Behind the Bastards - Tommy Robinson: The Fascist Grifter With An Addiction to Being Arrested

Episode Date: September 10, 2019

In Episode 83, Robert is joined by Jake Hanrahan to discuss Tommy Robinson. Footnotes:1. Tommy Robinson boasts about scoring drugs and proclaims himself 'king of whole Islam race', in newly emerged video2. Tommy Robinson encouraged vigilante action, judges say3. Finsbury Park attacker turned violent by far-right posts from Tommy Robinson and Britain First, police say4. Tommy Robinson: The rancour, rhetoric and riches of brand Tommy5. We’re told 84% of grooming gangs are Asian. But where’s the evidence?6. Rotherham abuse: report finds 1,400 children were victims 7. Number of child sexual abuse victims in Rotherham raised to 1,5108. Book Review: Enemy of the State by Tommy Robinson9. Pegida UK supporters stage anti-Islam silent march in Birmingham10. Arrests after Yorkshire anti-racism gig stormed11. Attacks on Muslims: numbers in detail12. EDL leader Stephen Lennon convicted of assault13. EDL Leader Stephen Lennon, AKA Tommy Robinson, Jailed For 10 Months For False Passport14. EDL founder Stephen Lennon guilty over football brawl15. Eyewitness: EDL return to Luton16. The EDL: Britain’s ‘New Far Right’ social movement17. The BNP past of the EDL leader18. Man held for 1995 murder Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. What's poorly introducing my podcast? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast with the worst introductions in the podcasting game and also the podcast where we talk about the worst people in all of history. So the introductions are at least in line with the terribleness of the human beings we talk about. My guest today is conflict journalist and host and operator of Popular Front, which is a podcast about the nerdy modern details of war. Jake Hanrahan, how you doing Jake? Hello, mate. Good, good, good. Thank you. Yeah, you and I, we just spent closing in on two weeks in Iraq and Syria together a little bit earlier this year. Yeah, we talked to a lot of nice people

there and today we're going to talk about somebody who sucks. Yeah, yeah. Oh, Tommy Boy. Yeah, Tommy Robinson. Yeah. How would you describe Tommy Robinson in like a sentence or two to just someone who wanted a quick description of who this dude is? He's like this hard right-wing quasi football hooligan. He's become kind of a joke, but he's also, you know, has caused hell for the last, like, God, man, like 10 years. I remember being school even hearing about him, just being like, who the fuck is this guy, you know? Yeah, he's been at this shit a while. He's kind of like a low-rent Oswald Mosley. Yeah, really, really low-rent. Yeah. And Oswald Mosley was not a high-rent Oswald Mosley. Yeah, exactly. It's like the woodlouse

of the Oswald Mosleys, you know? It's down there. All right. Well, I'm going to get into it. So, yeah, you know, I'm just going to read this story and you'll comment and, you know, one of your side jobs here, Jake, is going to be to mock me viciously when I mispronounce one of your country's ridiculous city names. Oh, yeah. I'm ready. Yeah, the one I keep having trouble with, it looks like Leicester, but I know that's wrong. Leicester. Leicester. It's absurd. That actually is absurd, but that's like my area, man, like East Midlands. It's down the road. It looks like Leicester or something, but yeah, it's Leicester. Yeah, Leicester. Yeah. Well, we will be talking about the Midlands at a couple of points today. My favorite. Yeah, yeah, that is

where some of this is set. So, Stephen Christopher Yaxley was born on November 27, 1982, in Lutton, England. Is it Luton or Luton? Luton, Luton. Luton, Luton, in Luton, England. In interviews, he tends to focus on the fact that his parents were with Irish immigrants into the country. He later told the Telegraph, everything in Luton is the son of immigrants, whether it be Irish, West Indian, Ghanaian, everyone I know. His mom worked at a bakery and his dad worked at a Vo Hall car plant in Luton. I've never heard of that manufacturer, but they're a defunct now, I guess. But yeah, it was like a big industrial employer in the town. As an adult, Yaxley has repeatedly emphasized the level of poverty and hopelessness that was endemic to the community

