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?

What is ...? is an occasional Another Angry Voice series. See the other articles here.

 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.

OR

Here's what Jeremy Corbyn actually said in the speech the anti-Corbyn mob are going berserk about

A spectacularly misleading article in the Independent by the little-known hack Benjamin Kentish has gone super-viral on Twitter after it's been picked up by the anti-Corbyn mob (a combination of marginalised pro-neoliberal Labour right-wingers, Tory concern trolls, and extreme Remainers who are just as prepared to lie and deceive  to achieve their agenda as the Brextremists are).

In this article I'm going to go through some of the stuff Jeremy Corbyn actually said in his speech, and expose the cynical selective quotation and manufactured outrage tactics that helped this shocking piece of "journalism" to go mega-viral.

Selective quotations

The Independent article about Jeremy Corbyn's speech to the EFF (the British manufacturing industry) manages to squeeze two selective quotations from the speech into the title alone.

This selective quotation tactic has really got the anti-Corbyn mob and the Remain extremists frothing at the mouth.

When Jeremy Corbyn actually spoke about the "benefit" of Brexit, he was actually making the point that the Tory government had squandered the "one benefit" of Brexit, which is the way the devaluation of the pound should have made British exports more competitive.

Here is the relevant section:

"Our exporters should be able to take proper advantage of the one benefit to them that Brexit has already brought – a more competitive pound. 

After the EU referendum result the pound became more competitive and that should have helped our exporters. 

But they are being sold out by a lack of a Conservative Government industrial plan which has left our economy far too reliant on imports."

Omission of this vital bit of context can only have been deliberate.

The next selective quotation is even worse. When the article quotes Corbyn talking about "cheap labour from abroad" the objective is clearly to get people furious that he's seemingly attacking immigration and the free movement of labour within the EU, but what he was actually talking about was the problem with globalisation and the offshoring of production to sweatshops in places with extremely low wages, poor workers' rights, and weak environmental standards.

Here's the relevant section of the speech in full:

"For too many of our people today the spread of insecure work, low pay and zero hours or temporary contracts is causing stress, debt and despondency.  

 It could not be clearer that change is needed, we must aim for something better.
Our new economic approach is necessary because for the last forty years a kind of magical thinking has dominated the way Britain is run. 

We’ve been told that it’s good, even advanced, for our country to manufacture less and less and to rely instead on cheap labour abroad to produce imports while we focus on the City of London and the financial sector.  

 While many economics professionals, politicians and City types insisted this was all a strength the banking crash confirmed it was in fact a profound weakness.  

 A lack of support for manufacturing is sucking the dynamism out of our economy, pay from the pockets of our workers and any hope of secure well-paid jobs from a generation of our young people. 

This is why Labour is committed to turning things around."

It's also worth noting that as well as the "to produce imports" part having disappeared, the word "from" has mysteriously appeared too.

In the body of the article the selective quotation tactic is continued with another use of the brazenly traduced "cheap labour from abroad" quote to imply that Corbyn is attacking immigration and the free movement of Labour rather than critiquing the offshoring of manufacturing and production.

Given that the selective and inaccurate quotation tactic was used both in the body and the title of the article, there can be little doubt that the idea was to manufacture as much outrage as possible. And the sheer number of outrage shares on Twitter just goes to show that this kind of cynical and dishonest manipulation works a treat.

Trump

The article works incredibly hard to create the impression that Jeremy Corbyn is imitating Donald Trump's "America First" rhetoric, rather than expressing his concerns about globalisation, privatisation, and offshoring that have remained consistent for decades.

This attempt to enrage the reader by casting Corbyn's speech as some kind of Trump-style posturing is particularly misleading because the speech actually criticises Donald Trump three times!

Here are all of the mentions of Donald trump in the speech:

"No amount of desperate attempts to cosy up to President Trump would compensate for the damage done by getting this [Brexit] wrong. Now is the time to put people’s jobs and living standards first."

"It must be said however that wanting to build it in Britain is not turning away from the world, nor some return to protectionism or Trump-style trade wars."

"A botched Tory Brexit will sell our manufacturers short with the fantasy of a free trading buccaneering future which in reality would be a nightmare of our public services sold to multinational companies and our country in hock to Donald Trump whilst we all eat chlorinated chicken."

