Hello, I'm Amber Athe, Washington editor of The Spectator, and I'd like to urge you all to give the gift of great writing this Christmas.

The Spectator has a special Yuletide offer for Americano listeners.

For $52, that's just $1 a week, you'll get a full subscription to The Spectator, which includes a beautiful, monthly 88-page magazine and full access to our brilliant American website.

We'll even throw in a free Parker pen so you can get scribbling yourself.

Just go to spectator.us forward slash Christmas and subscribe.

Have a very, very merry Christmas from everyone at The Spectator.

Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and now the Joe Biden presidency.

We will be looking at how a 78-year-old president will change America

and we'll be asking if normalcy, which is what he promised to bring, has returned to American

politics. The answer, of course, is no. I'm joined today by Douglas Murray, who is associate editor of the spectator and author of the best-selling blockbuster, the madness of crowds, which continues to sell disgustingly well.

Douglas, thank you very much for being with us.

It's a great pleasure, Freddie.

I want to do a sort of bit of a year in review with you today, if that's possible.

It's been a pretty good year, hasn't it?

Yes, it's not had any shortage of stories in it.

No, no, no shortage there.

I think for me, the overwhelming story of the years, obviously, COVID,

but the story that people aren't talking about enough in relation to it is China and COVID.

You recently wrote an excellent piece for the spectator, making a point that I feel should be

discussed more, which is whether we should be demanding reparations from China.

We being, I suppose, the West, the Western world should be demanding reparations from China.

If they continue to not allow an investigation into the origins of the virus,

...