đź”’ January 6 Was a Success. Here's How It's Coming to Britain
On 13th of September, British white nationalist Tommy Robinson is planning a rally in London. He’s not calling it a white nationalist rally, of course, he’s calling it a “free speech festival.” He also says they’re going to topple the government.
He says it’s going to be peaceful, of course, two nudges and a wink, the same as the American event it’s emulating, but Tommy Robinson—real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, who operates under a pseudonym to sound like more of a commoner—isn’t dumb enough to think that Keir Starmer is going to look out the window of 10 Downing Street, see a bunch of people standing around waving flags, shrug, and draft his resignation.
Indeed, Robinson—or if you prefer, Rupert Crumperton Oxley-Butterstarch—is well familiar with the method of messaging that enabled the January 6 attack to happen—and Charlottesville, before it. How to hide messages underneath messages. You can call it plausible deniability, or you can call it dog-whistling. Every so often you let some revolutionary rhetoric slip out, especially when you have the confidence boost of the richest white supremacist on Earth (who is also, unfortunately for us, the richest anyone on Earth).
It's unclear what he thinks the Starmer government might be replaced with next week—I doubt he’s delusional enough to see himself as a world leader; He doesn’t get along with Nigel Farage, the closest thing to a Trump analogue that the UK has, because, hilariously, Farage isn’t far enough to the right of the far right fringe of the UK’s right, whose mainstream left is even right of center.
And then, even if they were able to drag Starmer out of Number 10 by his ankles, the UK has this whole “King” situation that his goons need to navigate before they establish a new British regime.
But then again, Harrison Candleton Foxworth-Pendleward knows very well that the UK will not see regime change on September 13th. This is a longer game. Something similar to what happened at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, might just be the ideal scenario for him. Because, let’s face it, January 6 wasn’t a failure. It was a resounding success.
The capitol attack was, primarily, a phenomenal PR win for less motivated Trump fans as well as the undecided, or those who didn’t really like Trump but hated Woke more. They didn’t show up armed with guns. If you discount all the people—as defenders of the events usually do—who were so stressed or traumatized by it that they died from stroke, heart attack, or suicide, then the only person who was killed was Ashli Babbitt, one of the rioters.
This set the stage for an eager right-wing media ecosystem to dictate the narrative that this was, essentially, their Tiananmen Square.
January 6 was much easier to launder to the public than Charlottesville. Charlottesville was sloppy. They didn’t get anyone on their own side killed; instead they killed a counter-protestor, in a way that they would claim is usually beneath them, by ramming her with a car while they chanted about the Jews. Despite Trump’s notorious attempts to cover for the far-right after the fact and minimize their involvement, and the feeble attempts of influencers such as (Tommy Robinson superfan, obviously) Carl Benjamin to claim Heather Heyer actually died from a random heart attack, not vehicular homicide, the far-right wound up, on the balance of things, taking a big L on Charlottesville.
What the far-right understands, and was reaffirmed for them after the Charlottesville disaster, is that their strength is in victimhood.
Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 5-September