It takes some incredible amount of chutzpah to cast a speech as Trumpian when the content is highly critical of Donald Trump, but that's exactly what's been done, and exactly what a massive number of delusional right-wing "centrists" and easily-led Remainers have fallen for.

The rest of the speech

The hatchet job article worked incredibly hard to whip up fury over a few selective quotations and a desperately misleading effort to portray it as Trumpian rhetoric, but in doing so it neglected to even mention other aspects of the speech.

Procurement

"If [Theresa May] is so serious about taking back control why has her Government offshored the production of our new British passports to France?  

Workers in Gateshead were making them and that work has been taken away from that community. 

Unsurprisingly the French aren’t queuing up to have their French passports made in Britain.  

We have plenty of capacity to build train carriages in the UK and yet repeatedly over recent years these contracts have been farmed out abroad, costing our economy crucial investment, jobs for workers and tax revenues. 

Carrying on like this is simply not sustainable."

Critiquing Tory anti-EU rhetoric

"Too often, we have been told by Conservatives who are ideologically opposed to supporting our industries that EU rules prevent us from supporting our own economy. 

But if you go to Germany you’ll struggle to find a train that wasn’t built there, even though they’re currently governed by the same rules as us. 

When the steel crisis hit in 2016 Italy, Germany and France all intervened legally under existing state aid rules but our government sat back and did nothing."

Regional development

"The next Labour government will rebalance our economy so that there is prosperity in every region and nation. We will do this by setting up a national investment bank and a network of regional development banks to provide capital to the productive, real economy that secures good skilled jobs."

Housing

"We will focus relentlessly on ending the housing crisis caused by the Conservatives and their uncompromising commitment to the free market. We will build homes for the many not investment opportunities for the few and with them will come a new generation of zero carbon homes, creating new training opportunities and skilled jobs."

Solar industry

"Once innovators [in solar development], we are now falling back as the industry takes off across Europe. And why?

 British solar firms were hit by cuts to subsidies in 2015 and 2016 and changes to business rates for buildings with rooftop panels.

 Why did the Tory government do this? To save a few pounds in the short term, yet it has cost us jobs and innovation.

 As a result between now and 2022 France is forecast to add five times as much solar capacity as the UK, Germany ten times."

Outsourcing

"When there are billions of pounds of public money and thousands of skilled jobs at stake we cannot just focus on saving a quick buck when awarding these contracts.  

It is a totally false economy. Instead by considering public interest such as job creation and the supply chains, we can grow our economy in a way that works for everybody. 
Just today a cross-party committee of MPs has said that the stated reasons for contracting out services to save taxpayers money and to encourage innovation in delivery are too often simply not being met. 

In the words of the Public Accounts Committee 'there has emerged a small group of large companies which are expert at winning contracts but do not always deliver a good service'."

Customs Union

"BMW, Airbus, and companies after company has warned of the real and damaging effects of Conservative customs chaos. 

Theresa May and her warring cabinet should think again, even at this late stage and reconsider the option of negotiating a brand new customs union. 

This decision needn’t be a matter of ideology, or divisions in the Tory Party. It’s a matter of practical common sense. 

It’s not often that the Labour Party and the Institute of Directors, the CBI and the TUC agree, we need to negotiate a new customs union. What will help our manufacturing industries? 

The companies themselves are giving us a clear answer. The government should listen to it. 

But the Prime Minister seems more willing to listen to Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson. 

Never before has a Prime Minister discarded the interests of the country so recklessly in favour of the interests of their own party or their own self-preservation." 

A new deal for British businesses

"The very richest companies must pay a bit more tax and pay their workers better and in return we will train our people to have the skills our economy needs, upgrade our creaking infrastructure and provide the planning and support to help industry compete on the world stage. 

And those companies that we do business with as the government will have to be at the forefront of best practice to create social as well as economic value. 

Firms our government does business with will have to: properly pay their taxes, respect workers rights, provide equal opportunities, protect the environment, train their workers, pay their suppliers on time and end boardroom excess by moving to a 20-1 limit on the gap between the lowest and highest paid. 

That is the deal that we want to make with businesses, it’s one that will benefit our whole economy." 

Propaganda

The sheer amount of detail that was left out in order to traduce and distort Corbyn's speech into looking like a trumpian extreme-Brexit anti-immigrant rant is extraordinary.

If the so-called journalist had any integrity at all he would surely have focused on the fact Labour are committed to securing a customs deal with the EU (a very significant difference from the Tory approach), and would have at least bothered to mention the bold "new deal" that Corbyn offered to Britain's business leaders.

