Don't laugh at this British politician — his views aren't funny, they're dangerous
There's an old Karl Marx adage that has recently been exhumed as a cautionary tale to explain Donald Trump's meteoric rise to power: "History repeats itself twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
SEE ALSO:Meet the living, walking meme of conservative British politicsIn a nutshell, it means that many people failed to recognise Trump's threat to civil rights and democracy simply because he was perceived (and dismissed) as incredibly funny.
And to be fair, it's fully justified. Late-night hosts rubbed their hands at the pure comedic blessing that rained on them once Trump announced his presidential bid.
Nobody took him seriously. He was just a joke candidate, someone to point the finger at and laugh off as a lighthearted TV avatar, an internet meme, a boon.
But even when the violent, hatred-filled nature of Trump's candidacy became manifest, and his victory seemed possible, Jimmy Fallon still invited him to his Tonight Showand messed up his hair.
There are countless examples of farcical, comedic figures who were too easily dismissed or belittled for then to make a spectacular, unpredictable comeback.
Now, a similar thing could happen in Britain with a man whose composite name is the epitome of a British stereotype: Jacob Rees-Mogg.
His profile has been rising lately as newspapers suggest that his party his preparing him for a ministerial position. Others suggest that he's even a contender for prime minister.
Rees-Mogg even topped a poll by Conservative Home to be a successor to Theresa May and got 226 votes in the race to chair a select committee, losing for a small margin to Nicky Morgan.
He appeared on a major breakfast news program on Wednesday and made headlines for his anti-same sex marriage and anti-abortion news. With all the new attention, it doesn't seem like he's fading away any time soon.
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This Tory MP is so blatantly posh that he recently named his sixth son Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher. His Instagram is a perfect, calculated blend between a Wes Anderson movie and the old-timey image of eccentric British aristocracy.
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Often sporting a tweed suit that speaks of a bygone era of glorious British countryside and P.G. Wodehouse novels, Rees-Mogg attracts the amusement of the public with his plummy accent and posh manners.
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One of such examples, from 2012, is when he broke the record for the longest word ever used in Parliament — "Floccinaucinihilipilification", a 29-letter word meaning the "act or habit of estimating as worthless" which he said that casually came to his mind while speaking.
He once dared to call himself a "man of the people" with a Latin sentence — vox populi, vox dei —and similarly used Latin in his first tweet.
Can you see, then, the temptation to adopt a condescending attitude and treat Rees-Mogg as a joke.
But that'd be a terrible mistake, because Rees-Mogg is well aware of his appeal as a freakish, out-of-time outsider and knows how to play all of us with it.
He's not harmless either. Take down that comical persona of an old-fashioned chap from rural Somerset, and what you're left with is an aggressively backward Conservative, whose positions on abortion and LGBTQ rights are further right of his own party.
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In an interview with ITV's Good Morning Britain, Rees-Mogg recently said that abortion was "morally indefensible" even in cases of pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.
"Life is sacrosanct and begins at the point of conception," he said.
Regarding same-sex marriage, which he opposes, he said:
"I am a Catholic and I take the teachings of the Catholic Church seriously," he said. "Marriage is a sacrament and the decision of what is a sacrament lies with the Church not with Parliament."
Credit: @moggmentum/twitterNow the MP has a "grassroots" movement revolving around the Twitter account @MoggMentum and the eponymous hashtag — a dig at "Momentum", a grassroots campaigning network supporting Corbyn — is "to get @Jacob_Rees_Mogginto Number 10" and replace Theresa May.
His voting and filibustering record may help explain why he's basically become the poster boy of the Right in Britain, as many memes on Facebook groups such as "Reem memes with a right wing theme" demonstrate:
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I know what you're thinking. An eccentric outsider, with virtually no support within the party, who has a history of revolting against the whip and is too anti-establishment to infuse that British sense of stability and reassurance.
That could never happen here. Except, it can.
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