"As the immediate panic over Brexit subsides, it is time for a serious debate not only about the future of the EU, but the UN, and what might replace these corrosive institutions with arrangements more beneficial to the modern world."
From Brexit to Visions of a UN Exit?
By
Claudia Rosett
June 28, 2016
Britain's vote last week to leave the European Union -- the Brexit --
was a vote for freedom, a revolt against an unaccountable bureaucracy
in Brussels. Amid the excitement, Fox News briefly reported the story as
even bigger than it was, with a TV screen banner proclaiming not that
the UK was leaving the EU, but "UK VOTES TO LEAVE UN."Yes, some things are too good to be true, and this was one.
As parody, it would have been genius. As a piece of news reporting, the Fox mixup of the EU and UN inspired plenty of derision -- a bit of comic relief, gleefully seized upon by the stricken members of a pro-EU global elite and commentariat. They cannot fathom why a majority of British voters would choose to reclaim from the commissars of the EU the full freedom to control Britain's own borders, bananas and vacuum cleaners. In that context, Fox's botching of a news banner helps feed the narrative that the Brexit vote was some boorish mistake cooked up by a know-nothing mob.
Except that's false, in ways far more profound than the mistake in the Fox chyron. For an eloquent defense of Brexit, see Roger Kimball's "Focused on Disaster Narrative, Media Ignores Obvious Benefits of Brexit." To this I'd add that even in Fox's erroneous UN-exit caption there was, along with the comedy, some grist for serious thought.
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