You know how an abuser punches someone in the face and then says, “Look what you made me do”? That logic of inversion, of projection, of impunity? It seems to me that this is now being played out on the world stage. When Donald Trump and his goon squad of squalid appointees lionise terrorising the moderate left and smear the left for the very sins they commit… what else could we call this but abuse?
Donald Trump’s second term in the US may be the epicentre but the tremors are global. Project 2025 is a blueprint for authoritarianism. Trump’s administration has embraced this plan to dismantle federal agencies, purge dissenters, and consolidate executive power. I’m reliably told that in just six months nearly half of its 317 objectives have already been implemented. Trump has weaponised federal institutions to settle scores, revoke clearances, and to punish cities like LA and Chicago, run by his political opponents. This isn’t just politics, it’s systemic abuse and it’s spreading.
Over here in the UK the headlines are currently largely about either Nigel Farage or, more recently, his street fighting counterpart, criminal thug, Tommy Robinson, and there is a sense of a cowardly silence to condemn either.
Since Brexit, malign US funding has flowed into UK think tanks and populist movements, nudging Britain ever further rightwards. Reform UK polls at around 30 per cent – that’s theoretically almost enough to win an election with the supine fracturing of its mute opponents.
On the 13 September 2025, Robinson hosted possibly the largest far-right rally in Britain since Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. Over 110,000 people gathered in London. Elon Musk appeared via video, outrageously calling for the dissolution of Parliament and warning (seemingly hopefully) that “violence is coming.” And that was reflected in the flag waving histrionic crowds, violently bursting through police lines and openly inciting violence against the Prime Minister without being arrested.
How have Britain’s two main parties responded?
They may have, under spotlight, condemned the violence, in the pro-forma routine way they do, but vitally they haven’t condemned the ideology that underpins it nor those who have funded it and by these sins of omission they are helping to normalise performative and actual cruelty.
Musk was pointedly absent from Trump’s recent frenzied narcissistic trough feed over a Whitehouse dinner, with his craven supine tech quislings, but clearly Musk hasn’t gone quiet. He’s gone transatlantic. His endorsement of Robinson yesterday marks a dangerous escalation: Silicon Valley capital meets British extremism. This isn’t merely eccentric billionaire behaviour. It’s strategic destabilisation and our leaders are failing to call it out.
When regimes slide toward authoritarianism, resistance can take many forms:
Czech dissidents deployed, amongst other things, acute satire when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Denmark’s rescue of Jews was very successful and almost unique, after the Nazis occupied Denmark. Post-war West Germany introduced “never again” democratic safeguards. Better late than never.
Resistance comes in many forms, through the arts poetic, musical, visual- it can show up as satire, sanctuary, or solidarity. It will always be recognised in our refusal to normalize abusive, bullying cruelty. With the abuser’s ideology and logic now embedded in policy, the silence of both institutions and individuals is complicity, surely?
The global far-right doesn’t ever rest on its laurels. It networks and learns from one another’s operations. They fund each other. They amplify each other. They embolden each other.
It’s exhausting, but we must resist. We must write the next verse. We must take the knee. We must speak up on social media. We must be non-violently brave. We must decline contamination by those who, one day, will surely belong in the next equivalent Nuremberg trials.
