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The Tabloids' Brexit Outrage Is Designed to Troll Us Into Paralysis

They know exactly what they're going. It's a trap.

Friday's Express front page

You might have noticed that some sectors of our fearlessly free press have lately started to seem a little unhinged. The Daily Mail, which was always the printed equivalent of somebody's ranting uncle, is now purple and choking, eyes streaming with frustrated sadism as little white globs of fury fountain from a hideously engorged mouth. The Sun, everyone's favourite casually violent pub-banter idiot, has gone into a blind and thrashing rage; pint-glasses smash against everything in sight, blood and piss mingle in sticky rivulets down its clothes. The Telegraph and the Spectator are hunched into hideous new hieroglyphs, bent double under the weight of their own sneers; the Express, its world in collapse through darting eyes, is stockpiling weapons and barricading the doors.

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These people want fear – panic tingling under your skin from the moment you wake up; slow-stewed resentment sloshing through the underpasses of a greyer, grimmer Britain; bitterness falling in the constant drizzle, all while the front pages of the newspapers are more achingly lurid every day – and they're getting it.

This has been going on for months now, but today saw some really unprecedented hysteria. After the High Court's ruling on Article 50, in which three judges decided that our future shouldn't be put under the dictatorial control of one fanatic with her cabinet of shuffling non-entities and her secret unknowable plans, the reactionary press exploded with incoherent rage. "Enemies of the people," the Mail trilled, above portraits of the three judges. The Mail Online shockingly revealed one judge to be "openly gay". The Express sagely commented that "truly, November 3, 2016, was the day democracy died", before adding that "it is not in the British nature to take injustice lying down – more than ever, your country needs you to fight for its freedom". (They also described the constitutional ruling as "a plot too improbable even for a Franz Kafka novel", which is actually a decent comparison, but not in the way they think it is.)

All power must go to the executive, all must sacrifice for the lifeblood of the nation, all quibbling is treason. This language is dangerous and insane, no longer just floating off the edges of fascism, but outrightly, gleefully totalitarian. On the face of it, this couldn't be happening at a stranger time. The court's ruling might be a roadblock for Theresa May, but haven't we already had the referendum, and didn't these people win? Aren't they getting everything they want? Why are they so paranoid, so furious, so outraged, when there's no longer really anything standing in their way?

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This anger isn't really new, but the targets have shifted. The reactionary tabloids have always been swivel-eyed and apoplectic whenever it came to migrants or asylum seekers, travellers, benefits claimants, Muslims and queer people, demanding every kind of violence within and outside of the law. The liberal-metropolitan bourgeoisie was grudgingly, condescendingly tolerated, and that toleration was mutual – you laugh at the tacky tabloids, you might wear your "hated by the Daily Mail " badge, or call it the Daily Fail on Twitter, but that was that. Not any more: they don't just disdain nice sandal-wearing lefties now, they're lunging for blood. (Which could be a workable definition of fascism: it's what happens when the social violence that's always meted out against various broadly defined undesirables is turned inwards towards people who once thought of themselves as respectable.) All this demands outrage, and at long last there's outrage.

A common theme is to ask if these papers know what they're doing. There have already been victims; only a few months ago a sitting MP was murdered in the streets by a right-wing fanatic who gave his name in court as "Death to Traitors, Freedom for Britain" – have they forgotten what this kind of hysteria leads to? They haven't forgotten. This is all very deliberate. It's a trap.

The point isn't just to stir up fury and hatred on the right; the papers are fucking with you, filling their pages with outright fascism precisely so you can identify it. When they churn out invective against "traitors", or call for the insufficiently patriotic to be fought tooth and nail, or demand that anyone who disagrees with them be silenced, they know exactly what kind of associations this is bringing up – and then they can turn it around. Look at these out-of-touch paranoiacs, accusing us of being fascists, if you can credit it, when all we did was talk in fascist language, encourage fascist attitudes and propose fascist solutions. Who are the real crazies?

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They want one national spittle-flecked shouting match; everyone crazed and desperate, all the political unreason that undergirds the general discourse scrubbed of any patina of reason and gleaming on the surface. They want perpetual outrage, constant, swamping and pervasive. Why now? Because they can only pull this kind of trick once they've already won, when the outrage of a besieged and demoralised left is no longer dangerous.

This leads to a kind of paralysing dilemma: the media's simpering totalitarians might want you to start spewing as much fear and terror as they do, but simply ignoring it is hardly an option either. After all, it's not like there's any meaningful difference between simple fascist propaganda and a calculated, contrived imitation; the result is the same, the ideology exists in its own articulation. The best response is not to abandon outrage, but to push through it, to move past the paralysis of correctly identifying everything and doing nothing, and start thinking about what is to be done.

So the eccentric private interests behind some of Britain's biggest newspapers are taking on the language and signifiers of fascism to get what they want; now what ? It's not as if the organised left doesn't have experience dealing with fascism, even if it's fascism of a pettier, more localised type. The Express might be better organised than the EDL, but when the Nazis try to march through our streets, there have always been people ready to tear up a few bricks from the pavement and chase them off. When the same thing happens on a national scale, all we need is a more sophisticated brick.

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@sam_kriss

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