What caused the people of Britain to vote to Leave? Most pundits have explained it as a grass-roots rebellion by the working class losers of globalisation, coupled with the votes of older people resentful about the way their country is almost unrecognisable from the land of their youth. But, of course, there is more to it than that.
The role of Nigel Farage was enormous. Without him and the advance of Ukip there would not even have been a referendum. Furthermore, his unofficial Leave campaign, with its sharp focus on immigration, was much more effective than the deliberately lame effort of the Boris and Gove campaign.
Farage deserves recognition as a very skilled politician, although he also had the enormous luck to enjoy being endlessly promoted, in every major election between 2004 and 2010, by every MSM outlet from the BBC to the Daily Mail.
All saw him, rightly, as the most effective block to the ‘threat’ of the BNP. The BBC was the most shameless in the campaign. Without this ten years of artificial promotion, Farage would never have had the recognition or the European Parliamentary power base to panic Tory MPs into pressing David Cameron for the referendum.
It is a classic example of the workings of the Law of Unintended Consequences that so often kicks in when powerful people try to manipulate the democratic process.
The liberal Establishment were so full of fear, guilt and hatred that, in order to stop a small radical nationalist party winning a handful of seats, they created the reactionary political force that has now detonated an enormous land-mine under the entire United Europe project. Nigel Farage is a very skilled politician, but he is also one of the luckiest ever!
How it happened
Having given the two big political factors outlined above their due weight, however, we should note that, while they explain WHAT happened, they tell us little about HOW it happened. And they tell us nothing about why almost nobody saw it coming.
With regards to the actual opinion polls, the fact that they were four crucial percentage points out was almost certainly largely the result of some people’s fear of admitting to favouring the Politically Incorrect ‘Leave’ option. Nationalists everywhere are very familiar with polls understating their actual support for this reason.
But to understand fully the below-the-radar growth of the popular Brexit vote, it is also necessary to grasp the extent of the efforts put in to turning Facebook into a gigantic echo chamber for the long suppressed popular anger, alienation and frustrated patriotism of millions of voters.
It has already emerged that Facebook and Google statistics confirmed throughout the campaign that the Leave side had the edge in social media. But by looking only at the official campaign efforts of Remain and the two Leave groupings (Johnson’s and Farage’s) the MSM analysis is missing a vital piece of the Brexit jigsaw.
That is the gigantic ‘reach’ and enormous effort of the unofficial online campaign run by groups that emerged from the wreckage of the BNP. Together, these were reaching the UK electorate with around ten million views of anti-EU videos, memes and recycled Euro-skeptic press articles every day in the key last two weeks of the campaign.
The effect was noted by one Remain organisation which was also using Facebook but which complained that it was impossible to keep up with the volume and sheer popularity of Leave propaganda. “It felt like we were surrounded on all sides on Facebook.”
The huge reach of our material reflects the way in which it struck chords with huge numbers of ordinary people. But the network of pages and the pre-existing reach at the disposal of the half-a-dozen individuals who made it happen didn’t appear from nowhere or overnight.
Rather, it was the result of long, grinding, hours of work – often boringly non-political work – every day for several years. The task was made even harder by the fact that almost all of the Facebook pages we were using were at some point shut down thanks to the increasingly hysterical liberal censorship policies of Zuckerberg’s indispensable giant.
The ability of these ‘auxiliary’ Leave operations to inject killer videos and memes direct into the nation’s collective Facebook consciousness was developed not by publishing long, learned articles appreciated by the minority who in normal times have a geekish interest in politics.
The ‘trick’ was to work relentlessly, building a whole range of more of less ‘populist’ websites linked directly to their respective Facebook walls. To run one is fairly easy, but to run and fill a whole chain of them without too much cross-over is a major undertaking. It needs at least 12 posts per day, per page, to build reach with a wide range of posts that appeal enough to be shared and liked by large numbers of normal, essentially a-political people:
Outrage over cruelty to animals, anger over immigration and Political Correctness, sorrow over the death of much-loved popular entertainers, outrage over Islamist violence (pictured), admiration for outstanding sporting achievements, nostalgia for the country and customs we knew before the liberals wrecked it – all went together with current news stories to build the Facebook reach which was used to deliver the Brexit message.
Then, as the referendum drew near, we set about delivering that message in forms that would inspire masses of ‘ordinary’ people to share them with their own social media contacts – the sine qua non of the whole operation.
Long before the Farage campaign were told by their multi-million dollar American PR consultants that, when it comes to shaping public opinion, emotion trumps facts, the auxiliary Brexit campaigners were flooding Facebook with memes, videos and music clips featuring flags, poppies, babies, war veterans, mega mosque plans, Spitfires, arrogant Europhiles, closed down pits and steelworks, out-of-touch politicians, crazed Islamists and illegal immigrants causing mayhem in Calais.
Every one of those themes could have been backed up with a myriad of facts, but popular political rebellions are not sparked by facts but by emotions, so emotion is what the public got.
Indeed, it goes deeper than that, for the operation used (partly by instinct, for parts of it were not particularly co-ordinated, and partly by design, because parts of it were) the insights of the grandfather of theories of psychology in political campaigning, Sergei Chakhotin. His theories are summed up in his book, ‘ The rape of the masses; the psychology of totalitarian political propaganda’
Developed in the crucible of the efforts of the Social Democrats in Weimar Germany to counter Nazi propaganda, Chakhotin’s core theory was that all human needs can be boiled down to just four imperatives: Territory; Status; Food (which in modern society extends to money and economic security) and Reproduction/Nurture.
