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Rowan Croft runs the YouTube political channel Grand Torino. He says that he’s politically centre-right, not extreme right or alt-right, though his channel heavily features figures such as Justin Barrett of the National Party and formerly of Youth Defence, Herrmann Kelly of Irexit, Jim Dowson, the former BNP and Orange Order member who has been involved in supplying equipment to paramilitary vigilanties hunting asylum-seekers crossing the Turkish-Bulgarian border.
During the interview, we talked about Rowan’s faith in Qanon, a bizarre online conspiracy theory which holds that there exists no investigation into Donald Trump conspiring with Russian intelligence, and that the Mueller investigation is, in fact, a cover for investigating how Hillary Clinton and many of her top associates are pedophiles who have abused and murdered dozens of children. Both Rowan and the anonymous online source ‘Q‘ have made many predictions to prove their access to inside knowledge. No substantial prediction has come true.
Several people got in touch with me on twitter to say that they didn’t want me to play it at all. The guest is controversial for reasons you will understand when you hear it, but I don’t dismiss lightly the people who don’t think it should be included at all. The guest, by the way, is Rowan Croft, the YouTube political commentator who says that he is ‘centre-right’. Decide on that for yourself.
I’m not a fan of no-platforming, but I think that it is important take care who you give attention to. It’s all too easy for media to get clicks by featuring the most outrageous speakers, without caring that, in doing so, they shift the centre ground of debate, and make people who are only a little less extremist seem reasonable by comparison.
But that’s not the only consideration, and it’s not the only mechanism at work here. Whether they are religious cults or political extremists, it is a well-worn tactic to select for promotion the most mild and reasonable-sounding of their beliefs. They wait to reveal the most extreme of their views until the new recruit has already bought in to their worldview via its more palatable elements.
Once someone is on that escalator, they rely on groupthink and motivated reasoning to deliver their new adherent towards a position where they also accept the most extreme views of the group. I’m fully aware of the dangers of giving oxygen to extremism; but sometimes that’s not the only consideration.
One thing that Rowan said during the interview was that he would supply a source for his claim that quote, ‘Sweden has become the rape capital of the world’.
If you Google those words, ‘Sweden rape capital’, you will find literally millions of hits, mostly for alt-right blogs that circulate and recycle that phrase. It has become almost an article of faith for the far right or alt-right or whatever you want to call them. It’s clearly incredibly important for their belief system, and you can see why.
Firstly, Sweden is the type of Nordic welfare state that is the antithesis of the far-right’s world view, so it’s important to them to find evidence that it is having problems. Secondly, in the migrant crisis that peaked in 2015, Sweden accepted more refugees proportional to its population than any other European country. I should say here that this is still only a fraction of the proportion accepted by some non-European countries like Lebanon, but that’s a different story.
But the focus was on Sweden, and the fact that it is a successful welfare state, and that it accepted so many refugees by European standards gives the far-right two reasons to want to believe any claim that would prove that it’s a terrible place. The belief that they settled on was best articulated by Nigel Farrage who said
Pro-rata Sweden has taken more young male migrants than any other country in the Europe. And there has been a dramatic rise in sexual crime in Sweden – so much so that Malmo is now the rape capital of Europe, and some argue, perhaps the rape capital of the world.
Basically the claim is that stupid Sweden ‘let in’ thousands of dirty foreign refugees who immediately set about raping the pure blonde girls of Sweden. It’s a story that could come straight from any Ku Klux Klan propaganda. It’s an incredibly powerful story – powerful enough to overcome even the most obvious facts.
I said that if you Google that phrase you get millions of hits, mostly for alt-right blogs, but one of the first hits that you get is for the BBC article, associated with that programme, More or Less who examine statistical claims, the one that I played a clip of for Rowan. The article utterly debunks the claim that there is a spike in reported rapes associated with the arrival of the large number of refugees in 2015.
But Rowan says that he doesn’t trust the BBC, true to his word, he pointed me to the official Swedish government statistics website. Here is where the cognitive dissonance really kicks in. The Swedish statistics website is that he sent is the one where the BBC got their figures too, and those figures, the ones that Rowan linked me to, utterly refute what he’s saying.
The figures cover the period from 2008 to 2017, there is some noise in the figures as you might expect, but the level of rape is remarkably flat. On the website, in the notes for this podcast, I’ve also created a chart with the rate, rather than the absolute numbers, to take account of changes of in the population, and I’ve overlaid it on the Irish equivalent, and it’s notable how the Irish figure swings wildly from year to year, where the Swedish one does not.
Note that the Irish figures have a separate scale, on the right. This is because the Irish figures appear to be much lower than the Swedish ones, I’m comparing the trend rather than the absolute numbers. As well as very flawed collection of crime statistics in Ireland, the discrepancy is explained by the different standards of reporting in Sweden, where a point is made of recording every single criminal act. In Sweden, a woman reporting that she had been raped by her husband every night for a year would generate 365 separate records of rape; in Ireland that would be recorded as one crime.
That is probably an artefact of the figures, we know that there are serious problems in the collection of Irish crime statistics, but the key point here is that the very information that Rowan sent me absolutely proves the exact reverse of what he is claiming. There is no change in the rape figures associated with the arrival of a large number of refugees in 2015.
I don’t particularly want to harp on the point of rebutting Rowan, but I think that there is another important point here, particularly for the listeners who said that they think that I shouldn’t feature him at all.
I understand where they are coming from, but I think there is a bigger issue here. Rowan rejects any description of himself as an extremist, and that’s up to himself; other people will have their own opinions, but I think that some of Rowan’s views would be regarded as outside the Pale by most Irish people.
But the bottom line is that he is promoting his views, social media means that he can reach out to people unmediated, with nobody else checking his facts or challenging him. I think that it is important to put to him the craziest of things that he says, to test his grip on the facts, to examine the perhaps more appealing views he promotes in the light of all the other things he says, and to evaluate their truth by checking the claims that are verifiable.
