Kepler-186

David Lloyd on Liverpool’s civic buildings and developments. Focuses on the now 5 star Municipal Buildings. https://open.substack.com/pub/liverpoolpost/p/is-the-future-of-liverpools-historic?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios

Doesn’t quite work to In My Life but I like it

Excellent source on what’s going on in tech is 404media. Read two excellent articles. One on using third world labour to get paid on TikTok and Insta, the other (with pod) on manipulating algorithms to put out shite but profitable content. https://www.404media.co/email/859d66c7-c3cd-4e28-9af9-cd064e20e216/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter https://www.404media.co/404-media-podcast-28-ai-powered-tiktok-hustlers/ US is threatening to ban TikTok in the news today.

The biggest extremists in the UK put Liz Truss in to 10 Downing Street. She promptly crashed the pound making everything more expensive and nearly destroyed UK pension funds.

Bit more coverage than Echo in The Post yesterday. The refurb was crap and there were all sorts of problems with it, let alone the look and feel. https://open.substack.com/pub/liverpoolpost/p/st-johns-liverpools-punch-drunk-market?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-history-colonized-france.html Excellent read.

Analysis of Sunak’s rehashed “enemy within” speech. “Since Office Enemy without — beaten him & strong in defence Enemy within — Miners’ leaders Liverpool & some local authorities — just as dangerous in a way more difficult to fight But just as dangerous to liberty Scar across the face of our country ill motivated ill intentioned politically inspired.” ”excerpt from Margaret Thatcher’s notes for the “enemy within” speech to the 1922 Committee, July 19 1984.” -Thatcher’s notes read like a poem from an alternate universe evil e.e. cummings, but she intended to double down on them at that year’s Tory Party conference before the Brighton bombing fatally changed the course of that event. A draft of the speech she never gave were released by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation in 2014. It revealed that she had planned to say: “ We meet today as free people in a free country. But everyone of us here senses the shadow that has fallen across this freedom since last we met. The shadow I speak of is the violence and intimidation which has scarred and wracked the coal industry, and particularly the working miners and their families… … The shadow grows darker as influential men and women in our society question, even repudiate, the ideas of Parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. From this dark cloud falls an acid rain that eats into liberty. It can be seen above all in the natural home that these views and voices now find in the Labour Party. It explains why that party is so muted in its condemnation of picket violence; so muted in its praise for the hard-pressed police; so muted in its support for the tens of thousands of working miners; so muted in its advocacy of an NUM ballot; but so willing to trumpet the cause of the present NUM leadership in its extreme and uncompromising objectives. Yet the Labour Party in its present form, infiltrated by extremists, riven with factions, still stands upon the stage as the (principal) alternative to the Conservative Party in governing Britain. That, Mr. Chairman, is the measure of the shadow which has fallen across freedom since last we met.” https://open.substack.com/pub/brokenbottleboy/p/the-enemy-within-remix?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios

“Till we have built Jerusalem, and made it look like Milton Keynes.”

“We’re breaking down apartheid, We’re going to help the blacks. We’re doing it for freedom, And 80,000 grand less tax!”

Hello then Reds. Wha a win that was Reds

Darren McGarvey’s The State We’re In on iPlayer. Episode 1 (of 3) focusing on the justice system. He visits Liverpool and also prisons in Glasgow and Norway. Well presented and thought out. Daily Heil gave it a 1 star. 8/10 Next two cover Health and Education.

Only Tories deal in absolutes.

Never gets old.

“Men of Harlech, Stand ye steady, It cannot be ever said we, Don’t have Twitter links a plenty Gnasher will not yield!“ Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus, @Gnasher

The EU wasn’t perfect but Britain was one of the top dogs and could’ve long carried out its role as Perfidious Albion to the Europeans and the Greeks to the Yanks’ Romans but its future was gambled away by a spiv with a posh accent to satisfy cunts in his party and their fucked up libertarian backers who think good public services are akin to Soviet style collectivisation.

