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- [00:17]
A
So, all respect to Mike Isaac, who has been doing some great coverage of it, but now that the Elon Altman lawsuit has concluded, as to whether or not Sam Altman could steal a charity. You wouldn't steal a charity. I. I have to say, and I think Nova, you were mentioning this is Mike Isaac's view as well. Friend of the show Mike Isaac. This whole thing was a moronic slideshow, and we were right to not discuss it.
- [00:38]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think everybody in sort of like both in the courtroom and society just hates both of them. And so listen, I'm sad as well that the judge didn't. Like. There isn't footage of Elon Musk in the sort of chains in muscle being like 19,000 years. But, like, no, it turns out it's just the whole thing was a huge waste of time. He did manage to call the judge, like an activist on Twitter immediately after losing, which is kind of funny, but for the most part, who care?
- [01:13]
A
Yeah, you know what? It would have been much better if the bailiff had had to say at one point, Mr. Musk, you were not allowed to come into the courtroom dressed like Hannibal Lecter on the dolly. No one thinks you're Hannibal Lecter.
- [01:24]
B
They should have let them do it by trial by combat. I don't care if that's not legal in California. They should have made an exception. They should have done, like a kind of pay per view, like put them on a barge to into international waters and make them fight with knives.
- [01:39]
C
Presumably that would also mean Sam Altman's polycule would show up. Or am I thinking of Sam Bankman?
- [01:44]
A
Fried Sam Bankman.
- [01:45]
B
Fried Sam Altman arguably has a sort of harem of former X twinks, which I guess lends him, like, a kind of force multiplier there. Maybe. I don't know.
- [01:55]
C
Yeah. So in principle, it's the same, but it's not explicitly defined as a polycule. Yeah, I. I don't know. Maybe it's just the fact, you can even see with making the mistake between the two, that there's an overabundance of Sams for us to care about. There are a lot of these people who are only in our lives because they are annoying and have money. And as you said, Riley, the sideshow aspect of it, it's definitely a whoever wins, we lose thing. Because there's no one you want to root for here. There's no one you want to be like, oh, that person's just holding the line, obviously, in the libel case or whatever, where the rescue Diver was called Pedo Guy by Elon Musk. You wanted to support Rescue Diver.
- [02:33]
B
No, I hope that. I hope they both lose.
- [02:35]
A
I think I have the idea. Gavin Newsom, if you're listening to this, I know you are. A Thunderdome is not always an unreasonable way to conclude a trial.
- [02:45]
C
Yeah, yeah. You can get them on your podcast, and then your son can fulfill his destiny by doing a murder suicide. And it'll solve the problem.
- [02:52]
B
It's trash for you too, by the way.
- [02:53]
A
Oh, yeah. Hi, everybody, it's TF. We're gonna have friend of the show, frequent guest QAnon, anonymous contributor and researcher on feminism in the far right, Annie Kelly on in the second half to talk a little bit about. I don't know if you've all seen this. London has slopped.
- [03:08]
B
Yeah, we finally did. Speaking of trial by combat, we finally compressed CHUD versus woke into one day. And, you know, thanks to the police, neither CHUD nor woke interacted. And the CHUD march just was a lot smaller than the previous one. Elon Musk didn't show up on account of he was too busy fighting Sam Altman on that barge. Like, Casey Hopkins dialed in, like a video message being like, yeah, sure, what's up, morons? Or whatever, and the whole thing kind of fizzled. But I think it's instructive, and I think that's why we want to talk about it, is where this Tommy Robinson shit is and where it's going.
- [03:47]
A
Yeah. So for context, when Nova's talking about the CHUD march, which I think is journalistic malpractice, not for mainstream outlets to not refer to it that way.
- [03:56]
B
The Million CHUD March.
- [03:58]
A
She's referring to the Unite the Kingdom rally. I believe this is the second one. The first one was last year, maybe.
- [04:04]
B
Yeah, it's definitely like last year's was a lot, like, hype. Yeah. And then this time, not so much.
- [04:11]
A
And it grows out of this long tradition of the far right descending on London, prosecute a bunch of sort of fantastical terrors. Whether that's statue defending, which we remember a few years ago, whether that is like Covid Mark pro Covid marches, in a sense.
- [04:28]
C
They. They. They do right wing stuff and they also exhibit behavior previously only seen in Todd the Squirrel from the webcomic, A Quid, which is do cocaine at people.
- [04:37]
B
Yeah, it's. It's a real kind of like. It's. It's. It's sort of summer holidays for them. Come down to London, smash a packet of coke, piss up a war memorial and Sort of gesture menacingly to students with pronouns who are on the opposite side of 6,000 riot police from you.
- [04:54]
A
Yeah. And in this case, how I've written it down here is one of the two marches is indulging luxury beliefs of media types and is incorporating political concerns from that media based largely overseas rather than bread and butter issues like bins. And the other is a march for Palestinian civil rights.
- [05:08]
B
One is a march of the most, like, easily triggered sensitive people on earth and the other one is a Palestine march.
- [05:14]
A
Yeah. And of course, though guess, of course, which one John Woodcock, AKA Lord Walney, AKA Penis. Penis. Penis. AKA Boris Johnson's anti Semitism czar said was of course the Unite the Kingdom march, the Tommy Robinson march was quote, unquote, decent people who've had enough of importing intolerance.
- [05:30]
B
This year, this year, more than last year, they had even more Israeli flags.
- [05:34]
C
Importing intolerance is John Woodcock German now the whole weird, there's no such thing as anti Semitic Semitism in Germany except the stuff that's being illegally imported by Muslims because Germany has no history of anti Semitism. Right.
- [05:45]
B
In this case, what it is is it's the same kind of brain contortions that you see in like, Unionists in Northern Ireland where it's like someone who is themselves authentically very anti Semitic. Also tying an Israeli flag to a lamppost next to, you know, all of the other ones on the basis that, like, no, actually now they're Zionists, which is an interesting sort of about face for them.
- [06:08]
A
Yeah. And specifically, right, this something that is. Goes back to the idea of, you know, information and like political belief formation and what you do with. With your demands is that this. The weirdest thing about this march, it was a continuity from last year, is that it wasn't for a bunch of English nationalists. It was super fucking American. It was so American.
- [06:29]
B
Well, Starmer. Starmer banned a couple of like, American influences from coming to. To like, speak to the chuds. But even still, like, it's American money and it's American Grie. And so it's been interesting watching Tommy Robinson sort of like go on tour around the world seeking kind of support and seeking the kind of financing for this stuff. Because now it is just. It's crazy how American is. It's crazy how Christian it is. Half of these guys had the, like, massive crosses on wheels. People started saying Christ is king to each other, which is one of the least British things I can imagine.
- [07:07]
C
You have a king, he's God's delegate on Earth. He's got weird fingers. All right. You really don't want to mess with the hierarchy. It's interesting for me because I guess I inhabit two worlds here, where on one hand, organizers from the trade unions fighting the far right reached out and said that some people actually showed up and talked to the organizers saying they heard about it on tf. So I'm happy. On the other hand, I've gotten a bunch of angry emails from British people being like, oh, great, good job with your sideshow, you fuck. But how about you actually do something on the far right? Because they think lions led by donkeys is led by donkeys. So I am aware a protest has happened in the United Kingdom.
- [07:39]
B
So why did you waste all of our money putting up that billboard saying, like, migration makes Britain bloody brilliant, you effing cockwombles?
