What Happened in Britain Can Easily Happen Here

While Biden ‘not confident at all’ in peaceful transition if Trump loses election, the English right-wing riots for very MAGA reasons, Riots across Britain: how did we get here?

Biden knows is that the same thing that happened there can happen here. Same kind of manipulative politicians, the same kind of thinking being foisted on the public, the same kind of tinder waiting to be set afire.

 Britain’s riots put spotlight on far-right misinformation

The post would get amplified by an ecosystem of far-right personalities on social media, both within and outside of Britain. It would turn out later that many of its reported details were flatly wrong and that the assailant was a teen, born in Britain to Rwandan migrants. His religious identity was likely not Muslim. But a match had already been lit.

“It looks like the tweet has been deliberately fabricated to generate hostility toward ethnic minorities and immigrants, and it’s a potentially Islamophobic piece of propaganda,” Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University and expert in the spread of online misinformation, told my colleagues.

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The anger of the rioters arguably reflects a deep-seated resentment of minorities and Muslims among a segment of the British populace, embedded in decades of angst over Britain’s particular multicultural project. Though polls show the vast majority of Britons deplore the violence carried out by far-right “hooligans,” their motivations are inescapably linked to a more mainstream set of politics.

Speaking of online misinformation, The Jacobin provides us J. D. Vance Got His Faux Populism From Internet Weirdos

If you hang out with ordinary people in culturally conservative parts of the country and tell them, as Vance told an interviewer a couple of years ago, that we’re in a “late Republican period” where extreme measures might be called for, implicitly drawing an analogy to Augustus ending the Roman Republic and making himself emperor, you’re going to get a lot of confused looks. If you tell the same thing to Claremont Institute interns with Roman statues in their Twitter profile pictures, they’ll eat it up. And let’s not even get into the book Vance blurbed a couple of years ago calling for making teachers’ unions illegal (very populist!) and praising bloodthirsty Chilean and Spanish dictators Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco for knowing how to deal with the “unhumans” on the Left.

In full view of the company he’s kept these last few years and the arc of his political evolution, it’s pretty clear: Vance’s current rhetorical posture is not the result of his early experiences in Kentucky. Instead, it was grown in the petri dish of edgy online right-wing discourse.

From The Jaocobin's Britain’s Riots Are Designed to Terrorize Muslims:

For years, the Home Office has served as a platform for ultraconservative figures to push policies against vulnerable groups and asylum seekers, marked by Islamophobia and a strong commitment to punishing dissent. Activists and researchers have long warned of the potential consequences of such rhetoric — and emphasized the importance of hateful language.

The architect of the Rwanda plan, Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman, was fired in November for criticizing the police as “too lenient” on pro-Palestinian protesters. She repeatedly labeled the protests as hate marches, in a monthslong crusade against Palestine. Yet Braverman’s eventual sacking — in response to a series of articles she had published in the Telegraph — proved merely a communications gambit.

The Tories continued to intensify the stance on deportations that she had advanced. But the lines between the two parties also became blurred. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party followed suit with the Tories, adopting alarmist rhetoric on migration, scapegoating Bangladeshi people, and even implying the possibility of collaboration with European far-right leaders.

Their persistent dog-whistling has blinded these parties to the escalating damage that has been done. Now, Britain is engulfed in a coordinated assault on its democracy. The crisis now faced is the direct outcome of long-standing establishment actions — worsened by a perilous digital landscape that harbors the far-right architects of the current riots.

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The parallels between Greece and the UK indicate that ineffective counterterrorism measures are likely to escalate violence, now on the brink of spiraling out of control. As these words are written, far-right terrorists are targeting minority-led businesses, migration offices, and doxing individuals working for NGOs and migration-related services. 

The New Republic reported on the riots under The Day the Riots Stopped.

Newer, more organized fascist units like Patriotic Alternative and Britain First—which the previous government considered including under its definition of “extremists”—were not at the forefront. The rioters were instead a looser lot, priming themselves on WhatsApp Groups, X networks, and forums on the unregulated messenger service Telegram. Coalitions derived from the internet alone do not survive long; a sustained week of action was probably the full depth of their potential. The bulk are football ultras and lumpens in towns left spent by the death march of deindustrialization and Tory austerity, who would be classed as “downwardly mobile” if there were someplace further for them to fall. They are the locals at the riots because they can’t afford the price of a train ticket to riot anywhere else. But the petit bourgeois of the rabble can. These are the personal trainers, the crypto obsessives, and heirs to the family plumbing business who believe themselves to be in a much more precarious place and blame migrants for putting them there.

This reminds me of some of the MAGA people I have encountered in Muncie - too young to know the good old days when GM employed most of the population: 

Enough of what? The fascist thinks himself part of a subject population under foreign occupation. The takeover, he reckons, is run from London by its mayor, Sadiq Kahn, and backed by the BBC’s propaganda of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” The police, traditionally the fascist’s friends, do the work of a captured government by arresting people for making posts on Facebook. The properly committed (in the sense of an insane asylum) think the chain goes one higher: “The Jews” are also involved. Second World War fantasies run alongside fears of infiltration and the kind of craniometry found in “great replacement theory.” Here the malign neglect of the austerity era (which never ended) meets the mass paranoid dreams only social media can breed; real alienation finds its vengeful outlet not in the rioters’ actual dispossessors, but in the minorities destroying a “way of life” that none of them are bright enough to remember.

Another who sees these kinds of riots could happen here:

A lot of breath will be wasted by anyone who identifies “disinformation” as the cause and culprit, as if the mob were set to frenzy like a rabid dog near water by a Russian bot. They did not go to the street for a lie. They did not risk spending the next 10 years in the slammer for a lie. They went, many with intent to murder, because the warlike and paranoiac tenor of their feeds told them the lie was plausible. A vast architecture of corrosive belief props up the choice to tag “Move them out or we burn them out” on a wall or indeed to actually set fire to a migrant hostel. An ideology built entirely on the total language of domination, invasion, and replacement only spurs retaliation in kind. Fact-checking and passing out more Pinocchios-per-fib was proved not to move any needles during the Trump administration; a fresh dose of hectoring will not send the fascists back home for a cup of tea and some quiet meditation on their sins.

What I would like to think of my fellow Americans is that there are enough of us who prefer an imperfect democracy to a perfect dictatorship.

 The Guardian's Young women are the most progressive group in American history. Young men are checked out does not make me feel more confident.

“Gen Z is far less likely to be confident in the federal government, in the media, in organized religion, in the police, in the criminal justice system,” Deckman said. “This is just endemic to a generation of young people who have grown up in one crisis after another.”

There is fertile ground for bad things to happen here - it may be that young men will not be the dependable ones.

sch 8/9