Brexit Penny Dropping?

[La Colombe]

 

[RecklessAbandon]

50 minutes ago, La Colombe said:

 

As I has said before, I have listened to a lot of those conned by Brexiteers on JOB's show and this call is not an isolated example.

There is hundreds of hours of the ill informed and utterly convinced yet ignorant people out there just like that caller.

[woolley]

6 hours ago, RecklessAbandon said:

There is hundreds of hours of the ill informed and utterly convinced yet ignorant people out there just like that caller.

The irony.

[The Voice of Reason]

8 hours ago, RecklessAbandon said:

As I has said before, I have listened to a lot of those conned by Brexiteers on JOB's show and this call is not an isolated example.

There is hundreds of hours of the ill informed and utterly convinced yet ignorant people out there just like that caller.

Well if you take O’Brien as any sort of purveyor of truth or reason you really need to take a good look at yourself.

He is just a rabble rouser but seems to have taken you in. Please keep watching or listening to the nonsense he peddles if it suits you . No doubt you have spent “hundreds of hours” doing so

I don’t blame him, he earns a good living appealing to the simple minded. Who wouldn’t?
 

[RecklessAbandon]

Nigel Farage, 52% stake holder in Reform LLC since 2018 - had no idea there would be racists in the racist party.

Ferrari - "Will you disown them?"

Farage - "I may well do that" - Translation "Hell no, these guys are popular with a certain demographic which I am relying on"

[RecklessAbandon]

10 hours ago, The Voice of Reason said:

Well if you take O’Brien as any sort of purveyor of truth or reason you really need to take a good look at yourself.
 

Well making Brexidiots feel uncomfortable by holding up a mirror to their flawed thinking or getting them to say the "quiet bit out loud" doesn't seem like a reason to "take a good look at myself".

I would suggest drinking the Brexit Con coolade is more a reason for concern.  But then I wasn't conned.

[RecklessAbandon]

12 hours ago, woolley said:

The irony.

Remain voters knew what they were voting for.  Leavers were the ones leaping off a cliff with the promise we will grow wings before we dash ourselves on the rocks below.

So listening to "I want to not be under EU laws", "which EU laws specifically?", "I don't know, I can't name any" doesn't really paint the Leaver voter base as the well informed lot you think they are (or realistically pretend they are).

[RecklessAbandon]

I'm not going to post the link (I don't want to give GeeBeeBees the click traffic) - but what is this BS?

Farage being silenced?  You couldn't pry Farage from the limelight with a crowbar.

Sounds like the pre-emptive "we didn't win because the media silence and THEY don't want you to hear my truth" BS that Trump has been employing in the US.

[P.K.]

11 hours ago, The Voice of Reason said:

Well if you take O’Brien as any sort of purveyor of truth or reason you really need to take a good look at yourself.

He is just a rabble rouser but seems to have taken you in. Please keep watching or listening to the nonsense he peddles if it suits you . No doubt you have spent “hundreds of hours” doing so

I don’t blame him, he earns a good living appealing to the simple minded. Who wouldn’t?
 

@The Voice of Reason

Well, to use a tactic from JOB's playbook, you must therefore know a considerable amount of times where he has lied on air?

So post them up please. Good luck with that one...!

Personally I was surprised that brexit only had a moderate chapter in his book "How To Be Right". However the examples quoted illustrated in very clear terms just how the electorate were taken for fools. Overall it was quite a good read.

Having just finished "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World" decided I needed some lighter reading with JOB's "How They Broke Britain" and so far so very good. Recommended.

[The Voice of Reason]

17 minutes ago, P.K. said:

@The Voice of Reason

Well, to use a tactic from JOB's playbook, you must therefore know a considerable amount of times where he has lied on  air

Does the name Carl Beech ring any bells with you?

[Non-Believer]

1 hour ago, RecklessAbandon said:

I'm not going to post the link (I don't want to give GeeBeeBees the click traffic) - but what is this BS?

Farage being silenced?  You couldn't pry Farage from the limelight with a crowbar.

