Tag: donald trump

FREE SPEECH, BIG TECH AND BROKEN POLITICS

January 19, 2021 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the fallout from Donald Trump’s banishment from social media, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on ingrained prejudices about migrants and the poor.) It was published on 17 January 2021, under the headline “Control Facebook and mend broken societies… If only it were that simple”. London is full of “Pops”. From the area around City Hall to parts of the Olympic Park, there are dozens of “privately owned public spaces”. Places that […]

Categories: Free Speech, Politics, Science & Technology • Tags: alexei navalny, big tech, censorship, donald trump, facebook, free speech, parler, poland, social media, twitter

WELCOME TO FLATLAND

October 6, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This essay, on the shallowness of cultural and political debate, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on Home Office plans for asylum seekers.) It was published on 4 October 2020, under the headline “Welcome to Flatland, where shallow appeal ousts substance and reason”. Four international art galleries decide to “postpone” a controversial exhibition. Donald Trump and Joe Biden take part in what has aptly been called a “shitshow” of a presidential election debate. Celebrity activist Laurence Fox […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: black lives matter, donald trump, joe biden, laurence fox, philip guston, polarisation, presidential debate, racism, reclaim, usa

THE OPIOID CRISIS AND THE EXPLOITATION OF PAIN

September 2, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the opioid crisis in America, its roots and its lessons, was published in the Observer on 1 September 2019 under the headline ‘America’s opioid catastrophe has lessons for us all, about greed and racial division’. (I have restored a couple of paragraphs that I had to remove for reasons of space in the Observer.) ‘We’ll build a wall to keep the damn drugs out.’ So insisted Donald Trump at a rally last year to launch the White […]

Categories: International, Science & Technology • Tags: big phrama, david herzberg, donald trump, free market, johnson & johnson, medicine, opioid crisis, pharmaceutical companies, purdue phrama, racism, usa, war on drugs, working class

HAS THE RETWEET RUINED THE WORLD?

July 29, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Twitter, engagement ad democracy, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on Bryan Magee.) It was published on 7 July 2019, under the headline ‘Twitter won’t ruin the world. But constraining democracy would’. Has the retweet ruined the world? Chris Wetherell, the software developer who built Twitter’s retweet button, thinks so. Introduced in 2009, retweeting transformed the social media landscape, he suggests, by allowing people to pass on information without having bothered to […]

Categories: Politics, Science & Technology • Tags: brexit, democracy, donald trump, education, fake news, social media, social polarisation, technology, twitter

POSH MAY BE PASSÉ BUT CONTEMPT IS NOT

December 31, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on changing attitudes to class, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on cookery books.) It was published in the Observer, 30 December 2018, under the headline ‘Posh is so passé – today’s elite prefers the myth of the meritocracy’. I’m not posh,’ an irate David Dimbleby told the Today presenter John Humphrys. ‘I come from Wales, as you do.’ Dimbleby, who this month stepped down as host of BBC’s Question Time, was being interviewed by Humphrys, […]

Categories: Britain, Class • Tags: brexit, Class, david dimbleby, david runciman, democracy, donald trump, education, elite, elitism, meritocracy, michael young, populism, poshness, privilege, richard dawkins, technocracy, upper class, working class

BLOOD, SOIL AND CITIZENSHIP

November 5, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on notions of citizenship, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on bootlegging and Bob Dylan). It was published in the Observer, 4 November 2018, under the headline ‘Myths about shared culture have no place in the citizenship debate’. What links Mike Leigh’s new film, Peterloo, to Donald Trump’s threat to deprive children born to undocumented migrants of the right to US citizenship? It might seem an odd question, best left to Only Connect fans. But answering […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: 14th amendment, birthright citizenship, britain, citizenship, Class, donald trump, eric kaufmann, france, jus sanguinis, jus soli, michael walzer, mike leigh, peterloo, usa

WHY DEBATE BANNON?

