Stochastic Violence From Moygashel to McArthur Park

The Fascist Atmosphere is everywhere, from the livestreaming of genocide to the Vice-Singalling of the far-right and their media apologists, and now manifests itself in the migrants’ effigy on a loyalist bonfire. This is a global phenomenon characterised by the denial of reality, hatred of ‘the other’ and extreme and wild conspiracism.

We are waiting for the high point of bigotry in the British Isles. Here, Loyalists in County Tyrone celebrate burning refugees alive. It’s not a ‘cultural celebration’, it’s a festival of hate that’s permitted to dominate whole cities and intimidate whole communities in a way that no other cult is. As Emma DeSouza has noted: “Celebrating one’s own culture should not require the oppression of another’s. Free speech does not give one licence to hate speech without consequence. Twelfth bonfires adorned with symbols of hate are not about protest; they are targeted hate crimes and should be treated as such.”

This fusion of bigotry, xenophobia and spectacle fascism is rudimentary, everyday now and spools across the Irish Sea and back and forth across the Atlantic. The far-right watches itself through Palantír and we watch their performative violence on the streets of America, in the debris of Gaza, and atop the pallets of County Tyrone. It is a global phenomenon with local manifestations.

Amnesty International described the bonfire, to be lit at Moygashel, outside Dungannon, as “a vile dehumanising act that fuels racism and hatred. Sinn Fein Assembly Member Colm Gildernew described it as “vile” and “deplorable.”

Searchlight reports that: “It’s clear this involves the most extreme loyalists, who find support from fascists on the mainland – the British Democrats have been quick to boast of having activists in place at the recent violent Ballymena pogroms where migrant houses were also set ablaze.”

“And Tommy Robinson’s right-hand man Richard Inman has been ever present there, live streaming events online.”

“Britain First leader Paul Golding, Tommy Robinson, and indeed most fascist and racist activists, have welcomed these acts of violence. Loyalism of the boat-burning type has deep and terrible roots in Northern Ireland. It combines fascist political extremism with racism and terrorism.”

The contagion of far-right ideology and stochastic violence is out of control. The far-right is now unhinged, even within its own grotesque ‘rationale’. As Nick Cohen notes (Extremism sweeps the British right): “Something macabre is stirring in the soul of the British right. Driven half mad by the failure of Brexit and Liz Truss, it has doubled down on fanaticism. It prefers to push harder and faster to the extremes than face its own shortcomings. Ideas that Conservatives themselves would once have dismissed as fascistic now produce barely a mumble of dissent.”

Cohen has a puzzle: Who said this?

“The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.”

As Cohen says, it might have been a member of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, but it is, in fact Dominic Cummings, the former adviser to Boris Johnson and the architect of Brexit who now attacks Farage from the right.

This sequence of failure is now self-reinforcing. The debacle of Brexit is proof, for them, of the need for even more extreme measures and projects. The only unquestionable institution or project is Brexit itself.

America at War With Itself

Across the Atlantic, the USA’s descent into fascism is remarkable and disturbing. As Mike Brock writes (The Secret Police Are Here):

“Let us examine what Congress has actually authorized, since apparently no one else wishes to do so with any precision. ICE now commands resources that would make it the sixteenth largest military force on the planet. The $150 billion allocated for immigration enforcement through 2029 exceeds the annual military budgets of Canada, Italy, and Israel combined. This isn’t immigration policy. This is the systematic construction of a domestic terror apparatus funded at the level of a regional superpower’s defense establishment.”

Brock continues: “The agency operates under arrest quotas of 3,000 people per day, one million per year, with constitutional compliance treated as an administrative suggestion rather than legal requirement.”

“This is the language of systematic state terror operating under the banner of law enforcement. When federal agents are explicitly encouraged to arrest innocent people to meet numerical targets, when constitutional protections become negotiable based on bureaucratic convenience, when American citizenship provides no protection against unmarked federal kidnapping—we have moved decisively beyond the realm of policy disagreement into territory that has a very specific historical designation.”

Last week they were zip-tying disabled people in their wheelchairs, this week the scenes from McArthur Park, Los Angeles look like some post-apocalyptic movie. America is invading itself:

Heavily armed Trump regime forces raided at McArthur Park, a public park in Los Angeles, harassing and terrorizing civilians during their ethnic cleansing operation. (🎥: @Julio_Rosas11) 🧵 #3E #StopICE pic.twitter.com/qjLRoqbWkZ

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) July 8, 2025

It may be that Trump (or Miller) is, as many have suggested, be practicing for Martial Law. Or he could just be normalising the optics of troops in the streets. Or he could just adding to the atmosphere of generalised fear and intimidation.

The problem here, as Mike Brock points out, is one of journalistic and intellectual capitulation:

“The professional moderates who populate our discourse want us to believe we’re witnessing complex policy disagreements requiring sophisticated analysis. But we’re not. We’re documenting systematic constitutional violations designed to terrorize human beings into submission, funded by disaster relief money, implemented through arrest quotas that treat innocent people as acceptable “collateral damage.”

This is the common denominator across these arenas of what we’re still euphemistically calling “populism”: dehumanisation. It’s dehumanisation that allows refugees to be on top of the pyre, that allows anyone to be “collateral damage” in America’s state kidnapping programme, for disabled people to be portrayed as scroungers or for ethnic cleansing to be carried out in Palestine.

