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Reaction
An international anti-fascist show run by a Scandinavian nerd, a Slavic alcoholic and an American unc that takes you to the darkest corners of the internet to help you understand the footsoldiers of online right-wing mobilization - content creators.
Reaction
Episode 18 - Tommy Robinson
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Fredda hath returned!
And he is just in time to cover the jailmaxxing bri'ish buffoon, Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson.
Will Yugo single-handedly invade Boston?
Will Mike ever find out why there are no serbian women?
Will Fredda survive another confrontation with the patreon strike team his dentist?
Find out on this episode of Reaction Pod Z!
Speaking of getting the clap, uh Freda apparently got the clap. Oh no, uh okay.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, no, no, I mean I was ill, which is I I don't know what the fuck you guys said in the last episode about what happened to me. I heard um rumors of uh Patreon death squads or something. I don't know. Uh I d do you care to explain?
SPEAKER_08Dear listeners, thank you so much for increasing your pledges on Patreon. Please continue doing so. And the Patreon death squads have promised that they will indeed not kidnap Freda again. He's been reprogrammed to believe that he had issues, uh, Mike, what was it, with his teeth, right? That's what he can do. Because that makes sense. Norwegian guy teeth, yeah, very classical combination. And uh and he believes it. So let's let's uh you know be nice to our boy, yeah, humor me. Humor our boy and and listen to his uh uh fascinating story that definitely happened 100%, trust me, bro.
SPEAKER_04It's like that movie or that book of that woman who was in a coma, like while East Germany existed. I think it's called like Goodbye Lenin or something, and she woke up after East Germany had unified with West Germany, and in order to prevent some sort of like traumatic like event, they had to like basically fake that East Germany still existed for you know however long. But yeah, I haven't I haven't watched it or read it or anything, I just know that it exists. That's basically what I'm experiencing right now, except it's my teeth, which isn't fun because obviously that shit is not you know free as opposed to like the rest of healthcare in Norway, which is for some reason they said teeth and eyes, you don't really need those to live. That's not really healthcare. I ended up having to go to the dentist, and uh I went in, and I remember last time when I was doing like painkillers and stuff, I was like, you know, Miss Dentist, can I have something that I like some painkillers that I can take while drinking beer? Because like the World Cup is happening, and she and she was like So mean, oh my god, I relate and then so when I went in this time she was like, Oh, yeah, soon after this tooth uh issue is solved, you can then have beer again and watch the World Cup. And uh then she said, you know, did you watch the Norway vs Brazil game? And I was like, Yeah, it was awesome, you know. We we we beat them, we won. And then she went, I am Brazilian, and I was like, Oh fuck. I was like, oh no. Oh no, no, no, no. And then, you know, after after like a little bit of talking about you know the game and everything, I'm sat there with her with like you know, her fucking spider eyes, like eight ice or whatever, uh looking up at a bright light. Typical for Brazilians, yes, and that's why they make good dentists, very good dentists, Brazilians, and be born with them, yeah. And then she's got all these like things stuck in my mouth, uh, like like whatever the fuck they are, like drills and shit. And at that time, I was like, oh fuck, like did I mess up like like Norway?
SPEAKER_09Torturing you like I was like extra this Norwegian piece of shit.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean I'm hearing that like ending of like a every hitman mission was like excellent work, Agent 47. You know, head head to the extraction. But no, I didn't think she was gonna kill me or anything. I was just like, what like this would be the perfect time for like a pissed-off dentist to be like, oops, I messed up a little bit or something. I was so fucking scared. Gotta take that tooth out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, we gotta remove all of it. No, I I don't have a fear of dentists, but like at the moment I was like, oh shit. But Brazilian dentists.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, yeah. Every every next dentist that he has, if he doesn't go back to this one, which sounds like he will not, is uh hello, are you Brazilian?
SPEAKER_04Before he enters the it's it's so I get a new ethnicity every time. I had a Serbian dentist once. Wow, okay. I hope you didn't speak about football with him, because then you definitely would have left with no fucking TV. My dentist said I'm Serbian, and I was very careful after that.
SPEAKER_09Oh, come on. Like, oh no, every other nationality that would be considered racist, you piece of shit.
SPEAKER_07But okay. Also, it was a she, by the way. Hugo, dentists can be women too. Uh those don't exist. No, no, no.
SPEAKER_06Serbians are only men. No, no, no. You fell for the most classic joke about how you're a misogynist. The doctor in the uh emergency room, except it's the dentist office.
SPEAKER_08Did I assume? No, I did not assume it's a man because it's a doctor. I assumed it's a man because it's Serbian, okay?
SPEAKER_06Oh, okay. But there are no Serbian women.
SPEAKER_08There are no Serbian women, famously.
SPEAKER_06They're like dwarves, they all have beards. You can't tell them apart. You can't tell them apart, yeah. No, I think Serbian women are beautiful.
SPEAKER_09So there you go. I literally did a small joke about them not existing, which has no context whatsoever. And we leaned into it, and they they go like they're fucking ugly. You got like your mother is a filthy goblin.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_04Serbian women are beautiful, they're amazing, they're imperfect. We saw the misogynist off ramp, or rather you saw the misogynist on ramp, and we're like, we're heading there.
SPEAKER_07No, no, no, no, no. Speaking of misogynists, especially towards women. Yeah, speaking of horrible people who believe horrible things.
SPEAKER_04This is a podcast about the online right. Now they use the internet to agitate. It's about how they use the internet to agitate, organize, and quite often terrorize. There's probably not many better examples of this than the subject of today's episode. And I don't say this lightly, but this man is a loser by any conceivable metric of success. Be it financial, social, political, or obviously being a normal, decent human being. Despite this, this monumental fuck-up is a vital part of a massive international groupuscular fascist movement whose primary tool of agitation is disinformation, and whose goal seems to be pogroms in the streets of England. Today we head to Old Blighty, a term for the UK historically used by nostalgic Brits abroad longing for home, many of them perhaps blissfully unaware of the term's roots in Arabic. Coincidentally, the English flag, St. George's Cross, also honors a Greek Palestinian man. Once in Old Blighty, we'll go pub to pub searching for a man whose real name is Stephen Yaxley Lennon, that is, if he was let back into the country this time. Welcome to the Reaction Podcast. Today's episode, Tommy Robinson. Most scholarly literature has overwhelmingly focused on British far-right political parties as opposed to, you know, social movements and groupus. By the way, that's also like the same in a global context. Even with American stuff, you will not usually find scholarly literature on like Nick Fuentes or you know, God forbid Asmongold. Yeah. Yeah, it's not yet to adjust. And also the academics, I don't think, like watching like hundreds of hours of Twitch streams. They'd rather read.
SPEAKER_08True, and there's also a layer of uh elitism there where they intentionally ignore the immense impact that these online personalities have, because to them are just random people, quote unquote, on the internet. They're not part of you know suit and tie uh political organizations or mainstream uh legitimate uh uh media operations. That's why this show, to an extent, is in my opinion, important because we're doing something that uh respectfully nobody else is doing.
SPEAKER_04Or when you get it, like you you get it from like your random Twitch streams where someone is just like beefing or whatever.
SPEAKER_08And it's never contextualized, never brought uh, you know, with a with the full bow and package with a with an appropriate thesis about a particular a particular right-wing individual or idea that uh circulates online. Nobody allows you to create uh a better understanding of how all of them intersect in the general right wing ecosystem. Yeah. So what at some point probably academics are also gonna start doing it when it is so incredibly mainstream or when uh younger people be uh get into academia that were raised on the internet the same way that we were raised, especially in this part of the internet, and who with them carry a lot of knowledge uh also organically about these uh these particular figures and about that whole ecosystem. Maybe one of the future professors on the digital right PhD given out in I don't know uh Harvard will be an ex reaction podcast listener.
SPEAKER_04He'll be like, that was old man back in my day. Really taught me. I don't think that's like too far-fetched. I mean, I have people who talk who tell me that they're like starting PhD programs and shit, and like I'm like, holy fuck, you're you know, you you you are academically achieving something I've never done. So it's kind of cool to see like the people who who use these kinds of things as like a you know jumping off platform to to go on and dive deeper into things.
SPEAKER_08Very much so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and by creating this, we're also creating uh an additional, of course, more simplistic than what would be required for academia, but but a resource nonetheless, uh a general overview of of people that if they weren't in this space, it would take them uh months in order to figure out what the fuck is going on and who the hell they are.
SPEAKER_04I mean a lot of I guess some of the the stuff that we talk about people can find on their own, but for a lot of people, I think, in our listener base, uh they might not be people who are aware of the existence of these people. So they don't really even know where to start to look to learn about these people. They just feel the the sort of aftershocks of their actions. They feel it uh, you know, on their local communities as like people get racist or you know someone says like, oh yeah, I listened to Fuentes and that's why I'm like, you know, I hate you now or whatever. And they have no idea who the fuck Fuentes is. They just go home feeling sad because like now their neighbor hates them. So yeah, it's it's good to have like a catalog, basically.
SPEAKER_08It really is, especially one that you can even send to even more ignorant friends or acquaintances that you might have. It's like one of those uh animated shows that both an adult can watch, and there's gonna be hidden humor for the adult that the child will never notice, but then also the kid can watch. So somebody that's been in this space for a long time, they can learn a lot from the show as well. But also, this can be sent to somebody who's like never heard of Tommy Robinson whatsoever, never talked about these issues, and maybe potentially can uh change their attitude on him if they like him, or can learn how to defend themselves against people like him by by listening. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I I do want to say maybe don't show it to your child, but you know, because we do say some fucked up stuff sometimes.
SPEAKER_09But, anyways, let me to an extent. Is this the first reaction split?
SPEAKER_08I feel like it's kids especially that should uh be heavily informed because most parents tell them, like, okay, don't watch porn, don't watch gore, don't watch this, this, this. But they're not like, do not watch figures who tell you that the world is horrible and it's all the fault of Muslim rape gangs, right? Because that doesn't even go through their head, they're like, that doesn't exist on the internet. No, that's most of the internet, my friend. And it's far more dangerous than any like uh fucking porn video, baby.
