#Telling the ‘deplorables’ to shut up only feeds extremism

At age 15, I joined the biggest white-nationalist party in the UK, the British National Party. In the last decade, the BNP became hugely popular in blue-collar areas, feeding off workers’ misery following the 2008 crash and mainstream politicians’ refusal to discuss mass migration amid an economic crisis. I have since left the BNP and rededicated myself to countering its poison. And there is a lesson in my radicalization for the incoming Biden administration and US elites.

It began with unaddressed grievances — and, as many with a similar ­experience will tell you, the racism and radicalism came later. My comrades’ turn to the BNP came in response to a three-pronged attack: Politicians refused to address legitimate grievances about difficult topics; the media smeared us for our views; and hard-left activists were permitted to threaten and harass those who expressed anger publicly.

My concerns had to do with the open-borders policy favored by pro-European Union elites of left and right. Concerns about mass migration — whether the loss of social cohesion, rising Islamist terror or the depressive effects on workers’ wages — were left unspoken and unaddressed by mainstream politicos. The media, meanwhile, treated all such concerns as simply phobic and contemptible. And the left used its cultural power, ferocious on both sides of the Atlantic, to ­silence dissent.

Enter the BNP, offering a simplistic and conspiratorial account of what ailed us — and channeling grievances into underground hate. The more the establishment told ordinary workers to talk to the back of the hand, the more it strengthened the BNP’s leaders. 

If you tell a broad swath of society that its views are bigoted and ­unworthy of debate, you end up paradoxically empowering real haters, since they become the only tribunes of popular grievance.

No two countries are exactly alike, of course. Still, I worry a similar dynamic is afoot in the United States, especially in the ­aftermath of the disgraceful mob assault on Capitol Hill. To wit, Democrats and their Big Tech and Big Media allies have set about smearing the Trump movement as a whole as “seditionists” and “white supremacists,” whose views should simply be barred from the digital public square. 

It’s doubly galling, since the same US elites memory-holed the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots of 2020, which were lengthier, deadlier and more destructive than the Capitol Hill unrest. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris flat-out lied to the public when she claimed that we “witnessed two systems of justice when we saw one that let extremists storm the US Capitol and another that released tear gas on peaceful protesters last summer.” 

And now, with the silencing of conservative voices on social media, the removal of alternative platforms from mobile app stores and the revoking of their server access, old grievances remain unaddressed and new ones built off the back of this unprecedented gaslighting and censorship. 

If my experience with extremism teaches me anything, it’s that such moves can only boost haters. If the choices are the dour church ladies of establishment-approved opinion, on one hand, and an edgy underground movement claiming to speak forbidden truths, on the other, the latter will thrive.

Democratic elites, moreover, risk conjuring the very demon they claim to fear. It seems they plan to frame the stupid hooliganism of Jan. 6 as a sort of 9/11 redux and ­respond accordingly: with censorship and constant talk of “domestic terror,” which can only serve to legitimate wider crackdowns. 

But that gives the Viking-horned morons of Jan. 6 far too much credit, lending them an aura of radical prestige à la Osama bin Laden. And a share of ordinary Trump supporters will no doubt conclude that, yes, the entire American regime detests them and considers them domestic enemies, leaving no option but civil conflict; a small share of 74 million is still pretty large.

The BNP only died in the UK when the mainstream addressed the grievances that led to the party’s several historic election victories. The Brexit vote, and the open debate leading up to it, deflated the extremists’ aura of speaking dangerous truths. Addressing grievances and representing the interests of society as a whole is the only way to build a cohesive society. Pushing activists underground and creating resentment will only breed extremism.

Jack Buckby is author of “Monster of Their Own Making: How the Far Left, the Media and Politicians are Creating Far-Right Extremists.”