he grew up in. In 2016, he self-published an autobiography titled Enemy of the State, which I have not read because I didn't want to give this guy money since it was a self-published book. However, I did read a number of reviews of the book. One of them was a surprisingly positive review by a guy named Daniel Falkner, who's at a book reviewer for the London School of Economics. He chastised the book's flawed and inaccurate analysis of Islam, but he praised Tommy Robinson's writing on the economic state he and his peers grew up in, writing, quote, That portrait is bleak indeed. Economic vulnerability, social breakdown, and political neglect are themes that surface time and again. Importantly, the drug use, crime, and serious

violence that frequently accompany these broader problems are never abstract for Robinson. They are lived realities for him and for his broader community, and he is not shy of describing them in disturbing detail because, as he says, these things are bound to have shaped me in some way, growing up hearing the stories and experiencing the reality of life on the streets. You couldn't help but have it touch your life in some way or another. When we were chatting about where you come up, you've talked a lot about the kind of poverty in that particular chunk of the UK, which is not the chunk that I think most Americans, it's like London. It's kind of what you hear about, but yeah.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, there is one thing you can say that he is right about that, that like, how bad, you know, I live where he's from, it's like three train stops away, you know, like 40 minutes, and there's not a lot of difference, you know, it's my area, where he's looting, that's like out of London, but I'm Midlands, but still it's just, the kind of deprivation is just unlike anything you can really think of, because it's not like so bad that it's like dystopian or anything, but it's just so boring. There's just nothing to do. Do you know what I mean? And the only thing people do is like, you know, basically when you come out of school, you're either going to work in the factory or be a

drug dealer, you know, it's grim. Yeah, and it seems like one of the few things to do outside of those occupations is get into fights over whatever it is you find to get into fights over. Yeah, and that's a big part. Like in school for me, like just growing up, it was just, I got my head kicked in so many times, just from like, you know, just that was what happened, you were just, you hit a certain age and it's just right, you fight now, you know what I mean? It's weird, man, it's not nice. Yeah, yeah, it sounds shitty. And it sounds like Tommy Robinson had similar kind of experiences in his upbringing. Although I should note that several reporters have found evidence that Robinson comes from a more well off

background than he tends to portray himself. He definitely spent a lot of time in Lutton or Lutton and like grew up there as a kid. But there's also evidence that like his family was one of the wealthier families in the area. Emma Moss Lee reporting for Vice spoke to several people who grew up with and around him. One of the sources claimed that he came up quite well off as a result of his stepfather's family business, which is like a plumbing business. So it kind of seems like he was one of the more well off people in a very poor area. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but like, yeah, perhaps, but even, you know, even being well off around these areas, it's not, it's not the well off that you would think you like, certainly he's not in

the Hamptons, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, and he clearly had the same issue with like nothing to do. So why not fight? Yeah. Now, in his autobiography, Tommy recalls growing up with an assortment of non white friends, particularly Muslims. I found a very positive review of his autobiography by a far right author on medium. The article is titled Night of the Realm, which is how the guy refers to Tommy Robinson. Here's how that writer summarized Tommy's recollection of his childhood friend group, quote, in the book, he describes his early years of a bright yet lad racing through unchallenging schoolwork easily distracted and always up for a scuffle. Already in his teens, he saw Muslim friends he'd grown up with reach an age and then

drift away into big groups of Muslim youths. But a commonplace playground tussle would see dozens of Muslim men arrive soon after brawls injuries in the police called. Now, this is like an angle that Robinson pushes a lot in his media appearance, this idea that like as a kid, he came to realize that whenever there were fights, Muslims reacted with a group mentality and they would all habitually defend each other. I found another quote from Tommy Robinson this time in a Telegraph article stating quote, the mentality they have, I realized when I went to the World Cup when an Englishman out there gets in trouble, every other Englishman defends him. It's the mindset you're away from home and he's your brother. And that's a brotherhood they have every day. You get in trouble outside

a nightclub here, they'll get out of their taxis, their chicken shops, they'll come from everywhere, they don't need to know each other just because they're a Muslim and you're not. So yeah. Okay. I mean, I don't know about that man, bullshit. Well, I don't know, maybe Luton is a very, very different place actually to where I'm, there's not even a mosque in my town, you know what I mean? Oh, actually there is, but it's very small and it's just like, they also use it for other things as well, you know what I mean? So, I don't know. He's an unreliable narrator. Yeah, a little bit. I think, I mean, you know, if your mate gets punched up, I don't think that someone's just going to be like, wait, hang on, he's a Muslim, so I'll defend him. Like it's, you know,

