Mas a malta não se enxerga? Ou esta é a forma como este ser "superior" e com uma larga experiência (...) atrás de si, fala com a nossa comunicação social? Ninguém acha estranha esta forma de o Mourinho estar, sempre a criticar, a enviar recados, a levantar suspeitas? Que cambada!
Um muro! Cuidado com o muro...Um muro!? Não o está a ver?...
(Ah, ok, está a preparar-se para "dar o salto"? Sobre o muro, claro, como sempre esteve...)
Livros e publicações lidas em 2025
O nuclear, de Cédric Lewandovski
Os diários de viagem, de Albert Einstein de Ze'ev Rosenkranz
Assinado "Olrik"
A tirania da minoria de Steven Levitsky e Daniel Ziblatt
O capitalismo não é o problema, é a solução, de Rainer Zitelmann
Crítica XXI (nº2)
Crítica XXI (nº3)
Quando os bobos uivam (Onésimo Teotónio Almeida)
Hereges de K. G. Chesterton
Crítica XXI (nº4)
Como se ergue um Estado (Salazar)
Confidências no exílio (Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão)
A porta de marfim, de Maria Helena Prieto
Crítica XXI (nº8)
Marcello Caetano, Um destino de Luis Menezes Leitão
Porque perdemos a guerra, de Manuel Pereira Crespo
Nexus, de Yuval Noah Harari
Os diários de Ronald Reagan
Mousinho de Albuquerque, de Eduardo de Noronha
Cartas entre Marcello Caetano e Lopez Rodo
Aparição, de Virgílio Ferreira
Galileu em Pádua, de Alessandro de Angelis
Ensaios, de Adriano Moreira
A revolução antes da Revolução, de Luis de Freitas Branco
A exposição do mundo Português, de Augusto Castro
Adam Smith tinha razão, de Rainer Zitelmann
Português sem filtro, de Onésimo Teotónio Almeida
Como perder amigos rapidamente, de David Marçal
Crítica XXI (nº4)
O que é uma Constituição, de Ferdinand Lassalle
Remissão, de Carlos Guedes
Selecções da BD (1 a
História Diplomática de Portugal, de Pedro Soares Martinez
Deus, a Ciência, as provas
A política económica do governo de Sá Carneiro de Cavaco Silva
Solidão e poder - M. Joao Avilez
A minha vida, de Golda Meir
Espiões de Calder Walton
Crítica XXI (nº10)
How democracies die, de Steven Levitski e
Intimidades de Salazar, de Assis Gonçalves
Portugal na hora da verdade de Alvaro Santos Pereira
A Liberdade dos Antigos comparada com a dos Modernos (Benjamin Constant)
Crítica XXI (nº 11)
Salazar e António Ferro de António Ferro
A mecânica de Deus de Guy Consolmagno
Salazar visto pelos seus próximos de Jaime Nogueira Pinto
Sobre Democracias e cultos de morte de Douglas Murray
A Insanidade das Massas de Douglas Murray
O Laboratório progressista e a Tirania dos Imbecis de João Maurício Brás
Os novos painéis de S. Vicente de Fernando Branco
O fim da natureza de Bill Mckibben
Contos da Juventude de Fernando Branco
O tempo dos Filipes em Portugal e no Brasil de Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão
Egas Moniz um biografia de João Lobo Antunes
Filosofia e doutrina do fascismo de Giovanni Gentile e Benito Mussolini
Ser mortal de Atul Gawande
A Cambada de Vera Lagoa
Crítica XXI (nº 12)
Revolucionários ... de Vera Lagoa
Discursos I de Oliveira Salazar
Soares é Fish de Augusto Cid
Eanito el estático
As 33 estratégias da Guerra de (não acabei)
Discursos II de Oliveira Salazar
O meu treinador de Joana Bértholo
Immigration - La catastrophe Que faire? de Jean Yves le Gallou
Charlie Brown vários
O fim de tudo de Victor Davis Hanson
Discursos III de Oliveira Salazar
Um mundo infestado de demónios de Carl Sagan
A última aula de Fernando Branco
Terceiro Mundo de Franco Nogueira
Citações de Américo Thomaz de
Boletim Militar (2º e 3º aniversários) de vários
Missão na Guiné
Política Militar de D. Francisco Manuel de Melo
Nobody's perfect Charlie Brown
Bom dia! Já conhecem os amendoins que vendo? Não? O aspirador que promovo? Outros produtos? E os "novos" apoiantes do PS que se torceram todos para me apoiar? Ouviram o meu querido amigo Santos Silva? Um mimo de integridade intelectual! A Catarina Mendes que ainda anteontem (29.12) quase 6 meses depois de me ter candidatado me veio dar o apoio. Estou satisfeito, sensibilizado, seguro e etc...