- [07:48]
C
People literally fucking asked me that. And it was like a British dude in France who sent me this angry email. And I responded, I was like, sorry, we're actually a different show or a history podcast. And he just replied, thanks for the info. And it's just like, great, man. I love my life. But the thing what I wanted to say, though, was I've noticed this because of things that I've seen comments from Americans and friends back in the US being like, I've seen this insane shit on Twitter, which is kind of functioning as right wing TikTok now. Someone reached out to me and said. They showed me a screenshot of a tweet saying that a CHUD influencer was claiming that Europe is committing suicide by immigration. All the shit we talked about previously, like the suicidal empathy thing from Joe Rogan. And they said, the EU is. There's 100 million people in the EU who are migrants who weren't born in the EU. And I was like, there's like 350 million people in the EU.
- [08:36]
A
Yeah, they're all Muslim.
- [08:37]
C
Do you think 100. I mean, I was like, Britain, when it, before it left the eu, had a higher rate of people from not born in the country to white English parents or white, you know, white British parents percentage than other countries in Europe, it was 80%.
- [08:51]
B
I hear what you're saying, right? But I see why you struggled to get all of that on a billboard.
- [08:58]
C
What I'm trying to say, though, is that it's just that I have seen this is a weird fixation. I mean, what was this stupid ass Bret Stephens wrote this thing about Europe is worth fighting for or whatever because we're anti immigration. And it was like, I realized that Europe and Britain in particular, as a meme, has become a thing that they're obsessed with. Yeah.
- [09:17]
B
I mean, there's also sort of some of the jilted lover thing going on where they've lost Hungary or access to Hungary. Rod Dreher has sort of fled over the Carpathians. And so now there's always this kind of like, you know, sort of like, jangling the keys. Like, not jangling the keys, but, like, rattling the door handle. Like, dude, let me in. Fascism's a legitimate political ideology.
- [09:41]
C
I'm a woke immigrant to Europe, and I'm here with my child on camera right now. So say Woke 2 will be even stronger. When Woke 2 happens, we won't apologize for the terror.
- [09:49]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, what we're heading towards is dark woke, Woke two. Armed wooferendum.
- [09:55]
C
Yeah, exactly. And I'll be projecting shit on the white cliffs of Dover because I'm in led by donkeys and not another show.
- [10:01]
A
Yeah. But I want to go back to the Christian thing, right. Which is England stopped doing so do they. Thank you, England. England stopped, like, speaking in tongues and chanting Christ as king in 1700.
- [10:14]
B
Yeah. We deported all of those guys to America so that they could do the vic over there and not bother us.
- [10:21]
A
Right. And now it's. Now the whole point is it comes back dressed up as Templars carrying crosses. New Zealand church groups come and rip up the Palestinian flag in support of Israel. I can't believe a Knight Templar would be like, I support Israel.
- [10:37]
B
Specifically, just guy taking a kind of third position on the Crusades, where it's like, well, you know, who should really be in charge of the Holy Land is the Jews.
- [10:48]
A
And what I. But the thing is, like, this. This whole unite the kingdom march is as ever treated as this authentic expression of. Of what English people want that has to be listened to.
- [11:01]
B
The silent majority. Right, yeah, sure.
- [11:04]
A
I want to read from an article that you sent me, Nova. Oh, this is a beautiful little thing I love.
- [11:10]
B
I want to salute the New Statesman. Right. And specifically the. The author that they say scent here, Emily Lawford, because this is a classic in the genre of, like, liberalism sliding tackle into, like, fully just sending this woman on chud safari. And she's really good at it. I had a great time reading it.
- [11:31]
A
Yeah.
- [11:31]
B
Yeah. It's sort of metropolitan arrogance or whatever, but it's really good.
- [11:35]
A
And also, New Statesman under new management is like 5% less bad than it used to be. And I was able to do stuff like this.
- [11:42]
B
I would. I would much rather. I would much Rather see some honest to God sneering about how thick these people are than another article about how reasonable their concerns are supposed to be.
- [11:53]
A
Precisely. Old management would have been like, we sent our most sympathetic chud whisperer.
- [11:58]
C
There was a chud guy who was on TV during the 2019 election who basically was congratulating Boris Johnson for in advance and saying, get them all out. And it was like, wow, that, that sounds bad. And in my mind's eye, he was less of a sort of, you know, your garden variety shithead racist dude and more of like a, I don't know, like escapee from a home for the criminally insane. In my. I went and watched the Foot to remind myself of what it was like and in my mind's eye he was like, get him out, Boris.
- [12:24]
A
Get them all gone, Boris.
- [12:25]
C
But he didn't actually sound like that. But this guy sounds like he's real. It feels like the news, the New Statesman found the person that was in my mind's eye here.
- [12:32]
B
Well, specifically, there's an interesting arc of this, right, because I am old enough to remember a previous generation of lib sneering at Nazis, right, which was. Do you remember the guy who got, who was like on camera, very drunk and or high, talking about, he was trying to say like Islamic rape gangs, but what came out through quote, thick accent was Muslimic ray guns.
- [12:55]
C
Yes, I recall this, yes.
- [12:57]
B
And you know, he was much made fun of. I remember somebody else on Twitter, which as we've mentioned now is like right wing TikTok remembering that guy and someone replying, oh yeah, I remember laughing at him back in the day. It's crazy how he was proven right though. So that guy replying that doesn't think that he's been radicalized, but that's the kind of shift that we've had. And I think the only answer, right, because anyone who thinks that, anyone whose sort of view on that has shifted in that time, has the sort of brain of an unusually easily led sheep, right? And the way that you bring things back is with a bit of good old fashioned bullying, right? And so we need the lib sneering back. And I'm sorry for any kind of, you know, criticism that I made of it at the time, right, because we need it, we need it to pull people back into line.
- [13:50]
A
Going back in time and turning up Gordon Brown's hot mic.
- [13:55]
B
No, sure have been worse. He should have hit it like, I
- [13:57]
C
don't know, Sorry, Graham, the builder from Milton Keynes is not going to agree with you because he's all about respecting women.
- [14:03]
A
So a middle aged man wore a black shirt covered in gothic script. Fate whispers to the warrior, you cannot withstand the storm. And the warrior whispers back, I am the storm. The storm's name was Graham and he was a builder from Milton Keynes.
- [14:15]
B
Oh, that's that, that is, that is liquid like, like sort of like, you know, lib anthropologizing. I love that shit. I cannot get enough of it. It studs up into the tackle.
- [14:27]
C
That shirt feels so American.
- [14:28]
A
It's QAnon. Yeah, it's literally QAnon. It's like they donated all the old QANON shirts because that's like washed now because they're just in government and then they just got sent over here.
- [14:38]
B
I think the QANON shirts have never been washed.
- [14:40]
A
In the main it's like the donating
- [14:43]
C
the losers victory T shirts from the super bowl to developing countries. But they're giving all the CHUD T shirts and weirdly shirts that 19 year old infantry privates would wear, they all go over to Britain to be used in racist march.
- [14:55]
A
So I asked him why he'd come and he started crying. Sorry. He said, relatable.
- [14:59]
C
Sorry.
- [14:59]
B
Just like first interaction with this guy who is the storm, weeping openly unprovoked.
- [15:07]
A
He says, this is my home, this is my country. I'm scared. What could happen to you? Any female in this country, any male in this country, rape and murder. The people we've let in do not respect women.
- [15:17]
B
I mean, obviously this is written in such a way, right, as to make you wonder about the level of respect that Graham the Storm has for women.
- [15:26]
C
Right?
- [15:27]
B
And yeah, that's great. Again, good laugh. Socially useful to sanction this kind of behavior, right? But I'm also kind of curious, right? Because as we say, this is so fucking American. I don't remember the chuds being like this 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
- [15:40]
A
British chuds aren't supposed to cry, they're supposed to be hooligans.
- [15:43]
B
Yes.
- [15:44]
C
A testament to how much the lonely island has fallen off. Because 15 years ago they would have made a song about this guy's quote. They would have done the bedroom intruder song again all over again. These guys don't respect women.
