January 6 Was a Success. Here's How It's Coming to Britain
Tommy Robinson wants a revolution, but he's using an old playbook.
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.
If you’ll permit me to cite some Nietzsche real quick (sorry), the far-right of today’s era are wielding master morality as a sword while they wear slave morality as a mask. Two hundred years ago (2023) I wrote an article about what these terms mean in relation to figures like Trump and Musk—read that if I lose you here—but the super abridged version is that “master morality” is the idea that whatever you’re physically able to do is therefore justified. It’s “might makes right,” the law of the jungle, the long-defended policy of European colonialism that conquered lands are earned lands, spoils rightfully go to the victor, right up to today’s assertion by Russia and the USA that territorial rights are earned on the battlefield and Ukraine has no claim to regions of its nation it failed to defend against Russian aggression. Master moralists don’t seek to do what’s “right,” like that even means anything to them. They seek to do what feels good.
“Slave morality” is the idea that people who are physically powerless can still be right, and the people who suppress them violently can be wrong. Nowerdays, we call this “cope.”
White nationalism used to be an ideology that embraced its master morality—arguably the last official white nationalist federal government policy was South African apartheid that ended in the 90s—but you can’t stamp out these attitudes within a couple of generations. Growing societal acceptance of and empathy toward non-white people living in what these folks feel are traditionally “white countries” has triggered an immune response among the whitest people in existence. People like Benedict Fotheringham Caxley-Brixtonshire, who try to earn sympathy points among disaffected whites by revising white people as the most powerless people on the entire planet, and the smallest minority in the history of minorities.
Just a quick fact check here—I tried to research who the richest non-white person in the world currently is, but by the time you get that far down on the list, you’re relying more on fluctuating estimates than solid numbers. As of this writing it seems the richest human being who isn’t white is Mukesh Ambani of India… the 18th richest person in the world.
Donald Trump is a man who lives by master morality and doesn’t pretend like he doesn’t. Trump can do whatever he wants—literally. The Supreme Court officially ruled that he was King of America, in 2024, at a time when he wasn’t even president. Laws do not apply to him. He does what he wants. And he doesn’t use this power for any kind of charity or to make anything better. Every single action he takes is to show off his power, always in a way that scares people or harms people. That’s it. It’s not even Machiavellian; even his nameless Prince had some form of virtue.
That is the life that Arthur Bloomingdale Igby-Smythe dreams of having, what every white nationalist dreams of having. He doesn’t really believe in the slave morality, but he needs to pretend that he does in order to gain power in a society that still mostly believes in right and wrong. They will throw away that pretense the very second they get into power.
You only need to look at the United States to see what I mean. See how the hardcore MAGA crowd completely changed their behavior immediately upon the election of Donald Trump, both times. First they were economically anxious, worried about the decline of their culture, victimized, silenced, censored, unfairly treated. As soon as Trump took the oath, the mask dropped, and all they do is mock and troll. They immediately set about the task of relentlessly vandalizing the country. Not restoring what they said they believed was right about America, no, just running around like a pack of gremlins that got loose.
All the while they just brutalize and terrify immigrants the way they long ached to be allowed to do back when they were restrained by laws set down by the slave moralists.
Trolling is master morality. There is no such thing as right or wrong in the activity of trolling, the concept doesn’t exist. It is, entirely, doing whatever is funny, and their version of funny necessitates somebody getting hurt or upset. Beyond its innate cruelty, what’s exhausting about Trump and his administration is they just relentlessly troll their own citizens, every day, non-stop. They’re not doing politics, they’re having fun.
To get to the position where they’re able to do this, they have to first pretend that’s not who they are and what they’re about. This is where January 6 comes in.
January 6 wasn’t as sloppy as Charlottesville, but it was still a little sloppy. Its organizers were too open about their desire for it to turn violent. With what people knew beforehand, it shouldn’t have been as successful as it was. Likely it would have been more successful if its organizers had coded themselves better.
Those in charge of Belford Chumbersquire Coxford-Beckham’s “Free Speech Festival” are coding themselves better.
All the while they just brutalize and terrify immigrants the way they long ached to be allowed to do back when they were restrained by laws set down by the slave moralists.
Trolling is master morality. There is no such thing as right or wrong in the activity of trolling, the concept doesn’t exist. It is, entirely, doing whatever is funny, and their version of funny necessitates somebody getting hurt or upset. Beyond its innate cruelty, what’s exhausting about Trump and his administration is they just relentlessly troll their own citizens, every day, non-stop. They’re not doing politics, they’re having fun.
To get to the position where they’re able to do this, they have to first pretend that’s not who they are and what they’re about. This is where January 6 comes in.
January 6 wasn’t as sloppy as Charlottesville, but it was still a little sloppy. Its organizers were too open about their desire for it to turn violent. With what people knew beforehand, it shouldn’t have been as successful as it was. Likely it would have been more successful if its organizers had coded themselves better.