Estou bem assim ou ponho-me mais de lado? Sou ou não uma estrela?
Eu confesso ao povo português: fundei uma companhia de drones para acompanhar a minha campanha
Já tenho 325 assinaturas de nacionais do BE, 654 de colegas sem abrigo como eu, e 987 que não sei de quem são
(personal underlines)
The leaves on the oak tree in the park are three-quarters brown and bring to mind the two-tone hair of a model in the ‘before’ picture of a dye advert. The tiny leaves on the apple tree over the garden wall look as though they have been individually removed and stuck in an air fryer to crisp up nicely before being painstakingly reattached. The sky is leaden, the colour of Sunday afternoons on the box in the 1970s, when the grey screen swarmed with Messerschmitts, Heinkels and Spits…
It can only mean one thing. Winter is coming. And just in the nick of time. Because winter is wonderful – easily the best season, no matter what others may claim.
How so? Well, it is the perfect excuse for open fires and for knitwear – and nothing hides that beach-perfect body like an Aran sweater or a herringbone tweed overcoat. It’s the perfect time for walks in the woods or across fields, mud and rotting leaves underfoot, in the rain, drizzle or sleet, with wellies struggling for purchase. It’s the perfect time for bracing strides along the beach that leave you gasping for a mug of strong tea and a slice of shortbread, or better still a pint of bitter in a pub by a roaring fire.
And the most brilliant thing of all? This goes on for months and months. It might officially begin in December and end in March, but the winter we know and love really begins now and lasts till April. This is wonderful, because it means months of Sunday roasts, served up with lashings of Strictly until Christmas, Ski Sunday after. It means the chopping of logs, the warming of wellingtons, the smell of damp dogs, mud clinging to boots. It is, in short, the time of year that gets you closer to the lost world of fingerless gloves, of Fielding, Dickens and Austen.
At the heart of it is the recognition that Britain is a winter nation, because grey skies and the damp nipping cold are the resting bitch-face of our climate. They are what we get when the weather isn’t pretending to be nice. That means we are a people schooled essentially by winter. We might not do snow-chains or snow tyres – God forbid we’d be that prepared – but we are nonetheless wintry people, folk given to tight smiles to keep out the cold and wrapping up warm, even indoors.
And that’s why we can’t get enough of it. It’s part of the reason why Captain Scott went to the South Pole. It’s why we invented competitive skiing. It’s how we dreamed up beef wellington, the Inverness overcoat and the deerstalker. It’s why we invented the novel, because what else can you do to keep yourself going through long winter nights when television hasn’t been invented and your family cheats at cards?
Yes, we are a nation birthed beneath the gunmetal skies of November, December and January – as surely as Australia, for instance, is a country born of sunshine and a swath of fauna dedicated to killing you. And thank goodness, because winter is the season that feeds Britain’s phlegmatic soul; it gives us our grit and the kind of comedy we most excel in – gallows humour. What other option is there – particularly if you’re a Georgian or Victorian and central heating is still 100 years away, and it’s April and you’ve scarcely been warm since September? In circumstances like that all you can do is laugh, so is it any coincidence that laughing turns out to be our national pastime – whether it’s at the government, or other people’s governments, or the weather, or each other? Without winter we might not have satire, Billy Connolly or the Perrier Award, or whatever it’s called now.
So we have rather a lot to be grateful to winter for, and not just for filling up the reservoirs and killing off a few mosquitoes. The roasted forerib of beef, heaped with delicious marbled fat like the periwig of a courtier to Louis XIV, would never taste so good if we didn’t have February. Sherry wouldn’t illuminate the palate quite as it does without the frost.
