Brexit Catastrophisation Watch, Part 4 – Project Fear Begins To Unravel

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

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By arguing that the British people “didn’t vote for recession” as part of their advocacy for soft Brexit, Remainers inadvertently reveal that there is nothing intrinsically economically damaging about leaving the EU’s political union. Whoops.

With the post-EU referendum debate having moved on from the establishment’s sheer incomprehension of the result to an arbitrary and rather redundant battle over whether the British people voted for “hard” or “soft” Brexit (answer: read the bloody ballot paper), a curious chink in Remainer logic has been exposed.

Here is politics.co.uk’s Adam Bienkov, writing about the challenges facing Theresa May:

The first point to understand is that this is almost certainly the high water mark for her government. With Brexit negotiations not yet even underway, May is able to dismiss all questions about what exit from the EU will actually look like as being unpatriotic attempts to ignore the will of the British people.

As she told Corbyn repeatedly today: “Unlike the right honourable gentleman we think that we should deliver on what the people want.”

But while this approach may chime with the kind of attacks on ‘Remoaners’ we saw on the front page of today’s Daily Mail, it is a trick that can only be deployed for a limited amount of time. Yes the British people did vote to leave the EU, but they certainly did not vote to plunge the UK into a period of recession and international decline. And as the continuing collapse of sterling has shown this week, the sharks are already circling the UK economy. And pretty soon the prime minister is going to have to find a serviceable life raft.

My emphasis in bold.

Slavishly europhile politicians like Labour MP David Lammy are also now taking up the same “nobody voted for recession” refrain:

Funny. It’s almost as though Bienkov and Lammy are suggesting that leaving the EU needn’t necessarily mean “plung[ing] the UK into a period of recession and international decline”, and that Britain’s economic and diplomatic health is actually contingent on the kind of choices that Britain makes once we are free of the supranational political union.

Claiming that a mismanaged, uncontrolled or “hard” Brexit might cause serious economic harm is a perfectly respectable position. More than that, it is basic common sense. But that isn’t the argument that Remainers were making during the EU referendum campaign. No, they were claiming that any form of Brexit would be disastrous, that Britain leaving the European Union would be economically calamitous in and of itself, regardless of how Brexit unfolded or the model of our future trading relationship with the EU.

Here’s Adam Bienkov back in June, failing to draw that very distinction and blithely claiming that Brexit would automatically be damaging, no matter its ultimate shape or form:

Remain’s strongest arguments in this campaign are its warnings that Brexit would cause an economic shock that could cost jobs, increase prices and even push the UK into recession. These are warnings which have been endorsed by an overwhelming majority of economists, politicians, trade unions and international organisations.

One could chalk all of this up to normal political posturing were it not for the fact that Remainers are currently engaged in an insidious exercise to place themselves on the side of truth and reason while casting Brexiteers as bigoted and stupid enemies of truth and deniers of what should be indisputable facts.

Immediately prior to the EU referendum, Adam Bienkov fretted about “the growing disdain in the UK for the very concept of facts themselves”, as though voting for Brexit was somehow an irrational act of self harm:

But with the British public apparently so resistant to facts and the people whose job it is to deal in those facts so mistrusted, there does not seem to be overwhelming cause for optimism.

Even if Remain do somehow scrape a narrow win on Thursday, there should be little cause for joy on the left. Whatever the result next week, this referendum campaign should strike real terror into the hearts of all those on the progressive side of British politics.

If the UK does indeed vote for Brexit then it will open the door to a dark new political era. And it will do so at the same time as the left’s favourite weapons of facts, evidence and reason are less powerful than they have ever been before.

But of course this is a comforting leftist, pro-European lie. The British people did not suddenly become immune to facts. They simply cared about other, more important facts than the ones obsessed over by the Remain campaign – facts, hopes and fears which EU cheerleaders like Bienkov refused to even acknowledge.

Sudden geopolitical change inherently involves economic risk, and so Remainers gravitated toward the economic risk argument like flies to you-know-what, thinking that they could browbeat the public into voting Remain without ever having to do the thankless task of trying to make a positive case for the hated European Union. But it wasn’t enough, because even if Remainers were 100% right about the short to medium term economic risks of Brexit (and they certainly weren’t), the British people cared about other, more important facts.

