Why do so many of these uber-macho, anti-woke, pro-Brexit types not like Volodymyr Zelensky all that much?
Zelensky is the ballsiest leader the free world has witnessed for at least a generation. A David figure standing up against the ugly Goliath of Vladimir Putin, the latter a horrible bully who thought he could just roll his tanks into Kyiv and get his way, only to get hit square in the nose instead.
Putin at least partly banked on Zelensky fleeing to London or Paris at the first sign of real trouble; instead, he’s stayed in Kyiv and inspired his people to fight. It’s beyond doubt now that he believes deeply in his country and not only the existential right of Ukraine to exist, but the importance of his nations’s borders being absolutely respected. You would think that those people who have been going on for years about both the importance of the nation state and the need for positive, masculine role models would be in love with Zelensky. He’s everything they have been wishing for across so many years, perfectly embodied in one man.
Whilst some amongst the pro-Brexit, anti-woke crowd have expressed unadulterated admiration for the Ukrainian president and his cause, it’s interesting to note how many notable figures within that that group have been much more mealy mouthed about it all. Saying “It’s complicated” has become a way for some of them to get out of having to go all in on supporting Zelensky and Ukraine. It’s as if there’s just something inexplicable about Volodymyr and his cause that they can’t accept.
In fact, some of the reactions from the cross-western anti-woke right range from indifferent to downright hostile. Matt Walsh, the American conservative political commentator who speaks a lot about gender identity issues, tweeted this week:
“So how long are you guys going to keep the Ukrainian flags in your bios? Waiting until the next trendy cause comes along or will you pull them down before that?”
Or how about this from Candace Owens yesterday:
“President Zelensky is a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people. I will not move one inch away from that assessment—ever—no matter how flowery the media depictions of him are.”
If you had been in a coma for the last month, you would get the impression here that Zelensky might be some gender-fluid guy on YouTube weeping into his organic yoghurt about how he felt triggered by watching old episodes of the Muppets because they contained veiled references to the patriarchy, instead of the dude who is standing up to the one of the world’s worst tyrannical regimes and actually winning. If you want a hero for reclaiming the value of tough-as-shit manliness in an age of post-modern mushiness, Zelensky is absolutely the guy who you should be shouting to the skies about. He should be Matt Walsh and Candace Owens’s goddamn hero.
Why then do these figures across the right seem so wary of openly supporting Zelensky? First off, a lot of this can probably be put down to the weird politics of our age. I am completely guessing here, but the Matt Walsh tweet has more than a whiff of “owning the libs” about it. This is a contrarian position in which if the people who usually are against the things you really like are for thing X, then thing X by definition must be bad, or at the very least suspect.
And that’s what brings this all back to Brexit. The campaign to leave the EU and the subsequent attempt by Brexiters to convince everyone that what people really did when they voted to Leave in 2016 was to do so on the harshest, most punishing to Britain terms possible was built on the same sort of mindless contrarianism. If people who eat humous in north London think being in the EU is a good thing, it must by definition be a bad thing. Never mind that the majority of people in north London think being alive is a good thing, or care about the welfare of their children and for that matter their country a great deal, not to mention that they like to watch football and have a pint with their mates, which are all things they share with the vast majority of the rest of the country. Nah, if they think Brexit is bad, it must be part of some metropolitan elite conspiracy. Except that creating massive trade barriers with every neighbouring countries just to own the libs may not have been a great move, upon reflection.
In the meantime, nothing is turning out the way right-wing populists said it would. The “woke left” have not in fact questioned why Zelensky isn’t talking about the need for gender self-ID in Ukraine at this moment in time and for the most part have rowed in behind Ukraine and its president. It’s portions of the right that are finding it hard to support the super manly dude protecting his country’s borders from a dictator who views free speech in the same way the anti-woke brigade might look at having to attend a three-day Stonewall conference on pansexuality. Which is pretty weird, even with all of the caveats and attempts to explain this phenomenon I’ve just attempted above. Really weird.
The legal attempt by NI Unionists to claim the Protocol is unlawful fails completely
A court case in Belfast that aimed to have the NI Protocol deemed unlawful, supported by a group of unionist politicians including Jim Allister, the head of the Traditional Unionist Voice party, and uber-uber Brexiters such as Kate Hoey and Ben Habib, has failed.
