Tell me more about these dangerous actors in Ireland waging a massive propaganda war in order to foment hate. I’ve never seen any examples of this(tfk aside) and reckon I’m on the internet a fair bit. Not messing btw.
Who? A splinter group? Where do I sign up?
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Ah it’s gone silly. They start plucking them and then end up trimming them til there’s nothing left. They end up drawing them on then. Silly stuff. Alarmingly, the barber trimmed mine last time I was there.
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This lad had the same question.
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Aye, barber did the same- I may have mentioned that she’s a fine mare. I just said, “if you have to ask…”
When looking at the presence of the far-right in Ireland you have to understand that there’s a nexus between a whole host of different right-wing and far right issues - anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-vaccine, anti-LGBT, pro-Brexit, pro-climate change denial, anti-welfare state, pro-Trump, pro-Russia, pro-the European far right etc. Not all far right actors in Ireland will concentrate on all these things but there’s a distinct common thread linking them all.
Ireland has been an outlier so far in Europe in that the far right has made no headway at all in party politics, but iff that continues to be the case, it won’t be for the want of trying by far right actors.
Gemma O’Doherty is currently the most prominent. It’s been obvious for probably three years at least that she has been moving in a far right direction but she has gone full far right since her failure to get a nomination for the presidency. A quick dig into her Twitter feed is very instructive if you haven’t been paying attention to what she’s been up to. She’s looking to carve out a niche for herself as an Irish Alex Jones. She’s genuinely crazy.
Leo Sherlock’s theliberal.ie masquerades as a news website but is in fact a right wing propaganda site, which plagiarises and (very badly) repackages news stories from “mainstream” outlets and puts a far right-wing slant on them. Sherlock paid damages these outlets to settle breaches of copyright. The site engages in what pretty much amounts to fraud by running fake competitions on Facebook in order to attract “likes”, though most of its “likes” on Facebook have likely been bought.
This page documents the kind of shit Sherlock gets up to.
https://twitter.com/theliberal_x?lang=en
There’s a guy from Dublin called Rowan Croft - https://twitter.com/rowanwcroft - who was a leading figure in a far right propaganda tour of Ireland called Grand Torino involving Canadian far right “personality” Lauren Southern, who is banned from entering the UK.
Croft has a YouTube channel. In one of his videos b, he bizarrely films himself walking around a deserted Rooskey, Co. Roscommon like a pound shop Conor McGregor waffling hate speech against immigrants into his phone.
These were some of the comments underneath the video on YouTube:
Surprise surprise, there was an arson attack on the hotel earmarked by direct provision in the town the other night, which follows hot on the heels of a similar arson attack in Moville in Donegal. The cops should be all over this guy.
Stefan Molyneux - an extreme right pseudo-“intellectual” born in Ireland but who lives in Canada. He’s widely quoted by far right Irish social media accounts, probably more than anybody else at the moment.
Irish journalist Gavin Sheridan has done good work on exposing the nexus between a lot of these far right actors. Google and Facebook ban 8th Amendment referendum advertising because their platforms were being hijacked by far right propaganda was a clear sign that the international far right are interested in Ireland. Sheridan has done some good podcasts on this. The first one below is with Ken Early of Second Captains, the second is a free Irish Times podcast.
https://www.secondcaptains.com/2018/05/04/episode-1154-the-8th-referendum-propaganda-war-with-gavin-sheridan/
Internet forums are a battleground.
“Political Irish” is the current house forum of the far right in Ireland. https://www.politicalirish.com/
Politics.ie has a slightly more diverse clientele but it largely descended into a far right sewer several years ago.
After Hours which is the most popular forum on Boards.ie has been under sustained attack by far right troll accounts for quite a while now. A lot get banned, then simply re-register before gettng banned again and starting the same process again.
There’s a rag tag bunch of far right groups in Ireland and I’d wager almost every member of them is on the internet amplifying their message, be it on forums, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc.
Since Lucinda Creighton left Renua, they have pretty much gravitated to being quasi-far right. I’ve little time for Creighton but one thing she isn’t is a fascist. Renua has gone full dog whistle since she left.
Then there’s Justin Barrett’s “National Party”, “Identity Ireland”, there was the attempt to start a branch of the German neo-Nazi movement “Pegida” in 2016. The “Irexit Freedom Party” is a thinly disguised creation of outside actors allying with far right actors in Ireland.
