Star power or superpower? When politics becomes a reality show
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Fra Hughes
- 18 Apr 2025 15:37
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5 Min Read
With celebrity-driven politics and Western imperialism, US policies under figures like Trump risk global instability while empowering BRICS and the Global South.
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America is the greatest danger to the “rule-based order” they have championed for so long (Illustrated by Zeinab al-Hajj; Al Mayadeen English)
We have seen in recent years the crossover from the entertainment business to the business of politics.
Zelensky was a comedic clown in Ukraine prior to his anointment as President on April 22, 2019. He promised an end to the conflict with the secessionist oblasts in eastern Ukraine, only to be persuaded by Boris Johnson, then-British Prime Minister, to withdraw from a peace deal with Russia in April 2022, thus exacerbating the war, leading to the deaths of reputedly over one million Ukrainian soldiers. The catastrophic conflict was originally reignited when Zelensky launched an attack on eastern Ukraine in December 2021.
Trump gained huge exposure with the American populace through his appearance on a TV reality show “The Apprentice”, which he co-produced with British television producer Mark Burnett from 2004 to 2017. His catchphrase, “you’re fired”, became his main contribution to the show.
He fronted the programme for 17 seasons.
Clint Eastwood, former actor, was a mayor of “Carmel by the sea” from 1986 to 2001, Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected congressman for California in 2003, and let's not forget the man who ushered in “Neo liberal austerity" alongside British PM Margaret Thatcher, another product of Hollywood’s soft power, Ronald Reagan. Can we ever forget his epic film “Bonzo” where he starred alongside "Peggy” the chimpanzee?
I draw your attention to this crossover of well-known popular personalities as an indication of not just where politics is going, but where it is going wrong.
Politicians, a group that I neither respect nor vote in favour of here in the west, spend decades raising a profile with the public, in some cases not succeeding, in order to promote themselves with the public at large in the hope of placing themselves front and centre for a corporate-financed run to the top of the political pole.
Like monkeys scrambling for bananas, they climb the tree and try to snatch the sweetest fruit.
Celebrities, on the other hand, already have a huge public following and use their influence through television and newspaper interviews, book sales, and social media to promote their vision for society and their personal brand of non-party affiliated politics.
In a world where politics has become a dirty word, where politicians in the imperialist West are viewed as nothing more than corrupt corporate-bought and -financed stooges whose policies are in favour of the rich to the detriment of the poor and who use sound bites in place of policies... They tell us one thing in opposition: using “populism” to woo the voters, then do the exact opposite once elected. Is it any wonder people vote for a new way? They elect someone who claims to stand against the prevailing orthodoxy, an anti-establishment figure who promises peace but then accentuates war?
Trump promised peace between Ukraine and Russia and, by implication, an end to the genocide being visited upon Gaza when he courted the Islamic vote in 2024.
He has not brokered a deal that Russia is inclined to endorse, and he has doubled down on bombing the civilian population of Gaza and now Yemen.
America is the greatest danger to the “rule-based order” they have championed for so long, and indeed, it is a terrorist cabal of elites invested in the military-industrial complex and world indebtedness through the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and others.
Chumps tariffs, I mean Trump’s tariffs might backfire spectacularly and cause inflation and recession in the USA.
He is not an economist, nor does he appear to be taking advice on the reaction that his tariffs might create.
Are the chickens coming home to roost?
Trump is a businessman.
He is using the art of negotiating a deal as his premise for the presidency.
Plunging the world into even deeper chaos might suit his compatriots in government, the technocrats, the securocrats, and the globalists, but there is a danger - where they see opportunity in financially destabilizing other sovereign nations - that these tariffs, which, are in fact, sanctions being placed on the world’s economy may well drive BRICS to new heights as more sovereign nations wary of American exceptionalism may endeavour to persevere with a new global economic reality, where mutual respect trust and cooperation could well become the norm as a rising tide lifts all boats.
BRICS has the potential to reorder their “new world order."
It has the propensity to reignite the economies of the Global South, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
This is indeed a game of chicken as to who will blink first, but more importantly, it will be the economies that have resilience built into their system that can diversify and realign to the new economic reality that will survive, and this would be China and not America.
Interesting times lie ahead.
Let us hope they include the end of western imperialism, their ruled-based new world order, and the demise of the American war of terror on any and all sovereign nations who do not adhere to their white Anglo-Saxon supremacist vision of a world ruled by them and fooled by them and where everyone is governed via their exported white racist values; where people of colour have a place at the dining table and that place is to serve the food.