“Never trust a man whose God is in the skies. With a bible and a gun and hatred in his eyes “ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/laugh-riot-trump-fintan-otoole/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR-02-29-24 OToole Younge Klinkenborg Riskin&utm_content=NYR-02-29-24 OToole Younge Klinkenborg Riskin+CID_8b898781e582e88f0c5f99b878bf2446&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Laugh Riot “Donald Trump is not a Nazi, and his followers are (mostly) not fascists. But it is not hard to see how this description resonates with his campaign appearances. Trump is America’s biggest comedian. His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun. For them, he makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining. For anyone who questions how much talent and charisma this requires, there is a simple answer: Ron DeSantis. Why did DeSantis’s attempt to appeal to Republican voters as a straitlaced version of Trump fall so flat? Because Trumpism without the cruel laughter is nothing. It needs its creator’s fusion of rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation, whether of a reporter with a disability or (in a dumb show that Trump has been playing out in his speeches in recent months) of Joe Biden apparently unable to find his way off a stage. It demands the withering scorn for Sleepy Joe and Crooked Hillary, Crazy Liz and Ron DeSanctimonious, Cryin’ Chuck and Phoney Fani. It requires the lifting of taboos to create a community of kindred spirits. It depends on Trump’s ability to be pitiless in his ridicule of the targets of his contempt while allowing his audience to feel deeply sorry for itself. (If tragedy, as Aristotle claimed, involves terror and pity, Trump’s tragicomedy deals in terror and self-pity.)”

