Hate Nigel Farage? You're Probably Why He is Succeeding.

Ditto for those who hate Trump.

As my British friends know — but my fellow ‘Mericans might not — the Reform Party of Nigel Farage did remarkably well in local council elections over the weekend, mainly at the expense of what were the two major parties of longstanding, Labour and the Conservatives. Councils aren’t as powerful in the UK as states are in the US, but these elections are still an important indicator. And what is indicated is that Reform is now the leading party by far. Here is one projection of what would have occurred if this were a General Election to elect the House of Commons.

By the way, I stole that chart from Rod Dreher, who also has interesting analysis of these UK election results.

Nigel Farage has been compared to Donald Trump, mainly in that both are supposedly “right-wing” populists. The irony is that those who call the two right-wing and worse, much worse, do not get a most significant similarity between Nigel and the Donald — both owe their political success to the foolishness of their adversaries. In other words, if you hate Farage, you are probably why he is succeeding. Ditto for Trump.

Try not to have a conniption if I’m talking about you. Let’s instead go through some history.

It is easy to forget that the issue that got Trump rolling in 2015 as he launched his campaign was illegal immigration. Yes, people from polite society fell on their fainting couches when he told it like it is as soon as he walked off the golden escalator. But normies knew he was right. And he took a much harder line on immigration than the other Republican candidates. The rest did not get how fed up the Republican base and many independents were with illegal immigration.

Farage, of course, first became successful because he campaigned doggedly for Brexit when the two major parties did not. (Well, Boris Johnson and a very few Tories jumped on the Brexit bandwagon late. But Boris proved to be an unprincipled opportunist. I say that as someone who was a big fan of him before 2020.) And probably the biggest reason Brexit ended up winning in a national referendum is because the English wanted to stop the invasion of incompatible and even predatory immigrants from across the Channel.

In both countries, the establishment refused to heed the clear message that normal Americans and British wanted the illegal immigration stopped. After Biden was “elected,” that puppet regime turbocharged the Invasion with horrific consequences and a continuing toll of murders and rapes. In the UK, the Invasion became a “Boriswave” which unelected Wet Tory stooge Rishi Sunak and then Labour under Starmer did little to nothing to stop, much less deport.

Oh, the Tories made noises about controlling immigration and got some votes because of that, but then did not keep their promises. Which brings me to a second reason why Trump and Farage are successful.

To spare readers from the spectacle of me foaming at the mouth, I will pass quickly over the factor of the major parties of the Left inviting a Trumpist rebellion. It is obvious that the Democrats and Labour have been awful for some time. They could not even manage to find better candidates for President and Prime Minister than Biden, Harris, and Starmer, for God’s sake. The question is why have voters rejected not just Democrats and Labour, but also establishment Republicans and the Tories.

The answer is “failure theater.” For those unfamiliar with failure theater, it sounds something like this: “Gosh we really want to stop illegal immigration/fraud/crime/rigged elections but we just can’t because of the other party/political norms/we need you to elect more of us/blah blah blah.” Thus the Republican base told Republican politicians to stop Obama, Obamacare, Biden and so on, and the Republican politicians, even if they had majorities in both houses of Congress, pretended they wanted to but just couldn’t.

This routine only fooled the base, including me, for so long. Eventually, we saw through it. And as it continued, we got fed up with establishment Republicans, many of whom I once supported. This still continues in the Senate, the main holdout of establishment RINOs, with the failure to pass the SAVE Act to clean up elections.

In Britain, the Tories’ main failure theater under Cameron, May, Johnson and Sunak was not getting control of immigration. The excuse for years was membership in the European Union prevented that. But then when the UK left the EU via the Brexit referendum, the Tories let the illegal immigration become practically an invasion. Johnson used COVID as one excuse for that. (Oh, don’t get me started on how Johnson turned the country against him by his COVID policies.)

So voters are no longer taking the usual path of rejecting one major party by electing the other major party; they are rejecting both. (Of course, here in the U. S., where the two major parties are more entrenched, that looks slightly different. Here they have more and more rejected the old establishment wing of the Republican Party. Jeb! Bush crashing and burning in 2016 GOP primaries was a surprising moment in that process.)

Finally, the opponents of Trump and Farage went too far in trying to dispatch both and ended up making both look like courageous heroes. (We can argue about whether they are heroes. I think they are. My point is that opponents made them look like heroes.)

Trump’s opponents could not stick to old fashioned lying and vilification, with censorship and two bogus impeachments thrown in. No, they used lawfare to try to bankrupt and jail him between his two terms. He was indicted four times on 88 counts — or was it 91? People lost count. One DA, the now discredited Fani Willis, even summoned him to Atlanta for a mug shot. Trump brilliantly turned that into a campaign photo. Rough sorts who have had mug shots taken of them were not the only ones to love that. I myself bought the t-shirt.

Then came July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. While he is speaking to a Trump rally, a bullet rips through his ear. If he had not turned to look at a graph of illegal immigration, it would have entered his skull. He ducks below the podium, but when the Secret Service is about to hustle him away, he insists on encouraging the shocked crowd. Bloodied, he stands up, raises his defiant fist in the air and shouts, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

That epic moment in American history still gives me chills. I knew right then that Trump had won the election after opponents tried to jail and even kill him. And his opponents are a big reason he won.

Nothing quite that dramatic has occurred in Farage’s case. But he has been assaulted in the streets by Leftists. And an attempt to debank him blew up in the faces of the banks involved and of the BBC who reported lies about it. This has buttressed his reputation as a principled campaigner with unprincipled opposition.

More could be said on how the opponents of Trump and Farage, in trying to drag down and even destroy the two, have only dragged down and discredited themselves for all to see, and have elevated Trump and Farage to become heroes to a great many. Flawed heroes, but heroes nonetheless in the face of adversaries both predatory and foolish.

So, again, do you hate Trump and/or Farage? You are probably part of why they have so succeeded against the odds.

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Lead-in image courtesy of the Byline Times, a Farage hating publication appropriately.

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