But no, Jeremy Corbyn's bold "new deal" offer to British business leaders that formed the actual conclusion to the speech wasn't even mentioned once!

The truly sad thing is that it's highly likely that vastly more people will end up believing the warped version of events described in this shockingly deceptive hatchet job, than those who will actually encounter a more honest account of what was actually said.

What you can do:

• You could share this AAV article on social media to provide a more honest interpretation of what Jeremy Corbyn said.

• You could share the full transcript of the speech (here)

• You could add your comments on the Independent article to point out what a deceptive hatchet job it is, or correct people on social media who are using this desperate piece of propaganda to launch their own deceptive anti-Corbyn rants.

 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.

OR

Imagine the uproar if an independent left-wing media site had published irresponsible fearmongering fake news like this

Everyone remembers the absolute furore a couple of months ago over that story in The Canary that the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg was listed to speak at the Tory Party conference right? 

It didn't seem to matter a jot that Kuenssberg was actually listed as a guest speaker in Tory conference publicity, the mainstream media picked up her subsequent denial and created the narrative that left-wing independent media is creating "fake news".

Of course the Canary article attached more importance to the event literature about a Tory party fringe event than it was probably worth, but they absolutely didn't fake the evidence that she was listed as a speaker there, and the question of why the chief political editor at the (supposedly impartial) BBC was listed as a speaker at the Tory party conference was actually a legitimate one.

Now consider the absolutely undeniable fake news that the Daily Mail spread about the incident at Oxford Circus on Friday 24 November. They picked up a Tweet from November 11th and spun it into a headline about a lorry having supposedly ploughed into pedestrians, adding to the fear and panic over the incident.

Whether you think the Canary story about Laura Kuenssberg was justifiable or not, there's a vast difference between picking up on publicity listing her as a speaker at a Tory conference event and then working it up into an article about a lack of political neutrality at the BBC, and picking up a weeks old Tweet, combining it with unverified accounts of gunshots and using it to stoke public panic about an ongoing public safety incident.

One is an example of stretching something real beyond what it's probably actually worth, and the other is deeply irresponsible fearmongering.

Most of the mainstream media let this shockingly inaccurate and deeply irresponsible Daily mail headline pass without comment. 

The only reasonably big news outlets to run the story were the Huffington Post, RT, IB Times and The Irish Post. Apparently this kind of wildly inaccurate fearmongering by one of the most visited websites in the UK didn't warrant any kind of critical coverage on the BBC!

Just imagine how the BBC/Daily Telegraph/Murdoch Press would have dog-piled a site like Evolve Politics or The Skwawkbox had they published a load of pathetically researched, shockingly inaccurate fearmongering fake news about an ongoing public safety incident, then deleted it instead of issuing a proper retraction and clarification?

The question here is a simple one: Why is it that independent left-wing media outlets are apparently being held to very much higher standards than the right-wing press?

Aside from the Daily Mail fake news about the incident at Oxford Circus, there's also the way that the mainstream media regularly churnalise misleading drivel from the right-wing Guido Fawkes blog into headlines, like the fake news story they broke about Jeremy Corbyn having backtracked on a supposed promise to wipe out pre-existing student debts, when no such promise was ever actually made.

There's an ongoing mainstream media tactic of lazily churnalising misleading Guido Fawkes tropes into headlines while the majority of mainstream media coverage of independent left-wing media sites like The Canary, Squawkbox, and Evolve Politics is highly critical on the rare ocasions such sites get coverage at all.

Why do inaccurate and poorly researched Guido Fawkes posts so often frame mainstream media narratives, while a fraction of the inaccuracy or exaggeration from independent left-wing sites would be used to justify the increasingly common mainstream media trope about how such sites are unreliable and inherently untrustworthy?

Of course I'm not arguing that independent left-wing media should be afforded the same leeway as muck-raking right-wing trash sites like the Daily Mail and Guido Fawkes. 

When independent media outlets make mistakes or exaggerated claims it's absolutely right that they issue retractions or clarifications, and everyone in left-wing independent media has a big responsibility to work hard to make sure our assertions are backed up by facts and evidence.

The issue here isn't that certain independent left-wing media outlets have occasionally made mistakes or exaggerated claims (of course they have, nobody is perfect), or even that journalists in the mainstream media are seeking to amplify these mistakes or exaggerations in order to discredit independent left-wing media as a whole (self-interested mainstream media hacks attacking a perceived threat to the established order of things is actually pretty understandable). 