Gary Younge with a state of the nation piece in NY Review of Books. When we returned to London in 2015, after twelve years in the US, we could not get our son into the local elementary school. His class in Hackney, the neighborhood where we live, had the maximum of thirty kids in it, and none were leaving. Pretty much all the nonreligious schools in the area were at full capacity, too. He ended up getting a spot at a school two miles away. When our daughter started kindergarten a couple of years later, her class was also capped at thirty, and full. Today her class has just fifteen kids in it. Next year the school—located, apparently without irony, on the borough’s first “21st Century Street,” with dedicated green space, bicycle parking, electric vehicle charging, and 40 percent “tree canopy cover”—will close. (It is merging with another undersubscribed school across the main road.) So will more than ninety across the country. Low birth rates and Brexit-induced emigration have forced these changes. On average, elementary school classes in England are at 88 percent capacity, but in some areas, including my fashionable but still quite poor quarter, the rate is far lower. Not only are the schools shrinking and shutting down—the kids who go to them are getting smaller. After more than a decade of austerity, British five-year-olds are a full centimeter shorter now than they were in 2010, and they are becoming significantly shorter than children in other countries. I can’t help recalling what Kristian Jensen, the Danish finance minister, said in 2017, not long after the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU: “There are two kinds of European nations. There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.” Britain’s diminished status has been anticipated for some time. It was, to my mind, best captured by the broadcaster Peter Jennings on New Year’s Eve 2000 as he watched an impressive fireworks display cascade over the River Thames: Britain’s decline is relative, of course (its economy remains the sixth largest in the world), but it is real (it was fifth until the end of 2021, when India, its erstwhile colony, overtook it). Decades ago this diminishment was understood to be gradual and generational. After the Suez Crisis in 1956, there was an attempt to retreat to this smaller position in an orderly manner. I’m fifty-five, and my generation’s parents grew up in a virtually monoracial country, reliant on heavy industry, with the globe colored pink to mark British territories. I was raised to learn the metric system, the names of new countries—Zimbabwe, Benin, Burkina Faso—in a nation that saw itself as the stable conduit between Europe and America, with postcolonial ties across the globe. My children’s cohort has adjusted to an economy in which Indian restaurants employ more people than steel, coal, and shipbuilding all put together, and membership in the EU is a fact of history. But recently it has felt like we have been experiencing a more disorienting, abrupt descent. Public infrastructure has been run down to such a level that expectations of service, delivery, and maintenance that were commonplace just a few years ago now seem implausible. Trains and emergency rooms are only marginally more reliable on days when the workers are not on strike than on days when they are. Poorly maintained buildings thrown up using cheap concrete several decades ago have started crumbling, forcing many schools to close shortly before the school year started last fall. Four city councils have declared bankruptcy in the past year—including Nottingham, the ninth-largest city in the country—because they cannot meet statutory obligations with the money they get from the central government. In 2019 the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty accused the UK government of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population.” Four years later his successor said that “things have got worse” and claimed the UK was in violation of international law over poverty levels. Welfare payments have been slashed and the threshold for disability payments raised. In 2010, when the Conservatives came to power and launched their austerity agenda, the Trussell Trust, which oversees the largest network of food banks in the UK, operated thirty-five nationwide. Today it runs more than 1,300. At least one in seven of those using food banks is employed. That includes teachers and nurses. The salary of some experienced nurses has fallen by 20 percent since 2010; of experienced teachers, by 13 percent. In some areas you can’t get an appointment for your child to see a mental health professional unless they have already tried to commit suicide. In February 2023 I was diagnosed with a serious heart condition and put on a waiting list for an MRI. I’m still waiting. “The issue isn’t just incomes and inflation, but that people’s experience