Beware of people using bad faith delegitimisation tactics

Before we even get started let's be absolutely clear that I'm not saying centrists are the same as the modern day extreme-right. I'm not doing that, so don't even dare try to misrepresent my point to pretend that I am.

Yes centrists wilfully collude with the extreme-right in preference to working with the left, as in the Lib-Dem pact with UKIP to take control of Bolton Council, or the Centre Party's fateful decision in 1933 to seal their own destruction by elevating Adolf Hitler to German Chancellor. And yes both ideologies revere capitalism. But nobody is pretending that they're the same.

What I am going to point out is that centrists and the modern day extreme-right have a tendency to use the exact same cynical debating trickery to delegitimise their critics, or anyone who dares question the groupthink of their ideology.

The extreme-right continually present their critics as being motivated by hatred of Britain and hatred of (their utterly warped interpretation of) "British values". They also regularly claim that opponents of their ideology are the victims of "brainwashing".

Centrists use the exact same tactic, repeatedly insinuating that criticism of their beloved ideology is motivated by hatred, bitterness, or insanity, and delighting in the accusation that anyone supporting the anti-austerity, anti-privatisation, pro-investment politics of the Labour left is a "cultist".

If you don't believe our propaganda, you're 'brainwashed'.

If you don't believe in our unquestionable centrist groupthink, then you're a 'cultist'.

It's the exact same delegitimisation tactic, and it's absolutely commonplace in both ideologies.

The point of it is to deter people from even considering the critique of their own ideology by labelling the critic as dangerous, unstable, insane, brainwashed, motivated by hate, or whatever other slur they can think of.

They don't want people actually debating the topic at hand, so they concentrate all of their effort on delegitimising the source, in the hope that others will not even bother looking into what the argument is actually about.

It's the tactic of bad faith cowards who know that they'd lose the argument if the debate was conducted fairly and decently, so they resort to cynical delegitimisation trickery to prevent that from happening.

Lib-Dems

I think it's important to criticise the Liberal Democrats for their role in helping the Tories enforce the living standards destroying austerity fanaticism that laid the groundwork for Brexit, then cashing in on the crisis they helped create by posing as glorious saviours who are going to rescue us all from the madness by ... errr ... printing up "Bollocks to Brexit" T-shirts" and begging for another referendum with no deal Tories running the show so they can totally rig the ballot by picking the options, wording, and timing of the vote to their own advantage.

It doesn't matter how much you base your criticism on facts, evidence, logic, and links to verifiable sources, the Lib-Dem response in the comments always consists of the same barrage of evasions, deflections, straw man misrepresentations, whataboutery, excuses, absurd Lib-Dem fairy stories, outright lies, and cynical delegitimisation tactics.

The strategy is to deflect debate away from the actual criticisms, and undermine the critic with claims that they must be insane, brainwashed, hysterical, deluded, or motivated by hate to even dare trying to criticise the ideological groupthink.

Ian Dunt

If you're not on Twitter you probably won't be familiar with this guy, but he's hot shit in the centrist and Remainer echo chambers like FBPE.

He's one of these noxious Remain Ultras who gets off on sneering at left-behind working class communities (rather than reaching out to try to explain that the living standards collapse they experienced was caused by domestic austerity fanaticism, not immigrants and the EU), smearing all Leave voters as horrible right-wingers, and constructing bizarre fantasies that the UK was some kind of magnificent utopia under the Tory/Lib-Dem Austerity Coalition, before Brexit arrived, out of nowhere, and ruined everything.

He's a toxic Remainer who does more damage to the Brexit-sceptic cause with his wittering than good, and if other Remainers had any vague understanding of the strategic need to actually attract people to the cause rather than driving them away with toxic groupthink nonsense, they wouldn't revere and retweet him so god-damned much.

So the Guardian columnist Dawn Foster wrote an exceptional article in the Guardian criticising the Labour deputy leader Tom Watson for his campaign of internal wrecking tactics, and having a dig at the kind of centrist groupthink that Dunt and his ilk absolutely revel in.

Obviously Dunt hated it, but his Twitter response was absolutely telling.

Instead of critiquing any of the actual points raised in the article, or presenting anything even remotely counter-evidence, he resorted to ridiculing it as "off planet" insane, before questioning the fact that the mainstream media would allow such opinions to be published at all!

1. Refuse to debate or critique any of the actual points raised, simply deride opposing opinions as insane "thought crime".  

 2. Demand the mainstream media only ever promote the 'correct' groupthink worldview. 

 How is this mentality any different from the mentality of the far-right?

