Your correspondent has swapped places with King Charles. While the reigning British monarch has been in Washington, DC, I have been in London; sadly my arrival here was not greeted with the kind of lavish dinners and parades Charles and Camilla were given across the pond, but I soldiered on regardless. There is lots going on back home, and plenty happening here in the United Kingdom (UK). Let’s get to it:

The Supremes, voting, and race

This week the United States (US) Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Louisiana v. Calais, in a decision reflecting the court’s conservative/progressive split. The case centered on the way Louisiana draws its voting districts and whether or not it can use race to draw district lines. In 2022 Louisiana redrew voting districts, but those districts were challenged on the grounds that they violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act because they did not include a majority-black district. The state then redrew the maps, but those new maps were then challenged on the grounds that they included a racial gerrymander that violates the Equal Protection Clause of 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

The Supreme Court essentially ruled that you can’t at once draw voting districts based on people’s race and comply with the Constitution that outlaws discrimination by race. The 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed at a time when state governments, mostly in the US southern states, were working hard to suppress or stop black Americans from voting and to stop black Americans from being elected to high office. More than 60 years on, the country has changed enormously and there is no suppression of black voting or no attempts to block black Americans from being elected. Furthermore, the idea that Americans vote on the basis of race is not just offensive, it’s also wrong.

Take a different southern state, South Carolina, as an example. This state was once a hotbed of racism, segregation, Jim Crow laws, and active Ku Klux Klan cells. Today voter turnout rates are high among both black and white voters. South Carolina is about 65% white and 35% non-white, and like every state it has two US senators. In successive elections its voters chose Republican senators, one white, Lindsey Graham, and one black, Tim Scott. So, in a state that once saw horrific racism and violence against blacks, millions of white South Carolinians voted for a black candidate and black voters opted for a white candidate. Indeed, as the respected pollster, Patrick Ruffini, points out, there are 58 black members of the House of Representatives, and a majority are elected from plurality white districts.

Much to the surprise of our leftist friends, people are more than the colour of their skins. It turns out that people have brains, personalities, and individual preferences. They can evaluate political candidates based on their policies and make their choices at the ballot box based on their own interests. While most of us celebrate this progress, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), about which The Common Sense has written lately, decries the Supreme Court’s decision. They do that, of course, because the SPLC makes its money on racial division and by ginning up hatred. The acknowledgement that the US is actually far more tolerant and non-racist than most people think doesn’t fit the SPLC’s business plan.

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 Supreme Court ruling related to race discrimination in schools, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Amen to that.

The Covid Coverup

More than six years ago governments the world over were implementing Covid lockdowns … just for two weeks, you understand. Two weeks that turned into two years.

Back then Dr Anthony Fauci, then the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was telling us confidently that the virus had jumped from bats, or maybe from pangolins to people. What he wasn’t telling us was how he, using US taxpayer’s money, had directed risky gain of function research, via the EcoHealth Alliance, into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Science writers, like Matt Ridley, have done excellent work in telling this story so there is no need to go into it all here. But this week we learn that one of Fauci’s assistants, David Morens, has been indicted for conspiring to conceal records related to Covid-research grants.

The indictment shows how Morens sought to protect both Dr Fauci and the head of the EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak by concealing communications about Covid to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) scrutiny. In one email that Morens allegedly wrote to Daszak he states that he “learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe. Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

Morens was a government employee and therefore his communications are subject to oversight. His alleged efforts to conceal communications are against the law and he could, if convicted, be sentenced to spend time behind bars.

Covid imposed unfathomable human and economic costs that we have only just begun to understand. The episode also did great damage to science. Fauci at one point declared, absurdly but revealingly that “I am science.” People are rightly sceptical of the arrogant and unaccountable public health agencies that lied to us repeatedly and knowingly. And now we see the extent to which those agencies went to to cover up their misdeeds.

I, for one, hate thinking about that horrible period of our lives, but we have to doggedly uncover went wrong. Unless we do so, we will be doomed to repeat the disastrous policies next time a pandemic hits us. Check out this interesting discussion on this topic by economist, and old friend, Roger Bate.

We should never forgive those who funded dangerous research that cost millions of lives, lied to about that research, and promoted devastatingly harmful lock down policies that further ruined countless lives. If Morens is convicted, no matter how much time he spends behind bars, it won’t be nearly enough.