It’s going to get worse. Timothy Snyder has talked of the ‘normalisation of horror’ saying: “The government is putting before us the temptation to cooperate in fascist dehumanization on a grand scale” and warned of “the prospect of many great harms, including an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States.”

The Plot

In his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism”, cultural theorist Umberto Eco lists fourteen general properties of fascist ideology… He uses the term “Ur-Fascism” as a generic description of different historical forms of fascism. Taking a checklist today against Eco’s essay is sobering. Try it.

Number 7 is currently in play, certainly the “followers feel besieged” in Moygashel.

Over in Texas, ‘the plot’ is wild. The flash floods that took the lives of over 100 people has become the epicentre of the latest and wildest conspiracies. As freelancer Ben Makuch reports: “Some people, emerging from the same vectors associated with the longstanding QAnon conspiracy theory, which essentially holds that a shadowy “deep state” is acting against Donald Trump, spread on X that the devastating weather was being controlled by the government.”

“I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS,” posted Pete Chambers, a former special forces commander and frequent fixture on the far right who once organized an armed convoy to the Texas border, along with documents he claimed to show government weather operations. “WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?”

Cloud Seeding and the Chemtrails are now a permanent fixture in the besieged imaginary, impervious to rational discourse or the intervention of facts. In this petri dish of idiocy, the lines are blurred between former government advisors and MAGA influencers, as Cummings whines, “the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.”

The Big Bad City and Net Zero as the New Brexit

Looking across the pond is not to look afar but to look in our near future. The players often reflect each others tropes, language and paranoia. Trump’s aide Stephen Miller tweets: “NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.” Across the ocean, British pundit Matthew Goodwin pronounces that London is “over . . . a city in visible decline” with “no real sense of identity” (Myth of the Big Bad Megacity).

This war on the city can be seen in the discourse around the ‘metropolitan elite’, in the racist smears against Sadiq Khan, in ICE deliberately targetting ‘Democrat’ cities, in the coming storm against Zohran Mamdani, and in the triggered response to the 15 Minute City idea (a now staple part of far-right storytelling – see 15 Minute Cities and the Nightmares of the Paranoid Right).

The other unifying force of these movements is an overwhelming hatred of ecological politics or climate realities. This has been a staple of the Spiked! agenda over decades, and a trigger for the right-adjacent press. This is what Ewan Jenkins called a ‘Suicidal Nostalgia’ and brings together a strange brew: “The anti-net zero coalition makes for a strange constellation of forces. A suicidal alliance of agrarian revanchists, fossil billionaires, cultural reactionaries, suburban conspiracy theorists and disillusioned voters who, in yet another historical repetition, turn their rage not against capital but toward the climate movement.”

As I noted in Diagonalism, the Cosmic Right and the Conspiracy Smoothie – this coalition is deeply immersed in conspiracy cultures:

“Naomi Klein referred to the “conspiracy smoothie” that unites many protesters. Sociologist Keir Milburn hazarded the coinage of “the cosmic Right.” Drawing lessons from the mass phenomenon that is Bolsonarismo, Brazilian philosopher Rodrigo Nunes described the protests as the latest manifestation of “denialism” born of an inability to come to terms with the enormity of challenges confronted by humankind.”

In Britain, these groups now coalesce around Net Zero as the New Brexit, fulfilling Point 2 of Umberto Eco’s checklist, the rejection of modernism.

Ewan Jenkins writes: “It should be uncontroversial to state that net zero is a false flag, a hollow stage of political theatre. But this empty signifier now galvanises a storm of reaction across the social spectrum. Net zero has become a “useful enemy” writes the Guardian. In the UK, “net zero has replaced the EU as the thing on which all our ills can be blamed” writes Shaun Spiers of the Green Alliance.”

The denialism and irrationalism is profound, America/England/Britain was great (we’re not sure when) and ‘we’ will be again. Everything is both broken and in crisis, but also Great and Fine. Nothing is wrong, so nothing should be changed.

As Nick Cohen notes, “the right fantasises about a blood-and-soil version of English nationalism that Conservatives once abhorred”, and you can see interplay between nativism, white nationalism, and surveillance tech exchanged through Farage and his Trump networks and finance.

In The Lure of Greatness, England’s Brexit and America’s Trump, Anthony Barnett explores the dynamics at play between Trumpism and Brexit. He writes: “In January 2017, Theresa May told an American audience that by leaving the European Union the United Kingdom had taken a decision to restore our national self-determination’. Even Scots, and Welsh who voted for Brexit will wince at the claim. She was speaking for England. In October 2016, in her set-piece speech to her own party, she spoke of the ‘divisive nationalists’ of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. At the same time, throughout the speech she refers repeatedly to Britain as a ‘nation’ – and how she intends to build a ‘new united Britain’. Apparently, her English nationalism is not divisive. It is unifying. It is British.”

Amazingly, by this logic, we achieved self-determination by voting against Brexit.

This renewed Anglo-British nationalism is another form of denialism. In the post-truth world, Britain is a single nation and we are living in the sunlit-uplands of a new united country. Just ask the people of Moygashel.

The Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh John McDowell has commented on the Moygashel bonfire effigy featuring a refugee boat, calling it : “racist, threatening and offensive,” “nothing to do with Christianity or Protestant culture”, and “is in fact inhuman and sub-Christian”.

As we go to press, it’s just been announced that “The PSNI has confirmed that it has taken the decision not to assist a request from Belfast City Council for the removal of material from a controversial south Belfast bonfire site.”

This article was first published on my Substack Fifty Six Degrees North. You can subscribe here.