Already the world begins to change 185
The corrective effects of Donald Trump’s victory on the wider world have started.
The first thing it is doing is striking fear into the hearts of those who need to be made to fear.
Who are they? They are the Powers that rule us.
They are Leftist intellectuals. They are commonly referred to as “the elites”. Thomas Sowell calls them “the Annointed”. Donald Trump calls them “the Establishment”.
They have silenced the voice of the people by creating the undemocratic European Union. They do their utmost to impose their orthodoxy by suppressing freedom of speech.
Most of the press and the mainstream media are their lackeys.
And now, inspired by the British exit from the EU by popular vote, and even more by the triumph of Donald Trump, the suppressed are emboldened to speak out, to protest, to challenge the power of Their power.
They know it, they fear it, and they admit that they fear it.
Reuters, one of the leading media lackeys, “reports” the parties and organizations that pose the threat – without recognizing that some of them are corrective movements. The word “populist“ is applied to all of them, and considered enough to condemn all of them. But in this article the groups cited make a very mixed bag. All they have in common is that they threaten the monopoly of power that the Establishment now holds.
Back in May, when Donald’s Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election seemed the remotest of possibilities, a senior European official took to Twitter before a G7 summit in Tokyo to warn of a “horror scenario“.
Imagine, mused the official, if instead of Barack Obama, Francois Hollande, David Cameron and Matteo Renzi, next year’s meeting of the club of rich nations included Trump, Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson and Beppe Grillo.
A month after Martin Selmayr, the head of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s cabinet made the comment, Britain shocked the world by voting to leave the European Union. Cameron stepped down as prime minister and Johnson – the former London mayor who helped swing Britons behind Brexit – became foreign minister.
Now, with Trump’s triumph over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, the populist tsunami that seemed outlandish a few months ago is becoming reality, and the consequences for Europe’s own political landscape are potentially huge.
In 2017, voters in the Netherlands, France and Germany – and possibly in Italy and Britain too – will vote in elections that could be colored by the triumphs of Trump and Brexit, and the toxic politics that drove those campaigns.
The lessons will not be lost on continental Europe’s populist parties, who hailed Trump’s victory on Wednesday as a body blow for the political mainstream.
“Toxic politics”? “Toxic” because they are “populist”. “Populist” simply means “of the people”. But the Establishment and its media lackeys use it to imply the will of a rabble, a frenzied mob, driven by foaming irrational hate to do violence for no reason but a sheer lust for destruction – the very thing Leftist mobs do so often under the banners of, for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Politics will never be the same,” said Geert Wilders of the far-right Dutch Freedom Party. “What happened in America can happen in Europe and the Netherlands as well.”
Geert Wilders’s party “far right”? Read his latest speech here. He is proud of the Dutch tradition of freedom, tolerance, impartial justice. He is a patriot, a defender of the nation-state of Holland. That does not make him a Nazi, which is what Reuters, and all those for whom Reuters speaks, mean to imply by the label “far right”.
French National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen was similarly ebullient. “Today the United States, tomorrow France,” Le Pen, the father of the party’s leader Marine Le Pen, tweeted.
Aligning Marine Le Pen with her father Jean-Marie Le Pen is again an attempt to apply the “far right” or “Nazi” smear. She did take over the leadership of the originally neo-Nazi Front National from her father, but changed it into a tolerant conservative party, expelling members who held pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic views.
Daniela Schwarzer, director of research at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), said Trump’s bare-fisted tactics against his opponents and the media provided a model for populist European parties that have exercised comparative restraint on a continent that still remembers World War Two.
Again the implied smear: Trump “with his bare-fisted tactics” is corrupting the people of Europe hitherto restrained from active “populist” political action -“restrained” because they “remember World War Two” – ie. they have an impulse to be Nazis, and now are likely to break out in full Nazi form, inspired to it by Trump. Implication: Trump is a Nazi.
“The broken taboos, the extent of political conflict, the aggression that we’ve seen from Trump, this can widen the scope of what becomes thinkable in our own political culture,” Schwarzer said.
The “taboos” are those imposed by the Establishment. They are the locks on the lips of the people. That is the suppression of free speech.
Eyes on Austria next:
Early next month, Austrians will vote in a presidential election that could see Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party become the first far-right head of state to be freely elected in western Europe since 1945.
The Austrian Freedom Party was founded by a Nazi, an erstwhile SS officer, but moved away from its Nazi roots. It formed an alliance, temporarily , with the Social Democratic Party. What does it stand for? Pretty well everything. It is a “liberal” party, a “social welfare” party, but it favors “privatization” and low taxes. It has been described as “right-wing populist”, “national conservative”, and “national liberal”. It calls itself libertarian, and holds individual freedom as one of its highest principles. It is strongly anti-establishment and against Muslim immigration into Austria.
