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The Stop Trump protests are the ultimate virtue signal
The Spectator ^ | February 20, 2017 | Brendan O'Neill

Posted on 02/20/2017 9:38:03 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet

This afternoon, across Britain, the most pro-establishment demo of modern times will take place. Sure, the Stop Trump protesters gathering outside Parliament and elsewhere will look and sound rad. They’ll chant and rage and blow whistles and hold up placards with Trump done up like a tangerine Hitler. But don’t be fooled. These people are the militant wing of the old establishment. They’re radicals for the old status quo, pining for the pre-Brexit, pre-Trump era when their kind ruled and ordinary people knew their place.

The aim of the Stop Trump gatherings is to encourage MPs to deny Trump a state visit. Starting at 4.30pm, MPs will debate a petition insisting that Trump shouldn’t be afforded the pomp and shenanigans of a state trip because he isn’t a very nice person. His ‘misogyny’ and ‘vulgarity’ make him unfit for an audience with the Queen, apparently. It would ‘cause embarrassment to Her Majesty’. Well, we can’t have uncouth, foul-mouthed people from that uppity colony-turned-republic upsetting our monarch, can we? It won’t do. More than 1.8m people have signed this craven, forelock-tugging petition to protect Her Majesty from the ‘vulgarity’ of a brash, moneyed foreigner (who happens to have been elected by 63m people — 63m more than have ever voted for the Queen).

As MPs debate this plea from the chattering classes to protect the Queen from mortification — the petition’s signatories are largely based in the south of England and in metropolitan areas — protesters outside will beg them to ban Trump, or at least deny him the pageantry of our great state. Radical? Do me a favour. This is a painfully polite plea emanating from the metropolitan set and demanding our institutions be ring-fenced against the gruff speech and tiny hands of a stupid Yank. It’s as pro-British establishment as it is anti-Trump, the argument being that our political system is too pristine and good to be despoiled by the pussy-grabber-in-chief.

There’s an ironically nationalist bent to the protests — ironic because the protesters are no doubt the kind of people who fancy themselves as super-cosmopolitan and pro-EU. The protests are in essence an appeal to British decorum, to British fair play and temperance over the ‘vulgarity’ of rich, portly Americans. They’re calling on our MPs to do the bloody decent thing of turning Britain’s gilded, golden back on a nasty bloke from afar.

This is why so many in the political class have leapt with relish upon the Stop Trump moment — because they spy in it an opportunity to big up themselves and their institutions at a time when both are held in pretty low regard by most of the public. The Stop Trump cry is the greatest gift some sections of our ruling class could have wished for. It provides them with the shortest of short cuts to a moral high ground that has eluded them for so long. All they need to say is ‘Yeah, I hate Trump too’ and — boom — they’re good, they’re pure, they’re back in the moral game.

Hence the orgy of virtue-signalling and back-patting among certain parts of the political classes as they’ve stood up one by one to say ‘I don’t like Trump’. John Bercow, Harriet Harman, Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband, Nicola Sturgeon — they’re all at it; they’re all seizing the soap box being thrust in their direction by protesters praying that they slam Trump and in the process advertise their own superior virtue.

It’s a win-win for these people. They get to look edgy and glamorous to the Twitterati, who fawned like overgrown schoolgirls over Bercow when he said Trump shouldn’t address Parliament. And they get to whitewash their own past nastiness. Bercow voted for the bombing of Iraq. Miliband was at the forefront of demanding the bombing of Libya. These destabilising events created the very refugee crisis in relation to which Trump now issues cack-handed executive orders. Yet thanks to protesters, who have fashioned the most binary of moral universes in which Trump is the most wicked of politicians and anyone who opposes him is wonderful, these politicians can hide their own culpability for global disarray beneath the glare of being Against Trump.

Not surprisingly, the old establishment — the technocrats and bores and haters of ‘the deplorables’ who ruled the roost pre-Brexit and pre-Trump — love this rather shallow anti-Trump movement. Hillary tweeted effusively about the Women’s March against Trump. Obama has praised protesters. Over here some MPs are lining up to speak at anti-Trump gatherings. At the same time, some on the left have praised, or at least accepted, attempts by America’s intelligence agencies, the deep state, to weaken Trump’s grip on power. We’re witnessing the birth of a bizarre love-in between the old, bruised elite and supposed radicals, between an establishment rejected by ordinary people and leftists who miss that establishment.

A whole new era of protest is being born: one in which marchers demand greater power, not for themselves, but for a decaying bureaucratic elite that is looking on with horror at what democracy has spawned. This is no people’s movement. It’s the opposite, in fact. It’s an expression of metropolitan fury with the dumb political choices made by the people, cheered on by a sad, ousted establishment.


TOPICS: Chit/Chat; Government; Politics; Travel
KEYWORDS: brexit; britain; england; trump
I wish we could send our columnists and journalists to the same schools these guys go to.
1 posted on 02/20/2017 9:38:03 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
I wish we could send our columnists and journalists to the same schools these guys go to.

We would have to engineer brain transplants first. The 'journalists' in our country have long abandoned the responsibility to the Republic that affords a free press, and the best school in the world--HardKnock University, would do them no good at all given their current cerebral incapacity.

2 posted on 02/20/2017 9:45:17 AM PST by jimbug
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Britain needs to re-think this type of manure. I give them credit for finally paying off their bill to us for WW II., and they currently receive no financial “aid” from us.

That said, there is the curious case of three important things:

• Britain leans heavily on the US for developing nuclear weapons technology (she buys her SLBMs — UGM-133 Trident II — from the US to arm her four nuclear ballistic submarines).
• Britain also benefits from the massive American investment in arms. While the US does make some of that money back through selling them to the UK (ugh, they’re buying the F-35. . . why? Who knows — they’re just good friends I guess and like buying our stuff), the fact is that the UK benefits more because the bill for research is footed by the DOD and the F-35 aside, the UK could never afford the levels of research needed to buy such great weapons.
• American bases in Britain do defend her allowing Britain to skimp sometimes on her defenses and, even more interesting, is the fact that many thousands of Americans in the
UK spend a lot of money in local shops and businesses.

None of this is charity. The US doesn’t do it for the UK (at least not more than a small percent; we do love Britain, just not that much). The isn’t technically “aid”, but it don’t hurt neither.

So maybe they should remember the case of our liberal media. If you play the game wrong, you might just get benched.

red


3 posted on 02/20/2017 9:53:19 AM PST by Redwood71
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To: Redwood71

I would be willing to bet that the people of Britain who voted for Brexit will love seeing Trump.


4 posted on 02/20/2017 10:45:07 AM PST by McGavin999
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To: McGavin999

I have no idea who they think they are kidding. There hasn’t in actuality been any real connection between Britain and the mainland Europe for a number of decades. It’s been in name only for a long time.

Besides, who cares? It’s kind of like the Kardashians, or the lifestyles of the rich and famous. When it all comes down to it, it just don’t mean squat.

red


5 posted on 02/20/2017 2:48:25 PM PST by Redwood71
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