Is Farage racist or not?

Adam Bienkov, who also writes for Bylines Times, keeps a Substack blog. His latest effort is about Nigel Farage. Labour politicians recently have been tiptoeing around the question of whether or not Farage is racist. Bienkov has no reservations and hits the nail firmly on the head: Farage is a racist (£). Now this may come as a shock to you, but Labour seem unable or unwilling to say the same thing. Personally, I don’t know why it’s so difficult, but apparently it is. For me, it's blindingly obvious, but interviewers cannot get Starmer, Cooper or any other senior Labour politician to say what most people in my circle are absolutely convinced about. I assume they’re worried about losing voters who might otherwise be persuaded to vote Labour.

America's road to totalitarianism

An article appeared in The Guardian on Thursday: A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0. The piece by William Davies attempts to explain the madness gripping The White House as Trump's second term gets underway. It’s a shortened version of his piece from N+1, an online platform, that you can read HERE, and it's well worth a read.  Davies references a book published in 1951 by the German-born author Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. I bought the book earlier this year, although I confess I haven’t read it, mainly because the academic style makes it (for me) very hard to read. I have to go over each sentence several times to get what she's driving at, and some are very long indeed with multiple sub-clauses. A page-turner it is not. Nevertheless, it's seen as one of the definitive texts on totalitarianism, in whatever shape it comes, after all, she had Hitler and Stalin as recent archetypes. 

Mone, Money and greed

Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman have lost the case against their company PPE Medpro, which has been ordered to repay £122 million for supplying substandard surgical gowns during the COVID-19 crisis. The media is full of it, but I’ve been reading through the 87-page judgment by Mrs Justice Cockerill, who has seen and heard all the evidence and gives a timeline of events. What comes over is the absolute greed combined with a total lack of knowledge or experience on the part of PPE Medpro in handling products that were required to meet highly complex technical sterility standards. The company was established on 12 May 2020, a few months after the first lockdown began.

Nathan Gill

Nathan Gill’s name wasn’t a familiar one (to me) before the recent court case in which Reform UK’s Welsh leader pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from Oleg Voloshyn, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian, on at least eight occasions to make specific statements helpful to Russia. The statements were made while Gillian was a member of the European Parliament between December 2018 and July 2019. After Brexit, Gill was appointed leader of Reform UK in Wales. The strange thing is not that bribes were offered and accepted, but that we still don’t know how much money was involved.  You can be sure he didn't do it for a tenner.  The New York Times has a report HERE.

Is America going the way of Venezuela?

Following my post on Friday about Trump consolidating his power base, an article in The Atlantic by a Venezuelan woman, Gisela Salim-Peyer, an associate editor at the American magazine, brought to life a fear I have seen expressed by many moderates living under Trump's second term. The fear that America is slowly descending into authoritarianism. A few days ago, I read somewhere that the country isn’t sliding towards authoritarianism; it’s already there. And this is the essential point of the article. When do you accept that democracy has been irreversibly damaged and you are living an autocratic nightmare?  Things happen, and at first you're shocked, but you come to accept it. It’s akin to boiling the frog.

Trump: more moves to consolidate power in the White House

A memorial service for Charlie Kirk took place last Sunday at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. The crowd packed into a 63,000-seat arena, and another 20,000 were directed to an adjacent venue. Half of them were sporting bright red MAGA hats, making it look more like a campaign rally. Speakers included the president, vice president and several senior members of the administration together with Kirk’s wife, Erika. It was quite an event, the sort of send-off that might be reserved for senior statesmen, respected political figures and perhaps war heroes. Kirk was none of those things, but nonetheless Trump and his cohort thought it necessary to be there - mainly, and this is the incredible part, to launch an attack on the amorphous deep-state group they hold responsible for his murder.

Has Trump finally gone over the edge?

A day after a press conference in Washington where he spouted a lot of totally debunked nonsense about autism being caused by paracetamol, Donald Trump gave a rambling, deranged ‘speech’ to assembled world leaders at the UN in New York. The President of the USA appeared to confuse his audience of worldly-wise diplomats and intelligent, sophisticated statesmen for the ragbag of swivel-eyed, gullible, dimwits from Hicksville who turn up in their thousands to his MAGA campaign rallies. At times, it seemed he was challenging the UN delegates to make sense of what he was saying. Amazingly, he was using an autocue, implying that someone had actually prepared the speech and written the words down in some sort of order.  

Who will save America after Trump?

The United States Constitution went into effect on March 4, 1789, and with twenty-seven amendments, it has endured - until Donald Trump’s second term, that is. The founding fathers spent four months in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia writing and agreeing on the text. They presumably thought they had produced a bulletproof constitution that would provide a solid foundation for a republic, free from a capricious monarch and with safeguards to prevent a president, a Congress or the judiciary ever seizing power. I doubt that any of the 39 men who signed the original document would have believed a simple-minded, criminally incompetent moron could have single-handedly destroyed their work in just eight months after nearly a quarter of a millennium.  But Trump has done exactly that.

Trump is forcing America to alter its perception of reality

We are fortunate in Britain that when governments change, the senior positions in Whitehall remain the same. The so-called Mandarins retain the collective experience of the departments, ready to serve incoming ministers from day one, and doing it apolitically. As far as I know, it works well. The Americans used to do something similar, but with far more positions. An incoming president needed to fill or confirm about 4,000 political appointments, of which about 1,200 require Senate confirmation. Trump has done that, but is going much further, shifting the guardrails further and further away from him.

Charlie Kirk and money

There is a quotation from the Bible that was once heard frequently but is less so nowadays. It’s this one: The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil (Timothy 6:10). The US produces obscene wealth, although it’s never shared equally and doesn’t see the contradiction. Following on from my post on Tuesday about money being the main driver of just about everything in America, and certainly the singular motive of many right-wing influencers. I’ve been looking at a deposition given by Charlie Kirk to the January 6th Congressional committee in May 2022. It’s notable because out of 60 or so questions put to Kirk, he pleaded the 5th amendment to all except one (he wouldn’t even confirm his age!). The one question he answered was to give his place of residence (Scottsdale, Arizona). Most of the questions concerned money donated to Turning Point USA (TPUSA) Kirk’s pro-conservative youth organisation.