Now to Italy:
On the same day, a constitutional reform referendum on which Prime Minister Renzi has staked his future could upset the political order in Italy, pushing Grillo’s left-wing 5-Star movement closer to the reins of power.
So here’s a rebel movement against the Establishment that even Reuters cannot smear with the label “far right”. It calls itself a “left-wing” movement. But it also calls itself “populist”, “anti-establishment”, “anti-globalist”, and against the undemocratic European Union. One thing it also believes in that puts it decidedly on the left, is Environmentalism.
“An epoch has gone up in flames,” Grillo said. “The real demagogues are the press, intellectuals, who are anchored to a world that no longer exists.”
He dares to say it!
On to Poland and Hungary, where the Muslim invasion is not welcomed by their governments. That alone, of course, in the eyes of the Establishment makes them “right-wing”. Yes, they are nationalists, and nationalism now, in the age of the EU, of the Establishment’s preference for “open borders” and globalization, is the very essence of “Far Rightism”.
Right-wing nationalists are already running governments in Poland and Hungary.
But that’s Eastern Europe, where they are inclined to be more nationalist because of their years under the heel of International Communism, aka the Soviet Union.
In Western Europe, the likelihood of a Trump figure taking power seems remote for now.
Because –
In Europe’s parliamentary democracies, traditional parties from the right and left have set aside historical rivalries, banding together to keep out the populists.
Banding together, as in certain ways Republicans and Democrats have been doing for the last eight years in Washington, D.C., to safeguard their power. They are the Establishment in America against which Trump is leading a movement of the people.
But the lesson from the Brexit vote is that parties do not have to be in government to shape the political debate, said Tina Fordham, chief global political analyst at Citi. She cited the anti-EU UK Independence Party which has just one seat in the Westminster parliament.
“UKIP did poorly in the last election but had a huge amount influence over the political dynamic in Britain,” Fordham said. “The combination of the Brexit campaign and Trump have absolutely changed the way campaigns are run.”
UKIP leader Nigel Farage hailed Trump’s victory on Wednesday as a “supersized Brexit”.
As new political movements emerge, traditional parties will find it increasingly difficult to form coalitions and hold them together.
Now a look at Spain:
In Spain, incumbent Mariano Rajoy was returned to power last week but only after two inconclusive elections in which voters fled his conservatives and their traditional rival on the left, the Socialists, for two new parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos.
Podemos is a left-wing party, and Cuidadanos a “liberal-progressive, postnationalist” party – so also left-wing. Their inclusion in an article about the fear of the European Establishment is because they too are “populist”.
After 10 months of political limbo, Rajoy finds himself atop a minority government that is expected to struggle to pass laws, implement reforms and plug holes in Spain’s public finances.
The virus of political fragility could spread next year from Spain to the Netherlands, where Wilders’s Freedom Party is neck-and-neck in opinion polls with Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s liberals.
That was a bad segue. What is happening in the Netherlands is not, and will not be, a result of anything that is happening in Spain. But Reuters is now taking a wide view over Western Europe.
For Rutte to stay in power after the election in March, he may be forced to consider novel, less-stable coalition options with an array of smaller parties, including the Greens.
In Europe, the Greens are a mainstream movement, forming mainstream political parties.
In France, which has a presidential system, the chances of Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, emerging victorious are seen as slim.
The odds-on favorite to win the presidential election next spring is Alain Juppe, a 71-year-old centrist with extensive experience in government who has tapped into a yearning for responsible leadership after a decade of disappointment from Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy.
But in a sign of Le Pen’s strength, polls show she will win more support than any other politician in the first round of the election. Even if she loses the second round run-off, as polls suggest, her performance is likely to be seen as a watershed moment for continental Europe’s far-right.
It could give her a powerful platform from which to fight the reforms that Juppe and his conservative rivals for the presidency are promising.
In Germany, where voters go to the polls next autumn, far-right parties have struggled to gain a foothold in the post-war era because of the dark history of the Nazis, but that too is changing.
The trick of the Left to label Nazism a “right-wing” movement continues to stick. The Nazis were of course National Socialists. Their rivals for power were the International Socialists – the Communists. (Then Nazi Germany made a pact with Communist Russia. Both invaded Poland. Later the two totalitarian Socialist countries fought each other.)
Reuters does not mention PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West). It was started in Dresden in October 2014, and now is not only a significant force in Germany, but has branches in other European countries, including Britain. It is a nationalist movement, and it is, above all, against the Islamic invasion of Europe, so of course the press always labels it “far right”. The report deals with another movement, as strongly against Muslim immigration, which participates in elections as a political party:
Just three years old, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), has become a force at the national level, unsettling Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, who have been punished in a series of regional votes because of her welcoming policy toward refugees.
The AfD is specifically against Muslim immigration. The Left does not like to mention the word “Muslim”.