How is it even remotely possible to consider this kind of delegitimisation of non-conformist views, and craving for media censorship as any kind of liberalism?

Conclusion

As I said in the introduction I'm not arguing that centrism and the extreme-right are the same thing, so don't even try to pretend that I am.

What I'm saying is that their ideological adherents are prone to using the exact same delegitimisation tactics to deter people from even listening to their ideological opponents.

From deriding non-conformist opinions as insane, or deluded, or hate-motivated "thought crime" to demanding that the function of the mainstream media is solely to endlessly and unquestioningly repeat their own approved groupthink mentality.

Their politics may be different, but the illiberal and intolerant mindset, and the cynical debating trickery are very often exactly the same.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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How are "centrists" fine with this demeaning and degrading language?

"Centrist" hack Suzanne Moore has written a truly execrable article for the Guardian whining that Jeremy Corbyn hasn't got any women in his inner circle.

The weirdest thing is that Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinets have demonstrably been the most gender-balanced in history, with incredible and capable women in key positions, many of whom would never have been given a chance at the top table had the pro-austerity pro-privatisation orthodox neoliberal "centrists" managed to maintain their grip on the party after they pathetically tanked the 2015 General Election.

She's deliberately seeking to downplay and erase the role of capable and intelligent Labour women like Diane Abbott, and Angela Rayner, and Dawn Butler, and Rebecca Long-Bailey, to create the reality-reversed narrative that Corbyn's somehow a misogynist intent on keeping women down, rather than the Labour leader who has actually done the most to lift capable women into positions of responsibility within the party.

It's not difficult to see what the real agenda is, given that the article hearer image is of "centrist" self-publicity merchant Jess Phillips.

After her call for a "centrist" woman like Jess Phillips or Stella Creasy to take over the Labour Party, the author resorts to the most despicable line of the whole incontinent diatribe by referring to the women in Corbyn's cabinet in the most demeaning language with the phrase "a suitable female pet has to be groomed or the revolution may stall".

Suzanne Moore and all of the "centrist" dupes who have shared this noxious diatribe have deliberately invisibalised and demeaned intelligent and capable non-white, and working class, and genuinely left-wing Labour MPs.

And they've done it purely in order to promote their favoured choice of white, centre-right women from extremely privileged backgrounds (Creasy comes from an aristocratic family, and despite her faux working class pretensions Jess Phillips grew up in an incredibly wealthy household).

And what makes referring to Labour women in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet as if they're just mindless groomed pets on display, rather than strong independent capable women with minds and political views of their own all the worse is that Suzanne Moore and her "centrist" ilk would immediately assume the role of furious language police if it was anyone else (from either the political right or from the left) who was using such demeaning language about women with diferrent political views to their own.

These people are hypocritically spreading this undisguised misogynist contempt because they simply don't want to have, or even acknowledge the existence of black, or left-wing, or working class Labour women at all, because the only women they're interested in acknowledging or being represented by are white wealthy women who are exactly like them.

They're a bunch of arrogant, racist, classist, prigs, but they're so wrapped up in their self-righteous bubbles of "centrist" delusion that they've convinced themselves that speaking about other women in this grotesque and demeaning way is perfectly acceptable, because they actually believe that any woman who serves with Corbyn is fully deserving of all the contempt, and ridicule, and marginalisation, and abuse that they get.

In reality Moore and her ilk are just a couple of steps away from far-right bigots ripping veils off Muslim women and calling them "letterboxes" because these women won't do as they're told, but this type are so self-righteous in their "centrism" that they can't even see what kind of people they've become.

Suzanne Moore should be ashamed of writing this fact-averse and misogynistic diatribe. The Guardian should be ashamed for commissioning and publishing it. And anyone who shared it for any other reason than criticism of it needs to have a good hard look at themselves too.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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We need to talk about groupthink

Groupthink is a condition that tends to manifest in all organisations and all political movements, but some cases are obviously worse than others, especially when the groupthink ideas that are spreading like wildfire are strategically inept and counter-productive nonsense.

The groupthink propensity 

The Remain campaign is particularly prone to groupthink for two big reasons.

One is that they've developed an extraordinary echo-chamber on Twitter based on the FBPE hashtag, meaning all kinds of nonsense, misinformation, lies, abuse, and strategically inept gibberish gets spread through the cult-like uncritical amplification by other #FBPE activists.

Not everything written by FBPE hashtaggers is bad, obviously, but it's become so infested with abusive people and partisan liars it's extraordinary that anyone with any basic human decency would still want to be associated with it.

