Nigel Farage Has Hired A Journalist At The Centre Of Breitbart's Anti-Immigration Europe Coverage [View all]

[Denzil_DC]

During his three years at Breitbart London between 2015 and 2018, Liam Deacon churned out an extraordinary number of sensationalist stories about migrant crime, while promoting the activities of far-right, anti-Islam figures like Tommy Robinson and Anne Marie Waters, and attacking familiar targets of the European far-right like Angela Merkel and Sadiq Khan.

After leaving the publication, Deacon worked briefly for the Daily Star before joining the Brexit Party as a press officer in June.

More than 2,600 articles on the far-right site carry Deacon’s by-line. He started regularly writing for the website in April, 2015 as the European migrant crisis was rapidly escalating.

Some of his output involved mundane, tabloid news – Deacon’s by-line appears on the story about the man who officially changed his name to Buzz Lightyear, and the boat that was named “Boaty McBoatface” – or stories which touched on traditional right-wing culture war issues.

But mainly, Deacon wrote pieces which focused on Muslims, crime and immigration.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/brexit-party-journalist-breitbart

So much for the façade that the Brexit Party would be a sanitized, rebranded UKIP without the overt racism.

The fatuousness of that pretense will be clear to anyone who's been following Farage's recruitment drive for candidates to stand in a general election (each paying an "application fee" of £100 - a nice little earner on top of all the dark money slushing around).

Jacob Mates on Twitter has been taking a look at some of the candidates as they've been announced (because heaven forbid any mainstream outlet would do it, let alone challenge Farage on it during any of his monotonous media appearances):

Link to tweet

MatesJacob @MatesJacob
Aug 3, 2019

🚨PLEASE RETWEET!🚨

Yesterday the Brexit Party announced the names of their parliamentary candidates, so I thought I’d have a quick look.

I’m afraid it’s bad news.

[THREAD]

MatesJacob @MatesJacob

2/ Meet John Booker, an ex-UKIP councillor from Sheffield. You’d think the @brexitparty_uk might do some social media vetting of their candidates, but apparently not...

The Brexit Party ✔ @brexitparty_uk

CANDIDATE ANNOUNCEMENT:

Congratulations, John Booker!

Our Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for #Penistone & #Stocksbridge.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EA9bI3JWwAIP8ph?format=jpg

Link to tweet

MatesJacob @MatesJacob

3/ They seem to have missed his sharing of Islamophobic posts like this one:

Link to tweet

MatesJacob @MatesJacob

4/ ...and also missed his ‘likes’ on racially abusive comments aimed at @MagicMagid:

Link to tweet

MatesJacob @MatesJacob

5/ He liked a comment that warned against a Muslim “takeover”, with them “slowly getting people into powerful positions”

Link to tweet

MatesJacob @MatesJacob

6/ He liked a comment that seems to call for violent action against Islam/Muslims.

Link to tweet

MatesJacob @MatesJacob

7/ If the Brexit Party truly intends to be “intolerant of intolerance” it needs to withdraw this candidate immediately, and be far more thorough in vetting the remaining 600+ candidates still to be announced.
[END]

I'm sure they'll get right on to that. That's just one example. There are many other recently announced candidates whose past doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Look forward to the sort of rhetoric Farage is likely to come out with again during an upcoming election being matched by Johnson and his boss, Dominic Cummings. Let's just hope none of the other parties decide to join in.