The right-wing outrage machine: From Grimes to Guido to getting in the papers to BBC News...
Anatomy of a strategy for arseholes.
I know what the next bullshit right-wing culture war controversy will be. How? Because my masochistic tendencies mean I keep a weather-eye on the activities of assorted assholes — from the bad faith bottomfeeders like Darren Grimes to Guido Fawkes, who launders far-right points to make them into mulch that can be consumed by reporters at ‘real’ newspapers, and finally into the newspapers where I read almost every awful columnist. That’s why I’ve already spotted the next confected culture war story. It’s about Frankie Boyle…
Why Frankie Boyle? Because as the outrage from the BBC pay story starts to hit its half-life, the right-wing controversy matrix needs new energy to power itself. Frankie Boyle being ‘beyond the pale’, despite these chuds pretending they care about free speech, is a ‘good’ progression for them. It follows the same line — “You PAY for this FILTH!” — while moving the artificial anger into a new area.
Guido Fawkes has promoted Defund The BBC — the astroturfing campaign pretending to be a grassroots demand for the BBC Licence Fee to be scrapped — and Darren Grimes has too. His video yesterday, in which he ratchets up his accent to an almost comical degree — I half expected him to drag a whippet into shot, Grimes raged against the BBC, moving from the pay crisis to an attack on Gary Lineker before finally settling on a clip from Frankie Boyle’s New World Order (clipped tightly to remove almost all context) as the target of his tantrum:
“There’s nowt that any of’w’ere can do about it,” says diddy Darren Grimes, rubbing coal dust from his face as befits his status as… *checks notes* a man who dropped out of his fashion course — nothing wrong with fashion courses! — to go into his current career of lying, racism megaphoning and officially being too stupid to fill in forms.
I’m writing this newsletter as… 4.54 am, so I can’t tell if the Frankie Boyle faux-conspiracy has made the newspapers yet but I’m certain it will. The progression from the far-right outriders to Guido and TalkRadio until finally ending up in the newspapers and then discussed by BBC News was demonstrated by the recent completely bullshit BBC versus Rule Brittania ‘controversy’. Bollocks Frankie Boyle takes are about to take its place… again.