Sometimes an attack by your opponents is so feeble and ridiculous that it deserves broadcast by the unscathed target. Such is the case with an article on Vice News (18 March 2022). ‘Revealed: youth group trying to push the Conservative Party further to the right’ features research by The Citizens, who declare themselves as ‘public service journalism’ (they also founded Independent SAGE, the puritanical medics and academics who demanded harder and harsher Covid-19 lockdown).
Founded in 1994 as Voice of Montreal, a punk art magazine, Vice News became a prominent news website with headquarters in New York and offices around the world. But nowadays it offers nothing different than mainstream media, pushing woke ideology and cancel culture. Its latest hit job is on Orthodox Conservatives, an organisation that rose from the ashes of Turning Point UK, which had fleeting success in the unfavourable terrain of university campuses.
According to the Vice News report, Orthodox Conservatives is an ‘anti-BLM, anti-Islam, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, anti-green youth group’. It is doubly dangerous, as a conduit between the Tory establishment and ‘far-right’ extremists. The roll call of right-wing ogres begins with strategic director Joseph Robertson, who is given the oxygen of publicity on GB News. This young man has the audacity to express conservative views.
Next is Ethan Thorburn, who is hoping for a Tory candidacy, and currently works with a traditionalist MP, Andrew Rosindell. Then there’s Dominique Samuels, former president of Turning Point UK, who criticised Black Lives Matter amidst the George Floyd hysteria as ‘a front for communism’ on Talk Radio. Well said, I thought at the time.
Ben Harris-Quinney, head of the Bow Group think-tank, is described as a persistent critic of LGBT rights. That he was expelled from David Cameron’s Conservative Party in 2015 says more about the latter than the former. A regular writer for the Bow Group and previously at Migration Watch, Benjamin Loughnane has ‘spent evenings with British YouTuber and conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson at the Reform Club’, where government minister Jacob Rees-Mogg occasionally dines. Join the dots and you’ll create something like Carole Cadwalladr’s Observer diagrams showing that Brexit was a Russian-funded assault on democracy.
Alice Grant, pretty young thing of the Brexit campaign, and now education spokeswoman for Orthodox Conservatives, attended the summer party of the New Culture Forum think-tank, ‘hosted by UKIP MP Peter Whittle’. That will be news to Whittle, who actually served as a London Assembly member, where he and David Kurten left UKIP to form the Brexit Alliance.
The plot thickens. The office of Orthodox Conservatives is at 71-75 Shelton Street, London. Upstairs is ‘far-right Christian YouTube channel Herats of Oak, which features controversial figures such as English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson, Twitter-banned Ulsterman David Vance, sexist joker Carl Benjamin, and – I was pleased to see – myself!
‘Dr Niall McRae (sic), co-author of an Islamophobic and anti-Semitic booklet that ViCE revealed was distributed at Conservative Party conference in 2018’. This slander referred to Moralitis: a Cultural Virus, which I wrote with Bruges Group director Robert Oulds. This publication made no specific mention of Jews or Israel, but apparently our theme of the cultural Marxist march though the institutions justified a slur of anti-Semitism. Oh, how the progressive media hate the concept of cultural Marxism being used by conservatives to wake people up to the subversion of society. Yes, its originators in the Frankfurt School were mostly Jews – but so was genuinely anti-Semitic Karl Marx, and so is George Soros, who uses the religion he abandoned to silence critics.
The Orthodox Conservatives manifesto was presented to ‘far-right extremism expert’ Julia Ebner, who warned that the group is trying to shift the Overton Window to the right, with policies that are ‘unacceptable’ in mainstream politics (sounds like Trudeau on the truckers). What a shocker – conservative movement tries to make the polity more conservative!
The problem for Orthodox Conservatives is that faith, flag and family have been so undermined and vilified by the indoctrinating education and media establishment that ideas thought normal three decades ago are now taboo. In waging a war on woke, these activists risk being unpersoned, if they have not suffered this fate already.
The Vice News article is amateurish in its smearing. I am not so ignorant, because I have met almost all of the characters depicted. I worked with Peter Whittle, a nice chap, and did some interviews on his New Culture Forum shows. I’ve been on rallies with Alice Grant, and had drinks with Paul Joseph Watson, Ethan Thorburn and Tommy Robinson. And I regularly appear on Hearts of Oak.
My impression of these men and women is not of would-be fascists but principled defenders of freedom, whom will not lay supine to tyrannical suppression of speech, democracy and heritage. Vice News has scored an own-goal here, giving an edgy mystique to its political enemies. If you’re not on their list, you must try harder!
Niall McCrae RMN, PhD is a social commentator with regular appearances on Unity News Network, Hearts of Oak, the David Vance Show and George Galloway’s Kalima Horra debates. His books include The Moon and Madness (2012), Echoes from the Corridors (with Peter Nolan, 2016) and Moralitis: a Cultural Virus (with Robert Oulds, 2020). He is an officer of the Workers of England trade union.