Another reason for the propensity to groupthink is that an awful lot of Remain activists seem to hang on the every word of the clueless centrist hacks who have been wrong on virtually every major political issue over the last decade.

• They told us to vote Lib-Dem in 2010 which enabled the malicious and incompetent Tories back into power, and led to the disastrous austerity policies that trashed our living standards and eventually led to the Brexit backlash.

• Then they chickened out of properly opposing economically illiterate Tory austerity fanaticism and all kinds of other Tory malice (Wage Repression, Bedroom Tax, Secret Courts, Hostile Environment, Workfare exploitation, systematic disability denial, infrastructure under-investment, annihilation of local government budgets, Academification, disastrous prisons and probation service privatisation scams ...).

• Then they actually convinced themselves that Labour should push "austerity-lite" at the 2015 General Election and leave the public the impression that the entire political establishment was colluding to rip-off the poor and ordinary in order to further enrich the gilded class to which they belong.

• Then they bitterly opposed and derided Jeremy Corbyn for his unambiguous anti-austerity agenda, smearing everyone who supported him as Trots, and Marxists, and Stalinists, and dangerous extreme-left freaks. A hate campaign that backfored spectacularly when Corbyn won a landslide victory in the 2015 Labour leadership election. 

• Then they ran a lazy, complacent, condescending, and downright inept Remain campaign in 2016 that was so bad they somehow managed to lose to a bunch of bloody charlatans who didn't even have a plan for what to do if they actually won!

• Then in the immediate aftermath of this extraordinary defeat they focused all of their political energy on a spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup instead of holding the Tories to account for the Brexit farce they'd just created. 

• Then they were so convinced that Labour would be wiped out as a political force at the 2017 General Election that they completely failed to see the Corbyn surge coming.

• And for the last year or so they've been utterly fixated on the idea of re-running the EU referendum despite absolutely no reforms to properly punish electoral cheats and liars, no new regulations for online social media dark ads, and no real outreach to left-behind communities to explain that it was Tory austerity fanaticism that trashed their wages, living standards, and communities since 2010, not immigrants and the EU (with absolutely no acknowledgement of the fact that losing another roll of the dice with the Tories still in power would create an inescapable double-mandate for ruinous hard-right economy-tanking, chaos-causing, job-destroying Tory administered Brexit farce).

An awful lot of people in the liberal media are so economically insulated from real world issues (wage repression in-work benefit cuts, sanctions, workfare, disability denial, child poverty, public service cuts, the housing crisis, exploitative employment practices, food banks ...) that they simply can't grasp what's actually going on in the UK, why people are so angry, and why "more of the same" just won't cut it any more.

And what's more is that they suffer no actual consequences for their perpetual wrongness. They just rapidly settle on another absurd groupthink narrative to push until that one collapses too, then it's onto the next reality-averse narrative, and on, and on, and on, with nobody ever asking why they deserve their bloated six figure salaries considering the fact they're so repeatedly wrong.

So when a lot of people uncritically rote learn and repeat the political opinions of these economically insulated mainstream media bubble dwellers with vested interests in not rocking the neoliberal boat too much, it's hardly surprising that strategically inept groupthink nonsense ends up infesting mass movements like the Remain campaign.

Euro election groupthink

The latest display of absurdist Remainer groupthink centres on the European Parliament elections that Theresa May and the Tories swore blind that the UK was not even going to participate in just a few weeks previously.

This new groupthink narrative is that the five very different hard-Remain political parties should scrap off all of their existing policies and hastily cobble together a "Remain coalition" in order to turn the Euro elections into a de facto referendum on Brexit.

This Remainer coalition of convenience is a spectacularly stupid idea for so many reasons. Especially the fact that Euro elections have historically suffered very low turnouts; the recklessness of turning elections into single-issue ballots and referendum reruns; the failure to acknowledge that pro-Brexit activists have a huge advantage having finished first in the previous Euro election; the nonsensical expectation that pro-austerity and anti-austerity parties to join forces is (and ignores the fact that austerity fanaticism is one of the root causes of Breixit in the first place); the absolute fantasy that the rabidly unionist Lib-Dems would happily join forces with the SNP; and the intense ignorance of the fact that parties like the Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru have democratic structures that simply wouldn't allow the leadership to unilaterally join forces with rival political parties, even if their leaders were daft enough to think this absolute nonsense was a good idea.

