Purging the Racists

It’s that time of year when I don’t make foolish resolutions I know that I won’t keep. Instead, I’m vowing to carry on with what I started toward the end of last year: purging my social media of undesirables. At the beginning of last month I was forced to mute someone I follow on Twitter, (with a decision whether to unfollow them completely still pending), after they started re-tweeting all manner of racist anti-immigration and anti-vaxxer shit into my timeline. I decided merely to mute their tweets at this juncture in order to see whether this was a temporary aberration, or whether it is something consistent – I check back on their feed every so often and the jury’s still out. It’s been a while since I’ve felt forced to take this sort of action, but there are limits as to what I want to be confronted by when I log into Twitter – it’s a bit like having someone you sort of know round to your house and having them suddenly, in the middle of an otherwise innocuous conversation – slip on a Nazi armband and start extolling the virtues of the Holocaust. (Thankfully, I don’t know Kanye West, so this sort of scenario is unlikely to come to pass). You’d be left feeling violated, your personal space having been invaded by such bigotry and would doubtless usher the offender out of the door as quickly as possible.

So, this is the social media equivalent of showing them the door. At the moment I’m not saying that they can never come back, but they’ve got a way to go to prove to me that they really are a decent, rational, human being and not some raving racist crackpot. I can’t help but suspect that the miscreant here has harboured these views for a while, but has only become emboldened to express them publicly on Twitter since the company’s take over by Elon Musk – that skidmark in the underpants of humanity – and his moronic take on ‘free speech’, which has seen racists and Nazis re-instated and a proliferation of conspiracy theories and racist tweets, all happily encouraged by Musk. It’s all part of a wider pattern of the right attempting to normalise racism, bigotry and hate speech as part of the regular political discourse. Even here in the UK we have a large proportion of the popular press, not to mention a TV ‘news’ channel, in the form of GB News, apparently dedicated to this project. Just recently, as an example, we had them and the usual foaming at the mouth right wing loons on Twitter trying to turn the scandal of a Royal aide being racist toward a black guest at the Palace, into some kind of ‘woke’ conspiracy against the Royal family.

The victim was painted as the villain – apparently because she chose to be known by an African name and wear African traditional dress, although being a UK citizen of Afro Caribbean descent, this means that it is perfectly reasonable for someone to repeatedly ask her ‘where do you come from?’, despite responding several times that she is British. These racists, (who I had fun blocking en-masse by going through Twitter trending topics on the subject), really display their ignorance by stating that because the victim in this case has parents from the West Indies, she is practicing ‘cultural appropriation’ by adopting African dress. Do they really think that black people are indigenous to the West Indies? They are the descendants of African slaves taken there by European (mainly British) slave owners to work on their plantations. The clue is in the ‘Afro’ part of Afro Caribbean.

Thanks to the ascendancy in recent times of political leaders like Trump, Johnson and their ilk, not to mention, in the UK at least, Brexit and its drum-beaters like the odious Nigel Farage, these bigots have felt emboldened to crawl out from under their rocks and to start to try and recruit again. While, in the real world, the tide seems to have turned against them, the antics of Elon Musk have given them hope of a safe haven on a mainstream online platform. Hence we regularly seem to have ‘Enoch Powell’ trending on Twitter, with threads full of racists telling us how he was right. (He wasn’t). But, of course, we have to keep reminding ourselves that Twitter, indeed social media in general, are not the real world. The sort of bile and bigotry spewed forth by many of its denizens don not reflect the views of the majority of people in the actual world.

Anyway, the moral of all this is that if I follow you on Twitter and you start uncritically re-tweeting anti-vaxxer shit, conspiracy bollocks or anti-immigration rhetoric from the likes of GB News, then you are going to be shown the door. Sure, you can believe what you like, but I don’t have to listen. That’s all part and parcel of free speech, despite what idiots like Elon Musk think. I’m not expecting anyone doing this to care whether I mute or unfollow them or not, (let alone notice), but you’ve been warned. Thankfully, though, there are only a couple of other accounts I currently follow, (who have a penchant for anti-vaxxer and pro-Putin propaganda, it seems), which are presently at risk. The overwhelming majority of those I follow seem to be perfectly decent, sane and rational human beings who, even if I don’t always agree with some of what they tweet, are clearly not raving racist bastards. So, a Happy New Year to all you non-racists and a big fuck you to the cranks, bigots and Putin apologists out there.

Doc Sleaze