SPEAKER_04Maybe, yeah, maybe it's good to like you know inoculate them young. That's why you get all your vaccine shots when you're a baby.
SPEAKER_08Anyways, play this to your baby if it's second has come out immediately.
SPEAKER_06Instead of Mozart classical music just for sleeping babies, but it's this, yeah. Oh my god, get Jesus Christ, they could all learn about Steve Bannon. Yeah. If you want your child to never sleep again, show them a picture of Steve Bannon or Asmongold. I mean, honestly, I feel like all of these groups, like as we study more and more, we look at more and more figures, you see the connective tissue, you see the like astroturf nature of it, the way that these ideas are like photocopied, and it makes them even more laughable to be like, no English is the master race, no Polish is the master race, no Ukrainian is the master race, no German is the master race, oh uh Southern American, and you move around, and it's the same, like the same exact ideas, except you swap them in for whichever local region you're in, and seeing that kind of makes it all the more laughable, right? You have these non you have these exclusive categories, and they all make the same argument that they're the best, but yet at the same time, their leaders are all sharing notes and cribbing off of each other and supporting each other, and it's like the nationalism is so blatantly and so obviously fraudulent, it is so clearly opportunistic, and so you know, these like our documentation of how these things actually fundamentally operate, how they are just a scam that's being spread around the country by a bunch of organized scammers is actually important to discrediting them and countering them going forward.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, but one of the things that I think is fascinating with Tommy Robinson and his ilk is that in a sense they aren't that much like that. Like they're less like English supremacists and more uh successful because they don't lean on that, instead they lean on like the fact that like we are under attack. So they're like they're you know portraying themselves as uh just patriots who are defending themselves. Um and that has like a much broader appeal. It doesn't get you know looked at as weirdly, but as like people have been a part of these movements, say many times, you know, when you go to like one or two, three, four rallies, people start telling you what they really believe, and then uh some of them would, you know, open up their jackets and reveal like their Nazi shirts and stuff like that. Like it's uh it's not really like English supremacy that is like the uh the sort of uh binding uh idea behind this movement. Uh because most of their activists don't believe in that. It's just them feeling like something is coming for us, but they don't really know what. And then uh you know, Tommy Robinson and others they try to help them articulate that in a way that points it or in my opinion, in the opposite direction of what actually is happening to them. Hence why they are reactionaries, yeah. Exactly. As we discussed before, drawing on the scholarship of, among others, Roger Griffin, fascists largely are unsuccessful at the ballot box. As such, they've adopted a strategy of what we call right wing Gramsciism, the struggle for cultural hegemony, or in other words, the culture war. It's these electorally marginal, loosely connected and ideologically aligned groupuscules that are of interest to us. They lay the groundwork for fascist politics to become normalized, and because they share our online spaces. That being said, most fascist groups, far right parties and ideological currents of the far right in Europe, can be genealogically traced back to post-war Nazi or fascist parties. We start with a British Union of Fascists. Under Conservative Party member, turned Labour Party member, turned Fascist Party leader, Oswald Mosley. This wasn't the first British fascist organization, that honor goes to the boringly named British Fascists, who mostly did mostly actually kind of uh hated them and thought they were like LARPers. But not because like he was a fascist him himself at that point. This was like five years or so before he became a fascist. But he thought they were just like kind of uncultured, you know, hooligans or whatever. So during his tenure as a Labour politician, he kind of uh derided them. Falling out with the Tories and eventually falling out with Labour led him to start a new party. It was called the New Party because British people love having sh stupid party names like, you know, the British Left's Your Party. Favoring Keynesianism and corporatism, essentially social democratic economics, but with his skepticism about democracy's inefficiencies and weakness in the face of a potential communist revolution, led him towards what many chose as a solution to the threat of communism, that being fascism. His fascist party was eventually prescribed and banned in 1940. Prescribed is what happened to the Palestine Action Group as well. So, you know, it's fun that someone who uh is anti-genocide gets lumped um in with people like Oswald Mosley. After that, his party never recovered. He tried his hand at politics after the war, still a fascist, but selling it as pan-Europeanism, which of course nobody else would ever do again. Mostly Secretary A.K. Chesterton, who went from the British Unit of Fascists back to the Conservative Party, then left that and went on to form the League of Empire Loyalists, which is like a LARP ass name. Oh my god. That is but it's so good, you gotta admit, it's fucking incredible.
SPEAKER_08The League of Empire Loyalists? Jesus Christ. You yeah, you think it's LARPy because you l you watch Star Wars. But imagine hearing this before you ever watch Star Wars. You're like, oh, Empire, oh Leagues. Oh no. I don't know if you you contextualize it with modern media, I guess, yeah. Retroactively cliche, but it's I joined that. I joined that. That sounds good.
SPEAKER_06Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I've got this picture in my mind, I don't want to lose it. Which is Hugo at the head of like some dinghy, and it has a Union Jack, and they're doing a bay of pig style invasion on Boston to try to restore the British dominion over America and them just all being shot down like instantly and just floating on a little bit of flotsum in Boston Harbor.
SPEAKER_04That's like a single cop, page fifty. A single, like uh the most racist cop you know, like in Boston. Uh like Boston Police Department is the one who like single-handedly takes down this invasion. He sees the opening, and he's like, These are foreign immigrants coming to our shores. Yeah. Wait, wait, they're white. Oh no, it's already sinking.
SPEAKER_09Somebody help them.
SPEAKER_04Imagine Hugo watching ashore on the Boston cop, removes his ball of clava, sees his pale white Balkan skin, and he's like, What have I done? And then sees tattoos and styrillic and is like, ah, he's like, oh no, one of the real whites.
SPEAKER_09Oh god, no, oh Jesus, that's so that was close.
SPEAKER_04But yeah, they they established this shit in 1954 to maintain the British Empire, which they believed to be under attack by a Jewish-led conspiracy masking itself as Bolshevism and American capitalism. I'm not 100% sure how you square that, Peg, but you know, it is what it is.
SPEAKER_06I mean, it's it's the same argument that all anti-Semites make. They all they all say this exact same thing, right? Because they have a foreign enemy in the Soviet Union or China or whatever, and then they have to have a domestic enemy.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. But no, no, but they also have economics they don't like, and they're like, well, that's just because the Americans are pushing this like consumerist nonsense down our throats, which of course we would never do if it wasn't for the Americans.
SPEAKER_06Well, right, because they have to re redirect the energy because everyone normal, every normie, you know, hates their mortgage company or hates their credit card company or their student debt service, or so if you don't have an answer for why those things are oppressing people, then you're going to see a situation where people start going to the left. So you need to have you know the capitalists have to be bad, but in a way that preserves you know the hierarchy. And for us, you know, for for for those of us on the left, um, and for us centrists, us enlightened centrists in the podcast. Like me and you go, yeah. We yeah, exactly. We need to make sure that we have a narrative that actually explains the way the economy fundamentally functions, and that's why this like right-wing populism or these these theories of right-wing economic inequality always end up focusing on some sort of scapegoated group to defend hierarchy overall.
SPEAKER_04Alongside this, a short-lived National Labour Party merged with an equally short-lived White Defense League, both of which had split from the aforementioned Legal Empire Loyalists, which itself also then eventually merged back with the British National Party and became the National Front, who consider A.K. Chesterton, Mosley's secretary, their founder. It's all a long lineage of Nazis. And it's not that easy to keep track of, but it basically all traces back to also Mosley's British unit of fascists. Now quoting a man named Darren from a town named Luton in Bedfordshire, England. Quote, Through the late 1970s you had the National Front and British movement who were jumping on our football. At the time I just understood it as them not liking my black mates and them not liking me because I got black mates. Then when the National Front made big inroads on the terraces and infiltrated all the communities with leaflets, whether you liked it or not, you had to be involved. You have to choose your ideology. You had to work out which side you're on. If you sat on the fence and watched your black mates getting abused, that wouldn't be acceptable. So you find out who you are, without ever thinking you had to do that. That was Tommy Robinson's uncle, Darren Carroll, whose By the way, not a fan of fascists. But he was part of the founding group for the English Defense League. From that national front again, you get the main British Fascist Party in operation today, the British National Party. Friend of my channel and banned YouTuber, the Ghost of Guernsey, a Zoomer historian, was a member of that party until I think there was some sort of infighting split over someone's ethnicity or something. The usual. I say friend of the show or friend of my channel, like ironically, obviously, because he was in my chat calling me friend when I made a video on him. Very intimidating. Hey friend. Yeah, he was like, I just I literally just was like, please don't call me that man. And every time I said something super critical about him, he was like, sorry, I have to go tend to my child. Likely sorry, man. You childless dog. No, he does have kids. He actually has like an Eastern European wife, I think. No, no, he tells you you're a childless dog. Yeah, he's Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, he's trying to yeah. What does he know? Anyways. The BNP, the British National Party, has actually won several council elections in some areas like Oldham, Burnley, and Stoke, which sound like made-up names, but they're just British. It's just how it is. As I mentioned, from and around these parties you get the group of schools, the guys pushing the culture war. When these groupus schools are linked by informal networks and united for a common purpose, they become what historians Copsey and others in their book Tomorrow Belongs to Us call social movements. According to one of the most authoritative texts in the field, social movements are a distinct social process consisting of the mechanisms through which actors engaged in collective action are involved in continual relations with clearly identified opponents, are linked by dense Wait, sorry, let me try that again. Because this one is such a fucking stupid quote that I tried to like read several times to figure out how to read it out loud. I mean Hugo could read it.
SPEAKER_06Sounds like he would be in his voice, right? Yeah, do you do you want to try it, Hugo?
SPEAKER_08Where is it? Okay. According to one of the most authoritative texts in the field, social movements are a point. Are linked in are linked by dense inf I got this! You want me to do it? Are linked by while you bimtimated. Yeah, this one is really bad. One hour later. According to one of the most authoritative texts in the field, social movements are, quote, a distinct social process consisting of the mechanisms through which actors engage in collective action, are involved in conflictual relations with clearly identified opponents, are linked by dense informal networks, and share a distinct collective identity.
SPEAKER_04Ah, that's gay, bitches! Yay! Thank you so much, Hugo. Yeah, uh I don't know of like how much Anna's gonna keep in there, but to the listeners, me and Hugo tried to read that quote several times, and I kept fucking it up. Hugo had to bring it back in, Mike offered to try it, it was a whole thing. This applies to football hooligan groups, excellently, who are defined by their collective identity and their conflictual relation to other groups and not really much else. There's our team and there's their team. This also applies to anti-fascist groups, who are a social movement, a bunch of informal networks with collective identity engaged in collective action against clearly identified opponents, the opponents being fascists, of course. Then you have the fascists themselves, specifically the non-electorally minded, less intellectually concerned, street fighting fascists. Both fascism and anti-fascism thrives in football supporter clubs. It's why you see so many clubs with one fascist and one anti-fascist supporter club, usually duking it out against one another. These are people who are used to having an enemy and used to fighting him. It's why the National Front were so effective when they started recruiting in the football community, as Darren Carroll said. It's also both how and why the subject of this episode, Darren's nephew, Tommy Robinson, rose to prominence as part of the largest and most studied British fascist social movement, the Islamophobic organization known as the English Defense League.
SPEAKER_01Since it was formed just eleven months ago, the English Defense League has become the most significant far-right street movement the UK has seen since the National Front in the 1970s.
SPEAKER_08Tommy Robinson, or as his passport much less heroically says, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, not to be confused with Lebron or Lenin, has managed to turn a fairly ordinary career in thuggery, fraud, and self-pity into a brand at the heart of the UK's contemporary far-right ecosystem. He comes to us out of Luton, or how did you say Fred? I should say Latin. Luton. Ah, this time I got it right. Thank you, sir. Early 1980s, a working class town that the British press has spent decades using as a backdrop for every anxiety about race, migration, and so-called left behind white communities that you can imagine. His mum works in a bakery, his stepdad at the Vauxhall plant, and he grows up, and he grows up in the classic mix of casual racism, football culture, and economic decline that far-right narratives love to pretend is some kind of natural breeding ground for so-called patriots. He drifts into the Luton town hooligan scene, attaching himself to the so-called men in gear, the MIGs, which is basically an Ultras group whose whole aesthetic is drinking, fighting, and flying the Union Jack on their shirts, t-shirts, jackets, underwear, and socks. When he later realized he needed a harder sounding stage name, he simply stole Tommy Robinson from one of those MIG boys and repurposed it as a perfect name for a professional Western civilization defender. On paper, Steven was doing the respectable thing. He left school, trained as an aircraft engineer apprentice at the Luton Airport, part of that post-Tatcher story about, you know, working class kids being told to skill up and keep their head down, following all the rules. But his, let's say, problematic relationship with authority and specifically with women showed up very, very clearly, very, very early. As one briefing noted, quote, Robinson moved into activism when he lost his job as an engineering apprentice after assaulting a police officer who tried to intervene to protect Robinson's girlfriend, with whom Robinson was fighting in the street. The officer was off duty, a woman trying to stop a domestic confrontation. He responded by attacking her, earning a conviction for assault, occasioning actual bodily harm, and a year-long prison sentence. Because of that conviction in the post-9-11 security rules, the airport was not allowed to keep him on. So the budding engineer became an unemployable thug with a grudge against the woke state which imprisoned him so unjustly. At this point, you can probably see the pattern that's going to develop. He would do something violent or plainly illegal. The legal system would react in a completely standardized way, and he would then spin that response as a persecution by a sinister establishment that supposedly could not handle his incredible truth telling. The origin story for him at this point was no longer, you know, I smacked a cop during a fight about my girlfriend. Instead, it became they ruined my life and I would not bow down. The victim narrative became fuel for everything that followed. Recycled every time he was, of course, in front of a judge later on. Which is which so many times. It's so funny.
SPEAKER_04This like book that I was reading with uh Darren, his uncle, um, like he's interviewed quite a bit in the book. So many times Darren is just like, oh yeah, so like this time when Tommy was in jail, and then it's like, you know, a couple of chapters later, so yeah, and it's like, oh yeah, Tommy was coming out of jail again, a shit like that.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, yeah. He he's he he's uh roughneck, but uh he managed to both at some point excuse being a roughneck to himself and make an entire career out of it, as we'll as we'll learn. Usually, you know, you you either do the redemption arc or you double down. Yeah, you double down, and they're constantly persecuting. Yeah. By the mid-2000s, he had drifted from the whole football violence thing into politics. He joined the British National Party at the exact moment he was trying to rebrand open fascism as some like respectable pinstripped nationalism. He later claimed that he left when he discovered the BNP did not allow non-white members, as if that had come as a surprise to anyone who could read their fucking program. He didn't leave empty-handed though. He learned all he could about their crude ideological pitch, which is basically all about Islamification and of course multiculturalism, something that he managed to later on dump every single grievance imaginable right on top of. As Freda said earlier, that's when the grift was developed. You stir the actual systemic issues that people might have over to, in this case, uh so-called militant violent Islam and of course multiculturalism as as a whole. Some time passes, and we are in 2009. And uh with 2009, his big pivot from some minor crank uh pushed him to become quite a national figure. A small local outfit called United People of Luton, Jesus Christ, did I say it right? Yeah, you got it. Thank you, mobilized around an army homecoming parade, reacting to a tiny group of Islamist protesters. Robinson, now operating fully under his pseudonym, helped take that outrage and turn it into the English Defense League, or the EDL, which he marketed as a non-political street movement against militant Islam. In practice, it was a touring caravan of football hooligan groups, your good old local racist lads and the conspiracy crowd that comes along with it, all wrapped in England flags, lagger, and having a jolly good old time for Mada England.
SPEAKER_04I do want to say that that like tiny group of Islamist protesters, are you aware of what they did? The moment is like very, very it's kind of mythologized as this like horrible thing that happened, and it's literally called like the the insulting the troops incident. Like literally what they did was just saying, like, you know, British soldiers will go to hell. That's like kind of what they did. It's nothing major. And of course they did something else again in 2010. But yeah, I'll I'll talk about that.
SPEAKER_06I mean, there's one thing that I would mention, and you guys may not know this, but in in America, you cannot discriminate against someone based on their veteran status. In fact, most platforms that we uh exist on, Twitch, YouTube, if you just if you express discriminatory positions towards someone on veteran status, you can get deplatformed.
SPEAKER_08What the fuck does that mean? Like as if veteran was a race. How do I am from veteran land? What so if I'm like I dislike this guy because he's a veteran.
SPEAKER_06If you're if you're like veterans are bad people, you could get banned. And it's one of those things which is like hard like yeah, they're bad for being veterans, yeah. Yeah, it's hard to believe that's true because it seems so blind the face of of free speech, but it is this, I mean like for example, Hassan when he got banned.
SPEAKER_08It's the same level. If I if I say that filthy fucking probation dog versus uh that filthy fucking veteran dog, it would be classified as the same same level of discrimination, and then I would get banned, right?
SPEAKER_06Yes, and in fact, like when Hassan, like people talk about his you know, America Deserve 9-11 clip and him getting banned. What he was really banned for is he went on to he was he was speaking about American former congressman Dan Crenshaw, who was a uh a veteran of Afghanistan and who had lost his eye.
SPEAKER_04That's an eye patch.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, so he wears an eye patch from you know his time in in Afghanistan, and Hassan had said that uh what happened to your eye, Dan? Did you get fucked in the ice hole by a brave Mujahideen or something like that? And it was interpreted as being discriminatory against his veteran status, and that's ultimately what got Hassan banned. He wears like suits and goes to like Democrat politician rallies now. Does he? Does he go to Democrat? Oh my god. I mean, I know he was pushed out by Trump, right? Because he's a neocon.
SPEAKER_04I mean, I mean I mean Hassan, but okay. It still works, it still works. No, no. I just mean that like he's very different. Like that Hassan of like, I don't know, pre-COVID era or whatever the fuck. When like I would just hear about him like tangentially.
SPEAKER_06I don't think he would disagree with the the with the you know, it's something that Daria Lisa, who is one of the DSA candidates we supported in New York who just won, you know, she had said something, you know, about how there's blowback. Another uh DSA candidate, her name is Mylot, out of um of Denver, she said that it was the natural consequence of American foreign policy. So I don't think that the you know the the message behind what he was trying to say is is gone away. If anything, I think it's been fully mainstreamed where people understand that like American foreign policy and American exceptionalism and American worship of veterans and military service has led to demonstrable backlash and it has been harmful both for you know the countries that are victims of our imperialism, but also at home. And you know, I think that the cult of a veteran is starting to slowly be unwound in the US, but the laws are still like extremely strict against discriminating against people because they're veterans.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, this is like a thing that's pretty big in the UK. I like when I was in London last time, um I needed help to like figure out like where to go. And there was this guy who uh offered to help, and bro had like 15 poppy pins on him. He had like uh a Spitfir, which is like a World War II fighter jet pin, or not fighter jet, but fighter plane, uh prop plane, uh like on him. He had like several like St. George's flag pins, like Union Jacks and stuff, uh on his body. Like basically he was like, you know, Captain America but Britain. And I I looked at him, uh old guy, and I was like, like what is this guy's deal? But he was nice, uh, because I mean I'm white, so you know. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, you're one of the good immigrants, yeah. Or tourists.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, tourists, yeah.
SPEAKER_08Ah, so you're gonna go back home, okay?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, okay, then it's fine. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I robbed a plane, not a boat, so it's fine. Doesn't hate me then.
