What all these protests are really about

Training for urban warfare in the Mojave Desert

In the middle of California’s Mojave Desert is a town that looks like “a film set for Hollywood’s latest Arabian epic”, says Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. The 785 buildings cluster around a “lively market”, and a golden onion dome “crowning a pale blue minaret”. Yet “it is not Aladdin but an Apache helicopter that suddenly appears” as gunfire echoes through the streets. This is Razish, a fake village built to train American soldiers for urban warfare. First opened in 1981, it was then a mere “series of sheds”, but when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, it massively expanded. Brigades of 5,000 soldiers come and train here against the “resident enemy”, the 2,000-strong 11th Armoured Cavalry Regiment. It’s tough work: the houses are riddled with trapdoors and connected by tunnels “through which the pretend insurgents can scurry unseen”.

In response to the Ukraine war, this fake village has been updated again. Its sign has been re-written in Cyrillic and “the actors hawking chunks of plastic meat and veg in the street market speak not English or Arabic, but Russian. The music blaring from their hi-fis now has a distinctly eastern European flavour.” They’re bussed in to play the roles of villagers, governors, merchants and more, often living on the base during their employment. An investigation in 2019 found that the “military role-playing industry” as a whole generated $250m a year in US government contracts. These actors “are often recent refugees, having fled one real-world conflict only to enter another, simulated one”.

Why does the National Trust hate its members

The National Trust has declared itself a disgrace, says Harry Mount in The Spectator, because only 1% of National Park visitors are from the “global majority”. This phrase – which is perfectly useful in its proper context – essentially refers to the 85% of the world’s population that is not white. With its “customary love of patronising claptrap”, the Trust declares that “cost and access” could be the problem, before adding that a “lack of representation in the outdoors” could lead to people of some ethnicities feeling unwelcome. Cost and access? Going for a walk is free. And who needs “representation” on a footpath? The whole point of National Parks is that, at their loveliest, they’re empty.

More broadly, why does the Trust think the global population should be perfectly reflected in “every single gathering of people anywhere in the world”? Would you expect the population of a Cumbrian pub to reflect the global majority? Or the number of plumbers in Cornwall? Or even the population of London? Of course not. But it’s one of the Trust’s “peculiar, masochistic tendencies” that it’s never happy with its members. When Simon Jenkins was chairman, he described how a senior employee was furious that most visitors to Trust properties were aged 50 or older. Jenkins had to break it to him that “most of us turn 50 eventually”. The Trust should just get on with doing its real job: “preserving wonderful buildings and landscapes for those five million members to enjoy.”

Ma, ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!

Last week, says Dominic Sandbrook in The Times, Donald Trump sat in court for hours “in a simmering fury” while the former porn actress Stormy Daniels described their trysts in excruciating detail. America’s founding fathers would have found his predicament familiar. “Why, for example, did the first United States Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton never reach the White House?” Partly because, in 1797, he confessed to having an affair with one Maria Reynolds, whose husband blackmailed him about it, demanding the equivalent of a million dollars today. “Where Hamilton led, others followed.” Journalists turned a blind eye to rampant womanisers like Franklin D Roosevelt and John F Kennedy. Bill Clinton was not so lucky.

The “most memorable presidential scandal” involves Grover Cleveland. In summer 1884, as the Democrat’s campaign for the White House was in full swing, a Buffalo newspaper reported that 10 years earlier “he had secretly fathered a son, Oscar, with a woman called Maria Halpin”. Cleveland dismissed it: they were both single at the time; Halpin “had been carrying on with lots of Buffalo businessmen”, and Cleveland generously “lent little Oscar his surname”. Halpin, however, claimed Cleveland had stalked then raped her, and tried to lock her in an asylum after the baby was born. We don’t know the truth of the matter, but it had little political impact. When Republican hecklers sang, “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?” President Cleveland’s supporters replied: “Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!”