around here, it's factional between your friends. It's more your friendship group than anything like that from what I've ever seen, man. Like, I don't know. Yeah. And I could see, like people kind of hanging to friendship groups that are based heavily around race, because that kind of happens in a lot of places and like that being what, but I can't see him getting into a fight outside of a nightclub and some guy leaving his kebab shop to just be like, what's happened to go beat this shit out of somebody? My Spidey sense is a tingling. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe now just because everyone fucking hates him, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he's kind of, certainly I do think there's a lot of truth to what he's

saying in that sense, but I think he's also like creating his own perfect version of it, you know what I mean? Yeah, at this point, I have no trouble imagining people crossing the street to get in a shot at him, but we'll explain why over the course of this episode. So that Telegraph article also includes the claim that Stephen did very well in high school, scoring 11 ACs and something called the GCSE, which I assume is just British school test stuff. GCSE is like what you do and then you go on to college. So it's the first big exam. Yeah. And he did not go on to college, but he claims repeatedly everywhere that you'll find him talking to media that he did very well in like his school stuff up until that point.

And he also will usually emphasize that he never needed to study. And I, it's one of those things where this is in like every article where Tommy talks about his childhood. And to my knowledge, none of the journalists who repeat this have actually gotten any records and stuff. And I assume that's kind of difficult to do because that stuff's usually, it's like there probably would be no way to get his high school grades or whatever. But like, I don't know, it's a claim that is repeated that we can't back up, but it's definitely important for Tommy that you know that he did very well in school before he dropped out at 16. I mean, I mean, maybe, I mean, certainly, I wouldn't know how to even get my

GCSE. I think I've got one GCSE and I wouldn't even know how to get the paper for it, to be honest. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not weird that there's not back up for that. And he's clearly got a type of intelligence. So I wouldn't be surprised if he did do all right in school. Yeah. Now, in that telegraph interview, Tommy acknowledged that he had problems outside of school. And primarily those problems were his growing love of soccer hooliganism. As a very young lad, he got involved with the Men in Gear or Migs, which were apparently an infamous Lytton town football gang, one of its leaders. And most hooligan-y hooligans was a guy who used the nickname Tommy Robinson. The constant street fights were a hallmark of

Stephen's childhood. And they were also the first time he wound up in direct confrontation with Muslims. He told the telegraph, look, when I was at school, Imran and Cameron, two identical twins were some of my best mates, but there were problems with Muslim gangs and there were fights between the English lads and the Muslims. Whenever you get in a problem at school, it's flooded with Muslim men. They always seem to be waiting for trouble. So again, that's like a line that just he makes that point a lot about the way that he thinks these people react. Now, for what it's worth, that vice profile claim, talk to some other people who grew up around Tommy and claims that his falling out with those twins wasn't a result of them joining a gang, but was because they didn't

invite him to a wedding. So who knows? In 1995, when Tommy was 11 and still named Stephen, a 29 year old man named Mark Sharp was beaten to death by a group of five Muslim men while getting kebab for his daughter. The killing seems to have been tied to road rage rather than any racial motivation, but the fact that the attackers were from Bangladesh made it an inciting incident for racists in the area. I don't know. Is that one you heard about, Mark Sharp's murder? Yeah, I know about it because I mean, to be honest, it's not a lie that like there's certain groups that it's like, okay, like, don't mess with them. You know what I mean? And you know, and it's like Bangladeshis, the Somalians, like, you know, the gangs, it's like, don't fuck with them. So

there is an element of truth to the fact that, yeah, there are like these kinds of gangs of certain ethnicities. And it's like, you know, they will just stab you to bits. You know what I mean? And that's not based on racism. It's just based on what has been happening around the area for decades. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it doesn't seem like the Mark Sharp case was a result of that. Like it seems like this guy got into some traffic. Yeah, you can just get stabbed to bits for nothing here. Like, you know, people are like literally just want to stab you for nothing. It's it's it's so sick. It's disgusting. Yeah, see here in the in the civilized United States, we just shoot people. Yeah, we're more gentlemanly, you know, we look our enemies in

