In which the pond insists attention must be paid to the Lynch mob, but also finds time for the deeply weird Ughmann and furious flag-waving Frank ...

 

For some weird reason the reptiles decided to open the weekend's play with a ploy requiring empathy ...

Did you see it?

MAGAZINE
‘People look at you differently. You try to block it out’
On the track, sprint star Gout Gout is a global phenomenon. Off of it Australia’s best-known teenager is grappling with the impact of racial profiling, a demanding coach and an expectant public.
By
Andrew Webster

Sorry, Gout Gout, welcome to the world of the Murdochians and Faux Noise ...

The pond then moved over to the extreme far right to see if the reptiles had kept on striking the right tone ...

Say what? Where was the Lynch mob?

Oh sure there was "Ned" and the dog botherer and the Ughmann and a special exciting appearance by a flag waving Frank, but why had the reptiles disappeared the Lynch mob?

He turned up yesterday arvo and damned if the pond was going to let him slide into reptile cornfield oblivion ...

"Ned" and the rest of the rabble could be saved until Sunday, and only then if they deserved to make the cut.

Why every word the Lynch mob scribbles is a treasury of fear and loathing, and deserves to be treasured ...

The header: Donald Trump’s campus war to reshape the soul of US universities, Some are capitulating, others are waiting him out. But the President’s bid to shift American culture by encouraging universities to produce a different kind of citizen has one potentially fatal flaw.

The caption for the diabolical uncredited reptile collage - is there AI in the lizard Oz graphics department house?: What ails American higher education? Trump claims the elite campuses have been captured by his ideological opponents.

It was an eight minute read, so the reptiles said, and it was a compendium of all the Lynch mob had to offer by way of insight (amazing really to spend eight minutes revealing zip, nada, nihil):

Can you imagine any Australian university trying to ban gender studies? In 2022, I lived and worked at the University of Wyoming, in America’s reddest state. I arrived not long after its overwhelmingly Republican legislature tried to do just that. In May this year it finally succeeded. This campaign offered a foretaste of President Donald Trump’s war on the universities.
Trump has been so busy trying to make world peace this month, it is easy to overlook just how many culture wars he has started: on illegal immigration, on transgenderism, on blue-city crime, on trade imbalances, on net zero. For an aspiring peacemaker, he sure starts a lot of wars.
How is his frontal assault on the elite professors going? Like all wars, it has been imperfect in execution.
But its motivations are clear, its positive effects already discernible and the campus pushback oddly muted, if not accommodating. But his challenges are significant.

Indeed, indeed ...

Sorry, the pond decided one of its notorious cartoon collages might help the Melbourne University (yes, it's you Melbourne Uni, destroyer of student privacy) lesson go down ..,

What ails American higher education? Trump claims the elite campuses have been captured by his ideological opponents. He is mostly correct in this claim. In weakening their power, what does he have to lose?
Elite colleges help confirm the MAGA caricature of them at every turn. They have been terrible at recruiting for viewpoint diversity. Republicans are a vanishing species in the faculty lounge. Some disciplines, such as sociology, have zero self-identifying conservatives in their ranks.
Trump’s war? “We asked for it,” Michael Clune, a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, wrote last year. “The politicisation of research, hiring and teaching made professors sitting ducks.” A multi-college report this month revealed that 88 per cent of American students faked more left-wing views than they really held. They did this to appease their professors and to win peer approval. “Performative virtue-signalling,” the report said, “has become a threat to higher ed.”

Indeed, indeed, let there be none of that ...

How the Lynch mob loves itself some bigotry, and woke jokes ...

During the Great Awokening of the past decade, Ivy League universities have postured on their anti-racism bona fides. Yet, when pushed by a congresswoman, the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania were unable to condemn anti-Semitism. The depth of Israelophobia after October 7, 2023, was revealed on America’s most liberal campuses. Safe spaces for Jews became few and far between.
Anti-Semitism was a catalyst of Trump’s war. Some of the highest ranked and progressively uniform universities in the world produced the deepest form of the oldest hatred. Why not take them on? What is the moral argument against their reformation? What moral codes are elite universities actually upholding that would be jeopardised by Trump-led reform?
This infamous hearing on Capitol Hill set them up for the attack the 47th President is now waging.

