The country that gifted George Orwell to civilization is about to jail a young comedian for making a joke.
Yes. Great Britain, one-time incubator of modern liberal democracy, now chief exporter of Piers Morgan, isn’t too keen on anything that could upset anyone.
The offender in question, Mark Meechan, a.k.a. Millennial YouTube “personality” Count Dankula, taught his girlfriend’s pug to perform a Nazi salute. The video went viral. Meechan asks the pooch whether it would like to “gas the Jews.” The silly thing raises its right arm. Charming.
Now the buffoon (Meechan, not the dog) has been convicted in his native Scotland of “inciting racial hatred.” He is probably going to jail. And the dog, I suppose, will be enrolled in the modern equivalent of a denazification program.
Tellingly, Meechan is not the involuntarily celibate alt-Right grotesque you would expect. He considers himself an antiracist. Though, he admits he disdains political correctness (as anyone employed in the business of mirth should, given the deadly unfunny state of liberal comedians) he’s certainly no Nazi muffin.
What he could be described as isn’t limited to “clown,” though “fool” comes to mind. Still, in a supposedly free society—and one which violently attacks societies deemed unfree—being a crass fool isn’t against the law, nor should it warrant jail time.
Sadly, Great Britain has form for this kind of thing. Recently, three prominent right-wingers were denied entry to this righteous isle for having opinions which could upset our apparently pulpy sensibilities.
Lauren Southern, a Canadian alt-lite activist was stopped at the border (a cosmic rarity in itself, I should add) and sent packing. British officialdom, with Empire-like regnancy, deemed the belligerent blonde “not conducive to the public good.”
A similar fate befell Austrian right-winger Martin Sellner, and his American paramour Brittany Pettibone, en route to Speaker’s Corner, London. Both were detained and sent home.
The intended venue, Speaker’s Corner, nestled on the north-east edge of Hyde Park, has drawn those leaden with opinions like filings to a magnet, since an 1872 act of Parliament set the area aside for that very purpose.
Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and George Orwell frequented the corner in celebration of free speech and the distillation of ideas. Anyone can have a go. Speaker’s Corner is perhaps the closest thing 1800s Britons had to Facebook.
But the value of unfettered free speech is under sustained assault from those who don’t like the results. Russian bots, of course, swayed the Facebook-fattened rubes into voting for Donald Trump. Cambridge Analytica, the source of Mark Zuckerberg’s current woes, pulled the lever for Brexit. According to the losers.
Ever since those still-intoxicating bacchanals of democracy, the unaccepting have hatched countless plans to “adjust” the troublesome mistress before she ruins the fun.
You see, meddlesome voters keep getting it wrong. The rubes, marinating in their low-information, keep voting against their own interests as defined by people who are not them.
Of course, those infected with the smug style—“those optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward,” types —are duty-bound to nurse the rest into voting in the interests of the righteous and narcissistic moral guardians. That is, of course, what the compassionistas really mean.
The avatar of this “right-think” recently punished India with her gawping presence. Hillary Clinton, who collects grievances like a particularly fastidious magpie, gladly paddles the currents of compassion, impervious to the ruthless truth.
Such “compassion” congeals into brutish loathing when liberals assume they’re in spaces of higher brow, like Hillary. Riffle the letters or comments sections of the New York Times, or the London Review of Books. The solution to current apoplexy is to resist the votes for which they don’t care. Or, in peculiar bobo charity, “ask” the undynamic to vote again—correctly this time.
The mistakes of 2016, they contend, cannot stand. In high-grade irony, those giddily percolating in fantasies of overturning democratic results, often insist their endeavors are in democracy’s better interests.
Reading such Jungian nocturnal emissions should lift, rather than depress. They’ve learned nothing. And that is a good thing.
Forgive me, but, after imbibing a stupefying amount of “expert” opinion from the emotionally incontinent that bestride the mainstream news channels, I’m skeptical of their soothsaying.
Yes, Conor Lamb shoehorned his way into a Western Pennsylvania congressional district, but only after donning the overalls of a Trumpian Democrat. His kind are an endangered species in the purity-spiraling Democratic Party of today and the future.
Hence the coming midterms are unlikely to produce the redemptive riot belabored by those supposedly in the know. Six months in politics is a long time; six months in the Trump era is a century.
After all, the president, save that leprous spending bill, is getting it mostly right. So, allow the Democrats to wail and wheedle in manic authorship of the latest silver bullet to bring down their unattainable obsession.
And snigger each time they quote Orwell. He was talking about them.