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
The front-page article, published in the Daily Telegraph, claiming “London is home to as many as 585,000 illegal migrants, equivalent to one in 12 of the city’s population” was covered across the media and widely discussed by politicians and others.
The claim that “One in 12 in London is illegal immigrant” is based on this report, commissioned by Thames Water, conducted by the research company Edge Analytics in February 2023, which the Telegraph says it obtained “under freedom of information-style laws for the environment”.
🧵 Quite a few politically & historically illiterate brainwashed Trump-supporters replied or quote-tweeted the tweet below to tell me lifelong democratic socialist George Orwell was not in fact a democratic socialist. Truly Orwellian. So I asked Oligarch Musk's Grok about it...
In the preface to her newly reissued book, 'Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan - 30th Anniversary Edition', historian @NancyMacLean5 reflects on the resurgence of white power nationalism and political violence in contemporary America.
MaClean is known for her prescient best-selling 2017 book about the post–WWII conservative thinkers and policymakers who shaped the hyper-neoliberal #Project2025, 'Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America',
Evidence of why her prize-winning book has aged well and why @OxUniPress decided to republish it is obvious: numerous instructors continue to assign it, countless historians cite it, and the best Klan scholars have given it well-deserved praise.
According to the UK Electoral Commission website, in June & July 2024 alone, more than £1.7M flooded into Reform UK. Since 2019, more than £16M (73%) of its funding is linked to just nine companies & individuals with offshore interests.
The Electoral Commission website is easy to search, either by donations/loans to particular political parties, or by the names of individuals/organisations funding them. Since 2019, Farage's Reform UK Ltd/Brexit Party has recieved more than £22M (£4.4M/MP) search.electoralcommission.org.uk/?currentPage=1…
My January 2024 article in @BylineTimes revealed that by far the biggest single Reform UK Ltd donor is Thai-based Chris Harborne, who made his fortune in aviation fuel & crypto investing. He's given them around £13.7M (62% of their total donations).
GB "News" is jointly owned by Paul Marshall & Legatum, under the umbrella of holding company All Perspectives: three of its significant shareholders work for Christopher Chandler's Dubai-based investment firm Legatum & three Tory life peers are shareholders or Directors.
The five people listed as having 'significant control' over GB "News" umbrella holding company All Perspectives Ltd are: Philip Vassiliou; Paul Marshall; Richard Douglas; Alan McCormick; & Christopher Chandler.
The House of Lords Register of Interests reveals three Tory life peers are Directors or shareholders of All Perspectives: Lord Agnew of Oulton & Baroness Morrissey are Directors; Lord Farmer is a Shareholder.
Whose interests does free-market propaganda channel GB "News" serve?
In 2013, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner published the final report of its two-year Inquiry into child sexual exploitation in gangs & groups - the biggest investigation into the scale & nature of child sexual abuse in England ever published.
Anyone wanting to read “If only someone had listened”, Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups, Final Report', published November 2013, by Sue Berelowitz et al, it's here: