A still from a feature film I wrote and directed in 1995

The Rise of The Traditionalists, and Other Death Threats

of refugees and robots and alt-right radicalisation

It was just there in my inbox. I reached for my phone to switch off the alarm and glanced at the notifications. Like we all do every morning. There it was, amongst the New York Times and Reuters updates, the weather app and the Instagram likes. A death threat.

I woke up to a death threat seared into the glare of the smart phone screen, right there under ‘mostly cloudy, low of 0.6, high of 10.4 degrees’. I stared back into the faintly unreal glow.

A simple click would make it go away, but that wouldn’t delete the hate that was everywhere. Now, it was here — in my inbox.

It wasn’t random. It was personal.

I had accepted a ‘friend request’ from a stranger. We had a ‘mutual friend’, who had a high profile and was someone who I’d worked with, often. It wasn’t unusual to get friend requests on Facebook; I was touring literary festivals, and talking to all sorts of people, and striding out far beyond the edges of my echo chamber.

But, the hate was slipping into the shadows on all our fringes like slime mould, it changed shape and form and released toxic spores light enough to be carried on the wind of change.

A wind that began to blow in February 2013, when Valery Gerasimov, the Russian chief of general staff, published an article in the Military-Industrial Courier with the benign title “The Value of Science in Prediction.” Based on this, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it was forming “scientific” and “information operations” battalions, whose purpose would be “disrupting the information networks of the probable enemy.”

In other words, “bots that spread misinformation on social media sites including Facebook and Twitter, anonymously-operated third party sites that churn out fake news, and official state-run news networks like Russia Today, a television network, and Sputnik, a state-owned news organisation.” (1)

In August of that year, I spent the month walking 800km across Spain with my sons aged 16 and 12. By January 2014 I had my first exhibition and gave a talk about it. It was a hopeful, optimistic atmosphere, it felt as if all the positivity was real and I embodied the case for possibility.

Enter the Traditionalists

By February 2014, the winds were rising from another direction; an American investment banker specialising in media, called Steve Bannon, launched Breitbart London, the UK arm of his ultra-conservative Alt-News far right website. He told the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK’s forth coming election. It was, he said, the latest front “in our current cultural and political war” (2) to shape a Traditionalist worldview.

In March 2014 Bannon spoke about Putin at the Vatican Conference; “We, the Judeo-Christian West, really have to look at what [Putin]’s talking about as far as traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism”(3)

By June of 2014 my exhibition about our walk had travelled far, and was headed to St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh city centre. Telling the story of transformation in pilgrimage, a sense of humanity, and the values of fairness, justice, inclusion, and compassion.

From this the exhibitions grew, and more talks were added, and a book was 172% crowdfunded; this lead to more talks and 48 radio interviews. By September 2014 I was invited to give a TEDx Talk, Imagine What Could Change if You Walk the Talk.

That same month, Bannon arranged for Nigel Farage to visit the US to meet Republicans, Tea Party figures and the right-wing media.

In December 2014, my story was given a full page in the Daily Express national newspaper. I was soon standing in rooms full of people who were moved to tears by a simple story of transformation. I felt the love and respect. But, I also felt uncertain like it wasn’t real and something darker was stalking the periphery of it all.

Two months later, in February 2015, the increasing intensity of Russian intrusions into sensitive political targets had raised alarms in Washington, and Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told a Senate hearing that the “Russian cyber threat is more severe than we have previously assessed.” (4)

On the 22nd of March 2015 cash and support was given to far-right media outlets in the Western Europe. For example, “Voice of Russia, a state radio station that was folded into Sputnik, gave $470,000 to a French web TV channel founded by a former Front National advisor. (5)

Talking in some of the poorest places in my own country, places with few opportunities, gutted by austerity, to the disabled and disenfranchised, upstairs in pubs, in church halls and community centres, I felt the despair in the rooms. I also felt the perverse hope that in telling my story I might say something that could change things. A hope that both the audience and I shared. Call me naive, but I wanted that to be possible too.

In April 2015, radical right-wingers campaigning for Britain to leave the EU were invited to events hosted by Russia. Nick Griffin, the former leader of the racist British National Party, and Jim Dowson, the founder of Britain First — a far-right party — attended a conference of neo-Nazis in Saint Petersburg. (6)

Hate began to seep into the everyday to discolour the conversation, like foxing on the pages of progressive reforms; it drizzled fear into the desperation I was trying to answer, stirring up a malignant, torpid hostility.

