After Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015 the party membership swelled with hundreds of thousands of new members, mainly traditional Labour folk enthused by the party's first democratic socialist leader in decades.
The mainstream media were horrified by this surge of support for a guy who threatens the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that has served people like them so well for the last four decades, at the expense of millions of the rest of us, so the attacks on these new Labour Party members have been pretty much constant ever since.
The Labour membership surge
Ever since the Labour membership surge mainstream media hacks and opponents of democratic socialism have worked tirelessly to discredit it.
Aside from all of the abuse ("trots", "dogs", "rabble", "thugs", "Nazi stormtroopers") two themes have constantly stood out, the idea that left-wing people joining Labour are "entryists", and that Corbyn supporters are a "cult".
Anyone who is familiar with the history of the Labour Party would surely put up a counter-argument that the likes of centre-right pro-privatisation Thatcherites like Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, John McTernan, Margaret Hodge, and Alistair Campbell were the "entryists" who took over the party, and that the post-Corbyn membership surge is the mass home-coming of those who were driven away from the party by the right-wing pro-privatisation pro-austerity Tory lite agenda between 1997 and 2015.
But still the mainstream media persists in portraying the hundreds of thousands who joined Labour since 2015 as "entryists" and "cultists" rather than just ordinary people enthused by an actual alternative to the hard-right Thatcherite consensus of the last four decades.
Ukipification of the Tories
Ever since the 2016 EU referendum it's become increasingly obvious that the Tory party is being usurped by the small hard-right anti-EU faction (the crackpot element John Major used to refer to as "the bastards").
Theresa May called her vanity election in 2017 because she believed that having unified the traditional Tory vote with the extreme-right ultranationalist Blue-kip demographic, a landslide majority would be inevitable. But she didn't count on Jeremy Corbyn or the energised Labour membership orchestrating the biggest turnaround in British politics since universal suffrage.
Since the 2017 general election we've all seen how Theresa May dances to the tune of the ERG Brextremists, knowing that Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ERG mob easily have the parliamentary numbers to trigger a leadership election if she refuses to obey their instructions.
And now we've even got the spectacle of Nigel Farage's extreme-right anti-immigrant Leave.EU campaign openly bragging that they've infiltrated the Tory party membership with 10,000 Brextremists in order to ensure that the next leader of the Tory party is a hard-right Brexiteer.
They're so confident of their success that they've actually announced what they're up to on Twitter!
The mainstream media silence on this ongoing Brextremist takeover of the Tory party is staggering given the absolute brazenness of it, and the enormous fuss they made over the Labour membership surge.
The Orwellian state of the British media
On the one hand you have hundreds of thousands of left-leaning people finally coming home to the Labour Party after years in exile due to the right-wing pro-privatisation, pro-austerity gruel being offered by the orthodox neoliberal leadership.
And on the other hand you've got an extreme-right Brexit campaign group openly and publicly bragging about the way they've infiltrated the Tory party in order to interfere in the party's leadership election.
But somehow the former is the grave concern worthy of hundreds of columns and TV segments ranging from patronising faux outrage to outright abuse of ordinary people, and the latter barely gets a single mention.
If anyone in British politics is an "entryist" surely it's got to be a follower of Nigel Farage and Arron Banks tearing up their UKIP membership in order to join the Tory party and influence the next leadership election in favour of the most extreme Brexiteer in the running?
If anyone in British politics is a "cultist" surely it's people who continue to glibly dismiss every single piece of evidence that a "no deal" flounce out of the EU would be a social and economic catastrophe as "Project Fear".
Yet somehow left-wing Labour supporters are still continually derided as "entryists" and "cultists" by the mainstream media, while the Brexit cultists who are openly and brazenly usurping the Tory party in front of our eyes are just left in peace to get on with it!
The only conclusion that can be drawn out of this extraordinary contrast in mainstream media coverage is that the vast majority of the coddled mainstream media class are way more comfortable with extreme-right, anti-immigrant, Brextremists brazenly taking over the ruling Tory party in front of our eyes than they are with the Labour opposition returning to its democratic socialist roots!
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