon - he was debating “toxic masculinity” with Kirk – a linguistic invasion akin to the 1950s, when British trendsetters started calling people “cat” and telling them to “cool it”. Then there’s his Trumpian shamelessness. Abaraonye caveated his apology with the remarkable observation that “my words were no less insensitive than [Kirk’s] – arguably less so; the difference is I had the humility to recognise when I strayed from my core values.”
For that sentence alone – pious, vain, tasteless – Abaraonye ought to resign from his post. Had he been born 50 years earlier, and raised in Victorian values of modesty and shame, he surely would.
But Christianity has been replaced with secularism, tradition with novelty, deference with equality. It can be hard to tell because we retain the institutional shells of our past, but we have changed as a society, and if Trump comes here and detects an identity crisis, it’s because of economic stagnation and mass migration, no doubt, but also because we have become more American in opinion and behaviour.
The trial of Abaraonye is part of that process: in past times, we’d shake our heads and move on, let an arrogant youth learn from a mistake and not ruin his life over it.
But the internet, dominated by US companies, creates a spectacle of outrage to generate clicks, driving us all to be unBritishly intolerant. I have seen British Right-wingers alleging that Kirk’s death was as fake as the moon landing; Left-wingers, many of whom seem to believe that the overturning of Roe v Wade threatens women in the UK, that he was an evangelist for Gilead.
A “friend”, i.e. someone I don’t know, wrote on Facebook: “Normally the USA murders the good ones.” That person is a former Anglican vicar. I guess we’re all little Trumps now.
Please don’t read this column as anti-American. I’ve devoted a significant portion of my life to studying that country because I love it. I just think it makes better sense in its own context.
Let Mark Twain, Jack London, Archie Bunker or Homer Simpson flourish where they belong: over there. Or, if we cannot resist US politics, let’s at least import the best of it. When Governor George C. Wallace, a racist candidate for president, was shot in 1972, congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, a black liberal, made a point of visiting him in hospital. Her staff was furious with her. She told them: “sometimes we have to remember we’re all human beings.”
That meeting encouraged Wallace down the path of reconciliation and he later apologised for his racism. Debate is about scoring points, but hearts are actually changed through compassion and conversation.