The “Irish Proud Boys” are a branch of the “Proud Boys” who are a violent far right group started by a guy called Gavin McInnes who is a leading far right “personality” in the US.
“Genreration Identity UK and Ireland” which is run by an Irish woman, Damhnait McKenna, is a branch of the far right “Identitarian” movement.
The “Immigration Control Platform” of Aine Ni Chonaill is still around. http://www.immigrationcontrol.org/
I’d consider the following mainstream journalists or commentators to be allies of the far right - they may not give outright support to them but they do focus on the same issues the far right likes to focus on:
John Waters (who has pretty much gone full Nazi)
Ian O’Doherty (not far right but writes frequently about their hobby horse issues in a way they would admire)
Larissa Nolan (contrarian fake 'liberal")
Eilis O’Hanlon (contrarian anti-“PC”)
Alive Newspaper
Irish Catholic newspaper
Declan Ganley
John McGuirk (essentially Goebbels)
David Quinn (the “respectable” face of backward theocratic Ireland)
Keith Mills (the aggressively anti-gay marriage gay man)
Paddy Manning (same as Mills)
Breda O’Brien (the friendly face of backward Ireland)
Maria Steen (Opus Dei’s mouthpiece)
George Hook (doesn’t blame rape victims except when he does)
Hermann Kelly (UKIP puppet)
Ruth Dudley Edwards (imperialist 19th century hankerer)
Wendy Grace (the fresh face of backward Catholic Ireland)
Katie Ascough (same)
Ray Kinsella (Smurfit Business School guy has who has gone full Catholic fundamentalist)
Prominent Irish far right “personalities” include
Kate Bopp (Catholic far right fundie) https://twitter.com/JaneyMack66
Former Fine Gael councillor Brian Murphy (who was recently an outright racist recently banned from Twitter)
Ben Gilroy (Freemen On The Land, who is also involved in pushing the quck MMS Bleach “cure” for autism to gullible people, he has engaged in personal physical threats to people who have spoken out against him - he’s basically a thug. Gilroy is heavily involved with the so called Irish “Yellow Vest” movement, which is largely a trojan horse for far right politics).
Far right Irish video bloggers include:
“The Don” YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa1NWEh5V5c
“Critiqued” Youtube channel
“Computing Forever” Youtube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umrieijvOo4&feature=youtu.be
Then there’s the whole Irish far right Twitter sock puppet thing. There are certainly many hundreds and likely several thousand accounts like the below (about five of the below are definitely real people, but the rest are either bots or sock puppets). A dead giveaway of an “Irish” far right Twitter account is that it includes an Irish flag in its name, in a similar manner to how pro-Trump sock puppets include an American flag. They often have profile pictures of Michael Collins or something to do with 1916 or some obscure Irish nationalist figure and these pages usually try to give off an air of creepy Celtic mysticism. Now I can’t say for sure who is operating these accounts, but I’d say many of them are bots operated from the US or Russia, with others being duplicate sock puppet troll acounts operated by real people in the US, Russia, Ireland or elsewhere.
https://twitter.com/IrishNational1
https://twitter.com/irelandaboveall
https://twitter.com/Chieftain110
https://twitter.com/AltviewIreland
https://twitter.com/IrePatriot
https://twitter.com/IrelandThis
https://twitter.com/IrexitFreedom
https://twitter.com/MariaLaoise
https://twitter.com/EiredoGhaeilge
https://twitter.com/ComhraDublin
https://twitter.com/GatsbyRewoke
https://twitter.com/MichaelJMcCamle
https://twitter.com/elchopperino
https://twitter.com/AllPassingThing
https://twitter.com/CatholicArena
https://twitter.com/EugenReugen
https://twitter.com/DuxNormannorum
https://twitter.com/MacLoegairi
https://twitter.com/F_CKOUTTAHERE
https://twitter.com/EiredoGhaeilge
https://twitter.com/SonOfHibernia
https://twitter.com/2019Irexit
https://twitter.com/diarmuidmaccana
https://twitter.com/NastyBuck1
https://twitter.com/NatTradLad
https://twitter.com/mericanopsycho
https://twitter.com/DiglettUltach
https://twitter.com/Irish_agrAryan
https://twitter.com/Thatpearseguy
https://twitter.com/paddylepage
https://twitter.com/pogmothoinjack
https://twitter.com/franciscelt
https://twitter.com/gaeloglach
https://twitter.com/EireCalling
https://twitter.com/GaelicFury
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You’ll have to get them trimmed every time from now on so, mate. I was assaulted in this way many years ago and now if I forget to ask the fuckers to trim mine they look all bushy after a few weeks.
