Podcast: Play in new window
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Kev Collins’ Youtube channel his here. Ben Scallan writes for Gript.
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That’s a clip I played on the podcast a while back, it’s from one of the far-right protest a while back, and we’ve had a couple more of those anti-immigration protests in the last while. I saw some comments on social media about those protests, one in particular that caught my eye with, some let’s say unflattering photos of a group of protesters, and the comment was ‘Not one junior cert between the lot of them‘.
I’m certainly not going to argue that that woman in the clip or any of her cohort will be winning any Nobel prizes, but I don’t think that it’s constructive to call them stupid. It might cheer the troops, but it’s unhelpful for two reasons. First, it doesn’t win any converts. That is a debate well worn, so I’m not going to get into it.
But secondly, it’s dangerous to assume that everyone who doesn’t agree with you, doesn’t agree because they are stupid. At best, that leaves you dangerously unprepared.
And it’s important to recognise that that what you’re hearing there isn’t just random nonsense. There are clever people out there who are who are promoting very extreme messages.
I don’t know if that woman is aware of it, but the version of the conspiracy theory that she is giving was created by a French far-right figure called Renaud Camus, who published a book in 2011, Le Grand Remplacement, basically saying what that woman was saying, although Camus’ book was specific to France. Renaud Camus, by the way should not be confused with Albert Camus, who actually is a noted philosopher. Renaud Camus’ conspiracy theory has been spread widely on far-right websites, and adapted for many other countries including, as we hear there, for Ireland.
It is by no means original as a conspiracy theory, the nazis had a similar concept which they called Umvolkung, which referred to the supposed dilution of the Germanic people by Slavs in ethnically-mixed areas Eastern Europe, supposedly organised by the Jews, and in 1995 the American neonazi David Lane published his White Genocide Manifesto, which claimed that civil rights for African Americans was a plot to wipe out White people, organised by the Jews, and earlier the American lawyer with, let’s say a deep interest in ethnic issues, Madison Grant wrote a book in 1916 called The Passing of the Great Race, which claimed that the post-slavery migration of African Americans to the big industrial cities was an effort to wipe out White people organised by … the Jews … you might be noticing a pattern here.
Various incarnations of this theory have also been promoted by people on the fringes of polite society, including American journalists Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, French politician far-right leader Marine Le Pen, and it has inspired terrorism, including the 2019 attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 51 people, the 2011 attack on the Norwegian island of Utøya in which a total of 77 people were murdered, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.
This conspiracy theory, I think, is popular with … the people it’s popular with, because it satiates two racist desires for the price of one, the denigration of people seen to be inferior and sexually threatening, who are to be hated, and the blaming of people who are superior and to be feared, almost always the Jews, although in more polite society they are referred to as ‘the liberal media elite’, or some variation of that euphemism.
The fact that a supposedly all-powerful cabal have been trying to wipe out the white race for more than a century, with nothing to show for their efforts doesn’t seem to strike these people.
But I don’t want to talk about those people.
I want to talk about people who don’t go in for swivel-eyed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. I want to talk about people who say that they have rational, reasonable objections to immigration, or objections to mass immigration, or objections to uncontrolled mass immigration, and who say that they are unfairly tarred with same brush as the lunatic racists.
They say that it’s not possible to discuss issues like resource constraints which are strained by the arrival of what they call large numbers of immigrants or refugees, and they want to talk about how some groups of immigrants are incompatible with the culture of the communities that they arrive into, and that integration of immigrants into wider society can be poor, or fail entirely, creating culturally-isolated ghettos.
I think it’s perfectly fine to talk about all those things.
I also think that sometimes well-meaning people can shut down those discussions because, for them, the discussions resonate too strongly with racist themes, and issues that should be discussed calmly become taboo.
The thing is, I also think that there are some clever racists out there who recognise that they won’t get far ranting on about Jewish conspiracies, so they cloak their racism in a veneer of practical concern.
So the well-meaning liberals who shy away from practical discussions around immigration aren’t right, but they are not always wrong. At least some people talking about practical concerns are using it as a way to promote their own racist views. That doesn’t mean they all are; that doesn’t mean the concerns aren’t valid.
But it’s reasonable to look people’s track record as a whole and point out any inconsistencies.
That brings me to Ben Scallan. Ben is undoubtedly a talented guy, I’ve spoken to him, we discussed it, but ultimately he decided not to come on the podcast, which is his right of course.
Ben’s Twitter/X bio used to say that he is the son of a Dubliner father and Jamaican mother; these days it lists him as senior political correspondent at Gript Media where writes and posts video content frequently.
Which is what brought me to one of the videos he posted in advance of last year’s local elections; the set and graphics are done up to look like a news broadcast, and this is how he starts the piece:
He goes on to explain that what he is referring to is the fact that, unlike with Dáil and presidential elections, and referendums, there is no citizenship requirement to vote in the local elections.
And Ben frames this as an attempt to fix elections by buying immigrant votes with supposedly luxury provisions for asylum-seekers.
There is not doubt about what Ben means to say there. He’s saying that the government is taking active steps to change the composition of the electorate to the advantage of themselves, and of immigrants, at the expense of indigenous Irish people.
To be fair, Ben covers his ass with one quick comment in the piece, and I want you to listen to it carefully.
Did you listen carefully?
Did you hear Ben say that non-nationals were given the right to vote in Irish local elections in 2004? Because actually he didn’t say that. He said:
… and he followed it up almost immediately with a reference to a small technical change that was made in 2004, which could leave you with the impression that is the ‘for years’ that he was talking about.
And if that was the impression you got, you would be wrong. Very wrong. Wrong by more than a century.
The Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898, an act of the British parliament, which obviously controlled Ireland at the time was the act that created Irish local government, more or less as we know it today. That says a lot about how much Irish local government needs reform, but that’s a rant for a different day.
Before 1898 there were various property, gender, and other qualifications that were required to vote, but these were not put in place for the elections to local authorities. At the time there weren’t really any citizenship requirements to vote, because the concept of citizenship didn’t really exist in the way it developed in the twentieth century, passports weren’t required to travel, it just wasn’t a thing.
And basically, that never changed. Ireland isn’t so unusual in this, other countries that give the vote in local elections to non-citizens in one way or another include Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Jamaica, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malawi, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Trinidad y Tobago, UK, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
So what Ben characterises as an evil plot to thwart the will of the Irish electorate by importing hoards durty forriners is actually… nothing. The Irish government has not changed a provision that dates back to the time of British rule, and is common around the world.
And I suppose I could leave it there. A misleading scare story that has literally nothing behind it.
But I think that that isn’t just it. Because a common complaint that you hear in anti-immigration circles is that immigrants don’t integrate in Irish society. At the time of writing, the Gript website has more than 300 stories mentioning the word integration, mostly stories bemoaning the failure or inability of immigrants to integrate. A good chunk of those stores were written by Ben himself. And here, he mocks the supposed lack of integration:
Let’s leave aside error that he could vote if he showed up in Slovenia tomorrow, you have to be a resident, and you have to get on the electoral role, which both take several years, because what really gets me on this is that they are trying to corner immigrants into a no-win situation – if they don’t integrate, then that proves that they are bad, and if they do integrate and perform their civic duty and vote, or god forbid, actually put themselves up for election, then they are part of some dastardly scheme by the globalist elite to rig elections for Manorhamilton Urban District Council.
And it’s worth remembering that, at the end of the day, the electorate get the chance to decide on the fate of the candidates in the election, be it for Manorhamilton Urban District Council, or for Dublin Bay South where Ben was a candidate for one of the far-right splinter groups in the 2020 general election, and got about half of one per cent of the vote.
