Nigel farage

Inside Bannon and Burra’s post-CPAC blowout

National Harbor, Maryland “CPAC 2024 was a HUGE success!,” the conference’s account tweeted this morning. Cockburn isn’t sure how they’re measuring that: the gathering was decidedly muted when compared with previous Trump-era affairs. After the former president spoke on Saturday and Argentinian president Javier Milei offered attendees an economics lecture, Steve Bannon closed out proceedings. He led the CPAC crowd in chants of “Trump won, Trump won, Trump won” and branding Joe Biden “a usurper in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” Bannon has never feared courting controversy.

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Liz Truss works the crowd at CPAC

National Harbor, Maryland “Oh, that’s Liz Truss,” a young attendee says as the former British PM passes us in the corridor at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “She sucks. What’s she doing here?” Trying to sell books, apparently. Truss is one of two Brits — alongside mainstay Nigel Farage — addressing CPAC. Her visit forms part of the promotional tour for the US release of her book Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons From the Only Conservative in the Room, which has been handily retitled for US audiences: “Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism and the Liberal Establishment.

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Cockburn does Dallas

Dallas, Texas Howdy from the Lone Star State, where Cockburn is braving 100-degree heat, overpriced IPAs and America First applause lines to bring you coverage of CPAC Texas. The conservative conference has come to the Hilton Anatole in Dallas for the second year — and is once again headlined by former president Donald Trump, set to speak this evening. Appropriately, the hotel’s two bars are called “Media” and “Gossip,” as if they’d been purpose-built for your intrepid correspondent. Cockburn managed to finagle his way into the $375-a-head Cattleman’s Ball for free on Friday night, where he sat at a table with a cadre of fellow hacks, chief among them John Fredericks, the “Godzilla of Truth.

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Why we’ll all miss Boris

I think that Thomas Babington Macaulay had the last word about Boris Johnson’s forced resignation as prime minister of the UK: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous,” Macaulay wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Macaulay’s line needs to be slightly adjusted, it is true, because, ridiculous though public displays of puritanical moralism are, in this case it was mostly Boris’s colleagues in Parliament, not the public at large, that suffered that unbecoming fit of morality. Indeed, throughout it all, Boris — a politician with more élan than any prime minister since Margaret Thatcher — remained popular with the public. He was especially popular, I think, with the American public. And why not?

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Human after all

As the weird world of lockdown winds down, we might pause to consider what we’ve learned. I am hardly alone in my heightened hankering to unravel, synthesize, undo and discard. In this mission a voice from the past is helping me piece things together anew as the strange tyranny begins to dissolve. It began when Google started throwing videos of the Smiths in my daily cyberpath, prompting a non-essential trip down Memory Lane. Back in the day, I was, as David Cameron used to boast, a ‘huge fan’ of the Smiths. Precisely, I was a fan of Johnny Marr’s guitar literacy and the persona of Morrissey, the enchanting singer who had jettisoned his given names.

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Just-one-knee syndrome

Never in the field of human conflict has so much misery been caused to so many by so few. I’m thinking of the hard-left rage mobs that have been policing the public square since the beginning of June — quite literally in the case of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. I’ve been keeping a list of all the people who have suffered catastrophic career damage because they’ve fallen foul of the Red Guards — and it’s growing ‘exponentially’, as a virologist might say. Like the COVID illness at its peak, it has been doubling every two to three days. Some of the victims have been people you’d expect to lose their heads in this cultural revolution.

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Nigel Farage: Trump is taking us back to more traditional alliances

Our Washington editor Amber Athey interviewed Nigel Farage, founder of the UK Brexit party, for a Steamboat Institute livestream. We've published the transcript below.Amber Athey: Welcome everyone to the Steamboat Institute's live broadcast. I'm Amber Athey, the Washington editor for Spectator USA. And I am joined by Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Brexit party, who will also be a keynote speaker at the Steamboat Institute's annual Freedom Conference this year from August 28 to 29. Nigel, thank you so much for joining us again.Nigel Farage: Thank you. No problem at all.AA: So I want to go ahead and get started by giving you a chance to respond to a little bit of a controversy. People are very upset with you for attending Trump's rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Donald Trump, Brexit voice of reason

For a president about to face ‘The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History’, Donald Trump sounded thoroughly unperturbed when, as presidents often do when the House votes to impeach, he turned his attention to that essential part of the top job: a long, relaxed and amiable phone interview with Nigel Farage, addressing such matters of central import to the American public as the electoral chances of Jeremy Corbyn. Trump was on comedic top form, bantering about ‘Boris’ and ‘Sleepy Joe’ and ‘Pocahontas’, and explaining to his out-of-town audience that impeachment proceedings weren’t going to proceed anywhere because the Republicans control the Senate.

