The (NOT) Silencing of Tommy Robinson

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That said, it would have denied us the mirthless irony of Robinson literally being given a platform. At this point in his manically overexposed career, Robinson enjoys the sort of “silencing” that most international movie stars can only dream of. He makes so many head-to-head media appearances that he can barely replace the gaffer tape of martyrdom across his mouth between them. It’s an eye-catching look, the tape – although I prefer to think of it as a backstreet gastric band.

To any Robinson supporters still wetting their pants over his being “silenced”, meanwhile, I can only say: do you live off-grid in some remote crofter’s hut with no electricity in the outermost Hebrides? If not, would you like me to come round to your house and show you how to work your telly and your computer? Robinson is like a relentless barrage of viral pop-up windows. The only way to stop seeing him is to pull the plug, ultimately on the national grid. (Incidentally, although his real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, this article will refer to him by his chosen moniker, “Tommy Robinson”. To get your own EDL name, take your favourite rock opera and your favourite Neighbours family. His is Tommy Robinson. Mine is Jesus Christ Superstar Mangel. Cop that, antifa.)

Anyway, back to Robinson’s LIVE! FROM! THE! OLD! BAILEY! PAVEMENT! personal appearance on Tuesday, at which his contempt case was referred to the attorney general. It can never be overstated quite how little of a toss Robinson has given about the victims of grooming gangs, but those who doubt the fact should consider that he is serially willing to collapse their trials by acting in a manner that he knows is in contempt of court. Sorry, girls – you don’t mind going through the whole horror show again, do you? Only I’ve got some pissy look-at-me point to prove that risks you having to do just that.

As befits a man who is being silenced, there was a soundsystem and microphone and speech outside the Old Bailey, for the assembled throng and all the media organisations in attendance. “I shouldn’t have to face another trial,” whined Robinson. “I’ve been here three times with a prison bag. I’ve kissed my kids goodbye three times.”

Ah yes, the much-referenced Robinson kids. Of all the distasteful aspects of his most recent prison release (the one over the bungled contempt of court conviction, not the one for mortgage fraud), for me the worst element was the setting up of a camera to film Robinson’s reunion with two of his children in their own home. What you would have imagined should have been the day’s most intensely private moment was carefully staged and filmed by someone or other in his entourage. It is almost unwatchably intrusive. Robinson’s young son in particular is absolutely beside himself with emotion, yet the camera coolly continues to film. And why wouldn’t it? It’s business. Within hours, this moment had been packaged and released for political purposes, with the #prouddad apparently keen to put it to work for him.

But as Robinson very much wanted the world to know on Tuesday: “I’ve kissed my kids goodbye three times.” Well, quite. And, given everything you have said, you will surely be wanting to rush back to them, to give them the good news of your non-incarceration and at least temporarily relieve the unquantifiable emotional stress your entirely voluntary antics put them under. No? What’s that you say? A two-and-a-half hour lunch date? But Tommy – it’s half-term! What could possibly be preferable to a day with your children that you thought you might not have?

What turned out to be the priority for Robinson was a long lunch in the House of Lords with the former Ukip leader Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the current Ukip leader, Gerard Batten (hair by Lego), and various hangers-on, including Katie Hopkins’s organ-grinder, Rebel Media founder Ezra Levant. He is Canadian, so picture the usual Islamophobe, but mounted.

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More by Marina Hyde.

Fun with the Chump

Many more...

Hiding in plain sight: the US veteran suicide problem

As of June 29, 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Defense casualty website, there were 4,424 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) and 31,952 wounded in action (WIA) as a result of the Iraq War.

United States military veteran suicide is an ongoing phenomenon regarding a reportedly high rate of suicide among U.S. military veterans, in comparison to the general public. According to the most recent report published by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in 2016, which analyzed 55 million veterans' records from 1979 to 2014, the current analysis indicates that an average of 20 veterans a day die from suicide.

That means that since the Iraq war debacle in 2003, approximately 110,000 vets have died by their own hands, about 25 five times the casualty number in the war itself. As they say: 'go figure!'

Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners

David Olusoga’s two-part documentary Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners (BBC2) concluded last night by following the money. The money in question was that paid to the slave owners to compensate them for the loss of their human property when slavery was finally officially abolished in 1834. A 10-man committee divvied up nearly £17bn in today’s money among 46,000 claimants stretching across the entire British empire, from £800 or so to a country vicar for his single servant to £80m for John Gladstone’s (father of prime minister William) loss of thousands of unpaid workers on his plantations in Guyana. Not a penny, of course, was paid to the slaves themselves.

The compensation money was drawn largely from consumption taxes, as income tax didn’t exist at the time, which effectively meant the poor paid for it. The disproportionate extra whack they paid for basic goods set those who had already grown fat on the profits of slave labour nicely ever after. They were able to diversify, investing in industry, insurance and institutions whose income streams would balance each others’ fluctuations out and keep flowing nicely down the generations. This useful injection of taxpayer cash enabled its recipients to avoid any hardship once their indefensibly exploitative bubble burst and freed them to concentrate on other things, like building country piles, grooming their sons for government and ensuring that no more than seven families actually matter in Britain at any one time. It’s a good thing history never repeats itself.

Olusoga was able to provide us with a detailed and vivid picture of the spread of slavery profits through the British economy largely thanks to research done by a team of historians at University College London. They have been combing through the 46,000 entries in the Slavery Compensation Commissions accounts books and following the paper trails thereafter. The collated results are free to all at ucl.ac.uk/lbs.

More pernicious still, and as instrumental in shaping our cultural and imaginative landscapes as the money was in our physical and institutional landscapes, were the ideas unleashed and promulgated during the propaganda war between the abolitionists and their opponents. Black people, the latter argued desperately but influentially, were childlike savages who needed the firm, white, paternal hand of discipline to save them from themselves and their innate inferiority. Slavery was abolished (officially – the end of it in practice would take years) but the underlying ideas, theories and attitudes endure. Programmes like this, and thoughtful, thorough, unswerving guides like Olusoga bring them into the light. Because it would be a good thing if history stopped repeating itself.

Grauniad.

How Frank Gaffney was Reinstated and anti-Muslim feeling became Mainstream on the Right again

Since President Trump chose John Bolton as national-security adviser, the media has focused largely on Bolton’s calls for war with North Korea and Iran. And for good reason. But there’s another element of Bolton’s record that’s received less scrutiny but may also illuminate how he’ll approach his new role, and the compromises he may be prepared to make.

In 2016, Bolton played a crucial role in Frank Gaffney’s rehabilitation inside the conservative movement. For close to two decades, Gaffney has been Washington’s most dogged peddler of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. He’s traveled the country testifying against the construction of mosques, arguing that since Islam is a totalitarian political ideology, not a religion, American Muslims don’t deserve the protections of the First Amendment. Bolton’s intervention on his behalf is particularly intriguing because, in his own writing and remarks, he’s largely avoided anti-Muslim bigotry. But in today’s conservative movement, anti-Muslim activists are a legitimate constituency group, like people who support gun rights or oppose abortion. And Bolton has proved, in this case and others, all too willing to empower them.

Gaffney believes in the existence of a vast, secret network, run by the Muslim Brotherhood, to infiltrate the United States government and replace it with Sharia law. At various times, he’s suggested that figures as mainstream as former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, and former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano are dupes of—if not active agents in—this plot. And in the late Bush and early Obama years, Gaffney repeatedly insisted that the conspiracy had infiltrated the conservative movement via two men: anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and former Bush administration official Suhail Khan, both board members of the American Conservative Union (ACU). Norquist and Khan, Gaffney claimed in 2011, were running “an influence operation [that] is contributing materially to the defeat of our country, supporting a stealthy effort to bring Shariah here.”

But in 2011, anti-Muslim sentiment was less mainstream on the American right than it is now. And where Gaffney saw secret agents of jihad, the leaders of the ACU saw longtime conservative activists who simply wanted to bring Muslims into the GOP. So that year, the ACU’s board publicly repudiated Gaffney’s charges. It declared his claims that Norquist and Khan “harbor sympathy with Islamic extremists” to be “false and unfounded” and said the ACU “profoundly regrets and rejects as unwarranted the past and ongoing attacks upon their patriotism and character.” Four people who then served on the board told me that the ACU’s then-chairman, David Keene, also made an informal decision to bar Gaffney from speaking on the main stage at the ACU’s signature event, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). In both 2011 and 2012, the Pledge of Allegiance at CPAC was delivered by Suhail Khan.

