Excellent interview with Farage which goes into Farage and KIP's anti Establishment stance and Farage's political incorrectness in challenging the elite's political consensus. The article tries to understand why the Establishment fears him so much and it is because he dares stick a finger up to their political correctness, their political consensus.
The article doesn't explain their real fear, but their real fear is that they know they are conning the public with their political correctness consensus and Farage is the boy who cried the politically correct Emperor has no clothes and he will expose the emptiness of their political consensus and carry the people with him. There is nothing their Oxford teenage spinners can do because lies ae powerless against the truth.
www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/im-taking-on-the-establishment-and-they-hate-me-for-it/16758#.VQYklqJyaic
'I’m taking on the establishment, and they hate me for it’
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We’re interrupted every five minutes by passers-by who want to shake Farage’s hand or get a selfie with him. (‘Go to UKIP dot org and become a member. Bloody well do it!’, he tells one young fan.)
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One thing on the Farage Mind is the total out-of-touchness of his opponents in the upcoming General Election: the three main political parties. ‘They’re over-advised. They’re scared. They view the whole operation of politics as playing safe
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One thing on the Farage Mind is the total out-of-touchness of his opponents in the upcoming General Election: the three main political parties. ‘They’re over-advised. They’re scared. They view the whole operation of politics as playing safe, as if criticism is a bad thing.
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It’s hard to remember in recent years any other person or thing being the recipient of as much samey, uniform media bashing as Farage.
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From the newspaper of record, The Times, to the favoured newspaper of the new elites, the Guardian, and in pretty much every shade of commentary in between, Farage is bogeyman du jour
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The media now act, says Farage, like the guardians of ‘what is considered right-thinking’, and this is why they hate him with such rash feeling — his thoughts, his ideas, his politics are, by their judgment, un-right thinking, and thus must be shouted, or better still shut, down.
‘All through the civilisation of human beings, people form establishments’, he says: ‘An interwoven network that actually has a very big generational context, in that it hands on down. And we are challenging the establishment — we are challenging their very thought; we are challenging the very basis upon which they exist and operate. And there is nobody in history who has taken on the establishment and has not received the kind of treatment I am getting.’
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No, it’s something else about UKIP that gets the goat of the great and good — it’s a vibe, an attitude, a reluctance to stick to the ‘binary politics’ script, and a sometimes unprofessional and fruitily worded stab at some of the sacred cows of modern politics. ‘It’s because we challenge the consensus’, says Farage.
Consensus, and the breaking of it, and the blowback you get as a consequence, comes up again and again in our chat. And there’s no doubt that Farage is off-message, sometimes gloriously so, on a lot of what passes for mainstream, unquestioned political thought in modern Britain. Take climate change. What politician these days would admit to laughing about the polar bears? Farage would.
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The politics of environmentalism is utterly hostile to progress, he says. ‘If Natalie Bennett won the election, we’d all be living in caves’, he says with a chortle. ‘[This politics] is very regressive. There is nothing progressive in terms of the evolution of society or living standards in what these people stand for. And the whole thing is based on a fallacy: that our fossil fuels are going to run out and therefore we have to adapt the way we live.
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Here, Farage is kicking against one of the key planks of 21st-century consensus politics: the idea of planetary vulnerability and human hubris. And he gets massive flak for it. ‘[Climate change] is like a religion’, he says. ‘And you’re demonised if you question it. Ostracised completely.
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Or take the nanny state, or the nudge industry, or the public-health lobby — whatever it’s being called these days. Here, too, Farage rips up a firmly established script.
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‘It’s the modern puritanism’, he says of the bossy new politics of lifestyle micromanagement. ‘It’s about controlling people. It is the same paternalistic agenda from the great and the good, who think they know better than ordinary folk what is good for them.’
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Or take Ukraine. Farage is the only mainstream politician to have challenged the idea that the nasty war there is the handiwork of an Empire-dreaming Vladimir Putin. Farage’s big concern is with ‘the territorial ambitions of the European Union and NATO’, which, he tells me, ‘do not comprehend the mindset of Russia, which feels deeply threatened by this behaviour’: ‘If you poke the Russian bear with a stick, don’t be surprised if the bear reacts.’ He has no time for the celebration of the protesters in Maidan Square in Kiev, who, with the backing of Angela Merkel and John Kerry, toppled the Yanukovych government in 2014, precipitating the war. ‘I think the bringing down of an albeit corrupt but legitimately elected leader of Ukraine by people in that square waving EU flags… was disgusting’, he says firmly, and angrily. It was anti-democratic, he insists, and he isn’t wrong. Yet here, too, he’s been demonised, branded a Putin sympathiser, because once again he failed to read from the samey script of the political and media establishment.
‘I’ve been met with general horror’, he says. ‘See? We have consensus politics today, on everything. Everyone agrees on everything.’
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Listening to Farage, I don’t hear a racist or a fruitcake or a loon. Actually, I hear someone who says things that aren’t a million miles away from what Old Labour used to say.
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The mainstream media and chattering-class fury with Farage is really a story of the terrifying narrowing of the political sphere in Britain in recent years. Concrete consensuses have emerged on everything from the environment (endangered) to economic growth (not a great idea), from the spread of the welfare state (unquestionably brilliant) to the policing of personal lifestyle (all good). And a vast battery of insults, often pathological, have arisen to chastise anyone who pricks any of these consensus views. Question the environment thing and you’re a DENIER. Wonder if Western democracy is superior to Islamist radicalism and you’re ISLAMOPHOBIC. Challenge the smoking ban and you’re PRO-CANCER. The things it is acceptable to think and say shrink all the time, and the parameters of thought and opinion are tightly policed by the media, the Twittersphere and politicians themselves. Farage is feared, across the board, because he stands, often self-consciously, outside the bland, ideology-free, human-suspicious moral and political agenda now promoted by all sides in British politics and the media.'
Fabulous stuff. It's about freedom and ruling for the people. It's about putting the teenage whizz kids from Oxbridge back in their classrooms and seminars where they belong and letting the people be governed by common sense once again. They fear Farge because they fear the masses, they fear the people, they fear the truth.