The loyal folk of Ulster have long understood, in the words of Captain, the Honourable Harry Mulholland, that “God has chosen these six counties as an instrument to work His will”. They also understand that His ways are mysterious and they are beset by traitors, Roman Catholics, Bolshevists, international finance (and we all know what that means), the international labour movement and latterly, wokery and all that LGBTQI+ stuff.

So, it is not surprising that when the forces of international cosmopolitan Marxism write about historical and contemporary fascism, they shamelessly turn a blind eye to Ulster’s long contribution to the field.

You would never know from reading DK Renton’s Spectre article Trump, Fascism and the Authoritarian Turn that loyal Ulster has been doing this longer and more often than Giovannis come lately like Meloni, Trump and Netanyahu. Just because Ulster folk settled on a form of parliamentary authoritarianism rather than go the whole way down the fascist road, does not mean we were not up for it.

In 1911, when Hitler was sleeping in Viennese doss houses and Mussolini was still a radical socialist Edward Carson was organising and drilling a private army. The following year 400 000 people signed a Solemn League and Covenant, some in their own blood, to resist Home Rule. In 1914 this Unionist army was commanded by a British general and landed 25 000 German rifles. They were up for a civil war and were willing to fight those small bits of the British army that disagreed with them. The Proud Boys and Le Pen have never tried anything like that!

Long before Clara Zetkin was telling the Comintern “The fascist leaders are not a small and exclusive caste; they extend deeply into wider elements of the population”, the loyal men and women of Ulster were rallying behind their social betters.

Hitler and Mussolini get all the credit for using violence to smash up the working class movement, but the men of Ulster did not shrink from doing exactly the same thing to drive out the Sinn Fein Romanists and radical Protestant Lundys from the docks and shipyard. Management was grateful that it was the workers themselves who forced out the leftist agitators. As if that wasn’t enough, gangs of ex-soldiers kicked about 10 000 Catholics out of Belfast’s engineering factories. They never get the credit given to the Blackshirts and Brownshirts.

Ulster was first to mobilise former World War One veterans into militias and street gangs which were then incorporated into the state’s apparatus with the express purpose of terrorising malcontents. And the state’s official police force wasn’t averse to a bit of prophylactic murder in the 1920s. Hitler didn’t get round to wiping out whole families until the late 1930s. The RUC were doing it in 1922. Ulster got there first!

The Bolshevist Renton says that none of the European far right organisations “has anything like Trump’s relationship to a violent street movement”. Pshaw!

Ulster had William Craig’s Vanguard in 1972. Michael Farrell writes:

“Vanguard held its first public rally in Lisburn on 12 February. The occasion had heavy fascist overtones: Craig drove up with a motor-cycle escort and reviewed 500 men drawn up in military formation. During the rally he read out a pledge and asked his hearers to endorse it by raising their arms three times and shouting, ‘I do’. He ended with a threat: ‘We are determined, ladies and gentlemen, to preserve our British traditions and way of life. And God help those who get in our way.”

Paisley famously consorted with the UVF in the 1960s and in 1981 gathered 500 men on a hillside to wave their firearms certificates and declare “I will take full responsibility for anything these men do. We will stop at nothing.” Has Trump ever stood on a hillside with an armed militia on a winter night?

In 1985, Peter Robinson who was Paisley’s deputy and a longstanding intimate of the UDA led an incursion across the border into the Free State. Has Trump invaded Mexico yet?

As recently as last summer, the loyal folk of Ulster were proudly part of the wave of anti-migrant riots, mixing things up a bit by teaming up with southern racists and neo-fascists.

Ulster may be a small and marginal place. Its proud people are used to being mocked and scorned by self-styled intellectuals, woke progressives, Papists, cosmopolitans and Marxists. However, theirs is a long and storied contribution to the international far right and there isn’t anything Trump, Orban or Meloni have done that Ulster hasn’t done first.

Oh, and there is strong evidence that Ulster folk are a lost tribe of Israel.