Across the world, the Right reaches out to its base by campaigning on cultural issues, while serving elite economic interests.
This effective political strategy works by making the base ever angrier & more desperate.
It explains why #GBNews is paid for by wealthy hedge-funders.
Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, Farage & now Boris Johnson have all embraced & successfully exploited this strategy.
ALL of these societies are now dangerously polarised.
For centuries, dictators have galvanised support by demonizing imagined enemies - it's the exact same principle.
This is, effectively, what the culture war is all about: KEEP fueling the passionate base's anger & desperation: KEEP telling them that Britain, civilisation, & *our entire way of life* is under threat from a wide range of Others who are everywhere.
It's McCarthyism on steroids.
Once the frame is established, it can be claimed that almost anything, no matter how absurd the claim, is a symptom of "woke tyranny" or "cancel culture": the police, the ruling class, Universities, the National Trust; prisons - even the military industrial complex & capitalism.
Partisan & populist newspapers, magazines & radio & TV channels & platforms deliberately stoke division & outrage, which drives audiences & ad revenue - & anger.
Nuanced, & intelligent, measured thought & discussion is increasingly hard to find.
We're on a VERY dangerous road.
It was only a few years ago that we watched open mouthed as Trump & the cranks at Fox News puked out their increasingly unhinged, deliberately inflammatory, & deliberately polarising culture war rhetoric, as we smugly thought 'that could never happen here'.
How wrong we were.
And before the army of new anonymous #GBNews supporting troll accounts unleash their venom, it doesn't mean there aren't serious disagreements.
But using culture war rhetoric to frame these divisions is not only absurd, it's dangerous, wrong, & harms all of us.
We need #nuance.
"In terms of format we are like Fox but we won’t be like Fox in that they come from a hard right disinformation fake news conspiracy agenda" - Andrew Neil
Epidemiologists are "DOOMSDAY SCIENTISTS ADDICTED TO POWER! WE MUST FIGHT BACK AGAINST THIS MADNESS!" - Dan Wootton
#GBNews
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