Brexit, Covid19 and the future

The liberal class has been in meltdown for the last 5 years over the threat of Fascism. This farcical threat leapt out of nowhere when they lost the Brexit referendum and Trump won the 2016 election. Almost immediately you began to see talking heads muttering about how it all had “an echo of the 1930’s about it” though no one could explain why. It was actually quite sad watching normally intelligent people emotionally and intellectually collapse because they couldn’t cope with losing. It might have been funny if they hadn’t tried to run democracy into the ground as a response.

As normal the pushback started with a simple narrative - that both democratic events were in some way illegal or unfair. This started with mutterings about “the people” being lied to but soon escalated into ever more fanciful conspiracy theories about Russian interference and “dark” influence companies which had managed to taint both events. Again no real evidence was ever presented but there were endless stories and discussions in the media with just enough smoke to make people wonder if there was any fire whilst obfuscating the real truth - that the liberal class had lost and couldn’t stand it.

The weirdest part was the way that the liberals managed to work themselves into such a level  of panic and hysteria that they actually started buying into the nonsense that they had made up. They actually started believing that the Russians and Cambridge Analytica using some social media ads had managed to change the course of Western history.

Fortunately democracy is not that easy to break.

Those conspiracy theories and moral panics stuck even after multiple studies showed that the impact was tiny / if any. Even experts in social media who have every reason to talk up its capabilities declared it was nonsense. Alas the liberals minds were gone - all they could see was SS stormtroopers and book burnings.

A collective hysteria had descended.

In November 2019 the political wrangling over Brexit came to a head. The desperately undemocratic attitudes and behavior of the liberal class was thrown into sharp relief as they tried to avoid an election in case the people gave the “wrong answer” agan. This culminated in the Prime Minister's decision to prorogue parliament using the royal prerogative powers. This is a routine action and has been done many times in the past including for political reasons. But this time the liberal class exploded with mass protests in Downing street and Parliament square. “It’s a coup” was screamed by many - pretty strange coup where there is no military and the coup leaders are trying to have free and fair elections.

Fortunately for everyone Boris Johnson is not Hitler, the Tories are not the Nazis and democracy is still a thing in this country after they managed to get an election set which they won by a landslide. Suddenly it was clear why the liberal class didn’t want an election. They knew they would lose as apparently much of the country has more respect for democracy than they do.

It was this chain of events and the underlying panic which makes 2020 so interesting.

In November 2020 Boris Johnson and the Tories were apparently Fascists and Nazis attempting a coup but by March 2020 the liberal class including other politicians, the media and half the expert class were demanding that this “deeply dangerous authoritarian government” lock up the population at home in response to Covid19. Many people got political whiplash from the sudden attitude change though few seasoned watchers were surprised.

What became more shocking as time went on was the utter lack of interest in asking coherent questions about the government's intentions. “Lockdown now! Lockdown now!” they screamed but never asked “What comes next?”’ In short they were happy for a government which they had put on the same moral level as some of the worst human beings in world history to rob people of their most basic civil liberties without even considering the implications.

The government asked for the effective ability to rule by near decree. MP’s sitting in the House nearly pissed themselves in their eagerness to give away power by shuttering parliament. The very people who had declared that we were seeing “echos of the 1930’s” demonstrated their utter ignorance of history. Fortunately sane voices on the right of the Tory party demanded guillotine clauses and a speedy return to normality. The same people who David Lammy barely a year earlier had accused of being like Nazis - then followed up with worse than Nazis were the only people who actually did anything to defend basic parliamentary democracy. 

Around this time we had two big political events. The first was the discovery that Dominic Cummings the chief aid to the Prime Minister was found to have travelled during lockdown generating a huge amount of public anger. We can debate the rights and wrongs of the situation but the media witch hunt was deeply disturbing with journalists literally climbing over each other outside his house and a pressure group deciding to park a large TV screen playing a political attack advert in the road all whilst his autistic child sat inside. 

