When Rage Meets Faith

Christofascism explained

Last weekend a crowd of balaclava clad men marched on Dover, and the next night Portsmouth, to Stop The Boats. You’ve all seen the videos. Perhaps even studied them more than the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister who have yet to say anything about it publicly.

In the LRB, Daniel Trilling writes, ‘One of the main differences between today’s far right and the fascism of the mid-20th century is the absence of a uniformed paramilitary street wing. The anti-migrant protests in Dover and Portsmouth mark an attempt to create one – or at least to project the image of one.’

The 300 or so ‘Patriot Platform’ army who turned up in Dover at dawn on Saturday and blocked access roads into the port lend support to his theory.

The following night, Daniel Thomas, their self styled leader, who signs off his social media videos, ‘Remember Christianity is at the forefront of what we do’, led hundreds more men through Portsmouth to prevent the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), who rescue people at sea, from doing their job. How he and his army knew a boat would arrive in Portsmouth and were able to get there in time to “protest” when it was the first time a boat with rescued migrants landed in Portsmouth has thus far remained a mystery.

In the following days it was revealed that Thomas, who rebranded as Danny Tommo around 2019, is a privately educated business owner and company director, whose rap sheet includes a violent attempted kidnapping for which he served two years in prison.

On Friday in an interview with Tommy Robinson, he described Patriot Platform as a “Christian national resistance movement”.

Which brings me to the newly infamous Dr James Orr, who has been an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University since 2019, around the same time that Tommo turned away from his violent past and became a Christian activist. Prior to 2019 Orr was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Theology and Ethics at Oxford University.

Former editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber describes Orr as,

Always destined for glittering prizes. Born in Brussels, he attended Winchester and Oxford, followed his father into commercial law at Freshfields and then – in his telling – experienced a religious awakening in 2003 after surviving a potentially lethal skiing accident.

His Christianity is most pointedly expressed at his home just north of Cambridge. The Moorings, which author Rod Dreher say, ‘isn’t a church (though Helen [Orr’s wife] has built a chapel on the grounds for morning prayer), but it is a place of genuine Christian community and fellowship. He continues, ‘Moorings is a rambling property that consists of the main house, with a number of cottages in the gardens. James and Helen have built it as a sort of by-the-pants-se Christian community for Cambridge graduate students who are Christian, and who want to live in a loose community.’

It is at The Moorings that Orr has hosted people as ideologically similar as John Cleese, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Peter Thiel who gifted Cambridge with a five figure sum upon his appointment at their Faculty of Divinity and J.D. Vance who calls him his, “British Sherpa”.

After the broadcast of a Channel 4 News undercover investigation which appeared to show Orr potentially breaching section 61 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, Dreher who has documented the life of Orr and his wife at length over the years on his Substack wrote, ‘I can imagine how a patriot like James could see the crisis in his country as so extreme that cutting ethical corners to get into power the only man who seems capable of turning things around would make sense.’

Nonetheless, the Met Police has launched an investigation and if found guilty Orr could face up to a year in prison, which is the maximum sentence for his alleged crime.

He might be joined by former prisoner Danny Tommo if his post invasion of Portsmouth antics are anything to go by.

Orr and Tommo paths most markedly diverge post private school. Instead of going to University, Tommo briefly joined the military, serving as a tank driver with the King’s Royal Hussars. He was discharged on medical grounds before seeing any active service according to the Daily Mail.

Earlier this week the Telegraph lamented the high fees of schools that are presenting parents with the Sophie’s choice of sending one but not their brother or sister to private school, ‘leaving siblings with imbalances that last a lifetime’. I imagine Danny Tommo and James Orr as brothers whose paths diverged after private school yet have ended up at the same place.

Orr has described Reform UK where he was head of policy until the morning after the Channel 4 News broadcast as an “insurgent right-wing force”.

Tommo describes his ‘army’ as “working-class men who are bricklayers, roofers and carpenters who build the house you live in, the roads you drive on”.

In a rare interview with House Mag last year, Orr opined about “a wave of national uprisings like we saw in 1848”, such is the level of “rage” in electorates across the West. “A terrible beauty is being born. Let’s hope it’s more beautiful than terrible. But it’s happening, whether we like it or not,”

It seems his prediction is coming to fruition as next week Tommo and his patriots will be marching on the small village of Piddington, population 358, with what he says will be “thousands” of his masked followers,“for days” to prevent male migrants being moved into a nearby former Ministry of Defence site.

Tommo may be meeting a demand. The residents have been protesting for months opposing government plans to house 1,250 asylum seekers, and will hold a ‘symbolic referendum to leave the UK to demonstrate its opposition to Westminster.’ However they might not appreciate it turning into similar scenes from last weekend in Portsmouth where Police officers were attacked and RNLI rescuers have subsequently been doxxed and threatened.

In his interview with Robinson, Tommo also said “I predict that within the next six months Patriot Platform — with one message through a secure app — will be able to bring 5-10,000 people to a location in a matter of hours”. Orr who said at the Hay-on-Wye festival in Wales “Too much law today is about disagreement resolved through democratically unaccountable, technocratic, opaque, inaccessible procedures,” might applaud.

Where the two iconoclasts converge again is money. In a recent admission on a podcast Tommo said that his first protest was funded by an American think tank. This has since been revealed as the Middle East Forum, an American conservative think tank and foreign policy organisation, that ‘protects Western values against threats.’

Orr too has been funded by right wing mega donors, such as the Ben and Esther Rosenblum foundation, and other family foundations who fund both the Middle East Forum and the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank instrumental in shaping Republican policy and advancing a right-wing agenda. They in turn fund the Edmund Burke Foundation, where James Orr is the chairman. From their coffers Orr funds the National Conservatism conference, home to a movement “emphasizing national loyalty, marriage, civic responsibility, religion”, according to one of his former students.

Speaking at the conference a few years ago, Orr said,

What struck me in the Senate today was that your [American] revolution was no revolution. … It’s a restoration, a restoration of the spirit of a people, its customs byways, its songs, its heritage, its history, its faith, its institutions: restoration, revolution. … It’s restoration, my friends, that is our most urgent task. It’s the vocation to which every single one of you is summoned.

Whilst Tommo was unlikely to be at that conference, as America makes it difficult to get a visa if you have a criminal conviction, it is obvious to anyone paying attention that he has found his vocation as a Christian activist and leader of Patriot platform.

Orr predicts that by the time of the next election, “rage” over immigration will have grown such that there will “probably be an appetite within the nation to say, look, even if it means some low growth”, action on that issue should be prioritised.

A month ago, Tommo shared a video on his X account of he and his disciples, again clad in black shirts and blackshorts. In a measured tone he voiceover begins…

As evil grows louder in the world. God is raising up a different kind of Christian.

In his post attached, Tommo adds, ‘See you all on the 22nd of August…

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

Isaiah 6:8

#PatriotPlatform 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧✝️

The video continues, ending with…

They will not twist Scripture to make Sinners feel safe and Rebellion. They will not trade truth for approval because. Know what Jesus saved them from, so they will speak truth with boldness. They will call sin what it is they will call people to repentance. They will refuse to bow to culture, and for that, they will be hated.

Not just by the world, but by many who claim the name of Christ. They will be called extreme. It will be called divisive. They will be called unloving. The lukewarm will accuse them of hate because conviction feels offensive to the hardened heart. But truth has always offended Darkness, and though they are mocked now, history always vindicates those who stand with the truth.

Professor James Orr and Danny Tommo aren’t the eponymous antagonists of Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel. This isn’t the horse shoe theory, they are a zygote split.