SPEAKER_08Under Robinson's leadership, the EDL adopted a simple and destructive formula. Pick a town with a sizable Muslim population, announce a march against Islamification, bus in supporters from around the country, and just wait for shit to start. EDL crowds were filmed chanting burn the mosque down, giving Hitler salutes and targeting not only mosques, but trade union protests, left-wing meetings, and anti-cutz rallies, basically anyone they could label so-called traitors. Robinson insisted he was just worried about extremism, but the movement he built was functionally a street-level intimidation squad aimed at Muslims and anyone who stood with them. The state's response was messy, but of course, to an extent, significant. Some marches were heavily restricted or kettled, some were allowed to go ahead and trash entire town centers before police moved in. Meanwhile, Robinson was constantly in and out of court for public order offenses, threatening behavior and similar classics, building up a criminal record that the future fans would dutifully ignore or prompt up as a badge of honor and principle. Every arrest was framed as proof that the British establishment would do anything to silence the so-called voice of the people. And then, of course, the money arrived. Behind the scenes, figures like city banker Alan Lake and other wealthy sympathizers bankrolled the EDL with cash cash money, turning what had started as a loose collection of hooligans into a semi-professional operation with coaches, sound systems, branded merch, and an entire media strategy. Robinson began to see that, hey, racism could be an entire career. Outrage brought donations, donations brought infrastructure, and infrastructure brought more media attention and fresh recruits, snake-eating its own ass. At the same time, he started cultivating ties with the international far-right as well, Gert Wilders in the Netherlands, various counter-Jihad bloggers, and later the likes of Steve Bannon, even, who talked about him as a kind of British rock star of anti-Muslim agitation. But by 2013, the EDL project was rotting from the inside. The hardcore fascists were much more visible, the violence was harder to spin, and the brand was becoming toxic even for some of the people who had initially flirted and invested in it. He and EDL co-founder Kevin Carroll announced via a Quilliam press release and London press conference that they were both quitting the EDL because they could, quote, no longer keep extremist elements at bay, end quote. And they didn't want to be the public face for open neo-Nazis and white power types turning up to their demos. William framed this as a big deradicalization win. They said that they had facilitated the departure and that they would educate him about Islam and hailed it as a success for community relations and a blow against both far-right extremism and what they called Islamism. At the press conference and in the interview around it, though, Robinson's line was that his beliefs about Islamist ideology hadn't really changed, but that street demonstrations were now no longer productive, and that extremism should be fought with better, more democratic ideas rather than violence. He claimed that he had reflected while in prison for the passport offense and decided he needed to work with Muslims, not against them, apologizing in very general terms for causing any harm. Critics, including far-right researchers and Muslim organizations, immediately pointed out that he hadn't actually renounced his core anti-Muslim politics. He treated the whole thing as a kind of tactical retreat and PR stunt rather than a genuine ideological shift. Even Quilliam itself later stressed that they had only helped him with leaving the EDL, not that he'd undergone some sort of conversion. And as we now know, within a couple of years he was back on the same circuit, just under different brands. To me personally, this entire thing was done for two reasons, probably a combination of both. Later on, you boys will tell me what you think if you want to. Number one is he realized that there is little lobby money to be made in simplistic, militant, openly Nazi organizations. Right wing donors dropped the big bucks on more whitewashed and so-called respectable institutions. So he pivoted away due to unironic cash flow issues. The opportunity cost of staying there instead of creating something that was easier to sell to posh twatts was too high. And number two, it was also a praxis shift. He saw and understood that the path towards entering the political mainstream with his ideas isn't going to come on the back of so-called old ideas. And the new rebranding was very necessary. Very Hitlerite, by the way. Not Nazi, but Hitlerite in particular, you know, the rejection of revolution and the streets as means of taking power and focusing on mainstream politics instead. Also coming to these conclusions while in prison. Like he's he's literally so Hitlerite.
SPEAKER_06Well, I mean, yes, but also, you know, when you get beat on the street, you recognize that the state power is intense and he need to have a dual track strategy, right? Like you know, the streets are there as a supplement, they're never going to be the only thing you do. You have to have means of disarming or disabling the state or getting sympathizers in it so that you have the capability of accomplishing your political goals.
SPEAKER_08Exactly. And that probably played a role in it as well.
SPEAKER_04I want to add that uh with the like you know the depth. thing and the money uh concern uh that stuff hasn't changed like he's still constantly uh dealing with that to this day and it's getting worse and worse like he uh actually declared bankruptcy I think in like twenty twenty one or something like that and uh the reason he did so was because he had done like a libel against like a a 14-year-old Syrian boy or something uh and the you know the boy sued him and won hundred thousand pounds in damages which uh Mr. Laxley or whatever the fuck his name was Robinson couldn't pay because he's poor as fuck because he just keeps like you know doing contempt of court and stuff and keeps racking up more things that he has to pay. He really does yeah and then like so that was hundred thousand pounds which then you know escalated and now it's like two million pounds or whatever. But he yeah yeah there's so many cases yeah it's so many there's like you just look up like the amount of like money that he owes and for different things.
SPEAKER_08Absolutely and it it will touch it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah yeah because he owes like like what like four hundred thousand pounds in corporate tax that he hasn't paid he's done like tax fraud he's done like mortgage fraud he's done every kind of fraud under the fucking sun this guy's a fucking loser. He really has it's absolutely his his criminal record kept expanding in ways that had nothing to do with the fucking like I would expect violence but I wouldn't expect him to be like well you know I gotta get into like new types of crime.
SPEAKER_08Dude's a hustler he literally just can't help himself in 2012 he was caught using a passport under someone else's name to enter the United States despite being banned because of a previous drug related offense and he ended up with a 10 month sentence for playing games with immigration rules he otherwise by the way demanded be applied ruthlessly exactly to everyone else back home.
SPEAKER_04He was literally an illegal immigrant but also like I do want to say like going going to the United States with someone else's passport is like the dumbest way to get caught like all of his crimes are so dumb. They're all self-inflicted in the worst way. They look at the picture and then they look at you and he's gonna be like that's not you man.
SPEAKER_08At least get someone who looks like you like in in 2014 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for mortgage fraud. Like like the thing that the fucking mayor from the wire does like that's what the fuck this dude is doing. He tried to conspire with a corrupt broker to falsify applications worth over 160,000 pounds. Britain's a so-called law and order sheriff ladies gentlemen and then bees like talk about firing in I don't know a cannon from a glass house not throwing a rock from a glasshouse. So all of these what Fred I mentioned what I mentioned many that we would have to be here for an entire day to discuss he's like every time he does any of these things the second he's out of jail he's like what's the next thing yeah every time he does any of these he just doesn't show up to court and he that stacks another charge like he's so fucking dumb. Oh my lord loses more money and loses more money and like this man is getting crazy bank don't don't forget so to in order for you to be so horrible with just managing your existence like respectfully no actually very disrespectfully to lose all that money in continuity is is like you're trying to do it intentionally.
SPEAKER_09I feel like my boy Tommy like he's like he's like I gotta remain yeah I gotta remain militant so if I become too rich if I become too rich I don't want to sell out and and I don't want to sell out and show up to court. I'm just gonna do fraud I'm doing fraud he's like like it's not like some of these are so stupid because his shtick is get in prison and then say they are silencing me.
SPEAKER_08So some of these sound like he intentionally he's like fuck it like nobody's arresting me for anything I'm trying so hard okay okay Mike Mike give me give me your passport I'll go to fucking Florida arrested fuck yeah honestly I'm surprised Starmer hasn't pardoned this guy they seem like they have pretty similar politics hey now that's that's mostly that's got similar politics not you know Tommy Robinson yeah yeah I mean with uh yeah with with Star War yeah but yeah like after after formally breaking with uh the EDL the English Defense League and of course his fucking bank account he he didn't mallow out he he just experimented with a bunch of new shit he briefly fronted a UK spin-off of the German anti-Muslim street movement Pegida trying to sell the same old anti-Islam politics in slightly more middle class packaging Pegida UK though never really took off but it kept him on the far right speaking circuit flying out to rallies posting videos and staying just just just visible enough to be useful to donors and media operations looking for a recognizable angry face but these were his quiet times these were his plotting times I want to say like like it is fucking crazy to me that you can be a guy who's so fucking poor like so bankrupt and you keep flying everywhere and I'm here like I have one dentist appointment and I'm like I can't I I gotta eat ice soup now even though I've got money but like I'm like you know that's so much Patreon Patreon no milk dad for Patreon Patreon or please Patreon please yeah yeah yes so so please pay my fucking dentist money dentist money now life for dentist works but it's so fucking weird that like they they just go flying everywhere and like go to all these countries and I'm like where the fuck is the money coming from that's how you know it's so astroturfed that's how you know this like wealthy backers behind the scenes doing you know weird conspiracy theorist shit but it's actually real absolutely and but what's even crazier in my opinion is that he has like the TikTok generation attention spam when it comes to belonging to one organization for longer than 12 seconds.
SPEAKER_09Yeah we are talking about a man who at this point has moved through five organizations in 10 years.
SPEAKER_04If that's not min-maxing life I don't know what the fuck it is oh no that's that's just normal like far right shit because like these it's like cells and shit they just did you know divide constantly and like merge and divide and shit like that.
SPEAKER_09There is no consistency because they they constantly in fight yeah of course but when you combine it with the fact that he's in and out of jail and constantly also doing scams like this man can't sit.
SPEAKER_06Yeah yeah yeah he leaves jail and he's like I'm a new man New Org now New Orleans different fucking all these decisions just sound like they're they've they're they're done on a copious amount of premium cocaine it's like I mean I wouldn't fucking put it past him it's so it's speedrunning existence speedrunning existence so at some point his his quiet era starts going down and that was uh when the Canadian outlet Rebel Rebel News came into question Rebel Media later rebranded as Rebel News was an online far-right propaganda shop specializing in very slick YouTube friendly content about uh Islam climate denial and whatever culture war topic was trending at the time I jump in real quick please do yeah so or the Euros in the chat uh and listening in the chat he he still thinks he's streaming yeah he still see uh you know well everybody's chatting uh they're in the youtube you know and not only euros people from every corner hey what you need to understand and this is a very specifically North American phenomenon okay that I'm about to explain Canadian conservatives LARPing as American MAGA or right wing legendary the concept like in within America rebel refers to the Confederacy so when you are rebel news you're kind of calling back towards this neo-confederate kind of like stars and bars ultra conservative form of politics and to see that it's a Canadian broadcast network is hilarious because they never rebelled they never rebelled excuse me like Canadians never rebelled you know Queen Victoria one day decided to give them a little bit more freedom like that's why we have Canada this is not the four you know it's not something that draws on the roots of Canadian history. So calling yourself rebel news is a combination of American LARP and Confederate LARP and it's all the more funny because it comes from Canadian conservatives who do nothing but pretend they're actually Americans.
