Last week anti-Islam activist Anne-Marie Waters officially launched her bid to become UKIP leader. Her general ideas were very much in the mould of her “hero” Marine Le Pen. A mix of nationalist isolationism hostile to intergovernmental organisations (she not only wants Brexit but an end to the entire EU and her manifesto seems to suggest abandoning NATO) and trade unionist socialism (her second favourite topic is the NHS, she mentioned something on getting rid of tuition fees, and was previously a hard-left strike supporting trade unionist with Labour).
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| Waters' so called "dream team" ... |
Anyway Waters has been complaining on Twitter lately of the use of the term “far-right” to describe her movement. Yet her manifesto launch and the sort of people she was bringing along with her, and moreover her activity over the past couple of years more generally, certainly will not do much in the way of altering that impression of those who may hold that view.
First up chairing the launch event was Jack Buckby, apparently her campaign manager who announced he’s “known Anne-Marie for some years and proud to call her a friend and a colleague”. Buckby is an ex-BNP member who used to pose for photos alongside Nick Griffin who he regarded as “a top bloke”. He since says he left as they became “quite nasty” (a discovery that hardly required Sherlock Holmes), and instead joined another party called “Liberty GB” led by a man named Paul Weston.
However Weston in his own words actually says “I agree with a lot of BNP policy” and describes himself of the “National Front/BNP mould when it comes to the defence of English people”, but was opposed to Griffin on his Jewish/Zionist conspiracy theories.
Weston obsessively talks of “white genocide”, he claims whites who opposed apartheid South Africa had “a mental illness”, his party also has complained of things such as a “negress” winning a beauty pageant in Helsinki. He also actually admits he’s “hoping Islam commits a number of atrocities over the coming years” (a view shared by Buckby who stated after Wilders’ election defeat “only terror can save Netherlands now”) to counteract a “PC long march through the institutions” and even floats the idea of violence and suggests “if we and our children and grandchildren are to survive the 21st century, it will be via physical revolution rather than the ballot box”.
“Liberty GB’s” best known policy was a ban on Muslims holding public office. Also featured on their site include articles pushing conspiracy theories about liberal Muslims such as Maajid Nawaz being an “expert taqiyya merchant” who only deradicalised for money, and glorifications of Radovan Karadzic as “a hero of the West who should’ve been acclaimed not condemned”.
They also want the death penalty reintroduced and applied to “traitor politicians” (Tony Blair is compared to Lord Haw Haw and Hermann Göring). According to Weston on Twitter “Angela Merkel & all Muslim loving Western politicians will one day stand trial before peoples courts charged with genocide” and to “deport the migrants” and “prosecute the traitor politicians/journalists” are the “two steps for European survival”.
As for Buckby he’s more recently best known for contesting the Batley & Spen by-election following Jo Cox’s death (which he first speculated was an “attempted false flag” from the Remain campaign) where his campaign circulated tasteless posts exclaiming “DEATH OF A FOOL”. He’s also part of the alt-right “ProudBoys” where he writes “cuck of the week” articles on people such as Sam Harris, and reportedly also previously wrote posts railing against the “negroid culture” which “goes against respect for oneself dressing suitably and speaking English correctly”, and “a majority of modern women aged 18-25” who “are generally pretentious, stupid sluts”.
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| Waters, Tommy Robinson & Paul Weston with PEGIDA |
Incidentally Waters is of course co-leader of PEGIDA UK alongside Weston, who previously referred to UKIP as “a racist party” with “an utter contempt for native Britons”, and complains they are “useless on Islam and non-white immigration”, however now is saying he’s thinking of scrapping Liberty GB and joining forces with Waters if she were to win. Buckby meanwhile despite being barred from the party as an ex-BNP member, and previously arguing “UKIP should be boycotted”, attacking Nigel Farage and accusing the party of promoting a “multicultural hate agenda”, has been one of her closest campaign staff and most prominent activists on social media encouraging people to sign up and vote for her.
Anyway, moving on as this was certainly far from the only dubious figure chosen to speak at this event. The next speaker at the leadership manifesto launch was UKIP councillor Brian Silvester, another of Waters most noteworthy activists on social media, but also a man deeply lost in the weird conspiracy land of Infowars, “globalists” and the “Rothschild”, “New World Order” agenda.
