Free Republic

An American professor and writer has said that Donald Trump’s “brain is rotting in front of us”, and claimed that to compare him to Joe Biden is “dangerous and wrong”. Sarah Churchwell, an American culture specialist and the author of a book examining division in the US, The Wrath to Come, was appearing on a panel at Hay Festival chaired by The Independent’s chief book critic Martin Chilton. They were joined by political podcaster David Runciman and We Need to Talk About Kevin author Lionel Shriver. Shriver claimed that, ahead of the US election on 5 November, she finds herself...

I have a new fear. And this one’s a doozy. Having weathered more than one social-­media s- -t storm, I’m one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career for good. A single unacceptable sentiment, a word usage misconstrued, a sentence taken out of context suffices these days to implode a reputation decades in the making and to trigger ­McCarthyite blacklisting. But that isn’t the fear in its entirety. Suppose a perceived violation of progressive orthodoxy translates into the kind of institutional cowardice on display in the forced resignation of Ian Buruma from The New York Review...