day to day is getting worse as public services crumble,” Diane Coyle, a professor of public policy at Cambridge, recently told the Financial Times. “The bill for sustained under-investment in everything from infrastructure, health and education to private business is coming due.” We are experiencing the highest tax burden since World War II. Standing at around 33 percent as a share of the GDP, it is 4 percent higher than it was at the last election and 10 percent higher than in 1993, though still lower than that of other advanced economies. But with the biggest jump in child poverty of the world’s richest nations over the last decade—29 percent of UK children live in poverty—we have little to show for all these taxes beyond the bill for Covid-19. That’s in no small part because, thanks to instruments like value added tax and local council tax, the burden falls most heavily on the poor. What has happened to Britain? For all its faults, the British ruling class used to take itself seriously—if anything, too seriously. No one would accuse it of doing that now. The deluded act of self-harm otherwise known as Brexit was the most glaring example: for momentary electoral gain and an internal party truce, former prime minister David Cameron asked the country a question to which he did not want to know the answer and then resigned when they got it “wrong.” A nation that insisted on an aggressive, isolating version of its own sovereignty has spent the past eight years struggling to figure out what to do with it. But Brexit also acted as a sifting mechanism, elevating the least serious to the top. A public inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic laid bare the incompetence, infighting, and contempt of these new leaders, which has left Britain with one of the highest Covid death rates in the Western world. Dominic Cummings, as chief adviser to then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, referred to cabinet ministers in his WhatsApp messages as “useless fuckpigs,” “morons,” and “cunts.” Of Matt Hancock, then the health minister, Cummings wrote that he “is unfit for this job. The incompetence, the constant lies, the obsession with media bullshit. Still no fucking serious testing in care homes his uselessness is still killing god knows how many.” Hancock later resigned after he was caught on camera making out with a woman who was not his wife in what could have been a scene from a high school prom—in defiance of both his marital vows and Covid laws. Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser, describes a “bonkers set of exchanges” from an August 2020 meeting in which Johnson appeared “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life.” In his own testimony during the inquiry, Johnson claimed he simply was not getting the information that everybody else in the world was already acting on. “When you read that an Asiatic pandemic is about to sweep the world, you think you’ve heard it before, and that was the problem,” he said. “I was not being informed that this was something that would require urgent and immediate action…. We should collectively have twigged much sooner. I should have twigged.” Britain has an election due before January 28, 2025 (elections are scheduled every five years but can be called earlier if Parliament agrees). The pollsters’ consensus is that Labour, which holds a consistent twenty-point lead in the polls, will win for the first time in twenty years. How could this be? In 2019 the Tories won a colossal eighty-seat majority, their largest in more than three decades. Labour, meanwhile, which had long seemed intent on self-immolation, won its lowest number of seats, albeit with a higher vote share than the party gained under its two previous leaders and with more seats than the Conservatives won the last time they were in opposition. Most assumed that the Conservatives would comfortably hold on to power for at least another electoral cycle. With a lead like that, how could they possibly lose? On the other hand, after four years of Conservative rule, inflation here is significantly higher than in most of Europe and almost double that of the United States; interest rates, in an economy where most mortgages are, to some degree, variable, are at a fifteen-year high; rents are rocketing. The economy is in recession; the pound is worth 35 percent less against the dollar than it was seventeen years ago. This economic and social calamity has been coupled with political chaos. We are now on our third Conservative prime minister in as many years. The first, Johnson, resigned after his own party wearied of his inability to tell the truth. His lying to others, along with the jovial, floppy-haired posh-boy shtick, had already been factored in as part of the package. This is a man who had been fired from a journalism job for plagiarism, refused to say how many children he had, and