If the crackpot, right-wing, anti-immigrant constituency in the US sneezes its fanbase in Ireland and Britain catches a cold.

This is truer now than ever thanks to the hyper-digitised world we live in. Racist, anti-immigrant mania spreads like influenza in the Anglosphere. Social media algorithms place bigoted eyes before the bigoted messages they crave.

It may start off in the US where prejudicial rhetoric about ‘unvetted males’ came into mainstream political parlance among MAGA-types after the Afghan evacuations in 2021 and has been used to target migrants on the US-Mexico border too.

Seemingly it spread to Ireland and Britain in 2023, where far-right figures have sought to adapt the absurd term to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment for their own ends.

A burned out car after the racist attacks in Belfast.

placeholder image — A burned out car after the racist attacks in Belfast.

Such distortions have had less purchase in this country than elsewhere. But the events of recent weeks, the political dispensation in Britain – England especially – and the grossly irresponsible adoption of cod-MAGA posturing by some within the unionist body politic, are sources of concern.

And it is not just within unionism. Nationalist and republican readers will have heard the dog whistle statements about ‘unvetted males’ and ‘men-of-military age’ from people who should know better within their own communities.

Once upon a time it would have been easy to disabuse the deluded of their notions but it is worryingly more difficult as the digitally disinformed are fed more of what they want to hear in the racist echo chamber some some parts of the internet have become.