Twisting its lidless gaze, hate settled its stare on refugees running from wars we helped wage, telling us to blame them.

Leading up to the British election in May the astroturfing around the issues was shocking. And the result was an outright win for the Conservative party; who then had to deliver a promised referendum on the Europe Union.

That “friend” on Facebook began commenting on every post and I talked myself into tolerating it; or at least ignoring it. I have since learnt that tolerance is far from being a virtue, it is a peace treaty; when one side breaks it you are no longer obligated to keep your part of it.

It was a sign of things to come.

The Boxing Manoeuvre

A new wind stirred. That July, 2015, an English insurance salesman man called Aaron Banks, and his spokesman, Andy Wigmore, took Ukip leader and agitator, Nigel Farage off to Belize for a holiday. STM Fidecs Management Ltd. works as a secretary to PRI Holdings Limited, and registered Leave.EU after that weekend, passing ownership to Banks. Banks is a shareholder of PRI, which Panamanian-based Mossack Fonseca set up as an offshore company in 2013.

The self-styled Brexit Boys resolved to start preparing immediately for the campaign. Aaron Banks engaged the Washington campaign strategy firm Goddard Gunster to advise Leave.EU; it identified immigration as the critical issue and told him how to exploit it (7).

By August the rhetoric in the news around refugees escalated and Prime Minister, David Cameron, called them a “bunch of migrants”, and dehumanised those fleeing for thier lives to a “swarm”, like locusts.

Then in September 2015 Aylan Kurdi broke the world’s heart as he lay face down in the surf on a beach in Turkey, and we all understood for a moment.

The UNHCR and World Food Programme had to stop distributing food for 200,000 refugees stranded in Jordan due to a 40% funding shortfall; overnight nearly quarter of a million refugees could not feed their children anymore. The first Refugee March in London was held. By the end of the month, a girlfriend and I took 800 donated books, and stationery, and visited the Jungle, the informal refugee camp in Calais.

I saw first-hand the third world created on our doorstep. The opposite of humanity, fairness, justice, inclusion, and compassion.

I was born and brought up in Kenya, East Africa. As a little girl, I was told that the Third World was the owner of its corrupt deprivation, and there was nothing ‘we’ could do about it. Britain, on the otherhand, stood as a beacon of values like fairness and inclusion; it was so authorative, so sure of itself.

So I believed; and learned enough about our Western views to know we think attitude and ambition save you; assimilating the mantra that you can be anything you dream of.

If you are one of us. Not if, by an accident of birth, you are African, or muslim, or a refugee. The other side of that fence marking a border on another land, I was staring at the undeniable truth that we are the masters of creating penury.

In October 2015, I gave seven ‘sold-out’ talks around the country, including Henley Literary Festival and Sheffield’s literary festival, Off The Shelf.

With each passing week, the parallel between a pilgrim and a refugee grew too strong to ignore. The privilege to choose to walk with blistered feet, with only what I could carry, across a country - for ‘salvation’ - sat awkwardly in the context of the flight of refugees across countries; with only what they can carry on their back, and blistered feet, in a desperate, wretched scramble to save their lives.

The world was shifting beneath all our feet.

You cannot look into the eyes of a man with nothing who only asks you for a pen and paper, and not know how easy it is for you to change something for someone.

For all the grand tour, and the talks, and the books and the ‘wisdom’ I was giving out, giving a pen and paper is all it took to make a change for the better.

That new “friend” on Facebook was horrified, and began tagging me in Britain First posts so that I could be better informed as to ‘the truth’.

In response, I tried facts, I tried nice, I tried rude, I tried not to get drawn in. I asked not to be tagged. It didn’t stop.

I went to the beaches of Greece with my eldest son to help with the refugees risking their lives crossing in over-loaded dinghies. He went on to stay for two more months, and then took a boat going the other way and has been in Izmir, Turkey since; working with refugee in urban situations.

You can’t look in the terrified eyes of a mother who has lost her children somewhere out in the cold, dark waters in the night, and not put her in your car to go and look for them. She cried, and kissed my arm a dozen times, and said thank you. I cried because it was all I could do in the face of the worst the world was handing out. But, I could do that.