Merkel could announce as early as next month that she plans to run for a fourth term, and if she does run, current polls suggest she would win.
But she would do so as a diminished figure in a country that is perhaps more divided than at any time in the post-war era. Even Merkel’s conservative sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, has refused to endorse her.
So all over Europe there are populist movements rising against the undemocratic Leftist Islam-favoring Establishment. They dare to be opposed to big government, statism, collectivism, redistribution, open borders, world government, mass Muslim immigration, a globalized economy, and the elitist class that dictates the direction of the world towards those goals, and for which the retention and augmentation of their own power is the only thing that genuinely matters to them.
The populist movements have been timid or “restrained”. But now that America has voted for a populist leader, they will swell in number, become more demanding, perhaps appeal to a majority of voters, perhaps take power as ruling government parties. And they will defy the “taboos”. They will bare their knuckles. They will speak freely, even against Islam. They may go so far as to withdraw their countries from the EU; close borders; stop and even reverse the tide of Islamic immigration; resist globalization.
They may overthrow the Establishment, chuck the corrupt Clinton-type cabals out.
They really are much to be feared.
They are the hope of the West.
A very pessimistic post 10
Of course nobody can stop the collapse of Western civilization.
What do those of us who speak and write in favor of that colossal achievement and cry out warnings that it is under threat, think we are achieving?
Persuading multitudes to resist the flood? Can we? Can they?
Perhaps, at most, a few among us – Nigel Farage, Donald Trump – can try putting a finger in the dyke.
Mark Steyn defines “the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and call into question the future of much of the rest of the world”.
“The key factors” he lists are these:
i) Demographic decline;
ii) The unsustainability of the social democratic state;
iii) Civilizational exhaustion.
And here’s our abstract of his article:
Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 per cent of the global population to just over 20 per cent, and the Muslim nations increased from about 15 per cent to 20 per cent. Is that fact less significant to the future of the world than the fate of some tree or the endangered sloth hanging from it? In 1970, very few non-Muslims outside the Indian sub-continent gave much thought to Islam, but in little more than a generation the world is utterly altered. By 2020, it will be impossible to compare statistics between “the Muslim world” and the West because Islam is currently responsible for most population growth in English, French and German cities, and the principal supplier of immigrants to Canada, and already 25 per cent of the population of the European Union’s capital city, Brussels. September 11th 2001 was not “the day everything changed”, but the day that revealed how much had already changed. We’re seeing one of the fastest population transformations in history, whereby an aging ethnic European population is being replaced by a Muslim population. And the Muslims understand that, in fact, Europe, as they see it, is the colony now. I think the average Muslim does, in some basic sense, when he immigrates to the Netherlands, when he immigrates to the United Kingdom, when he immigrates to Canada or Michigan, want eventually to live in a Muslim society in those places. I am not saying he wants to fly planes into buildings, but his expectation is that the host society will assimilate with him rather than the other way around. This is the biggest story of our time, and the West’s leaders still can’t talk about it to their own peoples, not honestly. And they’re increasingly disinclined to let you talk about it.
Civilizational decline: whatever its causes – and the reluctance of Europeans to have children is certainly one of them – it is a fact.
You cannot miss it. It is here in America.
It is in the universities which have largely been transformed from institutions of disinterested learning into fortresses of Orthodox Thought.
It is in the schools, where text books teach that Islam is a beautiful pacific religion, not the primitively superstitious creed of a ruthless warlord which is what it really is.
It is in the media, which defend Orthodox Thought, the advance of Islam, and the dissolution of the West, with passionate pertinacity.
It is in the failure of conservatives to accept that it is happening at all, so they cry out against the last hope America has of holding back that tide for a little while at least – the possible presidency of Thumb-in-the-dyke Donald Trump.
Acolytes of the Left like to say that they are “on the right side of history”. Whether it is the right side or not, they are on the side of what is happening. The side of civilizational decline, of Muslim colonization, of the dissolution of borders, of Orthodox Thought.
Hillary Clinton, the Left’s candidate for the presidency, wants to increase Muslim immigration into the United States; wants “open borders”; wants to forbid the criticism of Islam. Hillary Clinton is on the side of civilizational decline.
Conservatives complain that Donald Trump is immoral in that he talks boastfully of his sexual conquests as most men do. But they seem not to have noticed that far more important moral principles are being discarded – to widespread popular indifference. At least half the voting citizens of America do not give a toss that Hillary Clinton is a corrupt, venal, lying scofflaw. Not that they don’t know she is all that – it’s just that they don’t care about her immorality. They see her as the right person to be president of the United States at this time.
And is she not? Isn’t she perfectly suited to the time?
Trump: the dread of the globalists 82
Most people find classes of other people that they can look down upon. But for your truest, nose-in-the-air, sneering-lip, merciless SNOB you cannot beat a Communist.
