The deplorables gambit
How saying “They’re calling you all far-right” has helped normalise the far-right.
Outside a library in Bristol two small groups of protestors faced off against each other.
One side was there to demonstrate against the library’s decision to hold a Drag Story Time session, where the performer Aida H Dee was due to read to children. The opposing side was protesting against the protestors.
The Spectator covered this event two years ago in a manner that strongly indicated where the journalist’s allegiances lay.
The anti-drag protestors were, she wrote, parents and grandparents: “The parents’ and grandparents’ view was clear: drag queens are for nightclubs, not toddler groups.” When one of that group described how he preferred his school days when children would just meet firefighters and police officers, she agreed that he “probably spoke for many”.
In contrast the counter-protestors were “menacing youths — with masked faces and concealed identities”. Though the journalist also added patronisingly that they were “little more than confused teenagers” and “naïve youngsters who have yet to learn the facts of life”.
When she quoted the younger counter-protestors chanting “I’d rather be a drag queen than a fash”, we were clearly meant to regard them as prone to hyperbole and hysteria.
But there was a huge fact the Spectator article failed to mention.
The organisers of that demonstration were, indeed, fascists.
That protest in Bristol — like several around the UK that year — was set up and promoted by the white supremacist group Patriotic Alternative.
It is unquestionably a far-right neofascist group. Its founder Mark Collett is a neo-Nazi who did combat training with members of the banned terrorist group National Action. He was a star of the documentary “Young, Nazi and Proud” and has regularly been a guest on a hate-mongering podcast hosted by the former grand wizard of the KKK, no less.
Patriotic Alternative’s involvement in the Bristol protest and a series of others across the UK may not have been known to all attendees but it was not a carefully hidden secret. Its name and branding was on the flyers and online adverts promoting the events, and the group boasted how successful that series of anti-drag protests had been at attracting new members.
So why wasn’t this disturbing fact given much coverage — or even mentioned at all — in most reporting, such as The Spectator’s? Why the unwillingness to call a fash a fash?
My theory is it is a sign of how successful “the deplorables gambit” has become.
The deplorables gambit
The tactic— which we’ve seen regularly in the UK and US over the last 10 years — goes something like this.
- A far-right group leads or becomes a powerful cheerleader in a campaign about Y, a topic that also attracts mainstream right-wingers.
- Some centrists and left-wing people are alarmed to see normal right-wingers joining forces with genuine neofascists so voice alarm.
- Right-wing commentators then deploy the deplorables gambit: “They are saying that everyone who cares about Y is far right! How dare they?”
- So mainstream right-wingers believe they have been smeared, ignore the warnings and become more aligned with their extremist allies, who they assume must have been unfairly categorised too and, like them, aren’t really far-right.
This pattern has repeated itself multiple times with multiple culture war topics in both the UK and US, from Brexit to ULEZ, and I think it has made commentators wary of acknowledging actual neofascism.
I call it “the depolorables gambit” because the archetypal case was when Hillary Clinton supposedly smeared all Trump supporters as being in the “basket of deplorables”.
The truth was: she didn’t. Clinton’s speech was very specifically to make the opposite argument.
Her point was that, yes, Trump did have supporters in that category — people who she said were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it” and prone to “offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric”.
But she wanted Democrat campaigners to recognise that the rest of Trump’s supporters were not like that, and to feel more empathy towards them.
“That other basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but — he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathise with as well.”
This call for empathy was scuppered by two things. The smaller factor was a mistake by Clinton herself as she had introduced the deplorables by saying that they were being “grossly generalistic […] half of Trump’s supporters”. She swiftly acknowledged it had been a mistake to say they were such a large proportion, even in jest.
But the far bigger factor was how the speech was then misrepresented by the right. Fox News and Republican commentators were soon pretending she had smeared all Trump voters as deplorables, when that was the opposite of the speech’s intention. An attack advert by the Trump team soon aired saying the quote showed she “viciously demoniz[es] hard working people like you”.
Similar patterns occurred in the arguments over Brexit.
Polly Toynbee stressed in The Guardian then that “rude, crude, Nazi-style extremism is mercifully rare [but] the leavers have lifted several stones”. Here she was clearly and correctly referring to how fringe groups, like the successors to the English Defence League, were gaining traction. Spiked then did what Spiked often did and then misrepresented those comments as if they were a general attack on Leave voters. Toynbee was, they suggested, saying “working-class Leavers” were the “cockroach-like wretches” below the stones.
The gambit in use today
The deplorables gambit has only become more widespread in recent months since Elon Musk began promoting more overtly far-right views and accounts on X / Twitter.
Anonymous accounts such as Inevitable West and Radio Genoa publicise outright white supremacist views and calls for mass deportations. Musk has praised far-right groups including the AfD in Germany and given huge public to support to Tommy Robinson, the Islamophobic criminal and EDL founder currently in prison for libelling a refugee schoolboy.
Yet fans of Musk and Robinson still refuse to accept that they are aligning with the far-right.
In the last week some of the most vicious accounts have been targetting the Prime Minister and safeguarding minister Jess Phillips with false accusations that they covered up and were complicit in the grooming gangs scandals.
Today Keir Starmer hit back. At a press conference he suggested he had common ground with those who had genuine concerns for the gangs’ victims. “For many, many years, too many victims have been completely let down — let down by perverse ideas about community relations or by the idea that institutions must be protected above all else,” he said. “And they’ve not been listened to, and they’ve not been heard.”
But he had no patience for those on the extreme right “whipping up of intimidation and threats of violence”.
“When the poison of the far right leads to serious threats to Jess Phillips and others, that in my book [means] a line has been crossed,” he said.
And how did the political editor of one of Britain’s biggest newspapers, The Sun, respond to this?
Did Harry Cole note the PM’s recognition that victims had been let down, and his separate criticisms against the far right?
No. He wrote this.
Obviously the PM in no way called “millions of normal Brits” with concerns about the grooming gangs “far right”.
It’s untrue and an utterly classic use of the deplorables gambit.
Yet soon after, right-wing accounts across Twitter were repeating the same lie, some even transforming it into a fake direct quote.
So how do we deal with the gambit?
I’m not entirely sure. It certainly is important that politicians go out of their way to distinguish overtly between the deplorables and the larger group of non-deplorables who only share some of their views and who deserve greater empathy. It’s the humane and right thing to do — and it is needed as evidence to show the gambit-users are liars.
But the problem is that even when public figures do spell out the difference, right-wing mischief-makers will edit that part out. And their simplified narrative will clearly then dominate in digital echo chambers.
Perhaps it is just a start to be alert to the deplorables gambit.
We also need politicians such as Starmer to think more carefully about how their messages will land with the non-deplorables. As Hilary Clinton rightly said, “those are people we have to understand and empathise with as well.”