Sounds like the pre-emptive "we didn't win because the media silence and THEY don't want you to hear my truth" BS that Trump has been employing in the US.

I watched Farage being interviewed on BBC this morning by Naga Munchetty and another guy whose name escapes me. He denied any responsibility for Brexit or its "shortcomings" (in fact he denied responsibility for virtually everything that was put to him). Lots of promises about the Reform manifesto which he'll presumably deny any responsibility for in time as well.

Farage is a self-serving charlatan.

[P.K.]

8 minutes ago, The Voice of Reason said:

Does the name Carl Beech ring any bells with you?

Yes. A very convincing liar who took a lot of people in. As a brexiteer you would know all about that...

However following the wrong lead doesn't mean O'Brien lied about anything now does it...?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/27/carl-beech-plausibility-of-liars-paucity-of-proof

Try again.

[RecklessAbandon]

27 minutes ago, The Voice of Reason said:

Does the name Carl Beech ring any bells with you?

So one example, I'm sure you can point to others?

[The Voice of Reason]

 

The derangement of James O’Brien

How They Broke Britain is a liberal-elite conspiracy theory, stretched over 350 pages of pompous, smug prose.

TIM BLACK 
COLUMNIST 

10th December 2023

 

 

British radio presenter James O’Brien is not easy to warm to. This is mainly due to his personality. A combination of moderate intelligence, a sense of public-schooled entitlement and a gargantuan ego has generated the event horizon of smugness – a man so full of himself it’s a wonder light can escape his presence. Sadly, thanks to his prominent media and social-media profile, we the public now struggle to escape O’Brien, too.

 

The privately educated son of a Daily Telegraphjournalist, O’Brien had been trying to force his views on the public for several years via various media outlets before he finally landed a plum gig on talk-radio station LBC in 2004. It is from this pulpit that O’Brien first began making a name for himself, mainly by humiliating and mocking mostly working-class callers who had the temerity to disagree with him.

There was a blip for O’Brien’s career in 2014-15. Over the course of several months, he played a major role in propagating the idea that there was a murderous ‘VIP paedophile network’ at the heart of the British establishment. He treated the fantastical claims of alleged victim Carl Beech as gospel, and repeatedly invited Mark Watts, the head of media organisation Exaro, on to his show to spread Beech’s claims. They accused a string of prominent people of raping and murdering children. But none of it was true. Beech was himself outed as a paedophile and eventually sentenced to 18 years in jail for fraud and perverting the course of justice. Exaro has long since folded. But not before lives had been ruined by claims O’Brien helped to spread. Something he has never properly apologised for.

 

Of course, such is his throbbing egotism, O’Brien was never going to let all that stand in the way of his career. Opportunity knocked in 2016, when a majority of mainly working-class Brits voted to leave the EU. Britain’s pro-EU middle classes were suddenly calling out for a vengeful voice with a superiority complex ready and willing to vent their prejudices against all things Brexit. Enter James O’Brien. From that point on, the smug-jock has gleefully turned the full force of his elite contempt on to Leave voters and indeed anyone deemed to be ‘on the wrong side of history’. His shows’ listening figures have soared to nearly 1.5million, and he’s become a pin-up for centrist dads and liberal bigots across the nation.

Not content with smearing those he disagrees with as racists, xenophobes and proto-fascists, and indulging in bien pensant anti-Toryism on his weekday LBC show, O’Brien has now decided to develop this shtick in his fourth book, How They Broke Britain. This follows on from his previous efforts: Loathe Thy Neighbour (2015) on immigration, and two more on the cleverness of James O’Brien, How to Be Right (2018) and How Not to Be Wrong (2020).

