In #HowToStopFascism I produced a 21C summary of the fascist thought-architecture... yesterday's @NatConTalk conference ticked a lot of boxes... 1/...
2/ "It's not racist to oppose mass immigration..." ... "our way of life"..."lower birth rate"... "multiculturalism is recipe for national disaster"..."Cultural Marxism"... they know exactly what they are doing...
3/ It's not fascism, yet. Nor is it actually right-wing populism per se. As I explain in the book, the fascist thought-architecture acts like a magnet on right-wing conservatism, pulling them into its moral/intellectual orbit...
4/ Using this language, the NatCons give extremists permission to use their own version of it: liberalism turned from valid tradition to alien ideology... human rights lawyers otherised... feminists cast as collaborators... it's all there in Camus...
5/ All those nice people at the tennis club, or at the church fete in Toryshire, or in the investment bank ... this is where your party is headed unless •you• call a halt. It happened to the Republicans. It's happening here.
6/ Of course they don't espouse the Day X fantasy yet. That's the dividing line. The issue is, are they prepared to use state power to suppress the would-be fascist insurrectionaries? Answer: the Tories are trying to rewrite the policing of extremism to focus away from RWX...
Braverman's "Let them pick fruit" speech today will show what a strategic mess Tory economic policy is.... the fiscal credibility of Hunt/Sunak budget *depends* on high immigration... 1/🧵
2/ Here's the crucial passage. Let's examine the logic... a) Fruit picking is not high skilled b) the reason there are shortages for all is that they are tough jobs even when the pay is good... and we have a STRUCTURAL LABOUR SHORTAGE...
3/ ... staying with her economic illiteracy ... Brexit has not so far enabled a high-wage, high-skilled economy because it has flattened business investment ... that was the outcome policy she fought for...
April saw a sea change in Western economic policies...from both the @WhiteHouse and @ecb ... 🧵 1/ (link at end)... basically neoliberalism has geopolitically weakened the West to the point of dependency on its adversaries ...
Nothing of this strategic significance happens by accident. There were firefighters already on the roof when the drone hit. Now there are 2x possibilities 1/ Putin wants to de-escalate, and this is a false flag designed to trigger a crisis move ... there have been 🧵
2/ ... persistent reports that VVP wants to stage a crisis inside Russia so he can extricate the army out of Zaporizhia/Kherson provinces - maybe this is the start of a choreographed sequence that does that - eg next one hits a NPP? ...
3/ ... or maybe it's a move to escalate, to pre-empt the 🇺🇦 counter offensive with a return to nuclear threats... worth watching the proxies here and in USA for if they frame this as a justification for escalation "we're doomed bcos Zelensky gone too far..."
Richard Sharp resigns. Good. Now learn the lessons 🧵1/ Boris Johnson drags another reputation into the 💩- there will be more to come. The entire administration looks corrupt from top to bottom...we need independent legal oversight of government...
2/ The Tories have politicised swathes of public appointment. This breach of the governance code fell the wrong side of propriety, but the whole system is producing mates-rates jobs for Tory donors and allies... Labour has to pledge an end to it...
3/ The entire "impartiality" drive Sharp imposed on the BBC, on the Tories' behalf, has to be scrapped by the interim management. It wasn't impartial, it was a drive to privilege "non-metropolitan" attitudes over the values of liberal democracy...
The upcoming Defence Command Paper is crunch time for the British Army. The Tories have depleted its numbers and capabilities, and screwed up the AJAX procurement - so the “modernised warfighting division” promised in 2021 looks further away than ever… 1/…🧵
2/ Meanwhile USA + Russia switching to division-centric warfare, & beefing up higher echelons. UK can realistically offer one manoeuvre division to NATO. So we need to find the money for rapid modernisation, rearmament, reserves and upgrades… 2/ …
3/ So we should resist the lobby that wants to deprioritise land capabilities in Europe/NATO in favour of expeditionary/naval/Indo-Pacific. It makes zero sense once you understand the nihilistic nature of Russian aggression 3/ …
For most people "Nazi architect" means Albert Speer. But in its new exhibition - Power Space Violence - @AkademiederK explores how the whole of German architecture contributed to militarisation, repression snd genocide 1/ ...🧵
2/ ... Nazi architecture went thru 4 phases: first the promise of cottages for the volk, in racially cleansed village communities ... like today's AfD and alt right they hated modernism ...
3/ ... but the massive interwar housing shortage was never abated: instead they built camps, barracks, arms factories and motorways - Hitler slashed public funding for house building ....