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From the September Print Edition of Byline Times
As the worst race riots in living memory, mainly targeting migrants and Muslims, the violence that spread across several towns and cities in the UK this summer was newsworthy in itself. But the volume of attention it received from key figures across the Atlantic seemed disproportionate.
Social media played a key role in the disturbances. The owner of the X(-rated) site we used to call Twitter, Elon Musk, had already helped to lay the groundwork for the riots by reinstating the accounts of Andrew Tate and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) – the loudest purveyors of false information about the tragic killing of three young girls in Southport on 29 July, with incendiary claims that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker.
As the rioting spread, leaving more than 100 police officers injured and leading to more than a thousand arrests, Musk continued to comment with something akin to jubilation – claiming that “civil war is inevitable”.
The owner of SpaceX and Tesla directly attempted to intervene in UK politics by echoing the far-right justification for the riots, claiming that they were the result of “two-tier Keir” policing. His trolling did not stop with the Prime Minister.
He went on to describe the former First Scottish Minister Humza Yousaf as a “racist scumbag” and – among the thousands of other US-based accounts focused on British Muslim public figures – he was joined by Canadian psychologist and darling of the ‘alt-right’, Jordan Peterson, who described London Mayor Sadiq Khan as “the worst of the lot”.
Soon, British Conservative politicians, who had been eerily quiet during the riots themselves, joined the chorus defending Musk and his platforming of ‘hate speech’.
Read the analysis of Adam Bienkov, Nafeez Ahmed and Kyle Taylor into the preconditions and planning of Britain’s summer riots in the September edition of Byline Times. Available in most stores or digital edition online now.
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss praised X and its owner for “standing up against bullies” and “attacks on free speech”. Former minister and MP Andrea Jenkyns bizarrely called for Musk to be made Prime Minister because “he would sort our country out for the better!” Kemi Badenoch, considered a front-runner in the looming Tory leadership contest, joined in to oppose “the smears of the left-wing mob” and to praise the far-right commentator Douglas Murray, much criticised for suggesting “brutal” attacks on Muslims and migrants.
What is going on here?
Neither throwing bricks at mosques nor setting fire to asylum seekers’ hotels are worthy examples of ‘free expression’ – they are clear-cut cases of intimidation and repressing the free expression of others.
And X is no crucible of ‘free speech’. It is the opposite – a paragon of ‘paid-for’ speech in which blue-tick premium buyers get prominence and preference over the rest of us. Meanwhile, Musk continues to play with the moderation system and algorithms to promote the right-wing views and voices he approves of.
In one way, the elevation of Elon Musk – one of the richest people on the planet – can be seen as an extension of the long Conservative Party tradition of fawning over right-wing foreign media moguls, like Rupert Murdoch.
But, after five years of analysing the role of Big Tech in fomenting division and faking mass movements, Byline Times is more suspicious.
Exposing the Real UK Race Riot Instigators: The Key Players and Transatlantic Network Around Tommy Robinson
Robinson has been blamed for stoking the unrest, but the tentacles of disinformation are global. Nafeez Ahmed uncovers a worrying nexus of tech platforms and far-right conspiracy – with links to Europe, Russia and the January 6 insurrection
As the riots erupted and then ended, the established press began its speculations about the causes of the violence. Some, ludicrously, will blame the Labour Government even though it has only been in power for a matter of weeks. Others, more circumspectly, consider the impact of more than a decade of austerity and poverty. The Daily Mail even splashed on a headline blaming Russian propaganda.
But few in the media will inspect the role that they themselves have played, toxifying the political culture against migrants and Muslims. They are more likely to blame hooliganism, the end of the football season, or the ‘feckless’ working class. But the evidence this newspaper has accumulated since its inception suggests that the riots were much more than a spontaneous outburst of anger and resentment, boredom and opportunism.
To understand this summer of confected discontent, it is worth looking back to 2016 when the leave result in the divisive EU Referendum was described by the head of communications for Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign, Andy Wigmore, as a “petri dish” for Donald Trump’s similarly shocking presidential victory that year in the United States.
Farage himself thanked his friend and Trump campaign manager, the far-right ideologue Steve Bannon, for his help with the referendum result – whose self-described ‘weapons’ included the Breitbart sites and his digital targeting company Cambridge Analytica.
Ever since he befriended Farage 13 years ago, Bannon has been focused on British politics as a kind of forerunner of what could happen in the US.
‘A Nationalist Uprising’: Islamophobia and the Bannonisation of British Politics
As Liz Truss joins Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson as the latest recruit to Steve Bannon’s dangerous and undemocratic internationalist ‘anti-globalism’ – more online information warfare and hate will be the result, writes Peter Jukes
He suggested this as recently as February – as I documented at the time in Byline Times – at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event in Maryland. Bannon shared a platform with Liz Truss, who nodded along while he described Tommy Robinson as a “hero”, and told a reporter that Nigel Farage would be installed as prime minister and that there would be a “nationalist uprising”.
Even then, Robinson and Farage were already in the combustible mix that constitutes Bannon’s apocalyptic politics.
When Rishi Sunak called a snap election, and Farage decided not to go to the US to support his friend Donald Trump, his rallying cry as the recently anointed new Leader of the Reform party, blazoned on the front page of the Telegraph, echoed the same insurrectionary language and attitude: “I’m back to lead the revolt.”
Is this just a colourful language? Not for Bannon, who is currently serving a prison sentence for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021. He will be out of jail before the Presidential Election in November and, though Cambridge Analytica may be long gone, the ‘MAGA’ movement has Elon Musk’s social media giant as one of its ‘weapons’, to join Murdoch’s Fox News.
We may never know exactly who lit the fuse that created terror and chaos at multiple locations in Britain weeks after a momentous General Election landslide for the new Labour Government. But those watching and provoking ‘revolt’ from across the Atlantic now have some kind of blueprint for what to do next if Donald Trump is not re-elected as President.
How do you destabilise increasingly progressive, and demographically shifting, populations? Bring chaos and division to the streets in a targeted and coordinated campaign of extremism. Byline Times will not be forgetting about the UK’s race riots. The established press will move on, but the events of this summer are part of a deeper, more disturbing, and altogether darker, vision of what some have in store for our democracy in the years ahead.