Meanwhile, hate leached old-fashioned values from the cultural psyche, and exposed the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, and the disabled, and pointed to all those people on the beach around me — with nothing but the clothes on their backs — and said they were to blame.

For everything.

I came home and volunteered full-time in a warehouse to sort donations for refugees down the European trail. It wasn’t extraordinary, it wasn’t glorious, it was what I could do. One of several hundred people over days, and weekends, and holidays, and high days, could do. Where we once felt powerless we found that each of us was infinitesimally insignificant but very necessary; and enough together to save lives over one winter between us all. Literally, people would have died that winter without real people doing what they could.

I started posting about it on Facebook, because the people I spent my days with were my heroes, as I was inspired I thought others might be by the little differences ordinary people were making.

When I handed a romance novel in his own language to a 32-year-old refugee in The Jungle camp in France, who just wanted to finish school, people cried. When I told the story of a man who arrived at the warehouse on foot, dragging a suitcase behind him to donate everything he owned — except the clothes he was wearing and a cheap suit left hanging in his flat — because he had more than those he was trying to help, and that week he had got a job, people knew this was the best of us all.

But as soon as any of us asked why there were refugees at all, and why they were being brutalised, we were called names, and cursed at, and accused of being traitors to our country.

In the past I’ve had my brushes with controversy and national outrage, but I have never been involved in anything that is vilified on the front pages of newspapers, something that has become government sanctioned savage and inhumane rhetoric. With a flourish of false equivalence, that ‘friend’ on Facebook was bitter at having to move to a new house alone while volunteers in the warehouse were helping the ‘wrong people’.

Hate began to wear a hundred guises. Friends questioned my priorities. Others accused me of glory hunting. Some resented feeling bad for not doing anything. Yet others said I loved refugees more than them.

Enter Far Right, Pursued By a Bear

I came to know the Far Right.

They were implicated in burning a warehouse doing what we were doing. We had to keep the location secret to protect lives and goods. They were violent and virulent, and I watched their ranks swell. Their fear slithered down the streets and slipped in through the windows and letters boxes of homes, and infected the cultural consciousness until it normalised cruelty.

I watched as influential voices slowly persuaded an otherwise tolerant and decent nation to turn on the most vulnerable. And the cultural narrative changed to nationalism.

By March 2016, the threat from Russia was unmistakable. Cybersecurity experts detected a second group of Russian hackers, known as Fancy Bear; and there was a clear pattern of agitation for withdrawal from the EU on Russia’s state-owned, English-language news outlets RT and Sputnik.

RT, once known as Russia Today, has an annual budget of $300 million, that’s comparable with other state televisions but online it is the alpha silverback gorilla. It is the #1 TV news network in the world on YouTube, with nearly 3 billion views.

“Along with Russia’s official news outlets, secretive ‘Troll Factories’ were pumping out huge quantities of propaganda. Low-paid workers created thousands of pro-Kremlin blogs, social media posts, and comments on local and Western news outlets. (7)

These Trolls look like people, they act like people, and their inflammatory posts change the conversation. The spectre of these is to burn the bridges and polarise debate; when you don’t have any common ground you can’t find compromise and cohesion, and unions fracture.

If you don’t believe this is possible, we are too smart for this, remember we were persuaded to support an illegal war on Iraq based on the lie of Weapons of Mass Destruction. That was at a time pre-social media, “Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda states one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated ‘bots’ — And they were all for Leave.” (8)

Leave.EU claims that in some weeks it reached as many as 15 million people. One video was viewed 9.3 million times on Facebook.

“We always knew the referendum would come down to two things — the economy on the ‘In’ side and immigration on the ‘Out’ side, and that if you could keep the subject on immigration you would win,” Banks said.

At no point does he show any sympathy or understanding for the Syrian refugees who have sought refuge in Europe. In fact, he defends a highly controversial “Breaking Point” Ukip poster, saying “politics is dirty”.

On the 22nd of June 2016 I wrote a short, heartfelt piece on Facebook, saying that poster should make us feel compassion, not fear, disgust and hatred. It was just a personal social media post, in response to that inhumane, racist UKip advert, and I warned of the dangers of the Far Right and Brexit.

