It’s been a little over a decade since cannabis was first legalized recreationally in the United States. As of today, recreational weed is legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia, and Americans have never been more pro-weed. In a Gallup poll from last November, 70 percent of U.S. adults said they support the federal legalization of marijuana, up from 50 percent in 2013 and a mere twelve percent in 1969.
In May, the Biden administration moved to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I, where it sits alongside heroin and LSD, to Schedule III, a category of drugs that the DEA says have a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” States with legal marijuana report economic benefits, a reduced burden on the criminal justice system, and positive health outcomes for patients with chronic pain and epilepsy.
But is legal cannabis really such a no-brainer? A recent study found that marijuana use—whether through smoking, edibles, or vapes—is associated with a higher risk of heart attack and stroke. Other studies have consistently shown that so-called “high-potency cannabis” increases the risk of psychotic episodes in young users.
Flashback: Second Thoughts on Pot: “‘Yeah, they all smoke.’ ‘Well . . . other things too, right?’ ‘Sometimes. But they all smoke.’”
Jamaal Bowman wants you to know that he’s now sincerely sorry about all those rapes.
Not ones that he committed himself, mind you. (Bowman may be a deeply goofy, lumbering “Squad” Democrat representing Westchester County, N.Y., with all the worst progressive politics in the world, but he is reportedly quite the genially approachable fellow.) The rapes of all those Israeli women, that is — atrocities committed on and after the October 7 surprise attack by Hamas on the Jewish state. Politico reported this morning, in an entry from its “New York Playbook,” that Bowman, currently running for his life against locally popular Westchester County executive George Latimer in the Democratic primary set for next Tuesday, now regrets having called reports of brutal sexual violence inflicted (indeed, GoPro’ed) by Hamas terrorists on Israeli women “propaganda” and “lies.”
Back in November, Bowman sang a different tune: On November 17, he stated that “there’s still no evidence of beheaded babies or raped women, but they still keep using that lie [for] propaganda.” Now he’s sorry.
Not helping matters: In “Bowman’s Folly,” Christopher F. Rufo and Luke Rosiak write that “The New York congressman appears to have plagiarized parts of his Ed.D. dissertation:”
Jamaal Bowman, the controversial New York congressman, often appeals to his work as a former school principal and his Ed.D. in education as the basis for his policy positions.
But, according to our analysis, Bowman’s primary academic work—his 2019 dissertation, “Community Schools: The Perceptions and Practices that Foster Broad-Based Collaboration amongst leaders with the Community School Ecosystem”—is riddled with basic errors, failures of logic, and multiple instances of plagiarism. (Bowman did not return a request for comment.)
Bowman has boasted about the paper on social media and considers it formative to his political orientation. When asked recently his political views, Bowman said, “I identify as an educator, and as a Black man in America. But my policies align with those of a socialist, so I guess that makes me a socialist.”
The newspaper is losing lots of money—reportedly on the order of $77 million a year—and rather than adding to Bezos’s reputation it is damaging it. The coverage of Israel is as approximately as hostile as Al Jazeera; the Washington Free Beacon found “at least six members of the Post’s foreign desk previously wrote for” that “news outlet bankrolled in part by the government of Qatar, which is now sheltering Hamas’s top leaders.” Republicans and some centrists dislike the paper’s anti-Trump tilt, and even Bezos, who is vaguely libertarian and likes America, has to wonder why readers would pay for a Washington Post dispensing predictably left-wing takes readily available free-of-charge from NPR.
Now the Post staff is worked up into a panic over a British former Wall Street Journal executive’s plan to bring in editors from the Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph to run the place. The supposed trigger is the British press’s use of “stolen” documents, but that seems like a pretext coming from the staff of a newspaper that published the Pentagon Papers. The real issue isn’t stolen documents (the Post staff didn’t mind when the New York Times published President Trump’s stolen tax return) but fear that the new Post management might curb the left-wing tilt. Whatever the motive, Bezos is under fire from his own staff, which is questioning his loyalty to the institution. One Post veteran editor and reporter, the biographer David Maraniss, posted on Facebook, “Jeff Bezos owns the Post but he is not of and for the Post.”
British journalist Robert Winnett, who had been set to join the Washington Post as its executive editor after the November election, has chosen not to accept the position after the paper published an expose raising ethical questions about his journalistic work.
