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 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was a response to the atrocities of WWII and the Holocaust, designed to prevent such horrors reoccurring.
Withdrawing risks weakening human rights, international isolation, destabilised peace agreements, and authoritarian drift.
Adopted in 1950 by the Council of Europe, the ECHR was a collective response to the Holocaust, during which about 11 million people, including 6 million Jews, were systematically exterminated, exposing the urgent need for a legal framework to prevent such horrors from recurring.
The Council of Europe, established in 1949 to promote democracy, rule of law, and human rights, made the ECHR a cornerstone of its mission.
Influenced by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the ECHR ensured states uphold fundamental rights.
Comparing political rhetoric across eras is a sensitive task, as context, intent, and historical outcomes differ vastly.
In 1990, Ivana Trump said her husband Donald owned a copy of “My New Order” – a printed collection of Hitler's speeches – which he kept by the bedside...
Some of Trump’s statements have been noted by historians, critics, and media for echoing themes or phrasing used by Adolf Hitler, particularly in their dehumanizing language, scapegoating of groups, and authoritarian undertones.
Below, with @grok's help, I’ll provide examples of Trump’s quotes that have been cited as resembling Hitler’s rhetoric, alongside Hitler’s statements for comparison, drawing from credible sources, focusing on specific language & themes, ensuring accuracy, & avoiding exaggeration.
Most people know very little about Trump's new best friend, El Salvador’s strongman leader, Nayib Bukele, who's been sat in the White House being adored by Trump and his team of fawning, dangerously unhinged sociopathic bootlickers...
Read this excellent article by Professor of International Politics at Lancaster University, Amalendu Misra, the author of seven critically acclaimed monographs on conflict and peace, whose primary research concerns violence in the political process.
Trump has unleashed a string of controversial policies since returning to the White House that have put his administration at odds with most of the world. He's also forged an alliance with one country that is willing to do his bidding abroad: El Salvador.
The techno-dystopia many have warned about looks a lot closer today, after @WIRED revealed that Peter Thiel's #Palantir (which has a £500 million contract with #NHS England to manage our patient data across NHS trusts) is involved in Elon Musk’s DOGE.
If you're unaware of who unhinged billionaire tech-bro Peter Thiel is, and why he should have nothing to do with the UK or our #NHS, or how he groomed and installed his protégé JD Vance in the White House, or how he's not keen on democracy, read this:
The BMA are concerned about patient data privacy & Palantir’s ties to US intelligence.
DOGE, Palantir, & IRS representatives have been collaborating to build a single API layer above all IRS databases at an event previously characterized as a “hackathon.” publictechnology.net/2023/11/22/hea…
🧵 A scholar who specialises in how Universities respond to authoritarian pressure across different political systems, cultural contexts & historical moments warns that compliance with the Trump administration will not protect their funding & independence. theconversation.com/universities-i…
Many American universities, widely seen globally as beacons of academic integrity and free speech, are giving in to demands from the Trump administration, which has been targeting academia since it took office.
Even before seizing power in 1933, the Nazi Party was closely monitoring German universities through nationalist student groups & sympathetic faculty, flagging professors deemed politically unreliable – particularly Jews, Marxists, liberals & pacifists.
The claim that 11,300 millionaires fled the UK due to Labour has been widely reported & discussed—even by ministers.
Just one problem: it’s extremely unlikely to be true.
A 🧵 about wealth, truth, propaganda, our broken news media, & how citizenship became a commodity.
This 🧵is about how the ultrarich use news media to oppose constraints on their wealth & power, & to break free from well-established legal, democratic & ethical norms, manifested in debate around what some have called the 'commodification of citizenship'. eprints.lse.ac.uk/123961/2/Commo…
The sheer volume of unreliable or false information spreading around the world has caused some scholars to refer to this phenomenon as a ‘disinfodemic’, which involves the spread of harmful, misleading and dangerously polarizing misinformation and disinformation.