the face and just stab them and run off. Yeah, we kind of spray and pray with an AR15 into a crowd. So yeah, I guess I prefer y'all's way. But yeah, well, we got acid attacks, actually. So you know, that's a big one now. Yeah. That's in real. Yeah, yeah, that's a big one in the UK. And I'm super excited for when somebody finally synthesizes a drone with an acid attack. That's gonna be a great day. Yeah. Yeah, it's fucked. It will happen. Yeah, it will absolutely happen. So yeah, Stephen left school at 16. The Telegraph just notes that despite his academic ability, nobody encouraged Robinson to stay on for sixth form. Rather than continue his academic career, Tommy decided to apply to study aircraft engineering at the Lytton Airport, the Vo Hall plant where

his father worked had closed down right around the same time he graduated. And the airport was basically the only blue collar game left in town. Now the Vo Hall plant closing may have had an impact on young Steven's attitudes towards Muslims. In decades past, Lytton had been a major hub of industry which had drawn in a large immigrant population. Steven's mother's family had immigrated in from Ireland and throughout his childhood increasing numbers of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims had also moved in. By the year 2000, when Steven was 18 and the factory closed, Muslims made up 15% of Lytton's population. Today they make up like a quarter and Lytton is one of the very few British towns where white Britons are an ethnic minority. So like right as jobs are getting

tight and his dad loses his job is when there's like this flood of immigrants in from like Muslim speaking countries. So it's one of those things where Tommy doesn't claim that he hadn't had an impact but you look at it and you're like, yeah, that seems like it might have had an impact. Yeah, I mean, it would piss you off, right? Like you're some like kind of angry young man and that happens, it would piss you off. I think the thing with Lytton is that there's the difference. So I look at it and I think, oh, I don't know. But like where I live, it's so small that like if you're broke, if you're poor, you're just poor. It's not like, oh, you're in the Muslim bit or you're the black bit or the white bit, like everyone's on top of each other. So you don't really care. You're

just like whatever, like we're all together. But in places like Lytton, it's big enough, but also like condensed enough to be able to have segregated areas. Do you see what I'm saying? So you can have a Muslim area and the white area in the black area. So there's definitely like animosity between all them kind of groups down there. You know what I'm saying? So I can see that something like that you could then he could then go like, oh, it was because of those lot over there. You know what I mean? Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah, like there's definitely a small segregation there. Yeah. And Steven studied carefully at the Lytton airport. And I'm going to keep going back and forth on that one, I'm sure. And managed to win a coveted apprenticeship in

aircraft engineering. This was quite an achievement over 600 people applied to the job. And Steven was one of only four who got in. In 2003, after five years of study, he qualified for the job. But he only actually held it for about two years, because he got in a spot of legal trouble. Now, most mainstream news sources, including vice, kind of breezed past this part of his backstory. Here's what they wrote in their write up. Almost immediately, his life was turned upside down when a criminal conviction during a drunken argument, he assaulted a man who turned out to be an off duty police officer meant he lost his job. Now, that's a really weirdly passive way of writing about that. And yeah, I just found that strange. So I went searching for a little

bit more detail. And there's a couple of people who cover the attack in a little bit more detail. Now, we'll talk about that in a second. Vice also notes that roughly a year before this incident, you actually joined the British National Party or BNP. Yeah, and the BNP is an outright fascist party. Yeah, completely. The guy that like the ran it was a part of NF National Front, which was an openly white supremacist, even Nazi group back in the eighties. Yeah, they're complete scum. Yeah, they're complete scum. They have a paramilitary mob with them called Combat 18. That's right. Yeah, the 18 is a reference to the name of Adolf Hitler, because the first letters of his first and last name are the first and eighth letters of the

alphabet. And that group's been tied to a lot of murders. And as far as we know, Robinson wasn't a member of Combat 18. But he did join the BNP. And again, this is kind of weird. Most mainstream sources I read who wrote profiles on him kind of let Robinson whitewash this. Like, here's here's exactly how vice describes it. Quote, Robinson describes his dalliances with hooliganism as well as a brief sentence of BNP member in 2004 as useful missteps. And they never like go any deeper into it. So I found that a little bit peculiar. And there's the a little bit more. Robinson can't ignore this entirely, because it's one of people's big claims when they claim that he's a fascist. And in his autobiography, the way he sort of whitewashes this is that he

claims that he joined the BNP, because he wanted to stand up to the Muslim gangs. And during the first meeting, he brought along a black friend. And when he saw how racist they were to his black friend, he left the meeting and realized that the BNP was bad, which I'm pretty certain is a lie. And there's some some evidence that suggests why I found a write up on Stephen Yaxley Lennon in the anti fascist magazine searchlight, which was a project of a charity called hope not hate. And this is the like this write up on him is the write up that like, revealed his actual name as Stephen Yaxley Lennon, because he goes by Tommy Robinson, which is there's a couple of different names this dude has. And it's actually kind of hard to pin down, which is his original.