The problems are that the mainstream media fail so badly to dog-pile and eviscerate the Daily Mail and other right-wing media outlets in the same way when they're guilty of publishing very much more irresponsible and inaccurate things, and that they actually churnalise misleading crap from the Guido Fawkes blog into mainstream media headlines without bothering to subject their posts to a fraction of the critical scrutiny they apply to claims from sites like The Canary or Novara Media (on the rare occasions left-wing independent media sites ever actually get a mention in the mainstream media).

 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.

OR

Are all white people racist?

I wouldn't normally react to a political rant written by a model I'd never even heard of because there are more important things going on in the world, but the way Munroe Bergdorf has been turned into some kind of heroic martyr after getting sacked by L'Oreal for her all white people are racist rant, I think it's important to criticised the misplaced hero worship and adoration she's receiving.

Firstly I'll begin by quoting what she actually said to get herself fired (with important bits in bold).

"Honestly I don't have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more. Yes ALL white people. 

Because most of ya'll don't even realise or refuse to acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour. Your entire existence is drenched in racism. From micro-aggressions to terrorism, you guys built the blueprint for this s***. 

Come see me when you realise that racism isn't learned, it's inherited and consciously or unconsciously passed down through privilege.  

Once white people begin to admit that their race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth… then we can talk. Until then stay acting shocked about how the world continues to stay f***** at the hands of your ancestors and your heads that remain buried in the sand with hands over your ears."

ALL white people

Monroe Bergdorf clearly accused all white people of being guilty of racial violence. There is no ambiguity here. She even used all caps to emphasise the point that she was making her accusations against ALL white people.

The dictionary definition of racism (Merriam Webster) is that it is "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race".

Accusing all white-skinned people of being guilty of racial violence, and claiming that white people are the most violent and oppressive force of nature on earth is brazen and obvious racism because it's defining people by the colour of their skin, not by the content of their character.

White supremacy

Several people have presented that the fact that she got sacked for this blatantly racist rant as some kind of proof of white supremacy. 

One excruciating Independent article (that failed to even disclose what the model said so that the reader could make up their own minds about whether she was just "speaking out against racist rhetoric" as the article claimed, or spewing racist rhetoric herself) even painted her as a "trailblazer to lose out on opportunities for calling out the insidious ways that racism functions"!

In reality the fact that she got sacked is proof of nothing except the fact that L'oreal is a corporation that considers anti-white racist views incompatible with their brand identity.

As someone who is considered by many to be a radical leftist I don't often find myself defending massive corporations, but the decision to fire a brand ambassador who decided to attack a huge swathe of their own customer base as being guilty of racial violence simply because of the colour of their skin, doesn't actually seem that outrageous at all.

Of course white supremacy exists, there's no debate about that. We just need to recall the events at Charlottesville, or any number of other violent extreme-right rallies, or the hateful bile spread in online hate chambers like Britain First to see that this sickening white supremacist ideology persists, but a model getting sacked for spewing anti-white racism isn't proof of anything except the fact that overt racism of all forms is unacceptable.

Only whites can be racist?

Not only does Bergdorf accuse all white people of being guilty of racial violence, she also seems to suggest that white-skinned people are the only ones who are capable of being racist because racism is supposedly learned and passed down through white privilege.

Of course this theory of racism is narrow-minded rubbish that ignores all of the countless examples of non-white racism like the ethnic genocide in Rwanda and the oppression of the Kurds in the middle east, through to the huge increase in white-on-white racism that has happened in the UK since the Brexit vote.

But what really rubs it in is that this ridiculous theory that racism is propagated only by white privilege is being expressed in the very same statement as a load of blatantly racist anti-white rhetoric.

Collective responsibility

Bergdorf accuses white people of having their heads buried in the sand over the crimes of our ancestors and ignoring the fact that empires of privilege were built through the exploitation of people of colour.

As an anti-imperialist I'm well aware of the way the British empire was built on exploitation and I don't need some racist rant from some model I'd never even heard of to accuse me (and all other white-skinned people) of racial violence and wilful ignorance to accept the fact.

Aside from understanding the depravity of the imperialist exploitation and genocide that built the wealth of Britain, the United States and numerous other western countries, I'm also well aware that the victims were not always people of colour.