Communists who attain power and riches – who become leaders of vast political-economic dominions; CEOS of banks surveying the nations from the heights of glass towers and directing the flow of populations over the seas and continents; cronies of billionaires, presidents, Arab princes and South American dictators – are the supreme snobs of this age. Male, female, or epicene, they sit atop the globe and believe, believe that they rightfully rule because they know what is best for the rest of us.
The Communist vision was always global. The only change in doctrine of late is their admission, their insistence, that the class taking riches from here and allotting them there must be them, the elite, not the proletarians. Not any of the looked-down-upon classes.
Then up jumps a person who wants national borders back; wants nations to choose their own goals and decide for themselves how to get there; wants to stem the flow of migrants; concerns himself with the hardship and bewilderment of the looked-down-upon classes. And the looked-down-upon classes cheer him on, and clamor for him to be their new leader,
The globalists quake, and curse, and scheme to destroy the upstart.
Investor’s Business Daily comments:
What’s the global economy’s worst threat? Torpid growth? Soaring debt? Unemployment? Lagging incomes? Massive migration? Nope. If you’re a global bureaucrat, the worst threat by far is populism and “anti-globalism.”
Those attending the Washington meeting of the G-20 industrial nations to discuss the world economy tried not to mention any politician by name, but we kind of know who they meant. Donald Trump in the U.S. has put a scare in Washington’s governing elite, while Britain’s Nigel Farage campaigned tirelessly to make Brexit a reality and, against all odds, succeeded.
No surprise that G-20 economic leaders see a threat from this. Their whole game is based on compliant governments enacting policies that they want. Trump, Farage and others endanger that.
“This trend of deep anti-globalization populism has driven politicians to come up with their campaign slogans and try to win votes and support. That has brought us uncertainty,” complained Lou Jiwei, finance minister of [communist] China, a place where there’s no need for “campaign slogans” or to “win votes and support”.
“We need to recognize some political risks such as the presidential election in some countries and in major economies,” he added.
By which he meant in particular the United Kingdom and the United States.
Socialist EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici (himself a former Trotskyist) was more blunt, calling Trump “not the most reassuring choice from an economic point of view”.
We find it funny that anyone would take seriously Communist Party functionaries speaking about democracy or economics. Yes, democracy is messy and it isn’t perfect, but at least it allows for a political system to self-correct — unlike in China or in the EU.
As for economics, well, let’s just say socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Everywhere.
But, of course, there’s a bigger irony at work here. These are the very same global bureaucrats whose “expert” advice steered the global economy off the road and into a ditch. Now they blame people who are merely responding to the economic mess the so-called experts themselves created. And they fling “populist” and “anti-globalist” as nasty epithets at any who dare to disagree with their failed brand of Keynesian-socialism and open borders.
Memo to the G-20 and other elites: It’s not wise to ignore the ordinary people who have borne the brunt of your idiotic economic policies and then to call them names — like, say, for instance, “deplorables” – for trying to change them democratically.
By law, these global bloviators aren’t supposed to meddle in individual countries’ elections. But that’s what they’ve done. They should remember that the world’s $152 trillion in debt, its bloated governments and regulations, its waning economic growth, and its legions of disaffected and jobless citizens are all problems they caused.
And that’s the very reason why [Donald] Trump, [Nigel] Farage and others like them are so popular.
Globalization: the terrible approaching fate of world totalitarian government 115
There are three movements pressing to control our lives, all fast becoming irresistible as they drive towards their ultimate objective: totalitarian world government.
First there is a concord of elites. These ardent globalists are the leaders of the EU, certain billionaires, and the chiefs of financial institutions and international corporations who want the entire world to be their shop.
Second there is the International Left, which to achieve its aim of world socialism, cites “man-made global warming” as a compelling danger which they insist only world government can control.
Third, there is Islam, on its centuries-old mission of world conquest, to force the entire human race to submit to the god and laws proclaimed by Muhammad.
At present the three are in tacit alliance.
In America now, in 2016, all three desire the election of Hillary Clinton to the US presidency.
The elites know they can pay her to do their will. Her passion for power and money makes her an easy tool in their hands.
The International Left remembers that early in her life she embraced communism. Though she no longer speaks of her discipleship of the American communist Saul Alinsky, her predilection for communitarianism and dominating government, remains manifestly unshaken.
Islam, through her, has acquired unprecedented influence on the conduct of US foreign affairs. Her closest aide when she was secretary of state – and at present – is a child of the Muslim Brotherhood. Numerous rulers of Islamic states have bought her favors. She has announced that she would import tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants into America.
But the interests of the three movements are different, and the nearer they get to their goal, the more rivalry and conflict will arise between them.