- [15:54]
A
This is a guy who is wearing an American shirt who is doing, doing the American CHUD thing. When confronted with the thing they're afraid of, which is to start crying at
- [16:03]
C
whoever asked them the question, the whole, the thing they've imagined in their head, then pivot to like, we got to do the death penalty and like deportation squads and shit.
- [16:10]
D
Yeah.
- [16:10]
A
And this is, like. This is a genuine transformation in what the right in this country was. And again, not saying, oh, we should go back to when it was hooligans, because that was also pretty bad, but that this is people who've been radicalized in a different way than the hooligans got radicalized.
- [16:26]
B
I've sort of. I've created a sort of counterpoint here or a juxtaposition by picking two paragraphs of this article, right? Because she did find. Emily Lawford, did find one of the kind of older species of chud, right, the endangered. The red squirrel of chuds, Right, the sort of British sort of version that's getting slowly pushed out. Right? And I think this is a real. It's a story, ultimately about how all of these guys are globalists, even if they, you know, purport not to want to be because they're engaging with the concerns of Americans, they're taking Americans money. And the joke with, like, the NF or the BNP was always like, yeah, they'd kick the shit out of people, but they didn't vote. Right? And the BNP was part of the start of this, like, long project to pull all of these guys towards what ultimately became Graham the storm. Right? Who in his way, is more desperate and pathetic. Like, it's. It's. They closed down the football factory.
- [17:23]
A
Yeah, the football factory. They, like, outsourced the labor to America. And as we're going to find in the second segment with Annie, also to the global South. And now I'll read this paragraph. You can still find the thugs, though, the ones who'd been with Robinson since his days in the edl. By the park, I met Jack, who told me he was a hooligan. I think the march is wank, he told me. Most of the people involved, he said, were thick as fuck, slick as a white powder, had congealed in his nostrils. Quote. Do you want some cocaine in your face? He asked. I'll give you a fucking line of coke.
- [17:49]
B
Oh, you don't want to hand it to them?
- [17:51]
A
But a few feet away, 20 police officers had swarmed around one man in an England football shirt who was lying on his stomach. His red face was covered in sweat, dirt and stone. A horde of men encircled the police, filming them from every angle. Relax, bro. Someone shouted. The man spat on the ground. Suck your mom, he said again. They're doing an American thing.
- [18:13]
B
Makes you proud to be British. No, that. That's like the last hurrah of, like, actual British Racists. Whereas now everyone's. Everyone's too Americanized. And I think it's a, It's, It's a real shame. Obviously, you know, these are not good people, right? I'm not suggesting that things were any better. I am saying that they were autoxinous, right? Like, and, and so I don't know, it's very, very funny to me to have the tiny minority now of like, aging guys who are like, I don't really give a fuck about the politics. I'm just here for the violence and the cocaine and the pissing on things and to have them be getting squeezed out by the guys who are like, Christ is king. That's, that's a real phenomenon.
- [18:58]
A
And it's because. And this is sort of what we're going to get to with annie in about 10 minutes or so. This is because, Graham, the storm wasn't the storm 10 years ago, whereas the suck your mom getting the shit kicked out of a football hooligan was.
- [19:15]
B
What it is, is it's different pathways of radicalization, right? And you're sort of your, your guy who wants to do coke and get in a fight with the cops or anyone, right, isn't headed to the same place, as you say. But that also means that, like, Graham, the storm is, you know, not to be like, oh, we have to feel bad for the racists, right? Obviously, I don. But someone who has been profoundly exploited and radicalized by this on the promise that you can sort of reclaim your dignity, which is constantly being assaulted by these sort of gangs of raping, murdering immigrants, right? And this is so bad that you have to cry about it unprompted to a journalist. And I think, I don't know, there's a real divergence. But it's also, Graham, the storm kind of worries me more.
- [20:04]
C
I have maybe a prosaic explanation for this, but I feel like Jack the cocaine connoisseur in this second segment, like you said, his interests likely haven't changed all that much. Whereas I think that via COVID lockdowns and the subsequent things in the last decade, a lot of people's relationships with the Internet, with social media, got way less healthy. They probably weren't great to begin with. I mean, Hussain did some reporting on this in his book about people who kind of lost their minds and became radical, like hardline Islamophobes, just from basically being on Twitter too much. But I think that when you look at this and you see someone who's wearing a QAnon shirt and is clearly not emotionally Regulated and is relating into it in the very, like you just described in a very, very sort of like, I'm willing to go shoot up a pizza parlor because I think they've got a secret child dungeon in it kind of mentality. That strikes me as someone who has kind of gotten. Gotten caught up in this really, really brain damaging sort of fabrication, lies, conspiracy theory, economy on the Internet.
- [21:07]
B
And because like Jack the coke guy, he's exactly where he wants to be.
- [21:12]
C
He's in whatever racist group chats he wants to be in. But his screen time hasn't changed that much from 2026 to 2016.
- [21:19]
B
Thinking about like a ardently pro vaccine football hooligan because it's like the sooner we all get vaccinated, the sooner we can get back out there and start kicking fuck out of people.
- [21:29]
C
He's like, I stopped doing CoC on my phone because it kept enticing me to pick my phone up and scroll and I don't want to do scroll anymore. I had to find a different glass surface.
- [21:38]
A
And the thing is, Jack, the like the cokey hooligan, I don't think he's really at risk of at some point walking up Downing street to like try and find where they keep the power in number 10 with like a bunch of his friends. Graham, the storm absolutely is. Yeah.
- [21:53]
B
And like the British state and in sort of organs of like surveillance and repression and every everything are actually pretty adept at dealing with Jack's. Not so adept at dealing with Graham's, you know, or at least not so adept at dealing with this version of Graham. The sort of like the Muslim version of Graham, on the other hand. Extremely. But these things, they don't transfer easily necessarily.
- [22:15]
A
And it goes back to. And this is sort of one of the points, one of the things we're going to kind of get into in a few minutes with Annie, which is that the way to actually respond to the Unite the Kingdom rally, that this sort of the people Tommy Robinson has allied himself with. Whether that that's like. And whether that's like these big American sort of billionaire funded far right groups or whether that's like the Nigel Farage doing the minimum possible condemnation like ritually he possibly can, while welcoming in everything he says all this stuff, it's that there is nobody who is responding to it at all.
- [22:45]
B
Yeah. I mean I've said it a million times, right. I hate it when the liberal state defends itself against the left, but I love it when the liberal state defends itself against the right. And just out of Self preservation. It should. I know it never will because. Because that's just how liberals are. But it's what they need to be doing. And I think it's fair to ask, given that that's something that we're leading into next episode, what are the prospects of any sort of future Labour Party leader in terms of doing that? And I think the answer is basically none.
- [23:17]
C
I will also say too that I saw people commenting like, oh, why didn't Sadiq Khan go and attend this march? Or whatever? Which is a stupid question, but it's a concern trolling question. It's like, because they try to kill him because they think he's part of you. Do you realize how all this works, right, that they see Siddi Khan as part of a international conspiracy or something?
- [23:36]
B
Yeah. There was a video of some woman at this march being. I'm not sure what the version of Fed jacketed you would apply on the right is, but people deciding that she was a left wing infiltrator off of the basis that she had glasses on. So left to their own devices, Graham the Storm and his friends are going to reinvent the Khmer Rouge.
- [23:59]
C
Oh, my gosh.
- [24:00]
A
And it's like, the thing is the people who are likely to, yeah, if they maybe not occupy Downing street, but try to, like go into the, you know, London mayor's office and see if what they can do about Sadiq, as
- [24:12]
B
we have seen, a million different things that you can do that are damaging. We could see a British January 6th with these guys. Graham the Storm could, like taser himself in the balls. We don't know what.