The bots latched on, the debate escalated, friends revealed their darker sides.

And someone felt it appropriate to threaten my life.

Within a year of standing in rooms speaking to 300 or more people at a time about life, and how to live it, I was getting death threats; and I hadn’t changed. I was still the same imperfect, ordinary, single mother, who walked across a country, and wrote sometimes, as I brought up two men of the future.

But everything is different.

I attended a lecture by Lt Gen (Ret) Sir Simon Mayall, KBE, CB, and PM’s Security Envoy to Iraq 2014–2015, Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Operations) 2009–2011, British Army 1978–2015. Called “Syria and the Transition to a New World Order”, it was fascinating. I had a seven minute one-to-one with him afterwards, and asked him if he felt “the Far Right are a significant threat?” He replied without reservation “Absolutely”, and added he saw the hot spots flaring up across Europe — including us here in the UK — and the USA, as a significant threat to the Western world’s way of life — particularly for world peace.

On admitting he voted Brexit to a young audience who are going to inherit that decision, I watched him flinch at their disapproval. I was talking to him when he blustered, “they keep calling us racists, and we’re not!” And I saw that, in fact, he was more afraid of the Far Right than other terrorists of any definition — only one of them did he consider a real threat to our way of life.

Around this time, my eldest son was back in Britain to give a talk at a literary festival. After all that had happened, I thought it was too contentious to do any publicity for it on Facebook. But, I did buy an advert. I made sure it was clear he was nineteen, in the hopes that would make people think twice about their interaction. I didn’t share the advert, no names were mentioned, and I wasn’t in any way linked to it visibly.

Things began to get simply bizarre.

By the next morning there were two rude, badly spelt, irrelevant, hate comments under the event advert. I checked who the people were (how dare they pick on my son). What I found puzzled me. Despite having 900 friends, they only had two likes at the most on any post. The posts were generally random music links that had no coherent taste to them, and their pictures were a mix of celebrity pictures.

But, we had the same “mutual friend”.

I went to another lecture, this time by a 24 year old, Jack Merlin Watling, already half way through his PHD, I left 40mins later and about 20% smarter from his lecture on the current Russian strategy.

The Russian objective is to destabilize political systems and undermine democratic processes across the European Union and in NATO member countries, while supporting anti-European forces. It’s not a state secret, the Kremlin’s efforts to steer events in its preferred direction are overt.

Russia funds all sorts of disruption, from the Right Wing party of Marine le Pen to the Far Left Syritza group in Greece. They funded a British comedian, Jonathan Pie, at the time, fuelling his meteoric rise on Facebook; on the other hand, they funded an anti-fracking march in Algeria. They don’t ask for creative control, they don’t care what your politics are so long as it is disruptive.

None of this is at odds with establishing the main ideology of traditionalism, or neo-traditionalism, Putin is a statist in politics, economics, and sociocultural matters.

On the second day before the House Intelligence Committee the FBI Director, James Comey, bluntly stated Russia would like more Brexits.

When I said be very afraid of the Far Right, I meant you to notice that our government is more afraid of them than they are of any other terrorism; they are more afraid of those who speak of “Rivers of Blood” than the rivers of blood they speak about.

So much so they offered up the longest, most successful, peace project in the history of the world as a sacrificial lamb! The greatest multicultural integration in the world, ever.

I meant you to notice the Far Right are hijacking the agenda, and materially impacting Europe’s ability to govern itself.

The Far Right, the Alt-Right, the Russians, want to reshape the cultural landscape with their Traditionalist ideology.

The struggle is between Traditionalists Verses Secularists and Multiculturalists; it’s not about borders it’s about ideology. The liberal multiculturalists who stand for fairness, justice, and community, we were caught off guard; complacent in believing in the incremental improvements to a more fair and just society, and the marginal gains of inclusivity. Believing the West was on a trajectory that would hold.

Around about here I first read a translation of the German ‘Daz Magazin’ article about Cambridge Analytica (9). With several high-profile Republican clients, this company is the dark horse in the pony show that is politics. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iran, Yemen and the Caribbean. In military circles this is known as “psyops” — psychological operations. Cambridge Analytica brings technology and big data to the arena, with data modelling and psychographic profiling for mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.