The problem is that like many of the best things in life, winter is the victim of its own success. It goes on too long, probably a good fortnight longer than would be ideal. And yet at the same time, it makes summer worth having by giving us spring to look forward to – otherwise those blue skies would become just so boring.
So don’t begrudge its onset. Embrace the arrival of November and the cold, dark months ahead. Stock up on horseradish sauce and mustard, get some port and tannin-dry reds in, and throw another log on the fire for Sadiq and his mate Ed. They love open fires, they really do.
(personal underlines)
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have gone into bunker mode. The pair – whose political fortunes are so tightly bound – have been forced all week to defend the Chancellor’s claims at last week’s Budget that there is a black hole in the country’s finances. Mendacity soon gave way to something closer to bewilderment. Neither can grasp why they are being called out for their omissions and dishonest briefings – always more fiction than fiscal – about the state of the economy. Their new argument is this: once you factor in the Budget’s own measures – welfare increases, the U-turn on winter fuel payments and the desire to increase headroom – a hole did indeed appear. They insist they had no choice.
What both fail to understand, however, is that voters can see these were choices. The black hole to be ‘filled’ was one created not by economic necessity, but by the Prime Minister’s political weathervane spinning out of control.
Peel back the politics and the story of this Budget is not headroom, inflation or growth. It is welfare. After last year’s Autumn Statement, the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast that by the end of the decade, nearly £1 in every £10 the government spends would go on working-age benefits. Labour’s second Budget has just added another £16 billion to that bill. Throw pensions into the mix and welfare spending is on course to hit £406 billion by 2030 – £109 billion of which will go on sickness payments.
To fund this, Reeves is euphemistically ‘asking’ those in work to pay more, pushing taxes to an all-time high and creating a system where the average person on £38,000 now hands over £2,000 a year simply to finance welfare. The squeeze is only going to get worse: someone working full-time on the minimum wage paid 12 per cent of their income to the taxman last year; by the end of the decade that will have passed 15 per cent.
We are living through a historic transfer – fiscal and human – from work to welfare. Labour has chosen a bonanza for benefit claimants funded by austerity for workers. And that transfer is accelerating. The most recent figures suggest that 6.5 million Britons are on out-of-work benefits, with more than five million under no obligation to seek work. The number of payrolled jobs has fallen by around 180,000 in a year. One in eight 16- to 24-year-olds – nearly a million young people – are now Neets: not in education, employment or training.
It is, in reality, spreadsheet socialism from a spreadsheet government. If the numbers balance out, the problem, it is believed, can be ignored. Welfare spending as a share of GDP is ‘no higher than in 2012’. So on paper it all looks fine – nothing to see here.
But believing this means wilfully ignoring a growing reality. Let’s examine the claim that total welfare spending as a share of GDP has been flat for decades. Welfare used to be dominated by unemployment; now the fastest growth is in sickness and disability benefits. When unemployment was 8 per cent, compared with about 5 per cent today, more people were at least looking for work. The chart being waved around in Whitehall does not capture the economic burden of a surging long-term sickness caseload – let alone the human cost.
Sam Miley, head of forecasting at the independent Centre for Economic and Business Research, says the rising incapacity caseload has cost an extra £14 billion in payments compared with pre pandemic, plus £13 billion in ‘forgone activity’ as people drop out of work altogether. The government’s own review by Sir Charlie Mayfield found that someone leaving the workforce in their twenties loses over £1 million in lifetime earnings – and the state incurs a similar cost. With around 5,000 people awarded sickness benefits every day, most of them unlikely to return to work, that is billions added to future tax bills. All this is entirely missed by that comforting spreadsheet which shows that welfare is ‘flat’.
Moving cash from the tax-producing parts of the economy to the benefit-claiming ones doesn’t just create a fiscal problem; it kills incentives. The question ‘Why should I bother with work?’ is becoming harder to answer.
