Farage, grinning broadly and never apologizing, has been attacked for wanting to deny some health care to immigrants and for putting up candidates who do things like decrying aid to “Bongo-Bongo land.” Here, surrounded by reporters and American conservatives, he is at unusually high risk for an international incident.
.. Jan Helfeld. Showing up at CPAC means risking an encounter with Helfeld, a minarchist who has been dubbed “the Socratic assassin” and (less kindly) “the libertarian Borat” for his meek-yet-torturous interviews about whether all government action is violence.
.. The American trip .. is supposed to connect UKIP with strategists who don’t know about it. “There are things like data mining where you’re much further advanced than we are,” says Farage. The conservative movement in America is stewing with ideas, compared to the U.K. “You’ve got think tanks; you’ve got policy development. Almost all of our commercial law is made in Brussels.”
.. When Britain’s leading Conservatives have made news in America, it’s been for hiring Obama campaign veterans for their own races, or for criticizing the Republicans who made foreign policy trips to London.
.. Farage said in a 2010 speech addressed to European Council President Herman Van Rompuy. “If you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they’re left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope that the Euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens.”
.. In a Jan. 14 Fox News appearance, Farage said that Europe was riddled with “no-go zones,” and that “wherever you look you see this blind eye being turned and you see the growth of ghettos where the police and all the normal agents of the law have withdrawn and that is where Sharia Law has come in.” Just five days later, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal spoke in London and warned of immigrants trying to colonize Europe.
.. “Farage gave an amazing speech at the embassy,” recalls Breitbart News’s Steve Bannon. (“The embassy” is the nickname for the house Breitbart News rents in Washington.) “I had Schlapp on one side, [Senator Jeff] Sessions on one side, and Laura Ingraham on the other, and they were blown away. The dinner ends, and Schlapp asks, ‘Is there any way you can come to CPAC?’”
.. “We’ve done it by picking up votes across the spectrum, but in particular we’ve done it by picking up votes from people who run their own businesses, who get up early in the morning, who work hard, and who find themselves, in our modern corporatist economy—I say that, instead of our modern capitalist economy—looking for champions,”
.. He acts on the belief that he doesn’t owe anything to the media. They’ve never been nice to him, and that’s still the case.”
.. “We have all, in the west, mistakenly—and I think in a very cowardly manner—we have pursued a policy of multiculturalism. We have pursued a policy of encouraging division in our lives, when we should have pursued a policy of coming together.”
“If you triangulate Russia, WikiLeaks, Assange and Trump associates the person who comes up with the most hits is Nigel Farage.
.. The source mentioned Farage’s links with Roger Stone, Trump’s long-time political adviser who has admitted being in contact with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker whom US intelligence agencies believe to be a Kremlin agent.
.. The spokesman also declined to comment on whether Farage had received compensation from the Russian state-backed media group RT for his media appearances. RT, which has featured Farage about three times over the last 18 months, also declined to comment, citing confidentiality.
.. Farage has said he only met Assange once has but declined to say how long the two have known each other.
Farage, who has declared mission accomplished and quit the leadershipof the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party since the Brexit vote in June, is a self-important loudmouth who should be taken seriously. His pomposity masks political guile. His bigotry is attuned to the times.
You can’t have observed Farage over the past couple of years and not think Trump may well win in November. That’s Britain’s lesson to America. There is too much smug Hillary-has-it sentiment swilling around.
.. The thing is, the prosperity was skewed, just as it’s skewed in the United States, leaving wide swathes of the white working class in particular incensed that employment has migrated offshore at the same speed as immigrants have come onshore to take a dwindling number of jobs.
.. Britain, too, has its miniature version of flyover country now. The global citizens of big cities like London and Manchester who voted Remain were aghast that anyone out there in Lincolnshire (let alone a majority nationwide) could think differently, in the same way as the global citizens of New York or Los Angeles can’t see Trump’s appeal to tens of millions of Americans.
.. The uncomfortable truth about the Trump campaign is that, like the Brexit campaign, it is perfectly timed to ride a mood of popular revolt — against neoliberal economics, against the bankers who emerged with impunity from the 2008 financial meltdown, against what Farage called “global corporatism,”
.. Because Hillary Clinton, as a symbol of dynastic entitlement (albeit a female one), is such an easy target for an anti-establishment movement, she is particularly vulnerable to the forces that have produced Trump and Brexit.
.. “One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalization.” The most extreme expressions of this, he noted, were New Labour in Britain and the Democratic Party, led respectively by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.