I know, it’s hard, what with all the fireworks around here, but there’s a lesson to be learned.

After the Brexit vote, Boris Johnson resigned.

And now, another architect of the catastrophe, Nigel Farage, has stepped down.

I have to give them some credit for recognizing, after the fact, what a disaster they have engineered, but they get no respect at all for running away like cowards from the hot flaming mess they made.

Please, America, remember this: bullying, bigoted ignoramuses will disintegrate at the first hint of opposition. Keep that in mind until at least November, OK?

Oh, who am I kidding. This is an electorate with the attention span of a jellyfish.

That’s a fucking dog-tornado-alert-siren.

It also comes out of /pol/, and is called “hILLhISTORY”, a reference to “hh” — “Heil Hitler”. And Donald Trump tweeted this bit of poison himself. Isn’t it reassuring to know that the Trump campaign is getting their slogans and ads crafted for free by the most evil collection of assholes on the Internet?

Earlier in this ugly election cycle, I read many articles arguing that, while they were not defending him, Trump was not literally a fascist. Don’t do that anymore. While you might have some clause you can pull out of your textbook definition to say that he doesn’t meet all of the specifications, he meets all the essential qualifications. He’s practicing the demagoguery of hate.

We’ve also allowed the demographic of ignorance to grow out of control to give him a power base.

---

Now Corey Lewandowski is claiming it was a simple “sherriff’s star”. These people are dishonest and disingenuous through and through.

By the way, fuck CNN for hiring that Trumpian bozo as a correspondent. This is also how the corruption of fascist demagoguery spreads–the assholes always fail upwards.

Christy Sheats posted this on her facebook page last March.

It would be horribly tragic if my ability to protect myself or my family were to be taken away, but that’s exactly what Democrats are determined to do by banning semi-automatic handguns.

You know exactly where this is going, right? Sheats is dead, shot by the police after she refused to drop that handgun, after she’d used it to murder her 17 and 22 year old daughters.

I think the tragedy is that no one took her guns away before she killed two people with them.

Republican families also feel the sting of our economy.

The wife of Maine Gov. Paul LePage has taken on a summer waitressing job near their Boothbay home. And she’s saving up for a Toyota RAV4.

Good for her. It’ll also give her more independence, and especially when her husband loses his job in the next election, I hope, that’ll give them some income to fall back on.

But of course it’s being politicized by Governor LePage.

Ann LePage had kept quiet about the gig, but her husband told a crowd at a recent town hall that his wife took a job to “supplement” his lowest-in-the-nation $70,000 salary. This year, the Republican governor unsuccessfully proposed to more than double his successor’s salary to $150,000.

Hang on, there. His wife quietly took on a hard, low-paying job to be able to afford some luxuries, and the governor is braying about it to justify getting a raise?

Look, he’s getting paid more than I do. You want to justify getting paid more? Do it by citing the work you do and how you deserve it for that, not by whining about how poor you are, when you aren’t. This is especially ironic coming from a governor who just had a tantrum over foodstamps, trying to end them because people who are really poor use them to occasionally buy a Twinkie. I guess he doesn’t see how similar that situation is to a well-off middle class family wanting more money so they can buy a shiny SUV.

Maybe when LePage shows a little empathy for the people he’s supposed to govern, it would be time to consider rewarding him for a job well done. I can’t see giving a raise to one of the worst governors in the country.

Or should I say, I’m so sorry, England and Wales? Because it looks like you’re going to have to drop that “United” stuff soon. You might also want to reconsider that “Great” prefixing “Britain”. Brexit won their referendum. The UK is going to begin the process of breaking from the EU. Stock markets are reacting with shock. The people who despise Nigel Farage are also shocked. Other countries in Europe are dismayed.

I’m afraid I see it in terms of what’s going on in the US today, and that worries me. Gary Younge’s take on the vote is informative. He talks about the incompetence of the Remain campaign, and how it was oblivious to the concerns of the people and set itself aside as the smart people who know better than you do, and never made a good case for remaining in the EU. And then he tears into the Leave campaigners.

It is a banal axiom to insist that “it’s not racist to talk about immigration”. It’s not racist to talk about black people, Jews or Muslims either. The issue is not whether you talk about them but how you talk about them and whether they ever get a chance to talk for themselves. When you dehumanise immigrants, using vile imagery and language, scapegoating them for a nation’s ills and targeting them as job-stealing interlopers, you stoke prejudice and foment hatred.

The chutzpah with which the Tory right – the very people who had pioneered austerity, damaging jobs, services and communities – blamed immigrants for the lack of resources was breathtaking. The mendacity with which a section of the press fanned those flames was nauseating. The pusillanimity of the remain campaign’s failure to counter these claims was indefensible.

Not everyone, or even most, of the people who voted leave were driven by racism. But the leave campaign imbued racists with a confidence they have not enjoyed for many decades and poured arsenic into the water supply of our national conversation.

In this atmosphere of racial animus and class contempt, political dislocation and electoral opportunism, the space for the arguments we need to have about immigration, democracy, and austerity simply did not exist. Our politics failed us. And since it is our politics only we can fix it.

I see this same dynamic playing out here in the US. The almost-successful Sanders campaign tells us there’s a huge part of the electorate that wants change from politics as usual, and yet the Democrats have anointed a moderate conservative, status quo candidate. Will Clinton actually respond to that productively? Will she make changes in party policy that will appeal to that broad swathe of the country that wants a more progressive government? She could end up the David Cameron of America.

Younge’s description above also fits the Trump campaign. The know-nothings are always a force to be reckoned with in this country, and if Brexit could win, could Trump rally the same forces to win here? That’s possible (but unlikely, we say, although everyone was saying Brexit was unlikely, too), but one way it could happen is if the Democrats try to take an uninspiring middle course.

What do I mean, “if”? The Democrats always take the path of trying to avoid offending anyone, and thereby end up pissing everyone off.

The world’s a somewhat scarier place this morning. I hope my country doesn’t end up contributing even more to the fear.