Newsletter #20: We’re back to social media and the purchasing of knives, yet again
PLUS: Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump
Good morning.
Aside from Southport, we were somewhat short on news in Britain this week. We will be discussing Trump and the United States (and Trump) quite a lot. He, alongside ‘drones in Turkey’, is a ‘live player’, as Sambo Burgers will tell us.
This newsletter’s agenda: We’re back to discussions about social media, ‘terrorism’, and the purchasing of knives, yet again (free/paid); As recession fears mount, Dr Lawrence Newport declares that Labour are ready to ‘LFG’ (paid); Trump’s Columbia ploy is a model for the rest of the world (paid); Trump is serious on Greenland — but his methods are counterproductive (paid); Yet more Reform UK headwinds (paid); Maurice Glasman is still around, I guess (paid).
We’re back to discussions about social media, ‘terrorism’, and the purchasing of knives, yet again
Axel Rudakubana has been sentenced to life in prison following his unexpected ‘guilty’ plea on Thursday. And what are our politicians talking about? Amazon and social media, apparently.
It has now been reported that Rudakubana managed to find a way to evade Amazon’s age verification before purchasing a knife online. His delivery seems to have been picked up by his mother or father. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has swung into action. We are informed that from now on, people purchasing a knife online will not only have to show an ID upon delivery — they will also have to upload a document prior to delivery, too. We will never escape the old ‘Zombie knife’ discourse…
Meanwhile — and far more damaging — Yvette Cooper has also decided to use Rudakubana’s murders to pursue the favourite demand of British politicians: more censorship online. After all, Rudakubana accessed violent material. Did this influence the attack? Maybe, but it’s unlikely that Cooper will achieve much through this. Even if we assume high levels of compliance by social media and other companies, Rudakubana could just get a VPN and access gore websites (something which may be beyond the ability of certain attackers, but most likely not Rudakubana, at least from what we know about his evasion of Amazon’s age verification software).
Once again, it’s all feeling a bit deja vu. In particular, recall the response to the murder of the Conservative MP David Amess in 2021. Most MPs decided that this murder, perpetrated by a Somali immigrant (in this case, actually motivated by Islamic extremism), was in fact a consequence of people being able to be mean to MPs via social media. The key failings with Rudakubana, as a number of others have pointed out, were not online but offline. So why are we talking about social media, yet again?
Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s main intervention on the matter has been, frankly, rather inept. Farage has insisted that Rudakubana’s murders be defined as a ‘terrorist attack’. This rather underwhelming angle is what Farage seems to have been hinting at for the entire time when claiming that there was a ‘cover-up’. Most people, understandably, were expecting something much bigger.
In my view, there are two problems with this approach.
The first is that, under the evidence we currently have available, it does not seem as if this was a ‘terrorist attack’, at least as usually defined. ‘Terrorist attack’, it should be remembered, doesn’t just mean ‘really, really bad’. This is despite his possession of an Al-Qaeda training manual, which he was charged with terrorism offences for. Why wasn’t this a ‘terrorist attack’? Because, in truth, Rudakubana does not seem to have been advancing any kind of conventional cause. He seems to have been psychotic and obsessed with violence in general rather than attracted to any specific ideology. That is not to rule out the fact that it is probable (though still somewhat unprovable) that Rudakubana was partially influenced by anti-white ideology, given his choice of target. But this doesn’t seem to be what Farage is suggesting.
But the second, and more fundamental — since facts matter less than feelings in politics, sorry Ben Shapiro — reason that this course is not useful is because: so what? Why does it matter whether this is a ‘terrorist attack’ or not? What changes? In fact, if it becomes a ‘terrorist attack’, it is actually easier for the authorities to deal with. It will become a matter of ‘integration’ (as Kemi Badenoch somewhat inexplicably seemed to suggest) and ‘combating extremism’. As it is, Rudakubana’s murders point to a far more radical — yet also fundamentally true — understanding of the nature of the modern British state. Why squander this opportunity for discussion?
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