Delingpole: The 2010s Were the Twilight of the Elites

This was the Decade of the Twilight of the Elites. From Brexit to the U.S. presidential election, from Bolsonaro in Brazil to the people’s revolutions that swept Europe, the arrogant, corrupt and complacent political establishments of the old order fought desperately to uphold their rotten hegemony only to be crushed, schooled and humiliated to the point of near-irrelevance by a mighty wave of populism. Here were some of the key moments…

Donald Trump’s Presidential Victory

No other event in the 2010s is going to eclipse the significance of Donald Trump’s presidential victory. We think of it now as a foregone conclusion but even on election day, President Hillary Clinton seemed so inevitable that bookmakers were offering 9 to 1 odds for anyone foolish enough to bet on a President Donald Trump.

After the damage of the Obama era, the U.S. was just one election cycle away from oblivion: under Hillary, the Swamp’s takeover of the entire political system would have been completed. Ordinary people in the U.S. — the kind, as the CEI’s Myron Ebell memorably put it, who dig stuff or make stuff or grow stuff — understood this and grabbed their chance to save America while they still could.

Nigel Farage versus Bob Geldof on the Thames

Donald Trump’s presidency would probably never have happened without the inspiring example of Brexit; Brexit, in turn, might never have happened without three decades of tireless campaigning by the ebullient, Mister-Toad-like cheeky-chappie Nigel Farage with his trademark cigarettes and pints of beer.

A key moment of the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign was when Farage sailed up the River Thames towards London’s Houses of Parliament in a fleet of fishing boats to be confronted by multi-millionaire pop star Bob Geldof in an expensively chartered floating gin-palace full of champagne-swilling Remainers. Nothing better symbolised the gulf between the globalist, Davos-style elitist metropolitan types who supported Remain and the working class makers, doers and fishers who supported Brexit.

Project Fear

Among those lining up to warn the British people that Brexit would be a disaster for them were: President Obama; the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney; the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gideon Osborne; Christine Lagarde (then head of the International Monetary Fund, now working for the EU themselves); the Confederation of British Industry; Prime Minister David Cameron; the European Union. The British people – as memorably recounted in Dominic Frisby’s Brexit Song – told these elites exactly where they could shove their fear-mongering nonsense.

Donald Trump’s tweets

Deplored by the GOP Establishment as brash, demeaning, unpresidential, President Trump’s Twitter feed is, in fact, his greatest weapon. He uses it to bypass the irredeemably biased, liberal-left-leaning, blinkered mainstream media and speak directly to the people who elected him in the punchy, funny, no-nonsense language they appreciate.

Obama’s red line

In 2013, both Obama and then Prime Minister David Cameron were itching to bomb the hell out of Assad’s Syrian regime. Like their predecessors, George W Bush and Tony Blair, both were neocon interventionists who believed — against most of the evidence from the previous decades — that chucking billions of dollars of men and materiel into foreign hellholes where everyone is fighting everyone can somehow bring order to chaos.

But they didn’t in this case — Obama because he’d chickened out, Cameron because he was vetoed by parliament — and it was a key turning point in international affairs, away from the Military-Industrial Complex beloved by the elite, in favour of the people. Ordinary people love their servicemen and women but are wary of sending them to unnecessary wars, especially ones which seem to cause more problems than they solve.

The Islamic State was a direct consequence of the botched handling of the second Iraq War; the Libyan intervention — Cameron’s proudest achievement — created a seedbed for more jihadi violence. Trump totally gets this. As, if he has any sense, will Boris Johnson.

South America’s Trump wins Brazil

Brazil is the world’s ninth-largest economy – bigger than Canada’s, Russia’s, Korea’s — so the election of Jair Bolsonaro as its president in 2018 was a highly significant victory for the forces of populism.

You could tell he was one of the good guys because the Western mainstream media routinely branded him ‘far-right’ and dwelt on his supposed sexism, racism and homophobia. But Brazil’s people wanted a leader who — finally — wasn’t a Marxist and was prepared to tackle the country’s monstrous levels of corruption and crime.

The United Nations Fails to Stop ‘Climate Change’

Despite a succession of annual conferences in exotic locations, attended by upwards of 30,000 delegates and their mighty carbon footprints, the United Nations made zero difference to climate change.

Actually, that’s not quite true: thanks to agreements reached at the COP21 climate summit in Paris in 2015, global warming may have been reduced by the end of this century by as much as 0.048°C (0.086°F). That’s a whopping one-fifth of one degree of reduced warming, achieved for a cost of just $1.5 trillion per annum.

We’re exposed to so much fake-news propaganda from the Greta-Thunberg-worshipping MSM that we sometimes forget the truth about the great climate scare: given a choice between green virtue-signalling and economic prosperity, free nations will always plump for prosperity. It’s why — without extreme authoritarian measures — the Climate Industrial Complex can never hope to triumph.

“People in this country have had enough of experts”

British politician Michael Gove is right, of course. This is the decade which tested the notion of “expertise” to destruction: from the expert political analysts who told us that Brexit and a Trump presidency were an impossibility to the scientific experts who kept insisting, against all evidence, that climate change was a deadly and unprecedented threat. From the media authorities who told us that Islam was a religion of peace and that anyone who worried about irrelevant stuff like border security and immigration or national sovereignty was ‘far-right’, to the medical experts who told us that there are definitely more than two genders.

We finally realised that the ‘expert’ class of supposedly trusted authority has in fact had most of its common sense educated out of it at university…

Seventeen different intelligence agencies…

Apparently — so the Democrats and the liberal MSM kept telling us — President Trump was guilty of Russian collusion because no fewer than seventeen different intelligence agencies said so. Amazingly, however, despite this apparent unanimous consensus from the various agencies of the Deep State, no convincing evidence whatsoever has been found to support their embittered smear campaign.

When Trump is re-elected in 2020 — as he will be — there will surely be a reckoning; and this reckoning is likely to have strong popular support. Up until the 2010s, most Americans would likely have taken it for granted that institutions like the CIA and the FBI could be trusted to look after the nation’s interests on non-partisan lines. No one — certainly no one on the Trump side of the argument — believes that any more.

There are no ‘really good people’ behind the door

One of the great lessons of this decade is just how incompetent, self-serving, arrogant and counterproductive the global elite establishment actually is. For years – since the Second World War, in fact – we have taken it on trust that the loosely social democratic consensus which has governed politics in the West is benign and fair and more or less beneficial. But it’s not.

These people are preening buffoons in it largely to preserve the status quo in the interests of future generations of preening buffoons like themselves. Dominic Cummings, now advisor to Boris Johnson and one of the key architects of Brexit, put this very well in a 2014 Times interview when he lambasted the incompetence of David Cameron’s government. He said: “Everyone thinks there’s some moment, like in a James Bond movie, where you open the door and that’s where the really good people are. But there is no door.”

Boris Johnson versus Davos

Among Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s first moves on winning the recent general election with a much, much larger majority than had been predicted was to ban his ministers from attending the annual globalist World Economic Forum shindig in Davos.

“Our focus is on delivering for the people, not champagne with billionaires,” said one of his spokesmen. Smart move. Davos is the embodiment of everything the global populist revolution is trying to overthrow: a cabal of achingly PC billionaires, star-struck politicians, crony capitalists and central bankers conspiring how best to stitch up the global economy in their own interests while the rest of us can go hang.

What will the 2020s bring?