Riled Up, Part II

 

When the story surrounding David A. Riley broke, I did my best to research thoroughly, but found very little regarding Riley's opinions over the last 40 years. Nobody, not even the big SF news sources, listed anything contemporary in terms of Riley's behavior. I then used my previous blog post to argue that we were basing too much conclusion on ancient history. But I also left myself a huge asterisk in place in case I was wrong.

Well, I was wrong. That asterisk came in handy.

If you haven't noticed, I've updated the previous post. I left things intact, but lined-out obvious mistakes and added annotations. That looks shoddy, and I'm embarrassed by it, but I felt that was the most responsible way for me to deal with the situation.

But one frustrating thing came up repeatedly from my critics. They kept telling me that the information regarding Mr. Riley was easy to find. Bullshit! It really wasn't. If I could be satisfied with second-hand and third-hand accounts, then sure, I would have found enough. But I'm not satisfied with tertiary evidence, and neither should any of you be! We live in the age of misinformation, and taking hearsay as proof is simply not acceptable.

Even Mike Glyer tried telling me the information was readily available. He said to me on Facebook, "Google still works, and the Internet Archive is still available." 

Mike, I love & respect ya. We all orbit around File770 because you're good at your job. But come on, man!

Yes, I totally used Internet Archive to find things about Mr. Riley. But I found nothing - yet. There are some archives of Mr. Riley's old blogs and blog posts, but one has to go through them one at a time. Tedious, very tedious. Someday I may find more. But I finally have to prioritize my time on something other than Riley's bullshit. This "easy to research" topic has already taken me two days.

Hey, maybe someone out there knows how to search through the Wayback Machine faster than I do. As before, I will always accept feedback, positive or negative. But for now, I found the below items mostly through luck and sheer drudgery.

That having been said (and to make up for the debacle which was my previous blog post), here is just some of the recent items which SF news outlets should have prominently featured regarding David A. Riley in the first place:

Item 1:

On March 6th of this year, Sara Britcliffe, the Tory (Conservative) MP for Mr. Riley's home district of Hyndburn, sent out a Tweet regarding a Drag Queen Story Hour performance put on by Sab Samuel, whose drag persona is Aida H. Dee. The Tweet said, "It’s been drawn to my attention that the drag act known by [Sab Samuel] is due to be reading to young children in Hyndburn.

“I have nothing against the work of drag queens and I’m a fan of Drag Queen UK.

“But having read several posts shared by Seb [sic] this is a wholly inappropriate move and I have urged them to cancel it.”

In response to this, David Riley said on Facebook, "Congratulations to our local MP Sarah Britcliffe for coming out and saying what needs to be said."

Fascistic? Probably not. Intolerant? Most definitely.

You can read Sara Britcliffe's quote in the Lancashire Telegraph here. Mr. Riley's Facebook post can be found here.

Item 2:

Riley wrote on Facebook, Nov. 18, 2020: "Tucker Carson [sic] is in my opinion one of the best political commentators around today. We could do with someone of his calibre on British TV."

SMDH.

He's said a bunch of other stuff supporting Carlson (with an "l") in recent years.

Here's the screen grab:

Item 3:

GB News is Britain's answer to Fox News. Perhaps that's putting it mildly. It's only been around since June of 2021, but it features a hyper-brand of ultra-right opinionating that the U.K. hasn't seen before. Naturally, David A. Riley posts a lot of things on Facebook supporting GB News and frequently rails against the BBC.

Doesn't prove he's fascist. But it does prove he's still ultra-right-wing.

I was still unable to find Mr. Riley's Twitter account. (I won't dignify the name "X.") Perhaps he's deleted it. But if anyone knows what it is, or has any recent screen grabs, let me know.

And now, a parting shot at those among Mr. Riley's critics who did such a shoddy job. (Oh, yes you did!)

Exhibit A:

All the critics of mine who insisted Riley's recent sins were obvious and easy to find. They were neither. The best luck I had (as you can see above) was from his Facebook account. Even then, what I found was hit-or-miss, with more misses than hits, and a lot of endless scrolling to boot. As I said, it's taken me two DAYS worth of free time for me to sort all this out. How DARE you people tell me it was "easy!" Or that I should "just Google it." Well, I found it, and you didn't! So there! Next controversy, y'all can do the work. I've earned some time off!

Exhibit B:

The Tumblr page, davidandrewrileyisafascist. It was cited by lots of social media posts as a source for proof regarding Mr. Riley's views. But when one looks deeper, one finds missing i-dots and t-crossings.

To save time, let me pull the most damning piece of evidence from that Tumblr page. It is a quote from David Riley which says, "Surely, even if the law was changed so that the BNP could no longer restrict membership on racial lines, the fact would still remain that applicant members would have to agree to the Party’s policies? Could adherence to these not be toughened up? In any case, I can’t imagine many Blacks or Asians willing to pay substantial amounts into the Party’s coffers."

The quote is attributed to BNP.org from 2009. But do we have a date? An article name? An old URL?

No. Just a name and a year. That is insufficient, and unacceptable! It's worse than no citation at all. And who does this Tumblr page? Maybe more experienced Tumblr users can tell me, but I saw no identifying information for this blogger. I'm sorry, but refusing to identify yourself doesn't make you a credible critic. It makes you a troll! Either call someone a fascist using your own identity, or let someone else do it, you coward.

[Postscript: For the record (and because some of you thought otherwise), I believe the quote is accurate. My main gripe is with the lack of citable source. My secondary gripe is with the anonymity - a primary plague of our era. Neither of these should be read as a defense of Mr. Riley in any way.]

Exhibit C: 

David Riley's endorsement of Andrew Brons after his MP election win in 2009. "Having first met Andrew over thirty years ago, I can't think of anyone better to be the first BNP MEP. He has worked hard as a British nationalist for more years than I care to remember. He will be a glowing credit to the BNP. Well done!"

I owe a great debt to Allyson Bird for providing this quote. She held on to it, and then passed it along to me. It's what changed my mind. But maddeningly, this has no available citation. Allyson is the only source, making it second-hand. It apparently came from the comments section of BNP.org.uk, and even the Internet Archive does not have a snapshot of this. I know, because I looked.

And why is this archive lacking? Even if Internet Archive missed it, was there not one person who recorded this? Are there no universities in the UK which keep the BNP's newsletters archived? Too much gets lost to history this way. We depend too much on crowdsourcing only to have the crowd fail. This isn't the first example I've come across, and I'm rather sick of it.

[Second postscript: Again, I am lamenting the lack of citable source, not disbelieving the quote or defending Mr. Riley.]

There! This doesn't exactly "fix" my prior post, but now I feel the ledger is even.

Eric

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