I'm from a working class background and I have some Irish heritage, so I know perfectly well that while the establishment class were building up the vast fortunes they maintain today.

Not only did the British ruling establishment build their fortunes on the backs of people of colour across the empire, they ruthlessly exploited the white working class in Britain too in their mines, in their sweatshops, and on their battlefields.

When it comes to imperialism, the occupation of Ireland was absolute proof that when it came to exploitation, genocide and famine, the British ruling class drew little distinction between white Irish people and people of colour elsewhere in the empire.

So why, just because of the colour of my skin, should I bear collective responsibility for the crimes of exploitation the British ruling establishment committed against my white working class ancestors to build their fortunes, and their savage repression of my Irish ancestors?

Tarring all white-skinned people as being collectively guilty for the crimes committed by some white people in the past isn't just ill-considered as a tactic for getting white people to consider the history of oppression that others have suffered, it's downright racist.

Imagine if someone tried to argue that all black people are collectively responsible for the crimes of Idi Amin, or Mobutu Sese Seko, or that all Asians are collectively responsible for the crimes of Japan during WWII or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

There would rightly be an absolute uproar about it, but when it comes to tarring people with white skin with the imperialist genocide and exploitation of the past, there are many who actually laud this kind of racism as if it's the wonderfully progressive anti-racism of a heroic trailblazer for freedom!

Privilege

Of course white privilege exists. Countless studies have proven stuff like white sounding names on identical CVs achieve far more success than non-white sounding names, however white privilege isn't the only form of privilege.

In the United Kingdom it's been proven that people from non-elitist backgrounds get paid thousands of pounds per year less than people from establishment backgrounds for doing exactly the same job.

Talk to anyone with a physical disability or a mental health condition about the way they are discriminated against.

Anyone who sees the world in terms of ALL white people being privileged and ALL people of colour being oppressed is thinking in a childishly two dimensional manner.

As a transgender person Bergdorf should know that privilege is a multifaceted issue that involves race, sex, class, creed, age, sexual orientation, physical and cognitive abilities and countless other things, but she decided to paint it in absolute terms as a skin colour issue in her rant.

In the 21st Century UK an able bodied, wealthy person of colour who has been educated at an elitist private school obviously has far more privilege than a white person from an ordinary working class background, a regional accent and a physical or mental disability.

How to alienate people

Issues like the legacies of imperialism and exploitation, continuing race discrimination, privilege and widespread indifference/denial are incredibly important, but to frame such important issues in the context of a racist anti-white tirade is massively counter-productive.

You don't engage people into thinking about these issues by furiously deriding them as massively ignorant and violent racists who are automatically defined as guilty simply because of the colour of their skin.

Such a confrontational and openly racist approach to these issues is clearly likely to be severely counter-productive, because tying these issues up with displays of brazen anti-white racism is more likely to turn people away from giving them proper consideration than it is to suddenly wake them up.

Publicity

Bergdorf may have got herself sacked as a brand ambassador for L'oreal, but she's certainly whipped up a mass of free publicity with her racist rant.

Instead of being just some obscure model few people had ever heard of, she's now being championed as some kind of heroic anti-racism campaigner by people too thick to see that ranting about "ALL white people" is the polar opposite of anti-racism.

It seems that social media platforms, and especially Twitter, have created an appalling online environment where calm and considered analyses usually get ignored, and the people who spread the most extreme views get the bulk of the publicity.

If you want to get a following of millions for your views on immigration and Islam, call refugees "cockroaches" and propose a "final solution" for the Muslim problem. Even if you get sacked from your radio show, it'll be worth it for the storm of free publicity.

And if you want to be lauded as a hero by right-on liberals, don't talk about issues like imperialism and privilege in rational evidence based terms, furiously generalise that all white people are violent and wilfully ignorant racists. Even if you get sacked as a brand ambassador for L'oreal, it'll be worth it for the storm of free publicity.

 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.

OR

People want honest independent media, not mainstream media distortions

Look back to April 18th 2017 and the day that Theresa May called the snap election of hubris, and you'll remember how all the talk amongst the political pundit class was of the UK becoming a de facto one-party state, the only debate being whether May would be crowned Brexit Queen with a super-majority or a mega-majority.

The polls had the Tories over 20 points ahead of Labour. One poll even had them taking double the vote (48-24). Theresa May had some of the highest approval ratings in history and Jeremy Corbyn was being treated like a figure of ridicule by most of the mainstream media.

