March 24, 2019

The internet: turning racism into a cottage industry

located:	United Kingdom
editor:	Gurmeet Singh

Prejudice has always sold. It's always worked to someone's advantage. From keeping women oppressed, uneducated and at home, to slavery, someone has always benefited directly from someone else's misery. One sickening, modern version of this takes the form of online trolls, and so-called "political commentators".

Take Katy Hopkins, for example. A woman so bereft of moral fibre, so cynical and hateful, that she's proud of her tactics to stoke hate after potential terror attacks. But not terror attacks against Muslims, or people of colour, no. Instead, it is against what Hopkins sees as 'European' peoples. After the Christchurch shootings – not a word from her. After the killings in Utrecht, Hopkins got on a plane, to go to Utrecht and film herself "reporting" the situation. In other words, she went to the site of a potential terror attack and made racist, callous, demeaning insinuations about the local migrant population. 

Or, take someone more indirect, like Douglas Murray, for example. The writer and author recently penned "The Strange Death of Europe", whose thesis seems to be that white Europeans are increasingly culpablised, guilty and weak, and cannot stop apologising to immigrants when they should be preventing them from coming into Europe.

Murray speaks with a very posh accent; he also has all the hallmarks of a respectable British education. But British respectability has taken something of a battering lately, with the Oxbridge elite failing to say anything more than "Brexit means Brexit" for two years. Murray adds a veneer of acceptability to these views, often by going on TV and Youtube and speaking in his posh accent. The resulting videos are then fed into debates with titles like "Douglas Murray destroys delusional feminist in debate". 

Or of course, take Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon. Robinson has become the embodiment of a racist and thuggish impulse. He shows up at the doorsteps of journalists who have written or investigated him and threatens them on live-stream. He's also put together a documentary which challenges the BBC's prime news investigation programme, Panorama, as being full of fake news. 

This isn't a random assortment of trolls. These characters represent some of the most prominent British racist trolls online, and of course, are each personally benefiting from their racist narratives. Robinson's estimated worth was thought to have gone up after he went to prison – since he benefited from a swell in far-right support for interrupting a British investigation into a paedophile ring. 

Douglas Murray, alongside others around the world like him, such as Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, are regularly invited to speak at panel events, with their videos widely shared on Youtube. Peterson was even invited to be a Fellow at Cambridge, earlier this week (the offer was later rescinded). But their respectability is often invoked online to justify prejudice. 

And finally, people like Katy Hopkins (there are too many to name), seem to relish terrorist attacks, when committed by people of colour. At the same time, they deny white terrorism and white supremacy. While they may not be as popular or successful as Robinson or Murray, they each occupy a special place in the far-right media landscape – they claim to tell the truth that the mainstream media won't. At the same time, they're able to carve out careers for themselves for doing very shoddy journalism. 

Prejudice and hate are not random and do not spring up from empty space. Prejudice and hate can be industrialised and monetised, and play a crucial role in a flourishing industry that surrounds them. How to fight this? Turn it off. Don't tune in and don't get triggered. More than anything, learn to see that what these people do is entertainment for a far-right audience. 

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