Scrapping the two-child cap makes this worse. Analysis from the Centre for Social Justice shows that a family with one adult working full-time and the other part-time on the minimum wage takes home around £28,000 a year after tax. By contrast, a family with three children and no adults in work can expect upwards of £46,000 once Universal Credit, health benefits and Personal Independence Payments (Pip) are added. To match that standard of living through work alone, a family would need combined salaries of about £71,000. In theory, the household benefit cap should limit this. In practice, claiming a ‘qualifying’ benefit such as Pip means the cap vanishes; total benefit income shoots up. The incentive is obvious.
MPs comfort themselves that because fewer than 1 per cent of benefit claims are deemed fraudulent, the remaining 99 per cent must be genuine. But you don’t need to spend long on social media to see this is just not true. In one TikTok video, a man on UC because of ‘anxiety of interview’ explains how hard it is to live on his and his partner’s monthly budget of £2,272. Their ‘necessities’ include a Sky TV subscription, the upkeep of an African grey parrot and a monthly tanning session. Much of this content may be ‘rage bait’ – Oxford University Press’s word of the year – but newspaper investigations have found a plethora of disturbing examples. ‘Two-child cap scrapped, mate. Watch this space. Baby number three. Thank you, taxpayers,’ declares one sickfluencer.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. Throughout its history, when Labour has been out of office it has argued that decent pay and decent work were the only means by which working people could advance themselves. But when the party has been handed power, it has repeatedly deferred to spreadsheet socialism, with worklessness as the cost.
When Tony Blair won a 179-seat majority, he quickly worked out that there was an easier option than tackling welfare dependency in benefits Britain: mass migration. Job vacancies could be filled with cheap imported labour, while the proceeds of a growing economy could be used to pay benefits rather than reform them. Why pick a fight with campaigners chaining themselves to railings when you can import workers and let tax receipts do the heavy lifting?
Every government since has relied on the same economic cheat code, with young Britons paying the price. Last year, under-25 employment fell by 2 per cent, while non-EU under-25 employment increased by 16 per cent. But the trick no longer works. Today’s migrants are less skilled than those from the accession-era EU, and the OBR no longer confidently asserts that immigration automatically produces growth. Time to fix welfare, then?
Apparently not. Far easier to pin hopes elsewhere. Where Blair used migration to cover up the problems, Starmer and Reeves seem to have discovered a new saviour: artificial intelligence. The OBR said explicitly that not a single measure announced by Reeves would boost growth – but it did sketch an ‘upside scenario’ in which a successful AI rollout could lift productivity growth to 1.5 per cent a year by the end of the parliament. That would, conveniently, give Reeves enough fiscal space to reverse her tax rises, and fend off the uncomfortable question of who pays for the welfare surge.
But the point is obvious: just as one economic boom allowed Blair to ignore worklessness, another might let Starmer ignore it too. This isn’t a plan. It’s a hope that someone else – migrants then, machines now – will pick up the bill. Meanwhile the human tragedy continues.
The reality is that once-great industrial – and solidly Labour – towns and cities are languishing on welfare. More than one in five working-age adults in Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham and Blackpool are on out-of-work benefits. Zoom in further and the picture is worse: parts of Grimsby, central Blackpool and Glasgow have more than half of all working-age residents claiming out-of-work benefits. Undoing that damage will be a huge, near impossible, task.
Far from lifting the working class through the power of work, Labour now seems content to let the work capability assessment become a trapdoor through which people fall into a lifetime of economic apartheid and structural abandonment. The generational pauperisation of our cities seems acceptable as long as the sums still add up.
If we are to solve this problem we must look beyond Whitehall and Westminster. Something changed in the national psyche during lockdown. Not showing up for work, skipping school, signing off sick – behaviours once frowned upon – became normal.
And it is not just ministers who must fix it. GPs have become far too ready to dish out sick notes – at a rate of 30,000 a day – rather than explain the medical benefits of work. ‘We don’t feel able to challenge patients if they want a sick note,’ says one. ‘They’ll complain. It’s very subjective.’ But with one poll finding that 83 per cent of doctors think antidepressants are over-prescribed, and that 84 per cent believe we have medicalised the normal ups and downs of life, it’s little wonder that mental health has become the main driver of rising sickness benefit caseloads and costs. This is despite the fact that studies show being out of work increases the risk of mental illness by 64 per cent, while those in work are 48 per cent less likely to have depression. This institutionalised kindness has turned out cruel.
