A detailed look at where the US is heading. It ain’t pretty as we’ve seen at the nascent stage we are at in this trajectory.
BTW, this strikes me as better posted in an England/Britain/United Kingdom/UK thread, but I can’t find on under those search terms:
THE DISUNITED KINGDOM
By Phillip McGough — 1 day ago
On the ongoing Riots in the UK
On July 29, 2024, three children were stabbed to death by a second-generation Rwandan immigrant in Southport, a seaside town in northwest of England previously of note for nothing more or less exceptional than being home to Britain’s only lawnmower museum. From the outset, the elements of the atrocity – migration, slaughtered children, and the evil of the crime – combined to provoke an explosive upsurge of popular anger. The scale and scope of that anger has since spread across Britain in the most serious outbreak of white working-class mass protest since the Chartist Riots of the 1830s and 40s.
Signs of the approaching storm were already visible the day after the murders, when Britain’s new Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visited Southport to lay the obligatory wreath and was met by vocal hostility from locals. This time the public wasn’t willing to go along with the British state’s choreographed rites of candlelit vigils and the hollow “anti-hate” messaging from state-sponsored community leaders mechanically deployed in the aftermath of now-increasingly frequent atrocities.
By August 2, protests composed almost entirely of the white working class and involving acts of violence had spread beyond Southport to other post-industrial towns in impoverished corners of the country, including Rotherham, Liverpool, Nottingham, and Tamworth. There seem to have been some instances of mosques being attacked, despite the fact the killer of the three children in Southport does not appear to have been a Muslim, and hotels being used to warehouse newly arrived migrants being set alight. In response, with curious readiness, gangs of Muslim men took to the streets and reciprocated.
For almost 48 hours news footage recalled analogies with Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles in the 1970s. Then Sir Keir Starmer chose to pour more gasoline on the flames. His official pronouncements in person and online in response to the disorder made no attempt to calm tensions or strike a tone of national unity, and it must be assumed that that thought never occurred to him. Nor was any sympathy offered in the direction of the complex social and economic grievances animating the protestors, or white working-class anomie in cities and towns across Britain which for decades have been used as dumping grounds for surplus immigration.
Instead, Starmer hectored the populace with incendiary far-leftist rhetoric tinged with petulant anger. There was blanket condemnation of the protestors as “far-right” (in other words, anything which isn’t far-left), sadistic threats of swift judicial retribution, recklessly clumsy threats of a “standing army” of specialist police officers to put down urban revolt, and a pledge for extra funds and resources to protect the Muslim community.
In later statements 24-hour courts and extra prosecutors were promised to fill prisons with quotas of the troublesome. There will at least be some cells for them: Labour’s very first policy announcement upon entering office on July 4, 2024, was to announce the early release of 40,000 convicted criminals. Was the space being cleared to make room for political prisoners?
Everything in Starmer’s performance, from his words to his frown, to his snarl and his body language, recapitulated the belief which now animates political elites across the West: there is no space for opinions on the right of the political spectrum at all. Accompanying this display was the other dominant contemporary leftist trait: a complete indifference to hypocrisy. This is the same Sir Keir Starmer who four years ago took the knee in servile response to the BLM riots on both sides of the Atlantic.
We are dealing here with a dogmatic psychology of fixed course and immutable outline: a lawyerly, procedural mentality that cannot think beyond law and procedure, nor concede any ground to a grassroots popular opposition whose essential demands undermine the foundations of the British liberal-multicultural project. Starmer has what the Germans call sitzfleisch, the tough ass of the bureaucrat, developed in order to execute a managerial role and completely unfitted to statesmanship.
Historically, democratically-elected governments have been able to weather unpopularity in a way that dictatorships can’t. But mass migration to Britain has not occurred democratically. For nearly thirty years, the electorate has consistently voted for parties pledged to reduce immigration, and just as consistently, immigration has continued to increase: in 2022-2023 immigration surpassed the one million mark.
Britain is now in the midst of a demographic-cultural transformation unknown at least since the Early Medieval period. Meanwhile, the British economy has stagnated (Britain’s GDP per capita is now lower than it was in 2008), Britain has the highest tax burden on record, public services are dysfunctional, crime is rising, and societal breakdown is accelerating.
Police officers stand guard between protesters defending the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque in Liverpool against the ‘Enough is Enough’ demonstration. (July 29, 2024).
How does this look to an average white working-class voter in Southport? You’ve watched helplessly from the sidelines as your country transformed from a functioning First World democracy into a semi-failed post-colonial state. You can’t help but notice that this decline overlaps precisely with the arrival of millions of men and women from strange alien cultures, not least because the town where you were born and grew up looks less familiar every day. You see these same newcomers encouraged by liberal elites to lean in to their ethnic and religious identities and grievances and leverage them for maximum tribal gain. Meanwhile, you, a member of the white residuum, are told with no sense of contradiction that any assertion of specifically ethnic interests on your part is beyond the pale of civilized discourse and just a few goosesteps from Hitler.
Increasingly alienated from the government media, you begin to obtain your news from online sites, which feature troubling stories and footage which the traditional media outlets choose to ignore. You see white-on-black crime provoke moral panic and solemn national debate, yet black-on-white crime, like acts of Islamist terrorism, is rationalized away as the aberrant psychopathology of disturbed individuals. You vote against all this, repeatedly. Yet your vote is ignored by both great parties of state, Labour and Conservative. Finally, when with all other forms of redress exhausted, you take to the streets and scream your grievances in the ‘language of the unheard’, no attempt is made to engage with your community or otherwise understand your sorrows, in conspicuous contrast to the response of the state to the BLM protests a few years ago.
What is called multiculturalism in reality is ideological window-dressing for a policy of mass importing cheap labor to maintain low-wage, high-consumption economies. As the growing cost of these policies is blamed on the failure of “racist” and “far right” working-class whites to embrace multiculturalism, whites are ironically embracing it their own way. The pace of demographic change in Britain is driving an increasing self-conceptualization on the part of whites as an aggrieved ethnic group like any other, a group with its own needs, interests, moods, and obsessions. Multiculturalism in this sense may be said to have finally worked in spite of itself: Whites are becoming as race-conscious as everyone else, even though this consciousness, we are instructed to understand, is illegitimate by default.
The Britain emerging from this crucible is an unhappy place. In his flailing and repressive response to Southport and its ancillary troubles, Starmer has already indicated his preferred solution: political repression. The only debate is about the degree of force to be applied. Britain’s liberal democratic tradition, a priceless inheritance forged by centuries of national tradition, is plainly incapable of containing the ugly, restive sectarianism of Britain in 2024: therefore it is going to be jettisoned in favor of an anti-democratic and illiberal model.
In the interim, the British people will continue to look in vain for leadership against the backdrop of a government which is little more than a rickety scaffold hugging a crumbling façade. It’s unlikely that Starmer is a man prone to introspection in the lonely hours of the night, a torment reserved for far more thoughtful men. More likely, Starmer and the regime which he embodies is in the midst of the phenomenon known to psychologists as irrational escalation: a self-destructive tendency to persist in a course of action and double down on it even as the results become obviously ruinous. As A. J. P. Taylor had it, the only thing men really learn from their mistakes is how to repeat them.
Phillip Mark McGough is a freelance writer and commentator from England.
https://im1776.com/2024/08/06/the-disunited-kingdom/
