Tommy Robinson. EDL. English Defence League. Racists. Racism. Racist. Case closed, yes?
A few years ago at a loose end – in full knowledge that the above was true – I was browsing YouTube and I came across an interview with the man. I pressed play. Almost the first thing he said was something like, “I am not the person people think I am.” That seemed interesting – challenge your beliefs and all that – so I listened further. Boy, was I in for a shock. Since then I’ve read his book, Enemy of the State – available from obscure retailers – and followed him on obscure social media platforms. This is what I have gleaned:
- For a racist he has a suspiciously large number of black friends.
- For a racist he has a suspiciously large number of Jewish friends.
- He even has a Muslim friend.
- He doesn’t seem to like racists much, even telling them to **** *** out of his comments and burning their flags.
- They don’t seem to like him much, sometimes claiming that he is a Mossad agent.
- His main argument is that mass migration in general and large-scale Muslim immigration in particular represent a threat to Britain and the British.
- He utterly hates the police. A lot of this springs from an incident when (so he claims) he was attacked by an off-duty officer who subsequently lied in court. But there are plenty of other cases outlined in his book.
So why the hate? Or to put it another way, why does Robinson attract hate in a way that Douglas Murray does not despite the two having almost identical political views? I can’t help thinking that a lot of this is to do with class. In accent, dress and associates Robinson is unapologetically – for want of a better term – working class . It would appear that a lot of the MSM etc have much the same attitude to the working class as they do to ethnic minorities: they should be seen and not heard. They should accept the opinions that have been assigned to them and be grateful.
Another explanation lies in – how shall I put this? – his general attitude to authority. Take yesterday, for instance. An “Against Anti-semitism” march was being held in Central London. Robinson encouraged people to go along. The organisers – because they know nothing about the man and think that attempting to curry favour with the MSM is something other than a fool’s errand – stated that his presence would not be welcome. He went along anyway. The police arrested him. The police’s actions were, of course, disgraceful but Robinson resisted arrest and got a face full of pepper spray for his trouble.
A further explanation lies in what might be described as “information management.” Robinson believes – as do I – that actions speak louder than words. So, he doesn’t believe he has to defend himself when smeared; his actions will speak for themselves. Except that – so far – they haven’t. This means that he hasn’t gone to the trouble of organising a defence of his beliefs in an easily retrievable manner. My gleanings above are the result of years of followship. His book is also terribly organised.
Robinson is the one on the left. The guy on the right is long-time political ally Danny Roscoe.
Way back I heard a couple of interviews of TR on the BBC, one TV, one Radio. It was evident that the interviewers expected to show him up as a racist/bigot/whatever. They thought it was going to be easy. Talks common, must be a thicko. Well, it was not easy. They couldn’t lay a glove on him or answer his questions in response. They don’t seem to have interviewed him again.
Do I think TR is racist? No. Do I think he has a point about grooming gangs? Hell, yes! Do I think he has been mistreated by the Government? Yes, with the caveat that some of his methods should have been well researched before hand (filming in courts etc)
Essentially I think he is a thorn in the govts side.
When I first heard of him, I sought out what he’d supposedly said and done; compared that to the things said in the media, and immediately reached the conclusion that the media is thoroughly bent in the UK. Already knew that, but it was another data point proving an already proven case.
I don’t know that I’d want to invite Robinson over for dinner, but I’d certainly meet him for a beer somewhere.
You can tell a lot about a regime by who it is they demonize. Not all that long ago, Robinson would have been “salt of the earth”, and entirely uncontroversial. Today’s status? Tells you a good deal about modern Britain, and none of it good.
Any normal person that is a patriotic citizen of their country can observe what has been done to Robinson and easily work out that the people doing it to him are not on their side, and never have been. This is one reason why Robinson is excoriated the way he is by all “right-thinking people”, and a clear indicator that such creatures do not have the current set of UK citizen’s best interests in mind.
The anti-semitism march was on public roads. So what if the organisers didn’t want him there? Is there a lawyer who comes to this site who can tell us what rights the march organisers here had to object to his presence, and what rights the police had to act on the organisers’ objections?
Did Tommy Robinson resist arrest? Not from what I saw. I saw him surrounded by maybe half a dozen policemen who could easily have handcuffed him and thereby removed any notional threat that he posed.
It seems to me that pepper spraying Tommy Robinson was no more than a thuggish, and wholly unjustified, assault.
I believe the law in question was “causing alarm and distress”. Now I think causing alarm and distress is a bad thing and there should be laws against it. But it is rather like the favourite catch-all of the police “breach of the peace”; a bit too easy to use.
Large scale Muslim immigration is not just a threat to Britain, it’s a catastrophe. I try to tell my Guardian reading friends that it is not the case that the muslim immigrants are similar to us but with darker skins. They are fundamentally different. The values we hold are largely despised by them.And they will work to oppress our values and impose their own.