The power and wealth elites, the tycoons, the plutocrats, are “crony capitalists”. They favor a world without national borders because they want no impediments to their pursuit of wealth and the power that wealth brings. Socialist government on a world scale would be an impediment both to their commerce and their power.
To the socialists, the capitalists are justly doomed. They can be made use of, however, as a source of funding for revolutionary change until History – aka world socialist government – “inevitably” destroys them.
Though neither hedonist tycoons nor dictatorial socialists – or the feminists among them both – fear Islam now, a world ruled by sharia law would not be a world they’d enjoy living in.
(Would anyone enjoy living in it? Devout Muslims themselves want nothing more than to escape it and get to paradise.)
But now they are all working towards the same end, and the only chance we have of saving ourselves from globalization is with the coming election. The only person who can save us from it is Donald Trump, who must become president and keep Hillary Clinton out of power. He wants above all, he says, to protect, preserve, strengthen and enrich the nation-state of the USA, where people of all derivations can live together in freedom under the Constitution. But those enormously powerful and ruthless forces, helped by the predominantly left-leaning media and the academies, are against him. Have they already become too strong to be stopped?
*
Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party who played a major role in bringing Britain out of the corrupt bureaucratic EU, speaks at a recent Trump rally in Jackson, MS, against those who work and scheme for corporate globalization.
London’s thought police 38
London, for long the greatest capital in the world, hub of the vastest empire in history, has recently elected a Muslim to be its mayor.
Intent on his ideological mission of Islamizing London, he’s made a strong start by introducing Thought Police into his fiefdom.
Robert Spencer writes at Front Page:
London’s new Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, is allocating over two million dollars (£1,730,726) to an “online hate crime hub” enabling police to track and arrest “trolls” who “target … individuals and communities”. There can be no doubt, given the nature of the British political establishment today, which “trolls” these new Thought Police will be going after, and which “communities” will be protected from “hate speech”. “Islamophobia”, which David Horowitz and I termed “the thought crime of the totalitarian future”, is now going to bring down upon the hapless “trolls” the wrath of London’s Metropolitan police force – and this totalitarian new initiative shows yet again how easily the Leftist and Islamic supremacist agendas coincide and aid each other.
“The Metropolitan police service,” said a police spokesman, “is committed to working with our partners, including the mayor, to tackle all types of hate crime including offenses committed online.” Given the fact that Khan … has numerous questionable ties to Islamic supremacists, it is unlikely that he will be particularly concerned about “hate speech” by jihad preachers (several of whom were just recently welcomed into a Britain that has banned foes of jihad, including me).
And the “partners” of the London police are likely to include Tell Mama UK, which says on its website: “We work with Central Government to raise the issues of anti-Muslim hatred at a policy level and our work helps to shape and inform policy makers, whilst ensuring that an insight is brought into this area of work through the systematic recording and reporting of anti-Muslim hate incidents and crimes.” Tell Mama UK has previously been caught classifying as “anti-Muslim hate incidents and crimes”, speech on Facebook and Twitter that it disliked. Now it will have the help of the London police to do that.
“The purpose of this program,” we’re told, “is to strengthen the police and community response to this growing crime type.” This “crime type” is only “growing” because Britain has discarded the principle of the freedom of speech, and is committing itself increasingly to the idea that “hate speech” is objectively identifiable, and should be restricted by government and law enforcement action. …
Behind the push for “hate speech” laws is, of course, the increasingly authoritarian Left. Increasingly unwilling (and doubtless unable) to engage its foes in rational discussion and debate, the Left is resorting more and more to the Alinskyite tactic of responding to conservatives only with ridicule and attempts to rule conservative views out of the realm of acceptable discourse. That coincides perfectly with the ongoing initiative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to intimidate the West into criminalizing criticism of Islam.
The excuse Sadiq Khan used for setting up thought policing was a mythical racist “hate surge” concocted by the Left.
Our British correspondent Chauncey Tinker writes at his website*:
The London Mayor wasted no time in trying to link the supposed racial hate surge with the referendum:
You can’t escape the conclusion that there is a link between the referendum and a surge in racial incidents.
During the referendum campaign he had attempted to tar the Leave campaign with the phrase “project hate” …
The wannabe first Muslim Prime Minister of the UK is now seizing his opportunity to set up an Orwellian specialized thought police unit to censor the internet …
For which he needs the co-operation of – or “partnership with” – social media firms, such a Facebook and Twitter.
How did the “conservative” British government react?
As you can imagine our new UK home secretary Amber Rudd, far from trying to damp down the surge in wild exaggeration by our stupid media, jumped on the bandwagon instead and announced a plan to tackle “hate crime”:
She was quoted [by the Independent newspaper] as saying:
Hatred does not get a seat at the table, and we will do everything we can to stamp it out.
