July 19, 2024 - 6:30pm

→ Hillary Clinton re-enters the fray

A surprising new voice has emerged in the fight to keep Joe Biden on the November ballot. Hillary Clinton, along with her husband Bill, has reportedly been begging donors to stand behind the President amid a wave of reports that he might step down. Her effort to lock Kamala Harris out of the Oval Office may be a pragmatic effort to help the party — if anyone knows about losing to Donald Trump, it’s her.

It could, however, be a more cynical move from a spurned aspiring president. If Hillary Clinton doesn’t get to be the first woman president after decades in politics, then neither does anyone else. Could the Democrats spring a surprise with their Biden replacement?

→ New report accuses Home Office of systematic racism

Britain’s immigration system is “built on a White supremacist colonial legacy”, according to a new report. The “Hostile Office” — entirely impartial, of course — report from the Migrants’ Rights Network claims that the UK’s immigration system is “racist by design” and “explicitly designed to both prevent [immigrants] from coming or remaining in the UK, or extract their labour for economic gain [sic]”.

It concedes that although this racism isn’t always explicit, everything is informed by racist assumptions and White supremacist ideas. Anyone familiar with university humanities courses will find the language eerily familiar: it goes on at some length about “racialised people”, the “construction of identities”, and the “Other”. But unlike critical theory, people in Government might actually read this.

CEO of the MRN Fizza Qureshi claims in the foreword to the report that causing misery for migrants is “one of [the Home Office’s] sole purposes”. One of its sole purposes? Remember, correct grammar is “linguistic racism”…

→ NPR promotes mental health break from politics

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and with Joe Biden on the brink of dropping out of the presidential race, this week hasn’t been a quiet one for American politics. It’s therefore a strange time for a news outlet to tell readers to take a break from the news, and yet that’s exactly what NPR did this morning. The best way to protect one’s mental health, according to a psychologist the outlet interviewed, may be “turning off the television, news outlets, wherever you’re receiving your news”.

At a time when the President is referring to his Secretary of Defence as “the black man” on national television and party leaders are turning on one another in public view, NPR would prefer that readers look away. In fairness, there are worse remedies for Trump Derangement Syndrome