I heard James O’Brien, a UK talk radio host, refer to someone as an Islamophobe as if that was a bad thing. It is not a bad thing. The Religion of Peace is vicious, vile and violent. Anyone who does not accept that statement should go to the founding texts of the Religion of Peace and learn the truth.
When Lee Rigby was murdered, nearly decapitated, the then Deputy PM, Nick Clegg, was quick to make a public statemebnt that the RoP is ‘religion of peace.’ He was lying. Lying. It is inconceivable that an educated and well-inforned man who had received confidential briefings on taking office could believe that his statement was true.
All our politicians know the truth; none of them speak it.
Which begs the question: Why? Why are they doing this, which is clearly against the interests of their constituents?
Do the math, and you rapidly come to the conclusion that they’re all either bent or on the other side. Doesn’t matter which, when you get down to it: They’re not “ours”, and we’re fools for continuing to vote for them.
Agreed.
Not agreed. Not unless there’s a very high bar in defining those terms (in which case stronger ones would do better).
Well, the example I tend to think about is someone firing off a machine gun in a crowded area and not hitting anybody.
TR is a culturist, not a racist.
As such, he is a huge danger to the truly racist “anti-racists.” If he can criticize groups of people who are organized by race for characteristics that do not depend upon race, they lose their most potent weapon.
It’s stupid to judge someone by characteristics they are born with. It is stupid not to judge them by their behaviour. Religion is a behaviour. And no religion should get a pass by the mere fact of being a religion. Some are worse than others. Some are evil.
Agreed – it is his Working Class accent and manner, that lead the establishment to hate this person. He does not “know his place” – he “talks back” and does not accept the establishment “narrative”. It is not really what he says, sometimes wrong and sometimes not wrong, it is the fact that he thinks for himself (does not spend his time watching television “entertainment” and getting his beliefs from it) that they hate.
But the establishment do not just hate him – they also fear him, as someone who could (just possibly) turn ordinary people against them. Not very likely, indeed very unlikely, but they fear the risk – no matter how small.
Remember as well as being snobs and bullies – the establishment are also rather cowardly.
Progressives have always fancied themselves to be the crusading revolutionaries, but once they took over the top slots, they really became the conservatives of the situation. They’d like to stay on top. They’d like to preserve this new status quo. Conservatism – the Chesterton’s Fence people, even with new fences – can come off as cowardly.
This makes the right into the new revolutionaries. We really ought to act the part now.
Slightly OT, but I feel compelled to address this again:
1. Black people can be and often are racist.
2. Jewish people can be and often are racist.
3. Muslims can be and often are racist.
Racism isn’t a white thing.
Having friends of whatever demographic (or even not having any such friends!) has nothing to do with racism, even just as a shibboleth of acceptability. What if his black friends despise white people and Muslims and Jews? Plenty of black people do. What if his Jewish friends despise Muslims and blacks? What if his Muslim friends despise everybody?
What if he only had white friends, who despised nobody?
My point is that using a list of friends and their attributes as an indicator of racism subtly feeds into the popular belief that racism is a white thing; that, therefore, if a white person can produce associations with non-white people he is somehow inoculated against the charge of racism.
And that is nonsense.
bobby b – the balance of forces is, presently, against us.
Both economic – as the Corporate entities (a relatively free economy has been gradually replaced by an economy of fiat money and credit bubble finance – the “Cantillon Effect” concentrating economic control under these few Corporate “partners” of government) are “Woke” (even if they reject the labels DEI and SEG they will just bring back this creeping totalitarianism by some other label), and MILITARY – as the police and armed forces are now indoctrinated in “Woke” doctrine – as are all other institutions, public and private.
Presently I see no chance of a “right wing revolution” (for want of a better term) – but as the economy and society collapses (which it will – economic law is real and the present international Corporate State system violates economic law in extreme ways) the situation may change.
I think the point is that having black friends means that you do not particularly favor your race. Nothing to do with whether his friends are racists, just whether he is racist.
I don’t think that what was stated at all implies that racism is a “white thing”. If Tommy Robinson was black, one might talk about his white friends to show that he was not a racist.
Now, you can be a racist against a particular race. So having black friends or Jewish friends does not necessarily mean that you are not a racist. However, “racist” can sometimes mean one who favors his own race over others, which claim would indeed be disproved by showing that he has friends who are not of his race.
At this point, the term “racist” is whatever the speaker says it means. Its utility has been lost in the polluted speech of the left, and we really don’t have a good word to use in its place.
Is Tommy Robinson racist? What the hell do you mean by the term, when you use it?
For some of these mendacious twits, “racist” literally means “white”, and you’re automatically “racist” if you’re also white or white-adjacent.