The public cared about the continued self-governance of our nation and the self-determination of the British people. Even the lowest of low information voters could glance at the history of the EU, all of those furiously denied ratchets towards greater political integration, and see that much more was going on than the “friendship ‘n cooperation” tripe served by the Remain campaign.

The British people didn’t see why their country should remain part of an integrationist, 20th century euro-federalist experiment when every other advanced country in the world outside Europe manages just fine without a continental parliament, supreme court and unaccountable government. They didn’t see how a European Union made up of 28 countries could possibly fight Britain’s corner better than an elected government of the British people, by the British people and for the British people. And they were quite right to question all of these things.

But the leftists and the pro-Europeans had nothing to say to the British people about their legitimate concerns. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Tumbleweeds. They slobbered to stay in the European Union like rabid dogs, but they never gave a good reason why. Instead, they shouted louder and louder about the economic risk, wheeling out one politically compromised “expert” after another to warn us of the impending apocalypse, while pretending that arguments about democracy, sovereignty and national identity were silly, or somehow fringe concerns.

And having been so wrong about the facts which the people considered to be most important, now it also turns out that the key Remainer “fact” – that Brexit would inherently harm the economy, no matter its form – was a steaming pile of nonsense.

Adam Bienkov is free to go on making the argument that a “soft Brexit” in which the current single market access is maintained would be by far the best way to approach our secession from the EU. As it happens, this blog agrees with him – considering that Britain must rebuild atrophied political and diplomatic trade competencies from almost zero, and that the default secession period set out in Article 50 is nowhere near long enough to negotiate a comprehensive replacement, risking additional short term economic obstacles by forgoing the single market without a new framework in place seems ludicrous.

But in making a distinction between hard and soft Brexit, Bienkov is also effectively admitting that Brexit needn’t be economically harmful at all, if done the right way. And if that is now his position, as an advocate of soft Brexit, then he should do the decent thing and apologise to his readers for the thousands of words of pre-referendum doomsaying and post-referendum hysteria to fly from his keyboard.

 

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The Real Deplorables

Samuel Hooper11 Comments

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We must not judge all Donald Trump supporters by the actions of his most obnoxious social media cheerleaders

With polls showing that Donald Trump would be cruising to likely victory in November’s presidential election if only men (with whom Trump leads in the polls) were allowed to cast a vote, a depressing new hashtag – #Repealthe19 – has started trending on Twitter, advocating for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women’s suffrage.

Deplorable? Of course. But it is also likely the handiwork of a few bored Trump-supporting trolls, and hardly representative of the millions of women and men who choose to support Donald Trump’s candidacy. Yet this will not stop commentators on the Left, politically and emotionally invested in a Hillary Clinton victory, from portraying this juvenile and offensive stunt as being part of a broader Trumpist attack on women, and extrapolating the actions of a few immature idiots to smear the character and motivations of other, innocent Americans.

As it applies to Donald Trump’s own personal behaviour, such criticism is entirely justified – by bragging that his celebrity entitles him to “grab [women] by the pussy” Trump has further highlighted an especially unsavoury aspect of his character which we should all have already been aware, and not soon forget. But while criticism of the man himself is entirely valid and even essential, we must be careful to avoid falling into the comforting trap of assuming that the many people who support Donald Trump share the same retrograde views of the candidate and/or his troll army.

In the ongoing aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s recorded comments stating that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables“, journalist Michael Tracey warns political pundits against making the mistake of tarring all Trump supporters with the same brush.

Writing in The American Conservative, Tracey warns:

To broaden their horizons, such pundits might consider visiting some places in so-called “swing states” where Trump support is widespread, rather than just bloviating from behind their computer screens. Traversing these areas, one can’t help but bristle at Hillary’s “deplorables” theory as not only politically counterproductive, but seriously foul. She—like the pundits promoting her—has gotten the analysis totally inverted.

The real “deplorables” generally aren’t the people whom Hillary denounced as wholly “irredeemable,” or at whom economically secure commentators fulminate on a regular basis. More obviously “deplorable” are Hillary’s fellow financial, political, economic, and military elites who wrecked the economy, got us mired in endless unwinnable foreign wars, and erected a virtually impenetrable cultural barrier between everyday Americans trying to live fruitful lives and their pretentious, well-heeled superiors ensconced in select coastal enclaves. It is thanks to the actions ofthis “basket of deplorables” that we’re in the situation we’re in, where an oaf like Trump is perilously close to seizing the presidency.