The idea seems to be that if all five of the minor hard-Remain parties (SNP, Plaid Cymru, Lib-Dems, Greens, and CUK) were to join forces they might have a slight chance of coming first in a fight against the various shades of Brexit which range through the "no deal" militancy of UKIP and Farage's Brexit Party, hard-right Tory Brexit, and Labour's soft-Brexit and confirmatory referendum compromise position. 

But despite all of the flaws, this blatantly absurd "let's turn the Euro elections into a de facto Brexit referendum" has become the widely accepted groupthink for Remainers to mindlessly parrot at each other.

Self-defeating nonsense

The consequences of this groupthink nonsense are quite extraordinary: When the Green Party tried to point out that turning the Euro elections into a de facto Brexit referendum is poor idea the FBPE mob turned on them in an instant, spitting torrents of bile and abuse at them for their lack of ideological purity to their brand-new Remainer groupthink idea.

Countless Guardian articles have been written pushing this absurd strategy, none of which highlight the importance of opposing the ruinous austerity fanaticism that caused Brexit in the first place, or acknowledge the absurdity of expecting anti-austerity parties and their activists to throw their support behind undisguised pro-austerity neoliberals like the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters.

In one article the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde complained bitterly about the split Remainer vote being "a masterclass in political incompetence" without a single mention of the "centrist" political incompetence of failing to oppose austerity when they should have, nor providing any sensible perspective either on the fact that the Leave vote is also extremely divided with Farage's Brexit Party and UKIP promoting a ruinous "no deal" meltdown, the Tories pushing hard-right Brexit, and Labour going for soft-Brexit and a final say referendum.

These groupthink Guardian articles, including the Marina Hyde piece, are also infested with massively-upvoted below the line comments from toxic Remain extremists bitterly smearing all Brexit voters as bigots, Racists, and Faragists (as if shrieking "bigot" and "racist" at people for three years because they made a mistake in a hastily conducted referendum that nobody understood the full consequences of at the time isn't infinitely more likely to cement their existing position, rather than win them over to your cause).
What's the strategy here?

So the groupthink is that the five minor hard-Remain parties should scrap all of their pre-existing policies in order to form a coalition of convenience in the vain hope of topping the Euro election polls. 

But what if they combine forces and still lose? How would that failed gamble look to the rest of us?

And even if this hard-Remain coalition of convenience were somehow able to finish first, everyone would easily see that they'd just benefited from the fact that hard-Leave was divided between three parties (UKIP, Brexit, and Tory).

Why is a hard-Remain coalition of convenience so damned important? What's the actual strategic objective of forming one? What happens if they turn the Euro election into a de facto referendum and still lose? And how is having groupthink tantrums because this fantasy isn't happening doing anything to enhance the Brexit-sceptic cause?

Why not just give up?

• The unfathomably popular Remainer strategy of turning the Euro elections into a de facto referendum on Brexit (which they'd still probably lose in a low turnout election) is a catastrophically shit idea.

• Screeching hate at the Green Party (your hard-Remain allies for God's sake) for pointing out the practical unworkability of an undemocratic five year coalition of pro- and anti- austerity, pro- and anti-privatisation, pro- and anti- Scottish independence parties is an unbelievably terrible idea.

• Elevating toxic political figures like Anna Soubry and Chris Leslie as your political heroes despite the fact they promote "more of the same" pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker neoliberalism that caused Brexit in the first place is an appalling idea.

• Spitting hate at anyone who tries to disarm Tory Brexit by ruling our a "no deal" meltdown and developing a compromise fail safe Single Market +Customs Union Brexit (just in case Remain manage to lose the next roll of the dice they've invested so much effort in campaigning for) because any sign of compromise fails your Remainer ideological purity test is an absurdly counter-productive idea.

• Endlessly abusing and repeatedly lying about the very people you desperately need to convince to support your cause in another referendum (especially 2016 Brexit voters, and the Labour left) is an unbelievably inept strategy.

• And how can anyone believe that it's constructive or strategically coherent to arrogantly sneer at people in left-behind communities rather than reach out to them to talk about how collapsing living standards have been caused by the malicious domestic policies of the Tory government (austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, appalling inaction on the housing crisis, vandalism of the social safety net,  ...) rather immigrants and the EU as the far-right Brextremist liars keep pretending?

Given that people who are prone to this despicable behaviour, condescending arrogance, absurd over-optimism, strategic ineptitude, and ridiculously counter-productive idiocy are jockeying for position at the forefront of the Remain campaign, how are they ever going to win?

Their ideological purity shrieking is so repulsive, and their groupthink desperation to gamble again is so strategically inept that they're actually turning Brexit-sceptics away from their cause, let alone actually convincing 2016 Leave voters and abstainers to join their cause (like they absolutely need them to).

