In 2018, Sky News Australia sparked outcry after it broadcast an interview with a far-right #nationalist#extremist who has expressed his admiration for #Hitler.
Sky News Australia CEO Angelos Frangopoulos downplayed it as "an error of judgment".
Frangopoulos is GB "News" CEO.
GB News' creators clearly believe that US-style grievance politics can sustain at least a low-budget, tactically neutered version of Fox.
GB "News" is a right-wing TV "news" channel. Britain hasn’t had one of those before. The shift is real.
"Trying to find guests for “Uncancelled” who truly cannot get a hearing elsewhere would mean booking flat-earthers, extreme religious fundamentalists, or actual Nazis."
Many of the most listened to voices in British media try their hardest to get canceled. Think about that. 🤔
If GB News wants to “puncture the pomposity of our elites,” then it should acknowledge that no group fits that description more than the small number of shutdown skeptics employed by right-wing papers & GB News - 71% supported the delay in lifting the coronavirus restrictions.
"Political polarization in the US seems to have been turbocharged by a hermetic right-wing media universe built on paranoia, resentment, and mistrust of authority. As GB News matures, the channel may test how receptive Britain is to culture-war topics brought over from the US."
"Already, Brexit influencers have imported the vocabulary of the American right (snowflakes, triggered, woke) as well as the idea that “owning the libs” is a political goal in itself."
In a piece for ConservativeHome, hard-right crank Donal Blaney wrote: “As these triggered snowflakes wail uncontrollably in impotent fury into their kale, lentil, & chai lattes this morning, and for months to come, all at GB News need to channel their inner Churchill.”
"Perhaps GB News will bait @Ofcom the British television-news regulator - with ever more polarized content, and then pose as a cancel-culture victim if given an official rebuke. Little by little, the channel could chip away at the British principle of neutrality in broadcasting."
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Some MPs who have been in parliament for many years NEVER appear on any of the @BBC's "flagship" politics shows - but Reform's privately educated shit-stirring 'anti-elite' former Tory Sarah Pochin - an MP for FIVE WEEKS - gets her own special introduction on #PoliticsLive.
Politicians using dangerously irresponsible anti-Muslim rhetoric know their comments are normalising Islamophobia and endanger British Muslim women. Islamophobic incidents rose by 375% in the week after Boris Johnson called veiled Muslim women “letterboxes” in 2018.
#PolitcsLive
Britain prides itself in NOT being the sort of country that tells women how to dress. States that do dictate women’s clothing (eg Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia) are vilified as misogynistic & ultra-controlling: the antithesis of the enlightened, liberal west. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
"Foreigners" DO NOT claim £1BILLION/month in benefits.
This disgusting anti-migrant dogwhistle by shameless liar and former Head of Policy Exchange, Neil O'Brien MP, is just one of several recent dispicable divisive Telegraph front page lies.
WTAF @IpsoNews? @HoCStandards?
The claims that the UK spends £1bn/month "on UC benefits for overseas nationals" (O'Brien) and "Foreigners claim £1bn a month in benefits" (Telegraph) are revealed to be lies in the article: the£1bn relates to "Benefits claims by HOUSEHOLDS with AT LEAST ONE FOREIGN NATIONAL."
The Telegraph claims that (unnamed) "experts suggested the increase reflected a SURGE in the number of asylum seekers being granted refugee status and in net migration."
To evaluate/make sense of this sensational unsourced claim, additional context is needed (but not provided).
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'.