Perhaps, though, attitudes are beginning to change. The National Centre for Social Research finds that a majority of Brits now believe the welfare system stops people from supporting themselves, while polling by More in Common shows that seven in ten think we should cut benefits for those who are able but unwilling to work.
If Labour fails to take heed of that trend, others stand ready to exploit the fairness gap it creates. Reform UK is ‘feeling confident’, as one senior source puts it, that internal polling shows the party can gain ground by tackling welfare dependency head-on. ‘We’re going to announce larger cuts than any other party, and not just on foreign nationals,’ the source says.
Labour was founded on the belief that fair wages and honest work was the path to dignity and that worklessness represented a failing Britain. Its modern-day custodians still make that case – but their actions suggest that, really, they see it as a challenge too difficult to overcome.
(personal underlines)
You may remember that in February the BBC found itself in a spot of bother regarding a film about the conflict in Gaza which, it transpired, had been narrated by the son of a Hamas minister. Some people, not least Jewish people, wondered if such an account perhaps might accidentally stray into the realms of partisanship, and the BBC was forced to withdraw the documentary forthwith. It then commissioned an internal report into why this young lad had been chosen to front the film, rather than, say, Rylan Clark or Clare Balding. As a consequence of the investigation, the BBC’s head of news, Deborah Turness, sent a round robin email to all BBC staff. Only now, nearly nine months later, can I reveal the disturbing truth about what Ms Turness told her colleagues. I reprint her letter below because I believe it is in the public interest to do so:
Hi everybody,
I wanted to write to you following the publication of the Peter Johnston review into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone. It has not been an easy time. Why? Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews. For completeness, Jews, Jews and Jews. And I want to take this opportunity to tell you that I am incredibly proud of the work we do every day calling Israel a rogue state that’s committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass murdering Palestinians. We believe this is public interest journalism. I also want to recognise the outstanding work of Hamas, for the professionalism and patience they show every day.
Yours, Deborah Turness.
Remarkable, isn’t it? Reading that missive you worry that you are in the presence of a demented anti-Semite. And yet those are the words which Ms Turness put in her email. Except – OK, here I confess – not exactly the same. They are her words – it’s just that I’ve changed the order of them around a bit. Spliced a few sentences together, replaced one word with another word, etc. Yes, we are in Morecambe and Wise territory – ‘I am playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order’, if you recall the conversation between Eric and André Previn, back when the BBC could be trusted.
If I were as arrogant as the BBC, I might try to justify my complete mangling of Ms Turness’s views as being ‘standard journalistic practice’, and that my very heavily rejigged and abbreviated form of her letter nonetheless accurately represented her sentiments. But it would be a downright lie, and it does not remotely represent her sentiments. So far as we know.
In an edition of Panorama broadcast in October last year, the production team spliced together two entirely separate comments by the defeated Donald Trump, speaking on 6 January to his enraged supporters, to make it look as if he was urging them to cause havoc at the White House, as indeed later occurred. In other words, Panorama wished the British viewer to believe that Trump had orchestrated that assault on democracy. They spliced together a segment of Trump’s speech where he said that he was going to walk with his supporters to the Capitol with another bit where he said his supporters should ‘fight like hell’. What Trump actually said to the MAGA thousands was that he was going to walk with them to the Capitol ‘to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard’. An almost diametrically opposite statement of intent to the one which the BBC put on air.
Now, I remember watching that Panorama. And I remember too being surprised and shocked by Trump’s words. I had previously argued with friends and colleagues who insisted that the President had been the architect of that chaos at the Capitol; give me the proof, I demanded. And for lo, here was the proof. Right before my eyes. Serves me right for being stupid enough to believe anything broadcast by that convocation of dim-witted liberal humanities grads, I suppose.
To my mind, this incident is rather more serious that the one Turness was addressing. It was a deliberate mangling of the truth to support a point of view held by the production team – and indeed most of the BBC, if we’re honest. It formed part of a series of ‘shocking’ breaches of impartiality, according to Michael Prescott, who spent three years as an external adviser to the broadcaster’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, before leaving the role in June. Not according to me, or the Board of Deputies – but to the BBC’s own adviser who, when he left, was seriously worried that the corporation was unable or unwilling to listen to criticism of its serially biased output. On Gaza as on most other stuff.