Under the circumstances it's hard to not just give up and accept that Remainer strategic ineptitude, and the toxic antics of the #FBPE mob is actually likely to make Brexit far worse than it could have been because if the hard-Remainers burn all efforts at compromise and de-escalation in order to create a final clash of civilisations showdown between them and the hard-Brexit militants, they're highly likely to lose it. 
They're likely to lose because despite how dreadful the Brextremists are, their far-right propaganda, and misinformation, and conspiracy theories, and hate-mongering, and outright lies they keep pushing actually have a clear strategic purpose.

If you're stuck in the middle between ideological fanatics on one side who know exactly what they're doing, and exactly who they're trying to convince to join their movement, and exactly which lies are beneficial to their cause, and exactly how to stoke hatred and division to their own advantage ... and a bunch of ideological puritans on the other side who insist on spitting hatred and derision at the very people they need to convince, and fantasising about ridiculous absurdities, and having pathetic groupthink tantrums because their absurdities aren't happening, and endlessly bickering between themselves over failed ideological purity tests ... then only the foolish would end up backing the latter to win, no matter how much you might actually tend to agree with their cause.

Apologies for the pessimistic conclusion, but it's increasingly difficult to have any faith that Brexit ruination can be avoided given the blinkered, counter-productive, and strategically inept groupthink nonsense that continues to infest the Remain movement.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Why are "centrists" so immune to the concept of counter-productive behaviour?

One of the trickiest things to understand about self-declared "centrists" is how they're so insulated from reality that they're incapable of even understanding the damage they keep doing to their own cause.

The primary fixation of the "centrists" at present is demanding another EU referendum that they've patronisingly called a "people's vote" as if the 33.5 million who voted in the 2016 referendum were somehow un-people.

Giving your campaign an absurdly patronising name is bad enough, but anyone with a grain of sense should be able to spot the massive glaring risk with this "another referendum now" strategy, which is that if Remainers conspire to lose it (like they did the last one), then they'll have created a cast-iron irreversible double-mandate for Brexit.

With this risk of creating an irreversible double Brexit mandate in mind, you'd think that "centrists" and other Remainers would be focusing all their efforts on trying to create as much public appeal as possible for the idea of stopping Brexit ... But no! A lot of the bone-headed, shockingly out-of-touch, unbelievably divisive, and downright dishonest behaviour of "centrists" looks like it's actually designed to make the general public hate Remainers.

"Taking the piste"

Andrew Adonis' Tweet about a 2nd referendum on his mates winter skiing options may have some kind of niche appeal amongst the most militant of Remainers, who knows? But if the replies are anything to go by, he's spectacularly misjudged the mood of the nation.

Brexit happened in the first place because Tory austerity dogma and wage repression policies caused an unprecedented collapse in living standards.

"Centrists" compounded the problem through their failure to pin the blame for this collapse in living standards on Tory government policy for fear of implicating themselves too (the Lib-Dems actively enabled Tory austerity dogma, and Labour "centrists" somehow decided that imitating Tory austerity dogma rather than opposing it would win them the 2015 General Election!).

This "centrist" failure left the door wide open for ukippers, hard-right Tories, and assorted extreme-right hate groups to falsely pin the blame for the consequences of Tory austerity and wage repression on immigrants and the EU.

Since the Brexit vote things have got even worse. More people in dire poverty, more people in exploitative low-paid jobs, more people feeling the effects of Tory wage repression, more people struggling to get by, more people relying on food bank handouts just to survive ...

Yet here's one of the most high profile Remainers (an unelected lord) actively fulfilling the caricature of an out-of-touch Remainer elitist living the high life while the ignored millions continue to struggle to survive!

How could anyone ever think that these appalling optics could help the Remainer cause?

Manufacturing the news

Brexiteers won the 2016 referendum with an absolute mass of deceptions, distortions, and outright lies. Even the Vote Leave campaign chief openly admitted that they wouldn't have won without the '£350 million for the NHS' lie.

It seems that rather than oppose this kind of outrageous propaganda, "centrists" have decided to imitate the same tactics to manufacture outrage and distort public opinion to their will, with the Guardian leading the charge.

An outrageously deceptive headline misrepresenting Jeremy Corbyn's Brexit policy in order to trigger a tsunami of rage shares on the Friday, an then following it up with an article on the Sunday openly gloating about the bitter internal Labour conflicts triggered by the mass rage sharing of Friday's deceptive headline and even outright lying about Jeremy Corbyn's Brexit stance!