“It is with regret that I share with you that Robert Winnett has withdrawn from the position of Editor at The Washington Post. Rob has my greatest respect and is an incredibly talented editor and journalist,” publisher Will Lewis wrote in a memo to staff on Friday, according to several news reports.
“The leadership at The Telegraph Media Group are reaffirming his continued role as deputy editor,” Lewis added, saying the Post will “immediately” launch a new search for editor.
“We will soon announce both the recruiting firm and process we will utilize to ensure a timely but thorough search for this important leadership role,” he said.
As John Nolte wrote on Monday, the Post’s staffers’ now-successful revolt against Winnett “is good news. No one should want any reforms at the Washington Post. The Post has no credibility. The Post can no longer move the public opinion needle. That’s right where we want them. That annual $77 million loss is merely icing. Nothing is better for America than for that garbage fire to keep right on burning.”
Nonsense — as with Portland in 2020, at least until Bezos makes up his mind about offloading the Post, it’s the Summer of Love at the WaPo:
BREAKING: Jen Rubin has declared herself Supreme Warlord of #WPAZ, ordered the defenestration of rival caudillo Fareed Zakaria.
White-collar companies that once championed programs to recruit diverse employees are now tiptoeing away from them.
PricewaterhouseCoopers and JPMorgan Chase are among those that recently removed or altered descriptions of their programs for underrepresented students. The shift came after an “anti-woke” movement took aim at U.S. companies and a Supreme Court decision overturned affirmative action in college admissions.
Employers’ embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives peaked in 2021, sparked by the death of George Floyd and the height of the Black Lives Matter movement a year earlier. In the years since, access to diversity programs has been slowly declining, a Glassdoor study in April found.
Howell Raines, who had the famous Freudian Slip in 2001 that the New YorkTimes’ hiring campaign “has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse,” won’t like this news at all.
Injecting lesbian sex into the origin story of the Star Wars franchise is the Bud Light debacle on crystal meth. Anybody could tell you that.
But Kathleen Kennedy, who has destroyed not just Star Wars but the Indiana Jones franchise as well from her perch atop Lucasfilm, can’t tell you that.
Amid unmitigatedly awful reviews by the public of The Acolyte — last I checked it was sitting at a 16 percent audience score at Rotten Tomatoes — Kennedy is now making the rounds not to apologize for the damage she’s done but instead to…
I think a lot of the women who step into Star Wars struggle with [toxic fandom attacks] a bit more. […] Because of the fan base being so male dominated, they sometimes get attacked in ways that can be quite personal…. Operating within these giant franchises now, with social media and the level of expectation — it’s terrifying.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment Kathleen Kennedy won’t undertake: someone puts you in charge of making and selling a product which has a well-defined, very loyal, and quite lucrative customer base, and you decide to change the product into something completely different which intuitively will not appeal to that customer base. And the result is that the customer base angrily refuses to buy your product.
Who do you think is at fault here?
Blaming the market for your failure to succeed in it has never, in the entire history of the market, produced positive results.
Disney won’t fire Kathleen Kennedy. It’s almost too late to fire her. She’s done so much damage that the rot has completely consumed its host.
It was necessary to destroy the franchise in order to save it.
There are too many to list, but all show an unbridled prejudice and racial bigotry by black people toward white people. After what was supposed to be a racial reckoning, at a time when the ideas of diversity and inclusion have become an integral part of society, there is a significant amount of anti-white bigotry that exists in this country that regularly gets ignored.
The kind of racist comments made above would cause significant controversy if they were made by white people talking about black people. The same should hold when it is black people talking about white people. Decades of radical indoctrination in schools and other cultural institutions in society have taught many black people to be resentful and hateful toward white people for something that happened over 150 years ago that affected no one living today. It’s indicative of just how radicalized many in the country have become.
White people should not be made to feel guilty or be the victims of resentment over things people did decades and centuries ago. Such rhetoric does nothing to promote racial equality.
It’s more than slavery, as the people supporting reparations like to point out. There’s an ongoing, 150-year, “systematic” racial bias, white privilege, unequal opportunity, Jim Crow, and racial oppression that needs to be dealt with. But you can’t assign guilt based solely on race. It turns the entire concept of “guilt” on its head.
Reparations and bribes won’t solve it. An apology by white people would be ludicrous. History is “history” for a reason: It’s in the past. Trying to elicit feelings of guilt from people who weren’t alive at the time that blacks were enslaved and who never consciously participated in any kind of black oppression is wrong.