But by early 2016, the climate in the conservative movement had changed. Donald Trump—having already called for banning Muslims from entering the U.S.—was leading the Republican presidential field. The ACU had a new chairman, Matt Schlapp. And in this more permissive climate, John Bolton moved to overturn the Gaffney ban. At a February 3, 2016, ACU board meeting, according to notes shared with me by someone in the room—the substance of which has been confirmed by someone else in attendance—“Bolton proposed a motion to rescind and repeal the 2011 resolution, and put the decision of whether to allow Gaffney to speak at CPAC back in the hands of ACU management.” After a contentious debate, Bolton prevailed. The board voted to declare that, “No one has been banned from speaking at CPAC.” (When I asked the ACU about Bolton’s role, the organization emailed a statement from its executive director, Dan Schneider, that said: “It is unfortunate that there has been a breach of board protocol about disclosing confidential discussions. But there was no difference of opinion on the board. All agreed that Frank Gaffney and other conservative voices are allowed to speak at CPAC.”)

A month after the board meeting, CPAC rolled around and, sure enough, Gaffney was on the agenda. He moderated a panel that included the Danish activist Lars Hedegaard, who has claimed that Muslims “rape their own children” and that “as a totalitarian system of thought, Islam has remained unchanged for at least 1,200 years.” Gaffney spoke again at CPAC in 2017. In 2018, he began his remarks at the conference by joking that, “everybody says it’s great to be back at CPAC. But nobody means it like I do.”

The striking thing about Bolton’s push for Gaffney’s reinstatement is that Bolton hasn’t generally echoed Gaffney’s conspiracy theories. In fact, Bolton has largely avoided anti-Muslim bigotry in his own public statements. He even publicly opposed Trump’s 2015 proposal to ban Muslim immigration.

What Bolton has done, again and again, is to elevate the anti-Muslim bigotry of others. In 2010, he wrote the foreword to Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America. Bolton’s foreword begins with the words, “Barack Obama is our first post-American president.” But he leaves the meaning of those words vague. It is Geller and Spencer who declare that “Barack Hussein Obama” is pursuing the “implementation of a soft sharia: the quiet and piecemeal implementation of Islamic laws that subjugate non-Muslims.”

In 2010 and 2011, Bolton spoke at rallies against the “Ground Zero” mosque sponsored by Geller and Spencer’s organization, Stop Islamization of America. But Bolton has not echoed Geller’s wilder and uglier theories: among them that Obama is Malcolm X’s love child or that Muslims practice bestiality. He’s never said, as Spencer has, that “there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists.”

Similarly, Bolton in 2012 defended Michelle Bachmann’s inquiry into whether former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood. “What is wrong with raising the question?” he declared on Gaffney’s radio show. (John McCain, by contrast, called Bachmann’s inquiries “specious and degrading.”) But, as far as I know, Bolton never questioned Abedin’s loyalty himself. As in his push for Gaffney’s reinstatement at CPAC, Bolton doesn’t preach hatred of Muslims. He just aids those who do.

Once upon a time, the American right made room for conservative Muslims. Now it makes room for people who want to deny them equal rights. And John Bolton, America’s next national-security adviser, is part of the reason why.

Peter Beinart.

On Brexit, the Tories are gaslighting half the country

An attempt is being made to write Britain’s pro-European tradition out of history. But the 48% are still very much here

It is not yet 28 months since the referendum, but it feels longer. The Britain that had not yet decided to leave the European Union feels eerily remote for a place we lived in so recently.

Political intensity can do that. The weeks after the vote were crammed with enough drama to fill months. Then Theresa May squeezed a self-sabotaging general election into the tight Brexit negotiating window. The era when governments understood the value of EU membership lies buried beneath a landslide of events. Recent history has become political archaeology.

But it isn’t only the volume of news that has done this. The past is being chased out of view more aggressively than it might naturally recede. In the autumn of 2015, Tory MPs were still celebrating victory in an election won by David Cameron on a manifesto promising to “preserve the integrity of the single market”. How many MPs currently serving in Theresa May’s cabinet rejected that view? How many said that the single market was disposable because escape from the EU was a more valuable prize? The answer is none. Not one of May’s ministers – including those who speak of Brexit now as if they had yearned for it since childhood – saw fit to mention that feeling in public just three years ago.