was caught on tape conspiring to have a journalist beaten up on his friend’s behalf. Max Hastings, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph and Johnson’s former boss, once said, “I would not trust him with my wife nor—from painful experience—my wallet.” The second, Liz Truss, boasted the shortest premiership ever. In just forty-four days she managed to crash the pound and the economy after a “minibudget” that proposed £45 billion in unfunded tax cuts—the biggest in half a century—that primarily benefited the wealthy. As the cost of borrowing spiked, parts of the pensions sector were threatened with insolvency. Truss fired her ideologically aligned chancellor, replacing him with a successor who ripped up the entire minibudget, making a nonsense of her agenda. The appointment smacked of desperation. Within a week she was gone. Her brief reign would have been even briefer were it not for the fact that the queen died just as her premiership began, suspending politics for ten days of official mourning. We are still paying the price, particularly with our mortgages. The third is Rishi Sunak, the man Truss originally defeated for the job and who was drafted after her resignation to perform triage on his colleagues’ self-inflicted wounds and repair the damage their party had done to the country. Sunak, born in Britain to a Kenyan-Indian father and Tanzanian-Indian mother, went to Oxford and then Stanford, where he got an MBAbefore working at Goldman Sachs, becoming a partner at a hedge fund, and going into politics. His wife, Akshata Murty, is the daughter of the Indian billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys and the source of his only real scandal thus far. In April 2022 it emerged that she claimed nondomicile status on her taxes, which meant that she did not have to pay tax on foreign earnings—a loophole that was entirely legal (she is an Indian citizen) but nonetheless reflected poorly on her husband, then the chancellor of the exchequer, who, the joke went, could not even persuade his own wife to pay her fair share of taxes in Britain. When the BBC pollsters constructed a word cloud from the terms most commonly used to describe Sunak, the four biggest epithets were “rich people,” “rich,” “money,” and “the rich.” With his favorability ratings at -29, Sunak is currently less popular than his party—which is really saying something. Conservatives have lost eight out of the nine seats they were defending in the last two years. The only seat they hung on to, in July, was Boris Johnson’s old seat. It is revealing that clinging to the former prime minister’s constituency was regarded as a victory. The manner in which the seats become vacant suggests at least partly why they were lost in the first place. One MP resigned after he was twice found watching porn on his phone in the House of Commons (one of those times, he said, he’d intended to look at tractors); one was sentenced to eighteen months after being found guilty of sexually assaulting a fifteen-year-old boy; another was accused of sexually harassing three women and using cocaine. Another admitted to groping two men while he was drunk. Yet another was found to have harassed and bullied a staff member and exposed his genitals near their face. Taken as a whole, these apparently unrelated incidents characterize the Tory government’s record over the past four years: a period of offensive lewdness, decadence, and entitlement against a backdrop of economic devastation and social misery, culminating in stinging electoral defeats. With few enticing economic levers to pull in an election year, the Conservatives are instead relying on a range of wedge issues, including transgender rights, environmental protection, immigration, and crime. Their flagship policy is a plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, even though this has been declared illegal, is proving unworkable, and is deeply immoral. The people who did not want Brexit are still angry, and many of those who did want it are angry because it hasn’t delivered any of the things they were promised. And so a change in government is likely, but a change in the nation’s fortunes is less certain. Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has indicated that he’d like to maintain Conservative tax and spending plans until growth returns. On most issues, ranging from nurses’ pay to student tuition, he refuses to say precisely what he would do, only that he would do it differently and better. This is a significant and discouraging departure from the leadership he promised. Starmer took over as Labour leader in 2020 from Jeremy Corbyn with a pledge to unite a demoralized party at war with itself. His launch video celebrates his record of standing up for unions, workers, and environmentalists, joining picket lines, marching against the Iraq war. “I spent my life fighting for justice, standing up for the powerless and against the powerful,” he said. “We can promote peace and justice around the world with a human-rights-based foreign policy…. We can put factionalism and division on one side and unify around a radical program.” His record in the years since, alas, says otherwise. During a period of popular public sector strikes, he told his front bench spokespeople not to join picket lines. He called for a nationwide ban on environmentalist demonstrations outside oil refineries and on roads. And as the war in Gaza intensified, he endorsed Israel’s decision to cut off Gazans’ water and power. This caution has a rationale. Starmer believes Labour has so much ground to make up after its enormous 2019 defeat because of the left turn it took in 2015, when the party chose Corbyn as its leader. But the rationale is at best partial. It is true that the party was bedeviled by allegations of antisemitism and that the membership had twice overwhelmingly backed a candidate—Corbyn—whom the parliamentary caucus refused to work with and sometimes actively worked against. Yes, it lacked unity and message discipline, which contributed to its catastrophic electoral losses in 2019. But it is also true that Corbyn was leader during the 2017 election, in which Labour increased its seats and its vote share and robbed the Tories of a majority with an extremely popular platform. Just as it’s true that Labour’s 2019 defeat was in no small part thanks to its insistence on a second Brexit referendum—an insistence championed by none other than Starmer himself. His efforts to lead the party to the right have left it, and him, without much to say and often directly contradicting things he has stated fairly recently—which the Tories will almost certainly focus on closer to election day. The party’s green investment pledge is a case in point. Just a couple of years ago Starmer pledged £28 billion a year for an industrial strategy that would invest in “battery manufacturing, hydrogen power, offshore wind, tree planting, flood defences and home insulation.” The green investment pledge was popular with voters and business. Conservatives sought to depict it as the kind of reckless, socialist spending commitment that would drive up taxes and borrowing, yet given the Conservatives’ own hapless economic record there is a good chance it would not have cut through. But the possibility of any vulnerability, no matter how remote, was more than the cautious Starmer could bear. In early February he slashed the commitment to one sixth of the original (£4.7 billion a year), insisting they would invest more only when the country had more. What words did pollsters report were associated with Starmer? “Nothing,” “Labour,” “not sure,” and “don’t know.” His favorability ratings stand at -13. So Britain’s two main parties, once coalitions of a broad swath of conservative and social democratic viewpoints, have now been taken over by single factions—the right wing of each. The Labour leadership may reasonably claim that their reorientation is producing results: they are tipped to win. Nonetheless, whatever enthusiasm there is in a country facing its fourth general election under its fifth leader in nine years tends to be roused by the Tories losing, not Labour winning. It’s clear what that does for Labour. It is not so obvious where that leaves my MRI. Polls show a significant majority of voters support nationalizing energy companies and water—which both party leaders oppose. The majority of the country is for a cease-fire in Gaza, which both parties oppose. The proportion of Britons who believe the government should control prices and reduce income inequality has more than doubled since 2006, and now stands at more than half the population, according to the British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey, one of the nation’s most respected polling institutions. “The public are as left-wing in their outlook as they have been at any time since 1986,” concluded the BSA. The coming election reflects none of this. When I returned from America in 2015, people asked if I was leaving because of the racism—as though by returning to Hackney I could somehow escape racism. When the UK voted for Brexit in June 2016 they asked if I regretted leaving the US; when Donald Trump was elected they assumed I must be relieved I’d left when I had. Only now that the two electoral cycles are in sync is it possible to convey my ambivalence at moving between two dysfunctional countries at war with themselves and the rest of the world, where the ballot box offers the clear choice of something even worse but few options for anything much better. Here in Britain, where my family and I remain, one of the most consistent predictions is that voter turnout, which never fell below 70 percent from World War II until 1997 and has not gone above it since, will fall even further.

