MAGA’s favourite Englishman

What do Steve Bannon, Elon Musk and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik have in common?

You’ll probably find it easier to identify the common ground between the first two. Bannon is, and Musk was, often espied sporting MAGA caps, signalling their affection for Donald Trump and everything he stands for.

Now, a good friend of mine, a psychiatrist by trade, claims that habitually wearing any baseball cap lowers the man’s IQ by at least 20 points. He didn’t diagnose precisely the further reduction caused by the MAGA insignia on that headgear, other than saying it’s significant.

Even if true, I’m sure that dropping 20 or even 30 IQ points still left Messrs Bannon and Musk with an above average level. In any case, one can detect some commonality between them.

But Breivik? The chap who in 2011 first blew up four people with a car bomb and then shot another 69 dead? Now serving a long prison sentence, Breivik seems the odd man out in that trio. Granted, Bannon was also a jailbird, but he only served four months for contempt of Congress. Hardly a mass murderer then.

So what do those three chaps have in common? I shan’t keep you in suspense any longer. All three are champions and admirers of Tommy Robinson, the English criminal bizarrely as popular in MAGA circles as he is reviled in his native land.

Even as we speak, Tommy is a fugitive from justice. The other day, he was spreading anti-immigration leaflets at St Pancras Station. Now, Tommy is a fire-eating crusader against Islamic immigration, legal or otherwise. He is entitled to his views, especially since I happen to share them.

But an old man at St Pancras didn’t. He tried to argue with Tommy, who responded in his well-honed manner. He shouted, “Come at me then” and punched the old man in the face, leaving him unconscious on the floor and the onlookers in a state of shock.

“He f***ing came at me, bruv,” yelled Tommy in the only idiom that comes naturally to him. In Tommy’s circles, you dis someone at your peril. A disrespectful word, and you’ll end up in hospital, as that argumentative old man did.

After that assault, Tommy hastily left the station, and soon thereafter a warrant was issued for his arrest. But he didn’t wait around to have his collar felt, as it had been so many times in the past. He hopped on a plane and fled the country, apparently for Cyprus or perhaps Tenerife.

That was by no means an isolated blip in an otherwise exemplary CV. Last October, for example, Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to 10 breaches of a High Court injunction.

At the time, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk and other MAGA types claimed that Robinson was a political prisoner convicted for his views, which proved that Britain was a fascist country with no respect for freedom of speech.

I share their commitment to that fundamental liberty, but I’d rather it were upheld by someone other than a thug with a long list of criminal convictions. Alas, not all of them had much to do with support for free speech.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon grew up in Luton, a town that relates to London the way Bedford-Stuyvesant relates to mid-town Manhattan. In 2003 he got a job at Luton Airport, but lost it when he was convicted of assaulting an off-duty police officer in a drunken argument, for which Stephen served a 12-month prison sentence.

At about the same time he adopted the name of the football hooligan Tommy Robinson as his nom de guerre and then proceeded to tread the path charted by his idol. He became a prominent member of Luton Town MIGs, a hooligan crew ready to do battle against all comers for the honour of their team.

In 2011 Robinson was convicted for instigating a 100-man brawl with supporters of Newport County. Overall, he served four prison terms between 2005 and 2019, including those for mortgage fraud, using a false passport and violating bail conditions.

During that time, Robinson entered politics, first as a member of the fascist British National Party (BNP), then as founder of the English Defence League (EDL). It was within the ranks of the latter that in 2011 he got another 12-week prison sentence for headbutting a fellow EDL member.

Prior to his 2018 sentencing for violating a court order, Tommy appeared on the American website InfoWars to ask for political asylum in the US. As far as I know, that wasn’t granted, but Tommy clearly knows which side his bread is buttered.

For, though Tommy’s tireless fund-raising in Britain does bring in some money, most of his financing comes from the US and Canada. The sums are significant, and they aren’t always put to political causes.

In 2022, Robinson filed for bankruptcy. According to The Times, he owed about £2,000,000 to various creditors, plus £160,000 in back taxes.

Appearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Tommy explained he was spending about £100,000 on gambling in casinos and online. In general, he wasted large sums on “drink, alcohol, partying”, which admission must have pleased his sponsors no end.

Their pockets are deep. Tommy enjoys the support of the US social media platform Breibart, started by Bannon, and its Canadian counterpart, Rebel Media, owned by Ezra Levant. Elon Musk has also been known to join the whip-around with a bob or two.

Philadelphia-based think tank, Middle East Forum (MEF), has spent about $60,000 on Robinson’s legal fees. They were also behind plans to get Tommy around $1,000,000 for a US speaking tour, but he was denied a visa because he had been jailed in Britain in 2013 for using someone else’s passport to travel to the US.

Another US sponsor is tech billionaire Robert Shillman, who donated to Rebel Media in 2017 for them to employ Tommy at around $5,000 a month. He also gets funds from all sorts of international right-wing organisations, such as the Australian Liberty Alliance and, according to strong rumours, Russian trolls.

Most of Robinson’s North American sponsors describe themselves as MAGA conservatives, libertarians or both, and they see this common thug as a kindred soul or else brother-in-arms.

I’ve spent so much time on Robinson’s CV to illustrate the confusion reigning on the American Right. It has to be tremendous for them to describe Tommy as a conservative, as my MAGA podcast host insisted to me many times.

Demanding terminological precision from modern people is always a losing proposition, but especially when it comes to political taxonomy. Thus, Americans use the word ‘liberalism’ to describe socialism, one of the most illiberal doctrines in history.

The term ‘conservative’ is similarly misused and abused, which is understandable in a revolutionary republic constituted along Enlightenment lines.

Intuitive, which is to say the only real, American conservatives find it hard to reconcile their inclination with America’s founding egalitarian documents. These proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, abolished all titles of nobility and, according to Jefferson, “created a wall” between state and religion.

That makes it hard to imagine how true political (as opposed to cultural) conservatism can exist in America. If probed, most Americans who consider themselves conservatives will admit that they define that political creed largely in economic terms.

They – including such brilliant and erudite thinkers as the late William F. Buckley – readily describe themselves as libertarians, which is unfortunate. Most libertarians I’ve met seek liberation not just from the state, but also from any religious, cultural or intellectual authority. This is an unacceptable price to pay for free markets, much as all conservatives see them as a sine qua non of just society.

Another outlet for dejected intuitive conservatives seeking a political home is single-issue causes, such as anti-immigration. This too is unfortunate, even if the single issue is worthy, as it is in this case.

That way lie ideological zealotry, fanaticism and eventually madness, for single-issue politics tends to put blinkers on the mind’s eye. In that focus, a disgusting recidivist criminal like Tommy Robinson becomes a fellow conservative and a natural ally.

This is the same warped logic that led French revolutionaries to proclaim pas d’ennemis a gauche (“no enemies on the Left”). Replacing gauche with droite doesn’t make this approach to political thought any more sound.

British conservatives are partly to blame for this confusion. They either shy away from hands-on politics, which they – well, I – find distasteful, or else pretend that today’s Tory Party has anything to do with conservatism. Its shilly-shallying on every issue that matters, emphatically including immigration, opens doors for thugs like Robinson to barge in waving a conservative flag.

As a result, conservatism becomes associated in the public mind with political, often criminal, thuggery. That does untold harm to both the concept and its chances of ever emerging from its present doldrums.

I could say the same about the MAGA movement in the US, but won’t. I’ve already upset enough people for one day.