Right Wing Trolls' Vitriol is Raging Against the Dying of the Light

I work close to the Houses of Parliament in London, and after I left work on Wednesday I strolled down to Parliament Square to take a look at the Day of Rage protest, to take some photos and write a report for this blog.

There are often mid-week, evening, protests around Parliament, and I have covered some of them before here. Being so handy to where I work, these are easy stories for me to post. They are generally pretty popular too, and Wednesday’s post was much better than average for these type of posts.

One of the reasons that I started this blog, was to put out an alternative narrative to main stream media and right wing social media. A green left take on things like demonstrations and news stories more generally.

Around about 70% of the traffic to this blog comes from Facebook links, the rest come from left politics aggregator sites, twitter, email groups and google searches. I have over 700 Facebook friends and posts are public, and I also link the blog posts in various Facebook groups. These groups are mainly of the green, left liberal, socialist and anarchist type political groups. But I also post the links into some more general politics groups and some London based community type groups.

The reaction to Wednesday’s post in the lefty groups was overwhelmingly positive, with likes, shares and comments from posters. In the more general political groups, there was some support, but a hell of a lot of negative, and in some cases, downright offensive comments.

I should have guessed really, as before I even went to the demonstration I’d read the twitter #dayofrage thread and it was full of right wing trolls, often complaining of paying taxes for the police to keep order at this protest, and maligning the protesters for being work shy, on benefits etc etc. No proof of these things was offered of course, but hey, why let the truth get in the way of your twisted view of the world?

No doubt these characters have been ‘radicalised’, by the right wing media, such as Rupert Murdoch owned The Sun, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, but the trolls went even further than these right wing rags.

Here’s a selection from the general Facebook groups that I post blog links to:

"Why won't you come face us?" ‘Because you smell and no one likes lefties.’

‘Must have been dole day today, or the snowflakes melted in the heat.’

‘Or was it too early for the great scrounging unwashed perhaps?’

‘If you support the politicization of grenfell, as these brain dead cunts do, then fuck you too, you are what’s wrong with this Country.’

‘The residents of the Grenfell flats disassociated themselves from this march. it would seem it was hijacked to further a political agenda.’

‘Here we go will try anything to win an election.’

‘Deluded twats lol.’

Charming! Remember, this demonstration was about probably well over a hundred people being burnt to death, because of the neo-liberal policies of the last 40 years and general uncaring and negligent behaviour of the local and national politicians, Tory, New Labour nationally and at local level which has been controlled by the Conservative Party since 1964.  

Of course, I fairly often get trolled by these ring wing numpties, and you have to have a bit of a thick skin if you blog about politics, but Wednesday’s post attracted the worst reaction I have ever had. Maybe I hit a raw nerve with this post?

I noticed during the recent general election campaign, as the opinion polls narrowed between the Tories and Labour, the right wingers became increasingly silent. I think Owen Jones, The Guardian columnist, might have put his finger on the reasons causing this outburst now. I’m not a big fan of Jones’ writing, but on Thursday he wrote a piece entitled ‘The old Tory order is crumbling – it’s taken Grenfell for us to really see it’ where he argues ‘The iconic episode that, for the right, summed up the fall of the post-war consensus was the “winter of discontent….If any episode sums up the collapse of our own neoliberal era, it is surely Grenfell Tower.’

Jones maybe onto something here, the political wheel in place since the late 1970s looks to be turning at last. Just like the post-war Keynesian consensus ended by Tory leader Margaret Thatcher, the neo-liberal era looks to be coming to a close. This is why these right wing trolls are making so much noise, but I think it is in vain. Their time, and neo-liberal politics time are about to become a nasty memory. It’s almost the time for the trolls to crawl back under their rocks.

Here’s to the not too distant future.