In the United Kingdom, Axel Rudakubana was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 52 years last Thursday for his stabbing murder of three girls and assault of ten more in July 2024. Rudakubana stabbed one victim over 200 times and nearly decapitated another. Police discovered ricin poison, racist anti-white and anti-colonial literature, an Al-Qaeda training manual, and a library on mass murder in Rudakubana’s room. Authorities and social services had been aware of him since 2019, when he was thirteen years old and experiencing homicidal ideation, but never took concrete action for fear of being tagged as “racist” and “far right.”
Rudakubana was born in the United Kingdom. He is not an immigrant himself, but does seem to have adopted an outsider ideology that justified his racist rage against society in his own mind. He is not a member of a terrorist organization, either, just a young man who wanted to terrorize British society. The sentencing judge called Rudakubana “evil,” which seems an appropriate descriptor. However, there has been a corresponding and conscious effort to disconnect his atrocity from his immutable characteristics and background. This campaign of talking points is the flip-side of the effort British public servants made to duck their responsibilities regarding Rudakubana for fear of being tagged as “racist” or “far right.”
Reacting to the verdict for Sky News, Tawhid Islam, an executive of the Liverpool Muslim Council, blamed misogyny for Rudakubana’s crime. In reality, Rudakubana is simply a coward. He had already tried to attack a school full of students with a hockey stick, but he was foiled by a full-grown man. Rudakabana chose to attack a group of young females this time because they were less able to defend themselves.
Mr. Islam also argued that “diversity is our strength.” Borrowed from progressive Democrats in the United States, this hackneyed liberal-left slogan no longer works on either side of the Atlantic. The magic is simply gone.
That Sky News interview captures two key verbal tactics of the liberal cognitive campaign against popular reaction. First, Tawhid Islam shunted blame for the crime to a relatively safer area of political discussion (misogyny). Then he invoked the liberal god of Diversity to imply that further discussion of Rudakubana’s background is racist, hence off limits. He changed the subject and then he squelched the uncomfortable debate: this is bog-standard liberalism, now.
As always, Prime Minister Keir Starmer reacted to the verdict by worrying about the rise of the “far right” in Britain. Similarly, Starmer has defended his record as a prosecutor during the investigations of Pakistani immigrant “grooming gangs” (read: rape gangs) in Britain by expressing concern that “the far right” will make political gains as the cases come to trial. Indeed, recent trials have revealed sickening details to the public, inspiring natural revulsion. Starmer has resisted a Parliamentary investigation into the gangs, conceding only two days before the Rudakubana trial.
The timing seems significant. For while his rampage was unrelated to the gangs, Rudakubana benefitted from the same racial favoritism. Police departments across Britain were afraid to arrest Pakistani nationals, though they were not afraid to arrest British parents for trying to rescue their daughters from the traffickers. Police put down a spate of public protests after Rudakubana’s attack, arresting Britons for incitement with “hateful language,” increasing public resentment against the two-tier system of justice in Britain.
Media outlets, particularly the BBC, marginalized the scandal, labeling anyone who spoke of it as “racist” and “far right.” This campaign of suppression was so successful that a series of Elon Musk tweets over the New Year’s holiday actually surprised millions of Britons with horrible details that they had never known, for they had never been publicized before. “Two-tier Kier” reacted to this development by accusing Elon Musk, who admittedly supports far-right parties across Europe, of “misinformation.”
Ah yes, “misinformation.” Readers will recall that just four years ago, or one American presidential term, it was “misinformation” to say that Covid-19 had likely escaped from a substandard biolab in Wuhan, China, or that it was created by gain-of-function research. To say these things was to risk mainstream media marginalization, social media ostracism, silencing, and career death. Funny story, it turns out that the CIA now agrees those people were right all along, and the people who denied it were faking the "science" the whole time.
Similarly, a whole lot of “misinformation” about Southport and other grooming gangs in the UK has turned out to be not only true, but the mere tip of a proverbial iceberg. It turns out that “misinformation” can turn out to be inconveniently true information, that even more important information can be obscured behind the word. It has been politicized beyond repair. People hear it now and instantly assume they are being lied to. Widespread cynicism is the result.
Not being British, but American, I can only speak for the United States. Calling someone “racist” here no longer has the same effect that it had in 2020. For during the period between 6 January 2021 and Election Day 2024, so many elements of the mythology of racist policing have turned out to be false.
We were told for years that George Floyd died because of a racist policeman, and that it was racist to say otherwise, when it turns out that heart tissue samples which might prove he died of fentanyl overdose were never even tested. Police shootings of black citizens are far less common than Black Lives Matter activists and progressive leftists had us believe, while their activism has saved exactly zero net black lives: black-on-black murders have in fact proliferated in the era of “defund the police.” Whoops!
