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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. I'm Max Jeffrey. Every week we ask a few of our

favourite writers to read their piece from the magazine aloud.

On today's episode, Douglas Murray says that the case of Carl Rittenhouse shows nothing in America matters more than your identity.

Henry Elliott wonders what makes a book a classic, and Sam Holmes tells us about his time as a Hamley's Christmas elf.

First up, Douglas Murray.

There was no reason for the world ever to hear the name Kyle Rittenhouse.

Except that in the summer of 2020, the USA was staring over a precipice.

The COVID lockdowns effectively ended after the killing of

George Floyd by a Minnesotan policeman. Suddenly, mass gatherings in the name of BLM were a public health

duty and, because it was an election year, neither Democrats nor Republicans seemed to know how

to react to protests that soon degenerated into

serious disorder. For a country that is only one bad police interaction away from meltdown,

it was inevitable that something would happen again. Sure enough, in August, a man called Jacob Blake was shot by police

in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There was a warrant out for Blake's arrest, and he was shot after fighting

with police, wielding a knife, and having already been tasered. Though Blake was not killed,

BLM and other protest movements immediately had another martyr

to hold up as evidence of systemic racism in America.

And once again, the peaceful movements turned very violent indeed.

...