- [24:22]
A
The funny thing, the strange thing, right, is that before the United Kingdom rally, videos appeared online, hugely inflating the number of attendees to millions. And this was eagerly repeated by people like Tommy Robinson. I think they used a Shakira concert in Copacabana to, like, and then used AI to like, make it look like Falker Square. Yeah.
- [24:41]
C
They had to put the shitness filter on it, make it gray, make it a little bit depressing, make the buildings worse.
- [24:47]
B
Sadiq Khan and his, like, covert Islamic Republic of London now looks like the Copacabana.
- [24:54]
A
And it was one of the most popular online videos about this subject made by a number of far right influencers who primarily discuss Britain, but don't live here and sometimes don't even speak English. So they claim well enough to know what they're even posting. And it is this ecosystem that's pretty
- [25:10]
C
rude to say Ian Miles Chong doesn't speak English.
- [25:14]
A
It's this ecosystem that this is where Graham the Storm is living. And this is how Graham the Storm is arriving, where the football hooligans should be. Right? It's, yes, it's partly his friends on Facebook and it's partly his, like reading the Spectator or the Telegraph. It's partly GB News. It's all of these, these things. But the most powerful economic flywheel that's involved in getting Graham the Storm to put on the shirt that he bought from America, come down to London and then start just weeping at the first journalist he sees is a whole economy of things that are utterly unrelated to Britain, except basically by chance, because we happen to have one incredibly valuable, apparently natural resource left here, which we're going to talk about with Annie in just a minute.
- [25:58]
B
That was a beautiful segue.
- [26:16]
A
We're just going to lead right on for what we were talking about, which is this economy that has sprung up in the last couple of years, combining like the financial incentives set by Meta, the ability to just produce convincing enough seeming content for people with motivated reasoning that AI tools allow you to do. And try and connect that to why, like Graham the Storm made his trip down from Milton Keynes to march in the United Kingdom rally. And like, just how this, how these things are connected to the rise of the far right in the ongoing march of, like the far right ideology in the UK without even really caring about the fact that that's the ideology they're promoting. And to help us explore this stupid, stupid phenomenon, it's Annie Kelly. Annie, welcome to the second half. Thank you for joining us.
- [27:02]
D
Thanks so much for me having, having me.
- [27:04]
A
So can you just draw a little line for us? Because we know all know about the London has fallen genre of, you know, real or video or whatever far right lunatic goes to Whitechapel, points to a sign in Bengali and then starts crying. But that used to be a guy who would go to Whitechapel, point at the sign in Bengali and then would have to physically start crying. But that's obviously like, that guy's job has been audited. Automated. We used to build things in this country. You know, can you just, can you take us through, like, how we get from that to the Britain in 2050 videos that get reshared by Tommy Robinson to motivate Graham the Storm to come and join the United, United Kingdom rally.
- [27:44]
D
Yeah. I mean, having worked in the field of, I guess, far right online social media content for over 10 years, an alarming thing that you find happening is that you, you become nostalgic for true, truly, truly dire content that came before because it only seems to get worse, as you point out. You know, the Londoners fallen content, which I talked about a little bit on a QA episode back in the beginning of the year. I mean, to those people's credit, they were genuinely traveling to that place and in some cases were actually making the effort to speak to locals, even if they would then, you know, kind of try and manipulate what they said. I think in one specific case with the South African travel YouTuber Kurt Kaz, he, he actually, he wasn't in Whitechapel, he was in Croydon. And a fan comes up to him on a bike and says, you know, oh, I love your work, and does a little wheelie for him on his bike. And then Kaz, this is clearly like not threatening enough for the narrative that Kaz wants to tell about London. So he manipulates the image using AI, I think, for the thumbnail, turns the guy into like the guy to be wearing a balaclava, threatening, advancing threateningly on him. And also like Photoshops a little worried expression on his face on Kirk Hauser's face as the guy advances something.
- [29:10]
B
Year old YouTuber still makes racist content the old fashioned way.
- [29:14]
D
I know, but you sort of think, well, you know, yeah, some human thought went into that. Right, some human thought went into that. And yeah, I find myself a little similar. This is a bit of a tangent, but, you know, thinking the same about the manosphere, I think. Think about how, you know, the pickup artists, when they were doing their, like, what they called sarging back in the day, in the early noughties, they would go up and write little field reports about how their evening out had gone, what tactics had worked with the hot babes, what hadn't. And then you look at someone like Clavicula who's just filming himself walking around and stumbling through conversations and you think, man, yeah, at least they used to. At least they used to be doing some gutter honest writing.
- [29:56]
B
At least they used to be getting some cardio, getting the steps in.
- [30:01]
A
But this like this genre of video, I mean, who's nostalgia. Okay, hold on. Idea for a Facebook page. Instead of who remembers the bin Man? It's who remembers Paul Joseph Watson?
- [30:11]
B
Who remembers who remembers the bin Man?
- [30:13]
A
Yeah, it used to be, as we say, someone like this goes to London, gets frightened for largely the benefit of people around the world who know about London. It's a very famous city. People have an idea of what it's like. A lot of people spend, speak English and so it's almost a whole Anglosphere scare tactic. Right. To go and get frightened about London. But now Tommy Robinson is sharing these London in 2050 videos. I have an example from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism of some of these videos that are being described. Annie, I'm sure you've seen a billion. We spoke to two people who said they were behind an account with more than 20 million views showing content like this. The account shows AI generated videos from the point of view of people walking through British cities in 2050. Liverpool, London, Birmingham and unnamed places in England. Hey, Matt Goodwin, take notes. That's how you list C. Depicted as dirty and full of rubbish, with people dressed in traditional Islamic clothing and hijabs lining the streets. Stalls have simply halal written on them. And there's bunting, featuring what looks like Arabic script as well as fire.
- [31:09]
B
And halal. I love to get my halal right next to the fire.
- [31:14]
C
I mean, obviously there's a racial component here where they're trying to. It's really, really grotesque. But the idea of, like, oh, it's chaotic and there's trash everywhere. It's like, wow, did you really have to burn a lot of fucking computing to generate that image?
- [31:26]
A
Yeah. That video is. They're able to now make, what, dozens of a day, hundreds of it a day, put it on a B, test it across hundreds of Facebook groups.
- [31:36]
B
Yeah. What we're getting to here is more efficiently strip mining outrage. Right. Is that fair to say?
- [31:44]
D
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think the thing that I find really fascinating about this journalism that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism have done, looking into some of the influencers and social media moles who are pumping out this AI slop, essentially, is that it's not even really clear there's much ideology behind it. You know, one of the people that they spoke to, I believe, was a. Was a Sri Lankan influencer who. He seemed pretty canny, essentially. He kind of had a vague understanding of the British political landscape, sort of said, you know, I'm aware that older people in the United Kingdom don't like immigrants. So I specifically target my content to be anti migrant because I know they spend a lot of time on Facebook. And so this is just a really profitable avenue for me. And he's actually teaching classes to aspiring social media moguls and Sri Lanka on how to do the same thing. And it seems that he has identified that this is, you know, he has lots of different kind of content, but this one specifically seems to really get views, really get shares. There was. But there was an even more fascinating case, I think, which was a man in Pakistan Who? It's hard to tell because the interview is translated to a certain degree. And it's also hard to know if he's being totally honest about his motivations. But it's not even really clear if this person fully understood the ideological implications of the extremely racist content they were making. You know, it was. They were kind of creating stuff, you know, with, yeah, images of far right rallies, you know, England says enough, I think even people shooting, shooting dinghy boats in the channel. Possibly another video, I think, of Keir Starmer announcing Sharia law, things like this.
- [33:34]
A
To be fair, he do that? I saw it in a video he
- [33:37]
D
did and we support that.
- [33:39]
B
We've all had a busy week and we missed some stuff. It's fine.