Progressive cities and states that encouraged homelessness, “sanctuary” for unauthorized immmigrants, antifa strongholds, and non-prosecution of shoplifters have seen predictable results: crime-ridden streets, closed businesses, and declining turnout for the Democrats who took part in it all. The trial of Daniel Penny was so nakedly political, so emblematic of two-tier, racialized justice, that Americans could not unsee it.
Justice is supposed to be blind. The goddess of justice in American civic religion is a blindfolded woman holding a sword of retribution in one hand and balancing scales in the other. Across the western world, starting in the United States but magnified in Britain and elsewhere, avowedly-liberal regimes have removed the blindfold in a misbegotten effort to right past wrongs in the present.
The impulse to have it both ways — to give the immigrant or the ethnic citizen special protections against police powers, while simultaneously smearing the critic of such protections as racist and reactionary — now defines western liberalism. In a profoundly illiberal turn, the sword of justice has been reserved for critics of this policy regime. Those who would replace the blindfold and re-balance the scales are deemed heretics and outsiders, “the right wing,” actual Nazis and fascists.
Over time, this has the effect of galvanizing support for the political right, driving voters away from the Democratic or Labour Party. In the privacy of the ballot booth, people give vent to opinions that are unsafe to air in public. Media participation in the gaslighting of public opinion does not reduce racism or increase social tolerance, in fact it does quite the opposite.
Alex Rudakubana reminds me of William “Willie” Horton. During the 1988 presidential race, the George H. W. Bush campaign used television ads against the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, that used Horton’s image. Horton had been convicted of murder, but was allowed to take weekend furloughs from prison because Gov. Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have ended the practice. Horton encountered police while on furlough, panicked, fled, and eventually committed a home invasion in which he raped a Maryland woman and stabbed her fiancé.
Americans were rightfully annoyed that a murderer had been set free to assault and rape people. Furlough programs were an example of the soft-on-crime approach that had the approval of liberal social scientists, but had long since worn out its welcome with taxpayers. To this day, it is common wisdom that the ads were racist when the ads made no mention of Horton’s race. Instead, to this day, the “racism” in the ad is deemed to be Horton’s photograph. That’s it. That’s the entire racism.
Viewers saw a black man, and on this basis the liberal intelligentsia still believes that a silent horde of racist television viewers voted for Bush, swinging the election. Lee Atwater, the political hand who came up with the ads after watching Democrat Al Gore question Dukakis on the furlough program during the primary debate that year, did not help matters with a deathbed confession to racism in his own thinking. Yet in the ad itself, only Horton’s blackness was communicated to viewers, and only by a photograph of Horton.
Liberals immediately and loudly complained about racism in the ads and it worked against Democrats in 1988, for in fact the vast ‘silent majority’ of American voters were repelled by the policy itself, and then infuriated by the gaslighting. Dukakis was the third Democratic nominee in a row with a perception of soft-on-crime policy to go down in Electoral College flames. Americans did not care if they were “racist” for opposing the idiotic luxury beliefs of their political elites, such as the supposed efficacy of prison furlough programs for murderers.
I was alive and politically aware at the time, so I knew people who did not care about Horton’s race, but decried the policy of furloughs. Horton’s blackness mattered most to the people decrying the advertisement. No one else cared. In American politics, this is called “waving the bloody shirt,” a term dating to the eve of the American Civil War. Social justice advocates have waved William Horton’s image as a bloody shirt since 1988.
The term “far-right mob” is a bloody shirt that the British elites wave to justify suppression of public dissent. It presumes that citizens have no legitimate complaints about the kid gloves that the British state wears with citizens of one color versus the iron fist applied to dissidents of another color.
Counterterrorism officials looked at Rudakubana and dismissed the danger. After his arrest, UK justice withheld the mugshot of Axel Rudakubana until his trial for fear of tainting the jury pool, and media outlets obediently used only pictures of the killer as a child. Meanwhile, police arrested or interrogated white British citizens for naughty racist tweets about immigrants. The phrase “non-crime hate incident” has come to define the Orwellian state of British justice. No one is allowed to discuss the racist elephant in the room, because racism.
Western liberals must stop calling everyone Nazis and fascists before they make Nazis and fascists fashionable again, stop calling contrary opinions “misinformation” to justify their own policy failures. Borrowed from progressive political discourse, this noxious habit becomes repellent to majorities of citizens. Over time, they develop immunity to the shaming. They embrace it.
When politicians protect evil in the name of fighting racism, they only empower the politics of resentment, reaction, and ethnonationalism against themselves. They elect the populists they fear most. “Fine,” voters say. “I will be ‘far right’ then.” It has happened in Sweden, in France, in the Netherlands. It is happening in Germany. It is happening across the west because western liberalism forgot its own best values of equal justice. They forgot that the goddess is supposed to be blind.