I'm not sure about second part. Tommy is closer to white nationalist and Farage to me always looked more like a nationalist. And this distinction I feel is somewhat lost on the internet.
Here is the thing, if Brexit happens then UK will have less immigrants from Europe. It won't do anything about Muslims that are already in UK and it won't do anything about Muslims that are moving in from non-EU countries. In theory they might even have an increase in Muslim immigration if lots of lower tier workers will move back to EU countries after Brexit.
You might say, but there are lots of Muslim migrants in EU now so if UK leaves then they won't be forced to accept some of them. Sure, but lets remember that UKIP wasn't created in 2015 and that they had their "leave EU" stance for years before Muslims in EU became a thing.
I'm sure that Farage would prefer if there were less Muslims in UK or that they were treated like second class citizens. But I think that most importantly he can't stand the idea that some mongoloids from Eastern Europe have a say in EU. Or that France and Germany, old friends of UK, could start undermining his once great country.
And no, I don't have quotes or anything of the sort to back this up, but this is how this thing looks to me.
My reading of the entire situation:
UKIP is a single purpose party whose purpose has been fulfilled. They had never held elected office within the UK, only within the European Parliament and they've been smeared as bigots and racists for the entire lifetime of the party.
They desperately need to pivot from "Out of the EU" to.... something in order to have any chance of political survival. Of all the things they pivot to, they pick "I'm not really thrilled with all these Muslims. I mean, they can't even behave properly
in prison" as one of their cornerstones.
Instead of maybe hiding that one at the bottom of the list of things they're worried about, they publicly send political dick pics to Tommy Fucking Robinson, who has held membership in three prominent anti-Muslim organizations, two of which he founded and those are the two that exist expressly to be anti-Muslim. Then on top of this, Batten declares "well, we can't bring him into the party officially but we really want him on board so we'll sneak him in the side door and make him our policy expert on Islam." Batten probably thinks he's meming and "triggering and owning the libs", but giving Tommy that title isn't just a dog whistle, that's a construction worker trying to get an attractive woman's clothes off. Making him an advisor on
literally anything else like maybe oh, I don't know, free speech would have been a better move
They could have picked
anything to pivot to, but they picked this issue and put the party weight behind it in the stupidest and most failure guaranteed way possible
Watching this play out is going to be entertaining, and if Carl thought being forever associated with Gamergate provides the people he poorly argues against with easy character assassination material... ooh boy, he hasn't seen anything yet. I can only hope he tries to take some kind of credit for this strategy
