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
Chase Herro, co-founder of Trump’s main crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, on crypto:
“You can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it.”
Despite crypto being bullshit, & memecoins being consciously bullshit, many – especially angry young gullible men – still invest: 42% of men & 17% of women aged 18-29 have invested in, traded or used crypto (2024 Pew Research), compared to only 11% of men & 5% of women over 50.
“It’s no accident that memecoins are such a phenomenon among young people who have grown immensely frustrated with a financial system that, I think it’s fair to say, has failed them” - Sander Lutz, the first crypto-focused White House correspondent.
🧵In January, Farage said Musk was justified in calling Starmer complicit in failures to prosecute grooming gangs: “In 2008 Keir Starmer had just been appointed as DPP & there was a case brought before them of alleged mass rape of young girls that did not lead to a prosecution.”
The allegation that Starmer was complicit in failures to prosecute grooming gangs is often repeated. But how true is it?
Two Facebook posts, originally appearing in April/May 2020, claimed Starmer told police when he was working for the CPS not to pursue cases against Muslim men accused of rape due to fears it would stir up anti-Islamic sentiment.
In 2022 the posts and allegations saw a resurgence online with hundreds of new shares. They said: “From 2004 onwards the director of public prosecutions told the police not to prosecute Muslim rape gangs to prevent ‘Islamophobia’.
Decades of research shows that parroting or appeasing the far-right simply legitimises their framing, and further normalises illiberal exclusionary discourse and politics.
Starmer's speech is more evidence that the far-right has been mainstreamed.
Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist who focuses on political extremism and populism in Europe and the US, is, imho, one of the most important voices on the Left today.
Allow me to briefly summarise some of his work.
In a 2023 lecture, Mudde emphasizes the importance of precise terminology in discussing the far-right, distinguishing between extreme right (anti-democracy) and radical right (accepts elections but rejects liberal democratic principles like minority rights and rule of law).
He argues we're in a "fourth wave" of postwar far-right politics, characterized by the mainstreaming & normalization of the far-right - what Linguist Prof Ruth Wodak in a related concept refers to as the 'shameless normalization of far-right discourse'.
After eight years as US President, on Janury 17, 1961, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, former supreme commander of the Allied forces in western Europe during WWII, warned us about the the growing "military-industrial complex" (and Trump2.0) in his prescient farewell address.
Before looking at that speech, some context for those unfamiliar with Eisenhower, the 34th US president, serving from 1953 to 1961.
During WWII, he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and achieved the five-star rank as General of the Army.
Eisenhower planned & supervised two consequential WWII military campaigns: Operation Torch in the North Africa campaign in 1942–43 & the 1944 Normandy invasion.
The right-wing of the Republican Party clashed with him more often than the Democrats did during his first term.
In England, 18% of adults aged 16-65 - 6.6 million people - can be described as having "very poor literacy skills" AKA 'functionally illiterate'.
This leaves people vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation, and poses significant challenges for society and democracy.
Being 'functionally illiterate' means that a person can understand short straightforward texts on familiar topics accurately & independently, & obtain information from everyday sources, but reading information from unfamiliar sources or on unfamiliar topics can cause problems.
Adult functional illiteracy—lacking the reading, writing, and comprehension skills needed for everyday tasks—poses significant challenges for a country, society, and democracy.