The United Kingdom is currently reeling from what the Brits are calling Brexit, or the vote to leave the European Union.
Many did not think that the referendum to leave would ever pass, but the right wing forces in the U.K. prevailed through the use of lies and scare tactics and created what could be the real downfall of the British empire. England will stand alone, surrounded by E.U. countries. The pound has dropped sharply, and the future of England is unknown at this time. How did this happen?
Well, I will call it stupidity and the Trump phenomenon. Brits and people in other parts of the U.K. have become increasingly disenfranchised with what is going on in Great Britain in terms of immigration and social policy. The economic malaise there is symptomatic of working class frustration throughout the Western world. Some Brits see the immigration of people from other E.U. countries as a threat. They have been told that it is immigration that is causing financial ruin. That is the story in the U.K.
Back on closer shores we have the presidential election in the United States. Here we have a large following for Donald Trump, whose tagline is “Make America Great Again,” implying, similarly to the U.K., that it is immigration that is hurting us most. And that immigrants must be stopped, and that we must deport those who are different from us, meaning different from him, meaning not white. And if you misunderstood the word “great” in his tagline, that is also code for white, but I digress.
In the U.K. a great deal of people now claim that they voted leave because they wanted to lodge a protest vote. They never thought it would pass. If enough people want to cast a protest vote, banking on the belief that others will vote differently, well you see how easily that becomes a problem.
This is where we say take heed in how you vote. Many people thought that Trump was a joke. But now he is the presumptive Republican nominee. A pretender to the Oval Office, armed with a clearly neofascist outlook. So the joke is on them. They voted for him as a protest to the establishment.
That is what they did in the U.K. They thought they were making a statement, and what they actually did was make a mess. We can’t afford to do that here. We can’t afford protest votes—we must vote for what we know is best and not for the clown with the funny hair and orange face. If we use our vote as a protest vote, we might actually get him as president, and then we will all know how the Brits feel. They have coined it “#Regrexit.” Take a lesson from the Regrexitors. Don’t do it. Let’s keep America great. Vote Hillary Clinton.