SPEAKER_04You know what's funny though we have those people who LARP or they don't even LARP as Confederates they fly the Confederate flag here in Norway. They're like people who love American muscle cars and shit and like they love like you know redneck quote unquote or Norwegian Norwegian version of like redneck culture. They have no idea what the fuck that flag means. Well you see that too actually in union unionists in in Northern Ireland also fly the Confederate flag yeah but like here they unironically are like that guy who's like you know like why why is your profile picture a swastika and he's like looks hard like that's them it's so funny.
SPEAKER_08But yeah but I mean of course symbols change based on uh local context or lack of context you have like if you go to South Croatia you have uh you can see the Confederate flag absolutely everywhere and it's literally because they're like we're South Croatia fuck the north so to them it's literally like South north and the Confederate flag is literally South of course it's extremely easy I need to see like South Koreans flying the the the Confederate flag during the this also the the the Yugoslav Civil War that sometimes the the Serbian forces would fly the Confederate flag because they were fighting for Republika Srpska which was trying to secede yeah so they're like seceding from Bosna so we're the rebels seceding from the thing. So you can always see everything.
SPEAKER_04But that's awesome fucking Serbian lost costers they're like no it's states rights man.
SPEAKER_09State's rights bro yes okay but no because they did better than the fucking rebels they got a like state inside of a state nobody's as loser fucking coded as the Confederates right but this next level when when why are you wearing a swastika t-shirt bro it goes hard yeah made me laugh so uh because there's definitely like there's some people out there it's gonna sound insane for me to even say but there's definitely like a completely like just insanely dumb dude but that so dumb that he's not bad. You know what I mean? He's just like man fucking do you see the unit like he literally orders a whole SS uniform off of the the internet because he watched the movie and he thought it looked cool.
SPEAKER_04No that there's like there there's like hella dudes like that in India. Though of course India's got like you know it's all fucked up right wing politics and shit but there are some people in India who are like completely apolitical and they are like you know they read Mein Kampf because they're like this guy's got good business strategies. Like you know I I can excel in business. It's fucking crazy. I'm gonna learn how to grind from Adolf Hitler. Literally and then also of course they have you know their own history with their own like swastika of course it's from there uh but uh you know they then grab like the you know Hitlerite version and they're like the Nazi version because they're like you know looks hard it's it's branding they there there's like stores just called Hitler and it's just like you know they're like it yeah it gets a lot of Google hits.
SPEAKER_09Yes a lot of Google it's crazy. Man the grindset the grind set is fucking legendary.
SPEAKER_08Indian grindset is crazy yeah uh but yeah back to the Canadian rebels yes they basically hired this motherfucker uh because in their head they're like okay he has brand recognition he has a built-in fan base that he's gonna bring in uh he has decades worth of footage uh him shouting outside mosques and courthouses and on the other hand for him rebel offered money cameras legal backup and crucially an upgrade in self-presentation he could now describe himself as a reporter rather than just you know the former boss of a racist street gang he is finally respectable so the long con the long plan is starting to work out right in front of his eyes at least in my opinion if I put myself in his shoes that's probably what he was feeling so to finish off by the time he re-emerged in the mid 2010s he was no longer just organizing marches he was doing pieces to camera turning up outside trials involving Muslim defenders pushing the boundaries of contempt of court and immediately wrapping any and every legal consequence he might have experienced in a tidy narrative about censorship no free speech and being convicted of journalism now that he of course has become a journalist if you drew a line from the BNP to prison to prison to prison to the EDL to prison to the re to rebel to prison it was remarkably straight with pretty consistent underlining politics I'll give them that Moslems they are the problem immigration that is a threat the left it's a conspiracy and any legal or social consequences I might face are proof that free speech is dead dude for convicted for journalism is so fucking funny I was like low key based yeah I'm imagining he's in a prison he's in a like there's like two you know first day he's coming in there at the mess hall there's like two fucking tatted out dudes what are you in for yeah what what what are you in for and he's like I'm convicted of journalism they're like whoa whoa whoa whoa these guys stop with this guy British far right figure Tommy Robinson real named Stephen Yaxli Lennon arrived in Tel Aviv last Wednesday October the 15th on a trip subsidized by the State of Israel.
SPEAKER_02The anti-Islam activist was officially invited by Amichai Shikli Israel's Minister for Diaspora Affairs and combating anti-Semitism Shikli said the invitation followed a recent attack on a synagogue in Manchester UK but the visit triggered backlash and even the UK based Jewish groups usually supportive of Israel including the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council condemned Robinson's presence in Israel. They cited his extensive criminal record and his reputation as a divisive hate preacher. But the state sponsored trip also put a spotlight on something deeper Robinson's longstanding ties with Israel. Last year British rapper Loki released a video revealing links between Robinson's former group the English Defense League and Zionist organizations which supported or in some cases even funded it.
SPEAKER_06Stephen Yaxley Lennon and his pivot toward so-called journalism began once the English Defense League collapsed rebel media handed him cameras and the title independent journalist from there he developed a formula turn up outside a courthouse live stream a defendant's face call that reporting when the contempt of court charges followed call that censorship it's a trick that works it has converted a man with convictions for assault mortgage fraud passport fraud into a self-styled martyr for free speech now he's backed by international donors who queue up to pay his legal bills which are very expensive very independent journalist is a self-granted title and just like financial advisor and life coach carries about as much professional weight. In Robinson's case it means no institutional accountability no editorial standards and no duty of care for the to the people he films. His business model runs on outrage bait donations and maximizing clout two threads in his career show what his journalism is actually for one is his long exploitation of the grooming gang scandal the other is the trait trail of racist violence that keeps following his biggest moments of virality. Most recently a direct call for the lynching of Pakistani men. The story of grooming gangs is a racialized weapon. Let's be clear the organized sexual exploitation of children in towns was real institutions have failed victims for years. Survivors deserved better than they got what also happened and what a decade of home office data, academic research and mainstream reporting now shows clearly is that the public story built upon these individual instances of crime bear only a loose relationship to the crimes themselves. A home office report published in December 2020 found no evidence that Pakistani or Muslim men are disproportionately involved in group based child sex abuse nationally the Guardian's coverage of that report was blunt. Most child sex abuse gangs in Britain are made up of white men.
SPEAKER_04Also I want to say you know the call is coming from within the house like it's literally their monarchy their politicians it's all of them like there's people in the monarchy on the Epstein list.
SPEAKER_06Like that's the thing like the the largest international scandal of of organized child sex trafficking the Epstein files and the Epstein class relates to the most wealthy and privileged members of our society. Rape, sexual assault sexual abuse they're common. Yeah no the the these are all like white like aristocrats academics uh business owners uh like you know founders of like massive tech companies it's that kind of shit it's not you know your like local like guy who lives down the street who like immigrated from Pakistan or some other country east of you and this is an old like trope right like this this the idea of racialized sexual violence to otherise a marginalized group is a tale of the time and it's shared across borders right you know it was used to otherise black men in the southern United States it's used to otherise immigrants it's used to otherise you know the Palestinian people with all sorts of charges for you know organized rape or systemic rape as a weapon of war when there was no evidence of that. So we see the same charge.
SPEAKER_08The enemy rapes might be the one of the oldest like charges against what whoever you want to define as your enemy. The enemy rapes we must defend our women this is literally 10,000 years old.
SPEAKER_06And and yeah and and it's now of course with like the racist angle it's always like you know we gotta defend our white women you know the academics Ella Cockbane and and Vac Tufail who conducted the underlying research put it plainly too the crimes in Rokedale Oxford and Telford were real but the racialized Muslim grooming gangs framing that grew up around them was not supported by the evidence and it diverted attention away from fixing the actual unglamorous failures in policing and child protection.
SPEAKER_04And this is Robert Lau he's the uh he's the Rupert Lau Rupert Lau Rupert Lau yeah sorry Rupert Lau he's the uh reclaim guy right restore yeah restore restore sorry sorry reclaim restore yeah yeah no so Rupert Lau um was a like an MP for for like great Yarmouth or some shit um I don't remember if he like got elected as a result of his actual like you know pressure group stuff but he uh basically created what was not a political party to begin with called Restore Britain which kind of tries to outflank a reform UK from the right and then eventually uh in 2026 like in February not that long ago uh he converted it into an actual political party in order to run for election. They currently have one MP in the House of Commons uh and they have thirty two councillors across Britain. Now to give you some perspective to the people who don't know much about this uh the House of Commons has six hundred and fifty seats that's one out of six hundred and fifty seats and the amount of councils in the UK they have thirty two but there is a total of eighteen thousand six hundred and forty five. So that's like saying you've got like a county in the United States.
SPEAKER_08Yeah.
SPEAKER_04It's not massive but it still is like you know it's more than most British fascist parties. Yeah. And like they're not overtly like you know quote unquote like fascist like they they don't overtly proclaim allegiance to Hitler and talk about you know great national rebirth and uh some sort of like fascist revolution like many other uh preceding fascist parties have said but they're also really young and they're still kind of figuring themselves out. Uh I I don't know like how how many months old the party is so like I I do think that considering they're trying to outflank reform UK from the right and they are also full of former members of like the British National Party and other things and the British National Party love them. I think it's fair to say they are actually like Fascist party, or at least full of fascists. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06In Rupert Lau's uh report in June 2026, the rape gang inquiry report, which is the document that Robinson and his allies now treat as vindication, illustrates exactly the move of creating this narrative of Muslim grooming gangs while ignoring actual victims.
SPEAKER_04Middle East I what should be mentioned, by the way, I just want to say like what should be mentioned, by the way, is that the government is doing its own inquiry into the grooming gags, but that is a an actual authoritative thing that you know has legal authority, it has like actual like it's binding, it it's got you know the authority to interview victims and you know force people to actually answer, like to testify, that kind of stuff. They rushed this report to get ahead of that, which is happening, so they could get theirs out first. And it's also just literally like a crowdfunded piece of shit that means nothing. Like it it just gathered a bunch of donations and there's no actual oversight over what those donations went to. And you know, of course, it went to this like thing that kind of has like a font and aesthetics of like a tabletop role-playing game like first draft like manual. Uh it's really weird.
