Project Fear has proved to be Project Reality

Brexit has proved to be the disaster we predicted.

It has certainly shaken my faith in democracy. We had a decision made by the uninformed, easily led, xenophobes, racists and the most stupid. It mirrors the support and election of Trump.

Social media, led by those with clearly vested interests (people like Farage, Johnson and Rees-Mogg who all made a killing) ran a campaign based on fear, division and the undermining of experts, that successfully divided the country, empowered the most unpleasant factions, cost us a fortune and has completely broken the country.

This was the same template created by Trump and the far-right populist MAGA movement.

They galvanise the uneducated and deprived and somehow convince them that a billionaire living in a lavish, gaudy mansion with gold toilets cares about them. They still cannot see this grifter is simply making money – $5 billion so far – while employing his extended family in a business that rivals the mafia.

Likewise in the UK, the same people from the same social strata have been convinced to put their faith in a merchant banker multimillionaire who is busily lining his own pockets while drumming up scare stories, racism and xenophobia for his own ends.

Brexit ‘has made everything from economy to immigration worse in UK’

It’s not migrants who are breaking the country – it’s billionaires, millionaires and social media magnates!! We are being duped!

Billionaires stole Democracy!!

What’s new?

It’s always been that way.

In the past the wealthy set up a system of commerce and politics that kept the feckless, useless, inferior working class working long hours, in poor conditions for little pay so they could make huge profits.

They lived in mansions; we lived in slums.

For these people the whole purpose of life is to make more and more money. It doesn’t matter about the cost. They do not care about human suffering or the effect on nature. Even if billions starve and the planet is destroyed – as long as they get obscenely rich. Everything is transactional.

Then came trouble.

First education. Give people knowledge, wake them up and they start causing trouble. So take over the curriculum, bring in religion, make it boring, tedious, dull and dreary – recite ‘facts’ – and put them back to sleep. Can’t wait to get out of there and work in a factory!

Then came the vote – first men and then (incredibly) women!! Once they have the vote they start looking at how it’s all set up. So, confuse them. Thrown a dead cat on the table. Buy off the trouble-makers. Find the dirt on the others. Discredit, distract, undermine and ridicule. Buy all the newspapers and run campaigns to brainwash the electorate. Lo – they vote for the exploiters. They’re gullible.

Then came the Unions wanting better pay and conditions. The billionaires used all their usual tactics – the media – to buy off, undermine, discredit, confuse and ridicule. They spent billions to break the unions because the unions wanted better pay and conditions, health and safety, and reduce profits. It was cheaper to spend money breaking them!

Now we’re in the world of social media and it’s even more sophisticated. Billionaires like Musk, Zuckerberg and Trump pull the strings. They discredit science, discredit experts and put loyal fools (like all Trump’s cabinet) in place. No room for facts or intelligence. Algorithms are used to undermine, confuse, spread conspiracy, directly attack, dig dirt, divide and rule. Lo – the cretins are malleable; the poor and exploited vote to be poorer and more exploited. They elect corrupt millionaires, billionaires and wannabe billionaires. The billionaires put into place the politicians to supply the laws whereby they get richer and the poor get poorer.

Elections are controlled by Billionaires and Nations. So Musk and Russia gave us Trump! Why? Because Trump makes Musk and other billionaires even richer and sides with Russia to increase their power and undermine the West. (What have the Russians got on Trump?? Could it be all those honey traps?? Orgies? sex with underage girls?? It’s not just crooked deals is it??)

Russia and China gave us Brexit to destabilise Europe and sap our power. It sure did that. Cummings was the twat who just liked wrecking things and Johnson was the sap who was used, bribed and is now making millions (having broken Britain).

Now the same forces are giving us Farage and Reform. They want the attention all on immigrants so that we don’t notice that they are robbing us blind. So Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk pull in countless billions but the country is broke and we’re all poor.

Crazy isn’t it? When’s the revolution?

There is no democracy.

We are being controlled!

I reckon Brexit opened up a can of worms & festering crap!

It empowered racists.

It empowered fascists.

It empowered nationalists.

It empowered populists.

It empowered intolerance.

It empowered nastiness.

