Playing the victim

I am sincerely shocked they didn't pick the shitty technocrat lawyer and IDF volunteer with a bunch of scandals under his belt and instead went with the likable normal guy who seems to take pride in helping people. What is going on? Either way it's another L for the Beltway lanyard-kissers and Never Trump Republicans who love to give Democrats advice and we can all take joy in that. Weasley little turds everywhere in shambles.

Again it's not that I am exactly stoked about a couple of slightly left of center Democrats here it's more that I am very enthusiastic about the idea of Donald Trump losing. It seems like the Democrats are trying to make that happen. The vibes remain good. There's gotta be a catch.

Basically this:

Although for the record I can exclusively report that there are a ton of Trump signs and banners up everywhere in the Never Not Humid Mosquito District of Shitty Brown Lake, New Hampshire where I spent this past weekend. The “Beautiful Boaters” are ready to go. The .15% BAC 60 mph two lane mountain highway death wish boosted pickups are assembling.

Simon Childs joins us today from the UK to write about the recent racist and xenophobic riots that have been going on all over the country the past week or so. To be sure there have been all manner of horrible protests against immigrants outside of shelters here in the States of late but it's honestly kind of surprising we haven't had more of this sort of rioting and violence. Give it time I suppose.

This one was three years ago. I always really like it. Maybe you missed it. Check it out now if so.

Show me the oldest t-shirt you own

I’m definitely never going to fit into a medium ever again but it feels weird to get rid of it

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Stay tuned for the Chris Cornell top 5 songs thing on Friday I think. Could maybe use one or two more if you are a writer or musician who is a big fan.

As always your support of this newsletter is appreciated. Chip in if you have the means to do so please and thank you.

Playing the victim

by Simon Childs

To get an idea of the kind of depraved victim complex that has taken over among a noisy minority and given rise to the spate of racist rioting throughout the UK, we can turn to a woman from Middlesbrough who told a reporter on Sunday that “it’s our country and we’re getting pushed out.” 

“I understand how the native Indians felt in America now, because that’s what the white man did when he pushed them out. Only it’s the white man getting pushed out of this country.”

In the past week, the UK has been hit by riots in numerous towns and cities. Some of it has been seemingly random: On Friday rioters set fire to a citizens advice bureau in Sunderland in north east England. On Saturday in Liverpool they burned a library. 

Most of the violence, however, has been targeted at asylum seekers, Muslims and other ethnic minority communities. The news and social media is awash with a staggering number of racist attacks, every single one of which would be sickening on its own.

Rioters have smashed the windows of hotels housing asylum seekers and attempted to set them on fire. They have rampaged around a non-white residential area smashing windows. They have formed vigilante traffic checkpoints and asked drivers if they are white before letting them pass. They have dragged an Asian driver out of his car and smashed it up. A former anti-terror police chief has said that some of the violence could be classified as terrorism. Not to mention the videos of people casually using racist slurs on streets up and down the country.

The tragic spark for this violence makes it even more depressing and bewildering. On Monday of last week, a 17-year-old named Axel Rudakubana went to a children’s Taylor Swift themed dance class in Southport, a small seaside town near Liverpool, and stabbed three young girls to death, seriously injuring eight other children and two adults. It was the worst mass killing of children in the UK in decades.

The following evening, locals gathered for a vigil to remember the murdered girls: Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine.

At the same time, far-right rioters also gathered in the town, including a convicted neo-Nazi terrorist. They hurled bricks at a local mosque, torched a police van and jeered “we want our country back” and chanted about “disgusting nonces.”

Since then, we have seen horror upon horror. So why did a senseless mass killing lead to what can only be described as pogroms?

Rudakubana was born in Cardiff, Wales to parents originally from Rwanda who moved to Southport in 2013. In other words, he’s British. Many of the racists gathering to cause chaos would deny that due to the color of his skin, but in any case, his true identity hardly seems to matter. Much like we just saw with the transphobic panic around the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, once the right has whipped themselves up into a frenzy of their own design, hateful fiction takes precedence over fact. 

Shortly after news of the killing broke, false rumors swirled on social media that the perpetrator was a Muslim called “Ali al-Shakati.” Suspicions that the killer was Muslim were fueled by far-right influencers like career misogynist Andrew Tate, who said that the killer was an “undocumented migrant,” and Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, who said that the killing was “more evidence to suggest Islam is a mental health issue rather than a religion of peace.”

Yaxley-Lennon is currently on holiday in a five star hotel in Cyprus. In a twisted irony, when the media reported his location – where he is on the run from contempt of court proceedings – he complained from his sun lounger. “My kids are crying, we come here so I could spend some quality time with them,” he said. 

“Now they are scared people are coming here to get them.”

There have been calls to ban the English Defence League – the far-right street group that Yaxley-Lennon founded, but in fact it stopped really existing years ago. The organization of these riots instead is more ephemeral. Experts are calling it the “networked” or “post-organisational” far-right. Content from far-right agitators is shared today on Telegram groups, where riots are planned. One group that apparently organized riots in Southport had been selling weed before the mass stabbings took place. Then it pivoted to selling fireworks and sharing a map of local mosques.