- [33:41]
D
But what was interesting about the interview with him was it was clear that he was just riffing off other AI content that he had seen be successful online, that he was kind of taking shots of this, putting it into an AI image generator and kind of just letting it roll. Essentially, at least from the interview, I couldn't really grasp whether he had any kind of particular understanding that he was catering to specific political demographic or anything. It was more literally just this content does well, I'm going to create my own version of it.
- [34:13]
B
And the facts that you can automate that too, right? You can ask ChatGPT or whatever what goes viral on Facebook, what's going to make me money on Facebook. And it goes, I don't know, do some politics, Claude.
- [34:26]
A
Make me 10,000amonth on Facebook. Make no mistakes. Of course it leads you to like make and post AI video of Big Ben being renamed massive Muhammad. And you know, that's Hussein thinking about
- [34:37]
C
Hussein commenting far right pages that started out as like, we love animals and animal protection and lost dogs and then pivot to anti halal slaughter to then just to Islamophobia. And this was a phenomenon he, he perceived, you know, 10 odd years ago. And it's like, well, it just seems so much more accelerated that you could effectively do an AI generated video that involves, you know, it recreate. It does, you know, dramatic reenactment of the imagined, you know, Muslim invader taking all your household pets and disappearing them or whatever. And it's like there's a certain audience, I think, that's going to recognize it as AI generated. Obviously, I think older people and people who aren't as savvy might not. But in general, my impression was that if it's entertaining, even when people know it's fake, they like sharing it because it's just like, yeah, but it's showing how things really are. That's certainly how I've perceived what I've seen coming back from America.
- [35:24]
D
Yeah, I think it's often quite similar to a belief in conspiracy theories. People will often kind of try and particularly in the academic field of conspiracy theories, kind of grapple with what belief means. And a lot of the time when you drill down to it in interviews, particularly for the more lurid sounding ones, interview subjects will kind of say, well, this specifically might not be true, but it's the kind of thing that might happen. And I'm kind of like signaling essentially that I believe that they are capable of this thing. Do you know? And I think there's something similar happening with the AI stuff. I don't think probably even 50% of the people who are sharing it are like, this is actually real. This really happened. So much as a sort of, it's, it's signaling a. What they believe to be a social truth, what they believe to be a fact.
- [36:11]
A
In fact, one of the commenters on the Great British People Facebook page, one of them that I think is run by this like Sri Lankan guy, even commented, you know, Graham the Storm. Most likely Graham the Stormer or an equivalent said, it's probably AI, but the fact is he's right about everything. He actually just goes out and says it.
- [36:27]
B
I mean, I think, I think what's interesting about this is this idea that Graham the Storm, right, this guy who is on a kind of like pathway of radicalization further rightwards and there's just this kind of flywheel powering him now that isn't really in anyone's control, maybe apart from, you know, some guy who is trying to like maximize ad revenue.
- [36:49]
A
This is why also it's so frustrating when the Unite the Kingdom rally was one of the reasons that the responses to two things, the Unite the Kingdom rally and all, all that it entails, as well as this industry that that's emerged that primarily involves just lying to the most addled racist pensioners that Britain has. No one can counter it because the liberal way of looking at this kind of thing is about disinformation. It's that this kind of thing is making Graham the Storm wrong about facts. And because he's wrong about facts, he accepts a number of beliefs and those beliefs lead him to London to call himself Graham the Storm.
- [37:24]
B
And if Graham the Storm had better information delivered as unentertainingly as possible, he
- [37:29]
D
would change his beliefs.
- [37:30]
C
I observed the same phenomenon in the United States with forwarded emails around the time when Obama first became, became president. And I remember one in particular that I'll summarize. It was effectively someone describing stereotype, massively over exaggerated stereotype of sort of evil Arabs on plane threatening, calling people infidel and stuff like that. And that Delta wouldn't do anything because it was woke, although they didn't have the word for it yet. And when finally people actually started getting forwarded enough people believed it was real news, actually found the person who originated it and he was like, oh well, I didn't intend for it to go around the whole country, but it could be true. This is the kind of thing that could happen and they wouldn't do anything about it. And it's like once again the direction never got the audience of the original claim. But I think what's pernicious and I mean interesting in a dark way about this is that you do have a segment of people who will see these things that are AI generated, I feel and believe them. And another significant segment of people who know that they're fake. But either like you said, ideologically support the idea that it could be true or just going to effectively concern troll or just BS people and just be like no, I saw it, it's real, that's real. And it's like well that person has 14 fingers and fire doesn't move like that. And the, all of the writing on the bus is gibberish and yet. So it's harder to combat it.
- [38:43]
A
It hard to say halal.
- [38:44]
C
Well yeah, because the car, there's, there's 18 different shops just selling halal and it. But I feel like it is, it is harder to combat it versus the, you know, the curse of the 2000s, the forward, forward, forward email that people would get from their grandparents.
- [38:58]
D
Yeah, I mean I guess the thing that I find that I find different about that is the, the guy who originated the forwarded email, like you said, he was trying to get across a point of view. He was, you know, this was something he believed even he knew he was bending the truth in service of a wider ideology. I think the thing that I find really hard to wrap my head around maybe because I am just quite an ideological person, I don't know is the fact that I think from what I can tell are just like the people who are producing this stuff that is not really their motivation. London Centric did some really great reporting recently about these TikTok videos which were claiming they were sort of doing these kind of sped up run throughs of houses and flats which it claimed were being handed out to asylum seekers and it would have inflammatory headlines, it would say stuff like, you know, I gave this to a Syrian asylum seeker who told me that he hated Britain and things like that. And when. So London centric managed to track down who was renting these flats and they all came from one specific estate agent, that estate agent, it turned out, then when they were confronted, managed to identify the person who had been doing the tours of these flats and sent through, I think just to sort of clear their own name, to make clear that it wasn't anything to do with them since through an interview of them confronting the person behind it. And I had been following this story and I had expected it to be a similar one. Similar, yes, it's not true, but I know this is happening in other places so I thought I would let people know. But the guy was actually, yeah, just much more upfront about the fact that he had previously had a quite successful TikTok account which had simply been reposting other people's content, but it had been successful enough that it had given him a payout. So when it got banned by TikTok for reposting other people's content, he sort of sat down and thought, okay, well how can I make some more income? And he kind of just sort of thought to himself, oh yeah, the far right, they seem really engaged on TikTok, they seem really active, the anti immigrant people. So I'll just kind of like make content baiting them. And it was, it seemed, you know, again, it's hard to, it's hard to read the minds of people like this, but it seemed purely commercial, his motives. And I think maybe the most fascinating part of the interview for me was when he was. When the person confronting him described the videos as racist, he said no, they can't be racist because TikTok's moderation policies don't allow for racist content. So if they had been racist they would have been deleted.
- [41:25]
B
A guy who's all guardrail, just like anything, Listen, I couldn't be like speeding because cars don't go that fast, that's illegal.
- [41:36]
A
The whole thing is so on rails. I mean we mentioned this Sri Lankan guy earlier. I think it's worth pulling out some of the quotes from that article in the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, one of the very few good journalistic in the uk. Sri Lankan influencer gay Soriya Pura Instagram feed shows off his lavish lifestyle. He and his friends flash expensive looking watches, dine at five star hotels and film videos in sleek modern Apartments. He claims to have made $300,000 by running Facebook pages, including some of which push this kind of stuff to British audiences.
- [42:04]
B
It's, it's, it's so, so funny to enrich yourself as a foreigner and as a person of color on the back of racist white British people. Well, that's actually like, that's praxis kind
- [42:19]
A
of specifically, though, if you think about it, making the country ungovernable in order to strip mine our most abundant natural resource, which is pensioner outrage. It's colonial reparations, quite literally.
- [42:33]
B
What it is is we have a domestic market of exploiting pensioner outrage that now can't compete with more efficient global extraction.
