I couldn’t sleep the other night, because I made the fatal mistake of reading about US politics directly before bed, specifically the executive order calling for the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian museums. If US politics were a film, I’d say we’re somewhere in between having read aloud from the book that summons demons as a joke, and the final bloodbath.
If JD Vance rewriting history isn’t sinister enough, then came the news that the US state department will be “monitoring” a UK woman’s abortion buffer zone case (why does everything they say always sound so creepy?) They are “concerned”, apparently, “about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom”. The case is that of Livia Tossici-Bolt – who held up a sign reading “Here to talk if you want” outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic and was this morning convicted of breaching the buffer zone. Her case was being funded by the UK branch of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a rightwing organisation with links to the White House, which has increased its expenditure and activities in this country of late. It has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the US.
