To prove one’s progressive credentials, one could do worse than to purchase a milkshake from an ostensibly detested fast-food corporation, douse a politician deemed a threat to the cause, and applaud oneself via the gleeful approval of Burger King.
This week, British progressives have underlined their helpless vacuity by doing just that.
Paul Crowther, 32, whose internet history I suspect would wilt steel, drenched Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage in milkshake because he doesn’t quite agree with Farage’s views.
Crowther, according to the media, is a progressive and voted for the Adderall child and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. He is confused. Corbyn, like all proper left-wingers, is a Brexiteer.
Yet, other progressives lauded Crowther’s efforts.
One kindred spirit, however, expressed her dismay at the act of milkshaking.
Ruth Townsley, of Happy City UK, a charity which campaigns to bolster happiness and wellbeing, wasn’t too pleased with Crowther’s assault.
“I prefer acid, but, milkshakes will do, for now,” she tweeted.
That’s right. Dousing people with whom one disagrees with disfiguring acid is to dip one’s feet in the still waters of Arūpa-loka.
What will do for now is the welfare line. Townsley was fired soon after deleting her tweet. Shame.
One elderly gentleman, with 22 years’ service in the elite Parachute Regiment, got the milkshake treatment en route to the polling booth to vote for democracy’s preservation. To be tolerant and progressive means attacking elderly veterans because they hold a different opinion. Or something.
Nigel Farage’s own crime is to lead the Brexit Party. Just five weeks old, the organization has vacuumed over £2.5 million (roughly $3.16 million) in small donations and burgeoned to 120,000 members. And the party is likely to win this week’s European Parliament elections, stomping the Conservatives into fifth place.
The new party’s appeal is ruthlessly simple: We voted to leave the European Union. We have not left. Tell them again.
It’s working. The Brexit Party will best Labour and the Tories combined, and likely decapitate the leaders of both. One of which has hours, rather than days, left in office.
We are here because of the folly threading our hapless government. Prime Minister Theresa May, in office but not in power, spent the best part of three years cooking up a deal to leave the EU in word but not in deed. Lawmakers marmalized that deal, three times.
She fancied a fourth vote. But her “New Brexit Deal” unveiled this week was not new, nor Brexit. That gloop of pity was dead before the details warped her tongue. She is currently holed-up in Number 10. The worst Tinder date in history.
So, here we are, fighting European elections three years after voting to leave Europe.
In honesty, we haven’t had this much fun since the referendum. There’s something vivifying about it all. Those shrill desperate wails from people who claim tolerance and understanding. They know it’s over.
“We must stop the extremists!” cry the actual extremists. After all, their views are held by a dissolving few inhabitants of an upmarket London itsu.
Meanwhile, Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party steam ahead.
They’ll be joined by like-minds. One-third of the new European Parliament will fall to parties skeptical of the European Union. The establishment is rightly terrified.
A Brexit Party win all but vaporizes the notion of a second referendum. We are already having one. And it is two-nil to Brexit.
Desperate people do desperate things. Upon realization that Brexiteers have not changed their minds, progressives resort to violence and antics reserved for infants.
Which is indeed strange behavior from those who claim to be tolerant, those who haughtily denounce the rest as fascists.
And fascist is what this is. It is “only a milkshake.” But imagine, for a second, the reaction if right-wing Brexiteers targeted and attacked pro-EU politicians, and Remain voters, denying their right to speak freely or place their vote.
It would be “proof” of the lurid spirits released by the referendum. Tiresome celebrities would soak themselves in tearful swellings of grief. They’d cry “fascist!” They’d be half-right.
Sadly, this was inevitable. Since the referendum, the mask of compassion apparently exclusive to our open-minded friends has slipped, revealing an unfiltered contempt for anyone not like them.
Those who voted Leave were parochial, racist, uneducated, stupid, deplorable. They didn’t know what they were voting for. Their vote demonstrated ignorance. Their voices deserved to drown. All rather fascist, no?
Historically, such rhetoric has justified all manner of grotesqueries.
When one is convinced those who disagree are not just wrong, but evil, violence is a natural remedy.
After all, progressives claim to occupy the “right side of history.” Everything they want is apparently inevitable. To attack, and de-platform, and deny the acceleration of “evil” is then morally essential.
But that “right side of history” leads to a mirage. Take a look.
All across Europe, in the United States, and now Australia, rebooted “conservative” parties are cleaning up.
Shorn of vote-killing 1980s economics, the radical majority swells with the progressives’ abandoned former base.
Branded extremist, they’re actually the radical majority.
As I have mentioned, most voters in Great Britain and America are socially conservative, and economically moderate. Parties adhering to this formula are winning. And they’ll keep winning. Which is a notion the GOP cannot quite swallow, lest it be revealed that Current Year is not 1980.
Now they’ve purged their own base of the right’s newest voters, the stunted teenagers of the Democratic Party will adopt the milkshaking tactics of their demented cousins across the pond. They’re just as desperate. And jilted.
But reality is a troublesome mistress. It’ll take more than a milkshake to convince her otherwise.
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