How Humza Yousaf became the target of a global right wing conspiracy

It then added: “Glasgow has been taken by a Pakistani.”

A man called Humza Yousaf was now first minister of Scotland. And the global far right was getting excited about his colour and his faith even if most Scots were not.

The new SNP leader, after all, was the first Muslim to lead a western European nation since the Christian reconquest of Spain more than half a millennium ago.

This for national-chauvinists like Tsargrad was a hugely powerful symbol.

For years this outlet has been repackaging western culture wars for a domestic audience, often with absurd twists. The popular right-wing news source has a penchant for the unseriously extreme.

One of its founders, a historian called Mikhail Smolin with a long whispy beard, last year made headlines by going on Kremlin TV and calling for Vladimir Putin’s army to train Scottish independence supporters as terrorists.

Humza Yousaf becomes Scotland's First Minister (Image: Jane Barlow)

But its claims that Scotland had “fallen’ - even if they were intended to be read in the “ha-ha, only joking” humour of 21st century post-fascism - seems to have slowly resonated among the globalised radical right.

Tsargrad, while repeating anti-semitic tropes that the Rothschilds decided who ruled France, presented Yousaf’s election as evidence that European democracy was a “farce”. But its take, and that of other continental far-right sources, has barely registered in Scotland.

However, the buzzwords of anglophone extremists, have started to bleed in to Scottish online discourse.

The day after the first minister was formally anointed by MSPs, English-language accounts on Twitter, or X as it was becoming known, started posting about the “great replacement”.

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This is a far-right, white-nationalist conspiracy theory, first concocted in France but later spread to the United States and UK, claiming that unspecified elites want to substitute immigrants, especially Muslims, for indigenous Christian Europeans.

Rightist social media influencers were determined to make Yousaf’s election fit in to their narrative of a plot.

Along came an influencer called Ian Miles Cheong. A Malaysian with a huge following in America, Cheong posted a video of the new FM from an 2021 debate on Black Lives Matter complaining about a lack of diversity at the top of Scottish public life.

However, Cheong and other rightists were trying to present the clip, first created in the feverish cauldron of Scottish online politics, as evidence that Yousaf thought there were two many whites in Scotland.

Elon Musk, commenting on the clip, declared Yousaf to be a “racist”.

The politician had said no such thing, as confirmed by independent fact-checkers at The Ferret. This did not stop Yousaf’s supposed “white, white, white” speech going viral. Cheong got more than 2m views on the video in March.

By the summer another far-right influencer, called EndWokeness, had posted it again. The owner of X, right wing billionaire Elon Musk, commenting on the clip declared Yousaf to be a “racist”.

Suddenly a Scottish politician was right in the sights of America’s far right.  Yousaf has since been - even a cursory check of social media shows - falsely accused of supporting Islamist terrorism, Shariah law and the great replacement.

He was not the first Briton to get this treatment, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, like Yousaf, a social liberal and a muslim, in 2021 said he had received almost a quarter of a million racist or radicalised social media messages since 2016.

Donald Trump speaks at a rally in 2023

Khan blamed Donald Trump - who had criticised his response to the London Bridge Terror Attacks - for a huge rise in abuse.

There seems to be something about Muslims being in charge in cities and countries in northern Europe that triggers America’s white nationalists. Is it because they see places like Britain - and Scotland - as some kind of pure racial homeland? Is it that extremists on either side of the Atlantic are feeding off each other?

Caleb Kieffer, is an intelligence analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a civil rights watchdog and global centre of expertise in white nationalism. He has been tracking the cross fertilisation of hate - including against Yousaf and Khan -between Europe and America.

“For nearly a decade, we’ve documented partnerships and rhetoric flowing from the US. to Europe and vice versa,” Kieffer told the Herald on Sunday. “European far right and Islamophobic figures will often travel to the US to speak at conferences and events where they paint an apocalyptic narrative of European culture and western society being eroded due to Muslim immigrants and migrants from non-European countries.

Scotland's First Minister, Humza Yousaf (Image: Robert Perry)

“They are often heralded as heroes among US anti-Muslim and white nationalist circles, who use these so-called warnings to push their own agenda.”

This explains American pre-occupations with baseless stories of immigrant quarters in European cities - Glasgow’s Govanhill sometimes included - becoming “no-go areas” for police or whites.

Kieffer continued: “Much of this rhetoric is akin to the bigoted great replacemen conspiracy theory, which posits non-white immigrants and people of colour are replacing the dominant culture in western nations.

“In the US ideas of a “great replacement” have moved from the fringe and online spaces to the mainstream, with right-wing political pundits as well as elected officials.

“US. based anti-Muslim hate groups seek to stoke suspicion around Muslims serving as elected officials or running for political office simply because of their religion.

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“Despite Islam having a long and storied history in North America, these groups portray those who worship Islam as fundamentally alien and a foreign threat. This feeds into conspiracy theories of Muslim immigrants and refugees posing a cultural or violent threat.

“This rhetoric is often reinforced by far-right politicians who deploy Islamophobia to score political points among their base.”

Echoing false internet claims that Yousaf supports the introduction of Islamic law in Scotland, Kieffer added:  “This has been evidenced by the manufactured hysteria around Sharia law in the US, which has been used to denigrate Muslim leaders and community members as being un-American and at odds with US law.”

American has some Muslim politicians of its own, including two congresswoman. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who came to America as a refugee from Somalia, and Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American from Michigan have received unprecedented abuse and threats since their election. Both are Democrats. The  American far right, Kieffer explained, has a particular problem with Muslims of the left.

 “A common conspiracy theory peddled by US anti-Muslim groups is the idea of there being a so-called ‘red-green axis’ where Muslims and the political left are united in their disdain for the US and are working to tear down the country from within,” he said. “This stems from both a disagreement on policy as well as distrust of the Muslim community among the far right.”

Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan

And this kind of hate is directed abroad too. “We see far right figures online and anti-Muslim groups extend rhetoric of this ilk to describe elected leaders overseas like First Minister Humza Yousaf and Mayor Sadiq Khan,” Kieffer said. “We’ve documented US hate groups and figures lauding the rise of far right political parties in Europe and cheering on anti-immigration protests, like that seen in Ireland last year.”

What worries the Southern Poverty Law Centre and other counter-extremism experts is when the language of the far right seeps in to everyday politics.

“While we must all speak out against hate, political violence and extremism, it is impossible to overstate the importance of elected officials, business leaders and community officials using their public platforms to condemn and act against political violence, attacks on democratic institutions, racism, antisemitism, hate crimes and vandalism against houses of worship and other minority institutions,” Kieffer said. “Our leaders should denounce and refuse to use divisive and white supremacist-style rhetoric. This type of language needs to be relegated out of the mainstream immediately. We must instead celebrate our diversity and strive for an inclusive democracy.”

Some of the SNP’s opponents, such as Scottish Labour, whose own leader is Muslim, have railed against far-right portrayals of Yousaf. But can we keep white nationalism out of our very online politics?