Fascism with American characteristics is going global https://newrepublic.com/article/179287/cpac-2024-trump-steve-bannon-fascism?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily CPAC 2024: This Year America, Tomorrow the World Sure, Donald Trump was the star. But the real story was the global coalition preparing to cast the world into darkness that is Steve Bannon’s brainchild. KENT NISHIMURA/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES Steve Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday Walking through this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, it was easy to be underwhelmed. Attendance appeared to be down from its heyday numbers, and the exhibit hall, dominated in years past by enormous displays by the now absent National Rifle Association, had a thin and vaguely pathetic feel, featuring tables full of bedazzled Trump hats, a stall selling hand-knotted hammocks emblazoned with the MAGA slogan, a Christian cell phone provider, and a pair of easels featuring depictions of Christ in his suffering painted by a woman as she performed a trance-like dance. To be sure, personalities and politicians beloved by Donald J. Trump’s voter base—Representative Jim Jordan, Senate candidate Kari Lake, and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, to name a few—were plentiful. Not to mention Trump himself, who appeared on Saturday. Although the roster of speakers on the main stage featured stars of the MAGA right, this conference was really not designed for the on-site audience, whose presence served as mere cover for a bonanza of right-wing media opportunities and a convening of thuggish leaders of authoritarian governments and movements throughout the world. In CPAC’s post-Covid, post–January 6 diminishment, one figure is notably ascendant: Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief White House strategist. It has long been Bannon’s dream to smash up the European Union and most international institutions, dating back at least to his involvement, via the now-defunct data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, in the Brexit campaign that led to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU. A tagline in illuminated red lettering above this year’s CPAC main stage read: “Where globalism goes to die.” In a hotel ballroom on Wednesday, the night before the conference kicked off in earnest, Bannon presided over a gathering billed as CPAC’s International Summit. Seated at a rectangular arrangement of tables set end to end were former Trump foreign policy and national security officials, a former U.K. prime minister, Hungary’s ambassador to the United States, Argentina’s security minister, and the heads of CPAC organizations in Japan, Australia, and Hungary. At the head table, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes, a former Trump communications official, sat flanked by Bannon and Rick Grenell, the former acting national security adviser and disastrous ambassador to Germany. Later in the week, the CPAC main stage would host speeches by the son of Brazil’s defeated autocratic former president, the president of Spain’s far-right Vox party, and the authoritarian leaders of El Salvador and Argentina. (Earlier that day, the Daily Beast reported that subpoenas had been issued to a CPAC staff member as part of a lawsuit against Schlapp, alleging the sexual assault of a young man.) Assuming his imagined mantle of Great Man of History, Bannon, clad in a rumpled olive-drab jacket and pants, made a bold declaration. “We’re the last thing from isolationists,” he said. “We believe in the Treaty of Westphalia and the Westphalian system. We will make sure we bequeath that system and our constitutional republic and your great countries to generations.” Westphalia is a word that pops up with some frequency in Bannon’s lexicon, a favorite perhaps for its Game of Thrones sort of vibe. When he speaks of the Westphalian system, Bannon is talking about the inviolability of national sovereignty, a concept born of a 1648 peace agreement between the Holy Roman Empire and the states of Europe. In 1648, it was an innovation. Today, it’s basically a highfalutin’ rationale for the aggressive rejection of all international governance structures and policy-producing bodies. Though Bannon’s gathering of global deplorables took place only days after the death of Alexei Navalny, a fierce opponent of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, in a Siberian prison, the dissident’s name never came up. But that doesn’t mean the participants weren’t aware of the optics of looking too cozy with Putin at just such a moment—especially following Trump’s February 11 hanky-drop for the Russian leader with an invitation to invade NATOcountries that haven’t met their defense-spending commitments. After all, Putin himself, with a figurative wink and nod, created a permission structure for his American and European fans to play-smack him when he told Russian television on February 15 that he would prefer Biden over Trump as the next U.S. president. C’mon, like who believes that? Probably not the people in this room. But they know that most American people really dislike Putin: Of the 15 “newsmakers” that Gallup asked survey respondents to rank in an August study, 90 percent viewed Putin unfavorably. So the Russia fans at the Trumpist summit now devised a way to distance themselves from that contemptible leader while working feverishly to elect his vengeful acolyte, Donald Trump—a pathway Putin likely opened for them deliberately. “Let’s remember,” Grenell told the group, “we should start every conversation and finish every conversation by saying, ‘Vladimir Putin wants Joe Biden to be reelected.’” His eyes shined with glee. Given this, it wasn’t really surprising that a resolution drafted by the CPAC board condemning “the police-state tactics of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Lula de Silva, and Joe Biden” was agreed to by voice vote. About an hour into the proceedings, Senator Tommy Tuberville sauntered in and was invited to offer a few words. “Our country’s in trouble,” he said. “You think you’re in trouble? We’re in trouble. There’s not one thing that we’re doing right since President Biden took office.... We’re broke. We have no borders. Our military is woke.” This was the man who single-handedly held up the promotions of hundreds of career military personnel for months because of his disagreement with the Department of Defense policy on abortion. Taking place at a momentous time in global election cycles, this year’s CPAC was closely tied not only to the U.S. presidential contest (Trump being the conference keynote speaker) but also to the June elections for members of the European Parliament, or MEPs. Hungary is currently locked in dispute with EU leaders in Brussels over Hungary’s draconian laws against queer people, which are justified by the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán under the guise of preserving the nation’s great