In the campaign for a chance to repeal the hated 8th amendment - the anti-choice clause that was in the Irish constitution - March 8th 2017 was a key date. On that morning thousands of people took a day off work or college to hold protests in the city centre demanding a referendum that then converged on O'Connell street bridge, blocking it for a couple of hours around lunchtime.  That evening there was an International Womens Day march, also demanding a referendum.  

The turnout for both was unexpectadly large and its likely that the large number willing to take a day off for Strike for Repeal demonstrated in particular that there were the numbers there to organise and ensure a Repeal referendum passed - as happened a year later.  The one minor fly in the ointment was a strange attack video that appeared a couple of days later, a video which huges amounts of cash was then spent to push it online.  I researched and wrote up the piece below at the time but for various reasons it was not published although it was privately supplied to a number of organisations and media over the following year as background.

You may have seen the rather creepy ambush video doing the rounds, in which a posh Brit tries to make fools out of Irish teenagers on the March for Repeal (March 8th). It’s the technique of a 12-year-old: suddenly change tack mid-interview to complex hostile questions and edit your final output so all it has are people looking confused or stammering responses. As we shall see for all its childishness there were both sinister motives and a lot of money behind its making.

The video appeared on a new page with only 9 followers at time of posting but got a huge paid-for reach through Facebook advertising, reaching 250k views in 48 hours. This would be consistent with spending about 500 euro on Facebook advertising. There was a reason for this new page. The pair shooting the video are actually a couple of posh kids from London, and their usual page is called ‘The New Brit’. You can sort of see why they felt they need for some fake Irish branding.

We were expecting the video. Towards the end of the March for Repeal in Dublin we were tipped off about an interview crew that had been suddenly switching to very hostile questions after starting out pretending they were sympathetic. We were told that when people behind the Midwives for Choice banner had enough and refused to answer more questions, the man interviewing them turned to the camera and said ‘another group of people who don’t want to talk to us’.

After asking on Twitter we received a number of similar reports and a tip off. It turned out that that the guy interviewing is a minor alt-right figure in England called Caolan Robertson. We quickly found him on Facebook, where he had posted a picture of himself standing in front of one of the Strike for Repeal banners on O’Connell bridge. He took this down a few hours later after we had tweeted asking other people who had contact with them to come forward. And a couple of days later he blocked us, just after one of the people he had targeted retweeted our thread giving some of the details you’ll read here.

Further down Caolan’s Facebook profile are anti-refugee posts, anti-Mexican posts (weird right, but presumably as a result of the influence of Trump) and typical anti-feminist and anti-social justice stuff. Pretty typical of the toxic brew any alt-right source spews out, they hate anyone who fights for social justice and they have created a whole bizarre terminology that is increasingly appearing in everyday language around this, e.g. ‘virtue signalling.’

Caolan’s photos have a lot of richkidsofinstagram imitating crap including a shot of an ice bucket of champagne with a ski slope in the background. Embarrassingly for the anti-choice movement he also posts material defending British colonialism. Who was he working with in Ireland? It seems unlikely it was the ‘New Brits’ initiative alone to fly over for the Strike for Choice, in particular as anti-choice material isn’t prominent, if present at all, amongst their previous posts. This is something of a new departure.

Caolan’s Facebook bio tells us that he is ‘Online News Editor at The New Brit’, which turns out to be a rather overblown description of a page with only 851 likes. Again rather embarrassingly for the anti-choice movement, one of the top items is a photo of him meeting Tommy Robinson “to talk patriotism and the future of Europe.” Tommy Robinson being one of the fake names Stephen Yaxley-Lennon goes under. Stephen/Tommy was the leader of the English Defence League (EDL) and has a number of convictions, including one that arose from assaulting an off-duty cop who intervened in a ‘domestic incident’ between Tommy and his partner Jenna. Another is for mortgage fraud. As usual with the far right, they are all law and order and ‘tough on crime’ until it’s their mates in the dock.

When not being the online News Editor of a page with 851 Likes, Caolan is or was in 2015 “the 20-year-old manager of No 9, in Chelsea” who got a Telegraph write up because he “developed the idea for a pig's blood cocktail.” Perhaps we are getting a picture here of someone who uses controversy for self promotion? 

If you wanted confirmation of the self-promotion at all costs tendency it seems very likely that the same Caolan appeared in a Channel 4 ‘Factual Entertainment’ documentary the previous year. This perhaps solves the minor mystery of why he has 32,000 FB followers but not much interaction with anything he posts. That episode of Shut Your Facebook promises “Finally we meet 19 year old Caolan who couldn’t care less about the 5,000 quid worth of debt he’s racked up in his quest to get famous on Facebook. To make him realise that debt does matter we take a trip to the bank to get 5000 one pound coins for Caolan to carry so that he can feel the weight of his actions, literally.”