It’s like the word “conservative”. When the left uses it, it means “Nazi nationalist scum”, and when I use it, I mean “Person of common sense that isn’t a leftist…”
How the hell do you reconcile the two? It’s like we’re in two different universes, living side by side. It’s nuts.
A minor observation is that Stephen Yaxley Lennon, as the bbc et al habitually refer to him, is one of the very few figures the establishment consider it not just acceptable but actually necessary to “dead name”.
They will always be terrified of Tommy Robinson.
Mainstream media people keep saying “he is racist – he is against Islam and the Prophet Muhammed!”.
First of all a person should not say “the Prophet Muhammed” unless they believe Muhammed was a prophet – that his message was what God told Muhammed to say. To pretend to be a Muslim, to say “the Prophet Muhammed”, without following Islamic Law (all of which is held to come from God) is to be a “hypocrite” – and the penalty, according to Muhammed, for being such a person, a person who pretends to be a Muslim without following Islamic law – as supposedly revealed by Muhammed, is death.
But more basically – Islam is NOT a race. It is true that Muhammed was a pale man (even by the standards of Arabs of his time, before so many centuries of slave trading from Africa – indeed it was his paleness that marked out Muhammed in a group) and allegedly made some unfortunate remarks about black people (“raisin heads” “look like Satan”) – but a Muslim can be of any race, and Islam IS NOT A RACE – it is a religion and legal system.
“But he is not against Islam – he is against Muslims!”
A Muslim is a follower of Islam – a Muslim can be of any race.
If someone does not believe in the doctrines of Islam – they are NOT a Muslim.
By the way, in case anyone does not know, Freedom of Speech is not about “I like pussy cats” or “I like flowers” – Freedom of Speech is about what international governments call “Hate Speech” (for example the European Union insists all “member states” ban “Hate Speech” – i.e. opinions with which those in power disagree) and the vast Corporate entities (not that there is really much of a difference between Partner Corporations and government – they are both controlled by bureaucracies made up of much the same people “educated” in the same places) also ban “Hate Speech” – i.e. opinions that those in power internationally, disagree with (hate).
In the 1960s Herbert Marcuse, Freedom of Speech as “Repressive Tolerance” (“Hate Speech”) which makes “unsafe” “marginalised and disadvantaged” groups, was considered extreme – now the doctrines of Herbert Marcuse and the other Frankfurt School Marxists are the basic doctrines of all public and private institutions in the West – this is why it is the “Frankfurt School “Woke” Marxist West”.
There is a historical echo in this of Kiplings Tommy Atkins
Ferox, you’re being silly. having lots of black friends would not be evidence against him being racist if he were himself black, but he isn’t. Having lots of Jewish friends wouldn’t be evidence against him being racist if he were himself Jewish but again, he isn’t.
At the rate they’re going, “racist” is going to become a badge of honor, not infamy.
Inevitably, the meaning of a word shifts to what you’re using it to describe. The underlying reality is what becomes the meaning for it, and if all these supposed “evil racists” aren’t actually generating evil? Hmmm? Consider the outcome. Note how thoroughly they polluted “Progressive” after WWI; it took until the 1990s before anyone was stupid enough to describe themselves as such, as demonstrated by Her Wisdom, Hillary Clinton.
Same meaning-shift will take place with “racist”. It’ll just take longer; one day, one of these idiot leftists will use the word, and find out that the meaning ain’t what it was, any more. Because of their incessant misuse of it…
He is a Putin arselicker & I have no time for the fucker, but still can’t support the idea he can be arrested for merely attending a rally. He was nicked for being unpopular.
Perry de Havilland said:
Have you ever stopped to analyze precisely why Putin has this following in the West? Along with what it is that gives him that popularity in the first place?
My take on why, after talking to more than a few you’d likely put into the same class with Tommy Robinson is that it’s not what Putin does that they respond to. It’s what he says, and the appearance he projects. They see Putin, and they see the opposite of their own smarmy politicians that don’t look out for their own, and who have instead taken the side of the immigrants.
The popularity of Putin with these folks stems not from their love for him or his actions, but is instead the reciprocal of the disdain their own politicians have demonstrated for them. The average Western Putin-lover isn’t actually in love with the man, but with what he represents: The diametric opposite of what they’re getting from their own politicians and leaders.
Whatever else he does, Putin does put out a great projection of unabashed nationalist pride and traditionalism. When the politicians of the West are telling their constituents “White people bad…”, this is enormously attractive.
Had the West’s politicians not sold out their constituencies, and if they weren’t spending all their time telling them how bad, how evil they are for being what they are? Putin would have limited attractions and popularity. As it is, betrayed by their own, people look at him sympathetically and wish they had someone like him of their very own.
Witness Geert Wilders, as an example of what happens when you cease to actually serve your constituents.
