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This is a value for value post: see the explanation in the footer.
Manifesto by Peter McLoughlin and Tommy Robinson
A couple of weeks ago my friends Tommy and Peter published their latest book. It went on sale on Amazon with the only promotion being a post on X by Tommy to his 1m+ followers.
The book features a cover design which had already been mocked online for using the "Comic Sans" font which even caused a "newspaper" in the UK to publish this:
The funny bit is the font isn't even Comic Sans, it's actually something called Chalkboard SE. Nothing could prove a point about judging a book by its cover better than this.
A couple of days later this happened:
There's not a single proper review of the book (I read it before publication but haven't had time to write a review). There's been absolutely no publicity except post by Tommy Robinson himself on X and articles like the one from Indy100 mocking the cover. And yet in the space of 2 days on Amazon it rockets to the top of the charts for ALL books in the UK, beating down a former prime minister and the best known TV Chef in the UK. Not to mention a mega bestselling author Richard Osman with a murder mystery.
Manifesto is a pretty academic tome exploring the bounds of political theory, philosophy, economics and finance, real democracy and population replacement.
It's well written, and it is easy to follow, but almost 1/3 of the book are footnotes and it certainly isn't a trashy beach paperback.
The Price
And let's talk about the price: £24.99 + postage makes it the most expensive book in the best sellers on Amazon UK. Boris Johnson's massive hardback book is clearly being sold heavily discounted by the massive publisher and is accompanied by massive media coverage. Not to mention the fact that the author was the Prime Minister!
And just on that price: the book is priced to represent the work that went into it, the costs of independent publishing (Amazon takes a crazy cut) and that it is an academic book at its heart.
The Guardian
https://twitter.com/TRobinsonNewEra/status/1846222177642705065
- TRobinsonNewEra
So we come to the latest article from The Guardian. The author of the article, Zoe Williams writes an article about Manifesto in the Guardian (archive). Obviously the first thing the Guardian does is plead poverty and beg you for money. We'll come to why that's interesting when I show you an excerpt from Manifesto about how wealthy the Guardian is and how it got that way.
Zoe, however is poor. Too poor to actually use her expense account to buy a book she's tasked with writing about.
It is that bad: I will not read it, because I will not buy it, because the day I put £24.99 or any fraction thereof into the pocket of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is the day I’ve parted company with the material world.
That's off to an intellectually superior start for sure.
So maybe Manifesto’s readers aren’t real readers? Isn’t this what dark money is for – setting up bot factories to disrupt democracies, and bulk-buying far-right trash to make it look more popular than it is?
This is a telling accusation. Tommy Robinson is popular: very, very popular to be honest. But honesty is something the far-left Guardian hack can't be. So she must deceive herself that some Russian Oligarch is throwing money at Amazon to buy an expensive book.
Here's a video showing the distribution of these books. I can tell you because I actually know Peter and the people handling distribution, almost all orders are single books or two or three at most.
https://twitter.com/TRobinsonNewEra/status/1843019896709357880
- TRobinsonNewEra
There have been no significant bulk orders. The first print run you see in the video above was sold out via Amazon in 4 days (sold out there for now). None of that was charity. New copies are being rushed into print right now to fulfill the back orders that have been placed via Tommy's own site trmanifesto.com.
There's just no getting away from it Zoe, Tommy and Peter's book, despite a really high cover price because there is no millionaire or massive publishing company like Boris has to subsidies it.
That might account for some of the sales, but there are enough real people to put real reviews on Amazon, and they’re all a variation on the same thing: “the truth is all coming out”; this is “the book the government do not want you to read”; “as long as there are people like Tommy, all is not lost”; “it unravels the web of lies we have been told for decades”.
So back to Zoe's crack "journalism" here. She won't read the book so she can't actually comment on any of its content, not even the picture on the back cover, because she hasn't seen it. All she has is the blurb on Amazon and the reviews.
Talk about lazy.
But all she gets there is affirmation that the book is opening the eyes of those who actually have read it who seem to come from a wide spectrum. She'll call the all "far right" and she doesn't even know that the opening line of the book says "This book is an anti-Fascist book. We spend most of this book exposing how the power of the Fascist state works".
Zoe and the Guardian are a core part of the Fascist state and how it works.
Many argue that Amazon shouldn’t have stocked the book in the first place. It had no problem removing Robinson’s 2019 book, Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam (co-written, like Manifesto, with Peter McLoughlin), on the grounds that its content was “inappropriate”. And Manifesto, after last week’s sales, is now unavailable, with the opaque message: “We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.”
And now she subtly calls for digital book burning. "Many argue that" is a journalistic trick to say, people I made up in my head are thinking something I want to say in my piece.
She's also of course wrong on fact here. Mohammed's Koran, Why Muslims Kill for Islam, was published in 2017. It remained on Amazon for a couple of years and was frequently the best selling Koran on Amazon in the UK. Contrary to what Zoe may think (I'm sure she's not read MK either) it contains a brief introduction and then the unabridged text of the Koran in English (using a well regarded and respected translation by Pickthall).
Mohammed's Koran was banned from Amazon (as was a solo book by Peter McLaughlin called "Easy Meat" about the Muslim rape gangs in the UK). Nobody has ever explained why these two books are too dangerous to be sold on Amazon alongside Mein Kampf or Mao's Little Red Book.
Extract from Manifesto
The Far Right and The Guardian
But as a gift to Zoe I'm going to include here some pages from Manifesto which discuss the way in which the Guardian, the paper she works for, is funded.
These pages are from the Introduction to Manifesto and I want to point out that we start on page 33 and already that page is up to it's 135th footnote. This book is very heavily sourced.
So as you can see (if you can read all that, Zoe) rather than Tommy Robinson's book being funded by some shady and invented "dark money" conspiracy theory, it turns out that the Guardian is funded by the billion pound remnants of tax-loopholes for plutocrats.
The Fabian Society
There's also a little mention of something called the Fabian Society. This is explained in much greater detail in the book than I'll quote here, but of course... Zoe knows all about them.
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