The announcement by an online conservative publication in Ireland is going to be a lot to live up to. But The Burkean promises it has collected the receipts that will prove something that goes beyond anti-conservative bias into the realm of a conspiracy. It all started when the publication, which was created by conservative university students, set up a fake Antifa account last year:
In December of last year a Twitter account was set-up. Titled “Irish Students Against Fascism”, it described itself as an aspiring antifascist organising hub to physically, socially and professionally harass individuals engaged with conservative or nationalist politics on campuses.
Very soon the account garnered well over a thousand followers, with retweets from the Union of Students Ireland’s official account among other leftist activist organizations. The account boasted of an impending website dumping incriminating material relating to students on campus, particularly in Young Fine Gael, and invited individuals to contribute over private messaging.
What has been unknown until today was that, from the very onset, the page was operated by students involved with The Burkean. The account was set up with the intent of performing long term investigative work into antifascism in Ireland, as well as its insidious and often blatant links with civic society, journalism and politics.
A look at the account in question shows that it has indeed been promising a big reveal:
To help contribute towards what we hope to become a tool for activists nationwide feel free to reach out to us
— Irish Students Against Globalism (@IrishAntifa) March 3, 2020
Apparently they got quite a few responses. They kept stoking the anti-fascist fervor:
Our website goes live at 7pm this evening naming and shaming fascists across Ireland.
No Pasaran! pic.twitter.com/mV0Sbv5Ezg
— Irish Students Against Globalism (@IrishAntifa) March 6, 2020
And then earlier today they posted a one word tweet “Surprise!” along with a link to the explanation above. The site hasn’t released any of the material they collected yet but they promise it is explosive:
Many young people on the Irish Right have long claimed that there is institutional bias constantly working against them. However, it is only now that we can definitively say that this is not the case.
There is no institutional bias against young conservatives. There is an outright conspiracy against them. A conspiracy that starts at the lower levels of university life and leads all the way up, like a conveyor belt, to the NGO complex and the halls of the Oireachtas. Individuals brazenly abusing their positions of power trying to destroy their political opponents, with no fear of repercussions. It is with this series of exposés that these repercussions will finally start to materialise.
Over the coming weeks, The Burkean will be publishing a series of exclusive messages, audio and video recordings that give a hint of the sheer scale of this corruption. These materials will show how students and organizations deemed to be politically dissentious had their data gathered and distributed amongst a host of campus activists, violent and non-violent, all with the support student government.
Again, that’s a pretty big claim. We’ll have to wait and see if what they’ve collected can back it up but they certainly have my attention.