At a recent Trump rally in Lancaster County, Pa., I was bemused to encounter a coterie of local Amish people who’d traveled there together by bus. Asked why they backed Trump, the overwhelming response was that Amish folks just wanted to preserve their traditional way of life (which they saw as under siege) and perceived Trump as enabling them to carry on with it. Some told me they supported Trump not because of some overweening disdain for their nation’s fellowmen, or immigrants, or even coastal liberals, but because they felt that the federal government was intruding on their ability to properly run their small farms.

More:

This also holds true in Lewiston, Maine, where Trump is favored to win the 2nd Congressional District and therefore at least one (potentially crucial) electoral vote. (Maine and Nebraska allocate their electoral votes by congressional district.) Lots of Franco-Americans populate this area, and many old-timers still speak French with a distinctive Central Mainer dialect. (Often it comes out when folks get inebriated at the bars in town.) When I visited recently, everyone basically had the same story: mills use to be the lifeblood of the local economy and by extension its civic institutions. Once the mills inexplicably shuttered, these workers lost their sense of location and community. Social-club memberships dwindled; parades and marches down the main thoroughfare became less of an attraction. There’s just not a hell of a lot going on nowadays, except Patriots games on TV, drinking, and drugs. Anybody with the means usually either bolts for relatively more prosperous Bangor to the north, or south to Boston and beyond.

Are the people who live in Lewiston really “deplorables”? Most of them like Trump, but they’re not the ones who crashed the economy or agitated to invade Iraq, as Hillary did.

Again: perhaps the true deplorables are the unaccountable elites whose decisions directly worsened life for millions of Americans. Oddly, you never hear Hillary running around to high-roller fundraisers condemning Goldman Sachs for their deplorable conduct; maybe that’s because they’ve directly given her and Bill hundreds of thousands of dollars for “speeches,” excerpts of which finally came out last Friday and are just as degenerate as you’d expect. (Goldman banned partners from giving money to Trump’s campaign, but handing over cash to Hillary is still perfectly fine.)

Tracey concludes:

Maybe the Amish of southeast Pennsylvania or the Franco-Americans of central Maine don’t use the correct Twitter hashtags or subscribe to Lena Dunham’s newsletter, but they’re still good people with normal ambitions for a happy, secure life. Screeching “deplorable!” at them is itself deplorable, especially because it lets the elites who bungled the country’s affairs off the hook.

This is my assessment too. There is a world of difference between some of Donald Trump’s most prolific (and obnoxious) social media supporters and the quiet men and women of middle America who see him as preferable to a President Hillary Clinton. You can argue (as this blog does) that these people are wrong, and that they are attaching their hopes and dreams to the wrong champion in supporting an egotistical authoritarian like Donald Trump. But they in no way, shape or form can they be described as “deplorable”.

Many of these people work hard, for stagnating pay which dooms them to falling living standards scarcely comprehended by the coastal journalists who scorn them. They raise families, attend church, give to charity, serve in the military. Sure, they might not be steeped in the latest fastidious trends of social justice or identity politics, but very few of them could be described as being full of hate.

Last Christmas, while we were back Stateside with my wife’s family in McAllen, Texas, I was perusing the shelves at Costco or Sam’s Club when I noticed Donald Trump’s new book “Crippled America: How To Make America Great Again” staring up at me from the bargain bin. Noticing me notice the book was a kindly-looking old man who wandered over, pointed at the volume in my hand and said, without a note of hesitation in his voice, “that man will save America”.

I had the briefest of conversations with him. Was this man an overt racist, sexist or homophobe? It certainly didn’t appear so, as far as I could tell. The baseball cap he was wearing suggested that he was a veteran, while his general appearance suggested that perhaps he was not brimming over with disposable income. And oh yes – like many people in that part of the country, he was Hispanic. Maybe that accounts for the strength of Clinton’s seething contempt toward members of her taken-for-granted minority constituencies who refuse to “see the light” and support her.