It created division, fear, tribalism and hate!

All the scum crawled out from under their rocks. Fed by conspiracy on the web stemming from right-wing Trumpists. Fed by the ultra-right GB News. Fed by billionaires like Musk with his malevolent X. Fed by Farage and the Reform with their stirring of hatred and fear and orchestrated fear of immigrants.

We are living in a right-wing fascist take-over fuelled by algorithms on social media! Hypnotised by greedy bastards with vested interests and distracted by lies!!

How Trump did it.

I taught in the USA for a year in 1979/80. That was a very enjoyable and interesting experience. I had lived and worked in the USA for short periods prior to that (in 1971 as a dishwasher) but had not been there long enough to immerse myself in the culture.

Being English I share a common language. That gives the illusion that our cultures are similar. They are not. I rapidly found that I actually culturally share more in common with my European cousins than I do with Americans.

The first hurdle was religion. In England Christianity is dead. The churches are empty. As an atheist that suits me fine. In the USA I rapidly found that religion permeated everything.

Then we have nationalism and patriotism. In England we have a cynical attitude towards those who rule. While some love the monarchy others want it kicked out. As for the country and our history many of us are ambivalent. I certainly don’t condone much of what went on during our colonial days. It was violent and racist. Neither do I support an establishment that deployed the troops, profiteered and stripped the wealth back to their palaces and mansions while the bulk of the country lived in terrible slums. So the pledge of allegiance, saluting the flag was an amusing joke.

Religion and patriotism seemed like a brain washing exercise to me. I didn’t think that would be nearly as effective as it proves to be.

I watched from outside. In my Biology lessons on evolution I had dour-faced parents with egg-timers checking that I spent 50% of time on creationism. I treated this as a joke.

I listened to my black and Hispanic students regale me with their stories. We had racism in England but not gangs with guns like in LA. Not the massive drug problem and battles with the police. (I guess we’re getting there now). I listened to the stories of shoot-outs, to the discussions on weapons – machine guns for heaven’s sake! This sounded nuts to me.

America always had that nutty side – the Wild West attitude, the religious extremism, white supremacy and Nazi stuff. It looks to me from outside as if the internet has fuelled it with conspiracy and reinforcement and Trump’s cynical populism has harnessed it, magnified it, empowered it, and brought together a set of disparate groups. He’s united the white supremacists, evangelicals and NRA and QAnon has turned conspiracy mainstream. Never realised there were so many nut jobs!

How on earth can democracy recover from billionaire take-over?

Social media is the game-changer.

It has become the tool of extreme right-wing fascist billionaires.

Not only are people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg bankrolling right-wing populists like Trump and Farage and getting openly involved in politics, but they are using their social media platforms to manipulate elections.

By spreading a constant stream of lies, conspiracy and disinformation, undermining experts, opposition politicians and generating fear, distrust and hate, they are actively undermining the very tenets of democracy.

They now use their algorithms to target people and play on their fears. This is brazen psychological manipulation on a massive scale.

By siding with the extreme right-wing evangelical movement, right-wing organisations like the National Rifle Association, climate deniers, vaccination deniers, white supremacists and other conspiracy nutcases, they have forged a conglomeration of lunatics that has become large enough to be electable.

All it took was to raise fears on immigration and racist unease about being displaced, coupled with lies about the economy, to create an unholy alliance.

Somehow they have convinced poor people that billionaires care about them. This is patently nuts. These billionaires are simply greedy monstrosities who are intent on profiteering.

The real problem is not immigrants making people poor; it’s billionaires not paying enough tax. That should be obvious. These greedy profiteers are fleecing poor people.

It is quite shocking the misery they are prepared to cause to make even more money!

The question is – how do we save democracy from these evil people? (and they are evil!)

The War on Truth.

Once upon a time we knew where we stood. The mainstream media had a bias (and sometimes made genuine mistakes) but we could read between the lines and had a good idea of what was going on. The money for that army of reporters has dried up. We moaned and griped about the bias of the media but we had a good picture of what was happening. They had highly trained, experienced journalists on the ground investigating and reporting.

Not anymore.