Anyone who has paid attention over the last three years can't have failed to notice the bitter "anti- Corbyn" agenda of "centrist" hacks at the Guardian. But the terrifying thing is that this anti-Corbyn groupthink mentality is so deeply embedded at Guardian towers that they're wilfully spreading deceptions and outright lies in order to manufacture divisions amongst opponents of Tory Brexit.

Any Guardian hack with a shred of journalistic integrity should be outraged that the organisation they work for is conducting such an obvious propaganda war to use deceptions and lies to attack Corbyn and drive a wedge between the Labour left and the Remain campaign, when any sensible strategy to minimise the Brexit damage should be aimed at unifying all opponents of Tory Brexit, rather than deliberately infuriating the Labour-left with anti-Corbyn propaganda and lies.

Preaching to the converted
 

 I vehemently opposed Brexit in 2016, and I've continually opposed the Tories' shambolic and incompetent handling of Brexit ever since, but JK Rowling's astoundingly patronising, hate-fuelled, faux biblical Twitter rant is so obviously appalling and that ordinary people must be wondering how she ended up so consumed by such bitterness and hatred, despite living a life of wealth, luxury, and almost constant acclaim.

Another puzzle is how thousands of "centrist" types apparently enjoyed this utterly cringeworthy display of preaching to the converted so much that they actively liked it and shared it!

If you wanted to actually reinforce the views of Brexiters, showing them this horrific display of patronising and elitist "centrist" bile would surely work infinitely better than composing some new lie to plaster on the side of a bus.

Counter-productive behaviour

If "centrists" were even remotely capable of learning from their own mistakes they would have clocked that their barrages of smears and abuse aimed at discrediting Jeremy Corbyn during the 2015 Labour leadership election only ended up boosting his popularity.

If they had any sense whatever they'd have got to grips with the concept of counter-productive behaviour, and evolved their campaigning strategies accordingly.

Another lesson "centrists" should obviously have learned is that their lamentable campaign tactics during the 2016 referendum somehow managed to hand a bunch of hard-right pro-austerity Brextremist charlatans an astounding victory, despite the fact they demonstrably didn't even have a plan for what to do next if they did somehow end up winning!

That "centrists" so clearly haven't learned either of these lessons should leave anyone who opposes Tory Brexit sick with worry, because presuming these people get the second referendum they want so much, how is Tory Brextremism ever meant to be defeated with a bunch of out-of-touch, unbelievably divisive, bone-headed, elitist, downright dishonest, and unbelievably counter-productive people like this fronting the campaign against it?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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What is ... Rage Sharing?

It's been known for a long time that headlines are the most important part of a news story.

Even in the time before social media it was obvious that far more people would see the newspaper headlines (on newsagent shelves, or on newspaper reviews on the TV, or on the canteen table, or on the next week's chip wrappers) than would ever actually read the contents of the article.

But since the advent of social media, headlines have become even more important because there are loads of people out there who will share articles without even bothering to read them first (especially via Twitter retweets), and other people who are so fact-averse that they'll form extreme political judgements based on the headline of the article that they've clearly not even bothered to read.

Some of the most mega-viral articles of 2018 have been astoundingly misleading anti-Corbyn headlines that are completely contradicted within the body of the article, but literally tens of thousands of people became so outraged by the deceptive headlines that they shared without even bothering to read the article and check that the headline is justified.

This behaviour is "rage sharing", and mainstream media publications are cashing in on it big time with absolute torrents of shares and clicks (the currency of online journalism).

Apéritif: Aren't biffers gullible?

I'll come to the two desperately misleading anti-Corbyn headlines later, but just to illustrate that rage sharing articles without reading them is not a new phenomenon, just consider the fact that in 2014 the extreme-right hate group Britain First shared a spoof story about the Essex villages of High Easter and Good Easter being forced to change their names by pesky Muslims and lefties.

Hundreds of Biffers rage shared the article and spewed bigoted badly-spelled diatribes in the comments without even bothering to read the article and clocking that it was a ridiculously obvious spoof which included quotes from people like "Dr Touchi" from the prestigious "University of South Thurrock"!

Independent: Corbyn the immigrant-hater

June 2018 saw a truly egregious examples of rage sharing with over 31,000 people sharing a grotesquely misleading headline in the (supposedly left-liberal) Independent that brazenly cherry picked highly selective quotations from a Jeremy Corbyn speech about trade policy to portray him as some kind of bonkers hard-right anti-immigrant Brextremist.

This outrageously deceptive headline struck a chord with the self-declared "centrists" (orthodox neoliberals to give them a more accurate description) and the ever-reactionary #FBPE Twitter echo chamber.

