Original post
As for the stuff on Rees-Mogg and the far right... well, strap yourself in, because this is going to be a wild ride. Some (or much) of this you may well know already, but I think it deserves being put down in one place to show off the underlying patterns. This Friday, he met with Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon to discuss political campaigning strategies. Yes, that’s Steve Bannon the former ‘chief strategist’ (a position created entirely for him) of Donald Trump, who got kicked out of the White House after a number of strategic errors including undermining his boss on North Korea and – perhaps more significantly – encouraging Trump into his disastrously ambivalent response to the Charlottesville race riot.
Before and since his time in the White House, Bannon has been editor of Breitbart, a far-right news-site that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a famous American civil-rights group, described as ‘a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill’. Breitbart is the self-described ‘home of the alt-right’, a movement of young, Internet-savvy white supremacists who probably don’t have one single origin, but were at least partially founded by the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Spencer has been fairly explicit about ‘alt-right’ simply being more marketable code for ‘white supremacist’ – note also from that link that he began his writing career in Taki’s Mag, a spin-off of that grand old Conservative organ The Spectator headed by (and named after) a defender of Greece’s most prominent neo-Nazi movement, the Golden Dawn. For the record, yes, Taki is still on the Spectator’s payroll, and no, he isn’t going anywhere. As for Breitbart itself, it’s hosted a long succession of virulently racist articles, and even had a ‘black crime’ tag for articles until recently as a pushback against the Black Lives Matter movement.
While the transatlantic far-right movement Breitbart is central to is a long-established force (Taki started writing in the Spectator in 1977, and it would be foolish to assume that he was part of the first generation), as we all know, it’s had a surge of recent success. In 2014, two years before President Trump, Bannon delivered a speech transmitted by Skype to a conference in the Vatican. In it, he laid out his worldview, speaking of an apocalyptic three-way war between ‘secular capitalism’, ‘Islamic fascism’, and the Judeo-Christian West’. He acknowledged the links between his own preferred ideology, ‘Traditionalism’ (the capital T is important – it’s a much more specific ideology than the name might suggest) and what would eventually become fascism, and while he acknowledged that Vladimir Putin was a ‘kleptocrat’, he described him as ‘very, very, very intelligent’, noted the appeal of his ideology, and suggested that he would be a useful enemy-of-my-enemy against militant Islam. Breitbart does appear to have put this openness to Russian outreach to practical use – they appear to have been co-ordinating their stories with Russian social-media bots with a level of precision that would suggest active communication.
This is not the first time that Breitbart has interacted with Rees-Mogg. They’ve got an entire tag dedicated to glowing articles about him, and he did an interview with their London editor, James Delingpole, in July. For the record, Delingpole is another Spectator columnist, as an indicator of how radicalised the ‘mainstream’ Conservative press is.
Farage is a more familiar figure, but I’ll lay the deets out anyway. As leader of UKIP, he was the socially-acceptable face of the British far-right. His deputy, Paul Nuttall, had a side-job writing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the Sport, and he himself networked with the Northern Irish loyalist militias who provide most of the backing and combat training for neo-Nazi groups like Britain First and their parent organisation, the BNP. He and his former party are also in deep with Russia. Like, really deep. He’s a big Putin supporter, and appeared so many times on Russia Today that an executive said ‘he has been known far longer to the RT audience than (to) most of the British electorate”. In fact, after the Brexit vote, he was offered a job with the channel, and he remains a ‘person of interest’ to the FBI investigation into Trump’s election. Meanwhile, the party’s main financial backer, Arron Banks, 'the man who bought Brexit’, is married to a woman who has been repeatedly investigated by the Special Branch as a suspected Russian spy, and appears to have conjured up a remarkable amount of money out of nowhere in 2014 which he promptly invested in the Leave campaign.
Rees-Mogg, again, has a history with UKIP. He proposed an electoral pact with them all the way back in 2013, even suggesting Farage as Deputy PM (!), and has cultivated warm relations with them since, describing them as ‘natural allies’ in 2015. He’s also had interactions in the past with other British far-right groups – in 2013, he attended a dinner held by the Traditional Britain Group, who advocate the ‘assisted repatriation’ of non-white Britons to their ‘natural homelands’, despite being previously warned about the TBG by the antifascist organisation Searchlight. In what should be an obvious pattern by now, the Traditional Britain Group have ties with both Breitbart and Russia, both through themselves and through an international neo-Nazi publishing house called Arktos Media which coordinates far-right organisations across Europe. Arktos is particularly interesting because of one of the authors it publishes, Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin is a fascinating figure in all this – a proud self-proclaimed fascist whose 1997 book, The Foundations of Geopolitics, is strongly suspected to provide the underpinnings of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy. While Russian journalists have dismissed his influence, and our view of Russian internal politics is sufficiently distorted that I’m not prepared to totally dive in on the idea that he’s Putin’s philosophical guru and the director of all his actions (not least because he’s in the fringe National Bolshevik Party – yes, they do mean national socialism, and they do mean it in that way – rather than Putin’s own United Russia), the similarities between what the book advises and what Putin has done since taking power are eerie. It suggests befriending Iran, annexing Ukraine, cutting off Britain from the EU, and encouraging isolationism, racial strife, and political instability in America. Could be nothing, could be a whole lot of something.
