We’ve all heard the prevailing narrative in recent weeks. The riots that hit our towns and cities were the consequence of a mix of ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ and ‘disinformation’ from malicious actors. Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate, Nigel Farage – all these individuals have been depicted as the James-Bond-style villain responsible for the mayhem.
This misguided theory has repeatedly been advanced by various liberal sophisticates on social media – people who always appear so desperate to flaunt their ‘progressive’, high-status opinions (the better to win kudos from their peers, of course).
It never seems to occur to such individuals that their own brand of politics, as well as their own rhetoric, might occasionally be seen as inflammatory and divisive by others. They are the clever and enlightened ones, you see. So they are imbued with a moral rectitude absent from anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their worldview.
Thus, when, for example, the chief of ‘anti-fascist’ charity Hope Not Hate, Nick Lowles, republished, at the height of the disorder, a false report on social media that a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough had been attacked with acid, most of those who can usually be found railing against ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ and ‘disinformation’ said nothing. Lowles is of their tribe, and so the potential effects of his inaccurate claim weren’t worth bothering about.
I experienced this kind of ideological dogmatism first-hand on social media a couple of weeks ago. Readers active on X (formerly known as Twitter) will probably know of an account there run by someone calling himself – I’m going to stick my neck out and assume it’s a bloke – the ‘Secret Barrister’. This account, which expatiates with great swagger on matters on law and justice, seems to have achieved cult status among certain liberal-left voices, enjoying a following of over half a million on the site. The person running the account has also written a book under the same nom de plume.
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