You can call this man deplorable if you will. Hillary Clinton has already preemptively labelled him so. Perhaps he is not quite “irredeemable“, though. Perhaps, like the African American protester she had thrown out of her rally the other day, by virtue of being a minority he might get away with merely being followed home and re-educated to better appreciate everything that Clinton is doing for him.

But the Hillary Clinton campaign and the American political elite in general are making a grave mistake if they assume that Donald Trump’s noisiest and most obnoxious cheerleaders on social media are representative of that beleaguered rump of Middle Americans who see him as their only route of escape from a status quo which has profoundly failed them.

Clinton has suggested that Trump supporters who repeat the “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan are somehow being unpatriotic for effectively suggesting that America is not already great. And if you are a typical Clinton supporter, perhaps your America is unquestionably great, delivering bountiful career opportunities and a consistently rising standard of living for you and everyone you know. But many others are less fortunate. In fact, the version of America which confronts many Trump supporters each and every day is significantly less “great” in nearly all of the ways which matter most to someone struggling to get by.

And these people deserve better than to be scorned and preemptively written off by the likely next president of the United States.

 

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Glenn Beck Is Right: Conservatives Should Abandon Donald Trump, Even If It Means a Clinton Victory

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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There was never any excuse for self-respecting American conservatives to support Donald Trump. But those who did so should seize what may be their last chance to rectify that mistake with honour and dignity

It is probably fair to say that US conservative media firebrand Glenn Beck has been on something of a journey since the days when entertained his paranoid Fox News audience with chalkboard conspiracies and tri-cornered hat-wearing Founding Father fetishisation.

And with his declaration that American conservatives should take the honourable course and refuse to support Donald Trump, thus allowing the election of Hillary Clinton, Beck should be commended for laying down invaluable covering fire for other conservatives looking for a way out of their ill-considered collaboration with Trumpism.

Beck recently wrote on Facebook:

Every person, each of us must decide what is a bridge too far.

[Senator] Mike Lee has obviously reached that point, where the moral compromise his party is asking him to make is simply beyond what is acceptable.

It is not acceptable to ask a moral, dignified man to cast his vote to help elect an immoral man who is absent decency or dignity.

If the consequence of standing against Trump and for principles is indeed the election of Hillary Clinton, so be it. At least it is a moral, ethical choice.

If she is elected, the world does not end…. Once elected, Hillary can be fought. Her tactics are blatant and juvenile, and battling her by means of political and procedural maneuvering or through the media , through public marches and online articles, all of that will be moral, worthy of [a] man of principal.

Her nominees can be blocked, her proposed laws voted down.

The alternative does not offer a moral person the same opportunity. If one helps to elect an immoral man to the highest office, then one is merely validating his immorality, lewdness, and depravity.

But it’s OK, at least it is not her! Right??

No.

Lee’s call for Trump to step down and withdraw from the race is respectful to him and to the process.

Trump stepping down does not guarantee a Clinton win, but it does guarantee that the Republican party still stands for something, still allows its members to maintain thier [sic] own self respect and that it still has a future.

This blog concurs entirely with Beck’s sentiment – the only point of disagreement is that last weekend’s “Trump Tape” revelations should in any way be the deciding factor in whether or not conservatives of conscience should support the GOP nominee. They should not. The decision to disavow and abandon Trump should have been taken months ago, ideally when the birtherism-stoking, policy-phobic former Clinton donor threw his hat into the ring to be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in the first place.

Are we really supposed to respect those Republican politicians who previously draped their arms around Donald Trump because they reluctantly withdrew their endorsements only when audio evidence of Trump’s character was leaked to the media, as though there were no prior warning signs as to his character? Are we to respect Reince Preibus’ party machine when it continues to nominally support a candidate who is constitutionally illiterate and profoundly un-conservative in every way? No, we are not. We shall not.

None of this is to say that many of the Trump supporters’ grievances are not valid – in many cases they are. But the leap between acknowledging Donald Trump’s criticism of the status quo and accepting his half-baked solutions while overlooking his glaring personality flaws is a leap too far.

