The man accused of shooting dead 10 people in a black neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York, earlier this month was apparently motivated by the Great Replacement Theory, says Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish. This is the conspiracy that a shadowy, Jewish global elite is deliberately encouraging mass non-white immigration to dilute the voting power of white Americans. The idea that there’s some secret plot to “dilute the ‘whiteness’ of America” is, of course, bonkers. But only because “there is nothing secret about it at all”. Liberals have been openly pining for more minorities – and thus, they think, more Democratic votes – for decades. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has talked of “an embittered white conservative minority” clinging to power, “terrified at being swamped by a new mulitracial polyglot majority”. When it emerged that the number of white people in America was falling, left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore declared it the “best day ever in US history”.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Marshall Plan – the massive US programme to rebuild western Europe’s economy after World War Two – is “the endless desire to repeat it” after subsequent conflicts, says Benn Steil in Foreign Affairs. “There will be a new Marshall Plan for Ukraine,” said Volodymyr Zelensky in March. European Council President Charles Michel agreed, announcing in May “the starting point for [a] kind of European Marshall Plan for Ukraine”. But as much as the country’s rich friends in the US and Europe would like to help, there’s one thing even the most “noble and generous of foreign saviours cannot change”: geography.