The pond broke its contractual requirement for a mention of "woke" as the reptiles flung in an attempt at a visual distraction, Palestine supporters gather at Harvard University during a rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 2023. Picture: Joseph Prezioso / AFP

... as if Australia isn't playing its part ...

An important skill for any aspiring academic is to be fast and loose with data ...

Universities with the highest spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs – such as the University of Michigan – report deteriorating race relations on their campuses. Again, asks Trump, why not rethink these racial obsessions and dismantle their anti-racism bur­eaucracies? What have they got to lose?
Are American universities too female? Possibly too female for Trump. Nearly nine in 10 professors “who identify as women” voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the US presidential election last year. This skewing is further exaggerated by campuses that are increasingly female dominated. More than 70 per cent of Americans beginning a liberal arts degree are female and liberal. Why not, asks Trump, weaken these centres of cultural power? Make them attractive to conservative women again.
The disparity between white and black suicide rates – the so-called deaths of despair – further advances Trump’s narrative. White men kill themselves at three times the rate black men do. Again, it is not hard for Trump to paint universities, where feminised men worry about their pronouns, where blacks are coddled and working-class whites increasingly absent, as the frontline of a social revolution.

Strange, but the CDC isn't trustworthy in MAGA world:

Suicide rates in the United States have traditionally been higher for non-Hispanic White than non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic people. However, provisional data demonstrated that patterns have changed recently with rates declining for non-Hispanic White people but increasing for non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic people.

The prof from Melbourne Uni (that's the university that surveils its students) tried a little billy goat butt:

This is, of course, a caricature of the modern campus. But it is one that plays powerfully to Trump’s base and stokes his war on the universities. Those institutions need a better line of defence than we have seen so far. They waver between ineffective opposition – knowing Trump’s indictment is not fantastical – and craven appeasement, which makes the President only goad them further.

Then it was back to the celebrations:

Homo Trumpicus?
Populist disdain for intellectuals has a long history in the US. Trump is one of the first to prosper politically from it. But he does not just want to win the votes of men and women excluded from the coiffured grounds of the academy. He intends to shift American culture by encouraging universities to produce a different kind of citizen.
The Soviet Union used education to craft Homo Sovieticus (cod Latin for Soviet Man). Homo Trumpicus? The new MAGA Man? Trump’s ambitions certainly find expression in an intellectual movement that has grown up in the shadow of his populism. This means not simply to rebalance higher education but to re-engineer its essential purpose.

Cue another snap replete with tokenism, US President Donald Trump, joined by golf legend Tiger Woods, speaks during a reception honouring Black History Month in the East Room of the White House on February 20, 2025, in Washington. Picture: Win McNamee / Getty Images

Speaking of intellectuals at work...

Needless to say, the Lynch mob is expert at digging out ratbags to celebrate:

Christopher Rufo has been a loud cheerleader of Trump’s marching back through the institutions seized by the left across the past half century. As I argued last year, Rufo is like Martin Luther in 1517, nailing his theses to a woke door. His Manifesto for the Counterrevolution aims to use collapsing trust in Ivy League universities as a strategy for winning the wider and longer culture war. It is a bracing read.
Rufo is among a new cadre of thinkers who see in campus wars the possibility of a new kind of citizen. These graduates will not be the safety-seeking, mental ill-health afflicted, race and gender-obsessed nervous nellies of progressive design. Rather, they will embody the virtues of family, faith and flag. Each is anathema to social justice professors. But they are virtues increasingly back in vogue.
Last week The New York Times revealed that first-time voters are registering Republican in greater numbers than they are Democratic. This is a remarkable turnaround. If the left loses the young, it makes a return to national political power infinitely harder. One possible, I think plausible, explanation is that students have become fed-up with progressive coddling. Universities that can offer something more vital will prosper.
My experience of several US campuses may be instructive here. Boston College is a Jesuit university. I did my PhD there. Priests were on the faculty. It was far and away the most ideologically diverse environment of my career. If you want to be exposed to a broad spectrum of opinion, you attend BC, Baylor or Notre Dame – schools that embrace Christianity but don’t make it a condition of enrolment. You might give secular, progressive Berkeley and Harvard a wide berth.
There is emerging evidence that conservative students are just happier in life than their liberal peers. Campuses that can foster something other than pessimism will become the new poles of attraction. Progressive miserableness has reached a pedagogical sell-by-date. Trump is just the first president to begin removing it from the shelf.
Take Columbia University, for example. It receives $US1.3bn in federal grants. Trump has threatened to withhold it unless the New York school gets serious about anti-Semitism, learns a more commonsensical vocabulary on gender (including greater protection for women’s sport) and addresses ideological bias in its ranks. Trump is using the enormous endowments of elite colleges against themselves; the aim is to change their soul.

