Kester Brewin

Tag: Trump

  • Trump vs The Prince

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    ‘It is not reasonable that they know how to rule, having always lived as private citizens… the first bad weather kills them.’ Reaching for something to read before bed the other day, I pulled down Machiavelli’s classic book on the dark art of state-craft, The Prince. Chapter VII begins thus: 500 years before Trump, it…

  • From Russia, With Chaos

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    Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been re-reading Peter Pomerantsev’s book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, each page pushing me towards the same, slightly counterintuitive conclusion: if you want to understand Trump’s America, you need to look to Putin’s Russia. I first read the book when a colleague – a history teacher I’d…

  • Stop Making Fun of Trump

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    Perhaps the only good thing to have come out of a Trump presidency is the dark humour, and I must confess – much of it has been brilliant. Seeing the wonderful placards (WE SHALL OVERCOMB) hearing the chants (TINKLE TINKLE LITTLE CZAR, PUTIN PUT YOU WHERE YOU ARE) and watching the SNL skits has raised…

  • Inaugurate Something… and Make Trump Irrelevant Again

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      My suggestion for marking Trump’s inauguration would be to inaugurate some amazing thing, some small seed of action that’ll build bridges and tear down prejudice. At the moment, the three most troubling words I know are ‘God,’ ‘bless,’ and ‘America,’ and every time I hear them in sequence part of my brain freezes. Can anyone tell…

  • Before Post-Truth, There Was Post-Production

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    What can we possibly trust in an online world with near-perfect CGI? When a 21 year old Carrie Fisher turns round at the end of a film made when she was in her 60s and talks about hope, and an aging Trump turns and arches his back on a hotel bed in St Petersburg, what…

  • Post Truth | Hypernormalisation and the Radical Response

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    In a post last week on the ‘Fake News’ scandal and the way that our information sources have become distorted, narrowed and – some now claim – deliberately confused by digital algorithms, I concluded by saying: In the chaos of this truthless mental and political environment, we more naturally turn to brands for security, to…