Yes, a Hillary Clinton presidency would likely be a depressing continuation of that dismal status quo. But as PJ O’Rourke recently noted on the BBC:

“She’s wrong within the normal parameters of wrong. It’s the kind of wrong we’ve had before, it’s a wrong we can endure, and a wrong [from which] we can recover… With him, who knows?”

And from the principled opposition to a Hillary Clinton presidency that Glenn Beck proposes, a better Republican alternative may yet emerge – hopefully one which is rooted in small government conservatism rather than authoritarianism.

So Glenn Beck is correct in his statement. Country should come before party, as should the dignity of the office of the presidency. And while Hillary Clinton labours under numerous ethical concerns of her own, at least she has not been recorded making lewd and vulgar remarks which some are interpreting as an admission of prior sexual assaults. It’s sad that the bar of acceptability in this presidential election has been set so low, but there we go. As The Onion recently reminded us, these are the two major party presidential candidates that the American people chose.

Is it unfair that John F. Kennedy lived a sexually debauched lifestyle with no negative political ramifications while Donald Trump is publicly hauled over the coals for often lesser transgressions? Perhaps not – and one can partially understand Trump supporters smarting at the double standard of Kennedy and even Bill Clinton being broadly respected while their man is painted as being unprecedentedly hostile to women. But this is 2016, and we hold ourselves to a higher standard now – or at least we should.

Some clearly disagree, believing that a coarse and vulgar candidate who talks about grabbing women “by the pussy” still deserves qualified support from his party. That argument would be stronger if we were reasonably sure that we were dealing only with words and not actions, if the candidate demonstrated real remorse and if they were otherwise ideologically sound. But when that candidate holds views which are often antithetical to the Republican Party’s stated values and ambitions, the justification for continuing to defend Donald Trump starts to become very threadbare indeed.

No self-respecting conservative should have ever thrown their support behind Donald Trump in the first place. But for those who did, Glenn Beck’s statement provides an undeserved opportunity to retreat while maintaining their dignity.

They should seize it with both hands.

 

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Brexit Catastrophisation Watch, Part 3 – The Cultural Elite’s Ongoing Anti-Brexit Tantrum Is Pointless And Childish

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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Hell hath no fury like a self-involved, virtue-signalling, pig ignorant artist forcibly separated from his beloved European identity

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to be in close proximity to a young child having a screaming meltdown in a supermarket, church or (worst of all) on a long aeroplane journey will immediately recognise the tenor and tone of the Guardian’s latest offering in their ongoing “But The Evil Tor-ees Took My European Identity From Me” series.

And this week’s whinnying public tantrum comes courtesy of writer Tom McCarthy, who can’t wait to tell us how he spurned the opportunity to attend a festival of British arts because daring to celebrate British artistic creativity post-Brexit is clearly akin to having attended the Nuremberg Rallies in 1930s Germany.

McCarthy pompously declares:

In our society, the artist may have no executive power whatsoever, but their ace-card lies in the fact that they command a means – perhaps the primal one – of putting value in the world: a means of making meaning. They can use this status to subvert, or to shore up, power – sometimes both at the same time – and they can do this well, badly or indifferently; but one thing they can never do is be politically neutral.

A few weeks ago I received an invitation to a special reception to be held at the Royal Academy for “British artists” to celebrate “British creativity”. In normal times such a gesture might have seemed a little jingoistic, but essentially innocuous. But these are not normal times. Given the extraordinary far-right takeover the country seems to be undergoing, current talk of “British” X or Y or Z (“values” or “decency” or “culture”) usually marks one end of a chain, at the other end of which someone is being shunned in a playground, spat at in a supermarket, or worse. The invitation mentioned designers and businesses who “shape our culture”, and outlined the security procedures that would surround the event. It wasn’t hard to read between the lines: while Martin Roth at the V&A had made it clear his institution would have no truck with such nonsense, the RA was helping to assemble a roll-call of figures from the arts to pose arm-in-arm with ministers, royalty and innovators of the James Dyson variety, for a soft-power, post-Brexit rebrand of “British” culture.

How terribly brave of McCarthy to make such a principled stand, which will have cost him absolutely nothing and cemented his status as a hero among other pig-ignorant europhiles in the cultural scene. No, really. How terribly subversive, taking a public action which panders to the existing groupthink and prejudices of the political and cultural elite, nearly all of whom remain horrified by Brexit. The idea that Tom McCarthy is in any way being countercultural or subversive is as hilarious as it is pitiful.