Those in charge of Belford Chumbersquire Coxford-Beckham’s “Free Speech Festival” are coding themselves better.
That phrase, as a matter of fact—It’s Okay To Be White—not coincidentally, originates from an identical campaign from 4Chan in which the phrase was posted to buildings and lampposts, deliberately inviting those who figured out its meaning to speak up and subsequently be publicly gaslit about it being benign. It is about baiting their opponents and controlling the frame.
You’ll notice something else familiar about this campaign: Urgent calls to remain lawful while cloaked in the insinuation of violence.
Tommy—uhh, Timothy Blaxton Caxton Waffle—does this exact same thing. Repeatedly urges his people not to commit violence on the 13th of September… while also speaking explicitly of revolution and how they will bring down the government.
Why is he so concerned that his followers are going to be violent? Well, probably because this is the same group of people behind the violent race riots across the UK last November, which Tommy managed remotely from Cyprus. Those riots were sloppy. It’s possible that he thought this would be his January 6, but in reality, it was his Charlottesville.
An extremely charitable reading of Tommy’s brand new “family and smiles freedom party” schtick, short of receiving a lobotomy during his latest prison sentence, is that he’s turned over a new leaf and decided that violence is not the way and now is the time to win hearts and minds. Maybe, by “revolution,” he means peaceful revolution. You know, like the reunification of Germany… which, notably, did not involve the rounding up and mass deportation of all the nonwhites.
I am not this charitable. I’ve seen enough of these damn playbooks and I have reading comprehension. Historically, leading to events like this, the over-insistence on peace, peppered with tantalizing little undertones of violence, is a calculated strategy. It’s coded messaging. There are two messages here, one for the public to receive and the other more discreet: Violence is expected and even preferred, but if and when it happens, we didn’t start it.
On January 6, which Trump was impeached but acquitted for, his biggest defense was his insistence that the protest remain peaceful… but then he also commanded “you will never take back our country with weakness.” The protest organizers called repeatedly for both peace but also revolution. Two messages, to be interpreted by two groups.
And there is some sloppiness here still. He can’t keep all of his followers in check, obviously, many of whom aren’t too smart. There’s this gammon, for example, who picks up the dogwhistles that they’re going to have to smash some heads but, when they do, it will have been incited by MI6, plainclothes coppers, and antifa, nudge nudge and a wink.
Tommy Toadhole Biscuits Bangersmash himself was a bit sloppy when he tweeted a video of this behatted gentleman describing how they will use the far-right as a springboard for the extreme right, and these lesser people will finally answer for the ingratitude they have shown toward “the most civilized people that[sic] ever fucking were.”
This is the same tired game, played out again and again. You’ve seen it before. The outcome isn’t written in the stars, but we’ve seen them all before as well. September 13 in London could go one of many ways—it could be another January 6, it could be another Charlottesville.
A more optimistic possibility on the whole is that it could be like last week’s similar “March for Australia” rally, which was a bit of a PR disaster for Robinson’s Australian equivalents. I don’t want to use too-positive language about this shitty event because a bunch of innocent Indigenous Australians were injured when the rally’s white supremacist organizers decided to descend on their encampment, but the national backlash shows that Australia is not yet at a the level of fascist acceptance on par with the USA, and hopefully, neither is Britain.
With any luck, September 13 could be a sad procession of a handful of football hooligans looking for a fight but finding only disinterested bystanders. I’m gunning for a total fizzler, but only if the left stays smart. At least smarter than Timmy Whatsisface.
On a completely different note, I’m writing a book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era tumbled down the fascism pipeline and set about smashing up the world out of hubris and spite, and how they worked their way into the deepest corridors of power. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
Even though - I think - this piece is about the violent hedonism of a bunch of amoral nihilists, the many manipulations of Baxter Peterbuilt Chasterton-Quimbley's name were pretty delightful. Kudos.
Seriously though, I don't get how these people, *especially their supposed leaders,* can honestly see themselves as victims. They usually come from moneyed and/or privileged/comfortable backgrounds, lead lives of comfort, and don't actually have jobs though they want for nothing. Why can't they just fuck off to their lives of relative comfort and leave the rest of us alone? Don't they have hobbies that don't involve inciting race riots?
Paxton’s definition of fascism notes that it involves “a mass based party of committed nationalist militants working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites”. Paxton’s insight sheds a lot of light on what is happening in the UK today (and what has already happened in the US). On the face of it, Yaxley-Lennon, Farage, and ambitious members of the Tory party have little in common but they all share a common goal of remodelling the political right into an explicitly fascist movement. Y-L is a grifter, but his political role is to stir up hatred and violence, helping the media who will do their best to amplify it and shift the Overton window further to the right. I still believe this is a decent country, but everyone is talking about Farage being the next PM like its something inevitable and not a choice we can refuse to make.