Indeed, indeed,  happiness is all, everything is good ...

Spare a thought for the suffering and the persecuted:

Affirmative action for conservatives?
What makes the Trump revolution bracing also makes it unrealistic. What would a quota system that tried to recruit for ideological diversity look like? As early as 1987, conservative professor Allan Bloom observed what he called the Closing of the American Mind. The force pushing the closure? The universities. Their obsession with equality – an unalienable right – made a religion of equity, a fantasy of progressive politics. To query either, as a few sceptical professors did, led to their banishment.
The forces at work 40 years ago are now more deeply entrenched. There is just not a ready pool of well-trained but unemployed conservative scholars to recruit from. These cannot be magicked up.

At this point the reptiles slipped in another distracting snap, Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Trump is taking on a multigenerational project that could as easily move back towards progressive hegemony as away. Picture: Rick Friedman / AFP

Then the Lynch mob started to sound a tad unhappy, a little fearful ...

Trump is taking on a multigenerational project that could as easily move back towards progressive hegemony as away. If he goes down the affirmative action path, he risks the replication of left-wing pathologies. By using a tool of the left to advantage the right, he may end up perpetuating the broken identity politics of the modern campus. Right-wing identity politics is as bad as the left-wing kind.
I’ve worked in universities across much of the English-speaking West. In none has a white progressive resigned so an applicant of colour may replace him. Rather, the emphasis of all DEI drives is to make it hard for up-and-coming white men, in their 20s and 30s, to get jobs. If no white progressive academic, male or female, in their 50s and 60s, that I’ve ever seen has been prepared to step aside to advance this progressive agenda, why should they do so for Trump’s?

Oh the jobs, there'll be jobs in abundance ...

“He only got the job because he’s a conservative.” Colleagues of a new lecturer will whisper this in the corridors. “She didn’t get this job on merit. It’s because she’s pro-life.” The left is adept at reading the progressive credentials of a job applicant. “Starts his interview with a land acknowledgment. Check.” “Uses preferred pronouns on Zoom. Check.” “Cites their experience of structural racism. Check.”
These litmus tests are not easily replicated on the academic right (an oxymoron). And neither should they be. But then how do reluctant university departments even begin to lessen their ideological uniformity? I get why Trump wants to make American universities more heterodox. I am less convinced he knows how.

Oh hush now, Lynch mob, of course he knows how ...

Fear not ...

Suppose he found a method that could work. Would his MAGA base embrace this new intellectual elite? As Clune argues wryly, “nothing would so efficiently invalidate conservative views with working-class Americans than if every elite college professor was replaced by a double who conceived of their work in terms of activism for right-wing ideas. Professors are bad at politics, and politicised professors are bad for their own politics. The hierarchical structure of academe, and the role it plays in class stratification, clings to every professor’s political pronouncement like a revolting odour.”
His logic applies in Australia too. I do wonder how far the campus orthodoxy on the voice in 2023 helped discredit the Yes position. When job-for-life professors demand allegiance to progressive ideas from the mortgage-stressed, the latter don’t submit without a grumble. When given the opportunity, they resist this paternalism. Trump grasped the instinctive power of this dynamic.
It just so happened that the paternalism on that occasion was of the left. There is no evidence a more balanced, let alone a more right-leaning, university elite would negate class tension. Universities are the elite, by definition, regardless of their ideological complexion. Filling them with conservative men wouldn’t solve this problem.

The reptiles slipped in another snap, a truly bland illustration of the great minds at work in the remnants of the lizard Oz graphics department, Harvard sweatshirts on display in a campus store window. While they may be too left-leaning, two-thirds of the world’s top 50 universities are American. The market for their product seems unquenchable. Picture: Joseph Prezioso / AFP

Of course they'll be able to embrace the new intellectual elite, the ones that survive ...

