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This is personal!Nigel Farage beats the establishment. Again.There is something wonderfully British about the Nigel Farage situation.MP Farage recently resigned his Clacton seat, forcing a by-election and effectively asking voters to elect him all over again. Britain’s major political parties then faced the obvious question:Who were they going to put up against him?Their answer:Nobody.Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Greens all declined. Officially, they said that Farage had created a “farce,” a “circus,” a “vanity project,” and serious politicians simply wouldn’t dignify it.How terribly principled.There is another possibility:they were afraid he would beat the pants off them.Rather than send a candidate into the electoral woodchipper, Britain’s political establishment discovered a sudden respect for staying home.Farage, you see, is simplytoo far rightto run against.And what, precisely, makes Nigel Farage so terrifyingly “far right”? He thinks Britain should control its borders, British laws should ultimately be made in Britain, violent criminals should receive meaningful sentences, taxes and regulation should be lower, farmers and domestic industry should be protected, Net Zero mandates deserve reconsideration, free speech is worth defending, and British history need not be treated as a national embarrassment.He also supports keeping the NHS free at the point of use, which is presumably an especially cunning form of fascism.Apparently “far right” is now easier than actually arguing with Farage's policies. The particularly awkward problem for Britain's political establishment is that increasing numbers of British voters seem to agree with him.Perhaps the frightening thing about Farage isn't that he's far right.It's that he's far too popular.Apparently the proper way to defeat the dangerous far right is not to stand against it and persuade voters to reject it.It is to hide from it.Fortunately, democracy found someone much braver to run:Count Binface":Binface is a 5,900-year-old intergalactic space warrior who wears a rubbish bin on his head and campaigns to make 99 Flakes cost 99p and ban speakerphones in public.Compared with Westminster, something of a moderate.So Britain’s major political parties left the job of confronting Nigel Farage to a man dressed as household waste.Then it got better.Farage won with roughly 63 percent.Count Binface came second with about 27 percent. And yes,Binfacewas actually financed, backed and supported by the other major Parties and still roundly beaten."I've managed to beat the establishment candidate"Nigel FarageThe man wearing a rubbish bin was willing to do something Labour, the Conservatives, Lib Dems and Greens were not: stand against Nigel Farage. Perhaps the establishment isn’t frightened that Farage is too extreme. Perhaps it is frightened that he is too popular. So popular, that they could only put up a trash bin as a candidate.But Farage does seem extraordinarily unlucky around British institutions. First he wasdebanked by Coutts, the 300-year-old private bank synonymous with Britain's wealthy and well-connected establishment, producing a scandal serious enough that regulators had to “remind” banks not to discriminate on political grounds. But of course, charges against the bank were never brought.Now theMetropolitan Police are investigating Reform donations, while theParliamentary Commissioner for Standards resumed yet another investigation into Farageupon his return to Parliament. Sound familiar?Nothing seems to sharpen the institutional microscope quite like a conservative becoming inconveniently popular. Pure coincidence, naturally.Perhaps Farage should try wearing a rubbish bin on his head. It appears to attract considerably less institutional concern.Either way, British politics has achieved perfect symbolism:The establishment refused to take out the rubbish.So the rubbish took them out.Cheers!Jill and Robert with Nigel - at Palm Beach, Trump’s acceptance speech, 2024.(I can’t resist finishing this essay up with an old favorite!)Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it on social media, crosspost or email it to a friend!ShareSo, apparently my sense of humor belongs in the rubbish bin and my politics are “far right.” This may be particularly problematic since I am actually a dual U.S.-British citizen, although for reasons increasingly obvious, I have somehow neglected to renew my British passport.Subscribe nowIf my particular combination of politics, sarcasm and rubbish-bin humor appeals to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Being this ridiculous every week takes considerably more time than you might imagine.JGMWOKE 1.0 VERsUS WOKE 2.0Woke 1.0: Change the CultureDEI everywhereCritical Race Theory“Equity” over equalityIdentity politicsIntersectionalityPronouns in the bioGender as self-identification“Latinx”Defund the PoliceAbolish the PoliceCancel cultureSafe spacesTrigger warningsMicroaggressionsSpeech is violenceSilence is violenceWords are violenceMen can get pregnantBiological sex is a spectrumDrag Queen Story HourRemove statuesRename schoolsRename military basesRewrite curriculaDecolonize everythingReparationsCorporate DEI departmentsRacial preferences in hiring/admissionsMandatory diversity trainingESG“Anti-racism”“White privilege”“Whiteness”“Heteronormativity”“Lived experience” over inconvenient statisticsCensorship rebranded as “content moderation”Disagreement rebranded as “hate”And, naturally, a land acknowledgment before the quarterly sales meeting, because apparently the entire United States is stolen land, private property is a colonial construct, and the rightful owners are whichever Indigenous people occupied it at the historically convenient moment.Woke 2.0: Change the SystemNow the ambitions get somewhat larger.Abolish ICEDecriminalize illegal border crossingSanctuary cities and statesMass amnesty / pathway to citizenshipExpand voting access to noncitizens in some local electionsAbolish the Electoral CollegeMake Washington, D.C. a stateMake Puerto Rico a stateExpand the Supreme CourtImpose Supreme Court term limitsRestrict presidential control over executive agenciesStrengthen the independence of the federal bureaucracyWeaken or eliminate the Senate filibusterAbolish the Senate, or radically restructure itReplace equal state representation with population-based representationLower the voting age to 16Expand federal voting-rights legislationUniversal voter registrationRestore voting rights to felonsReparations through government policyWealth taxesExpand federal administrative power over climate, labor and civil-rights policyNational gun-control measuresRestrict or eliminate qualified immunityFederalize abortion protectionsConstitutional amendments guaranteeing various positive rightsAnd when an inconvenient constitutional structure gets in the way, explain that the Constitution itself is the problem.Woke 1.0 wanted to change what you could say.Woke 2.0 wants to change the machinery that decides who governs.Or, put another way: the revolution has moved on from the HR department, to governance.Woke 1.0:Pronouns, bathrooms, statues and DEI.Woke 2.0:Borders, elections, courts, states, the presidency and the Senate.JGM