Show Notes
As friend of the show Charles C.W. Cooke has said, "To the honest eye, Joe Biden was a mid-wit career politician from Delaware who had the chance to appear normal enough to unseat Trump from office. To the authors of our roiling morality play, he was Earth's Last Honest Man. After he won the White House, this second characterization was foisted upon us with abandon." It was never true, as was finally and irrefutably hammered home with the pardon of his son, Hunter.
No one has done more to expose Biden for the man he really is than Miranda Devine. Australian listeners will remember Miranda from her successful career in Australian journalism, before she moved to the US to take up a role with The New York Post. She has gone on to release two of the most influential books on American politics this decade, 'Laptop from Hell' and 'The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold out America.'
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Read The Spectator Australia here [https://www.spectator.com.au/].
More from Fire at Will
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The Economist recently described Germany as "the hole at the heart of Europe". That's a reasonable description, particularly given it accounts for a quarter of the EU's output, but it has been in recession for the past two years. Another way to look at it is that Germany is a representation of Europe, and all of its challenges.
Whilst illiberal progressivism (or woke for short) appears to be in retreat, what will take its place is an open question. The right in the UK has splintered, Europe is still being suffocated by the weight of the leftist social democratic model, free speech is under assault in Australia (as it is pretty much everywhere), and whilst the Republicans are resurgent in the US, Trump's brand of economic protectionism would have been anathema to the American right in years gone by.
There's an interesting historical pattern in British politics, and you can see it in various shapes and forms since the days of William the Conqueror. About once every century, there is a realignment that completely changes the nature of politics in the country. The last great realignment was the 1922 election, with the Liberal Party falling to third-party status, the Conservatives establishing themselves as the largest party in Parliament, and Labour emerging as the undisputed opposition party.
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