You can’t “stamp out” hatred home secretary. Hatred is thought, you can’t “stamp out” what goes on in people’s minds. …
The BBC could be trusted to share the point of view of the Left and the Muslim mayor – and the so-called conservative government:
In the BBC news website [an] article began with this sensational announcement in bold letters:
More than 6,000 hate crimes have been reported to police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the wake of the EU referendum, figures show.
By using the phrase “in the wake of the EU referendum”, the wording here is clearly designed to sensationally suggest that the 6,000 hate incidents are somehow related to the EU referendum. In fact the figure of 6,000 was just the TOTAL number of reported “hate incidents” in the UK for the month. The article then reveals that this figure was only around 30% higher than the same period in the previous year. So even if you take these figures blindly at face value, then the most you could sensibly claim is that 1,800 reported “hate incidents” were somehow POSSIBLY (not NECESSARILY) related to the EU referendum campaign. Furthermore the quoted figures were for a whole month, they were not restricted to the immediate period around the referendum. …
There have been changes in the way “hate incidents” are reported … There had also been an 18% increase in 2015 over the previous year, which was probably due to the fact that the public are being encouraged to report more of these “hate incidents”. …
Some of the reported incidents may have been entirely made up for all we know, many others may well not have qualified as crime at all. It also seems very strange to me that mere “verbal abuse” should be included in a category of “violence against the person”.
The [BBC] article overall contains two videos which both describe particular alleged racist incidents. This helps to build a subliminal impression that the figures related to racist “hate incidents” alone. However there is NO BREAKDOWN of the figures to reveal the more specific nature of the incidents, for example if there was a surge in racism which races were involved.
In summary then the very worst case is that 1,800 extra “hate incidents” were reported in the whole month period. So, out of a UK total population of 65.1 million (at least) then less than 0.003% (or about 1 in every 35,000 people) felt the need to report such an incident to the police in this month over and above incidents reported last year. Also, bear in mind that these included as “hate incidents” behaviour as minor as verbal abuse (one estimate put these at 76% of the reported incidents). For all we know most of these incidents might have been cases of verbal abuse aimed at Leave campaigners. …
I think its fairly safe to say that any actual increase in hate that genuinely can be attributed to the referendum campaign did not by any means all come from the Leave side of the argument. Ironically one of the “hate criminals” revealed in this article is one Noel Fielding, a “comedian” who regularly appears on BBC TV, who apparently had “joked” in 2015:
Don’t applaud Farage, stab him.
But needless to say, he will not be prosecuted for a “hate crime”.
Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton clarified that while reporting of hate crimes had risen via an online form, there was no evidence to suggest that this was uniquely related to a Brexit vote, nor that the crimes have actually been committed. …
To summarize, the media have attempted to smear the Brexit referendum result as creating a significantly increased climate of racial hatred on the basis of no evidence at all. Our political leaders have hastily responded to the non-event.
So first the Left invented “hate speech”. Then they invented “hate crime”. Then Islam, in the person of the incredibly elected mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, set up Thought Police to stop anyone making any criticism of the appalling ideology of Islam. And finally, the British “conservative” – and apparently now heavily feminist – government endorsed the entire movement.
If only all the people who voted to leave the EU really would make war on their enemies!
Which sigh from our heart the London Thought Police would treat as a “hate crime”.
For a little while yet we may still write such things on a website in America.
*The whole article is worth reading here.
The new wave gathers force 194
For us, the arguments against Britain’s membership of the European Union are strongly persuasive. They are political arguments: for British self-determination; for the continuation of the nation state as a good in itself; for throwing off the burden of dictatorship by corrupt bureaucrats.
But what of the economic arguments? Is it better for Britain to remain in the EU or to leave? Is it better for the world economy for Britain to be in or out?
George Freidman, who founded the private intelligence firm Stratfor, and is internationally recognized as an authority on world affairs, writes at Mauldin Economics:
In looking at Friday’s market decline, it is clear that the investment community was surprised at the outcome of the referendum in the U.K. What is most surprising is that they were surprised. There were two competing views of the EU. One view regarded the European Union as essential to British economic well-being. The other saw the European Union as a failing institution, and saw Britain being pulled down if it remained.
The European Union has been caught in long-term stagnation. Eight years after the financial crisis it is still unable to break out of it. In addition, a large swath of Europe, especially in the south, is in depression with extremely high unemployment numbers. An argument could be made that these problems will be solved in the long run and that Britain should be part of the solution for its own sake. The counterargument is that if the problems had been soluble they would have been solved years ago.
For a financial community, there is a built-in desire for predictability. It can make money in good or bad markets and economies. It has trouble making money in uncertainty. Therefore, the financial community was inherently biased toward Britain remaining in the EU because it gave them predictability. There was a subconscious assumption that everyone had the same bias toward maintaining the status quo. This was not just the view of the global financial community. It was one shared with other elites – political, journalistic, academic and the rest.