It seems they were trying to assert that the NI Protocol broke the Acts of Union 1800, which is about as wacky as it gets from my perspective, although I stress here I’m not a lawyer. Basically, they argued that the NI Protocol de facto made Northern Ireland no longer part of the Union - not the worst argument - but seems to call upon elements of an Act signed into law more than 200 years ago, when there was no concept of “Northern Ireland” in existence yet, to try and back this assertion up.
Anyhow, they lost and this is just the latest saga of Northern Irish Unionists losing their rag about the Brexit they fully and readily signed up to, except as usual without blaming either Brexit itself or the Conservative Party that not only brought the NI Protocol into existence but fought an entire general election campaign around how great it was all going to be (although on the last point, the one around blaming Boris Johnson, some of them are starting to wake up). What makes it all the more painful is that the freak election result of 2017 made it so that the DUP held the balance of power, only for the party to harm both itself and the cause for which it was formed in startling fashion. I understand why they’re angry with the world as a result of this, but instead of trying to action frivolous lawsuits, perhaps they should take a look in the mirror and come to terms with the fact that they have sabotaged themselves to a stunning degree. Maybe then they can begin to figure out how to salvage what they can from a terrible situation they actively helped to create.
The Festival of Brexit, Theresa May’s white elephant, is falling apart
A report put out by the DCMS select committee this week had a revealing set of conclusions about the “Festival of Brexit”, or the Download Sunshine Pod Extravaganza or whatever the hell they’re calling it now, I genuinely don’t even want to take 30 seconds to google it, what’s the point. You know what I mean. The Festival of Brexit.
Anyhow, the DCMS Select Committee has called it an “irresponsible use of public money”. Those are pretty strong terms as these things go. The full quote from the report is even better:
“The desire for it to seemingly cater to everyone, everywhere, is a recipe for failure and investing £120m in something when the Government, by their own admission, ‘did not know what it was’ is an irresponsible use of public money.”
Sing it, brother and sisters.
This reminds me that Theresa May’s premiership was nothing more than a series of missteps. There seems to be a desire to re-appraise her time in Number 10 in light of Boris Johnson’s tomfoolery, but let’s get serious here for a moment: what are May’s accomplishments in office? What did she do as prime minister that is noteworthy? If you hate Cameron, this is a useful exercise: first wartime coalition. Gay marriage. Got the Tories their first majority for over two decades. This isn’t me saying David Cameron was a good PM, incidentally - I’m using DC as a comparison here to illustrate how mindbendingly, catastrophically terrible a prime minister Theresa May was. She achieved nothing - in fact, less than nothing, as she went backwards on some of what she set out to do at the beginning. Her premiership can metaphorically be summarised as her laying down mines for others to trod upon, only for all of them to blow up at her own feet.
The Festival of Brexit is classic May and an uncomfortable holdover from her premiership. It’s like someone at a party in 2022 saying “Brexit means Brexit” and really meaning it, completely free from irony, while everyone else hides behind the sofa. As such, it’s another wonderful metaphor for Brexit itself: something that seemed like a really good idea at the time to many people, as well as amazingly popular, which now that it has become real seems about as fun as cleaning up after a large house gathering.
The Daily Telegraph has a headline that reads: “How to get along with the French on holiday – including what to say about Brexit”
I didn’t need to read the whole Telegraph article in order to tell you what to do here. Just agree with the French that the whole idea was completely shit. Simple, French holiday sorted.
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Nigel Farage, Arron Banks et all (Banks for sure, I haven't read the actual facts about Farage) were receiving funding by Russian money for destablising the west. There's a byline times article about it by Peter Jukes which I just recently read
https://bylinetimes.com/2022/03/08/putin-plot-against-great-britain-and-how-he-got-away-with-it/
So that explains how some of these guys are now experiencing cognitive dissonance that the guy who help fund their campaigns for his own agenda has now become the world's most recent "new Hitler"
I kind of wonder how we aren't a whole lot more angry about the way Johnson and the Brexit campaign have rolled over and done whatever Putin wanted for so long, and how Brexit has been a cover for ignoring serious security worries for years now. Really, we ought to be waking up to this stuff!
Given how brexiters shouted "SOVERINTEE" and "FWEEDOM", if you arrived in the UK from another country from 2016 onwards, you'd perhaps be under the impression that the EU was about to do to the UK what Putin's Russia is doing to Ukraine at the moment.
Ukraine is fighting for its sovereignty. And doing so, up close and personal. Red in tooth and claw. You'd naturally assume then that those claiming sovereignty and freedom would be on the side of Ukraine and any other country in the same predicament. Not as we see with the odious bigot Nigel Farage making any and every excuse for Vlad Putin.