- [42:44]
C
Rapaciousness of offshoring, you know, just for a couple cents more of profit, they're going to destroy a domestic industry.
- [42:50]
A
Paul Joseph Watson has to do the Full Monty. Okay?
- [42:54]
C
There was a movie in the 70s called the Kentucky Fried Movie, and there's this dumb skit. Some of them have really not aged well. But one of them was like, we're going to solve America's oil crisis because this is the early 70s by basically running teenagers on like an assembly line to extract oil because of acne, and it's going to power cars. And it sounds disgusting and absurd, but the idea of like, we're going to, we're going to fund our lifestyles by generating heat and selling electricity to the grid from racist pensioners, like, it sounds similarly absurd. And I was thinking about what you were saying, Annie, because it feels like in my mind I can recall a couple of things, like in 2016, the sort of Facebook monetized blog pages they called fake news at the time. Like, typically, I think they were somewhere in the Balkans, people in general, but it might have been elsewhere, were making things like Donald Trump wins the Nobel Peace Prize or gets some of the Brexit stuff too, says all Catholics must vote for Trump kind of thing. And it was similar. It was just ad revenue driving it. And it's weird to trace that through line from what you're describing. The person who is invested in it. It's like, I'm going to make things up for the cause in say, 2010 or 2009 to that to then this, where it's not even somebody doing it to, to get clicks within the environment of the country that they're in. I mean, the story from, from London centric is, is, is different in this regard. But the idea of like a guy in Sri Lanka being like, well, I know old British people are on Facebook and they Hate foreigners. And it's like, and, and that's. And there's like two steps in the flowchart to get to Laughs Lifestyle from that.
- [44:16]
B
I kind of think that there's a. The progressive route out of this is simple. We have to put boomers in the matrix. We have to put them in the pods from the matrix. We have. Because otherwise all of the outrage is getting farmed anyway. It's just getting farmed to like evil ends. Right? Like we could, we could be using that to power stuff here, Take those
- [44:37]
C
jigsaw puzzle paintings of like the perfect country hamlet somewhere in England where, you know, everything is just, is oil painted and you can convince them they're living in that and then this problem goes away and they power the grid.
- [44:48]
A
I mean, if you really think about it, right, the Unite the Kingdom rally is like the effluent byproduct of outrage farming being undertaken at an industrial scale. We are. Britain is being, is being treated as a factory farm. And the effluent, the Superfund lake is the Unite the Kingdom rally. It is a byproduct, a valueless byproduct these people don't give a shit about.
- [45:11]
B
Yeah, it's just tailings.
- [45:12]
A
In March, one of Surapuria's pages posted a claim misrepresenting. Sadiq Khan pledged to build 40,000 new London council homes by saying the homes would be only available to Muslims so they could be, quote, near mosques and halal food shops.
- [45:23]
B
I don't know why he would, I don't know why he would institute that policy. But you know what, fairs and also
- [45:28]
A
this, by the way, this stuff isn't, as always, right. This stuff doesn't actually come from outside the country. It's just these guys in Sri Lanka are just better at spreading it because there's a quote from Robert Jenrick about Andy Burnham, more on him on Thursday's episode, saying if Burnham wins, a million low skilled migrants will be allowed to stay and get British citizenship for the next few years. They won't stop the boats. He'll put them in bed, sits on your street and to pay for it all, he'll have to hike your taxes.
- [45:50]
B
He's never going to fit a boat in.
- [45:52]
A
That boat's a small boat. It's a small boat.
- [45:54]
B
Famously, I guess, I guess they do
- [45:56]
C
inflate, but I don't mean to be glib, but I just. It feels like they're taking the James Dyson model, but for racism. Like they basically, they're like, well, you know, we got to Move it elsewhere where the labor is cheaper and we can have the headquarters somewhere with a zero tax rate. And you know, I guess to me it's, I knew that there was money to be made in some of this, but it, but didn't realize it was to this scale. And I presume that what that means is that one has to be making significant amounts of content like churn, we
- [46:22]
B
are stupid to be left wing. Like what is wrong with us?
- [46:27]
A
He goes on to say, the UK is an important audience. They really don't like people from our countries living there. Not just Sri Lankans, even more so Indians. And then again, it describes more of these videos, right? One AI generated video shows a large naval ship colliding with two inflatable dinghy's full of people who are thrown out of the boats into the sea. The caption reads, who really wants to see something like this? Others claim that Starmer will introduce Sharia law.
- [46:48]
B
Yeah, just, just, he's like, just like mining the sort of British boomer id.
- [46:53]
A
Right, but there's a reason. But that's why. Because these guys are, you know, you might say hilariously rootless cosmopolitans. This is why it's so American. This is the most American thing I'm going to say in this episode where one of the. I see someone's already scrolling to this. One of one of the sort of like memes that he produces and sends and gets reposted and gets paid for is, oh, Starmer bin Laden wanted for terrorist crimes against white Christians, pensioners and the disabled. They barf sack O crumbo'd Starmer on
- [47:24]
B
a long enough timeline. Claude and Chad GPT will invent boomer
- [47:28]
A
standard English and O Starmer bin Laden wanted for terrorist crimes against white Christians, pensioners and the disabled.
- [47:35]
B
Yeah, I thought it was weird that Andy Burnham ran on that, but.
- [47:39]
A
And again, like reform UK counselors are constantly sharing all this shit. Bill Piper, Reform UK counselor in Leicestershire, commented, this is in late 2025. So he's been joined by 10 of his friends who all believe the same thing. Say quote, I've been saying it for ages. On an AI generated image of a man wearing a T shirt printed with the slogan quote, Support the country you live in or live in the country you support. His method. This is the end of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism article. His methods appear to yield results, at least for some of his students. In a Facebook group, one student posted an AI generated image of the meta CE Mark Zuckerberg with a large pile of cash saying, thank you very much, Mr. Zuckerberg, for helping people in Sri Lanka. And the thing is. He's right. Right. It's as you say, it's just if another thing was more lucrative, that's what they'd be doing. Yeah, Right. But this is the thing that's lucrative because these are the people who are perennially unsatisfied and desperate to be scared because being scared is their in group identity.
- [48:33]
D
Yeah. I mean, I think it speaks maybe to just the foolhardiness of the effort to ban under 16s from social media. I mean, it really doesn't to me, like, under 16 are the ones we should be worrying about. You know, the power of. The power of the over 65 seems to be just like creating an entire new racism industries in the global South. And also I think maybe speaks to the fact that it's actually just not a very smart idea, particularly to have a population who are largely unused to social media suddenly unleashed on it.
- [49:06]
B
Yeah. Everyone's online and very isolated and now there's this technology that seems to be able to, like, get to any.
- [49:15]
D
Yeah, I mean, the truth is, yeah, I think that there is some very compelling evidence on the harms of social media for under 16s. I'm just like, not convinced it's compelling enough that it's much more harmful for them than anybody else, if you know what I mean. Like, I think, you know, a planet for all of us.
- [49:32]
A
I think this honestly segues quite nicely into just showing how hilariously poorly targeted the Online Safety act is. Right. Largely because UK lawmaking is written in newspaper columns. Right. A lot of the laws just get written in Daily Mail columns. And the more you write it in a Daily Mail column, the more of a law it will become.
- [49:48]
C
Yeah.
- [49:48]
B
And like, despite the sort of valiant efforts of a few of the more left side of, like, you know, lib journalists, no one's really been able to sell anyone getting that panicked about your nan getting radicalized. And to be honest, they should. But it's very, very easy to get people worried that your, like, kid is going to be made to have pronouns by the Internet, you know, and it's
- [50:10]
A
like there's this whole category of socially destabilizing information, like substance out there that the country refuses to take seriously. It does not sublimate, like, the sexual urges of a Daily Mail columnist in the form of protecting children from seeing pornography, which is so good. I don't think you should probably still do that. But the point of the online safety law is we are terrified of the innocence from all of the horrible smut that's out there.
