1988: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is sacked by the Times for #fabricating a quote.
1995: a recording emerges in which Pfeffel agrees to provide Darius Guppy with the address of a journalist who was investigating him so that he could have him beaten up.
2004: Pfeffel sacked by Michael Howard for #lying about an affair.
2012: Pfeffel apologises for #accusing Liverpudlians of wallowing in "victim status" in a 2004 article.
2016: Pfeffel fails to apologise equates the EU’s efforts to unify Europe with those undertaken by Hitler.
2017 Pfeffel #accused of worsening the plight of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe after wrongly claiming she was in the country teaching journalism.
2017: Pfeffel forced to apologise to Parliament for #failing to declare outside earnings totalling more than £50,000 on nine occasions.
2018: Pfeffel offensively & divisively describes Muslim women who wear the niqab or the burka as looking like “letterboxes” & “bank robbers”.
2018: Pfeffel fails to apologise for #lying when he claimed Britain’s top military laboratory was certain novichok came from Russia.
2019: Pfeffel #investigated by Independent Office for Police Conduct over his four year relationship with Jennifer Arcuri following reports Arcuri’s tech firm was able to access £25,000 in public funds & that she was allowed onto three overseas trade missions.
2019: Elected by Tory members as leader, Pfeffel pledges to “unite the country” - Britain is now more polarised than at any time since the Thatcher Government.
2019: Pfeffel #lies to the Queen about proroguing Parliament.
2020 - 2022: Pfeffel's #catastrophic handing of COVID, in which he reacted slowly & supported the dangerous 'herd immunity' approach, results in untold #suffering for millions, 180,000 largely avoidable #deaths, & £billions in taxpayers' money #wasted, often on friends of Tories.
2021: Pfeffel's independent adviser on ministerial interests Sir Alex Allan quits after Pfeffel overruled his finding that Priti Patel boke Ministerial Code (again) & bullied civil servants. Philip Rutnam receives £340,000 plus his legal costs over his claim for unfair dismissal.
2021 - 2022: Pfeffel deliberately, shamelessly & relentlessly lies to & misleads Parliament & voters in regard to #Partygate, holding both in utter contempt.
2022: Pfeffel continues to lie, mislead, obfuscate & behave like the damaged immoral sociopath he truly is.
For more insights into *Dear Leader*, & the mystifying Cult Of Personality that has grown up around the profoundly damaged & dangerously irresponsible sociopathic liar, who is destroying trust in politicians, undermining democracy, & ruining Britain, see:
Chase Herro, co-founder of Trump’s main crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, on crypto:
“You can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it.”
Despite crypto being bullshit, & memecoins being consciously bullshit, many – especially angry young gullible men – still invest: 42% of men & 17% of women aged 18-29 have invested in, traded or used crypto (2024 Pew Research), compared to only 11% of men & 5% of women over 50.
“It’s no accident that memecoins are such a phenomenon among young people who have grown immensely frustrated with a financial system that, I think it’s fair to say, has failed them” - Sander Lutz, the first crypto-focused White House correspondent.
🧵In January, Farage said Musk was justified in calling Starmer complicit in failures to prosecute grooming gangs: “In 2008 Keir Starmer had just been appointed as DPP & there was a case brought before them of alleged mass rape of young girls that did not lead to a prosecution.”
The allegation that Starmer was complicit in failures to prosecute grooming gangs is often repeated. But how true is it?
Two Facebook posts, originally appearing in April/May 2020, claimed Starmer told police when he was working for the CPS not to pursue cases against Muslim men accused of rape due to fears it would stir up anti-Islamic sentiment.
In 2022 the posts and allegations saw a resurgence online with hundreds of new shares. They said: “From 2004 onwards the director of public prosecutions told the police not to prosecute Muslim rape gangs to prevent ‘Islamophobia’.
Decades of research shows that parroting or appeasing the far-right simply legitimises their framing, and further normalises illiberal exclusionary discourse and politics.
Starmer's speech is more evidence that the far-right has been mainstreamed.
Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist who focuses on political extremism and populism in Europe and the US, is, imho, one of the most important voices on the Left today.
Allow me to briefly summarise some of his work.
In a 2023 lecture, Mudde emphasizes the importance of precise terminology in discussing the far-right, distinguishing between extreme right (anti-democracy) and radical right (accepts elections but rejects liberal democratic principles like minority rights and rule of law).
He argues we're in a "fourth wave" of postwar far-right politics, characterized by the mainstreaming & normalization of the far-right - what Linguist Prof Ruth Wodak in a related concept refers to as the 'shameless normalization of far-right discourse'.
After eight years as US President, on Janury 17, 1961, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, former supreme commander of the Allied forces in western Europe during WWII, warned us about the the growing "military-industrial complex" (and Trump2.0) in his prescient farewell address.
Before looking at that speech, some context for those unfamiliar with Eisenhower, the 34th US president, serving from 1953 to 1961.
During WWII, he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and achieved the five-star rank as General of the Army.
Eisenhower planned & supervised two consequential WWII military campaigns: Operation Torch in the North Africa campaign in 1942–43 & the 1944 Normandy invasion.
The right-wing of the Republican Party clashed with him more often than the Democrats did during his first term.
In England, 18% of adults aged 16-65 - 6.6 million people - can be described as having "very poor literacy skills" AKA 'functionally illiterate'.
This leaves people vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation, and poses significant challenges for society and democracy.
Being 'functionally illiterate' means that a person can understand short straightforward texts on familiar topics accurately & independently, & obtain information from everyday sources, but reading information from unfamiliar sources or on unfamiliar topics can cause problems.
Adult functional illiteracy—lacking the reading, writing, and comprehension skills needed for everyday tasks—poses significant challenges for a country, society, and democracy.