I find this suggestion by James Smith deeply plausible, echoing a point made by Will Davies last year that ‘free speech’ is becoming the unifying principle of a right-wing in the process of recomposition: a successor conservative movement to Trumpism with appeal to many nominal centrists would be one that retains […]
An interesting analysis from Pity the Billionaire, by Thomas Frank, loc 1746-1759: And so, over the years, the movement came to affect a revolutionary posture toward the state that it might have borrowed from Karl Marx or Jean-Paul Sartre. It imitated the protest culture of the sixties, right down to […]
I love the phrase ‘rhetorical rapture-race’ used by Thomas Frank to describe the mobilising dynamics of the far-right resurgence in the U.S. From his Pity the Billionaire loc 960: Conspiracy theorists have always been with us. But Glenn Beck brought them into the mainstream. And so began one of the […]
Something to remember as the Tory-led condemnation of Labour’s alleged anti-Semitism reaches fever pitch: Shadow education minister Lucy Powell ran day-to-day operations for Labour’s 2015 general election campaign. That year’s dog-whistle consisted of telling the electorate, again and again, that Labour had never apologised for destroying the economy, and that […]
I listened to a fascinatingly crap podcast while in the gym earlier – Robin Aitken, introduced solely as a ‘Tory supporter’ but last seen complaining about institutional discrimination against conservatives during his career at the BBC, has produced an episode of Analysis on Radio 4 exploring whether anti-conservative sentiment is the […]
I find it more than a little disturbing that these two explicit threats to press freedom have been issued by the government in the space of 24 hours. Note that Cameron’s statement about the Snowden leaks comes at the same time as prominent NSA loyalists are breaking ranks in America […]
