Breitbart comes to London, and the results are a sorry stain on British journalism

In February, Roy Greenslade reported that US conservative media outfit Breitbart News Network was expanding into the British media scene with the establishment of a London office. Heading up Breitbart's new UK operations are executive editor James Delingpole and managing editor Raheem Kassam.

The expansion – which Delingpole himself effectively concedes is about "pandering to readers' prejudices" to maximise profits – reveals the worrying extent to which the forces behind climate denial and racism are one and the same: "American conservativism" of the "right-wing libertarianist" kind.

Anti-science

Given Delingpole's track record of fundamentalist opposition to climate science at the Telegraph, it is hardly surprising that Breitbart UK's environmental reporting standards sink to an unprecedented low.

In one story this month, for instance, Delingpole lauded a new US poll which found that: "More Americans believe in God than in man-made global warming." Only thirty-three per cent of respondents, the poll showed, are confident that average global temperatures are rising mostly due to human-caused greenhouse gasses.

Delingpole mockingly dismissed the explanation of Nobel Prize winning biochemist, Prof Robert Leftkowitz: that public opinion is being misled by "the force of concerted campaigns to discredit scientific fact" - largely funded by the fossil fuel industry, as documented in a recent extensive study in Climatic Change.

Rather, said Delingpole:

"Perhaps he should venture out of the biochemistry lab a bit more often. If he did so, he would realise that the 67 per cent who had doubts about greenhouse gas theory are almost certainly correct."

Delingpole's scientific evidence for this is the alleged inability of broadly accurate if conservative (rather than alarmist) computer models to account for "real world data" – data which he completely fails to understand, hence his endorsement of the fictional "pause in global warming since 1997."

Anti-activism

Similarly, another story this month by Breitbart 'political correspondent', Andre Walker – a former Tory political aide who resigned after being caught plotting to smear a deputy council leader – lent unwarranted credence to a new report by the anti-climate policy advocacy group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

One of GWPF's funders is Tory Party donor Michael Hintze, head of $5bn hedge-fund CQS which operates in the oil finance industry, among other areas. The report claimed that "environmentalism" had come to "permeate school curricula across the UK," resulting in children being "brainwashed" by climate change activism.

Walker's story on the report quoted a spokesman for British education minister Michael Gove, saying that teachers who do not offer a "balanced" view on climate change issues are breaking the law. "There has been concern for a number of years about teachers using the classroom to preach radical ideas," commented Walker, before throwing in a bone for his former party: "The Thatcher government introduced the National Curriculum in 1988 because some schools spent so much time on 'trendy' causes that they had little time left for the basics."

Anti-everyone

While attacking environmental science and activism, Breitbart UK simultaneously revels in being an unadulterated mouthpiece for right-wing ideology without even a semblance of editorial objectivity. Literally dozens of 'news' articles over the last month, many by editor Raheem Kassam, offer gushing praise for the anti-environmentalist UK Independence Party (Ukip) - which as far right expert Dr Matthew Goodwin of the University of Nottingham explains, has "considerable overlaps with the extreme right."

"Far from being 'xenophobic' or 'racist'," Kassam writes instead, "Ukip's objections to mass immigration into Britain" are merely a reaction to the Blair government's policy of "'open borders' immigration from Europe." He whines that Ukip is "often unfairly lumped" with the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League (EDL).

Compare Kassam's unbridled enthusiasm for Ukip with the sober assessment of Dan Hodges in The Telegraph, who explains how his views on the party have changed as the party's racism has become increasingly obvious:

"Over the past year Ukip has gone beyond raising general concerns about immigration to directly targeting and stigmatising individual national groups. Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians and Albanians are amongst the favourite targets. And, as Nigel Farage said at the weekend, he believes that's fine because they represent national, not racial stereotypes. But of course it isn't fine… Ukip is now an overtly racist and extremist party."

Indeed, in a damning overview in yesterday's Spectator, Nick Cohen decisively highlights the systematic pattern of overt xenophobia on the part of Ukip candidates and representatives, demolishing the myth of the party's love of Britain.

Kill 'em all

Breitbart's hysterically partisan support for Ukip is no innocuous error of judgement. On 2nd April, Breitbart columnist Patrick Dollard tweeted this in response to the Fort Hood shooting last month by an Iraq War veteran – the same Texas base where former US Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people in 2009:

"If there is even one more act of Muslim terrorism, it is then time for Americans to start slaughtering Muslims in the street, all of them."



Patrick Dollard (@PatDollard) If there is even one more act of Muslim terrorism, it is then time for Americans to start slaughtering Muslims in the streets, all of them.

Despite being widely reported and condemned, to date Dollard has not deleted or apologised for this statement, and Breitbart.com continues to list him as a columnist.

Legitimising far right extremism

The problem is that the Breitbart phenomenon represents just one strand of an increasingly entrenched web of neoconservative influence that is working hard to legitimise far right extremism.

Breitbart UK's managing editor, Raheem Kassam, is an Associate Fellow at the leading London neocon think-tank, the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), where he was marketing and communications director from 2010 to 2013. The Henry Jackson Society was criticised in 2012 by founding HJS member and former director Dr Marko Attila Hoare, a historian at Kingston University, who complained that the Society:

"… has become an abrasively right-wing forum with an anti-Muslim tinge, churning out polemical and superficial pieces by aspiring journalists and pundits that pander to a narrow readership of extreme Europhobic British Tories, hardline US Republicans and Israeli Likudniks."

While running pro-Ukip spin in the name of journalism, Kassam is also long-time director of 'Student Rights,' which describes itself as an "independent" anti-extremism "campus monitoring group," despite actually being a HJS-funded project sharing the same office.

Student Rights has come under fire recently from motions passed by multiple Student Unions at London universities for "disproportionately and unfairly targeting Muslim students, contributing to their marginalisation and ostracisation, damaging campus cohesion and feeding into a growing trend of Islamophobic discourse in wider society." The motions note that:

"Student Rights' work and reporting has been used by far-right groups to target a Muslim-student event which led to reported threats of violence and the event subsequently having to be cancelled by the university."

While Student Rights' directors deny this – pointing to some recent work on far right extremism - according to the Institute for Race Relations (IRR) "the majority of its work has been on 'Islamic extremist' events" and "its counter-extremism agenda shares some aspects of the far Right's framework about Islam and the Left." The group – which does not actually represent any students – has according to IRR opposed student activist "events in support of Palestinian causes; events in solidarity with Guantanamo detainee Shaker Aamer (labeled an Al Qaeda operative); and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign meetings."

The HJS project's far right sympathies go back to its founding in 2009. London Student, the newspaper of the University of London Union, reports that the same year, Student Rights criticised the London School of Economics Student Union for passing a 'no platform' policy on fascist groups, including the British National Party (BNP). A Student Rights editorial characterised this policy as "another example" of unions "limiting free speech on campus":

"The BNP is a legitimate political party… Student Rights draws the line at violence and hate-speech, but this doesn't tend to be the topic for most BNP members."

That editorial is no longer available on the website.

The bizarre Breitbart marriage between climate-denying Delingpole and extremism-obsessed Kassam is perhaps not all that bizarre. It represents the disturbing logic of how Anglo-American neoconservative ideology is attempting to influence public and politics by harnessing anti-science discourse and rehabilitating the extreme right.

Both these activities happen to support two intertwined goals: empowering Anglo-American control of Middle East fossil fuels, and criminalising peaceful activism that could undermine this control.

Though the neocons like to pretend they're fighting for freedom and liberty, it's obvious they stand far apart from these basic democratic values.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed