On Sunday July 2nd 2017 Donald trump tweeted something extraordinary. He shared a ridiculous doctored video of him beating up a guy whose head has been replaced with the CNN logo. You'll probably be aware of this already given the significant amount of mainstream media coverage of this bizarre Tweet on both sides of the Atlantic.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017Before we even get into the origins of the video, the content should be deeply concerning to anyone who gives the remotest damn about the freedom of the press.
Trump's attacks on certain sections of the media were bad enough before this doctored video clip, but anyone who imagines that the President sharing this clip wouldn't be seen as an incitement to abuse and violence towards the press amongst by the angry meat-head demographic of the Trump supporter base is clearly delusional.
Not only is the creator of the video a rabid Islamophobe and anti-Semite, he's also been guilty of spreading fake news, which is quite some irony given that Trump posted the bigot's video with a rant about CNN being "fake news".
Trump was so pleased with the video clip that he'd ripped off from this Reddit bigot that he even retweeted it from the official Presidential Twitter account, meaning that it will be permanently recorded on the US public record as an official statement by the President!
The fact that the work of a depraved extreme-right bigot has been written into the US public record brings us neatly to Theresa May.
Not many people will know that Theresa May also ensured that the work of an extreme-right social media bigot was recorded on the public record by reading out a Tweet from a notorious Twitter troll account at Prime Minister's Questions as a pathetic attempt to score political points against Jeremy Corbyn.
Theresa May's decision to write this vile xenophobic and misogynistic Twitter troll into the permanent Hansard political record went virtually unnoticed by the public because the incident massively contradicted the prevailing UK mainstream media narrative that it was Jeremy Corbyn who had a lax attitude towards bigotry and online abuse not Theresa May, so went almost entirely ignored.
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| For some reason Theresa May never did sing the Notting Hill Carnival song composed by her favoured Twitter troll. |
The fact that Trump is getting pilloried by the UK press for doing essentially the same thing that Theresa May was given a free pass for in September 2016 raises the question of why the different treatment.
Why do the UK press regularly hold Donald Trump to account for his unstable behaviour, his hard-right economic policies, his contempt for civil rights and the rule of law, and his extreme narcissistic tendencies, but they treat Theresa May with almost total reverence and deference when she has largely the same outrageous hard-right politics and the same absurdly narcissistic right-wing authoritarian personality type (minus the confidence and charisma of course)?
Is it just a case of snobby and superior Brits laughing and pointing at the silly American, when their own leader is arguably even worse?
Or is it a deep sense of ingrained subservience that lower-ranked members of the British establishment have towards their lords and masters that makes them incapable of criticising their own political leaders with anything like the venom with which they'll criticise foreign leaders?
Whether it's snobbishness towards foreigners, or ingrained British subservience, this disparity between the way British mainstream media hacks will criticise Donald Trump, but turn a blind eye to Theresa May for exactly the same kind of behaviour is totally unacceptable.
There's no way they should end this disparity by lessening their criticism of Trump, so the only way to address the problem is by treating Theresa May and her shamelessly shambolic Tory government with the same level of scrutiny and criticism as they're prepared to treat Donald Trump and his chaotic Republican administration.
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