Truthfully, what these people love about Putin is that he’s an unashamed (appearance-wise…) advocate for his people. When the politicians in your own nation seem embarrassed by your very existence, and are working for the “other” that they’ve deliberately brought in…? What the hell does anyone expect?
Many times, and it’s not hard to understand. More people need to grasp the sad truth that the enemy of my enemy is often also my enemy.
Quite so, but as you observe, it’s just “appearance-wise”. But hey, Putin dislikes the LGBTQXYZ clown-train, the notion of women-with-a-penis, the choose-your-own-pronouns absurdity, and all that. Consequently, some otherwise sensible folk who see that all as malarkey therefore deduced Putin must be one of the good guys.
Tucker Carlson is perhaps the most disappointing example, concluding Putin is some sort of Ronald Reagan in Cyrillic (Ronny must be spinning in his grave).
But since Tucker has gone off the UFO deep end, I now realise the fact he was a pretty good cultural critic led me to vastly overrate his ability to think critically. Tucker bravely rejected the MSM narrative on many issues, only to swallow hook line and sinker the even more twisted Russian MSM narrative 😀
I see the whole deal with Tucker Carlson and his ilk as being more a symptom of the dysfunction on the part of the “establishment” than anything else.
If you find that being a contrarian gets you attention, which is what Carlson mostly is, then you go all the way and see what happens. That’s what he’s doing right now; he’s a mirror-image for all the BS they’ve been putting across for decades now
The issue here is that what we’re witnessing is the final denouement for all of the outright bullshit and gaslighting the people in charge have spent decades at. Were you to have run Donald Trump as a legitimate presidential candidate back before the 1990s? LOL… Wouldn’t have gotten the votes Ross Perot did, let alone won. After decades of gaslighting and all the rest of the attendant BS? His election was a shot across the bows by the electorate for the establishment: “See? See who we’ll elect if you don’t straighten out…?” It’s the same with the rest of this crap like loving Putin or what Carlson is doing: It’s a symptom of the demonstrated performative incompetence of the establishment that’s been pumping smoke up everyone’s asses for the last half-century plus.
They only got Biden into office through massive fraud, and that was enabled by a bunch of special rules they put in for COVID. They’re not likely to be able to do that again, and having shot their bolt? They’re going to have to take their medicine, which is coming.
None of this crap, whether it’s the election of Trump (who I remain dubious of, for a lot of reasons…), the love for Putin, or the amount of credulous BS pumped out by Tucker Carlson is coming out of nowhere. It’s all reactive, and what it’s reacting to is the establishment having lost its f*cking mind, collectively.
None of this would have happened thirty-forty years ago. You’d have been straight laughed out of the house, had you suggested any of it. But, here we are, and it is mostly happening because all the supposed “experts” and “leaders” have self-destructed their credibility and prestige.
You can only insist that the Emperor is clothed for so long, before the reaction comes. We’re living in that period, right now.
Kirk:
Perry:
That is definitely a contributing factor, but i submit that:
(a) The root cause of the problem is a general dumbing down due to the modern Western diet.
(b) In this specific case, there is the specific problem of Westerners being unable to grasp the concept of freedom from arbitrary power.
There is a serious deficit in freedom from arbitrary power in WEIRD countries, to a varying extent; but there is an even more serious deficit in Russia.
(And Russia is not even the worst right now!)
I note that, in Europe, Putin tends to find more supporters on the “far-left”.
Perry – like a lot of people, Tucker went from the correct position that the establishment lies a lot (and they certainly do lie a lot) to the assumption that the establishment lie about everything all the time.
“The establishment say Putin is bad? He must be a good guy! The establishment say there are no space aliens visiting the Earth- they must be in the offices of the government telling the government people to say that! The government says that Americans landed on the Moon – obviously they did not land on the Moon, Hollywood faked it…..”
Do not laugh – I get otherwise intelligent people telling me this, every day.
They have been driven crazy by so many government lies – so they think everything the government and corporations say is a lie.
I am not sneering at such people – on my bad days I am halfway there myself.
WRT Tucker Carlson, you can say for him that at least there is method in his madness: not only does he oppose aid to Ukraine, he also opposes aid to Israel.
As i understand at 2nd-hand (and my memory might be faulty), Tucker’s position is that, after tolerating, even fomenting, anti-White racism, Jews can make no claim for support against antisemitism.
That is where my theory about the objective antisemitism of most American Jews comes in handy: I believe that Tucker has a point in claiming that **American** Jews have tolerated and even incited anti-White racism; but Tucker neglects the (obvious to me) fact that American Jews have also tolerated and even incited antisemitism.
The emphasis is on ‘American’, because American Jews vote overwhelmingly for the Corbynist party (Democrats); while British, French, and Israeli Jews vote overwhelmingly against the local equivalents.