SPEAKER_06And one of the things that's really interesting is Middle East I uh they did an analysis of the report, and they found that on its own numbers, white suspects made up 63% of the group-based cases where the ethnicity was recorded against 13.7% for Pakistani suspects, meaning that Lau's own numbers is his arithmetic implies well over one million victims of white gang perpetrators. And that report says almost nothing about those white perpetrators. Survivors who complicated the narrative also got discarded. Holly Archer, a well-known Telford survivor, has described how a far-right group twisted quotes from her own book to make it sound like she blamed immigration, turning her story into one about migrants coming over here to rape our girls, which is not what she wrote or believes. A Rochdale Survivors charity was approached with promises of wealthy donors attached to the same political project. This particular racialized panic has already produced a body. In 2015, Rotterham resident Mushin Hamed, an elderly Muslim man, was beaten to death by two white neighbors who called him a slur for Pakistanis and a groomer while they did it. That is what this narrative of Muslim grooming gangs is for. In January 2025, Elon Musk's intervention showed how fast these racialized myths convert into physical attacks. A civil society research group tracking Musk's posts found that they triggered an immediate surge in Islamophobic rhetoric and interpersonal targeting of Muslims and South Asians across the United Kingdom, and that Twitter became a hub for coordinated amplification of the same narratives by far-right accounts based outside Britain. Musk demanded Robinson's release from an 18-month prison sentence around the same moment, framing him as a martyr for telling the truth. The sentence had nothing to do with grooming gangs. It was for libeling a Syrian schoolboy. Yep.
SPEAKER_04And that's the thing that's uh really interesting about by the way, who he still has not paid. He has not paid the money that the court ordered him to pay.
SPEAKER_06And that's one of the things that's really interesting. He has done is like these far right, you know, leaders like Elon Musk, I think it's fair to call him a far right leader. They don't give a shit what crimes people on their side commit. You know, if if you physically attack a law enforcement officer, the supposedly in blue not line, uh love the cops Trump will immediately pardon you because you are attacking it for his benefit. They are blatant in their arbitrariness, they're blatant in their uh uh willingness to excuse any crime as long as it's a member of their tribe, which is fundamentally decivilizing. Ironically, these right-wing figures, how much they claim to protect Western civilization, are attacking the fundamental prevences and norms of uh a so-called liberal society. Yeah. And and like none of this requires a statutory process to fix, but one is underway anyway. Baroness Louise Casey's June 2025 national audit into group-based child sexual exploitation led to a statutory independent inquiry into grooming gangs chaired by Baroness Ann Longfield with full powers under the Inquiries Act 2005. That began work in April 2026, and it has until 2029 to examine institutional failures across England and Wales.
SPEAKER_04And of course, they released their you know quote rape gang reports to try to get it ahead of that, because you know it's hot in the news.
SPEAKER_06And this is survivor consultant work running entirely separate from the fake privately crowdfunded report. Robinson had spent 15 years insisting that the British state was incapable of this type of accountability, but now that it exists, he has nothing to do with it. And his energy goes into the version built to prove a racial thesis rather than protect vulnerable children. It gets even worse because on June 17th, 2026, Robinson posted an AI-generated image depicting the lynching of Pakistani men. He captioned it the only solution. This wasn't a one-off lapse under provocation. A British court has already examined a version of this pattern once before. Aaron Osborne, who drove a van into worshippers outside Finsbury Park Mosque in 2017, killing one man and injuring several more, had been subscribed to Robinson's website and was reading his tweets in the run-up to the attack. A note found at the scene referenced one of Robinson's posts. An email from Robinson's account reached Osborne shortly before the attack, warning him about a supposed nation within a nation forming just beneath the surface of the UK. A jury heard evidence that this correspondence played a part in radicalizing a man who went on to commit murder. So Robinson is posting shit, calling for the lynching of Pakistani men, knowing that he's already inspired an attack that led to the maiming and killing of innocent people.
SPEAKER_04The clearest case study Yeah, he knows exactly what he's doing.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, well, and and that he's doing it intentionally. Like he's provoking like imagine a left winger did this. Imagine a left-wing content creator or independent journalist or streamer had been corresponding directly with somebody right before they committed a fatal attack. They'd be in prison for life. But yet he seems to escape accountability. And the clearest case study of this is the 2024 Southport riots, because here the chain from Robinson's platform to actual mob violence is documented by the police, by parliament's researchers, and by human rights investigators. After the murder of three young girls in Southport on 29 July 2024, false claims spread that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker. He was in fact the British-born son of Christian Rwandan refugees. Robinson, posting from Cyprus, told his followers that the mosque near the attack had a long history of creating terrorists and warned that if the government didn't act, these communities would quote, create monsters. I think the other thing to like uh stop here and and point out something is that for right wingers, it doesn't matter that this guy wasn't Muslim, right? Yeah to them, if he's racially black, that's in the category of other of foreigner, which means that they now have the authority and the right, and it's righteous to attack anybody they identify as not, quote, belonging in Britain. So the when we point this out, when we point them out the fact that the attacker wasn't even a Muslim, they'll say, well, he's the son of an immigrant, so therefore all immigrants are open seasoned for attack.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, they'll be like, you know, he's African or whatever the fuck, and like what do you mean by that? It it's the same thing with like how early racialization happened from Christians racializing Muslims, not based on like specifically like skin color or anything like that. It was specifically because of their faith. And I think that same sort of racialization happens, no matter if you're even like white in England, I think you can very easily be racialized for being a white Muslim, because you might have like, you know, certain like cultural mores or like you know, dress certain ways, you might you know style your beard in a certain way where they're gonna be like, that's not a white thing to do, and therefore they're gonna be like, you're not white, really. And of course, it works the same way where you know black person is even though he's not Muslim, still kind of Muslim to them.
SPEAKER_06Well, right, it's just the category of other, right? Like the specific details or the nuances or the or the differences between groups to them, yeah, they're they're not part of whatever the in-group is, which for them is also an expanding and contracting category for whatever's politically viable. Yeah, that gives them license to deny them rights, to dehumanize them, to treat them as less than an animal. And within hours of of his posts about the this attack, the local mosque, which had nothing to do with it, hundreds of rioters gathered outside it, throwing bricks and torching a police van while chanting Robinson's name. Perseyside police said they believe EDL supporters helped organize this disorder. The unrest spread within days to Rotherham, Tamworth, Sunderland, and Middlesbrough, where mosques and asylum seeker hotels were besieged by mobs hundred strong. Amnesty International later analyzed X, formerly Twitter's own recommendation algorithm, and found that in the two weeks after the attack, Robinson's posts pulled in over 580 million views, a figure Amnesty called unprecedented for someone formally banned from most mainstream platforms for hate speech. This is a measured, algorithmically rewarded pipeline running from Robinson's disinformation straight into a mob outside a place of worship. And fundamentally, we can see how Tommy Robinson has morphed from like a street gang leader to somebody who is organizing from an international perch funded by big name donors, calls for direct violence around the UK.
SPEAKER_04In terms of understanding why people subscribe to these ideas, why people become activists of these kinds of organizations, I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I prefer a detached, empathetic approach to examining the fascist phenomenon. This means understanding it on its own terms. There are thousands of regular old British geezers flocking to the EDL or its other sister organizations for some reason. And it's important to understand what that reason is. Professor of Applied Social Psychology Bert Klandermans defined three forms of collective grievance that motivate social action. Number one, suddenly imposed grievances, which are unexpected threats to people's rights, status, or circumstances. Number two, illegitimate inequality grievances, which relates to societal or material inequality, poverty, that kind of stuff. Number three, violated principles grievances, which is quote, when moral outrage is evoked as a reaction to important principles or moral values being violated. Now that can be legitimate violations of a moral uh value or principle, or it can be a fabricated one. This last one I think is most relevant for us. With British fascist, and particularly the EDL, what drives recruitment, participation, and enthusiasm is what sociologist James Jasper termed moral shocks. Moral shocks, often the first step towards recruitment into social movements, occur when an unexpected event or piece of information raises such a sense of outrage in a person that she becomes inclined towards political action, whether or not she has acquaintances in the movement. According to CM Quinn, out of thirty-two EDL respondents, twenty-seven had never been a part of any protest action prior to joining the EDL. The majority of them didn't enter the movement through friends, acquaintances, or existing networks, and didn't know anybody in the EDL prior to joining their first demonstration on their own. The thing that motivated them was, quote, events such as the insulting of troops in Luton in 2009, and the burning of the poppies at the Remembrance Day event in London in 2010. These actions had been carried out by the organization Muslims against Crusades, to specifically so outrage and target the image of the British Armed Forces. During the 2010 action, they chanted, quote, British soldiers burn in hell. Now this might on the surface sound like a legitimate grievance itself against British imperialism in the Middle East, but of course these guys are themselves a far-right Islamist group. And to get the exact sort of reaction that they got. Except in the White Anglo context, it's a plastic poppy flower. Whilst these preachers and protesters are not representative of the wider Muslim population, respondents see them as the voices of intent, which the Muslim population needs to denounce. And if they do not, and the respondents feel they do not, they are seen to be in support. None of us would jump to denounce the burning of a plastic poppy or the insulting of British troops who have done horrible shit in the Middle East. And at hazard many a Muslim or just brown person in the UK feels the same. But if said Muslim or brown person doesn't actively denounce these things, they're viewed as enemies who are out to attack white people. These people don't talk about how they hate Muslims or hate brown people, though. They talk about how they're under attack from Muslims or brown people. When they talk about hate, it's pretty much exclusively about how everyone hates them, the troops, the country or whatever have you.
SPEAKER_06One of the things that I would say, just to jump in, is is this is an example of what why being white is a privilege. Not to get all woke, but yeah, too woke, yeah. We are considered to be individuals. I am not responsible. If a bunch of white people go out there and do something crazy, I am not considered to be responsible for it. They don't represent me. Whereas if you are a brown person or you're a Muslim or you're a black person, you are expected to respond to and be represented by the actions of a of a minority or the actions of an extreme. And you are not given the ability to have your own identity. Blackness or brownness or or being part of my minority religion is seemed to transmute responsibility onto the entire collective. And that is like kind of the nature of what whiteness represents. Like I have the right to be my own person, to be de-racialized, right? To not have responsibility for everybody who shares my skin tone. Whereas black black and brown people, Muslim people, they are seen to share collective responsibility for the crimes of any individual.