Jim Comey back in the news

While the Trump Administration’s legal actions against Morens are right and proper, the new charges against former Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) director, Jim Comey, are absurd and damaging. To be clear, your correspondent has a low opinion of Comey. From his handling of the Hilary Clinton email affair to the way he dealt with the false accusations of Russia colluding with the first Trump presidential campaign, and to the politicisation of the FBI, he will go down as one of that agency’s worst leaders. The best thing would be for him to be forgotten about entirely, but Comey is back in the news thanks to a new indictment brought by the Trump Administration.

Last year while out at the beach Comey posted a picture of some shells to his Instagram account. The shells were arranged to spell 8647, which, we are lead to believe, meant “get rid of Trump.” Eighty-six is restaurant slang for “remove something” and 47 refers to Trump as the country’s 47th president. Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, claims this Instagram post was a direct threat against the president.

The Trump Administration’s latest attempts to go after Comey are unlikely to succeed. Trying to convince a judge and jury that this one Instagram post, which was deleted soon after it was made, was a credible threat against the President will be a tough job. Furthermore, the Trump Administration will have to convince the court that Comey’s actions were not protected by the First Amendment, which secures, among other things, people’s rights to free expression.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that this indictment has been made. On the campaign trail Trump said, “I am your retribution.” The Biden Administration’s use of lawfare against Trump and its other enemies was disgraceful. But the efforts of the Trump Administration to do the same is just as wrong, and in the case of Comey, more transparently personal and vindictive.

There are, as we saw with the latest attempt against Trump’s life at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, real threats against the President. Therefore, the focus of this Administration and law enforcement should be against the actual threats and not the imagined ones made by washed up former officials.

Maine’s main man

I have already written about the Democratic Party’s Senate candidate Graham Platner … you know the one with a Nazi tattoo who associates himself with Jew haters and who believes the alliance between the US and Israel is “shameful.” Platner was running in the Democratic primary against the state’s governor, Janet Mills. On Thursday Mills announced that she is suspending her campaign, so Platner is effectively the Democrat’s choice to go up against the sitting Republican senator, Susan Collins.

What are we to make of this? I suppose we are forced to conclude that among America’s leftists, rather like those in the UK, if you want to succeed in politics, all you need to do is express your hatred of Jews and Israel.

Saving Britain

As I’m in the UK, this week I attended the Center for Policy Studies’s annual Margaret Thatcher Conference on Prosperity. The theme of the meeting was to discuss the reforms needed to make the UK an investable place once more and how to boost economic growth, which has flatlined for too many years.

The UK has been in the economic doldrums before and managed to dig itself out. In the 1970s the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), a venerable London think tank, was discussing ways of turning the UK’s dismal economy around. The IEA provided the intellectual firepower to Margaret Thatcher, who had the iron will and testicular fortitude, if you will, to enact reforms.

Sitting in the glorious City of London Guildhall, where the conference was held, I got a powerful sense that Britain and its inhabitants don’t want to accept the slow decline of this once proud country. Speaker after speaker spoke not only about the problems investors and entrepreneurs face, but also about the promise, the energy, the intelligence, and the will of the British to be great once more. Growth and prosperity are possible if the UK can reform its disastrous energy, tax, fiscal, welfare, and regulatory policies. In fact, if it can do that, growth won’t only be possible, it will be inevitable. Watch the proceedings and decide for yourself. Maybe this is how people felt in the late ‘70s and maybe, just maybe, a turnaround is on the cards.

Speaking of the IEA, your correspondent is delighted to learn that the great Dan Hannan, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, will be the think tank’s new leader. There are few people who defend the free market, international trade, individual liberty, and the West with more clarity and eloquence than Dan Hannan.

Hannan and his colleagues at other think tanks, such as the Henry Jackson Society and Policy Exchange, have a tough road ahead. If it is true that you can tell the health of a society by the way it treats its Jews, then Britain is very unhealthy. This week on the streets of London two men were stabbed by a deranged Jew-hater of Somali origin. This comes after countless attacks on Jews, on synagogues, and on Jewish institutions. And it comes after years of hate marches on the streets of London, with people seeking to “globalise the intifada.” The intifada refers to the murder of Jews. Well done London, you got what you wanted.

Will Britian really continue down this path? If it does, I fear it nothing good will come to this island state and all the discussion and debate at the Margaret Thatcher Conference will be for nought. But Britain does not need to self-destruct. There is time to turn things around, and this country can be saved if people of good conscience and moral clarity to act now.