Pwned By Tommy Robinson

A Very British Glow-op

Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley, is the ultimate tool of the British intelligence community. Recently, he has respawned on Twitter, and now has been deployed once again into the middle of the race riots that are occurring after an African man stabbed three young British girls to death.

Naturally, the British public is outraged at the government’s response to the incident, which includes statements like “it doesn’t matter” and that Muslims will be defended by the government. I assume readers are familiar with these events; otherwise, they can get up to speed on their own. This post is about MI5’s favorite asset.

Robinson is interesting because he can so easily direct the British “football hooligan” conservative right and terrify the British reactionary right. Robinson can turn essentially racial problems into “religious” problems by redirecting right-wing anger toward migrants to the adjacent concept of Islam. By making the issue anti-religion rather than anti-persons, the state can more easily justify intervention on the part of the migrants on the basis of religious freedom. By redirecting the focus from immigration to “Islamofascism,” the responsibility of Parliament for the ethnic cleansing of native Britons is replaced with animosity toward the Muslims themselves.

British reactionaries are terrified of “containment” through this “anti-jihad” sentiment, and once any circumstance is touched by this, and especially when touched by Robinson, they will immediately swear it off. It’s quite remarkable how fear of being controlled by state narratives vis-a-vis Robinson leads directly to their being controlled by Robinson.

Of course, it is completely reasonable, especially in a police state like Great Britain, to be wary of mass protests. The mass protest, unguided by a vanguard, can accomplish little in and of itself. The only major “protests” that were effective that I can think of were the Dutch Farmers and the Canadian Truckers. I hesitate even to call these protests, however, as their character was more like a classic workers’ strike in key areas of the economy where this tactic is still effective. These were not mere spontaneous events, but logistically organized and supported for a sustained, targeted effort.

That said, a vanguard must exist. The late, great Jonathan Bowden is known for his speeches before a much more working-class element during his time with the BNP. Unfortunately, the contemporary British reactionary right has been scared away into the purely intellectual space, and therefore has no interface to a network of citizens who could be guided en masse. Without this “ground game,” reactionary Britons are left impotently warning to an online echo chamber about the dangers of attending protests, powerless to prevent those protests from occurring, and powerless to organize anything successful in lieu of riots in the streets.

The ground is ceded by default to the rabble and to compromised activists like Tommy Robinson; as Bowden would say, Tommy Robinson is to be “stepped over,” not stepped away from. Without organizing that connects the online world to the real world—complete with recognizable class hierarchy, as was the case with Bowden—the British reactionary right is basically left as nothing more than an online philosophy debate club.

This pattern has repeated many times over the last few years. Some protests happen in the UK; the British reactionary right cautions against going to the protests; the protests happen anyway; then they are co-opted by the press-controlled state and used to further totalitarian, anti-British measures by the state. It is right to caution against going to disorganized chaos, but this cycle that repeats is ultimately a losing strategy, for people who want to lose, such as Peter Hitchens. Like Peter Hitchens, American conservatives are also beautiful losers. From the American perspective, the British reactionary right looks much more like the American libertarian scene than the American reactionary scene. Libertarians would rather be right than win.

Is that the case with the British reactionary right? Despite many differences across the British reactionary right, they seem to understand how not to step on land mines, but have no way to guide people out of the minefield. This is understandable, given the extreme danger of moving in a minefield, analogous to any organized activity under the “Five Eyes” of the state; nevertheless, the current strategy is a losing strategy, if indeed British reactionaries want to win. Americans certainly have an advantage in coming up with a winning strategy due to luck more than anything, given the presence of Trump and now Musk in our politics, but the difficulties facing the British can’t be allowed to stop them—if indeed, they want to win.

UPDATE: Musk is now involved in the events.

Musk taking the side of native Britons is a big win for the British. It’s worth noting that, although I still agree that advising reactionaries not to attend protests is good advice (due to lack of ground game), Musk would never have gotten involved if not for the apparently inadvisable protests occurring to spur these events on. It demonstrates again the need for the British reactionary right to be integrated into a hierarchical network from the bottom up, rather than observers from the sideline, which would then bring opportunities to capitalize on, such as when elites like Musk take their side, and could offer patronage.