Supporters of the climate-activism organization Just Stop Oil sprayed paint on World Heritage Site Stonehenge and were arrested on Wednesday, just before thousands are expected to visit the historic structures for the summer solstice.
“Today’s action has come days after the Labour party’s manifesto has recommitted them to stopping all future licences for new oil and gas, should they form the next government,” reads a statement by Just Stop Oil. The United Kingdom will hold a general election on July 4, 2024.
Niamh Lynch, a 21-year-old undergraduate student at Oxford University, and Rajan Naidu, 73, began spraying orange powder paint on Stonehenge around noon, according to a press release by Just Stop Oil. The Wiltshire Police arrived at Stonehenge and arrested these two individuals on suspicion of damaging the ancient monument. In 2022, Naidu was one of 51 Just Stop Oil campaigners who was arrested for breach of an injunction, and because it was his third breach of the injunction, he was sentenced to 34 days in prison.
“Continuing to burn coal, oil and gas will result in the death of millions. We have to come together to defend humanity or we risk everything,” a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil said in a statement. “That’s why Just Stop Oil is demanding that our next government sign up to a legally binding treaty to phase out fossil fuels by 2030.”
In trying to cast doubt on the authenticity of the G7 and Hollywood fundraiser videos, [Rhona Tarrant, CBS’s resident “disinformation expert”] suggests that viral videos where Biden bumbles through sentences are also manipulated.
[CBS’s Chief White House Correspondent Nancy Cordes], for her part, repeatedly wonders out loud about the impact these videos might have on the election. The end goal, as always, is to Protect the Precious.
In their collective firefighting against the cognitive decline videos, the Regime Media have gone far beyond obsequiousness and servility- descending into outright Orwellianism. The Media have taken on the role of The Party as depicted in George Orwell’s 1984, and like The Party, they now command you to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears”.
It is very clear that the Regime Media thinks Biden needs to be protected from the impact of the endless flow of videos documenting his mental decline. And in so doing, they have signaled they will pull out all the stops. Just like they did in 2020, when Biden needed to be protected from Hunter’s laptop. Biden’s ongoing and well-documented cognitive decline is the 2024 version of Hunter’s laptop.
But Hunter’s laptop required a certain connect-the-dots ability by the public to understand. In sharp contrast, while Joe has never been the sharpest intellect in politics, we’ve all seen his decline in recent years:
He’s losing his mind,” Jon Lovitz’s character says in The Wedding Singer while watching his rival experience an emotional breakdown. “And I’m reaping all the benefits.”
I suppose that’s how George Latimer is feeling right now.
Latimer, the Westchester County executive and former New York state senator, is running against incumbent Jamaal Bowman in his district’s Democratic House primary next week. When Latimer first entered the race, his sanity relative to his rival’s eccentricity was the subtext of the campaign. Now it should be the text.
Bowman is the squadnik whose anti-Semitic obsessions have occasionally culminated in semi-violent fantasies about Israelis. From a policy perspective, Bowman has turned against funding for Iron Dome—a purely defensive system—and the Abraham Accords, which expanded normalization with the Arab world and increased Jewish integration in formerly hostile countries. He is against every instrument of peace and every expression of American allyship with our fellow democracy.
In other words, his voting record contains no redeeming qualities whatsoever. No one loses anything by Bowman getting booted from Congress.
But of course it goes beyond policy. Temperament-wise, Bowman is volatile. He was recently censured—a rather serious reprimand in the House—for trying to disrupt congressional business by pulling a fire alarm and then lying about it, even though the whole fiasco was on video. (Does Jamaal Bowman not think Congress has security cameras?)
As Bowman spins out, he keeps losing backers, such as the left-wing J Street and the progressive erstwhile ally Mondaire Jones. And so he has doubled down on whoever’s left in his camp, which he assumes to be exclusively made up of rabid anti-Semites.
His rhetoric has become indistinguishable from that of the Ayatollah Khamenei. Recently he was caught on video saying to a crowd of supporters: “Because I am fighting against genocide, I am being attacked by the Zionist regime we call AIPAC.”
A conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, Bowman can be seen ranting that the documented rape of Israelis on Oct. 7 by Hamas is made-up “propaganda.”
