Kevin Mulroue

Erm...

[Un Étrange En Terre Étrange @LoinDuTribu]

This is interesting to me because racism is not some exotic personality disorder possessed exclusively by men with shaved heads and suspicious quantities of St George’s flags.

I grew up in a small, overwhelmingly white working-class town. When I was a kid you could practically count the black residents on one hand. Nobody was gathering in the woods wearing pillowcases, but racial ignorance was simply part of the wallpaper. Boys and grown men casually used slurs. People told jokes that would now make an HR department spontaneously combust. My unusually dark-skinned dad had friends who called him “Blackie” and “Dusky”, affectionately, because apparently the 1980s were being supervised by nobody.

I always understood that racism was wrong. But that is the nursery-school version of understanding racism. Racism bad. Very good, child. Have a sticker.

Popular culture probably helped. I was hopelessly engrossed in films and television, and by the 1980s mainstream entertainment had generally established that racist bastards were supposed to be the bastards. By the time my dad was waking me up after my mother had gone to bed so we could watch Lethal Weapon 2, I possessed sufficient moral sophistication to understand that the apartheid-loving Afrikaner drug smugglers were probably not Riggs and Murtaugh’s misunderstood philosophical opponents.

Then you grow up.

You leave the little white bubble. You meet people from completely different backgrounds. You move through cities. You discover cultures you previously knew through television, stereotypes and whatever bollocks somebody’s uncle said in the pub. And eventually you realise something rather awkward: understanding that racism is morally wrong does not magically purge your brain of every assumption you absorbed while growing up.

That is the adult lesson.

You catch yourself making an assumption. You examine where it came from. You discover that something you regarded as universal was incredibly culturally specific. You hear an expression, learn its history, and suddenly understand that an entire cultural conversation was happening around you while you were cheerfully oblivious to it. You correct yourself. Then six months later another bit of ancient software boots up and you get to do the whole fucking exercise again.

This is why I find the absolute confidence of race realists fascinating.

They frequently behave as though everybody else has been hopelessly contaminated by ideology while they have somehow emerged from childhood, class, nation, media, politics and culture with the observational purity of a laboratory instrument.

I know my perceptions can be distorted by where and how I grew up.

That is precisely why I interrogate them.

The bloke announcing that racial inequality simply reflects biological reality apparently thinks his own brain arrived factory-sealed.

That seems considerably less scientific to me.

[Un Étrange En Terre Étrange @LoinDuTribu]

I’m not sure “conservative logic” explains Glinner, because plenty of conservatives manage to get through the day without turning their politics into a travelling circus of revenge porn.

What is distinctive about Linehan is that his convictions seem to have one enormous gravitational centre: trans people. Everything else gets dragged into orbit around it. Israel. Immigration. Trump. ICE. The police. The left. Civil liberties. The question is no longer “what do I actually believe about this?” It is “which side contains the people I hate?”

That is why you get these extraordinary little ideological teleportations. He does not appear to have spent ten years reading Zionist history and emerged clutching Herzl like Moses coming down the mountain. He discovered that lots of people he despises support Palestine, and suddenly he is on the timeline practically spraying champagne every time the IDF turns another neighbourhood into aggregate.

Same with ICE. When agents were shooting protesters, Linehan was practically vibrating with excitement. There was no trans angle. No gender-clinic connection. No pronouns hiding behind a dumpster. He had simply reached the point where state violence against people coded as belonging to the enemy tribe felt emotionally satisfying.

And that matters because ordinary conservatives are perfectly capable of saying immigration is badly managed, borders matter, deportations are sometimes necessary, and shooting protesters is fucking monstrous. You can have right-wing politics without developing the moral instincts of a football hooligan watching somebody from the away end get kicked down a staircase.

Clint Eastwood is almost the perfect counterexample. Conservative, politically active, occasionally eccentric as hell, yet still capable of making Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby and Letters from Iwo Jima. Whatever you think of his politics, the man retained enough imaginative sympathy to make art about people who complicated his own worldview.