There’s another axis here, though, and I think it’s important to help understand the whole thing. That axis is money. As I mentioned in a previous post, Rees-Mogg has helped publicise one of the largest and best-connected pro-Brexit think-tanks, the Legatum Institute. Legatum is run by a pair of New Zealand-based billionaires who specialise in disaster capitalism – identifying an economy in trouble, storing money in safe locations outside the blast radius (for example, buying Swiss francs when you think that the Kenyan economy is about to go under), and then sweeping in after the crash to buy as many of the country’s assets as you can grab dirt-cheap. Their interest in Brexit was made explicit when Brexiteer MP John Redwood, who helped write a paper for them after the referendum, was caught advising his buddies in finance to do exactly that. Oh, and as the Open Democracy article linked above says, one of their early ventures into disaster capitalism was in ‘90s Russia, where they ended up with the fourth-largest stake in the state petrochemical company Gazprom, putting them in the family of oligarchs who serve as Putin’s secondary government. Gosh. Fancy that.
Rees-Mogg has been described as ‘the new face of Russian political interference in the UK' after it emerged that multiple Russian bot-nets had switched from pushing Trump and Brexit to ‘Moggmentum’. It also emerged that he and a former business partner had been involved several years back in ‘SibInCo’, the Siberian Investment Company, which has apparently gone to some lengths to disguise its online presence. He’s also been on Russia Today, but then again, so has everyone.
For the record, Rees-Mogg has since said that his meeting was ‘interesting’ and Bannon was ‘well-informed’. He also said that Donald Trump re-tweeting Britain First videos was unimportant because Twitter is a “fundamentally trivial medium” – a useful stance for someone who is not presently well-served by attacking either Trump or Britain First.
You only asked me to look up Rees-Mogg’s far-right connections, but I felt that wouldn’t tell the whole story. Rees-Mogg isn’t a Paul Nuttall or a Tommy Robinson, a simple bigot wrapped up in something bigger than himself. Xenophobia, aggressive Russian nationalism, and the failings of late-stage capitalism now seem very closely bound together, and he’s now very much at the point where they all intersect. Frankly, it’s pretty damned scary.
As for the stuff on Rees-Mogg and the far right... well, strap yourself in, because this is going to be a wild ride. Some (or much) of this you may well know already, but I think it deserves being put down in one place to show off the underlying patterns. This Friday, he met with Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon to discuss political campaigning strategies. Yes, that’s Steve Bannon the former ‘chief strategist’ (a position created entirely for him) of Donald Trump, who got kicked out of the White House after a number of strategic errors including undermining his boss on North Korea and – perhaps more significantly – encouraging Trump into his disastrously ambivalent response to the Charlottesville race riot.
Breitbart and the Alt-Right
Before and since his time in the White House, Bannon has been editor of Breitbart, a far-right news-site that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a famous American civil-rights group, described as ‘a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill’. Breitbart is the self-described ‘home of the alt-right’, a movement of young, Internet-savvy white supremacists who probably don’t have one single origin, but were at least partially founded by the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Spencer has been fairly explicit about ‘alt-right’ simply being more marketable code for ‘white supremacist’ – note also from that link that he began his writing career in Taki’s Mag, a spin-off of that grand old Conservative organ The Spectator headed by (and named after) a defender of Greece’s most prominent neo-Nazi movement, the Golden Dawn. For the record, yes, Taki is still on the Spectator’s payroll, and no, he isn’t going anywhere. As for Breitbart itself, it’s hosted a long succession of virulently racist articles, and even had a ‘black crime’ tag for articles until recently as a pushback against the Black Lives Matter movement.While the transatlantic far-right movement Breitbart is central to is a long-established force (Taki started writing in the Spectator in 1977, and it would be foolish to assume that he was part of the first generation), as we all know, it’s had a surge of recent success. In 2014, two years before President Trump, Bannon delivered a speech transmitted by Skype to a conference in the Vatican. In it, he laid out his worldview, speaking of an apocalyptic three-way war between ‘secular capitalism’, ‘Islamic fascism’, and the Judeo-Christian West’. He acknowledged the links between his own preferred ideology, ‘Traditionalism’ (the capital T is important – it’s a much more specific ideology than the name might suggest) and what would eventually become fascism, and while he acknowledged that Vladimir Putin was a ‘kleptocrat’, he described him as ‘very, very, very intelligent’, noted the appeal of his ideology, and suggested that he would be a useful enemy-of-my-enemy against militant Islam. Breitbart does appear to have put this openness to Russian outreach to practical use – they appear to have been co-ordinating their stories with Russian social-media bots with a level of precision that would suggest active communication.