SPEAKER_04I want to say though, like uh, and that makes a lot of sense because the whole reason that whiteness exists is, of course, because blackness exists. Blackness was invented first, and whiteness as a response.
SPEAKER_06Oh, yeah, absolutely. Right.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, demonizing the other, and then you were like, well, okay, now we have elevated rights over them. Um whiteness would not exist if blackness wasn't like invented.
SPEAKER_06And and and and it's important to understand that this like the other rising has served a purpose within society. It was social control. Right? You had you wanted to create separate classes of labor of the population that could be hyper-exploited, and you would to do so to prevent solidarity from forming between you know white workers or the various marginalized groups, and to generate this kind of otherization, this separation to prevent that from happening. It was and it was done intentionally, and it was done with full knowledge. Like if you go back and look at the original laws, for example, in in the Americas, setting aside or explaining the differences or defining blackness, defining whiteness, it was done for the purpose of preventing, you know, combinations uh by laborers against their upper class.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I I think I don't know if we've talked about this before, but uh it's it's uh, you know, in America, like a lot of this stuff came from Bacon's Rebellion, which was a rebellion of white poor people and black poor people in the colonies. And the, you know, the owners and the slave drivers, there were white slaves at that point as well, less of course, uh, they were like, well, fuck. We can't have these people working together. Well, let's split them apart, let's make one better than the other. And that's obviously because, you know, those racist ideas existed at the time, but they weren't like fully fleshed out and like as sophisticated as they are today. But also what I want to say is that the idea that like, you know, you are under attack, you are like your identity is under threat, that kind of thing, that's like everything in racist right-wing agitation. They don't want you to like be proud of Britain. They don't want you to be proud of like who you are as a like a white person. They want you to feel like you have to defend being proud of it. You can't just be like, yeah, no, I'm I'm cool with like being from my country. They want you to be like apologetic about it in the way that they say that, you know, us wokies or whatever are trying to push on people. But they're the ones who are pushing this shit. Like, we don't fucking care if you're like, yeah, no, I'm I'm proud that I'm like Serbian or I'm proud that I'm like Danish or whatever. I might take offense to the latter, but still, like I think for the most part, all this stuff is being pushed by the right, because the right need you to be a victim. The same way that Tommy Robinson seems like pathologically to need to be a victim. And if you're not a victim, you're not under attack, you have no reason to quote unquote defend yourself or defend something. And that's the thing that motivates pretty much every one of the respondents uh uh that have been questioned here by the author. They are all people who want to defend something, to defend the UK, d defend, you know, the troops or whatever. They're they're motivated by patriotism or like a kind of love, um not hatred, explicitly. But of course, it becomes like an abusive kind of love, is how the author frames it. It's it's a bunch of people who normally might be kind of normal. This one person, for example, didn't say, you know, it was lack of uh jobs or economic opportunity or anything like that. Uh it was literally just patriotism. He wanted to serve in the military, but was rejected due to colorblindness. And so he took to street fighting and then later joined the EDL to quote serve his country. Because obviously they don't care if you're colorblind. They don't particularly care if you can read, I think. Among all respondents, this was a key factor. It propelled them from aggrieved citizens to social movement activists. But even so, it's always some sort of grievance that's coming for their status. They call it like a two-tier justice system that disproportionately favors brown Muslims and disfavours white English workers. Or it's a fear of change, but a change that disfavours them. I think what they feel in a real material way is a loss of status or a feeling that things aren't heading in the right direction for them. And what the general background radiation of European racism, as well as the EDL, provides for them is a way to articulate this, not as a critique of the system that they live under, but as an attack on them by the opponent, the other team, or the outsider. What differentiates the EDL, which is full of fascists, mind you, from your average fascist movement is that, quote, the EDL is not a revolutionary movement, and has not participated in a protest of a revolutionary nature. There's no desire to overthrow the state and its institutions. As that is what the EDL are defending, end quote. What the EDL's activist members expressly want is to defend the system, defend or return to a status quo that benefited them, and accomplish this through the same way as our fascist group schools from past episodes, or through right-wing Gramsciism, or the conquest of cultural hegemony. It's genuinely like a leftist parody of a reactionary organization. They exist purely to defend the system and to function as an activist street fighting gang, or should I say, supporter club, for fascist parties like the British National Party and national conservative parties like UKIP, Reform UK, and Restore Britain.
SPEAKER_08Completely on point.
SPEAKER_04Not party, social movement. Yeah. Important. Social movement, apologies. Yeah, they never stood for elections. Yeah, they didn't want to. That was like too snobby. I apologize.
SPEAKER_08I apologize to the real working class out there, yeah. But often when you're building a movement, no matter what it is, it's it's uh sometimes the more important question, or at least equally important question of what is Is supposed to be, uh, is what should it never become. And with more progressive organizations and so on, what it should never become is a question of uh um ideological merit, of principles, of uh this is what we are and this is what we aren't, because we genuinely believe this is the right way forward and that other one is not. With right wing organizations, it's much more of an of a of an aesthetization, where type of right wing organization you want to make and the type of right wing organization you do not want to make is uh completely uh based on how much utility you can get from the particular aesthetic that you are presenting with this project. Yeah, and with the EDL, uh to an extent, in a in a strange, almost semi-principled way, he ends up leaving it once it no longer holds those particular core values of what it is not.
SPEAKER_04But it's uh you know, every fascist Yeah, because they they they like aspirationally did not want to be racist. Like aspirationally, like exactly but they but obviously they are, but you know, exactly in their mind, like we don't want to be the racist guys, we don't want to be the Nazis.
SPEAKER_08But in a very similar way, how almost every uh fascist organization that wants to uh actually be productive anywhere around the world, uh they do not want to be associated with the scary aspects of what it means to be far right. Yeah. So what I'm trying to say is is the principle that they were following when they left the EDL was that they realized that this thing can no longer garner mainstream political support, and in my opinion, more importantly, garner mainstream high levels of financial influx from from members of society or from lobby groups, etc. etc. etc. Especially when they saw the direction that it's going. The decision, I believe, when they sat down on the table was like, guys, like too many quote unquote radical elements are here. Not from the perspective of a we're not Nazis, but from the perspective of give this another two years and it's gonna be it's yeah, it's already yet. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And yeah, we become the uh OG ones, the British union of the British National Party? Yeah, we're gonna become the BMP. So let's get the fuck out of here before this thing starts stinking really fucking bad. Uh before we are ostracized as as fringe radicals, and let's uh you know regroup, reset, and uh and do something else down the line. That's I think the conversation that was going on at that uh at that table when they were deciding to quit. They were making an informed political decision, uh not because uh they were afraid of out in the open racism, they were afraid of out in the open racism because they thought it would limit just how much racist agitation they can do. So both from a financial perspective and an organizational perspective, they just jumped ship on time, which is an incredibly interesting kind of maneuver because it's uh it's not that common. It's not that common. But then again, uh the success of an operation is defined by what the intentions uh of said operation are before you even fund it. And in this case, the success of the operation of the EDL was to grow uh the particular financial feasibility that it could have. And the second that financial feasibility started uh financial and political feasibility started uh drying out, they jump ship.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. The one thing that I would note, the way that this right wing movement has has shifted their political ends, right? Like UKIP was really about leaving the European Union. The problem with Britain was they we need to get our sovereignty back. You know, that's the UK independence party. We need our sovereignty back, we need to leave the EU, and then once we're in control, things will all be better. And as you know, as their policies have been achieved and the disasters have only gotten worse and conditions have worsened, they've shifted from kind of a structural critique, uh almost an institutional critique, to highly racialized critique. And that's like, you know, UKIP is basically like, oh, the institutions of liberalism are bad, they're common as in bag of outcomes. They win their argument, and then it goes to reform, which is like, oh, it's immigrants, you know, those those people, you know, it's almost like a colorblind movement where it's like recent immigrants and the flood, those people have not, you know, uh, they have not acclimatized, they have not um become British. But people that were born here of all races who are, you know, who have accomplished the culture or integrated with society, they're fine. And then restore Britain is like an actively racial movement, right? So you've gone from institutions of liberalism are bad all the way to the very ideas of liberalism must be rejected. And that is the same way that these politics have have uh been changing throughout Britain's recent history on the right, is fundamentally going from what was a maybe immigration restrictionist European skeptic movement all the way to a racially exclusionary fascist movement.
SPEAKER_08Very well put. And to slowly start rounding us off, let's uh put Tommy in a global perspective because you're sitting there in your beautiful house in rural Nigeria, or at that mountaintop in northern China, or as most of our listeners from the beautiful streets of Rio de Janeiro, because uh of course Brazil Brazil number dentist. And you're like, why the fuck shout out to the dentist? And you're like, why the fuck am I learning about some random British fucking street hooligan uh mortgage faking uh racist? Well, because turns out there is a international conspiracy, and it's not run by Jews or Bolsheviks or uh any other candidates, Freemasons, etc. Yeah, we got holistic Freemasons, etcetera. It's it's actually unironically a rather complex pyramid of media influencers, both mainstream and niche, that try to tell you that all your problems are never systemic, but indeed come from those who look a little bit different to you or live in a way that is not seen as normal by yours. And Tommy is an exact example of somebody who is often sold to his supporters as a very, very, very local figure, one of our one of our lads from down at the pub. Just a lad from Luton, uh, who spoke up when nobody else would, but in reality he became a small but useful cog in a much bigger machine of international fascism and far right politics. From early on, Robinson's anti-Moslim activism plugged into what researchers call the so-called Counter-Jihad movement, a transnational network of politicians, bloggers, and street groups who frame Islam as an existential threat to the so-called West. When he fronted the EDL, for example, he was already building links with the Dutch far right, with American Islamophobes and fascists, with uh institutions like Prager You, the Daily Wire, with a shit ton of different European identitarian figures, all of whom treated him as basically their British franchise. You know, you build uh from one McDonald's in your town into a hundred other towns with the same McDonald's franchise, but in this case, instead of selling burgers, you're selling basically a British version of swastikas. Last year, even the frogman himself, Jordan Peterson, platformed him as a booster of protest and race riots he had planned for the time. His international support went into overdrive once Robinson rebranded himself as a persecuted citizen journalist when he was jailed for contempt of court over his courthouse live streams. The campaign to free him was coordinated as much from Washington and Toronto as from the UK. US think tanks and far-right media platforms held bankroll protests in London, fly in sympathetic politicians like Arizona Congressman Paul Gossar, and lobbied the Trump administration to lean on the UK government over his case. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted support. Breitbart pushed his story heavily, and Steve Bannon publicly praised him as a solid guy and the backbone of Britain, not because Bannon suddenly cared about some provincial English fucking court, but because Robinson was evidently useful to his project of building this entire alt-right pro-Trump bloc inside of Europe's heart. On the ground, you could see that international fascist ecosystems were at work everywhere, from demonstrations that rallied around him at free Tommy marches in London, the crowds mixed EDL veterans, UKIB activists with unironically very diverse in DEI, Italian, French, Dutch, Belgian far-right politicians who flew in to speak, who flew their flags next to those of the UK on patriotic UK matches on UK streets. People from Geert Wilders' PVV, France's Rossebramant National, and Belgium's Vlaams Belang. Did I did I say Vlams Belang?