culture. “And the [EU] countries, although they are coming with this democracy and rule of law bullshit, sorry for using this word … their core problem is that there is a country, there is a government, there is a right-wing force in the heart of Europe, in the center, standing up firmly for those values,” said Miklos Szantho of CPAC Hungary. “So … the ultimate goal that we do have in this election—for the MEP elections and for the American elections—is to build a global coalition against the globalists.” Democracy did not have a good week at CPAC. It wasn’t just Szantho. On Thursday, video emerged of podcaster Jack Posobiec with Steve Bannon at a side event, announcing the end of democracy, adding, “We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” Posobiec fishes something small out of his pocket, perhaps a religious medal, and holds it up. “Because all glory is not to the government; all glory is to God.” Bannon chimes in with, “Amen.” On Friday evening, a group of Nazis and other white supremacists gathered at a CPAC party, according to Ben Goggin of NBC News: At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed so-called “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Turning Point USA is a national group with chapters on college campuses that is aligned with the Republican Party and led by right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. At Bannon’s Wednesday night anti-globalist globalist confab, former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss (who lasted six weeks in office in a contest with a head of lettuce, sort of) called for coming down hard on protesters against Israel’s actions in Gaza. “The problem is we are not cracking down on people who are openly supporting terrorism,” she said. “… So often, it’s the extreme anti-capitalists, the extreme so-called environmentalists who are also peddling antisemitism. And what we need to do is, we need to make sure that they are just not allowed to have these massive protests.” From the main stage on Saturday, Javier Milei, the newly elected neolibertarian president of Argentina, ranted against “unlimited democracy” and accused pro-choice organizations of having “a murderous agenda.” Milei ran for office on a campaign modeled on Trump’s—complete with “Make Argentina Great Again” caps—and has echoed Trump’s false claim of a stolen 2020 U.S. presidential election. On stage, the two enjoyed a close hug after Trump name-checked Milei from the podium. Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, used his speaking slot to decry the treatment of his father during an ongoing investigation into the storming of Brazil’s federal government buildings by a mob after the elder Bolsonaro lost his bid for reelection in 2022. He asked the U.S. Congress to conduct a hearing into the matter. For his part, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, a cryptocurrency enthusiast known for his brutal, often indiscriminate round-ups of citizens and mass incarceration, sought to make a distinction, based on a falsehood, between himself and, presumably, Biden, when he laughably claimed, “In El Salvador, we don’t weaponize our judicial system to persecute our political enemies. And now, who’s the dictator?” Throughout the conference, two main themes were hammered for the benefit of the Trump base: demonization of trans people (or denial of their very existence) and straight-up anti-immigrant xenophobia. In other words, attacks on people whose voices are rarely given a platform anywhere; people who are among society’s most vulnerable. Nigel Farage, the happy Brexiteer, told the International Summit, “Religious sectarianism now beginning to dominate British politics. Parliament Square as we speak is full of thousands of people waving Palestinian flags.” The problem, he contended, lay in Britain’s immigration policies, which had simply allowed in too many Muslims, threatening British culture. “If we lose our borders, we lose a significant part of our culture,” he said. Truss laid the issue at the feet of her political opponents, implying that current immigration policies thrive to feed the electoral needs of the Labour Party. “The British Labour Party needs Muslim votes,” she said.” It relies on Muslim votes. It had 86 percent of the Muslim vote at the last general election. It needs to keep those Muslim votes.” In the summit room, Bannon explained how the Trump people are already recruiting replacements to take over some 3,000 civil service jobs a Trump administration would empty in order to place its own people. “So on the afternoon of the 20th, in the transition, we’ll have beachhead teams and landing teams that will be able to go get that second and third level where the work really gets done and where the administrative state actually makes a difference,” Bannon said. “If we want to save our country, we have to take down the administrative state.… So I think this fight, that internal fight, is going to be absolutely vicious, and we have to win it.” And one more thing, he added: “We’ve learned collectively that we don’t need the legacy media.” He has a point. Along the hall opposite the main hall, podcast, video, and radio sets line the wall for the length of the space. None are from mainstream media outlets; rather, they’re from the panoply of right-wing and far-right platforms from which Republican activists get their news: The Epoch Times, NewsMax, RightSide Broadcasting, The John Fredericks Show, and the like. During the final session of CPAC 2024, after Trump had left the main stage following a nearly two-hour rant, Bannon returned to the podium to declare Trump “the greatest president of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” and to repeat the lie of a stolen election. “Lock ’em up!” he said. “All of ’em: Garland, Wray, Biden, Mayorkas!” The crowd obliged with the requisite chant. Although the room wasn’t terribly full, it all looked great on the livestream and in the videos taken from it that will live in perpetuity, be sliced and diced and repackaged for messaging, and generally serve as a well of material shot with high production values—lighting, sound, set. Fascism does not require a majority of support in order to win. Its willingness to trample norms allows for massive cheating and manipulation of the public. CPAC is a neofascist enterprise, and the fascists are getting organized. They’re telling you what they want to do—and they want to do it all over the world. Scoff if you care to, but keep a close eye.

More astroturf than The Pits.

He was at uni and pals with people who wore hang Mandela t shirts but apparently he never did. Some of them are high up Tory operators now, real black ops shit.

I read this yesterday and it sort of explains how we’ve got where we are. Long read but well worth it. ‘Well grubbed, old mole!’: The press, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the propagation of neo-liberalism in the UK“ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14648849211015853