The ones in Dale Farm who will be facing the police on the 19th (along with an army of volunteer soldiers) embody many things the left purports to hate. The examples of environmental destruction, misogyny, homophobia, and child abuse rival extremist Islam. A great behind-the-scenes book about it is Gypsy Boy by Mikey Walsh. It’s the true story of a Romanian Gypsy who grew up getting the shit kicked out of him every day by his bare-knuckled boxing coach/dad and then getting raped every night by his uncle. When Walsh realized he was gay he was forced to leave the group because Gypsies tend to agree with Ahmadinejad when it comes to homosexuality in their community—it does not exist. Like most sane people, this makes me want to puke. I don’t care how quaint you are. If you’re intolerant, I don’t tolerate you.

In Dale Farm, they bought greenbelt land under the auspices of preserving it but quickly bulldozed it to make way for prefab homes and trailers. They live among heaps of garbage and terrorize anyone who tries to stop their war on the countryside. They claim they are victims left with no choice, but Wales and Scotland are rife with land. Shit, the government claims there are 738,414 unoccupied homes in Britain. Network Rail alone is sitting on thousands of acres of unused land. Unfortunately, none of it is as close to London as Dale Farm, which is about half an hour due west of downtown. The media class keeps telling us about the horrible shortage of affordable housing in that area, but there’s a shortage of affordable housing in Beverly Hills, too. It doesn’t mean dolts on the dole have the right to bulldoze the parks and set up a litter factory. 

Americans should care about this assholes v. losers war because we’re acting like the losers. When France bans the burqa, the American left tells us we’re just as bad because we force women to wear high heels. When we tell them about African Muslims practicing female genital mutilation we’re reminded that we circumcise boys. When we tell them gays are murdered in Iran they assume it’s a fake fact made up by Fox News. When we tell them 25% of the world’s Muslims (a mere 370 million of them) think suicide bombing is “sometimes or often justified,” they change course and say, “So what? We wage wars.” Even as the Twin Towers fell, millions of Americans denied Muslim culpability and said it was a secret trick played by rich white men.

I’d like to think New Yorkers would start kicking ass and taking names if some meandering Iranians tried to bulldoze Central Park. It seems hard to imagine America could be as weak as the Brits. Support for the Irish Travellers is virtually endless there, and the opposition seems confined to carefully worded OpEds in the Daily Mail. One pathetic headline pleaded, “Travellers invaded my village a year ago—and it’s sheer hell. Don’t tell me they’re the victims” and contained the following cringefest:

When I was giving evidence at a recent public inquiry into the site, I broke down in tears, such was the stress I have been feeling over these long months. Inevitably, this led to a series of cruel, mocking calls from the travellers.

A slightly braver response was the guy who parked his van on the town hall steps the way the Travellers planted themselves in his neighborhood, but that’s about as “Born Free” as they get. You don’t see a lot of “We Don’t Call 911” signs in the UK.

Which is the problem. Britain has raised a generation of citizens who have, to quote Milton Friedman, a “childlike dependence” on the government. They don’t put sugar in the bulldozer’s tank or form a posse to chase trespassers off the land. They call the council and get a solicitor to send a notice to the barrister. They defend themselves by writing letters asking the government for help, and if that doesn’t work they go to a meeting and cry.

It’s still hard to picture an American doing that, thank God.