Within seven weeks Theresa May's reputation has been shredded, the Tory lead had evaporated (in the end the Tories won the General Election by less than a million votes) and Jeremy Corbyn walks away as the undisputed champion of the election for the way he conducted himself with the integrity of a true statesman, and never once crawled down into the political sewer to sling insults, abuse, smears, deliberate misrepresentations or lies back at the Tories and their despicable right-wing media bully boys.. 

Jeremy Corbyn fought a fantastic campaign. To millions his authentic optimism was a refreshing antidote to Theresa May's robotic repetition of her catchphrases (many of which will continue biting her for the rest of her political career), her cowardly refusal to debate her political opponents, and her refusal to give straight answers to even the most basic and mundane of questions.

We all saw how Corbyn has been monstered by the mainstream media, not just the filth that was relentlessly lobbed at him during this election campaign, but also during the two Labour leadership contests in 2015 and 2016 (where "left-liberal" publications like the Guardian were amongst the worst offenders).

Jeremy Corbyn has a lot of admirers. A lot of people remember him as one of the leaders of the Iraq war protest, and a lot of people really appreciate his statesmanlike refusal to crawl into the sewer and slinging abuse back at the Tories and their bully boy hacks in the mainstream media.

These Corbyn supporters needed media to turn to, and remembering the treachery of the supposedly left-wing media they turned in their droves to independent media.

According to research by Kaleida, of the 10 most shared political articles on Facebook during the election campaign, three were Another Angry Voice articles, including both of the top two.

 #1 So how many of these Jeremy Corbyn policies do you actually disagree with (102,655 shares)

#2 Why you need to speak to someone who works in the NHS (85,045 shares)

#7 Theresa May's extraordinary Facebook meltdown (50,885 shares)

In the final week of the general election the Another Angry Voice Facebook page generated almost one million likes, comments and shares.  That's almost as many as the Labour Party Facebook page managed, and significantly more than the Facebook pages of all of the other political parties combined!

That's one lone wolf guy making more Facebook noise than the pages of every UK newspaper except the Daily Mail and the Independent. And a huge amount of the Daily Mail's interactions were on their clickbait honey trap videos (you know, cute kids, fails, and cat videos) to lure people into their depraved extreme-right echo chamber.

Evolve Politics was even more viral than Another Angry Voice. Their virality rate for the final week of the election was an astounding 578%, working out at 5.78 interactions per follower in a single week! 

With just 92,000 followers Evolve Politics content generated more engagements than the page of the ruling party in the final week of an election campaign!

The best virality the mainstream media managed was 0.4 interactions per follower achieved by the Independent (they produced some fantastic articles to hold Theresa May and the Tories to account, so I'm not at all surprised they were the most viral mainstream media source).
 

7m+ views! Astounding statistics, but all I did was
say something that needed to be said.

 
The Canary, despite having slightly lower interaction and virality figures than AAV and EP, also played a huge role because their content was very much dominated by factual well-sourced articles rather than the mix of articles, infographics and videos approach taken by the other two pages.

The phenomenal virality of factual independent media content should be one of the dominant stories of the post election analysis, but the mainstream media are skirting around it for some reason.

Either they're too blind to have even seen it (do they have no Facebook friends in real life or what?) or they saw it going on and decided not to give any extra publicity to the fact their carefully planned election narratives were getting totally annihilated on Facebook by two small left-wing websites and a lone wolf blogger!

Of course there's a lot of speculation for the mainstream media political pundits to do over the future of the nation under a hung parliament with the Article 50 clock ticking (well done for the smooth and orderly Brexit Mrs May!), but their inept attempts to frame the election through the prism of Brexit-Remain goggles are painful to watch.

This election was so obviously a battle of truth against lies.

Honesty is undeniably in the ascendancy in British politics, thanks in no small part to Jeremy Corbyn for leading by example, and to an epic social media fightback against a frankly depraved smear-mongering campaign by the billionaire propaganda barons and their minions, and the transparently fake pro-Tory "neutrality" of much of the political pundit class.

Maybe the mainstream media will wake up to this absolutely essential honesty vs lies theme at some point? I guess they'll have to won't they. Millions upon millions of us are now seeing right through their propaganda tactics, their depraved smear-mongering and their smug fake neutrality.

 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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