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It can be striking to consider just how rapidly a country’s – or even much of the world’s – society and culture can change, and often largely owing to the influence of a single individual. In most cases these transformative figures are warriors: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon. In our own time, the man who is ushering us into what feels like a new era – namely, Donald Trump – is not a warrior but a peacemaker, albeit a peacemaker who’s deeply familiar with the ancient wisdom that the best way to establish peace is to be prepared to the hilt for war.
Not only has Trump overseen the Abraham Accords as well as brokered peace between India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, Cambodia and Thailand, Egypt and Ethiopia, Serbia and Kosovo, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His firm action on illegal immigration and his outspokenness about freedom of speech have given strength to Western Europeans who have heretofore been all too timid to speak up boldly about these issues. And his string of successes have helped empower Western European parties that share his agenda, more or less, among them the AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France, and the Freedom Party in Austria.
At home, the backlash to radical woke-ism that made Trump’s decisive 2024 victory possible has begun to alter the cultural landscape in ways both big and small. Companies and universities are giving up on DEI. In place of clothing ads featuring morbidly obese models we have the sexy actress Sydney Sweeney promoting American Jeans. Low-rated Trump-haters like Stephen Colbert are losing their TV gigs. Howard Stern, the sometime King of All Media, who ruled the airwaves with a daily audience of as many as twenty million only to turn off his core audience with his irrational hatred for Trump (once a frequent guest) and his mindless embrace of woke ideology, is reportedly being dropped by SiriusXM Radio after his numbers have dropped through the floor.
But for me one of the biggest headlines of the last few weeks is this. In Britain, Tommy Robinson, the people’s hero whose uncompromising stance on Muslim rape gangs not very long ago made him persona non grata on mainstream television and a frequent victim of a policing system that arrested critics of Islam while letting Muslim rapists run free, seems to be well on his way to being treated by at least some segments of the British establishment with the respect he deserves, thanks in large part to the fact that Jordan Peterson interviewed him amiably a year ago (garnering 2.7 million hits) and Elon Musk praised him earlier this year on X. In recent days Tommy has not only been accorded a long, sympathetic interview by the English podcaster Dan Wootton but has also been granted a full three hours on the highly influential Triggernometry podcast – whose hosts, Konstantin Kisin and Frances Foster, had for years considered Tommy beyond the pale, but who now accorded him the respect he deserves.
This is not to say that the UK itself is undergoing a huge metamorphosis. The other day, six months after the Munich speech in which J. D. Vance called out our European allies – the UK in particular – for their disregard for freedom of speech, a report by Trump’s State Department repeated the criticism, focusing on British legislation that, among other things, “limit[s] speech around abortion clinics.” The report came in the wake of the UK’s new Online Safety Act, which forbids “harmful content” (that ambiguous term) on social media and requires Internet users to share credit-card information and photographs of themselves in order to access many sites. Then there are various local ordinances in places like Thanet, a town in Kent, where it’s now actually illegal for more than two people to talk together in a public area.
Even more appalling, the UK’s execrable Labour Party prime minister, Keir Starmer, has joined the leaders of France and Canada in promising to reward Hamas’s October 7 butchery by recognizing the so–called “Palestinian state.” This after more than a year during which pro-Hamas mobs have been given wide berth by police even as brave, lone souls carrying British or Israeli flags have been treated like thugs. At times it has seemed that every major public institution in Britain is already in the hands of Muslims or of their compliant, cowardly allies. Every week seems to bring with it a fresh example of cringing official appeasement: on August 14, for example, the City Council of Birmingham – where it’s forbidden to display the Union Jack (but OK to fly the Pakistani flag) – announced that the municipal library would be lit “in green and white to mark the eve of 77th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence day.” Things were bad enough under Queen Elizabeth, but since Charles took the throne, he’s led the way in publicly – and nauseatingly – eulogizing the Religion of Peace.
Still, there may yet be a slim hope for Britain’s recovery from this madness. There are signs that the nation’s insanely polite and passive multitudes – who are politically far more to the right than either Labour or the Tories – may finally have been pushed to the limit of their tolerance for leftist tyranny and their willingness to bite their tongues when it comes to the subject of their country’s ongoing Islamization. If the months after October 7 were marked by frequent rallies (and riots) in support of Hamas, recent weeks have seen ordinary Brits gathering to protest outside the luxury hotels where illegal immigrants are being housed. It is widely assumed that Nigel Farage, the father of Brexit and the founder of the Reform UK Party, will be the next prime minister – a remarkable turn of events in a country where the alternation of power between the Tories and Labour goes back a century.
Not that Farage is the ideal candidate to lead Britain back to sanity. He’s a longtime friend and supporter of Trump – but he’s no Trump. London and many other British cities are so packed with illegal aliens – and with legal Islamic immigrants who have long histories of criminal violence – that the safe, orderly cities of yore, populated by painfully polite and law-abiding natives, are ancient history. But Farage says that deporting any of these foreigners en masse is off the table. A quarter of the country’s Muslims admit to supporting sharia law, but Farage isn’t about to ship any of them home, either. Indeed, many of his party’s leading supporters – and its chairman – are Muslims.
In short, like GB News and Talk TV, which were purportedly established to be right-wing alternatives to the consistently left-leaning BBC, ITV, and Channel 4, Reform UK has proven to be far less of a genuine alternative than was originally expected. Like those new media organs, it appears to be run by people who – afflicted by the most English of weaknesses – are desperate to be “respectable,” to be clubbable, to be embraced by the establishment. A Reform government may well prove to be a marginal improvement over the Tory and Labour regimes of recent decades. But real change can’t happen unless a party gets into power that is prepared to pull a Trump. That party may be Advance UK, which was founded this year by Ben Habib, a former member of Reform, and which Tommy joined last month.
“I don’t believe there’s any hope in Reform,” Tommy told Wootton, condemning Farage’s refusal to criticize mass immigration, censorship, two-tier policing, transgender ideology, and (not least) Islam – among much else – and contrasting his pusillanimity with the boldness of leaders like Trump and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders. Still, Tommy feels that a Prime Minister Farage would be an improvement over Starmer, provided that he’s succeeded, soon enough, by someone who’s got the guts, character, and vision to do what’s necessary to rescue Britain from Islam – assuming, of course, that it’s not already too late. How wonderful it would be if Farage’s successor were Tommy Robinson himself. At the moment such a development sounds extremely unlikely. But then again, so, at one time, did Donald Trump’s election as president.