The Washington Post has made several attempts to stanch the bleeding, including cutting its outlook section and offering mass buyouts for veteran staff. As Lewis told the newsroom, the Washington Post must “take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path.” Part of that action will include setting up a “third newsroom” whose purpose, an internal memo said, “is to give millions of Americans — who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed — compelling, exciting, and accurate news where they are and in the style that they want.”
However, as the old D.C. saw goes, personnel is policy. And in key respects, the Washington Post has ceased to offer “traditional news.” The newspaper has become so widely out of step with popular opinion in the United States, as well as common decency, basis in evidence, and an attachment to common sense and self-correction and critique. Nowhere is this truer of the Washington Post’s coverage than on Middle Eastern affairs, where the paper suggests the half-true slogan “go woke, go broke,” might be modified to “go Hamas, go homeless.” (“Go Khomeini, get no money”? Look, puns are hard. But the analysis holds.) WaPo’s coverage of the Israel-Islamist conflict, including the recent war against Hamas and other Iranian proxies, provides a harrowing look at how fringe the Washington Post has become.
On Oct. 7, 2023 — when Hamas terrorists, other Iranian proxies, and ad hoc groups of Gazans invaded Israel and murdered over 1,200 people, taking 240, including Americans, hostage, and beginning an attack that continues in the form of rocket barrages to this day — the Washington Post and its staff stood at the ready to put their resources and energies to work on the wrong side, the side that terms the country where the Washington Post is headquartered “the Great Satan.”
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah “liked” and shared a post praising the attacks as “decolonization.” She later penned a column drawing equivalency between the pogromists of today and their victims. Prior to Israel’s response, Attiah warned that Jerusalem was about to commit an “atrocity.” She has since accused the Jewish state of “genocide” — overlooking numerous steps Israel has taken to reduce civilian casualties, including some of the largest evacuations of civilians ever undertaken in urban combat.
Toward the end of my term as Secretary of State, I had the opportunity to visit the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Permanently displayed in the Rotunda alongside the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights is the Emancipation Proclamation. As I stood reading, I felt the presence of my ancestors. I said a little prayer of thanks to them—and to God—for the great fortune of being born American.
Most Americans are familiar with the Emancipation Proclamation. Issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, it declared freedom for millions of slaves living in the South. Today, however, many Americans remain unaware that two more years would pass before the enslaved living in Texas learned of their freedom.
It was on June 19, 1865, that Union soldiers arrived in the farthest territory of the Confederate states—in Galveston Bay, Texas—bringing with them the news that slavery had been abolished. Major General Gordon Granger read out General Order No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.”
Google is planning to move out of one of its massive offices on the edge of San Francisco Bay later this year, Google confirmed to SFGATE on Thursday.
As first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Google plans to depart from its 300,000-square-foot office in One Market Plaza’s Spear Tower within the next year. This is the first time in Google has been reported to be entirely leaving a building in San Francisco, even as the tech giant has moved to cut over a million square feet of office space elsewhere in the Bay Area. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)
“We’re focused on investing in real estate efficiently to meet the current and future needs of our hybrid workforce,” Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont told SFGATE in an email Thursday. “We remain committed to our long-term presence in San Francisco.” (Lamont gave an identical statement to the Chronicle.)
The Chronicle reported that Google’s lease ends in April 2025, but Lamont told SFGATE the company would move out later this year. He did not immediately respond when SFGATE asked for clarification of the timeline for the company’s departure from Spear Tower.
Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.
Lawmakers and internet companies blame the slow rollout on burdensome requirements for obtaining the funds, including climate change mandates, preferences for hiring union workers and the requirement that eligible companies prioritize the employment of “justice-impacted” people with criminal records to install broadband equipment.
The Commerce Department, which is distributing the funds under the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, is also attempting to regulate consumer rates, lawmakers say. This puts them at odds with internet providers and congressional Republicans, who say the law prohibits such regulation.
The slow pace of funding allocation and compliance will push the project start dates for modernizing rural internet access to 2025 and 2026, according to a timeline officials outlined in a House budget hearing.
Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr said the program’s goal of providing high-speed internet to most underserved areas will not be fully realized until 2030, nine years after its enactment.
Rarely has a cabinet secretary done so little with such vast resources.
On the CBS show “Face the Nation,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had to defend the Biden administration’s woeful record of building new electric vehicle charging stations that are key to unlocking its hoped-for EV nirvana.
