Censorship made this monster

The internet is abuzz because Donald Trump is not just tweeting inanely, that is no longer news, but  retweeting from the sewers of tweetland, from a place even the odious InfoWars scolds are agin. "Yeah," says conspiracy-monger Paul Joseph Watson direct that place of pure odium, "someone might want to tell whoever is running Trump's Twitter account this morning that retweeting Britain First is not great optics."

"Optics!" And this from a man who first gained fame for posting about chemtrails, jewish bankers, a New World Order, and the lingering influence of the Illuminati. It takes sustained effort to go beyond that pale.

So that's where Britain First are--way out beyond that point where even Prison Planet et al won't go. But the US president will.  If you're British, you probably already know them. If not, Brendan O'Neill from Spiked (who slums it so you don't have to), describes "Britain First [as] the odious right-wing group that thinks Muslims are the source of Europe’s every social and moral ill." And the connection:

Trump shared a tweet by Jayda Fransen, the brash, weird woman who fronts Britain First, containing a video titled, ‘Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!’...

The video, which he shared with his 43 million followers,

had the caption "Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches", but it turns out the perpetrator was not a Muslim migrant, but a native Dutchman. When asked about it, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it didn't matter whether the video was real or not. "Whether it's a real video, the threat is real, and that is what the President is talking about," she told reporters.

As O'Neill summarises:

It’s the smoking gun the ‘Trump is Hitler’ lobby has been waiting for. Here’s the actual president sharing actual hard-right propaganda about how awful Muslims are. Twitter is going to implode; they cannot believe their luck.... That is just nuts. It’s proof of his infantile streak, his lack of awareness of the historic responsibilities of his office.

We know who made the president. But Britain First, and other groups like them? Who made this small group of fruitloops a thing? You know who: all the people currently imploding on Twitter saying "how dare you." All "the virtual leftists fulminating about ‘fascism in the White House’ and ‘Islamophobia’ now getting the blessing of the actual president of the US, the British MPs insisting parliament denounce Trump, the Muslim community groups saying this proves anti-Islam hate is goose-stepping through the virtual and political worlds etc, etc." 'J'Accuse, says O'Neill:

For you made this monster. Britain First is a mess of your unwitting creation. You, and your censorship, and your cowardice, and your pathologisation of concern about Islam, and your treatment of any questioning of mass immigration as tantamount to a hate crime, created the space for these new, ‘edgy’ right-wing movements to take root and expand. In making certain things unsayable, you paved the way for these largely virtual loudmouth outfits to say: ‘We will say the unsayable.’ Britain First is a cast-iron example of how the chilling of public debate never, ever fixes problems or disappears people’s concerns or prejudices; it merely warps them, and often worsens them, and forces them to take root elsewhere...
    Here’s the thing. So shrunken has the space for honest, all-views-welcome moral and political discussion become in recent years that now even to speak of ‘British values’ is to risk being branded a racist. And they’re surprised that in a climate like that a group called Britain First is making waves? And they call Trump stupid. He is, but so are they if they don’t recognise the direct contribution their fear and chilling of rigorous discussion about faith, values and the future have made to the growth of Britain First and others. Trump’s bluster, the bluster of Britain First too, is a product of this chilling. You people losing it on Twitter today – you are the midwives of this new weirdness.

Free speech. It's a great thing.  It helps confirm that the president is infantile and even conspiracy-mongers have limits. But start banning any burying speech you don't like, and it can all come back and bite you in very unpleasant and unexpected ways.
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