And that pretty much brought the pond's time with the Lynch mob to a close ...

How universities are fighting (and not fighting) back
Harvard is 389 years old. Trump has less than 3½ years to bring it to heel – a little longer if a president JD Vance or Marco Rubio continues the campaign. There is an argument that these ancient (in US historical terms) institutions can simply wait out Trump’s radicalism. They have endured through numerous scares and passions, continue to command top fees – even if their social licences are weakening – and are organised for the long haul. Dig in a little, otherwise make nice, and wait for the Trump storm to pass. I suspect this is how the Trump war on the professors will peter out.
There are more than 4000 universities in the US. They differ markedly in size, wealth, demographics and quality. Among them are the best universities anywhere. Two-thirds of the world’s top 50 universities are American. They may be too left leaning. But the market for their product seems unquenchable. Their interest in being transformed by any US president, let alone this one, is consequently not strong. Wait him out.
Some universities will embrace the new MAGA dispensation. Good luck to them. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, the state’s largest (and my wife’s alma mater), has chosen to ride the Trump wave. It just made two strong conservative men, registered Republicans, its president and provost.
Can you imagine any Australian university having the courage to embrace that kind of political diversity?
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

What a most excellent distraction, and speaking of embracing diversity ...

At this point, the pond had to quickly sober up and end its cartoon jag, because the Ughmann was clamouring for attention ...

The header: Progress and prosperity are fired by fossil fuels, We live in the world fossil fuel built. Everything made has coal, oil or gas embedded in it. And here’s the rub: humanity burns more wood now than in 1800.

The caption for the deeply pathetic uncredited collage - is there AI in the house?: At the dawn of the 19th century, the whole world ran on about 25 exajoules of energy a year, almost all of it wood and muscle. We now burn through that every fortnight.

The pond isn't going to comment on this Ughmann outing.

It's deeply weird, and that's all that needs to be said ...

Humans are creatures of fire. The mastery of it is so deeply buried in our past that it is the stuff of mythology.
The ancient Greeks believed the Titan Prometheus stole fire from Mount Olympus and gave it to humanity, a crime against the gods so great he was condemned to be punished for eternity. This much of that myth is true: Homo sapiens did not capture fire, we inherited it. Some earlier hominin was our Prometheus.
Fire would have terrified and fascinated our distant ancestors as it raged across the land. Maybe it was the smell that enticed them on to the still-smouldering ground: of animals that could not outrun the flames and were cooked where they fell.
The scavengers came, first on wings, then on four legs, then on two. The pliant meat would have been a revelation to proto-human teeth used to ripping through raw flesh.
Perhaps a smouldering log was hauled back to the camp and the flame rekindled by fanning and feeding it. And one distant night long ago there was the first captured light that did not come from the moon or the stars, and warmth that did not come from the sun.
Until the rains came and doused it. Then, in the wet, cold, dark, the creatures would shiver in their fitful sleep and dream of keeping and controlling the light forever.
The next revelation might have come by chance. While toolmaking, a spark lit some dry grass and the secret of making fire was revealed. Fire became a possession. Fire gave them power.

Deeply weird, and even more deeply weird that the reptiles should interrupt the fire and sun god worship with a threat to much beloved plastics, as if The Graduate's best line had been forgotten, Delegates discussing the world's first legally binding treaty to tackle plastic pollution failed to reach consensus on Friday (August 15), as states pushing for an ambitious treaty said that the latest text released overnight failed to meet their expectations. Observers said that a three-year global effort to reach a legally-binding treaty to curb plastic pollution, which is choking the oceans and harming human health, now appears adrift. Sean Hogan has more.

More deep weirdness followed, not least a deeply weird lust for a paleo diet:

Cooked meat became a staple. This unlocked more nutrition in the food and made digestion vastly more efficient. That fed the hominins’ energy-hungry brains. They grew to become human. In a very real sense, wise man, Homo sapiens, could also be called Homo ignis, man of fire.
Without fire we would not exist. And with fire we could exist in more hostile climates.
We carried fire out of Africa into colder regions that would have quickly killed us if we had journeyed without it. Cold has always been a bigger killer of humans than heat, and this migration came during the last ice age, when global temperatures were about 6C colder than today and sea levels around 120m lower. We are still living in the tail end of that era.
On our journey we encountered other hominin travellers who also had captured fire. We outcompeted them, but their memory is still etched in our DNA.
We pushed north to the edge of the Arctic, clinging to life on a brutal frontier possible only with fire. Some continued to walk across the land bridge where the Bering Strait lies today, into North America, then all the way to the tip of the southern continent.