Someone I know, who has many friends in Britain, told me that she didn’t know anyone who favored a British exit. That was true. As the graduate of an elite college she is in touch with similar people around the world. This enclosure has profound social indications to consider, but in this case it created a psychological barrier to anticipating what was coming. When everyone you know thinks an idea is rubbish, it is hard to imagine that there is a majority out there that you haven’t met that doesn’t share your views.
There was also a sense of contempt for the opponents. The leaders, like UKIP leader Nigel Farage, were odd from the elite point of view. Their rhetoric was unseemly. And their followers by and large did not come from the places in London where the elite did. Their views were not the liberal, transnational views of the supporters of the EU. They led much narrower, harder lives and did not know the world as the pro-EU people did. So they were discounted. There was an expectation that the elite, who had governed Britain for so long, were dealing with an annoyance, rather than a peaceful rising against them. Thus, in spite of the polls indicating the election would be extremely close, the “remain” supporters could not believe they would lose.
The reporters of leading British media were talking to their European and American counterparts. The politicians were doing the same. And the financial community is on the phone daily with colleagues around the world.
The challenge that was posed in the U.K. referendum is present in many countries around the world, albeit in different forms.
What has become universal is the dismissive attitudes of the elite to their challengers.It is difficult for the elite to take seriously that the less educated, the less sophisticated and the less successful would take control of the situation. The French Bourbons and the Russian Romanovs had similar contempt for the crowds in the streets. They dismissed their lack of understanding and inability to act – right to the moment they burst into the palaces.
The analogy should not be overdone but also should not be dismissed. The distance between what I will call the technocratic elite and the increasingly displaced lower-middle and even middle class is becoming one of the major characteristics of our time. This elite did not expect “leave” to win because it was clear to them that the EU would work itself out. They didn’t know anyone who disagreed with them – a measure of how far out of touch they had become with the real world. And above all, they were dismissive of the kind of people who led their opponents.
Not understanding their own isolation and insularity; not grasping the different world view of “leave” supporters or that they couldn’t care less if the financial institutions of the City moved to Frankfurt; not grasping the contempt in which they were held by so many, the elite believed that “leave” could not win. …
In the end, the financial decline on Friday resulted from the lack of imagination of the elite. And it is that lack of imagination that led them to believe that the current situation could continue. That lack of imagination, the fact that the elite had no idea of what was happening beyond their circle of acquaintances, is a far greater crisis in the West than whether Britain is in the EU or even if the EU survives.
We are living in a social divide so deep that serious people of good will and a certain class have never met anyone who wants to leave the EU or who supports blocking Muslim immigration or perhaps even who will vote for Donald Trump. …
No one had the right to believe that this couldn’t happen. No one should believe that it will be confined to Britain. No one should believe that it won’t happen again. The days when the elite could assert that the EU is going to be just fine in the face of evidence to the contrary are over.
This new wave in politics, this force arising directly from the “silent majority”, is transforming the political scene not only in Europe but throughout the West.
As it is a movement that favors capitalism, it will bring greater prosperity to greater numbers of individuals if it continues to succeed. The next victory needs to be the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.
Why Britain must leave the EU 117
Pat Condell passionately makes the case for “Brexit” – Britain’s exit from the European Union:
Brexit The Movie:
Long as the movie is, it’s riveting. Find out just how horrible the EU is – and what a loser!
A kaleidoscopic shift of the political pattern of Europe 198
New political parties have been rising in many European countries to oppose established policies of both leftist and conservative governments, particularly policies towards the European Union and immigration.
Most of the new parties are on the Right, but recently some have been formed – or have quite suddenly grown from being inconsequential groupings into forces to be reckoned with – on the Left.
The newly aggressive parties of the Left are mainly in the South, in countries at the receiving end of EU subsidies, angry that the subsidies are not substantial enough.
The new parties of the Right are mainly in the North, in countries at the paying end of the system, angry that they have to subsidize the failing economies of the South.
That sections of the Left should see how badly Europe needs a strategy for survival, should find fault with the EU, and object to unending immigration of dependents into their already hard-pressed welfare states, is a startling development. It means that new political patterns of alignment and opposition are emerging.
In the following article, which we quote from Gatestone, Peter Martino writes about the new parties’ concern with the adverse economic effects of EU membership. He only touches on immigration as a factor in the intensifying discontent which prompts the formation of new political organizations, movements and agendas, but it is in fact quite as hot an issue.
Last week, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won a landmark victory in the Rochester & Strood by-election. With this win, UKIP secured its second Member of Parliament. The UKIP candidate, Mark Reckless, won 42.1% of the votes, thrashing the Conservatives (34.8%), Labour (16.8%) and the Liberal Democrats (0.9%). It was the first time ever that UKIP stood in Rochester & Strood. The party won votes from all the major parties. The Conservatives lost 14.4% of the votes, Labour 11.7% and the Liberal Democrats a whopping 15.5%.