- [50:35]
B
Yeah. And I think it's important to articulate this stuff as basically pornographic. Right. Okay. It's not sexually explicit most of the time, but a lot of it is, as we've seen with the sort of like, you know, Royal Navy sort of running down small boats. It's sort of violently porn pornographic. It's certainly appealing to a sort of like very basal emotional level.
- [50:56]
A
Right.
- [50:56]
B
Because that's how you get those clicks. And it's, it is learning from a lot of the same things that Born Producers have done.
- [51:01]
A
And the Online Safety Act, Right. Specifically, it specifically says legal but harmful content for adults so long as it's democratically relevant. And AI video of, you know, Keir Starmer saying, I'm going to, you know, saying the antifa super soldiers tweet, basically. Right.
- [51:19]
B
This, this video of Keir Starmer saying the Shahada. Democratically relevant.
- [51:24]
A
Yeah.
- [51:24]
B
Right.
- [51:24]
A
And so there's a specific carve out, ironically campaigned for by the right wing press who are now having rings run around them by these like AI content farms, at least in terms on return on invested capital because they don't have to employ a libel lawyer, they don't need an office, they don't have to
- [51:38]
C
hire Roger, they're not going to pay for his department in Budapest.
- [51:41]
A
Yeah, like these, the, the overheads on terrifying pensioners when like British reporters are doing it is really high. Right. And they're getting rings run around them. But it's because the right wing press campaigned for this carve out where you can lie about, so long as it's about politics. And guess what? Everybody involved in the Online Safety act was like, yep, so long as it's not to do with jacking off, I'm fine. And so it's like I say, how I think about this is it carves out protections for politically flavored content. So it's legal but harmful for someone to assemble an anti immigration panic video that may as well to him be in Greek. And it's protected because it takes a policy position which is we should kill everyone coming over in the channel. It's almost as though the Online Stuff Safety act was created to facilitate right wing disinformation or right wing propagandizing at scale because industrial scale lying is fine.
- [52:30]
B
Yes, that's an interesting thing. However, it sounds like what you're telling me to do is to start farming outrage by making right wing Greek language content.
- [52:41]
A
Everyone moves one language over. Yeah.
- [52:44]
D
The British market is saturated. We need to be moving to the
- [52:49]
B
East Yeah, yeah, I'm in racism. But like in emerging markets, I mean,
- [52:53]
C
I will say that I can imagine that in terms of trying to come up with like, what is the most ridiculous, overstated, sort of Islamophobic hyperbole that you could sell and say, this is what's happening in the country. I bet you Greek Cyprius would be really good at that. So, like, maybe that's where they need to offshore it to.
- [53:07]
A
Yeah, we have, we have Artisan made in England.
- [53:13]
B
I'm currently getting Grok to generate me a video of the Greek president wearing a fez and growing a moustache out.
- [53:19]
C
If they've taken the Copacabana footage of Shakira and say it's the Unite the Kingdom rally, they could absolutely take them out in the northern Cyprus that has the enormous northern Cyprus flag painted on it with the Ataturk slogan painted underneath it. And they could just be like, yeah, that's Eastbourne. That's what it looks like now.
- [53:36]
B
Specifically making my fortune convincing, like British boomers of the megali idea. Like you have to become like anti Turkish.
- [53:45]
A
One thing I want to go back to right before we sort of close out is we've been talking a lot about these ideas as coming from outside in. And I think that's not quite right. It might be the people capitalizing on the ideas are outside. But I mentioned the right wing press earlier. It's that these are all ideas that the right wing press has. It's what they've taken Alison Pearson and automated and outsourced her and de skilled her. Maybe. I can't believe that there was anything there to Deskill, but there you go.
- [54:13]
C
I was gonna say it's really difficult to subtract one from zero, but okay, let's go.
- [54:17]
A
Poor Melanie Phillips. She's. She's got to sign on now. But these are British beliefs. It's just there is a global far right ecosystem that is mixing them up with American beliefs and then creating them in the most efficient way where the cost of labor is cheapest or where your reach is highest. Right, Yeah.
- [54:39]
D
I mean, I think that's. That's precisely why I found the other example that the other case study that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism managed to find with the Pakistani man so interesting because he really was, as far as I can tell, he really was just simply just finding content that was already successful and replicating it. But as you say, that wouldn't have been possible essentially without this content already existing in British media ecosystem. He. Yeah. Had just kind of simply found Like a cheaper and kind of more effective way to create this content. But yeah, as with all things with AI, which is kind of, I think, you know, why so many people get so angry about the kind of claims that it's going to make all of artists and writers obsolete. It can only do that. It can only make them obsolete by cannibalizing their work. Right. And I think what we're finding is, you know, that's true for talented artists and it's true for talented writers, but it's also true for talented racist content creators.
- [55:38]
B
We don't get the artisanal stuff anymore. You know, it's all slop. And I, this, this is why I called it a flywheel earlier is it's, it's not gonna produce something different, but it's gonna produce the same thing faster. Right? And I think, I guess what makes me me really depressed actually. Ronnie, can I segue into the next episode? Is that allowed? Okay, so next episode we want to talk about Andy Burnham, right? And Manchesterism and Burnham Ism and where that's all taking us. And it kind of strikes me that, you know, we're going to talk about him and like Bond Markets and I think in both cases, right, the sort of, Graham, the storms of the world, the guys who really engage with this kind of content, the guys who are really radicalized by it, have understood, even if not consciously, right. That the way that they get what they want is by never being happy, by never being satisfied. And that's something that this kind of content ecosystem needs from them. It needs them to be always unsatisfied. So they're always clicking more, they're always consuming more. And so they're going to remain like ever radicalized. And I don't know that anyone has a solution that isn't just give them more of what they want. And that makes me really depressed and really worried.
- [56:44]
A
Yeah. It's the result of this I read recently and this I think, known for a while that Starmer tends to select his front benchers based on who goes. Well, who goes on TV well, right. It's very trumpy from him. But he loves television. He's obsessed with television. He wants good TV performers because it's not just a government, it's an entire anti political governing philosophy. Because Tommy Robinson and those Sri Lankan guys and like the American influencers who are handing out the crusader crosses to like Graham the Storm are hoping to convert the football hooligan guys. Those guys are all political entrepreneurs in some way. Some of them are just entrepreneurs like The Sri Lankan guys, some of them have ideologies they're trying to put forward. Some of them are syncretist. Right? But they're all political entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs. They're all doing something. They're taking an action to make things different, whether that's their bank accounts or like the amount of fascist boots on the street in the country. But the government seems primarily interested in using the power of the state to change the theater of news media, which is why they tend to give in to all of the demands that will never be met because they must be seen in the theater to be engaging with the thing that's also in the media. Right. It's also on tv.
- [57:52]
B
You want, you want, you want an easy ride from like, you know, Ed Balls or like Sophie Ridge or whoever.
- [57:58]
A
Yeah, not to say the Starmer regime doesn't do anything. It does use power. It uses its power to crack down, but it always cracks down in response to Ed Balls and Sophie Ridge and the press and, and, and so on and so on. Or like, you know, the, the whatever the addled wackadoo you can get for fucking Question Time. And it only steers them in one direction because these guys are not political entrepreneurs. Right? Nor is Andy Burnham, by the way. The government treats like United Kingdom and all the ideology around it, including all the AI Slopaganda as this authentic expression, people's of beliefs that need to be accommodated, prevented from spilling into street violence and not entirely artificial panic stoked by columnists taken over by content farmers in Sri Lanka responding to economic incentives set by Meta. That is to say, they don't see this as the problem that it is. They see this as just. If we can just message it better, if we can just strike the balance, then all of these incentives that are way above us or deep in someone's fucking hindbrain are all going to go away if we can get the margin right. Which is I think based on everything we've talked about in the last half hour about what this actually means to people and the emotive charge that you get from watching a Britain in 2050 video. Because they're never going to make Graham the Storm cry about how much they, how much he loves their immigration target, right? It's, it's bound to fail and we've seen it fail.