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How They Broke Britain reveals the shallowness of O’Brien’s supposed intellect. ‘Obviously, there was no real plan or secret conspiracy to break Britain’, he writes. A serious thinker wouldn’t have to state that. O’Brien has to because that’s precisely what his hysterical title and thin narrative suggest – namely, that Britain’s ‘unnecessary domestic decline and international diminishment’ can be laid at the feet of just 10 people: Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, Andrew Neil, Matthew Elliott, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

 

This is what O’Brien’s puddle-deep thesis boils down to: the UK’s ‘hideously right-wing media’, led by Murdoch and by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, created an ‘ecosystem in which dishonesty could flourish and facts wither’. All because, according to O’Brien, Murdoch wants to make money and Dacre is a far-right paranoiac frightened of immigrants. The media has thus ‘commoditised hatred’ and ‘commoditised fear’, laying ‘the red carpet of racism down [on] which Farage could slither’ and helping ‘to create the environment in which Brexit could happen’.

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O’Brien’s tall tale doesn’t stop there. Having caused Brexit, the ‘ludicrously Tory-leaning media’ facilitated the prime ministership of Boris Johnson, ‘the living, lying proof of just what can rise to the top when the subversion of the media / political ecosystem… has come close to critical mass’.

Or, in short, it was the media wot dunnit.

 

 

How They Broke Britain also reveals the flipside to O’Brien’s conspiracism: his contempt for the public and for democracy. The people that actually voted to leave the EU in 2016, and the Red Wallers who voted for Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2019, are effectively dismissed as dupes, puppets, the passive objects of bad men’s designs. In this regard, How They Broke Britain starts with a terrible Noam Chomsky quote – ‘As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please’ – and deteriorates from then on.

The achingly privileged O’Brien doesn’t treat his fellow citizens, particularly the working-class ones, as rational, autonomous beings. No, as his long-time treatment of his radio-show callers testifies, they’re beneath O’Brien. They’re always ‘manipulated’, ‘fed an almost unleavened diet of deceit, division and distraction’ by the ‘malevolent genius’ of Rupert Murdoch and the ‘malign’ Paul Dacre. And they’re irrational – the willing consumers of the ‘fear’ and ‘hate’ packaged up by tabloids pandering to their ‘worst impulses’. Elsewhere, O’Brien tells us that older Brexit voters, ‘bamboozled and betrayed by the swiftness with which the Britain of Bernard Manning and Enoch Powell had been abandoned’, take to Nigel Farage because he makes ‘their prejudices feel respectable again’.

 

That’s how O’Brien sees those who don’t share his painfully narrow worldview. As brainwashed. As people possessed not of thoughts and beliefs, but of ‘impulses’, ‘prejudices’ and ‘bigotries’. There’s barely a page of How They Broke Britain that doesn’t drip with O’Brien’s bourgeois condescension and contempt for the so-called lower orders.

. He can’t accept the simple fact that people disagree with him for good reasons, not wicked ones. He can’t accept that some people don’t share his affluent, liberal worldview. That they voted to leave the EU not because they’re racist bigots, spoon-fed hate by the Daily Mail, but because they wanted to repatriate law-making powers, to ‘take back control’.

O’Brien’s mind is just shut too tight. He has taught himself ‘how to be right’ by steadfastly refusing to countenance the possibility that he might be wrong. He won’t allow even a scintilla of doubt to intrude upon his monomaniacal loathing of Brexit. And it’s this overriding, near-pathological self-certainty that sustains his conspiracism, that allows him to write such a thick, myopic book, in which he constructs a false story of Britain’s imagined descent at the hands of an evil, incompetent few.

 

This silly, one-note narrative is tedious enough when he monologues versions of it at the start of his radio shows. But when it’s stretched out over 350 pages of pompous and hysterical prose, it’s near enough unreadable. It amounts to a tale not of ‘how they broke Britain’, but of how Brexit broke James O’Brien’s brain.

 

 

Edited June 14 by The Voice of Reason

[RecklessAbandon]

Okay, so what does that opinion piece/book review have to do with anything (other than the fact that the author is a staunch defender of Brexit and Farago, Spiked activists were active in campaigning for Brexit and responsible for spreading the exact lies that JOB was exposing - funny that)?

Also, Spiked?  Really?  You're pinning your arguement on a website that defends the likes of Katie Hopkins, Nigel Farage, Alex Jones, the Democratic Football Lads' Alliance, Tommy Robinson, Toby Young, Arron Banks, Viktor Orbán?

Spiked (magazine) - Wikipedia