So the War on Populism is finally over. Go ahead, take a wild guess who won.
I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t the Russians, or the white supremacists, or the gilets jaunes, or Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult, or the misogynist Bernie Bros, or the MAGA-hat terrorists, or any of the other real or fictional “populist” forces that global capitalism has been waging war on for the last four years.
On 12 March, British PM Boris Johnson informed the public that families would continue to “lose loved ones before their time” as the coronavirus outbreak worsens.
He added:
We’ve all got to be clear, this is the worst public health crisis for a generation.
A little over 20 years ago, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) conducted a military exercise that involved a “hypothetical scenario” of hijacked planes flying into both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.
— Shakespeare, King Lear
Science of fear, dead reindeer and the Process Church + this day in history w/the Beslan massacre and our song of the day by Deerhoof on your Morning Monarchy for September 1, 2016.
Fear Makes People Stupid!
“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”—Edward R. Murrow, Broadcast Journalist
America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.
The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.
Tom Secker Presents Professor Lars Svendsen
In a culture that in many ways is characterized by social disintegration, fear is something we all share, a unifying perspective on existence. Political fear does not arise in a vacuum, it is created and maintained. This week we explore these ideas with Professor Lars Svendsen, the author of A Philosophy of Fear. We discuss why he wrote the book, where the modern culture and climate of fear comes from, whether philosophy has adequately confronted it, and how a politics of trust could be the antidote to the politics of fear.
Today, almost all politics are a politics of fear, and almost all policies are defended and excused through some notion of 'security'. Fear-therefore-security is the dominant political dynamic of our time. This week I take a look at these concepts, exploring whether all politics is a politics of fear, and offering examples of when this can work well and when it can work very badly. I focus in on the recent general election in the UK, showing how every candidate, even those offering some degree of real opposition, are all engaged in a politics of fear and security.
Peter B. Collins Presents Peter van Buren
On the February 21, 2015 episode of Exposing Faux Capitalism, I discussed: Cutting through media censorship and fear mongering in the vaccine debate, and talk about the suspicious alleged killing of three Muslims in North Carolina and suspicious reported death of a young boy wandering out in the cold in Toronto.