It would be hard to overstate how violent these groups have become. One with 13,000 members has been sharing a list of 39 immigration-related charities, advice clinics and lawyers as potential targets all while its participants call for the home secretary to be hanged.

This new form of far-right organizing hasn’t sprung up overnight, but it has gone into overdrive in recent months. Until recently, Robinson was a busted flush. He was banned from Twitter for breaking its rules on hateful content and had become basically irrelevant. But in November of last year the platform’s new owner Elon Musk reinstated his account. Musk lately has been signal boosting Robinson’s content and saying that a race war in the UK is “inevitable.”

Musk has re-invigorated the far-right Twittersphere. Meanwhile the right-wing of British politics has careened even further right, and its media has become even more shrill and apocalyptic in its tone.

In the last three years we have been the unfortunate recipients of two new billionaire-funded Fox News-style rolling news channels –  GB News and Talk TV – which have plumbed hitherto unknown depths of bigoted vomit passed up as news. On Sunday GB News interviewed a psychologist who said that the riots are “understandable.” Legacy media has been at it as well, with the Telegraph newspaper choosing to “both sides” the pogroms with the headline, “Far-right clash with Muslims in rioting.” The same media eagerly defamed a series of peaceful mass protests for Palestine and regurgitated the claim of then-home secretary Suella Braverman that they were “hate marches.”

There is a spectrum of blame here. It starts with the far-right, who have directly encouraged this, but also includes the two main political parties and a large portion of the media, all of whom should have seen this coming as they indulged and pandered to racist attitudes and presided over a country in decline.

The Conservative party has just ended 14 shabby years in charge. One of its countless failures was a mangled asylum system which forced refugees to live in hotels, often in small, economically deprived towns, in a way that was almost bound to stoke tensions. (Similar protests against the housing of migrants have gone on in many states throughout the US). 

In this context, mainstream political rhetoric on migration has gone from bad to worse. And it all came to a head in the recent general election.

The Conservatives stood on an impossible promise to “stop the boats” – a reference to the small dinghies that refugees are forced to use to cross the channel from France in the absence of safe routes for asylum. Using the kind of imagery that wouldn’t be surprising to hear at a Trump rally, Tory election videos depicted Labour “rolling out the red carpet” for migrants.

They were defeated soundly, in part because of a challenge from the far-right Reform UK party, led by Trump fluffer Nigel Farage. Reform only won five seats but nicked millions of potential Conservative votes by being even more alarmist on this issue. The Tories reaped the electoral whirlwind, having talked up a problem they couldn’t solve. Now Britain is seeing the results of the disaffection that they sowed.

The Labour party, which won the election, has its own past of contracting the rights of asylum seekers, and has largely indulged the moral panic about migration rather than challenging it. It’s a stance that will be familiar to Americans, where Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have taken a stance almost indistinguishable from Republicans on the border. 

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s response to the riots has been to promise an immediate and brutal police crackdown, with a “standing army” of specialist officers, as well as “swift” justice in the courts for violent offenders. Britain’s jails are already stuffed full, and the Vice President of the Prison Governors’ Association has warned that a surge of inmates would “cripple and destabilize” the system. While a carceral solution may quell the riots in the short term, the toxic swamp from which this monster emerged will take longer to fix.

As I write this, Yaxley-Lennon is sharing videos of Muslims who have taken to roaming the streets, masked up in self defense, or who have been provoked into acts of violence. He and his fellow racists are claiming that they are the true aggressors, that it’s all Keir Starmer’s fault and that it is the English who are, as ever, the victims.

Simon Childs is an editor and reporter for Novara Media in London. 

Here are some other things to read.

What a surgeon saw in Gaza

In this harrowing interview, a US doctor describes his recent experiences working in a Gazan hospital, where he treated children with horrific, often fatal, injuries.

New StatesmanBruno Maçães

Bruno Maçães: Gaza was a hard place to be even for you, a Western doctor. How hard is it for the children who are there? 

Feroze Sidhwa: There are multiple aspects to [the hardship]. But one of them is the way in which a lot of these children have died. Most of them have been killed in explosions where a lot of them would have been trapped under rubble. Some of them are going to die immediately from a concrete block hitting their head or something like that. But a lot of them have just had their leg pinned under the rubble, and because there’s no heavy moving equipment, there’s no way to get to them; they’ve slowly died of sepsis while buried in this dark tomb alone, freezing during the night, boiling during the day. And this would have taken days for each one of them. [It would take] three, four, five days for them to die in this way. It’s horrific to think of the scale of the suffering. 

The ones that survive [explosions] are the ones that we saw. There was a little girl named Juri. She’s this thin little girl. She’s obviously malnourished. She has been her entire life. She’s got necrotic skin on her face from the explosion that ripped part of the skin off; her buttocks are flayed open. Her left leg is missing, like two inches of its femur. Her sciatic nerve’s been cut in half. She’s got maggots falling out of her wounds. It’s horrendous, what is happening to some of these kids.  