According to him Emmanuel Macron is a “NWO adherent” and “just another Rothschild stooge”, who is “peddling more the same globalist agenda” and “will finish France it will be an Islamic state”. He also of course is a big fan of Donald Trump for “putting the brakes on the globalist agenda that was being shoved down our throats” and retweets “we will fight against the globalists agenda & attempts to remove Bannon from the White House”.Furthermore he thinks George Soros “causes civil unrest and violence in multiple countries” and “belongs in jail”, accuses Commons Speaker John Bercow of being a “closet Zionist Bolshevik infiltrator”, and says the “UK should follow what Putin is doing” in “putting interests of his country before international law”.
His timeline is full of retweets for lunatics from the Infowars scene such as Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Mike Cernovich, Stefan Molyneux, Roger Stone, or Jack Posobiec (as an aside he’s also retweeted groups like Britain First too). So unsurprisingly he pushes stuff such as the Seth Rich conspiracy, the “Deep State”, or the the “Syria hoax” hashtag from outlets such as the absurd Assadist conspiracy nut “Partisangirl”, Cernovich, and even David Duke, forwarding theories Obama or the BBC were staging a chemical attack to frame Assad, along with more old school conspiracies about JFK repeatedly.
Silvester also is a big fan of Piers Corbyn, the deranged conspiracy weather forecasting brother of the Labour leader Jeremy, and his views on the weather are suitably wacky. According to him “global warming is the biggest science hoax ever”, he’s forwarded stories claiming “climate change is a hoax developed as part of a secret plot by UN to takeover the world” and “create New World Order”, a scare “orchestrated” by the CIA, or “a geostrategic weapon” used to harm Putin. He thinks Al Gore and Soros (again) should be tried for “crimes against humanity” for this “biggest scam in history”.
This guy is an obvious conspiratorial loon, yet Waters says she was “proud” to have him at introduce her leadership manifesto launch, and he is her most retweeted Twitter account campaigning for her.
Also at this launch were YouTube media outlet Rebel Media best known for their fondness of using Antifa knuckleheads as a prop for puff coverage towards genuinely far-right groups or people. Their British section includes someone who’s used slurs such as “pig jews” and says even “secular Muslims are terrorist enablers”, plus an anti-Semitic Rothschild conspiracist pizzagate enthusiast, whilst the guy who was at the event interviewing Waters thinks Maajid Nawaz’s think tank the Quilliam Foundation are “violent, lying thugs” whose “agenda is terrorism” and “should be classed as a terror group”.
All those people from Rebel Media and Waters herself are good friends with another one of their Twitter activists called “Annie Greek UK lover”. She helped organise the “UK against Hate” march in Manchester last month, which was picked up and promoted by Rebel Media, and spoke alongside Tommy Robinson and co at that event. She also was pictured as part of Waters campaign team at her launch, and been sharing multiple jolly pictures with them at all over the past few months, and has organised another match for September that Waters and the Rebel crew will also apparently all be attending again.
According to her “if you are a Muslim then rape is what u believe”, and she agrees “ALL Muslims who live in Western society need to be interviewed” and “those that don’t speak out should be classified as traitors and shipped to the Middle East” and “non EU citizens should be banned” from the UK to end “ellen culture” (sic).
This woman constantly refers to Muslims as “barbarians”, “inbreds”, “monkeys”, monkey racers” and “monkey looking men”, “dirty monkeys” that “I'm to disgusted to even touch”, or after saying she was being harsh on monkeys “just worthless creatures”. In regards to migrants she demands “those apes should return in the jungle they came from” and posts images of them “practicing their natural monkey climbing skills”.
Also according to her Turkish people are “inbred rapists”, “rapists barbarians”, “barbaric subhumans” and says she refused to be treated by a Turkish doctor and “would rather die”. Meanwhile Somalis are also “inbreds” who “look like monkeys” but “don’t even have a monkeys IQ”. And says she boycotts “Paki curry or Arab kebab” so not to “support their economy”.
She calls Hillary a “pedophile goddess” and suggests support for her from black people was down to low IQ levels, plus if she won “all white Americans would have fled USA asking for asylum in Europe”. Merkel “the most obvious example” of a mentally ill communist. Whilst Tony Blair is “the ultimate traitor”, deserves the death penalty and should be “publicly executed” along with George Soros. Also “anyone not supporting brexit is a traitor and should be sentenced as one”.Reminder this is one of Waters most regularly retweeted accounts. Her interactions with her “dear friend” on Twitter include agreeing to get together for their marches, or sharing photos from events with mutual “I love you” messages. It’s hard to believe over a period of months of following her on Twitter and several meetings in person, it could not be worked out that this woman who’s tweeted about “monkeys” or “inbreds” hundreds of times isn’t particularly the sort you want on your campaign team or desire hero worship from.