UKIP is expected to do very well in the British general elections next May. Last month, a poll predicted the party could win up to 25% of the vote in these elections. In the 2010 general elections, the party had only 3.1%.
UKIP stands for the preservation of the Britain’s national identity. It opposes the European Union (EU) and wants Britain to remain a sovereign nation rather than become a state of a federal Europe. The party is also critical of mass immigration, in particular from Eastern Europe. Though Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, carefully avoids the issue of Islam, the party has also become the refuge of voters who worry about Islamization. Above all, however, the party embodies the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the traditional political establishment.
As such, UKIP is part of a broad trend that can currently be perceived all over Western Europe.
In Spain, a poll this week said that Podemos, a brand new party that was established only nine months ago, is currently the largest party in the country with 28.3% of the vote. The governing conservative Partido Popular of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy would finish second with 26.3% and the Socialist Party would get only 20.1%. Three years ago, in the November 2011 general elections, the Partido Popular won 44.6% of the votes.
Unlike UKIP, Podemos is a party that clearly belongs to the left of the political spectrum. Podemos (the Spanish for We can) was founded by “anti-capitalist” academics and trade unionists who want to “oppose the dominating EU politics from the left”. Unlike UKIP, Podemos does not want to abolish the EU. On the contrary, since Spain is receiving billions of euros in EU subsidies, a majority of the Spaniards clearly want their country to remain an EU member state.
However, the party opposes the austerity policies that the EU is imposing on Spain as a prerequisite for the continuation of the flow of EU subsidies. Both the Spanish Socialist Party and Prime Minister Rajoy’s Partido Popular are perceived by voters as implementing the same set of EU-prescribed policies.
In this regard, Podemos does resemble UKIP, which also accuses the British political establishment of simply implementing EU mandated policies. In Britain’s case, the dissatisfaction with the EU stems mostly from British taxpayers having to pay billions to the EU, which are then transferred to countries in the south of Europe [such as Spain -ed], where governments use them to fund welfare programs. In this sense, the rise of leftist tax-and-spend parties (or rather tax-other-countries-and-spend parties), such as Podemos, reinforces the rise of parties such as UKIP in the north of Europe.
Indeed, all along the Mediterranean, parties opposing the EU-mandated austerity policies are growing spectacularly.
One of the keynote speakers at Podemos’ recent first-ever party congress was Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Greece’s neo-communist party Syriza. In last May’s European elections, Syriza became Greece’s biggest party with 26.5% of the votes, ahead of the governing Nea Demokratia party of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. Syriza draws on the same kind of sentiments as Podemos and is popular for exactly the same reasons.
The same is true of Italy’s Five Star Movement, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo, which, with 21.2% of the vote, became the country’s second largest party in last May’s European elections.
And the same is even true for the Front National of Marine Le Pen in France. Ms Le Pen claims that without the euro, the EU’s common currency, there would be “no need for austerity”. Drawing on anti-EU sentiments, the Front National became the largest French party in last May’s European elections with 24.8% of the vote.
The popularity of these parties is still rising. A recent poll in France revealed that Marine Le Pen might win the next French presidential elections, not just in the first round, but also in the decisive second round. It is the first time ever that the FN leads in a presidential poll against France’s two major parties, the Socialist PS and the Center-Right UMP.
In the countries to the north, however, the popularity of the parties opposing the EU subsidization of the southern countries is rising equally spectacularly.
In the Netherlands, the anti-establishment Party for Freedom (PVV) of Geert Wilders is currently the biggest party in the polls. Wilders has consistently opposed the bailing out of countries such as Greece and Spain with Dutch taxpayers’ money.
In neighboring Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party established last year to oppose eurozone bailouts, is shaking up politics with its astonishing wins in recent state elections.
In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats (SD), opposing both immigration and the EU, won 13% of the vote in last September’s general elections, but their popularity keeps rising. Last week, an SD spokesman said the party is currently expected to win up to 18% of the vote.
All across Europe, the electorate is deeply dissatisfied and disillusioned with both the Conservative and the Social-Democrat parties of the political establishment. Voters no longer see much difference between the traditional political protagonists, who are perceived as imposing an EU agenda that, for various reasons, is seen as bad for the country.
In Europe judging by the polls, political landslides are on the way.
Cries from the doomed 3
Two British voices – Nigel Farage and Godfrey Bloom – cry out against the undemocratic EU’s destruction of Greece and a repeat of the subprime conspiracy of politicians against people.
Who’s listening? Hardly anyone in the joke of a “European parliament”. But millions on the Internet.