Remember when everyone was constantly banging on about “online radicalisation”? In those days, it usually meant confused and resentful young Muslim boys who fell prey to “preachers of hate” on YouTube and would, if not referred sharpish to Prevent, start thinking it was a good idea to blow the hated kufir up while he went about his morning commute. Occasionally, it would refer to confused and resentful young men of all stripes who’d fall prey to the more radical sort of manosphere influencer and start fantasising about spree-killing as an alternative to getting a girlfriend.
Rees set off an actual bomb, at considerable risk to life…to disable a traffic camera
We may have stopped talking about it so much, but online radicalisation never went away – and it has now acquired a yet more tragic and silly form. Take, for instance, the case of 63-year-old Kevin Rees, of Sidcup, in southeast London. The retired electrical engineer was jailed on Friday for 15 years for attaching an explosive to an Ulez camera near his home and blowing it up.
It turned out that he was active in a number of anti-Ulez Facebook groups, and he told the court in his defence that he was “strongly opposed” to the Ulez scheme. No shizzle! Some may think 15 years a bit harsh – the judge in sentencing chose to regard this as an offence with a “terrorism connection” – but given that shrapnel from the explosion caused damage 100 metres away, our man’s “propaganda of the deed” can at least be said to have been pretty careless of human life. It didn’t help, I dare say, that when he was busted the police also found a stash of stun-guns in his house.
I don’t know about you, but I find this particular version of online radicalisation, if anything, more alarming than the traditional sort. It’s the bizarre disjunction between ends and means, the sheer disconnection from any sort of decipherable reality, that gives me the willies.
I hold no brief for your basic Islamist nutcase. But if you squint at it from a certain angle, you can sort of see how if you did hold a particular portfolio of views – that the hated infidel’s liberal democracy is an insult to the laws of Allah, that the Greater and Lesser Satan should be driven like dogs from the holy places of the Middle East, that the Prophet (PBUH) would be mortified by all these ladies wandering about with their faces on display, and so on – you might be crackers enough to see terrorism as a proportionate form of redress. You might be open to a beardie dude in a funny hat telling you such redress is sanctioned by God. Maybe, too, if you’re seventeen years old and blue-balled to an absolutely extreme extent, you might be demented enough to think the solution to your lack of romantic success was violence. Horny seventeen-year-old boys aren’t noted for their sense of proportion.
But when it comes to sense of proportion, Mr Rees is in a whole other class. He set off an actual bomb, at considerable risk to life…to disable a traffic camera. As causes go it doesn’t exactly reach the bar set by Horatius at the bridge, “facing fearful odds/ for the ashes of his fathers/ and the temples of his gods”. He was prepared to go to jail, prepared to risk killing innocent passers-by, to defend the ancient right of every free-born Englishman to…avoid paying a charge for driving a diesel car into a low-emissions zone?
Facebook isn’t just making your granny a bit dotty. It’s making your drunken uncle into a terrorist
His brain appears to have been badly cooked, too, by a diet of idiotic stories giving the impression that the only thing the woke police do these days is arrest people for non-hate-crime-incidents and misgendering trans people. When he was placed under arrest for setting off, I repeat, an actual bomb on a suburban street he at first asked the arresting officers whether he was being run in for “something to do with the anti-Ulez sites”.
“I assumed it was just the so-called Facebook police,” he told police. If the problem with the nutty left is that they think that language can be “literal violence”, the problem with people like this guy is that they think that literal violence can be language.
Similarly marshalled by social media, we have the mobs who sought to register their legitimate concerns over the Southport killings by lobbing rocks at the police and menacing the local mosques; or the sort of folks who cross the country to register their legitimate concerns over immigration policy by marching around in balaclavas and menacing people who volunteer in lifeboats. Facebook isn’t just making your granny a bit dotty. It’s making your drunken uncle into a terrorist. So much for the democratising power of the internet and social media spreading light and reasonableness.
Finally, since we’re on the subject of online radicalisation, Time magazine now reports that Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela (or semi-invasion; whatever the word is for barreling in and kidnapping the head of state) took place after the leader of the free world sought advice and encouragement from Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok. Grok told him it would be a great idea, apparently. “After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.” Swarm over, as it is written, death.
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