According to Prescott, when the allegations about the Panorama film were put to the BBC’s head of news content, Jonathan Munro, he replied: ‘There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short-form clips.’ It was Munro, incidentally, who was involved in the appalling decision to commission a helicopter to pry on Cliff Richard’s home, telling a High Court that he had ‘no concerns’ about broadcasting the helicopter footage. He was also involved in the corporation’s decision to rehire the disgraced Martin Bashir.
Of course, it is the antithesis of normal journalistic practice to edit actuality in such a way that it suggests the precise reverse of what is the truth. It is one of the first things you get taught when training to be a journo: quotations should be edited only if they retain the sense of what is being said. That is why it was quite wrong of me to mangle Turness’s email to the staff and I’d like to offer her a full apology and wish her the very best in continuing with her brilliant stewardship of the BBC’s news coverage. What a great job she is doing.
Um retrato objectivo e meticuloso do mundo nas décadas do "colonialismo" do século XX. Franco Nogueira consegue definir e explicar os meandros dos interesses envolvidos e que estiveram na génese do ostracismo mundial propagandeado e defendido pela "instituição" ONU às províncias ultramarinas.
(personal underlines)
JD Vance has for months faced mounting pressure to censure Nicholas J. Fuentes and his army of boisterously racist and antisemitic supporters, known as Groypers. Speaking exclusively to UnHerd at the vice president’s residence on Friday, he doesn’t mince his words. “Let me be clear,” he says. “Anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki [the former Biden press secretary] or Nick Fuentes, can eat shit. That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States.”
“Antisemitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred,” he says, “have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting.” If that were the end of it, Vance would be a typical politician of an earlier age, and we likely wouldn’t be sitting down for an interview in his library at the Naval Observatory in Washington.
Vance isn’t typical. About to take off for the Christmas vacation, America’s first millennial veep is dressed in a crisp button-down and fleece vest with dark denim. His getup strikes a sharp contrast with his old-timey surroundings, lined with leather-bound books by and about vice presidents. His own memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is among the newer additions; a medieval-style painted crucifix stands out from the shelves.
More to the point, Vance is acutely sensitive to subterranean political and cultural shifts which until recently only registered on the seismometer known as the internet, but which are starting to remake the world aboveground. Fuentes — who has called Second Lady Usha Vance a “jeet” and labeled the vice president a race-traitor for marrying her — is but one jagged spike on the seismic wave. And to Vance, not even an especially pronounced one.
Says Vance: “I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated, and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.” That is, the Hitler-praising Groyper king functions as a useful foil for pro-Israel hard-liners in the Right’s raucous internal debate over America’s alliance with the Jewish state.
The debate descended into out and out civil war last week at a gathering of Turning Point USA, the organisation founded by the late Charlie Kirk, with Ben Shapiro denouncing the podcaster and Vance ally Tucker Carlson — and being denounced, in turn, by Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly, representing the insurgent Israel-critical camp. The vice president tells me he hasn’t yet watched the dueling speeches but thinks it’s healthy for the debate to continue. In his own address to TPUSA Sunday, Vance glossed over the controversy, rejecting “purity tests.”
Tucker Carlson, for example, gets a robust defense from Vance. “Tucker’s a friend of mine,” he tells me. “And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus.”
He goes on: “The idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it.”
What’s really afoot, he thinks, is “gatekeeping”, and people are “trying to settle their own ideological scores” — especially with respect to Washington’s policies in the Middle East.
“I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, and that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on,” Vance says. “But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes.”
Fuentes thus refracts — and, with his noxious rhetoric, distorts — a legitimate discontent. Says Vance: “99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we ought to have that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans are not antisemitic, they’re never going to be antisemitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate.”
What about Fuentes’s promotion of an overt white racial politics, complete with liberal use of the N-word? Is Vance worried by that stuff? Yes — but he believes there have been far worse offenders who got away with racial politics in recent years, because their version of it was aligned with elite prerogatives and progressive moral hierarchies.
