by Brian Patrick Bolger (June 2025)

Alas, I haven’t been short-listed for the new vacancy in the Vatican. Prince Harry and now President Trump are the bookmakers’ favourites. I have been away in Florida and, besides the alligators on the golf courses, it was a great trip visiting an old Special Forces friend of mine. It was a breath of fresh air in the US— people seemed happy enough and convivial, unlike in Europe where the sullen phone staring phenomenon is all the rage. On my voyage avec Air France, the millennial French man on the aisle seat refused to engage with me. It may have been my Fuck The Guardian t-shirt, but hey! He spent the entire journey eating Madeleines with his adjacent family, staring perplexed at the seat in front, no doubt thinking about how it all went wrong with the French Revolution. The modern world seems devoid of the old common parlance, the type of communal spirit which bonded communities. Growing up in Liverpool, I remember the constant chatter on trains and buses. People left their front doors open (don’t try this at home’ folks) as children played without carrying carving knives. In London today you need a bullet-proof jacket to avoid a stabbing on the Underground. It’s not about ethnic minorities. Black Uber drivers in Florida are mega. Or Maga. They were hilarious. Across the pond, in the Sceptered Isle, ‘This Other Eden,’ as Shakespeare described it, there is a serious disconnect, a sullen and collapsing community and an overbearing legal elite which has ruined normal discourse by policing free speech.
We visited the famous ‘Dixie Crossroads’ Rock Shrimp restaurant in Titusville. I had Rock Shrimp and Shrimp Crackers. The waitress had never heard of Liverpool. I said I’d never heard of Titusville. Then onto the Navy Seals museum in Fort Pierce where I saw a beautiful Malinois service dog with its handler. He wore one of those special dog harnesses with a sign ‘Do Not Pet.’ I’m sending one to Meghan Markle…
I had a beer and Sushi on the pier overlooking the magnificent white ‘Cocoa Beach.’ It was cheaper than a beer in Prague now. The petrol is half the price of Europe, as are the breakfast diners, the car wash, the magnifique Golf Courses (20 dollars a round, it’s a steal, despite the alligators). My friend has a two bed next to a Golf Course, near the beach, a balcony, with a choice of 18 swimming pools. Cheaper than an apartment in Prague. In London, you need to be super successful, an MP or a Civil Servant, to afford a bedsit in Walthamstow. Its cheaper in Camberwell if you don’t mind the constant stabbings. London has a bizarre conglomerate of, on the one hand, the pen pushing ‘Trahison de Clercs’ of the indolent class and gig-shifting fools paying taxes to support what Michael Lind politely described as ‘The Management Class’ ( working from home…still).
I returned to the news that the world’s greatest couple, Harry and Meghan, are splitting up. And, unrelated, a new ninth planet may have been found, according to Terry Long Phan, an astrophysicist at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Perhaps the narcissist duo could go there, if its big enough for Meghan. Poor Harry, unwanted in the US, is now persona non grata in the UK, having had his police security allowance removed. He ‘worries about the safety of Meghan if he visits the UK.’ I have sympathy here for if you had subscribed to Netflix only to watch a Cooking show devoted to burning rice and a woman with a face like an avocado. It could turn one psychotic.
On a serious note, the politics of Europe has been revamped by the success of the ‘populist’ Reform UK party in the local elections, defeating both the governing Labour Party and Conservatives. The liberal media are aghast at this. Whatever could account for this? Perhaps the 183,000 homeless Britons (including 90,000 children) who, at the same time, are being refused accommodation so as to accommodate the undocumented boat refugees. Or perhaps its the SERCO organisation—paid billions in taxpayers money to house migrants in five star hotels. Its a huge industry; its so beyond the pale of justice that indigenous homeless people are being removed by SERCO from Hotels and replaced by migrants. Boat people mean more bucks. It’s this sense of unfairness that permeates the madness of British politics. The Minister of State, Angela Eagle, admits she doesn’t know how many migrants are now in the UK. Or how much money has been given to organisations such as SERCO. Anyway, try finding a budget Ibis Hotel or Best Western in the London area on your next sojourn in London. Good luck!
In Germany, another bastion of democracy and freedom, the second largest political party, the AfD, has been classified as ‘extremist.’ We have gone from the ‘Far Right’ to the catchphrase ‘The Extreme Right.’ Next year, when a party committed to family and community are elected in Sweden, they will be deemed illegal as they are no doubt members of the ‘Very Extreme Right.’ The AfD were voted in by half of the German nation but lets not allow this to interfere with ‘democracy.’ It is the only political party in Europe, besides Switzerland, which has ‘Direct Democracy’ as part of its constitution. Direct Democracy, as opposed to ‘Representative Democracy,’ is were you gather to discuss and vote on local issues. Imagine that? L’Horreur. You can vote for anybody you want in Europe as long as they are rainbow flag-waving metrosexuals with a degree in ‘The Sociology of Gender.’
Meanwhile, in dinner party ideas latest, a woman in Australia has been accused of planting poisonous mushrooms in a meal she prepared for her ‘best’ friends, no doubt having watched ‘With Love, Meghan’ on Netflix. Or perhaps she just hated her friends. President Trump is putting tariffs on foreign films in an attempt to get rid of malign foreign influence. The era of woke film is over they say; non-binary Snow Whites or Bridgerton’s Stalinist rewrite of English Regency history as black people rule the roost at court. I doubt it is over. Hollywood can’t help preaching. Liberalism, as the inheritor of Christianity, assumes a missionary pitch to the unwashed masses. The next James Bond movie could feature Prince Harry, with Kamala Harris as ‘M.’ Witkoff as the evil boss of ‘Spectre.’ Putin as the KGB assassin. And Meghan as the saviour who arrives at the last minute with a plate of mushrooms for the bad guys. It’s now an age when fiction becomes the reality; the triumph of Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle,‘ when the simulacrum replaces reality. In most aspects of life, be it art or politics, this replacement becomes the norm. We are living in a gigantic online movie, divorced from reality, directed, not by Philosopher Kings, but by ‘Influencers.’
Table of Contents
Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in Universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as The Independent, The Times, The American Spectator, Asian Affairs, Deliberatio, L’Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica, The National Interest, GeoPolitical Monitor, Merion West, Voegelin View, The Montreal Review, The European Conservative, Visegrad Insight, The Hungarian Review, The Salisbury Review, The Village, New English Review, The Burkean, The Daily Globe, American Thinker, The Internationalist, and Philosophy News. His new book, Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century, is published now by Ethics International Press. He is an adviser to several Think Tanks and Corporates on Geopolitical Issues.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
- Like
- Digg
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link
2 Responses
Europe is a hellofa nutritionless stew, nowadays.
Bravo