Those who look in regularly on Zelo Street will be familiar with the Identitarian movement, whose leaders have featured in banning orders preventing them from coming to the UK, whose followers and their banners have featured in support of parties like UKIP, and whose members have backed the likes of Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who styles himself Tommy Robinson. Put directly, this is a far right group.
Identitarians, in groups like Generation Identity, are infamous for their support workers who offer the homeless “Warm pork meals” - Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in one. GI was behind the voyage of the C-Star, the ship that was going to interfere in efforts to save refugees crossing the Mediterranean. Identitarians tried to mount a blockade to prevent migrants crossing from Italy into France (both stunts were failures).
The Identitarian movement are slickly-presented, modern-day Nazis. And this clearly presents a problem for the mainstream right-wing. So like the invention of the non-existant “Alt left” - because there most certainly is an “Alt right” - someone has decided to invent an equally fictitious “Identitarian Left”. And pushing this suspiciously leaky boat out is the loathsome Toby Young. How does Tobes peddle his invention? Simples.
“My latest @spectator column is about America being ranked as one of the 10 most dangerous countries in the world for women, an example of the complete disregard for facts by the identitarian left”. He just makes it up. Sometimes he adds a Strawman. “So Owen, Aaron and the rest have never complained about the Morning Star’s support for Stalin’s show trials, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, etc., but are absolutely *scandalized* about it’s [sic] failure to toe the line on trans rights. The identitarian left in a nutshell”.
Sometimes he comes over all lofty as he chucks the phrase in again: “Just because the identitarian left commits the naturalistic fallacy - all people are born with equal and identical capacities, therefore they’re entitled to equal treatment - they assume their opponents do too”. It must exist, as it commits naturalistic fallacies!
Even those mainland Europeans are roped in: “Fantastic response from the French Ambassador to Washington to identitarian, left-wing claptrap about France’s World Cup victory being an ‘African victory’”. Keep on inventing that identitarian left!
And he’s still at it today, so skint that he’s on hols in Italy. “Identitarian dogma: define ‘racism’ in such a way that only white people can be racist, proclaim that all other definitions are wrong, and accuse anyone who disputes your definition of being a racist”.
Tobes even uses his new pet phrase to attack Labour MPs: “If you think someone’s skin colour invalidates why they’re saying, David [Lammy], that’s racism. It may be ‘woke’ and it may endear you to the identitarian left. But it’s still racism. And, no, the fact that I’m white doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to call out racism when I see it”. Except that Lammy’s point about white men deciding what constitutes racism is well made.
There is no “identitarian left”. There is, though, a worrying exercise starting in which those on the right nervous about the far-right try and dump the nasty stuff on the left.
It’s only a pity that Toby Young is the one doing the dumping.
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2 comments:
It's been a bit quiet without Tobes offering his musings.
I'm glad the empty headed arm waving meff is on the side of the far right.
With friends like him......
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