Deeply weird, and naturally there was a weird association to go with the homily, Neil Armstrong on the Moon. Picture NASA

How deeply weird can the Ughmann get? Why, he's just cranking into full deeply weird gear (remember, you need three on the stick to be truly deeply weird) ...

There was another, earlier, migration north and then east: across India, through Indonesia, to the rim of an ocean. Then, some believe, came a remarkable and long-forgotten journey by boat, perhaps chasing the smoke the travellers could see rising over the horizon. They set foot on Sahul, the continent that is now New Guinea, Tasmania and mainland Australia.
With firestick farming, these first people transformed an entire continent. Across tens of thousands of years Australia’s plant and animal life evolved in response to routine burning, creating a human-influenced ecosystem unique in the world. Some wattles need heat or smoke for their seeds to germinate. Gums carry buds beneath their bark that can sprout quickly after fire has stripped their canopy. Their leaves contain flammable oils that help fires spread, clearing out less tolerant plants.
Fire shaped modern humans, and the First Australians used fire to shape this land.
Cast across all peoples and all lands, human progress was tied to fire and food, bounded by what the land could yield. Energy in calories fed human and animal muscle, and wood fed the flames.
Hominins controlled fire by about a million years ago. The availability of wood set limits on growth. Wind and water power also made contributions to this pre-industrial economy.

Then the reptiles knocked the pond for a hoop by bringing back Bronnie, the long forgotten one ... Former speaker of the house Bronwyn Bishop slams the Albanese government’s energy policy as a “clown show”. “He is a fool … it is a clown show," Ms Bishop said. “Until we solve the question of us using our fossil fuels for our benefit so that we can have cheap power, so that we can again build a manufacturing sector, never mind this policy that they carry on with. “It is the lowest of all time, forced down by this labor government, it's happened on their watch.”

On with the deeply weird ... and know what's going to happen at this point ...

Take it away deeply weird Ughmann ...

Progress was glacially slow. From the first year of the common era to 1800, total world output rose several-fold, on the order of six times, but most of that merely kept pace with population; average incomes changed little.
Vast forests were felled to meet the energy needs of a growing population. England’s expanding demand for fuel and the mounting cost of scarce woodland pushed people toward coal from the late 1500s. By 1650, coal was well established, especially in London. Coal is denser than wood and burns hotter, opening new possibilities for industry.
The pace of growth quickened when coal was used to boil water to make the steam that drove the wheels of industry. It pushed trains across the land and ships across the sea. The muscle power of man and beast was replaced with furnaces and pistons.
Between 1800 and 1900 the size of the world economy roughly tripled.

Can it get any weirder? Of course it can ... The Last Zephyr off the assembly line at Ford Geelong in 1959. Picture: New Holland Publishers

Of all the final cars to celebrate, the Ughmann picked a dud, because there was a dud in the family? (Not even a Zephyr Mark III?)

Did the pond mention, deeply weird?

My grandfather, Allan Uhlmann, was born in 1899 in a house on the outskirts of Brisbane with no sewerage, no electricity and no running water. There were no cars on the streets and no planes in the sky. Yet he arrived on the cusp of another fossil-fuel revolution.
Oil, the lightest and most potent fuel of its age, powered an explosion of growth unmatched in human history.
When Allan died in 1967, there was a Ford Zephyr in the garage, a television in the lounge, a fridge in the kitchen and a flush toilet out the back. Two years later the Americans landed men on the moon. In Allan’s lifetime he could have met the Wright brothers and Neil Armstrong. Life expectancy had risen sharply with modern medicine, child mortality had collapsed, and wealth had expanded on a scale no generation before him had known.
By the year 2000 the world economy was about 19 times larger than in 1900.
Wealth is the shadow cast by energy. Rich nations are energy rich. Rich people are energy rich. Poor nations and people want to be rich. Your lifestyle is measured in the heat you can afford to waste. The average Australian commands as much energy each year as about 70 people pedalling bicycles, day and night, seven days a week. That is around 10 times more power than the equivalent person in 1800.
At the dawn of the 19th century, the whole world ran on about 25 exajoules of energy a year, almost all of it wood and muscle. We now burn through that every fortnight. In two centuries our energy use has exploded nearly 30-fold, and with it everything we call progress.
We live in the world fossil fuel built. Everything made has coal, oil or gas embedded in it. And here’s the rub: humanity burns more wood now than in 1800.
There is no energy transition. Every new fuel has been an addition to a pile that grows ever higher. Wind and solar add only a sliver to that pile and will never be the dominant source of primary energy. We are, and will remain, creatures of fire.