McCarthy continues:

The fact is, I’m not an example of “British creativity”. Like all English-language writers, I’m thoroughly European. To read Shakespeare is to read a rich remix of Ovid, Petrarch and Lucretius; to read Joyce (a British passport-holder) is to read Mallarmé, Laforgue, Goethe. The wellspring of our shared archive is Greek – and since the Hellenic world was in fact spread all around the Mediterranean basin, this means that to be European is already to be African and Asian.

Millennia of trade and empire, of diaspora and endlessly crisscrossing migration, have produced a culture that is and always will be cross-pollinated. If London and other British cities have become cultural hubs, this is because they stand at intersections within larger, international flows and networks. To credit an intersection with creating (“innovating”) the currents from which it merely feeds, though, is like calling a lightbulb a generator.

The number of idiotic sentences about Brexit and democracy uttered by self-proclaimed artists probably now registers in the tens of millions, but still McCarthy’s claim that all English-speaking writers are “thoroughly European” is particularly fatuous.

If “all English-language writers” are European, why do we not hail F. Scott Fitzgerald as a great European author? And even if we did consider Fitzgerald to be European, using McCarthy’s tortured logic, isn’t this yet more damning evidence that one does not need to be part of a supranational political union to derive a sense of regional or continental identity? Fitzgerald’s European-ness is innate and inalienable, according to McCarthy, and utterly uncontingent on belonging to a power-hungry, relentlessly integrating Cold War-era club like the EU. So what exactly in the problem with Brexit?

Is Switzerland, outside the European Union, not “European”? Is Norway somehow severed from the continent, its artists unable to “cross-pollinate” ideas with their French or Spanish peers? And if the likes of John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald are great European writers despite both of whom having perished before the sainted European Union came into being, isn’t this proof that sharing an undemocratic set of supranational institutions is entirely unnecessary in forging a common heritage and identity?

Weepy British artists still in floods of tears at the thought of Britain leaving the EU should in fact take heart from Tom McCarthy’s rant. Since “all English-language writers” are “thoroughly European”, even those who lived their entire lives on a different continent decades before the institutions of the European Union even came into existence, why get so upset simply because Britain will shortly cease to send MEPs to Brussels and Strasbourg?

The culmination of McCarthy’s virtue-signalling extravaganza:

About the same time, I received another invitation, this time to read from my work at an anti-Brexit art festival in Hackney’s gallery-filled Vyner Street. Beneath bunting designed by Fiona Banner, Bob and Roberta Smith and Jessica Voorsanger played a gig, Katrin Plavcak and Ulrika Segerberg did an electronic sewing machine-enhanced performance, Lucy Reynolds conducted a “choir” who chanted in 20 languages at once, and a large crowd who could trace their heritage to every corner of the Earth ate, drank and generally had fun celebrating internationalism and renouncing tribalist bigotry, while children darted round their legs.

It’s quite possible that several of the Vyner Street participants, being high-profile culture-shaping innovators, were invited to the RA too. I doubt they’ll go, though, any more than I will.

And there it is. That’s what this is really all about. Tom McCarthy hasn’t had his European identity ripped away from him, as by his own admission his sense of European-ness transcends any one political institution and seemingly includes African and Asian culture, too (perhaps someone needs to have a quiet word with him about his imperialist, oppressive cultural appropriation).

No, this is members of the British artistic and cultural scene, left-wing almost to the last man, doing what they do best: spurning patriotism at every turn (embracing “all centuries but this and every country but their own”, as W.S. Gilbert might have put it), revealing their exquisite discomfort with anything British and promoting a rootless form of virtue-signalling internationalism instead. It is self-evident that Tom McCarthy would have no qualms about attending a celebration of French or Italian culture, were he invited to one. No, it is only his own culture which he detests and sees fit to associate with the “far right”.

“Look at me, look at me! I’m a citizen of the world! I’m not beholden to your base, quasi-fascistic preoccupations with national identity and community”, screams Tom McCarthy’s insufferable hissy fit in the Guardian. Well, good for him. Thankfully, a majority of Britons (even those cowed by Project Fear into voting Remain) disagree with this toxic notion.

