America’s Far Right Is Calling for Civil War in Ireland
"Florida university to host extremist after DeSantis-led lurch to right"
Following last week’s riots in Dublin, an alliance between far-right, anti-immigration influencers in the US and Ireland continues to grow.
Police and crowds of protesters in Dublin city center on November 23, 2023.Photograph: Brian Lawless/Getty Images
“Ireland is on the brink of civil war,” white nationalist Nick Fuentes declared Monday during his show on Rumble. “It’s going to be ugly.”
Ireland is not on the brink of a civil war, but riots did break out in Dublin last week following a stabbing outside a school that left three children and two adults hospitalized. Despite an unknown attack motive, the situation spiraled.
Ireland’s far-right community quickly claimed that this proved immigrants pose an inherent danger to Irish society: Within minutes of the stabbing, far-right Telegram channels lit up with questions about the attacker’s ethnicity. It was eventually reported that the attacker was a naturalized Irish citizen who came to Ireland from Algeria in 2003 .. https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2023/11/27/what-do-we-know-about-the-suspect-in-the-parnell-square-knife-attack/ . Less than two hours later, well-known figures within the Irish far-right community were organizing their followers to meet up in Dublin’s city center that evening. The riots quickly turned violent with police cars, buses, and trams set on fire. Dozens of shops were looted, and a number of police officers were injured. In total, 34 people were arrested on November 23.
Ireland’s own far-right community, like the far-right in the US, has been fueling anti-immigrant sentiments in the country for years.And this dark international alliance of far-right, anti-asylum American and Irish influencers is unsurprising. During his show, Fuentes, the leader of the America First movement, said that Conor McGregor, an Irish MMA star who called for war in Ireland in response to a report that noncitizens could vote in Irish elections prior to last week’s Dublin riot, should “rise up.”
Conor McGregorPhotograph: Brian Lawless/Getty Images
McGregor, Fuentes said, needed to “salvage the country because it’s either going to be the Irish or it’s going to be the blacks … only one side is going to come out of this alive.”
Some far-right influencers in the US have also pushed elements of the great replacement theory .. https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7vezb/great-replacement-theory-decade-of-hate , a conspiracy claiming that a globalist elite is working with Western governments to force out native populations through immigration.
Tucker Carlson, who now broadcasts his show on X, told his millions of followers that “the Irish government is trying to replace the population of Ireland with people from the third world.”
Former White House adviser and 2020 election conspiracist Steve Bannon, who is currently strategizing for former US president Donald Trump, responded to Carlson by declaring: “Ireland is a powder keg.”
Meanwhile, Catturd, the hugely influential pro-Trump account on X run by Florida shitposter Phillip Buchanan, told his 2 million followers to make the hashtag #IrishLivesMatter trend—which many duly did.
Elon Musk, who this week told X advertisers to “go fuck yourself,” also weighed in, claiming on X that the Irish prime minister “hates the Irish people,” and agreeing with another far-right influencer who posted on X saying Ireland needed McGregor to run for office. “Not a bad idea,” Musk wrote in reply.
McGregor, who, just 24 hours before the riots broke out, posted “Ireland, we are at war” to his 10 million followers on X, has become a lightning rod for international and local far-right support. McGregor has not fought an MMA fight for more than two years and has since spent much of his time outside of Ireland, including in his home in Florida. His social media posts over the past year have become increasingly political and have been directly influenced by many of the same far–right figures who encouraged their followers to meet in the center of Dublin ahead of the riots. The Irish police are currently investigating the riots, and McGregor is one of many currently under investigation for alleged incitement to hatred.
In far-right Telegram channels, poorly-generated AI images of McGregor proliferated, showing him in various poses ranging from standing patriotically in front of a burning bus to debating in parliament, as well as ones of a bare-chested McGregor holding a rifle and leading a mob of similarly-armed Irishmen. “Rebellion 2023?” wrote the operator of the far-right Telegram channel who posted an image.
Some experts believe that all of the attention that US far-right figures are giving to Ireland’s far-right community is now emboldening Irish figures to continue pushing their rhetoric. “In Ireland, this international attention appears to have been largely welcomed by far-right communities here who see such attention and promotion of their cause as a positive, and are drawing on this attention as further support for their campaign to target asylum seekers and migrants based on lies and falsehoods,” Ciarán O’Connor, a senior analyst with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue think tank, tells WIRED.
