It's been a rum old few weeks for what we used to laughingly call the alt-right in this country. First The Beeb's go-to "balance" for rationality, Nigel Farage, quite rightly got the boot from his LBC show, and lo there was much chortling. Then, even more entertainingly, Twitter finally decided it had had enough of the tedious Katie Hopkins, an unpleasant rentagob who'd been monetising her appalling opinions for far too long already.
This gradual realisation on the part of broadcast and social media that the opinions held by the likes of Mr Farage and Ms Hopkins is welcome, albeit overdue (It's interesting to note that this period has also seen Twitter flexing its muscles over the American President's somewhat elastic relationship with the truth, even the usually supine Facebook has pulled some ads from The Donald). A mainstream media presence gives the gloss of respectability to even the most objectionable opinions, and Lord knows they've plenty of those.
Farage and Hopkins both have plenty of previous, of course, with Katie being the pioneer of being cast into the outer darkness, gradually retreating from the mainstream to the fringes, before being booted even from them. Her journey to so far beyond the pale that you can't even see the sodding pale is well documented here by Otto English. Of course, generating clicks by being ever more abhorrent is not something unique to Hatey Katie, but she's done it better than most.
The problem is that fascism is one hell of a drug. Needing harder and harder hits of unpleasantness to satisfy the needs of her rabid fanbase, Hopkins inevitably painted herself into a racist corner, removal from normal discourse was always going to happen. Call it the Hopkins parabola, the need to cause outrage fuels an arc which is only ever going in one direction. It's a path previously followed by Nazism's very own Tiny Tim, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, or "Tommy Robinson" to his lumpen fans. Variously portraying himself as a "journalist" and, even more laughably, an "author", the pint sized Goebbels and putative EU parliamentarian hasn't exactly drifted to the right, he was always there, but he has gradually realised that his days of being called by Newsnight (yes, that really happened) are behind him, and doesn't even pretend to be anything other than a provocateur these days.
And it would appear that pound shop Enoch Powell, the boy Farage, is on the same path. Brexit done and dusted, he can now be found mostly at Dover, recording videos for the rump of racists that still hang on his every word of the "floods of illegal immigrants" which are apparently arriving every day. After poor old Nige got the boot from LBC he hot-footed straight to the Kent coast to stand around in a shit coat looking angry whilst pointing at some buses. There was a brief hop to his good mate Donald's absolutely disastrous shit-show of a rally, presumably to help make up the numbers, and then he was back on it (slightly oddly, given that anyone arriving in the UK is now supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days, a matter, presumably, for the Kent Constabulary).
From head of a political party to sticking conspiracy theory videos on youtube in a few short weeks, it's been a pretty lively time for Nige, and it would appear that though he arrived late to the Hopkins Parabola, he's intent on making up for lost time. An appearance on InfoWars beckons.
But what's caused all this? Well, the short answer is probably BLM, which did a sterling job of smoking the racists out of the woodwork. Various types declaimed their Big Racist Thoughts with their usual degree of smirking solemnity, only to find out that that they were pretty much out of step with public opinion. It's the same reason that Trumps poll ratings are crashing. I'm prepared to bet a few quid that whichever Cro-Magnon thought that flying that "White Lives Matter" banner over the City v Burnley match was a wizard wheeze wasn't expecting it to go down quite as badly as it has.
It probably didn't help that the "statue protectors" shat the bed quite so spectacularly either. Anyone with a long enough memory suddenly saw the rearing of a sort of hooliganism that we'd not seen in full cry since the eighties, when Maggie and the Sun lit the fire of toxic nationalism in the belly of a disenfranchised generation of whites who'd seen their lives ruined by the very forces they claimed to stand for. To say it was counter-productive would be a sizable understatement.
This is not to say that the racists aren't out there, but more that they're finally being opposed, and there's not as many of them as they thought. As the world changes around them, faster than they can process they lash out, they retreat to the margins.
You may have heard of Parler, it's basically racist twitter (I know, more so than the actual one). They're all over there these days, yer Hopkinses, yer Darren Grimeses. all over there celebrating "free speech". It's the margins. What this lot are too dim to understand is that they're allowing themselves to be ghettoised. They can all sit in there yammering on about "Cultural Marxism" but each time one of them does, they're spewing less bile into the mainstream. It's a malodorous echo chamber full of the dullest minds to ever pen think-pieces about people on benefits. Possibly Tom Harwood and the Guido Fawkes mob will be the next bunch to jump ship, maybe, dare we dream, the odious Brendan O'Neill, though as he rather seems to tick the Beeb's "have one total cunt on for balance" box maybe it'll be a little while before he, too follows the Hopkinns parabola. But a man can dream.
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