Deeply, deeply weird, and come to think of it, winnowing the message out from the chaff and the verbiage and the wandering down mammary lane, deeply stupid, though that should go without saying ...

And so to the bonus, and the pond is proud to present Frank ...

The header: Operation Raise the Colours: UK residents sick of ‘apologising for being British’, Supporters of the movement indicated that they were fed up with the situation where local councils were happy to fly the Palestinian and LGBTQ flags but not that of their nation.

The caption: An online movement called 'Operation Raise the Colours' has inspired people across the UK to fly flags. Picture: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The pond did wonder why Frank had made an appearance. 

He had once been a firm reptile favourite, but had disappeared in recent times.

In fact the last time he'd appeared had been an epic nine minute read back in September 2024, Why are we shaming our children’s heritage? The war on the West’s history being waged in schools is cutting children off from their cultural inheritance, proudly made available by the pond in the archive...

Could Frank have a book in the offing?

Why this wild-eyed excitement about flag waving?

Suddenly, flagging has become a big thing in England. Out of nowhere a social media driven grassroots movement of flaggers has emerged. Throughout England groups of newly emerging activist are hanging flags on lampposts and painting red crosses on roundabouts.
Even in my sleepy town of Faversham, Kent, the St George flag can be seen, one pole after another, waving in the wind. One flagger tells me: “We want to make sure that our town becomes proud of its national heritage.” Another tells me: “Raising the flag helps make us feel at home.”
There is little doubt the people supporting Operation Raise the Colours are not just in the business of confining their activities to one-off stunts. At the very least this grassroots movement is determined to challenge the nation’s local councils to value the English flag and to cease being hostile to the flying of the Union Jack.

The pond did its best to lather up flagging enthusiasm for Frank's offering, though the reptiles didn't help with a snap, The flag of St George is painted on to a mini traffic island, in Manchester, United Kingdom. Picture: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The pond began to get a sense of where Frank might be going with this talk of flags on the ground ...

On with the waving, though the pond felt it might be a sign of quietly drowning ...

The movement of flaggers took off in Birmingham. Probably this movement would not have gained such prominence if it hadn’t been for the reaction of Birmingham’s Labour-dominated local council to the sight of England’s flag flying from the city’s lampposts.
The council reacted by ordering the removal of the flags on the grounds they put the lives of pedestrians and motorists “at risk” despite being up to 7.5m off the ground. It was evident to all that this council applied a different standard of judgment in relation to the Palestinian flag, which are flown all over the city.
Birmingham’s flaggers, who call themselves the “Weoley Warriors”, stated that their goal was to “show Birmingham and the rest of the country of how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements”.
One local resident, Mrs Owens, a former police officer, told the media: “I think there will be trouble, even riots if they take them down.”
She added: “We are sick of having to apologise for being British. The flags have had such a positive impact on the community – people love them. There is nothing political about it.”

Then came a snap from little England, Cars pass St George's Cross flags in Stanwell, west London. Picture: AFP

Sorry, Gout Gout, no doubt you can sense where all this is heading ...