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Raheem Kassam is 53 today!

Residents of one of Washington, DC’s smartest co-op buildings dove for cover early this morning at what they thought was machine-gun fire — only to discover it was the popping of champagne corks from the penthouse. Yes, Raheem ‘The Randy Dandy’ Kassam, the Bannon-bantering, Farage-friendly Brit currently wasting his talents as editor of Human Events, staggers into his 54th year today. https://www.instagram.com/p/BsZuDWWA2Hp/ Kassam was born in London in 1966, and attended Cambridge University’s highly prestigulous Wikipedia College. He is related to Enoch Powell on his mother’s side, and to Sitting Bull on his father’s. Mentored by Nigel Farage from childhood, he published a slim volume of erotic verse at the precocious age of 46.

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The cosmic magnetism of Trump and Brexit

Polite British eurosceptics still insist that Brexit isn’t Trump and Trump isn’t Brexit — as if that meant anything at all. Many of us Britons like to think that our populist revolt is a more civilized affair than the one happening across the Atlantic. As London prepares to welcome President Trump next week, it may be time for the British to admit that we have been deluding ourselves. The truth is that Trump is the sun to the Brexit moon. Some mysterious cosmic magnetism always seems to pull them together. Nigel Farage might call it destiny. Look at recent history. On June 24, 2016, the day after the EU referendum, Donald Trump arrived by helicopter at Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland.

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A milkshake a day keeps the fascists at bay

Yesterday a hero appeared in our midst. A valiant warrior armed only with a cold milk beverage. Not since the Normandy Landings have I seen such bravery against an impending Nazi invasion. Over here in the UK we have our own version of Donald Trump. His name is Nigel Farage. Like Trump he is a hideous Nazi, Hitler incarnate. A walking harbinger of xenophobic hatred, spewing fascism and racism. He is the cause of Britain’s pain and division. He was the one who decided that we should hold a referendum on whether to leave the glorious EU. It’s the mark of a typical fascist authoritarian to inflict democracy upon the ignorant masses. The result of that hateful vote has split our once tolerant and peaceful country in two.

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When in the course of Human Events

The eccentric debut of Raheem Kassam and financier-attorney Will Chamberlain’s new Human Events is here. Ronald Reagan’s favorite magazine is now Raheem’s roundhouse. So how does it look? Not the worst. Eager to solidify the bridge between the Trumpzine of today and the conservative periodical of old, the site is highlighting a forty-something Trump shaking hands with the Gipper. ‘This is no time for “peacetime” Republicans,’ say the editors, dissolving any pretense of partisan non-affiliation. ‘This is a time for brawlers. And we are here to brawl.’ On tap for week one: Donald Trump Jr., Chamberlain’s legal analysis of the Mueller exoneration, the popular populist Italian writer Alessandra Bocchi and Conservative Inc. grandee Dennis Prager, among others.

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Inside Raheem Kassam’s ‘Transatlantic Right Wing Spring Fling’

Cockburn doesn’t mind a cocktail or two, but he wasn’t sure if he could stomach the ‘Raheem is Daddy’ special on offer at the Nigel Farage party last night at CPAC. Kassam is a particularly proud boy at the moment, and perhaps understandably so. He’s just bought Human Events, the media company, with his ally Will Chamberlain and his party had a celebratory and very boozy atmosphere. Raheem himself called it ‘The Transatlantic Right Wing Spring Fling.’ ‘Feel free to say how hot my date was,’ he said. His party was an ‘off-the-record’ (but not for you, dear reader) knees-up at Pose Nightclub, upstairs at CPAC, and a veritable ‘who’s that’ of conservative personae, including several folk who were too damn dangerous for access to the convention proper.

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