For the past ten years Trump and other populists have been waging a war against experts, science and rational thought. It’s been relentless. They have successfully convinced people that all experts and scientists lie; that they are all in the pockets of either Big Business (Big Pharma) or some shady body they call ‘Deep State’. The only source of ‘truth’ are Trump and the populists.

These populists have one aim – to make money. Nothing else matters. To this end they look after the interests of their paymasters – the billionaires. They want a quick buck out of oil. To hell with global warming or the environment. We can’t allow that to get in the way of making money. Open up the wilderness, remove pollution laws and environmental restrictions. MONEY MONEY MONEY.

They’ve exploited terrorism, Muslim extremism and mass immigration to create fear, hate and division as a vehicle to get them elected.

They use targeted social media to reinforce conspiracy theories and sow the seeds of distrust and fear.

They cunningly exploit the publics own fears and doubts.

Conspiracies are endorsed – Global Warming is somehow a global scam, Covid is a scam, the CIA blew up the towers, we never landed on the moon, the holocaust never happened, all predictions are wrong, scientists can’t be trusted, the election was stolen, Trump’s convictions were all manufactured – a witch hunt. It’s calculated. We are taught to distrust the evidence of our own eyes. Trump’s crowds are bigger than ever before in history. We are living in the age of Orwellian double-think. This time it’s real. We are being orchestrated with a real ‘two minute hate’.

First Musk came out from the shadows to openly embrace the limelight. He used the MAGA movement and is making billions more. He banished fact checking from Twitter. Who needs facts? Under the banner of ‘Free Speech’ you can say what you like, put out lies and blatant propaganda and nobody can question it. The barriers have gone.

Zuckerberg could see which way the wind was blowing and quickly jumped on board.

The rule of law has been bypassed. We are now living in the Wild West where anything goes. It’s a scary place. A handful of billionaires now call all the shots. They manipulate us through their media platforms and, as we’ve seen with Trump, use their money to escape the law. They are effectively above the law.

There is nothing subtle about this. We see with Musk. He has become so brazen that he operates in the open. He seeks a future without any restrictions, where he, and his fellow billionaires, can operate without restriction. Forget workers’ rights, unions, environment or safety regs. This is the Wild West. To this end he is now taking on governments. He doesn’t like any government that has a left tinge. He wants the world governed by right-wing greed. They have their sights on the Labour government, NATO and the UN – anything that might interfere with unrestricted gluttony. Everyone is running scared because they can see the immense power these people have. They control the media. They control minds. They control elections. That power is very real and Musk knows it.

The truth is now what they say it is.

Trump, Musk and Zuckerberg have declared war on facts and truth. The pushback must start now

This is the new world.

The billionaires call all the shots.

The only question really is how far will they go?

How much money does one man need? When is enough enough?

(PS – despite the romantic representation of the Wild West in the films, it was a fearful, ugly, brutal time of death, prostitution, fear and violence. Laws were brought in for a good reason!)

They used to run things from behind the scenes!

The billionaires think we’re so dumb they can come right out in the open! They know they can get away with anything. Social media has given them the tool. They control minds. Newspapers and TV was so clumsy!

Now they just buy the MPs and actually tell us they are doing it!!

Who runs this shitshow of a world? The ones who benefit; the ones who are screwing us!

What has caused the Far-Right Riots?

Well to start with we’ve had fourteen years of Tory austerity creating poverty and ruin in our cities. Deprived communities become full of resentment.

We’ve had Brexit with its torrent of xenophobic/racist propaganda stoking up fear and hate.

We’ve had huge immigration that has altered the feel of many areas of the country. A lack of integration doesn’t help.

We’ve had Islamic terrorism

We’ve had ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Libya, Sudan and now Ukraine – creating millions of displaced people.

We’ve had global warming creating large swathes of uninhabitable land.

We’ve had the rise of trouble-making populists like Johnson, Trump, Farage, Bolsonaro, Modi, Oban, Le Penne, Meloni and the rest, who have demonised immigrants.

We have opportunist rabble-rousers like Tommy Robinson.

We have conspiracy theorists spreading lies – like Alex Jones.

We have that manchild Musk and the whole of social media undermining truth and reality.

It’s going to take a lot to sort all this mess out!!