Castigating the inventor James Dyson for having “[thrown] his lot in with Nigel Farage” in supporting Brexit, McCarthy declares “I don’t even dry my hands in public toilets” any more following the EU referendum, a riveting declaration that this brave, Super Virtuous Man will have absolutely nothing to do with those who dared to defy the pro-EU orthodoxy.

If Tom McCarthy chooses to forego washing his hands after using the lavatory as part of some pinch-faced middle class anti-Brexit rebellion, that is his own business. This blog would be quite content if he simply took pity on the rest of us and ceased to sculpt prissy, virtue-signalling little articles in the Guardian out of his own faeces.

 

Thousands Of People Take Part In The March For Europe

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Donald Trump’s Second Presidential Debate Performance Was Red Meat To The Alt Right

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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Who is Donald Trump trying to impress? And why?

If you were wondering exactly what audience Donald Trump was playing to with his combative debate performance in last night’s second presidential debate, here’s a clue.

Donald Trump’s “braggadocious” threats to prosecute Hillary Clinton if he wins the presidential election will do nothing to temper the fears of undecided voters who have no love for Hillary Clinton but harbour reservations about throwing their support behind an authoritarian wannabe strongman.

But this kind of language is absolutely lapped up by Trump’s strongest source of support – the conspiracy-tinged alt-right, who see Hillary Clinton not merely as an ethically challenged creature of Washington D.C., but as evil incarnate – the “wicked witch of Benghazi, cackling over her cauldron” as one pro-Trump social media user put it.

And the conspiratorial InfoWars site certainly lapped up Trump’s second debate performance, as seen in the instant reaction video shown above, and again at far greater length in that site’s six-hour coverage of the debate at Washington University in St. Louis.

But in the midst of the pro-Trump cheerleading, InfoWars reporter Owen Shroyer actually makes a very pertinent observation:

You know, it is an amazing dynamic where it seems like if you like Donald Trump, no matter what, he wins, if you like Hillary Clinton, no matter what, she wins. How do we break any ground on that? How do we break through that paradigm where only your candidate can win the debate? I think that that illustrates the polarisation that we’re seeing in this country in this election cycle.

Indeed, different sites and journalistic outlets have called the debate in line with their partisan leanings or the supposed proclivities of their readers, preferring to pander than to challenge or upset. The Guardian declared a victory for Clinton, while the Spectator and numerous American conservatives (even those opposed to Trump) declared him the victor.

As this blog commented following the debate:

My initial assessment: if you disregard actual facts (as we now seem to do), Donald Trump probably had the better of this debate. He went on the (nuclear) attack, hit Hillary Clinton hard, gave his supporter base something to cheer about and managed to do enough incendiary things to bump the Trump Tapes story fallout down the news agenda. Hillary Clinton didn’t commit any significant gaffes and was more poised, but again there was nothing tremendously inspiring about her sales pitch for the presidency.

And it seems that we do now disregard facts and adherence to them when judging a candidate’s debate performance. While Hillary Clinton certainly was not consistently truthful during the debate, Donald Trump made significantly more blatant falsehoods. But can he still be said to have “won”, by virtue of having been more combative in tone and unapologetic about his deceits? Apparently so.

What is clear is that more than ever – even more than four years ago, when Republicans trapped in an ideological echo chamber of their own making were convinced that Mitt Romney was going to lead them to victory – is that both sides have retreated to their respective ideological bubbles, hermetically sealed safe spaces of bias confirmation in which awkward facts or revelations are diminished or entirely ignored in order to avoid the slightest cognitive dissonance in the minds of their supporters.

Donald Trump’s combative performance and willingness to step into unprecedented territory in his attacks on Hillary Clinton will have been red meat to those of his supporters already firmly ensconced in the bubble. Threatening to send “crooked Hillary” to jail is red meat to the ascendant alt-right movement.

But will it have done anything at all to convince wavering voters that Donald Trump is capable of carrying out the duties of the presidency in a calm and measured way, or that he represents a safe choice for those unwilling to vote for Hillary Clinton? Almost certainly not.

And with less than a month to go until the election, Donald Trump still has all of his work ahead of him to reach that low but mysteriously elusive bar of acceptability.

 

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