02 June 2023 , 18:54
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There's an old saying that when America sneezes Britain catches a cold.
It implies that when something happens in the Land of the Freak we slavishly follow suit. Think invading Iraq or letting hedge fund cowboys almost bankrupt us.
Usually though, our effort is a pale imitation of theirs.
They come up with McDonald’s, Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali, we respond with Wimpy, Cliff Richard and Henry Cooper.
We’ve seen it in politics too. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were cut from the same callous cloth, Tony Blair copied Bill Clinton in putting on a virile JFK tribute act, and Boris Johnson followed Donald Trump down to the gutter by pulling his anti-elitist, fake news con trick.
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And as Republican Ron DeSantis makes his pitch to become the heir to Trump’s populist throne by planting his flag firmly on the anti-woke battleground, we can see how the Right will attempt to stay in power at our next general election.
Ron DeSantis (PA)The Florida governor is riding a wave of popularity through laying every modern evil at the door of this leftie, anti-inequality disease.
“The woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism,” DeSantis said, announcing his run for Republican candidate at next year’s presidential election.
“It’s an attack on the truth. And because it’s a war on truth, I think we have no choice but to wage a war on woke.”
The Right in Britain have already taken up arms. Instead of demanding answers from the third worst government in living memory (after Johnson’s and Truss’s) our Tory-supporting newspapers vent their spleen on all things woke.
And Britain’s barely-watched Fox-lite TV channels are full of shock jocks fulminating against snowflakes, backed up by loons from neocon think tanks.
They believe pubs and workplaces are full of people disgusted with student demands to pull down statues of slave owners, who vomit into mixed-gender toilets at the sight of trans rights activists.
When, in reality, people are really disgusted at the amount of families using food banks and the human waste being flushed from toilets into our rivers by privatised water companies.
This week, the right-wing media had a field day with a claim that we live in one of the world’s biggest nanny states, citing a survey that calculated Britain was the (checks notes) 11th most socially restrictive country in Europe. Yes, 11th. Like Trump, they see the truth as merely an intangible object to be twisted.
There are elements of woke culture, such as publishers censoring past writers, that are annoying and unnecessary. But the Right’s obsessive determination to find threats to our culture where none exist is aimed at distracting us from the failures of their own spent ideology.
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As the next election looms, this paranoia will be jacked up, mostly on TV from Red Wall Tory MPs who are about to be made jobless, sitting in front of more Union Jacks than you saw at
the Coronation, selling a vision of a dystopian future.
One that says if you vote Labour you will get compulsory BLM knee-taking at every sport event, Tarmac-chewing environmentalists glueing themselves to your path, a trans teacher in every classroom, all sausage rolls made vegan, the Church of England claiming Jesus may have had a vagina, and Gary Neville made leader of the House of Lords.
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