Also posting pictures alongside Waters at her campaign launch included a fan of David Duke who tweets black crime articles from Daily Stormer and have “joined UKIP for @AMDWaters!! She’s our only hope!” Or a Britain First fan who posts Oswald Mosley interviews and retweets of Nick Griffin and “joined UKIP in order to help elect @AMDWaters as leader”. Obviously she wouldn’t have been aware of this, nor is it a suggestion of holding them herself, but still not a good look for someone complaining of mentions of “far right”.
So just to recap, Waters’ leadership launch went as follows. She invited an ex-BNP member from a party which campaigns for all Muslims banned from public office to chair the launch. Also invited an Infowars conspiracy crank to introduce her to the stage. Posted selfies with campaign volunteers and supporters who are basically fans of Britain First. Had puff coverage from her friends at the ridiculous far-right promoting Rebel Media outlet.
Then topped it all off retweeting endorsements from people who go on Red Ice Radio (where Waters herself has recently been on as well) such as Ingrid Carlqvist (described by Waters as “my friend”) and Anke Van dermeersch (who spoke at Waters “Islam kills women” event last year, and who notably met with the Golden Dawn in Greece last year), and others she regards as “heroes” such as Geert Wilders or Tommy Robinson. Again to repeat, that is not doing much to change minds of those who perceive this movement to be “far-right”.
As an anti-Islam activist Waters has moved in some highly dubious circles, and the list of those Waters has praised, promoted, and/or shared platform with could go on. Many would argue her embrace of various of the characters already mentioned, along with her enthusiastic endorsements of Wilders as “my favourite politician”, Le Pen as a “hero”, the AfD in Germany, along with virtually every other similar European party all commonly associated with the term would be enough to consider her movement “far-right”.
There is an alternative take on this, in that she herself has not put forward views as extreme as some of the people she befriends and associates with, and may not even have been aware of all their views. Although that take also suggests severe levels of ignorance and poor judgement on her behalf and is hard to believe given both the length of time, and quantity of people she has travelled with amongst these circles. She has in fact already been publicly challenged on allying with Weston.
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| A potential cabinet "liked" by Waters ... |
The much more plausible and likely scenario is she has allied with people like Weston, Buckby or Carlqvist for the past few years simply because her own views have moved closer towards them than to others, and does not see her disagreements as deal breakers. After all she must know these people by now, but still clearly allies with them often retweeting them, and has liked tweets suggesting as prime minister she put Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, and Buckby in her cabinet, or that Hopkins and Britain First’s Jayda Fransen are “women that would be great leaders”.
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| Among the "rapefugee" tweets that Waters has retweeted |
However whilst likely most would disagree on much of the rhetoric and solutions, it is still worth noting some of Waters' grievances do have merit (albeit exaggerated in reference to calling Germany “a violent third-world hell-hole” or that the UN say Sweden will be third world by 2030 which comes from reading too much Breitbart and conspiracy sites) and reading some of her work there is clearly an old school feminist there who in fact genuinely cares for women’s rights.
Her critique of the sort of confused “World Hijab Day” celebrating brand of “feminism” exhibited for instance by the ludicrously stupid “Women’s March” leaders is essentially correct, and her rage against it clearly does not come from the same angles as MRA types, Molyneux, Lauren Southern, or some of her allies amongst her circles who may be closer described as “trad-cons” and regret moving beyond the 1950’s.
But Waters also clearly has an extremely high tolerance for allying with such people and frankly even worse over agreement essentially over Islam and “ethno-nationalism”.
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| Waters with "my friend" Swedish Red Ice Radio host Ingrid Carlqvist |
Even she would have to concede that some of the people she has promoted, praised or allied with and described as “friends”, events she has attended, the rhetoric of “rapefugees” etc, accusing actual liberal Muslim activists of “taqiyya”, abandoning and tearing up intergovernmental organisations, or talk of putting media or politicians on trial for treason, would not be widely considered remotely near to the centre in the context of British politics.
In fact they’d all be considered commonly held views on the “far-right”. And you suspect Waters surely knows this, considering she must see the wave of Enoch Powell memes and EDL types in her Twitter mentions, and says herself she wants to make UKIP “radical”, which is by definition far removed from the centre.
Regardless of labels though, one thing Waters would admit is she is bringing Le Pen style politics to UKIP and a surge of membership emanating from followers of people like her friends Tommy Robinson or Paul Weston. Odds of her winning the leadership were slashed after a report of 1000 new members signing up believed to be motivated to support her. Win or lose, how this plays out will be interesting.
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