Host Margaret Brennan asked how it could be that, with $7.5 billion allocated for this purpose two years ago, the administration has managed to build eight.
Not 8,000, or even 80. Eight.
But back to high speed internet for a moment. If only the administration knew some one in America with the required expertise in this department:
For $42 billion they could have bought Starlink dishes for 140 million people
Of all the inventions in the dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror, perhaps none is more terrifying than the robotic guard dogs in Metalhead. In the episode, from the fourth series of the programme in 2017, Maxine Peake plays Bella, a woman who, along with two companions, breaks into a remote warehouse to look for medicine. Instead, she finds an autonomous “dog”, armed with a shotgun, knives and shrapnel sprays. It quickly kills both of her colleagues and chases Bella over the moorland with ruthless single-mindedness. The film is a chilling vision of machines programmed to do one thing only. The dog does not think or feel; it just kills.
Such machines are no longer fantasy. Last month, it was disclosed that United States Marines special operators were testing robotic dogs armed with guns based on sentry automatic machine guns. Robotic quadrupeds have become increasingly common across the US military in recent years, for everything from bomb disposal to perimeter patrols, but arming them is a newer development.
Not to be outdone, three weeks later, the Chinese military released a YouTube video showing its own four-legged robot, armed with an assault rifle, working alongside its soldiers on exercises. “It can serve as a new member in our urban combat operations,” one soldier says in the video, while the footage shows the rifle firing off bursts, “replacing our members to conduct reconnaissance and identify [the] enemy, and strike the target.” The film makes it clear why such a robot might be useful, able to run into dangerous situations ahead of human soldiers. In another video, an army of similar machines does press-ups in sync.
The Colorado Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in a lawsuit against a Christian baker who refused to make a cake celebrating a gender transition, one of three such cases from the state that have pitted LGBTQ+ civil rights against First Amendment rights.
Two cases have centered on baker Jack Phillips, who in 2012 refused to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding. Phillips partially prevailed before the U.S. Supreme Court in that case in 2018.
Colorado is 104,094 square miles in size, and has a population of 5.84 million people. How on earth can it function with only one bakery?
I’ll sum up the details of the hit piece, because the details aren’t important: Winnett, while working in the UK, used stories by a shady reporter who used deceit, and maybe even phone hacking (if you remember that scandal) to get stories. The hit-piece is wondering whether Winnett did enough to instruct his reporters on journalistic ethics — and you know, Washington Post “journalists” are all about journalistic ethics — and whether he maybe he encouraged the bad behavior.
Like I said, the details are not important. What is important is that these charges date from 15 years ago and no one has had much interest in “resurfacing” them — until now.
It’s not like Winnett hasn’t been working in journalism all this time. He didn’t retire from journalism and just jump back into it.
This story was old and dead.
But Washington Post reporters now “resurface” it to try to pressure Bezos into firing him.
You may have noticed a bizarre trend at organizations whose staffs are full of younger liberals: Internal disputes aren’t kept internal anymore but are aired in public, on social media or in the press, with rampantly subordinate staff attacking their colleagues or decrying managerial decisions in full public view — and those actions apparently tolerated from the top.
In the most extreme cases, you get meltdowns like the one at the Dianne Morales campaign for mayor of New York, where staff went on strike to demand, among other things, that the campaign divert part of its budget away from campaigning into “community grocery giveaways.” But it’s especially a problem in the media, where so many employees have large social media followings they can use to put their employers on blast — and where those employers have (unwisely) cultivated a freewheeling social media culture where it’s common for reporters to comment on all sorts of matters unrelated to their coverage.
* * * * * * * * *
I hate that I’ve written so many paragraphs about this. I hate that I know so much about this dispute. It’s so high school, and it ought not to be any of our business. These are all internal HR matters. But [Felicia] Sonmez is explicit: She wages these fights in public because management is more responsive to that than when employees complain privately. By giving her “good friend” [Dave] Weigel such a long suspension and doing nothing to her, management is only encouraging her and other Post employees to put their colleagues on blast more, which she has indeed been doing.
Airing internal workplace disputes in public like this is not okay, even when you are right on the merits. My statement isn’t just obvious, it’s how almost all organizations work. If you think your coworker sucks, you don’t tweet about it. That’s unprofessional. If you disagree with management’s personnel decisions, you don’t decry them to the public. That’s insubordinate. Organizations full of people who are publicly at each other’s throats can’t be effective. Your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac.