In the Brexit campaign, the question of Territory (and its derivative, Sovereignty) was obviously of particular importance, but the other three core needs were all addressed as well. To be honest, this was an area to which our post-victory ‘wash up’ concluded we had paid insufficient attention, so future nationalist social media operations are urged here to pay more attention to what is written here than what we actually did during the hectic campaign.
Emotional connection
The relentless appeal to deep-seated emotions in the auxiliary Leave campaign was adopted by the Faragista Leave.EU Facebook operation. As multi-millionaire organiser Arron Banks explained:
“What they [hired-in political strategists Goddard Gunster] said early on was ‘facts don’t work’ and that’s it.
“The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”
Sore loser Remainers have since tried to spin this as an admission that Leave was on the opposite side of the facts. This is, of course, simply untrue, it is just that the Leave campaigners (apart from the tame and ineffectual Gove/Johnson operation) understood that the vote was always going to be ruled by peoples’ hearts and guts, rather than by their heads.
“The Conservatives are now trying to rewrite the campaign that immigration wasn’t important, but boy was immigration important,” Banks said. “The first thing we did was poll everybody and we found that if immigration wasn’t the issue, the issue was schools or education, proxies for immigration. It was the number one issue by a country mile.”
And so it was. And it helped the Leave.EU site rack up three quarters of a million Likes. Undoubtedly important, particularly as the official Remain page managed only 564,000.
But both pale into insignificance to the fact that, between the different Facebook operations that have been taking up much of the effort of a few individuals who cut their political campaigning teeth in the BNP, the total number of Likes is well over two million – comfortably more than three times that of the operation which Mr Banks poured over £5 million to build up.
Further, the engagement and ‘talking about’ statistics of the auxiliary operations are staggeringly high. Most important of all, they already had a reach into the sections of the alienated Midlands, Northern English and Welsh working class which, without our encouragement and influence on this immensely powerful medium, would not have turned out for Leave in the overwhelming numbers that they did.
All well and good, the sympathetic reader may think, but is it wise to be tipping off the opposition as to these powerful tactics? Well, for a start, I am keeping a few key ‘trade secrets’ under wraps and will only reveal those to individuals with serious references as genuinely on side. But there’s a more important factor to consider here as well:
The answer is that political social media exploitation was first mastered by the Democrats in getting Obama elected, and since then they have honed their techniques and exported them to every significant leftist campaign in the world. They already know it all, even though their demographics and their political challenges are very different to ours.
Their most important operation is voter registration and mobilising the vote of young students and professionals with little or no experience of the real world. They are brilliant at using Soros-funded operations such as Avaaz to build gigantic email lists. And they also use emotion ruthlessly (witness particularly the shameless exploitation of the murder of Jo Cox). But hey couldn’t use our techniques to win over ordinary working class voters if their lives depended on it!
They already know the value of Facebook, but that doesn’t mean they can use it to appeal to people likely to vote for a cause such as Brexit or Donald Trump. They could spend several years punting out soft, appealing memes and videos to build up a big Facebook following, but the moment they tried to harness their reach politically by posting material with which an ordinary working class audience has no sympathy, that reach would collapse.
Hence, the left can’t copy us. The people who can, however, are the hard-core nationalists who read this page. With Exit votes likely to spring up like mushroom over the next few years, there is every reason for individuals who want to develop really serious influence to stop wasting their time putting out a couple of hundred leaflets every Tuesday evening, and do a couple of hours posting hunting and scheduling every day (hey, you can even recycle ours, because we’re not slacking up!)
It is also intended to reach into the pro-Trump movement in the USA. Not because anyone who is new to this now has the time to build up the reach of the Auxiliary Leavers in the UK, but because any number of them could knuckle down and build up following of fifteen to twenty thousand before November – and one hundred of them would do a lot of good in a tight-run contest.
Slow learners
I could have delivered these insights in a private lecture to a small number of nationalist leaders, but most of their organisations are already fully extended and couldn’t give this operation the attention and resources it needs without having to impose cuts on less productive parts of their parties – something close to impossible in any established body. There are also some very slow learners out there, who find new techniques too challenging to comprehend, let alone adopt.
Hence instead I am publishing this in the hope of helping expand the overall use among nationalists of this open source political revolution.
I do not hold it out as a panacea, not least because Facebook is, as already noted, steadily drifting towards a level of liberal totalitarianism which may well, at some point, make it unusable for the sort of campaign outlined above.
I believe that it already well past time for every single nationalist and patriot to open and run back-up pages on the Russian equivalent VK. It will of course be years before VK has enough Western users to give it the critical mass it needs to form public opinion, but it is already entirely suitable as a means of communication between nationalists, and it’s inevitable that pretty soon it will be necessary at least for exchanging information about what is really happening outside of the bubble of MSM censorship.
But if you want to reach the public, the ‘ordinary’ unengaged, ‘all-politicians-are-wankers’ public, then Facebook is, and will for some time remain, by far the best way to do it.
So I urge those of my readers who are seriously interested in making a difference, as opposed to treating nationalism as a sort of social club or hobby, to go away and think about this article. Then to re-read it. Several times. And then to get in touch to arrange to discuss your needs, potential and the effort you will need to achieve it.
Why? Because spreading ‘best practice’ among nationalists, particularly in order to help put right the democratic deficit and to reinvolved alienated parts of our communities with politics, especially within the EU, is part of the core mission of the Alliance for Peace and Freedom.