It was absolutely clear that very few of the people rage sharing the article were actually reading it, otherwise they couldn't have failed to spot the brazenly dishonest selective quotation tactics, or the fact that Corbyn's trade policy speech was actually pretty good.

Guardian: Corbyn the militant Brextremist

In December 2018 The Guardian jumped onto the rage share bandwagon with a brazenly deceptive anti-Corbyn headline of their own that was so widely shared by "centrists" and the #FBPE echo chamber it almost broke Twitter with a mind-boggling 88,000+ shares (at the time of writing).

Literally thousands of people reacted in absolute "never voting Labour again" fury to the headline "Corbyn: Brexit would go ahead even if Labour won snap election" without a single one of them picking up on the crucial facts that:

1. The words "Brexit would go ahead" were plucked out of thin air by Guardian hacks and placed next to Corbyn's name in the headline (amazingly he's not actually quoted saying this anywhere in the article).

2. What Corbyn actually said was common sense. If he won a snap election he'd go to the EU and establish basic stuff like whether they'd consider renegotiation, and whether they'd extend the Article 50 deadline. Anyone who thinks that upon becoming Prime Minister he shouldn't attempt to establish the EU's position on the drastically changed political circumstances as a matter of urgency is quite frankly out of their god-damned tree.

3. If you've got the patience to read all the way down to paragraph 18 of the article you even find Corbyn expressing his view that if there's another EU referendum then Labour's policy would be decided democratically by its members (meaning Labour would back Remain whatever Corbyn's personal beliefs!). Surely an article saying "Corbyn keeps second referendum option on the table" would make a less misleading headline than a phrase Corbyn didn't even use designed to make it seem like he's arbitrarily ruling out a second referendum entirely?

Profit and propaganda

It's absolutely clear that the corporate media are learning that there's a significant market in anti-Corbyn rage share articles with headlines that bear little to no relation to what Corbyn actually said.

In fact the liberal mainstream media and the anti-Corbyn mob seem to be developing a kind of symbiosis.

Outlets like the Guardian and the Independent benefit from absolute torrents of shares and clicks when they use deceptive anti-Corbyn headlines, and the #FBPE echo chamber, Labour right-wingers, and other Corbyn detractors get the instantly shareable anti-Corbyn headlines they constantly crave.

Stuck in the middle

The big loser in the scenario (aside from Corbyn and the Labour Party of course) is the standard of political discourse that is now not only polluted by the lying Brextremists and the absurd unicornist fantasies they've fostered amongst their herd of followers, but also by equally extreme people on the Remain side who have no qualms whatever about sharing desperately misleading headlines, or even just outright lying, if they feel that doing so serves their political purposes.

They're either such gullible dupes that they mindlessly rage share articles without even reading them to check that the headline is justifiable, or they know perfectly well that the headline is deceptive but they share it anyway because they consider their political agenda to be far more important than stuff like truth, honesty, and integrity.

Either way their attitudes are just as bad as the Brextremists who got us in this mess in the first place.

How is rage sharing a deceptively titled article without even bothering to read it first any better than believing a lie on the side of a bus? And if they do know that the headline is deceptive but they're sharing it anyway, how is that any better than actually writing a lie on the side of a bus?

Who needs bots?

We're all aware of social media bots by now. Whether it's dodgy Russian bot farms spreading divisive propaganda, pro-Israeli astroturfing operations, or the bot nets that the Brexiteers ran during the 2016 EU referendum.

But who actually needs bots to spread their propaganda when it seems incredibly simple to just trick a vast army of unthinking, uncritical real life human drones into rage sharing your political propaganda for you?

There's a massive propaganda war going on, and the footsoldiers are an enormous army of absolute dupes who are so intellectually lazy they don't even bother to read the articles they share or think about things for themselves.

Rage sharing is here to stay

Had the Guardian chosen a reasonably fair interpretation of Jeremy Corbyn's position as their headline rather than deliberately seeking to portray his stance as negatively as possible (as some kind of rigidly inflexible Brextremist absolutist) they know for a fact they wouldn't have triggered such a tsunami of rage shares.

As far as they're concerned, if blatantly deceptive headlines create enormous torrents of shares and clicks, then sod journalistic standards and sod what remains of the Guardian's dwindling reputation, let's cash in on the rage shares and grab as much advertising cash as possible as the torrent of hits floods in.