Linehan increasingly seems to have done the opposite. One genuine obsession swallowed the rest of his politics, and everything became a loyalty test.

He has not constructed a coherent new philosophy.

He has assembled an enemies list and mistaken it for one.

[Lib Dem Life (Simon McGrath) @libdemlife]

this is impressive honesty

[❄️ Snow 🔻 Himbo ☭ @SnowHimbo]

I love the economic model where we are told that paying supermarket cashiers a living wage will instantly collapse the global economy, but a CEO getting a $50 million exit bonus for ruining a company is just standard market health.

[Strummer @Strummer2323]

🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

SERIOUS QUESTION: Now if capitalism is so great, why do corporations need tax breaks, subsidies, exemptions, grants, bailouts, legal protections, and trade barriers to survive ?? And when ordinary people ask for help, why is it suddenly called socialism ??

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

83% of British people are white

87% of MPs are white

92% of Police officers are white

94% of the House of Lords are white

85% of Britains richest families are white

The notion that Britain experiences systemic anti-white racism is absurd

It’s a far-right conspiracy

[Claire #JusticeForNoah @ClaireMadMax]

You either think people should be burned out of their homes because of the colour of their skin or you don't. There is no third position

[Kevin Mulroue @kevinmulroue]

@prioutlaw118 @anon_opin It’s late so obvs I’m too tired to debate this rationally, but listen to ‘Englishman in New York’ and then put ‘God Is In The House’ on. Sting fans coming after Nick Cave? Jesus wept.

[The Pink King @DayalSami]

Call me a hater but I think living in a world where both trillionaires and global poverty coexist is a sign humanity has failed as a species

[Bob Morgan 🇬🇧🇺🇦 💙 @Bbmorg]

Things I am glad the UK doesn’t have. A head of state who can pardon anyone. Politically appointed judges. More guns than people. Greedy insurance companies running the entire health system.

[Beosweyne @iggypopbarker]

Remember the Thomas Hamilton riots? Or the Ian Huntley ones? Or the Fred West ones?

No, me neither.

[HUMAN WA$TE @Dplanet]

🚨🇬🇧 A man in Bolton allegedly tried to burn down the home of a local Imam while his young family were inside.

Not shouted abuse. Not a nasty tweet. Not “concerns about immigration.” A man in a motorbike helmet tried to set fire to a Muslim family’s home with children inside.

And this is exactly why Tommy Robinson’s rhetoric is so dangerous.

When you tell angry crowds that Britain’s towns are being taken over by “Pakistani Muslims,” “race gangs,” and hostile minorities; when you take a murder with no Muslim connection and deliberately drag Muslims into it; when you tell people they are under attack in their own country - you are not “just asking questions.”

You are painting a target on innocent people.

Tommy Robinson does not need to personally hand someone a petrol can for his rhetoric to matter. This is how incitement works in the real world. You create the enemy. You repeat the lie. You tell people they are victims of a conspiracy. Then some coward in a helmet decides an Imam’s family home is a legitimate target.

That is not patriotism.

That is fascist politics: collective punishment, racial paranoia, religious hatred, and violence against innocent families for the supposed crimes of people they have never met.

If this Bolton attack is confirmed, it should be treated with the full seriousness it deserves: an alleged attempt to burn a Muslim family alive in their own home.

And every politician, pundit and “free speech” grifter who has spent years demonising Muslims should be asked one simple question:

How many more homes have to burn before you admit what your words are doing?

[Florence Lox 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @floboflo]

Hearing that an African immigrant with a troubling family history, has had kids with multiple partners and now lives in a country with a major drug and violence problem had been criticising the UK.

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Working-class white people are burning down the homes of black working-class people, at the instigation of the world's only trillionaire. How has it come to this?

[jude martin @judecambridge]

Private Eye:

[a rare photo of sean connery signed by roger moore @steamedhamms]

rupert lowe joins others on the modern right in selling his country out to the yanks

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Somehow this is "woke" and not just being a decent human being.