There is little doubt Mrs Owens’s message has resonated with wide sections of the public. Supporters of the movement indicated they were fed up with the situation where local councils were happy to fly the Palestinian and LGBTQ flags but not that of their nation.
The movement of flaggers quickly spread from Birmingham to towns and cities throughout England.
“Let’s bring back patriotism once and for all,” stated the Facebook page of Operation Raise the Colours. It urged members to post images of the assorted national flags of the four British nations “being raised around our great towns and cities”.
In response individuals decided to form groups that took it upon themselves to go out and do what they called “flagging” around their town.
There is also no doubt that the flaggers have provoked a hostile reaction from large sections of the British elite that regard the flaggers with contempt and never miss an opportunity to issue warnings about the threat posed by far-right conspirators lurking in the background.
This alarmist reaction was personified by Nick Ireland, the Liberal Democrat leader of Dorset Council, who insisted that some residents found the sudden appearance St George’s and Union flags “intimidating”. He added that it was naive to suggest these emblems had not been “hijacked” by some far-right groups.
Ireland and other sections of the “patriotism is dangerous” brigade never stop to ask the question of why members of the public find symbols of the nation they inhabit intimidating. Neither does he consider why it is OK for his council to fly the flags of Ukraine, Palestine and Pride but not those of his own nation.

The far right? You mean furious Frank Furedi, agitated by furrin flags? A protester waves a Palestinian flag in central London. Picture: AFP

Quaint really, these flag wars, and it took the pond back to the 'Nam days, as the pond did its best to get exercised by furious Frank ...

The reason some members of the public find England’s flag intimidating is because the British establishment has for decades treated this symbol of English nationalism with contempt. The message they communicate is that only simple-minded fools, football hooligans or far-right nutters could associate themselves with St George’s flag.
Yet the people supporting the flaggers are normal working people fed up with being made to feel strangers in their own home. Still, there is little doubt that the mainstream media’s accusation that this movement was racist and organised by the far right had an impact on the participants of Operation Raise the Colours.
When I interviewed the people going around and raising the flag of St George on the lampposts of Faversham, I was struck by their initial defensive justification of their action. They spent the first two minutes of our discussion trying to reassure me they were not racist but patriots fed up with the way their flag was devalued. It was only after I explained that I was on their side and supported their objectives that they felt confident to drop the “we are not racist” rhetoric and discuss the concerns that motivated them.
They explained that they were hoping to bring back patriotism so people could feel pride in their community and in the achievements of their ancestors.
This point was later echoed by Joseph Moulton, one of the organisers of Flag Force UK, who told a television interviewer that he had encouraged people to not just do the flagging but to use it as a “gateway to actually building the communities … doing the litter picking, helping the food banks, looking after vulnerable people”.

The reptiles helped out with the flag waving with a Sky Noise down under report from Freya ... Sky News host Freya Leach discusses people in the UK raising patriotic flags as councils “scramble” to remove them. “Over in the UK there’s a movement called ‘operation raise the colours’, where patriotic Britons are taking to the streets and flying Union Jacks and St George flags all around the place,” Ms Leach said. “The councils who obviously are deeply offended … are scrambling to go take them down.”

Sorry Gout Gout, you'll have to endure a last outburst from furious Frank ...

What struck me about my conversation with the Faversham flaggers was they were a group of committed men and women who were struggling to find their voice. None of them was previously politically active. They knew what they were doing mattered and was important to their community, but they also understood that they were being confronted with powerful forces that were ready to belittle their behaviour and distort their message.
Yet they were excited by the realisation that their campaign gained so much support. “I am giddy because for the first time in my life I feel that what I do really is important,” said Lizzie, a young mother of two children. Her husband Joe indicated they were doing this for their children, so that they could feel that Faversham was their home.
As a sociologist I concluded that the people participating in the flagging movement were in the midst of finding their voice. I felt they were halfway there. They had taken a gigantic step forward, but they had not yet been able to work out a compelling argument justifying their cause.
Nevertheless, the Faversham flaggers, like their comrades up and down the country, have succeeded in making their voices heard. Even sections of Britain’s political establishment, which regards the movement of flaggers with contempt, have been forced to concede that it’s actually OK to fly the flag of St George.
Though reluctantly, even Prime Minister Keir Starmer fell into line. Backing the right of the public to fly the flag, he remarked that patriotism “will always be an important thing”. Starmer, too, must have realised that something important was astir and that the rebirth of English patriotism had become a fact of life.

Then it became clear why Frank was intent on a comeback ... Frank Furedi’s latest book is The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History (Polity Press).

As for the rest, a final furious flourish of flag waving cartoons to celebrate Frank's folly ...