If tens of thousands of people are going to send your article mega-viral by rage sharing it simply because the misleading headline confirms their political biases, and nobody is ever going to hold you or them to account for spreading such a vast barrage of deceitful and deceptive propaganda, then why wouldn't other unscrupulous mainstream media hacks make use of exactly the same tactics?

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The new Guardian business model: Deceptive headlines to generate rage shares

Corbyn: Brexit would go ahead even if Labour won snap election blares the Guardian headline.

Why is Corbyn saying this unhelpful absolutist nonsense? Surely Labour needs a more nuanced stance on resolving Theresa May's Brexit mess? These were my first responses when I saw the headline, but then I noticed the distinct lack of quotation marks so I did what most of the thousands of people who rage shared the article didn't, and actually read the full article.

Within the first few paragraphs it becomes clear that what Corbyn actually said is very different from Brexit would go ahead even if Labour won snap election. (in fact he isn't quoted saying this anywhere in the article at all).

Corbyn's actual position is that if Labour won a snap election he would go back to Brussels to try to secure a better deal. Corbyn's statement that "you'd have to go back and negotiate, and see what the timetable would be" is clearly completely different to I'm going to force Brexit through regardless.

In fact Corbyn's position here is actually common sense. If he's lobbing Theresa May's shambles of a deal into the dustbin of history (where it belongs) the obvious next step is to speak to the EU negotiators to establish the basics of their position under the new circumstances. Are they prepared to renegotiate now that the government has changed? Are they prepared to renegotiate if Theresa May's Customs Union red line is dropped? Are they prepared to extend the Article 50 deadline to allow time for further negotiations?

Yes, the EU have told Theresa May "no renegotiation" but you'd have to be crackers to think they'd absolutely refuse to renegotiate if the British people voted to reject Tory Brexit and the new Prime Minister came with a new Customs Union proposal (that would certainly help to deal with the tricky Irish border issue).

If they said "no" they'd essentially be telling Britain that we're stuck with the unpopular shambles of a deal that both the British public and the British parliament have rejected, which would be an astoundingly anti-democratic stance.

If you're incredibly generous to the Guardian you could try to argue that Corbyn saying that he'd take the logical step of going to Brussels to talk about the practicalities and timescales of renegotiation is not entirely contradicted by the absolutist position blared out in the article headline, it's more of a distortion than an outright lie.

But then after trawling through 18 paragraphs of the article (including several on the absurd "stupid people" / "stupid woman" distraction) we get to the part that absolutely contradicts the bold absolutist assertion in the article headline.

When asked what Labour's position would be in the case of a second referendum Corbyn answers that "it would be a matter for the party to decide what the policy would be".

Admittedly Corbyn goes on to reiterate his position that his first step would be to see whether the EU would open the door to renegotiation, but how the hell is talking about what Labour's position would be in a second referendum compatible with the absolutist stance from the article headline that "Brexit would go ahead"?

If Corbyn is leaving the door open for a second referendum, and saying that the party's stance would be decided by the (largely pro-Remain) membership, why the hell is the Guardian unambiguously claiming that Corbyn's position is the absolutist stance that Brexit will go ahead regardless?

Why is the content of the article so clearly at odds with the headline?

And why are the crucial details that expose the headline as a lie buried in paragraph 18?

Surely a fairer and more accurate headline might read "Corbyn leaves option of second referendum on the table" or "Corbyn: If EU won't renegotiate, Labour members will decide referendum policy".

But nope, the Guardian chose to run a deceptive headline in the hope of creating a storm of outrage shares like the (admittedly far more despicable and deceptive) mega-viral Independent article earlier in 2018 that grotesquely cherry-picked highly selective quotations out of a Corbyn speech about trade policy to misrepresent what was said as an attack in immigrants.

The Guardian know that the vast majority of people who read the headline won't end up clicking through and reading all the details of what Corbyn actually said. And they also know that an accurate headline wouldn't generate a fraction of the 48,000 (at the time of writing) rage shares on social media, so it's perversely in their commercial interests to publish a deceptive headline in order to maximise the amount of exposure.

If they can ensure far more exposure, and a higher level of clicks through the use of a deceptive headline, why wouldn't they?

The Guardian clearly don't give a damn about further trashing their own reputation through the dissemination of dishonest rage-share click bait headlines.

They're clearly more interested in fuelling the anti-Corbyn bonfire with deceptive headlines than helping the public to understand the reality of what Corbyn actually said.

When a news organisation is prepared to publish deceptive headlines like this it becomes ever clearer that they're not actually trying to report the news, but to create it.

They're not providing reasonably impartial coverage of what was said, they're pushing political propaganda.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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