Free Republic

While President Donald Trump attended big-money fundraisers for the Republican Party and his 2020 re-election campaign at mansions in Southampton and Bridgehampton on Friday, many of his East End supporters are eschewing the spotlight — especially after last week’s calls for boycotts of billionaire Stephen Ross’s fitness chains SoulCycle and Equinox because he hosted the president. “We are all in the closet,” said a boutique owner in Southampton who fears reprisals from his customers — most of them moneyed Democrats — if he speaks openly about his allegiance to Trump. “It’s like you have this disease and people want to...

Britain's most notorious Islamist extremists were bankrolled by more than £1 million of taxpayers' money while waging their campaign of hate, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. A dozen supporters of Islamic State recruiter Anjem Choudary – many of them now convicted terrorists or jihadis who are fighting in Syria or have died there – were paid wages by a businessman who was handed huge sums of public money to run computer training courses in libraries and job centers. And now a judge has found that the man – a close associate of Choudary's – funnelled tens of thousands of...

Michael Collins' chronicle of South-East London looks for the roots of today's chav-bashing. The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working ClassMichael Collins Granta Books, 2004.South-East London has never enjoyed a good press. Guidebooks treat it as an afterthought, an appendix to the real business elsewhere in the capital. Historical Greenwich is mentioned, of course, and a handful of other tourist-friendly sights, but that's your lot. The days when the South Bank theatres were surrounded by syphilitic brothels and murderous backstreets are long gone, yet the stigma persists. This corner of the capital remains a world apart. In...