SPEAKER_04I do not know anything about Belgium.
SPEAKER_08Vams Belangs. When analyzing, for example, the hashtag Free Tommy hashtag that you know uh was used back in the air when they were trying to get him out of prison. When you analyze it, it shows that a large chunk of the online so-called grassroots support wasn't British at all, but almost entirely came from the US or uh to a lesser degree from Australian accounts and other overseas networks that were plugged into this wider far right ecosystem. The far right is surprisingly international, until of course it isn't, and they start shooting each other. Rebel media in Canada gave him a professional media platform, while US conspiracy influencers like Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Paul Joseph Watson amplified his content to millions, driving donations and international attention. Don't even get me started on how much dough he's getting from Israel. Jesus Christ. As a man who bangs on about defending our nation and British values, Tommy has been remarkably keen to cash checks from abroad, especially from hardline pro-Israel outfits that see his anti-Muslim agitation as very useful PR. In 2018, the Middle East Forum, a conservative pro-Israel think tank based in Philadelphia.
SPEAKER_04Isn't that where Netanyahu's accent is from, like his American accent? Philadelphia.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, he's from he's he's uh he's originally from Philly, and is you know, that's not his he's yeah, his name, just like Tommy Robinson, Benjamin Netanyahu changed his name.
SPEAKER_08He's a perfect combination of me and Mike because he's uh Polish and Philadelphian. So basically when you unite Mike and Yugopnik, you get Netanyahu. That's why Mike we should never have children. Uh but yeah, he he the the the Middle East Forum, the conservative pro-Israel think tank that's based in Philadelphia openly boasted that it was paying Robinson's legal defense, lobbying the UK government on his behalf, and funding and organizing free Tommy rallies in London. This is a group that does not want foreign influence. Yep, that does not want cultures and ways of life counterthetical to that of the English lad. Doesn't want big shadowy elites telling working class men and women of Britain what to do.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, but for that moment, just just for that moment, those Philadelphians, they were true geezers too.
SPEAKER_08It's about it's not about the result, it's about the geezers we make along the way.
SPEAKER_04It's about what's in your heart, yeah.
SPEAKER_08At that moment, they could uh close one eye at the fact that these are some of the most elitist and influential people upon earth, and they could all just sit down in a pub and sm and and and drink a couple of Guinnesses that probably the Philadelphian elites were would just vomit from even uh looking at. But uh groups like these, like the MEF and other US pro-Israel donors, treat figures such as Robinson and Gert Wilders as attack dogs whose Islamophobia helps launder their own politics as some sort of defense of Western civilization, and of course Israel as its frontline outpost. Robinson happily leaned into that particular script, loudly proclaiming his Zionism, posing an Israeli flag merchant, joking on camera, quote, I got my Zionist card out, shalom motherfucker, while explicitly appealing for it again, quote, shekels from Israeli back. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_09He's he's like plea, hey merchants, give me shekels. It's like anti-Semitically, like, please forget.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Oh and and said Israeli backers are like, yeah, sure, man. I don't care about the anti-Semitic literal. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you can be as anti-Semitic as you want. I don't care. Doesn't matter. You you're not you're not left wing, so you know.
SPEAKER_08Exactly. But half of like the my problematic hot take is that uh not half, but like 80% of the uh Israeli administration read the elders of Zion and were like, oh no, that's a fucking amazing.
SPEAKER_09Let's be that let's be that right now. Oh fucking give me that shot.
SPEAKER_06I mean ultimately, like the the problem, the problem is that these organizations are nihilistic, they are vicious, and they wear their might makes right philosophy on their sleeve, so when they see other people that are willing to do the same, they cohere out of uh a kind of reverse solidarity, the solidarity of evil. And I don't know any other way to describe it than that, like appealing for shekels, like Jesus.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, but when it c yeah, they joke amongst each other and they don't really care about uh stak or uh or giving slight offense because they are literally comrades in arms. And when it comes to particularly pitching Israel to Europeans and to British people in particular, British geezers and patriots, the main thing you need to do is uh inform them that Israel is not uh one of those backwards, filthy Muslim Arab countries. No, it is an outpost of Western civilization. Tel Aviv is just like London, it's not like Damascus or like Tehran, right? Or like Tehran. Uh and a combining uh something that might have sounded very strange to like, I don't know, a 60s, 50s, or god forbid, 30s or 40s fascist, like the so-called uh uh Jewish state with with a far right movement might on paper uh sound uh sound insane, but when it comes to the Zionist project of Israel, which is colonization, apartheid and genocide, but most importantly, colonialism, apartheid and genocide over the other, the lesser being done by the civilizational movement uh that is associated deeply or at least attempts to be associated deeply with the West. When when you look at it that way and you properly explain it, then it makes a lot more sense to to be uh on the same side of and sometimes even directly or indirectly fund, especially Islamophobic or anti-Arab, anti-Brown people in general, uh movements in uh in the in the so-called West.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_08Uh hell you can you can even boast and openly say uh our brothers from Israel are giving us shekels because if somebody knows, and this is what Tommy Robinson always says, if somebody knows what it's like to fight these quote unquote barbaric hordes, it's the Israelis. We need to learn more from Israel, we need to be more like Israel, which is a direct call, well, to genocide and mass murder. Yeah. Uh and that's that's kind of that's my TLDR thesis of of uh of these international uh projects of of collaboration. It doesn't matter whether it's uh an Israeli outfit working with a British outfit or a British outfit working with a Belgian one or a uh or one from Poland or one from Brazil or one from Canada or or the US. There's surprisingly large amounts of potential can come out of linking a grander Western civilizational kind of uh ideological arc uh between all of these individual movements and creating kind of a a larger D D universe in which all of them can can can coexist and feed off of each other, especially financially, but also to a lesser extent in the scale of importance ideologically until of course they kill each other.
SPEAKER_04Or I was gonna say, or until they turn every country into Israel, but yeah. Absolutely, but then they would have to kill each other as well. Yeah, of course, yeah, because you can only have one Israel. Because like, you know, if they if it's an Israel surrounded by Israels, those are Israels that want to kill the Israel, so you know it's under siege, right? It's gotta kill the other Israels. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_08When you get rid of all or even from the perspective of the internal, what you always need somebody new to get rid of. And I don't know what the fuck the other minorities, paler minorities that support uh groups like this in the UK that they think that after they get rid of the evil browns and blacks, they're not gonna come come for them as well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean they're already like coming for like Polish people who are like the whitest people on earth, like but they're yeah, they're not white in their eyes, yeah. So like it's it's gonna be, you know, then it's gonna be the Irish, then it's gonna be the Scottish, you know.
SPEAKER_06Uh we're gonna be last.
SPEAKER_04But which one of those are you? Scottish. Scottish? Oh, okay. I'm I'm I'm like in in my head going through like what are them like most likely to have owned slaves in the past.
SPEAKER_06Like, I mean my my uh my grandparents migrated in 1930.
SPEAKER_04Oh, okay, you're good.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, you know, they're you're they're not they're not like southern fucking Scotch Irish overseer types.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, yeah. Freddie, he's one of us, he's a proper whitey. He the his generation didn't stay there for a long time to become uh what was it?
SPEAKER_09Us whitey Us.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, I forget I'm a Slavic dog.
SPEAKER_04I love how Yuga was like was hitting you with like the mega racism, being like, yeah, no, it it uh Mike is like racially pure like us, and then Mike was like, what do you mean us? You filthy slav mut.
SPEAKER_06What the fuck? No, no, no, I would never say that. I wouldn't I would I would fight too, I would fight against those those things, man, you know.
SPEAKER_04I would fight really hard. Darren Carroll, Tommy Robinson's uncle, had helped found the English Defense League, but now works for the charity Exit Hate, who help people leave movements like the EDL and find a meaningful community elsewhere. The EDL and similar movements target vulnerable people. This happens online too, quite frequently. According to an article in the mirror by Kieran Williams from 2023, 37% of all the people that Exit Hate help leave movements like the EDL have autism or associated conditions. The Exit Hate's founder said that, quote, hardcore extremists targeted people with these conditions and the charity wanted more research into the issues. Darren Carroll was also a vulnerable person, having lost both of his parents at thirteen. It's safe to say the deck was stacked against him. But after two women who reminded him of his mum, spat at him and called him Nazi scum one day, it led him down the long path towards where he is now. He's a member of the Construction Workers Union. He joined the Labour Party and tried to help the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants make inroads into labor, but they of course weren't very receptive considering they were trying to outflank UKIP and the rest on immigration. We've all seen how that's gone. On the final page of her book, Angry White People Coming Face to Face with the British Far Right, journalist Xiao Hung Pai said I know that Darren will not just sit and wait for things to happen. He's now exploring alternatives to the left of Labour. In June 2015, he went on his first anti-austerity demonstration in London. In the near future, Darren wants to be able to tell his story to fellow working class Britons and instill in them the importance of collectively resisting racism. He will continue to try to find his way.