September 10, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the controversy over Steve Bannon’s invitation to the New Yorker festival,, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the Swedish elections). It was published in the Observer, 9 September 2018, under the headline ‘Condemning all debate with Bannon amounts to giving up on politics’. Two memes have become central to much contemporary political debate. The first is that we need to break out of our echo chambers. The second is […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Politics • Tags: alt right, david remnick, donald trump, far right, free speech, new yorker, steve bannon

THE SUPREME COURT AND SOCIAL CHANGE

July 9, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate about Donald Trump’s judicial pick for the Supreme Court, and what it tells us about the relationship between courts, democracy and social change, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on an exhibition in Florence on the Islamic influence on European art.) It was published in the Observer, 8 July 2018, under the headline ‘The law, whether in the US or UK, can’t change society if we resist’. […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: democracy, donald trump, judicial activism, judicial system, justice, law, roe v wade, scotus, supreme court, usa

MORE THAN ONE WAY OF BEING REACTIONARY

May 14, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the debate over Kanye West’s comments about Donald Trump and about slavery, was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the new working class.) It was published in the Observer, 13 May 2018, under the headline ‘Are rightwing black people traitors to the cause? Of course they’re not’. ‘I feel the pressure, under more scrutiny/ And what do I do? Act more stupidly’, rapped Kanye West on […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Justice & Liberties, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-racism, donald trump, kanye west, race traitor, racism, slavery, ta-nehisi coates

THINKING ALLOWED ON THE WHITE WORKING CLASS

March 2, 2018 by Kenan Malik

. This is a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed programme on ‘the white working class’ , in which I took part with Gurminder Bhambra and Noam Gidron. . The painting is ‘The Workers’ by Walker Scott.

Categories: Class, Politics • Tags: brexit, donald trump, identity politics, racism, white working class, working class

DONALD TRUMP AND BRITAIN’S LIBEL LAWS

February 15, 2018 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on Donald Trump’s fancy for stricter libel laws. It was published under the headline ‘Trump Wants British Libel Laws. America Does Not.’ While American lawmakers once sought to protect their citizens from the clutches of British libel law, Mr. Trump now wants British-style laws in the United States. . After a long campaign by free-speech organizations, the British libel law was finally amended five years ago. The 2013 […]

Categories: Britain, Free Speech, International • Tags: british libel laws, british politics, donald trump, first amendment, free speech, libel, libel tourism, usa

FAKE NEWS AND THE GATEKEEPERS OF TRUTH

February 11, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a shorter piece in response to a Treasury tweet on how British taxpayers ‘helped end the slave trade‘.) It was published in the Observer, 11 February 2018, under the headline ‘Fake news has a long history. Beware the state being keeper of “the truth”‘. . Before Facebook, there was the coffee house. In the 17th-century, panic gripped British royal circles that these newly established drinking […]

Categories: Free Speech, Politics • Tags: censorship, donald trump, emmanuel macron, fake news, free speech

TOO POLARISED? OR NOT ENOUGH?

December 24, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 24 December 2017, under the headline ‘A Britain of common values was always a myth. By arguing, we shape ourselves’. What links the results of the Catalonia elections last week with the row in Britain over the proposed new blue passport? The one is the latest expression of the polarised character of electorates, the other of the way that the most arbitrary, irrelevant issues can become the focus of intense political controversy. Neither […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: 1984/85 miners strike, brexit, british politics, donald trump, protests, thatcherism, vietnam war, working class

LESS A DEBATE THAN POLITICAL TROLLING

December 3, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of an article published in the Observer, 3 December2017, under the headline ‘When crude tweets set the global agenda we are surely in a new age of politics’. The most powerful leader in the world tweets like a teenage Nazi on 4chan whose sole aim is to create outrage. Three retweets of anti-Muslim hatred first tweeted by the deputy leader of a British neo-Nazi group do indeed cause global outrage. British politics becomes consumed by […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Politics • Tags: alt right, anti-muslim hatred, donald trump, far right, islamophobia, muslims, racism, twitter, usa

NOT POST-TRUTH AS TOO MANY ‘TRUTHS’

February 5, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Fake news. Alternative facts. Post-truth politics. Three issues that dominate much current discussion, all connected to new anxieties about how we can distinguish truth and falsity, and all seemingly linked to the election of Donald Trump as US President. Trump’s election victory was, for many, fuelled by a wave of fake news. His proclivity to lie, for instance about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, has been reframed by his advisor Kellyanne Conway as the acceptance of ‘alternative […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: alain de benoist, alt right, alternative facts, donald trump, enlightenment, fake news, far right, identitarian movement, identity politics, left, post-truth, postmodernism, relativism, truth, universalism