This is not the first time that Breitbart has interacted with Rees-Mogg. They’ve got an entire tag dedicated to glowing articles about him, and he did an interview with their London editor, James Delingpole, in July. For the record, Delingpole is another Spectator columnist, as an indicator of how radicalised the ‘mainstream’ Conservative press is.
UKIP and Domestic Fascism
Farage is a more familiar figure, but I’ll lay the deets out anyway. As leader of UKIP, he was the socially-acceptable face of the British far-right. His deputy, Paul Nuttall, had a side-job writing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the Sport, and he himself networked with the Northern Irish loyalist militias who provide most of the backing and combat training for neo-Nazi groups like Britain First and their parent organisation, the BNP. He and his former party are also in deep with Russia. Like, really deep. He’s a big Putin supporter, and appeared so many times on Russia Today that an executive said ‘he has been known far longer to the RT audience than (to) most of the British electorate”. In fact, after the Brexit vote, he was offered a job with the channel, and he remains a ‘person of interest’ to the FBI investigation into Trump’s election. Meanwhile, the party’s main financial backer, Arron Banks, 'the man who bought Brexit’, is married to a woman who has been repeatedly investigated by the Special Branch as a suspected Russian spy, and appears to have conjured up a remarkable amount of money out of nowhere in 2014 which he promptly invested in the Leave campaign.Rees-Mogg, again, has a history with UKIP. He proposed an electoral pact with them all the way back in 2013, even suggesting Farage as Deputy PM (!), and has cultivated warm relations with them since, describing them as ‘natural allies’ in 2015. He’s also had interactions in the past with other British far-right groups – in 2013, he attended a dinner held by the Traditional Britain Group, who advocate the ‘assisted repatriation’ of non-white Britons to their ‘natural homelands’, despite being previously warned about the TBG by the antifascist organisation Searchlight. In what should be an obvious pattern by now, the Traditional Britain Group have ties with both Breitbart and Russia, both through themselves and through an international neo-Nazi publishing house called Arktos Media which coordinates far-right organisations across Europe. Arktos is particularly interesting because of one of the authors it publishes, Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin is a fascinating figure in all this – a proud self-proclaimed fascist whose 1997 book, The Foundations of Geopolitics, is strongly suspected to provide the underpinnings of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy. While Russian journalists have dismissed his influence, and our view of Russian internal politics is sufficiently distorted that I’m not prepared to totally dive in on the idea that he’s Putin’s philosophical guru and the director of all his actions (not least because he’s in the fringe National Bolshevik Party – yes, they do mean national socialism, and they do mean it in that way – rather than Putin’s own United Russia), the similarities between what the book advises and what Putin has done since taking power are eerie. It suggests befriending Iran, annexing Ukraine, cutting off Britain from the EU, and encouraging isolationism, racial strife, and political instability in America. Could be nothing, could be a whole lot of something.
Legatum
There’s another axis here, though, and I think it’s important to help understand the whole thing. That axis is money. As I mentioned in a previous post, Rees-Mogg has helped publicise one of the largest and best-connected pro-Brexit think-tanks, the Legatum Institute. Legatum is run by a pair of New Zealand-based billionaires who specialise in disaster capitalism – identifying an economy in trouble, storing money in safe locations outside the blast radius (for example, buying Swiss francs when you think that the Kenyan economy is about to go under), and then sweeping in after the crash to buy as many of the country’s assets as you can grab dirt-cheap. Their interest in Brexit was made explicit when Brexiteer MP John Redwood, who helped write a paper for them after the referendum, was caught advising his buddies in finance to do exactly that. Oh, and as the Open Democracy article linked above says, one of their early ventures into disaster capitalism was in ‘90s Russia, where they ended up with the fourth-largest stake in the state petrochemical company Gazprom, putting them in the family of oligarchs who serve as Putin’s secondary government. Gosh. Fancy that.
Russia
Rees-Mogg has been described as ‘the new face of Russian political interference in the UK' after it emerged that multiple Russian bot-nets had switched from pushing Trump and Brexit to ‘Moggmentum’. It also emerged that he and a former business partner had been involved several years back in ‘SibInCo’, the Siberian Investment Company, which has apparently gone to some lengths to disguise its online presence. He’s also been on Russia Today, but then again, so has everyone.For the record, Rees-Mogg has since said that his meeting was ‘interesting’ and Bannon was ‘well-informed’. He also said that Donald Trump re-tweeting Britain First videos was unimportant because Twitter is a “fundamentally trivial medium” – a useful stance for someone who is not presently well-served by attacking either Trump or Britain First.
You only asked me to look up Rees-Mogg’s far-right connections, but I felt that wouldn’t tell the whole story. Rees-Mogg isn’t a Paul Nuttall or a Tommy Robinson, a simple bigot wrapped up in something bigger than himself. Xenophobia, aggressive Russian nationalism, and the failings of late-stage capitalism now seem very closely bound together, and he’s now very much at the point where they all intersect. Frankly, it’s pretty damned scary.
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