But it’s definitely Kindergarten Cop:
RIP:
It is with great sadness that we announce that San Francisco Giants Legend and Hall of Famer Willie Mays passed away peacefully this afternoon at the age of 93. pic.twitter.com/Qk4NySCFZQ
The president of the Chicago Teachers Union claimed during a radio interview that aired Sunday that conservatives don’t want black children to learn how to read.
Stacy Davis Gates made an appearance on WBBM 780 AM to defend the union’s contract demands. Gates claimed that conservatives who expressed criticism of the demands “don’t even want black children to be able to read.”
“Remember, these same conservatives are the conservatives who probably would have been championing black codes, you know, during reconstruction or thereafter,” she said. “So, forgive me again if conservatives pushing back on educating immigrant children, black children, children who live in poverty, doesn’t make my anxiety go up. That’s what they’re supposed to say. That is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right wing.”
Setting aside that I missed that moment when I was handed my VRWC decoder ring ages ago, where is Gates finding all of these “conservatives” in Chicago, whose last Republican mayor left office in 1931?
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A reader messages: “Someone needs to tell her whose idea Jim Crow was. #dontknowmuchabouthistory,” Well, to be fair, she’s a teacher.
DISNEY MAKES SURPRISE IN-KIND CONTRIBUTION TO TRUMP 2024 ELECTION CAMPAIGN! Joy Behar, Rachel Maddow Warn Donald Trump Could Cancel The View If He Wins Election. “To recap: Rachel Maddow says Trump might put her in a camp with illegal aliens. Brian Stelter says Trump could ‘punish’ him. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. says Trump may place her in prison. And Joy Behar says Trump could cancel ‘The View.’ Enough already. Donald Trump is already polling ahead of Joe Biden. No need to entice voters more.”
Republicans might be in the same position as the Tories right now if people like 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney or his running mate, former House speaker Paul Ryan, were at the head of their 2024 ticket. But in Britain, the moral equivalents of these Never Trumpers are still in charge. While Britain’s Conservative voters told their leaders what they wanted in the 2016 Brexit vote and the 2019 general election, the Tory establishment refused to go along.
Given the first-past-the-post system, even if Reform ties or beats the Conservatives in the national vote, it may just mean hundreds of second-place finishes. Those few Tories who keep their seats will probably be on the party’s Left flank, further sinking the chances of changing and thereby saving the party. It also remains to be seen whether Farage can begin the process of political realignment that will see the Conservatives replaced as the main opposition to Labour.
But the lesson here for Republicans, including those who remain members in good standing of the D.C. establishment, is that conservative political parties that ignore their voters are headed for the scrap heap of history. If they want to avoid the fate of Britain’s Tories, they must follow Trump’s lead and listen to their working-class voters rather than to Wall Street or Never Trumpers who have long since abandoned them for the Democrats.
He might never become prime minister or even a member of Parliament.
But if he keeps up the pressure, Farage will drive the Conservatives to adopt leaders who resemble him — the only kind who can attract his voters.
Old-guard Republicans are as eager to get past Trump and Trumpism as the Conservatives were to get beyond Farage and Brexit.
But immigration is the defining issue of our time on both sides of the Atlantic, not only in America and Britain but on the European continent, too, as demonstrated by last week’s E.U. elections.
Immigration restriction has a popular constituency throughout the Western world, and one that’s impatient with older center-right parties reluctant to take up the cause.
Trump and Farage both perceived that, and while nobody else can be Donald Trump, Farage’s strategy is one other politicians, including Republicans after Trump, can employ.
Here the Farage strategy doesn’t require a new party; the same pressure can be applied to the Republican establishment through primaries.
Whether or not populist Republicans win a general election, simply by making it impossible for other Republicans to win without them, they gain leverage the way Farage has.
The flipside also applies — populists might not win without immigration-loving, business-oriented Republican or Conservative voters — but populists ultimately care more about the issue.
What London financier wants to jeopardize lower taxes for the sake of higher immigration?
Brexit and Trump’s election were eight years ago, but 2016 is still the present and future of the political right.
Related: Farage explains why discussing immigration is such a taboo topic:
GEE, THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG AT ALL AFTER THE COVID CRISIS SUBSIDED:
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