- [59:09]
D
Yeah, I saw a, a Labor MP on Blue sky recently and she was, she was on Blue sky, so, you know, it didn't go down well. Kind of talk about, she was like, when, when the late, when the immigration issue is solved Then we can kind of, you know, we can move on to. The public will be more understanding. Yeah, I think you're exactly right that people are. Yeah. This is the immigration issue in a sense. And it's really hard to understand exactly how this will be solved for all the Online Safety Act's faults and yeah, I think you elucidated them really well. Something that, once again, I'm feeling nostalgic about stuff that's not that great. It does feel like to me already, like a relic of a bygone era, which is when governments genuinely felt that they had some kind of role in regulating social media. It sort of came off the back of. There was a similar bill that came through. They call it a bill in the eu. I forget what they call it. An act, I can't remember. And one in one in the US which was typically even more toothless than our own. That was during the Biden administration, obviously. And it all felt, you know, I kind of watched these sort of make their way through and gradually get more watered down each time. But there was still some kind of effort, some kind of understanding that there was something that governments could essentially could do about social media. And I think social media platforms themselves also really had this consciousness up until 2024 or so. This was something that, you know, they were frightened of and you could see that they were doing kind of piecemeal. It was certainly not enough attempts at moderation on their own platforms. I have watched that over the last two years just completely roll back almost to total silence. You, you know, there was a time when if you looked up the great replacement on YouTube, it would say the great replacement is a conspiracy theory, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of the content that it showed you would be people, people debunking it. That is not the case anymore. You can find this. I think the second result I got recently was somebody saying the great replacement is real. I've seen people who got deplatformed and demonetized post 1-6-just quietly kind of get their accounts back, get their finances back on their advertising Money back on YouTube. Similarly with Facebook, there was a time when they certainly weren't doing enough on Qanon and anti vaccine content and things like that, but there was an effort to suppress that. That is not the case anymore. In fact, my sister, who doesn't research this stuff but recently became pregnant, said that she had to basically close down her Facebook account because it just kept on. The second it found out she was pregnant, it just kept on sending her anti vaccine content over and over again, you know, about what vaccines would do to her baby, et cetera. And I see absolutely no appetite at all on behalf of governments to do anything about this. It's almost as if, because we understand that Trump has no interest in doing anything about it, that the whole kind of system has collapsed essentially on the understanding. And that's why I think you get stuff like should we ban social media for under 16s? Because it's sort of. We have kind of essentially decided that this stuff is ungovernable and therefore all we can do is govern the public.
- [62:20]
B
Instead, you keep seeing that word ungovernable show up in more and more like op eds. Now, I think that's the kind of mood music for Burnham as well is, well, there's nothing we can do because, you know, it's just. It's just over.
- [62:35]
C
I saw something interesting because before you joined us, Annie, we were discussing this and I mentioned that American friends and people who are similarly minded have been sharing a lot of very obviously American influencer, like right wing Twitter and TikTok content that's focused on the United Kingdom. And I was actually kind of taken aback because all of a sudden they were talking about Manchester as sort Manchester has fallen. You know, white people are being outbred or whatever. And I don't necessarily think there's something so acute as to say this is because they to discredit Andy Burnham. But it was interesting to see it kind of come to the fore a little bit more. And it feels, I don't know, like I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of assuming that everything is directed because it's very chaotic. We can see that so much. There's so many actors with very different reasons involved in this. But it is interesting that it feels like any kind of politics that might venture into, into opposing this then suddenly becomes the target of this deluge of just of nonsense. But you can still drown in nonsense, apparently, whether or not you point out that it's fake. It's like there's just too much of it. And I guess my question to you before we close, Annie, was you are far better versed in this than I am. And I feel like you see a lot of different angles in this and have been doing this for a while and I guess, is there anything that you feel like people should be aware of because of both the risk of, say, people they know being radicalized, but also just in general the trends of that you're seeing? Because as we've said on this episode, it has changed. It's become more dangerous, but it's definitely changed.
- [63:59]
D
I think the truth is that even though this stuff is much more profitable, it's not entirely going to replace our industry of homegrown YouTubers who go around kind of causing trouble in city centers, usually filming people who are. Anyone who's not white for one thing, but also kind of honing in on homeless people, on addicts. I don't know if you guys have covered this before. It's kind of called Auditing. Have you discussed that?
- [64:29]
B
Oh, we're very familiar with that. Goes back to ages ago, back to when we had the Twitch stream. I've long been interested in those freaks.
- [64:38]
D
Yeah, I mean, I think it's funny because I think there is like as much as the AI slop might travel really far, it also feels like there is this appetite type a kind of almost Colosseum esque appetite for real blood, real debt, you know, And I kind of wonder if that kind of content in a saturated market of AI slot will come to have a certain kind of cachet to a degree, because it's so kind of visceral and ugly.
- [65:06]
B
It's the sort of like if you're not in front of a green screen, then go out into the street and like push someone on the camera kind of thing. Right. Well, I do wonder, just by way of closing, whether what we're headed for isn't sort of the worst of the both worlds where you have all of the sort of fictionalized AI radicalized stuff like, you know, the sort of imaginary Navy shooting at people, then the real guys have to go and compete with. And so you end up with those guys kind of chasing that. I don't know.
- [65:34]
A
I don't know.
- [65:34]
D
Yeah, I mean, I think that's really true. I mean, I think even in the time that I've kind of been following Auditing, it's definitely. Yeah, it's definitely kind of escalated in terms of the kind of violence that its audience expect, essentially. Well, yeah, I mean, I guess as that case of the guy in the United States who actually killed someone. Right. What was his name?
- [65:54]
B
Oh, God.
- [65:55]
A
Oh, Chud the Builder.
- [65:56]
D
Yeah, yeah. So I think that is probably actually just like a really dark place that it's heading essentially is that. Yeah, I think you're right. There's kind of an escalating appetite for more violence in these videos and that is kind of then egged on by the kind of fantastical scenes that AI can create.
- [66:16]
B
So, yeah, so good news.
- [66:19]
A
More good news to come anyway. Look, I actually think we're off also about at time for today. So Annie, once again, thank you very much for coming and spending some time with us today. As a reminder, where can people find more of you?
- [66:30]
D
So yeah, you can find me on xpo. Don't really tend to post there anymore. And if you want to actually see what I'm saying, I'm on Bluesky. But you can also listen to me regularly featured on the QAA podcast.
- [66:44]
B
Amazing. Thank you so much.
- [66:45]
A
Qaa friends of the show help heartily recommended by us. Otherwise we will see you in a few short days on the bonus episode.
- [66:54]
B
Going to be talking about Manchester, going to be talking about Andy Burnham, Madchester,
- [66:59]
A
the Hacienda, you remember the. The Northern Quarter.
- [67:02]
C
So obviously, you know, we plug everybody's things that we've got going on. Riley. November you've got no guys, no mayors. November you've also got Kill, James Bond and podcast. I am in a band called Second Homes. We have an album called Find a Way to Hate It. It just came out last week. It's available on Bandcamp to stream for free as well as to purchase and we will link to it in the show notes. Thank you so much, Riley, for giving me a chance to plug it. And thank you, Annie. This has been really informative. Thank you.
- [67:25]
D
Thanks so much for having me. Always a pleasure.
- [67:27]
A
And we'll see you in a few days on the bonus. Bye everyone.
- [67:30]
C
Bye.
- [67:30]
D
Bye, Sam.