Somebody might say, it’s war and in war, bad things happen. Children are certainly going to get hurt in a war. That’s understandable. Nevertheless, it’s not exactly clear why these particular munitions have to be dropped on these particular houses. But leaving that aside, it certainly doesn’t explain the children who were shot. And that was a constant issue that we dealt with. We had kids shot in the chest and shot in the head – in other words, clearly deliberate, clearly targeted [since the assault on Gaza began, Israeli authorities have denied that civilians have been deliberately targeted].

Robert Fisk: Journalist’s job is to challenge authority all the time

This interview is part of the Institute’s “Conversations with History” series, and uses Internet technology to share with the public Berkeley’s distinction as a global forum for ideas. Welcome to a Conversation with History. I’m Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Robert Fisk who is the Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper of Great Britain.

The Business StandardTBS Report

I think that's a problem. An awful lot of journalism in the east coast of America now is graduate school journalism, maybe degrees that don't count in journalism – I mean, degree in English history or politics, yes, but not journalism. I was very struck by the fact that reporters are supposed to be obedient now. Look at the reporting of the West Bank, where American journalists keep referring to occupied territories as "disputed territory," where the wall is called a "fence," where a colony is called a "settlement" or a "neighborhood," or an "outpost", where [there is a] constant desemanticizing of war to make it safe journalism so you won't be called controversial. Heaven spare you if someone falsely accuses you of being anti-Semitic. This kind of journalism breeds internal laziness, and it's lethal, because if a public is presented with pictures of the Middle East in which there are "fences" and "disputes," a fence like the bottom of your garden, a dispute which you can solve over a glass of water, cup of tea, and a court case, then the use of violence becomes generically violent, it becomes mindless, and thus the Palestinians, for example, who may throw stones, or whatever, become a generically violent people. In fact, if there are walls and if there are people occupying your own land and keeping it –

I'm against all violence for all reasons whatsoever, but at least you can understand what it means.We desemanticize and make war more lethal in the same way as television, for example, will not show you the worst scenes that we see. I remember once a crew coming back from Basra in the Iraqi/American war, not embedded – they were on the Iraqi side of the line – and they came back to Baghdad with terrible pictures. A kid had its hand blown off, a woman is shrieking with shrapnel sticking out of her stomach, and they sent these pictures across to London, to the Reuters bureau, and I remember this haughty voice coming back, "We can't show these pictures. Don't even bother to send anymore." You know: "We're going to have people puking at breakfast time. We – we – this is pornography!" You see? And then the worst quote of all. He said – and I remember his words, I read about it from Baghdad during the war – he said, "You know, we've got to show respect for the dead." And I thought, "You bloody well don't show any respect for them when they're alive, but when they're in bits we've got to respect their bodies." Heaven spare me.

I always say to people – on the road, Basra in '91, I saw women, as well as soldiers and civilians, old men, torn apart by British bombs as well as American. And dogs were tearing them to pieces to eat, it was lunchtime in the desert. I tell you, if you saw what I saw you'd never support a war again. But you won't show that on television. And by not showing that on television we present the world with a bloodless sand pit. We pretend war is not that bad. It's "surgical," always "surgical strikes." Surgery's a place where you're cured in the hospital, not where you're murdered or killed or torn apart. Thus, we make it easier for our leaders – our generals, our prime ministers, our presidents – to sell us war, and for us to buy into war and go along with that. That makes us lethally culpable and potentially war criminals in a very moral sense of the word – or immoral sense, I should say.

For Those About to School of Rock

by A.J. Daulerio My seven-year-old son loves drumming, particularly the loud, cymbal-heavy style, which would prevent most parents from buying their children a complete kit, but I’m a pushover, so we got him one last Christmas. He’s played it every day since, to the point where the

Flaming HydraA.J. Daulerio

But the money was less important to me than working next to professional musicians, preferably famous ones. The fastest way to get in on those gigs was to learn how to break down equipment quickly and properly roll the cable. But that also meant I had to be a gofer during every session and that I had to perform tasks outside of the studio, some of them beneath human dignity.

These are my notable interactions with rock stars between 1996 and 1998 when I interned at two recording studios in Philadelphia, primarily Studio 4 in Conshohocken and Sonic Recording Studio off Delaware Avenue. 

· Dropped off laundry for one of the members of the band Dishwalla.

· Accidentally popped Duncan Sheik in the face with a wind screen while I tried to attach it to the mic right before he performed an unplugged session of “Barely Breathing” for radio contest winners.

· Mashed up ear mite medicine and mixed it into wet food for Sheryl Crow’s dog, Scout.

· Drove to Sam Ash to replace a busted drum head for Charlie Benante from Anthrax. 

· Was asked not to “look directly” at Fiona Apple.

· Had to pretend the head of Ruffhouse Records was “unavailable” when Richard Marx called.

Here's some new music to listen to.

My Direction, by FOOTBALLHEAD

from the album Before I Die

FOOTBALLHEADCRLSS

Good bye.