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.
"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
I missed this story about Kevin Roberts - President of the Heritage Foundation & the man behind #Project2025, who has close ties to Truss, Patel, Oliver Dowden & Jenrick (who have all given speeches at the Heritage Foundation) - KILLING HIS NEIGHBOUR'S DOG WITH A SHOVEL!
“He was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly... he kind of lost it & took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” said Kenneth Hammond, chair of the History Dept at the time.
Farage may become Britain's Trump, & Reform UK, Britain's Republicans: same divisive 1930s-style propaganda; same support from the same handful of billionaires; same climate change denial; same policies, from the same opaquely funded global network of free-market think-tanks.🤑
Tommy Robinson CHECKS HIS SOURCES, so he knows Evie is a right-wing online magazine which has spread COVID-19 & vaccine misinformation, & has a traditionalist/antifeminist worldview.
In 2022, Evie launched an app which collects menstruation data, funded by Peter Thiel.
Evie’s anti-vax blogs provide a window into how COVID denialism & misinformation are being marketed in right-wing women’s media. Evie’s founder and editor-in-chief is a former model turned would-be Catholic lifestyle influencer named Brittany Martinez.
In 2023, Rolling Stone described as the "Gen Z ‘Cosmo’ for the far-right" (so Tiny Tommy obviously gravitates towards it), the Peter Thiel-linked Evie Magazine is "harnessing the culture war to grow its audience."
Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews in order to facilitate the Holocaust.
In the book 'Unhumans', right-wing conspiracy theorists Jack Posobiec &Joshua Lisec claim that Progressive-minded Americans are bloodthirsty Communist "unhumans" hellbent on destrying civilization.
This 🧵quotes this article by Gil Duran of @GeorgeLakoff's #FrameLab. George is a cognitive linguist & philosopher, best known for his thesis that our lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors used use to explain complex phenomena.
Here's the context debunking the abhorrent lies about Springfield Haitians 'eating geese & pets' currently being pushed by Trump, Vance, endless gullible MAGAs, & much of the US right-wing media, which have so far resulted in two bomb threats.
Not content with attacking the UK & Brazilian Governments & spreading wild conspiracy theories, petulant sociopathic politically illiterate one-man-disinformation machine Elon Musk has now lambasted Australia’s government as “fascists”.
The Australian Government has proposed laws that could levy substantial fines on social media companies if they fail to comply with rules to combat the spread of #disinformation and online scams - which Musk has zero interest in doing.
The billionaire owner of @X posted the word “fascists” above a childish tweet posted by the Tesla-loving dimwit who designed the shit X logo, who referred to misinformation as "so-called misinformation".