Let’s start with the core flaw, you confuse motivations with explanations.
People often experience their political anger through immigration. That does not mean immigration is the root cause of that anger. Social science is not obliged to take self-reported grievance at face value, particularly when those grievances are actively shaped by political entrepreneurs, media ecosystems, and identity framing.

You say “not a single one of us joined because of neoliberal inequality.” That statement alone should give you pause. Political movements rarely recruit by advertising abstract economic structures. They recruit by offering simple culprits for complex losses. Immigration becomes the symbol, not the origin, of deeper insecurities sucah as declining public services, housing scarcity, labour precarity, and the erosion of social trust. These conditions pre-date 2015 and exist regardless of migrant presence.

Your Scandinavian example actually undermines your argument. Those societies experienced rising inequality, welfare retrenchment, housing crises, labour market flexibilisation, before immigration became electorally salient. The far right did not create these problems but it rebranded them, redirecting anger downward instead of upward. That is not accidental, it is strategic.

Which brings us to the most telling contradiction in your critique. You accuse Sudbrack and Downes of misunderstanding “real people”, yet you defend a political movement whose economic programmes consistently oppose wealth taxes, weaken labour protections, resist redistribution, and align with business elites. Trump's authoritarian rule has magnified these issues at present - just look at his interference in markets for his own personal wealth gains.

In other words, you are outraged about material decline while defending a politics that guarantees its continuation. That is not rebellion, it is misdirected loyalty.

Your argument also relies on a familiar sleight of hand, turning cruelty into realism. You frame exclusion, suspicion, and collective punishment as “hard truths,” while dismissing solidarity as naïveté. But politics built on permanent enemies does not restore dignity, it consumes it. Movements organised around fear do not empower the marginalise, they require new scapegoats to survive.

And here is the uncomfortable question you conveniently avoid. If immigration were dramatically reduced tomorrow, would wages rise? Would housing suddenly become affordable? Would public services be rebuilt? Would power shift away from economic elites? And most importantly, which seems to be central to your underlying but evident racism - would crime rates drop.

History, and evidence, says no.

This is why blaming scholars for the far right’s rise is a displacement of responsibility. No one “pulled” you into jingoism. You chose a politics that offers emotional certainty over structural change, identity over justice, punishment over repair.

At some point, democratic adulthood requires more than demanding others validate your anger. It requires asking whether your politics serve your humanity, or merely flatter your resentment.

If you want people to “pull you out,” start by letting go of the comforting lie that someone else caused your cruelty.