The other event was the eruption of the Black Lives Matter protests in the UK as a response to the death of George Floyd in the USA. Again the liberal class turned politically on a two pence piece. Gone was any concern for Covid19 infection rates or lockdown rules. Now it was about empowering the protests who had valid reasons to be on the streets. Apparently one man travelling across the country with his family was a national panic but 30,000 protesting in central London defacing and damaging statues with a virus on the loose was all good. Anyone who was paying attention looked on with a growing sense of disgust.

Since then things have only got even worse. 

The police are now selectively enforcing the law with anti lockdown protests being repeatedly attacked as was an anti illegal migrant protest in Kent which involved military veterans. In both cases the wall of silence from the liberal class in the media, parliament and across the country has been deafening. Apparently in their minds the right to protest only covers things that are on their approved list. You would think that the liberals who had been wetting the bed over a Fascist takeover might be more worried about the police acting on political preferences but apparently not. They are all good with it as long as it is subjects they don’t like - what could go wrong?

This utter disregard for even pretending to be concerned about authoritarianism or civil liberties was perfectly encapsulated in a speech by the Prime Minister who discussed bringing the military onto the streets to assist with policing and guarding installations. For a group of people who thought he was Hitler reborn you would have expected a strong reaction. We got nothing at all except again from the right of the Tory party.  

Recently it has been leaked that the government has been using GCHQ to track the phones of the population to understand whether people were sticking to lockdown. Then it came out that the 77th Battalion of the British army (Information Warfare Unit) was being used to ‘counter’ anti vaccine stories and ‘propaganda’ online. This has been matched in scope only by the tech giants like Facebook, Google etc who have actively censored content throughout. Videos with expert after expert have been demonetised or simply removed. These aren’t any people but world leaders in their fields but because they disagreed with the mainstream the content was removed or hidden. Google even went so far as to hide the Great Barrington declaration from its search results effectively locking it away from many people who couldn’t find it. 

This Orwellian-like censorship and manipulation by the private sector and government goes beyond anything that the Soviet Union achieved because the technology has only recently been invented. Did any of these issues raise a flag with the liberal class - nope. In fact again they have mostly been cheered on as a rational response to Covid19 and in many cases begged the government to do more. 

So where are we now?

Looking at the last 12 months it is hard not to see a creeping authoritarianism within the UK. The government which barely 12 months earlier had been attacked for attempting a coup has been able to curtail our liberties with barely a murmur of protest. One minute the government was comparable to some of the worst humans in world history and the next was being celebrated for taking strong action in the face of a virus. In fact the liberal class has cheered it on with only the right of the Conservative party acting as a brake on the buildup of excessive state power and interference. 

It sadly really has demonstrated the intellectual vacuousness at the heart of modern liberalism and the skin deep belief in democracy. Like sticking lipstick on a pig, the liberal class utter words like liberty, democracy and freedom of speech to sound like they believe in it but really don’t. After all their noise about defending us from authoritarianism they have shown they are all good with using state power as long as they agree with the outcome. 

We are fortunate enough to have a government that I truly believe has no wish to retain these restrictions any longer than necessary but that is this government and there will be new ones. The Covid19 crisis has been a blueprint on how any would be dictator could take power. Generate enough fear and slowly boil the democratic frog until it is dead or disabled. 

It is this that concerns me the most. 

The collapse of liberalism into a form of virtue signalling rather than a belief in freedom of speech, democracy and personal liberty has robbed us of one of our most powerful democratic shields. This has happened at a time when the liberal class has corrupted the political lexicon via threat inflation - if you scream Nazi enough people stop listehing or even worse can’t recognise a real one when they come along. Furthermore we have seen so few in parliament and across the country are actually willing to push back in an emergency. We need politicians, journalists and the people to be willing to stand up for all everyone’s rights whether we agree with that person or not. We need the media to realise they are not there to police discussion but to ask hard questions and hold politicians to account in order to minimise state control. My concern is that if we don’t get grassroots reform then we are vulnerable when a politician comes along who really is an authoritarian.

Then we truly might see a replay of the 1930’s.