Even on the back benches, “Eurosceptic” recently meant resistance to further European integration and a demand that powers exercised in Brussels be “repatriated”. The view that such a goal could only be achieved by quitting the club was explicitly held by about a dozen Tory MPs – including two who defected to Ukip in 2014. By referendum polling day, there was still not a majority of Conservative parliamentarians prepared to say that Brexit was a good idea.

People are allowed to change their minds, and the referendum result was pretty persuasive. It is normal for a seismic electoral event to reshape the political landscape. But it doesn’t have to eliminate memories of the way things stood before. Yet that is what the Brexiters seem determined to achieve.

A clique of Tory ultras have lately told Downing Street they might tolerate the UK staying in a shared customs space with the EU until 2022, two years beyond the transition period envisaged at present. This has been reported as a formal concession by the Brexiteers, although they have no official role in the process. The position of chair of the European Research Group, occupied by Jacob Rees-Mogg, has no constitutional value. It meant nothing two years ago. Somehow it has become the pulpit from which permissible boundaries of thought and deed are dictated to the prime minister.

The “concession” on a temporary customs union is meant to give May leeway to negotiate a Canada-style free trade agreement, and thereby to abandon her Chequers blueprint. Tory MPs are feeding out rope to be sure that any prospect of a softer Brexit is hanged. It is a proven system. Even the terminology has changed meaning since the referendum. A “hard” Brexit was once any deal that surrendered benefits of the single market. Now “hard” is used interchangeably with the idea of total rupture with no deal at all. “Soft” Brexit is used by many Tories to mean a deal unworthy of consideration by patriots.

That spectrum places the Canadian model as a middle way. But in 2016, the official leave campaign would not endorse such an obvious economic downgrade, ripping the UK out of frictionless commerce with its neighbours to borrow instead a template cut to suit a country 3,600 miles away.

Brexit hardliners are not really interested in the Canadian model, anyway. Their current position is just another twist of the ratchet, taking the whole conversation a notch further away from European integration. That has been the game all along: bullying by incremental demands, grinding away at Cameron until he offered a referendum, then the pantomime of waiting for his renegotiation, then the verdict that, alas, it was not good enough. Now it is the same with May: chivvying her towards the edge of a cliff while pretending to be interested in bridges.

It happens so insidiously that it can be hard to keep one’s bearings. Not long ago, comparisons of the EU to the Soviet Union were the stuff of sweaty diatribes on Ukip web forums. Now they appear in speeches by a foreign secretary who voted remain. That is not an ordinary conversion to Brexit. It is symptomatic of a project to pretend that Britain never had pro-EU Conservatives or a pro-European political tradition. It is the systematic erasure of remain from the national story. The new Tory orthodoxy casts EU membership as an aberration, an alien thing imposed by a few “citizens of nowhere” on a captive people who prayed in secret for deliverance, then rose up to take back control.

That isn’t how 48% of voters, 16.1 million people, saw it. But it takes an effort to keep hold of the memory. The past two years have felt like a vast exercise in gaslighting – the method of psychological coercion that involves subtly undermining people’s confidence in what is real until they begin to question their own judgment. Thus have the parameters of sanity in the debate shifted. The norms have moved so far that any deal starts to look like a victory for common sense over extremism. But that is only because today’s political maps don’t even mark the spot where realistic accounts of Britain’s European interests used to appear.

May is relying on that disorientation when urging MPs to back her in the Commons. She will offer something she calls moderate and declare its adoption vital for the national interest, measured on a scale that only shows degrees of folly and national self-harm. And then the idea is that we put the whole sorry business behind us, let EU membership fade from our minds. Let the wind and dust erode our memories until the past is barely recognisable: a ruin, somewhere the forgotten tribe of Remainia once lived. But the problem is, prime minister, we’re still here.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist.

H/T Elly

Is Trump's "I'm a self-made billionaire shtick"... well... a myth?

In an extraordinary and very lengthy piece of investigative journalism, the NYT does a lot to suggest that. Far too long to be reprinted here, below's just the opening salvo:

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

Around the time of the 2016 election PBS broadcastet a Trump documentary biopic that suggested the same (but with less depth) but unfortunately I can't find it.