A professor of advertising at the University of Florida, Jon Morris, has done research on voting and has found emotions are about twice as important as facts.

The power of big data manipulation is in the ability to microtarget political information or “alternative facts” specific to an area — a tenement block, an individual flat, one person — based on a profile of the user with an 80/90% accuracy telling you what you want to hear and creating a silo of homogeneity. They can do this because big data holds 4–5,000 points on every single adult in the country, culled from their social media use. You know those quizzes to you did to find out which Harry Potter character you were, or what your favourite colour said about what you should have been? Those were all cannon fodder for the machine, those ‘word clouds’ of your year? Those too, sold by facebook for $12 a person. The computer never stops learning.

Andy Wigmore, who is Leave.EU’s communications director, is on record with the Observer Newspaper claiming Cambridge Analytica came on board with Leave.EU leading up to the referendum. In February 2016 company chief executive, Alexander Nix, talked openly about how it had helped to supercharge Leave.Eu’s social media campaign. This would be illegal in the UK, as it was not declared to the Electoral Commission; and, unlike, the US our personal data is protected by European law (at the moment) and needs consent for use.

However, hedge fund billionaire, Robert Mercer, “good friend” of Nigel Farage, Trump campaign megadonor, is a major shareholder, and co-owner, making a $10 million equity investment (10), in right-wing news organisation, Breitbart. Steve Bannon was a board member of Cambridge Analytica.

There is a Traditionalist Axis. Using ‘Cognitive Warfare’ to change the cultural landscape.

Trump won the election, to become the 45th President of the United States. Steve Bannon resigned from Breitbart to become White House chief strategist in the Trump administration. CNN reported that within hours of Trump’s victory speech, Putin congratulated the US president-elect and flagged Moscow’s willingness to restore ties fully with its old Cold War foe. While Nigel Farage ended up in a gold lift photo opportunity,

The very next day there was an article in the same national Daily Express newspaper that had covered my story, congratulating Trump on his magnificent win written by the “mutual friend” — who also happens to be Ivana Trump’s PR.

Somehow my political stand, my work with refugees, my own platform, and and six degrees of separation had converged under the hood of Facebook to put me in the crosshairs.

The Throwdown

The Traditionalists have taken the hill, metaphorically. How does this culture influence our moral thought? What shape will the lanscape take in comparison to the rights imbued for us in a multicultural and secular society? How does our sense of right and wrong influence our politics? Or, does politics influence our sense of right and wrong? Governments are a reflection of the behaviour, capabilities, morality and imagination of the people who elect them, and people are the direct representations of their governments. You become like the company you keep.

Leaving the European multiculturalist and secular union, England has little choice but to ally with the nexus of rising power; Russia, the Alt-White House, Turkey, Saudia Arabia, and on it goes. It is time to really know where our beliefs come from, where we sit in the entanglement and lies of propagandist sensationalism, and what kind of world we want to live in.

If you can’t articulate what you think, and why, there is a good chance you are under the influence of people with an agenda that does not include your best interests. No matter what they tell you.

Politics is indeed dirty; I lost the narrative control of my own life online, and death threats come with the territory overun by an ochlocracy, and a deliberately ill-informed, emotionally goaded, and malleable public — us.

And, radicalisation is a far right aim too.

I am not claiming I am any kind of Jo Cox. That would be hugely disrespectful of her incredible life, the influence she had, and her legacy.

I am saying I am a canary in a coal mine. At least, I am the canary you know.

Most of those “people” that trolled me have now disappeared from Facebook, mysteriously. I’m told they are just dormant, waiting to be activated at a moments notice.

Keep a look out for a man called Sydney Andrews, who is a fictional — and female — character in the American soap opera, Melrose Place.

The links cited are just one of many checked and cross referenced, these are the ones that succinctly express their points.

1 http://www.cjr.org/special_report/putin_russia_propaganda_trump.php

2 and 8 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

3 http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/31/14439908/steve-bannon-worldview-visa-ban

4 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war

5+7 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/08/why-putin-is-meddling-in-britain-s-brexit-vote.html

6 http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/what-does-fascist-conference-in-st.html

8 http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/10/arron-banks-man-who-bought-brexit

9 republished: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analytica-brexit-trump

10 https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-08-17/trump-s-new-team-brings-deep-ties-to-major-donor