While Caolan is in front of the camera, we are fairly certain that the person recording was George Llewelyn John, also from Chelsea and ‘Editor in Chief’ of the same 851 Likes New Brit page! These guys sure like their titles but I guess in Ireland we are familiar with hostile Brits who like to give themselves fancy titles, the ruins of their castles litter the landscape.

In response to comments on Twitter about where the money for the trip, video and promotion came from George responded “Have a look how much my apartment costs, I don't think funding is a problem.”

Caolan later tweeted that an American company had paid for the trip before having second thoughts and deleting the tweet. @GoChaela screen grabbed it in the meantime though and posted the screengrab, they were then blocked by Caolan indicating a desire to keep the involvement of American funding secret. We know huge amounts of money pours into Ireland every year from the anti-choice movement in the US. It’s how the Irish anti-choice movement, despite being unable to mobilise numbers, can spend incredible sums on advertising vans, offices, load of full time staff, free transport and giant TV screens for fairly small protests. Indeed for some of the full time staff of the anti-choice movement it seems that it may be more to do with taking home a big salary than anything else at this stage. 

To return to the video we don’t know how many of the 250k views it got in the first 48 hours were down to paid advertising but we suspect it’s probably in the region of 500 euro. If so that’s more than what we understand was the entire spend of #Strike4Repeal itself. Confirmation yet again that the anti-choice movement has wheelbarrows of cash to burn while the pro-choice movement does bar work at festivals as its major source of income. The reach achieved provides an excellent small scale example of how money translates to power.

A couple of days after this they were paying to promote the video to people who Like the National Ploughing Championships. Interesting both because this is obviously at attempt to frighten rural Ireland and also because it strongly suggests this aspect of the advertising is being run from Ireland rather than Chelsea or the US. Unless we’ve overlooked some link with the Chelsea Flower Show, the Ploughing Championships while an enormous event here are hardly the topic of Chelsea cocktail bars.

That finance imbalance is because to a significant extent for the anti-choice side this is a proxy war, the wealthy have always insisted on controlling the mass of the population right down to controlling our very bodies. It’s that ideology which explains why the same groups and individuals that defend the catholic church’s running of the Tuam homes now make the ridiculous claim to be ‘pro-life’. In both cases the actual goal is to control our sexual lives, and, where that control is defied, to punish those who ‘transgress’. Hence the tendency of many anti-choicers to talk of pregnancy as a punishment for sex.

We don’t know how this pair connect exactly to the anti-choice movement in Ireland, information on that would be appreciated. We do know George and Cora Sherlock, Deputy Chair of the ‘Pro-life’ Campaign, have followed each other on Twitter recently and, as @newsworth_ie points out, this seems to be one of a number of alt-right connections she has made.

The anti-choice movement here has a disastrous public image as a gang of unpleasant interfering religious fanatics which basically harks back to De Valera’s vision of a catholic, peasant Ireland. That is why they have no appeal to anyone under the age of 50. The access they are given to catholic schools provides recruits for them but none of those teenagers stick around once they meet the realities of life. The gangs of 16-year-olds on any year’s Rally4Life never translate into a gang of 20-year-olds 4 years later.

It’s quite possible they have identified the alt-right’s appeal to a narrow layer of frustrated young male misogynists as a desperate way of gaining some youthful following. This makes some sense, there is a layer of young men under the influence of creepy ‘Pick Up Artist’ Youtube's and Men’s Rights Activist rants that have a shared hatred of feminism and a 1950s ‘Ad Men’ set of patriarchal beliefs. Their frustration that many women have at least partially escaped the forces that once pushed them into unfulfilling & abusive relationships have found expression over the last years in the growing right wing anti-feminist backlash that provides the driving force for alt-right recruitment.

The danger for the pro-choice and other progressive movements is that alt-right methodology may reach some that the old reactionary catholic conservatism of Youth Defence and ‘Pro-Life’ Campaign’ repulse. The right making use of a sense of lost male entitlement is not new, one historian of the Weimar republic noted that one fact right factions had in common was “a deep-seated, almost mythical fear and hatred of women”. The young men who fell for that rhetoric in the Germany of the 1920s died in the snows of Russia in the 1940s committing horrific crimes as part of that journey.

The anti-choice movement’s attempt to capitalise on this layer also runs into the long running problem of the fringe far-right in Ireland. The geographically closest allies are in the UK and while there is some common ground there is also the little issue of attitudes to British colonialism and loyalism that won’t work down here at all. This first attempt of the Irish anti-choice brigade to work with an outfit actually called ‘The New Brit’ certainly illustrates that in spades.

If anything it’s useful that the first attempt at alt-right propaganda in Ireland is so openly tied to old reactionary catholic conservatism on the one hand and British Empire worship on the other. That is going to hurt more considered interventions they might make in the future as it exposes the very unattractive common agenda behind the lols.