Irish far-right influencer Keith O’Brien, who is known online as Keith Woods, has maintained relationships with the far right in the US. O’Brien has become a leading figure within the Irish far-right movement in recent years, and spoke at a notorious white supremacist conference in Tennessee this summer. Over the past 12 months, his profile has grown internationally too, thanks in large part to both Fuentes and Musk. Fuentes has hosted O’Brien on his online show several times, while Musk has responded directly to O’Brien on X, particularly around a new anti-hate-speech law that is set to come into force in Ireland soon.
O’Brien, who did not attend the riots in person, told his Telegram followers that they were the government’s fault. “They flooded our country with unsustainable levels of migrants, planted small communities with migrant centers, responded to legitimate concerns by labeling all opposition ‘far right,’ and passed the most draconian hate speech laws in the world to shut us up,” he wrote. “When you deny people an outlet to express concerns they know are reasonable, you make them desperate.”
While two of the children injured in the stabbing attack have been released from hospital, a 5-year-old girl is still there with critical injuries.
David Gilbert is a reporter at WIRED covering disinformation, online extremism, and how these two online trends impact people’s lives across the globe, with a special focus on the 2024 US presidential election. Prior to joining WIRED, he worked at VICE News. He lives in Ireland.
As part of its ongoing "Black in America" project, CNN posted a story to its website earlier this week titled “Could an Obama presidency hurt black Americans?” Credited to CNN correspondent John Blake, the piece quotes the wit and wisdom of Steve Sailer, identified only as “a columnist for The American Conservative magazine.”
Specifically, the CNN story quotes a column by Sailer first published last year in which he opined that Obama offers voters “White guilt repellent.”
"So many whites want to be able to say, 'I'm not one of them, those bad whites. ... Hey, I voted for a black guy for president,'" Sailer wrote.
What the CNN article fails to note is that in addition to writing columns and movie reviews for The American Conservative, Sailer is the founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, a neo-eugenics online discussion forum where right-wing journalists and race scientists have promoted selective breeding of the human species. He also writes frequently for the anti-immigrant hate site Vdare.com, named for the first white child born in America, and runs a website, isteve.com.
Sailer's website is rife with primitive stereotypes. On it, Sailer mocks professional golfer Annika Sorenstam for having well-developed muscles and claims that Asian men have a hard time finding dates because they look “less masculine” than other men.
Last January, on the hate site vdare.com, Sailer labeled Obama a “wigger.”
“He's a remarkably exotic variety of the faux African-American, but a wigger nonetheless,” Sailer wrote. “Even genetically, Obama, whose East African descent is apparent in his unusual features, has only a distant relationship to the West Africans who are the ancestors of almost all African-Americans.” To illustrate his point, Sailer used photos of Obama side-by-side with Jesse Jackson and the rapper Ludacris, “both of whom have conventional West African features.”
Assessing the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, Sailer wrote, “The plain fact is that they [black Americans] tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.”
This isn’t the only time in recent history that CNN has turned to an unabashed bigot for commentary on controversial issues in America while cloaking the source’s full identity.
In October 2006, CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta reported on a study by J. Phillpe Rushton that purported to show that men, on average, are more intelligent than women. Gupta identified Rushton only as a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Since 2002, Rushton has been the head of the Pioneer Fund, a pro-eugenics foundation that funds the research of academic racists like Jared Taylor and Rushton, who himself has received over $1 million in Pioneer grants. Among Rushton’s findings are that on average blacks have larger genitals, breasts and buttocks, characteristics that, according to Rushton’s "research," have an inverse relationship to brain size and, thus, intelligence.
Then last April, CNN host Paula Zahn invited white supremacist James Edwards to participate in a live on-air panel discussion of “self-segregation” in America. Edwards, a self-proclaimed crusader for the white race, is the co-founder of the Political Cesspool, a Memphis, Tenn.-based AM radio show whose guest lineup is a rogue’s gallery of prominent figures on the radical right, including former Klan leader David Duke, anti-Semitic attorney Edgar Steele and the neo-Nazi teen singing duo Prussian Blue.
On that occasion, CNN identified Edwards rather sparingly as a “talk radio show host.”
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