Hate explosion in the UK: Arise, Sir Snob Geldof, by Brendan O’Neill.
Brexit, they say, has emboldened the hateful. It has given people permission to spout their prejudices, to pollute public life with their weird, rash dislike of anyone who is different to them. And it’s true, Brexit has done this. Only not in the way they think.
The most visible hatred in the three months since the EU referendum has been of the Remain variety. … The hate that’s really been emboldened by Brexit is that old, historic disdain for ordinary people and their allegedly irrational antics.
In his latest rant against the dim-witted, Geldof says Brexit voters were cogs in the ‘armies of stupidity’ currently conquering the Western world.
In his keynote speech at the One Young World Summit in Ottawa yesterday, he described Donald Trump as ‘a liar, a fool and a racist [who] vomits his bile on to the disinherited of the United States’, and listed Brexiteers as being among ‘the post-truth politicians, those reality-television actors’ who are corrupting the little people’s minds. They are ‘commanders in the armies of stupidity’, he said, and too many of us — not him, of course, but us — ‘succumb to these fools’. The ‘impatient electorate or distracted populace is loath to accept or acknowledge’ basic political truths, he said, and ‘thus they leave us with fools like Trump or [Boris] Johnson in the UK’.
You can almost smell the snobbery. …
Old snobberies, hidden or coded for years, have become explicit since Brexit. …
The great irony, of course, is that all this emboldened elitism, this post-Brexit ridiculing of anyone who thinks differently to the good, decent Remainer, is precisely why people voted Leave in the first place. A political and cultural establishment thinks of us as an army of stupidity and ignoramuses and lizard-like thinkers, and dreads nothing more than being left in a room with us, and then they wonder why we rejected them and their worldview.
A reader comments:
It’s not Sir Snob Geldorf.
Snob is the wrong word to use in connection with this man.
He is himself an uneducated pleb and completely untalented as an ‘artiste’. A piss artist is all he ever was. “I hate Mondays”; how utterly pathetic that was.
The irony is, only low information nitwits would ever listen to the rubbish he produced when in his active years as a totally talentless musician. And who is he trashing? The poor bastards who bought his drivel 20 years ago.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
