Tuesday 25 April 2017

We need more liberals like Keith Olbermann


I've been watching a lot of Keith Olbermann's series The Resistence and The Closer on GQ's Youtube channel. He's a very angry man who yells facts at his audience and does so in a well-researched, properly sourced and well-written way.

He's not trying to be a nice liberal. He's not trying to be soft and non-confrontational. He's not interested in pulling punches in the name of fairness. He's on the attack because he views the country he lives in and believes in as being at risk. He's passionate about what he's talking about. He's well aware that the right has its Alex Joneses and Bill O'Reillys (well... not so much them anymore, but you get what I mean) and those people, disgusting as they are, speak with certainty and passion and don't feel a need to beg to be heard.

They just shout and we on the left need to learn to shout louder, shout more eloquently and shout truer things than the opposition.

I say this as a British lefty who has spent his entire adult life watching this country's supposedly left wing party sell out its principles to become Tory Lite and what other left wing movements in this country still exist become progressively more interested in eating their own young than actually getting things done.

We need to actually start standing up for ourselves and be fully prepared to tell our opponents when they are being racist and sexist and xenophobic and homophobic and transphobic and privileged.

Because this is why they win. While we simper and try to understand the racists and homophobes and make them feel safe and valid for some fucking reason, they go on being loud and comfortingly certain for their voters.

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