Headlines of Hate

Are the rabid right-wing headlines perpetrated by the UK’s print media driving their readers to dangerously high levels of outrage and hate? Top TV doctor Brendan Balls has expressed fears that such headlines must surely be pushing the blood pressures of the average Daily Mail-reading proto-fascist to potentially fatal levels. “We must bear in mind here that so many of them are elderly or grossly overweight and subsisting on a diet of pure fat and alcohol,” he told viewers of ITV’s This Morning, while presenting his regular health segment. “It can surely only be a matter of time before they start suffering massive coronaries as they read the latest made-up story about illegal immigrants raping white women or eating swans without the King’s permission.” Indeed, the question of just how much outrage such readers’ cholesterol congested circulatory systems can take before the inevitable happens has become even more pertinent following a recent series of medical incidents. “While the usual symptoms of this headline-induced stress are foaming at the mouth and the grinding of teeth, there have been a number of bizarre incidents reported by police, in which they’ve been called by paramedics who have found victims whose heads have apparently exploded, spattering their living rooms with bone fragments and brain matter,” claims Balls. “In every case, the headless body was found clutching a blood stained copy of the Daily Hate!”

In fact, investigators believe that they have identified the very headline which triggered each of theses cranial explosions: ‘Benefits Claimant Foreign Criminals Get Sex Change on NHS’. “Each of the victims are believed to have been reading this particular story when they were gripped by violent seizures – witnesses have described how they became so enraged that their faces went puce-coloured, the veins on their necks and heads bulged and their eyes started popping out, before their whole heads exploded,” says Dr Balls. “Experts strongly suspect that it was the headline’s particular composition – bringing together popular right-wing trigger words like ‘benefits claimant;’ ‘foreign’ and ‘criminal’, with the whole idea of transsexualism at public expense, in one sentence – which triggered these seizures in a very specific group of readers.” All of the victims were, reportedly, white middle class retirees in their late sixties, suffering from high blood pressure and living in the Home Counties. Younger readers, it has been speculated, would likely be in more resilient health and therefore better able to survive the induced stress of such a headline. They might also harbour more liberal views on immigrants, trans people or the NHS, some experts have postulated.

The most startling thing about the offending headline uncovered by investigators, however, was its provenance. “Obviously, it was completely made up, as most such bellowing headlines in the right-wing controlled press are. At best they take the tiniest piece of factual information and twist it into grotesque hate-fuelled propaganda,” explains Brendan Balls MD. “But it turns out that this particular story was fed to the Daily Hate through an obscure news agency which, on further investigation, turned out to have ties to a left-wing journalist!” The journalist in question, Mo Keppler, has subsequently admitted his involvement, claiming that the story was all part of a long-term plan to undermine the extreme right in the UK. “Look, it has long been obvious that the sort of insane hate-filled headlines run by these papers were designed to stoke up as much blind fury and hatred toward their targets on the part of the papers’ readers,” Keppler told the BBC Radio Four’s ‘World at One’. “The question was – how can we on the left turn this build up of dangerous anger to our advantage? How can we turn these headlines of hate against themselves?” The only answer , Keppler and his associates determined, was not to keep condemning the right-wing media for their constant stream of poisonous bile, but instead encouraging them to go further, to print ever more outrageous lies about immigrants, Muslims, gays, lesbians, trans people, single mother, benefits claimants, non-whites and anyone who votes Labour.  “We need them to stoke up their vile readership’s hate levels to maximum, in order to ensure that that their hearts and heads start exploding, thereby significantly whittling down the number of potential Reform UK voters,” he opines. “Which sometimes means helping them along by feeding them the sort of material guaranteed to trigger fatal seizures!”

Keppler, though, believes that he and his associates can go even further.  “Maybe we on the non-foaming-at-the-mouth-neo-Nazi-collective could start our own faux extreme right-wing media, peddling the most offensive and outrageous lies about all of the usual hate targets in order to try and push those blood pressures up to breaking point,” he says.  “While the kind of stuff that the current right-wing media puts out might be hateful, it is usually, to some extent, constrained by some sorts of boundaries of decency and lip service to the notion of ‘journalistic integrity’, such false media as I’m proposing could go the whole hog.”  The journalist is sure that there would a guaranteed readership for such a publication – all those right-wingers who want to go beyond the mundane hate purveyed by the likes of the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and GB News.  “The ones who want the ‘hard stuff’, who crave to read about how Britain is wrecked due to rampant immigration and unbridled socialism, who want to hear how every crime is committed by black people, Muslims or, failing that, working class benefits claimants,” opines Keppler. “The ones who need their ignorant bigotry and biases confirmed on an hourly basis.”

The group have already been carrying out research into which headlines would generate sufficient outrage and offence to wipe out the maximum of right-wing readers. “According to AI, ‘Immigrants ate my twelve year old daughter’s pussy’, (it was apparently black and white and answered to the name Frisky)., is the headline most likely to drive right-wing readers to fatal coronaries,” Keppler claims. “This is the sort of direction we have to go in if we’re to get their hardened arteries over the line into the heart attack danger zone, as, like drug addicts, they need their hits of hate ever stronger to fuel that outraged reaction.  Before long, we’ll have the bastards dropping like flies, depriving the likes of Fartage and ‘Tommy Robinson’ of their potential base of supporters!”