“Let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity,” he later adds. “Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family” — not least, Mrs Vance. “Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the past five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good.”
He goes on: “If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.”
Then, too, Right-wing racialism is, in large part, a reaction against bipartisan elites who for decades maintained a porous border, with the flow of newcomers surging to a flood under the Biden administration. “That necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love,” he says. “Ethnic rivalry and balkanisation is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence.”
But wouldn’t Vance’s own children — Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel — be treated with contempt in the Groypers’ ideal America? The difference, for Vance, is once more about possession of actual power to effectuate policy. “If you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power.”
Calling out some of his likely opponents in the 2028 contest, he adds, “It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids ‘jeet,’ and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.” (Khanna, the Indian-American California lawmaker, has said he’d be “fine” with his kids being disadvantaged by race-based affirmative action.)
All of this raises a deeper question: who counts as a “true” American? For many on the hard Right, the fashionable answer is “Heritage Americans”. That category excludes anyone who arrived after the initial wave of Anglo settlement, sometimes defined as narrowly as the Mayflower and its descendants. This treats as lesser citizens not just recent arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but also Ellis Islanders like Italians and Jews, possibly even the Scotch-Irish.
What does Vance make of Heritage Americanism? He worries it poses more questions than it answers. “Is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century?,” the vice president asks. He tries to strike a balance between credal nationalism — Americans are people who believe in American ideals like liberty and equal justice — and thicker notions of belonging, emphasising shared language, culture, and history. Both, he says, have something to them.
The Heritage Americanists, he argues, grant too little to the credal aspect. “We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project,” he says, “a project that is very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being.”
Pure credal nationalists, meanwhile, forget that people are more than their abstract commitments: “Do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for 10 generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it.”
Contra the Heritage Americanists, Vance believes that culture and identity are transmissible over time. “The racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants — what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendants of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s not consistent with American practice, either.”
I ask him if he’d countenance differing legal treatment for the Mayflower descendant versus the person who received his passport 15 minutes ago. “No, no!” he replies. “Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally.”
But: “I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants — even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people — you do change the country in some profound way. . . . The problem with American immigration over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”
For a much longer span, of course, it was religion that defined Western identity, with Christendom encompassing a patchwork of nations otherwise at each other’s throats. Can faith still serve as a sort of moral glue today, in societies that are fast descending into what used to be called the “Blade Runner scenario”, after director Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi dystopia that portrays 21st-century Los Angeles as a city divided among polyglot ethnic formations arrayed tensely against each other?
“When I talk about America having some common culture,” Vance says, “I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians. . . . There’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity.”
And yet, religion often clashes with contemporary politics. Vance’s own spiritual leader as a Roman Catholic, Pope Leo XIV, takes a much more universalist approach to questions of immigration and assimilation, and has reportedly deputised the US bishops to counter the Trump administration’s hawkish border policies. How does Vance reconcile his religious leader with his political positions?
While he welcomes the Vatican’s voice in international affairs, he thinks of its counsels as one moral lens that must be applied alongside other perspectives. The Bishop of Rome “is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on.” The “dignity” of would-be migrants is part of it. So are “the wages of workers” and “the social cohesion of the United States of America.”
“Balkanisation and ethnic hatred,” reflected in the rise of the likes of Fuentes & Co., are thus mostly symptoms, to Vance’s mind. Moralising denunciation, in his telling, will do little to address the underlying disease. Critics will no doubt see his reluctance to draw brighter red lines as a political strategy: taking care of his Right flank ahead of a 2028 presidential campaign.
He is certainly careful about whom to denounce and on which grounds. Still, I walk away from JD Vance’s home concluding that the position he espouses — the need to renegotiate questions of immigration and belonging to avoid a descent into even worse ethnic strife — is a sincerely held expression of his worldview. Whether it can be translated into a responsible politics will be the big test of the next few years.
UnHerd subscribers can read the full transcript of Sohrab Ahmari’s interview with JD Vance here.
Curioso o facto de ter havido uma diferençazita para uma das últimas campanhas...
Depois os me(r)dia não têm culpa...