Basically a list of nutters who the Internet has given voice to, and in prior generations would be ignored or perhaps institutionalized.
Conveniently leaving out the left wing nutters of course, who appeal to a much broader spectrum of the population. In a recent study by UL’s Rory Costello, 31% of Irish voters identified as radical left wing authoritarian, supporting a more powerful government that controls people’s lives and a centralized economy where innovators and business leaders are replaced by morons. Unsurprisingly 57% are Sinn Fein voters who demand free everything without having to work for anything, admire Maduro’s Venezuela, and long for the day when everyone in Ireland is rummaging through trash cans for food.
But the threat to personal and economic freedom is from the alt-right who likely have a few hundred members in Ireland.
I asked Sid a question related to his post and he obviously went to a lot of trouble to reply to me. the post i asked about was about right wing nutjobs. There was no reason for him to include any loony left wing nutters.
No need to get defensive.
If you want to see nutters who demand everything for nothing, have a look at the so called “Yellow Vest” protests in Ireland and elsewhere.
The far right’s fingerprints are all over them and it is overwhelmingly becoming a far right movement. Scan the comments section off the Faceboook page of the “Irish Yellow Vests” and you’ll see loads of comments that could easily have come from your keyboard.
By the way, wanting a proper welfare state with a proper national health service, large scale building of public housing, good free education, good public transport etc. is not authoritarian, it’s the exact opposite. It’s common sense. That’s how the best societies are run.
Bots and sock puppets are not “nutters”, by the way. They are part of mass scale disinformation war by Russia and the international far right to amplify the messages of far right politics. They are very effective.
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I chanced upon this Twittter post a short time ago. I think a quick scan of the accounts which reply to it shows a good example of far right strategy in action. There are 47 replies and about 90% express a hardcore anti-feminist, anti-“political correctness” or pro-“masculinity” message, using familiar far-right cliches such as “cultural Marxism” or familiar alt-right “lulz” techniques. Many, if not the majority of the accounts which post on the thread bear the classic hallmarks of bots or sock puppet accounts. This type of thing is becoming the norm on Irish Twitter and it’s about amplifying your message to make it seem much more common than it actually is in real life - to drown out your “opposition” out with sheer weight of numbers, no matter what those numbers are actually made up of, ie. troll bots and sock puppets.
I dont go on twitter. Its utter fucking shit. That goes a long way to not being influenced by people.
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Media in general vastly over-amplify it’s actual relevance
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Not going on Twitter is certainly a good way to maintain good mental health. However an ever-increasing proportion of political influencing is taking place on it, and other social media and exclusively online platforms. Those who spend a lot of time on social media usually have extremely poor concentration spans and gravitate towards sensationalist material. The far right are extremely good at distilling their “message” into short, sensationalist, bite sized morsels which tend to make people sit up and take notice - and lies, which they pile on by the barrelful, by their nature tend to be short, sharp and memorable. Non-extremist politics, particularly of the centre-left variety, is extremely bad at distilling its message into short and sharp soundbytes.
Confusion is the key to wearing down people’s worldview into a deeply cynical one. A deeply cynical worldview tends to make people more fearful. The Russians are the masters. What they do in the west now is what they’ve been doing at home for years. I think the George Osborne comparison in this video is poorly taken, but many other much more pertinent actors and events have emerged in the west since this video was made at the end of 2014 to prove the overall point right.
Its vapid shit. Total polarisation now, especially if you follow US politics. Our side is always right, the opposite always evil. Hilarious when one viewpoint thinks their argument is pure and have no self awareness they are exhibiting the same behavior they give out about. But you don’t have to go as far as twitter to see that.
Shouldn’t we be more concerned with the marginalisation of homosexuals, Pakistanis and those who are gay and Pakistani? Here’s some casual homophobia and racism from the moral policeman
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zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
You think? You’re some piece of work.