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Hillary Clinton believes government should make virtually every choice in your life. Education, healthcare, marriage, speech â all dictated out of Washington.
But something powerful is happening. Weâve seen it in both parties. Weâve seen it in the United Kingdomâs unprecedented Brexit vote to leave the European Union.
Voters are overwhelmingly rejecting big government. Thatâs a profound victory.
People are fed up with politicians who donât listen to them, fed up with a corrupt system that benefits the elites, instead of working men and women.
– Ted Cruz
A major power centre has been challenged and almost by definition power centres have some control over the public narrative. For decades EU apologists have wielded their immense budget and nomination powers to promote people with the “right” attitude and projects with the “right” purpose. Simultaneously a highly skewed PR narrative has been dished out so incessantly (complimentary of unaware taxpayers) that numerous voters now confuse this narrative with the truth. This is why so many EU apologists genuinely seem to perceive the EU as a force for everything worthwhile, and every EU-critic as either dumb, a xenophobic throwback or misled by the PR-narrative of the other side.
– Mark Brolin
It is such a shame, though, that the term “metropolitan liberal” is used here. I like to think I am a liberal in the John Locke/Ludwig von Mises use of that fine word, and also glory in living in the greatest metropolis on earth – London. It is one of those terms that is in danger of becoming hackneyed. Stop it.
The statistical correlation between both age and relatively low levels of education, on the one hand, and a vote to leave on the other, was much remarked upon, not only in Britain but throughout Europe and the rest of the world. Age and lack of education were usually taken by commentators as a proxy for stupidity. The majority vote to leave was therefore a triumph of stupidity: for those who vote the right way in any election or referendum have opinions, while those who vote the wrong way have only prejudices. And only the young and educated know what the right way is.
While age is certainly not a guarantee of political wisdom, the ever-increasing experience of life might be expected to conduce to it. But in the wake of the vote, there were even suggestions that the old should have no vote because they wouldnât have to live as long with the consequences of it. The reaction to the referendum exposed the fragility and shallowness of that each personâs vote should count for same.
The relation between political wisdom and levels of education is far from straightforward. It was educated people who initiated and carried out the Terror in the French Revolution. The Russian Revolution, and all the great joy that it brought to the Russian people, was the denouement of decades of propaganda and agitation by the educated elite. There was no shortage of educated people among the Nazi leadership. And the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were also relatively highly-educated, as it happens in France. The founder of Sendero Luminoso, who might have been the Pol Pot of Peru, was a professor of philosophy who wrote his doctoral thesis on Kant.
– Theodore Dalrymple
Comparisons have been made between the popular uprisings on both sides of the Atlantic â some of them lazy. Boris Johnson, the UK foreign secretary and leading Leave campaigner, and Mr Trump may have shaken up their respective establishments, but blond hair is one of the few things they have in common. Brexit and Trumpism are not one and the same.
– Sebastian Payne
Seumas Milne remains on the staff of the Guardian and Observer while Labour pays him to work as its director of strategy. As a colleague on leave, he has the right to be treated with a gentleness journalists would not usually extend to spin doctors who do not enjoy his advantages. I therefore write with the caution of a good corporate man and the cheeriness of a co-worker when I say Milne could not do a better job of keeping the Tories in power if rogue MI5 agents had groomed him at Winchester College, signed him up at Oxford University and instructed him to infiltrate and destroy the Labour party.
– Nick Cohen
“She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.”
– British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, talking about Hillary Clinton back in 2007
This is going to be so good đ
The desperate need of left-wing journalists to see Obama as “pure” and “most successful” â to see him as they’ve reported him instead of how he is â is in part a result of the racial pathology of the left, its tendency to reduce people to their victim group. The notion that “the first black president” has been a failure would be, according to this way of thinking, a nasty slight against a race rather than, what it is, an indictment of bad ideas and their consequences.
– Andrew Klavan
Identity politics is, in my view, one of the great, if not the greatest, scourges of the age. It isn’t an exclusively left-wing phenomenon, either.
Hereâs a newsflash for Marvel: race-baiters and gender warriors who complain endlessly about the âlack of diversityâ in comic books donât buy comic books. Theyâre interested in identity politics, not fun. When your customers â lifelong comic fans â pick up the latest issue to find a smorgasbord of irrelevant, hectoring social and pop culture commentary, they probably wonât buy the next issue. Not because theyâre sexists and racists, but because the stuff you are publishing sucks.
– Charlie Nash at Breitbart.
PS. I haven’t yet seen the latest Captain America film but it is on the list of ones I do want to see. Any recommendations?
OK, youâre angry. But ignore the vote and tanks could be on the streets.
If you wanted to convulse the country with rioting on a revolutionary scale, to cause a lethal rupture between the governing class and the governed and even to provide the conditions for the rise of 21st-century fascism across Europe, hereâs what you do.
After a referendum in which an unprecedented number of voters took part, and in which well over a million more people voted for change than for the status quo on our membership of the EU, you declare that the decision cannot be allowed to stand, chiefly on the grounds that the people were too stupid.
– Dominic Lawson (article behind Times pay wall unfortunately).
This outpouring of anti-democratic sentiment, this unquestioned faith in the wisdom of the elite over the will of the people, did not begin with the Brexit vote. Through the rise of evidence-based policy and quangos, experts have crept into more and more areas of policymaking. And the sentiment that the masses are a bit thick, brainwashed by the media and stirred up by demagogues, has long greeted every General Election result that doesnât go the metropolitan eliteâs way.
But the Brexit fallout has brought this long unspoken prejudice out of the bistros and into the streets. The idea that the people are effectively incapable of taking part in politics, that you need a PhD in European law to have an opinion on EU membership, is now being shouted from the rooftops and scrawled on placards. Left-wing Remain types, so long the sort who would pretend to speak on behalf of the little people, are now openly calling for elite rule.
– Tom Slater
During the course of this splendid campaign, every Ponce in Christendom seems to have stuck his patrician nose about the parapet, sniffed the Great Unwashed and called on the waddling geese of Strasbourg to stand between them and us ruffians. Luvvies and musicians (acting and music being two former escape routes for we chavs now colonised by public school spawn) of course, identity politics social justice warriors (writing the most currently disadvantaged people around â white working class males â out of history, one gripe at a time) naturally. And Eddie Izzard! There have never been a greater number of people Iâve loathed who have been made to cry all at once.
– Julie Burchill
First, Brexit means Brexit. The campaign was fought, the vote was held, turnout was high, and the public gave their verdict. There must be no attempts to remain inside the EU, no attempts to rejoin it through the backdoor, and no second referendum. The country voted to leave the European Union, and it is the duty of the government and Parliament to make sure we do just that.
– Theresa May
May is currently the front-runner to be the next Prime Minister.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, âPorcupinesâ, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty FrĂ©dĂ©ric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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