But that write up of him goes into his backstory and notes quote, in 2004, he joined the BNP with a family membership. In the same year, he assaulted an off duty police officer who intervened to stop a domestic incident between Yaxley Lennon and his partner, Jenna vowels. During the scuffle, Yaxley Lennon kicked the officer in the head. He was convicted in April 2005 for assault, occasioning a actual bodily harm for which he was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, an assault with intent to resist arrest for which he received a concurrent term of three months. That was also a BNP member and was cautioned for possession of cocaine. So that's a different picture than I found kind of painted of him in the, you know, in the vice articles, not like

positive towards Robinson, but it doesn't dig into this stuff. Like that's a different case. If this dude's got a family membership in the BNP, that's a real different story right there from just a guy who slides into a meeting and then slides out of it. Yeah. Like family membership. I didn't even know such a thing existed, you know. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's what these folks claim is the case. And they've been right about other details of his back. Oh yeah. No, I can believe it. Like I just didn't even know like you would, it's the sort of thing you would think, yeah, it seems a little bit deeper than like, oh, let me just go and talk to these guys for a minute, you know. Yeah. Oh, they didn't like my black friend. Maybe these Nazis are racist.

Yeah, exactly. And it's also like that assault. It's like, it's weird how passive the write-ups usually are. It's like he assaulted someone who turned out to be an undercover cop. It's like, no, he was abusing his girlfriend and this cop walked up and he kicked him in the head. Yeah. Yeah. That's like, I'm sure that happened another time as well. Like then basically like from what I understand, they're just huge cokeheads. And in fact, that even the like alt-right have accused him of spending like all the money on coke and stuff, you know. That would not surprise me. And it's also like kind of the same with the, a lot of the fascists in Portland and stuff, like a lot of the proud boys in Patriot prayer. Yeah,

there's a lot of rumors and a couple of like former members who have alleged like, yeah, the ringleader speed up, spend all of the money they crowdfund on blow. And after all of these rallies, they have big coke parties. It just, it turns out a lot of people who like to fight and do cocaine are also interested in far-right politics. Yeah. Well, it's a heady mix. Yeah, surprising. So Stephen Yaxley, that's still what he's going by at this point, spent around a year in jail. When he got out, he opened a tanning salon in Luton and moved to Bedford. I keep fucking it up. No, no, I'm laughing at the tanning salon. Oh yeah, he opened a tanning salon. Oh, I didn't even know that, you know. Yeah. And he moved to Bedford,

which is a town with near Luton, with an average family income though, of around a quarter of a million dollars. So he's clearly doing a lot pretty well at this point. I tell you what, Bedford is literally like, I don't know, an hour drive, if that's nice, like 40 minutes away from me, like Bedford is pretty poor. Oh, weird. Okay. So that's just a situation where there's some rich people. Yeah, like moving to Bedford is certainly not a step up. Do you know what I mean? Interesting. Okay. See, that's... There are nice areas. Don't get me wrong, you know, but no. It's hard to tell. It's just because all I can look at is like what the average sort of family income there is. That's why it's kind of, it's hard to tell, right? It's a good job. It's a good

good job I've been there because yeah, it's not the best place. But certainly like if you managed to start your own business, I imagine you had a bit of money coming in. Yeah. And his stepfather, you know, they had hard times after his stepfather got laid off from the vo-hall plant, but he opened up a plumbing business, which seems to have been very successful. And where Stephen also worked and he also made cash buying, renovating and flipping houses during this period. Wow. Okay. Yeah, it seems like he's doing really well actually in making a very comfortable income at this period of time in his life. Now that does not last super long because of some events that occur in 2009. And we will talk about that. But first, Jake, we have to break

for your very favorite thing. And... Now, Jake, you don't do ads on your show, but is there any product you would like to provide a free ad plug for today? A product. Or concept. Yeah, product to concept. Popular front. Pretty good concept. That is a good concept. Yeah, I don't know, man. I would just say don't do drugs, get fit, and care about nature. There you go. Well, you were the first person saying don't do drugs on the spot. Really? And I will say this is one area where we disagree with. I agree with getting fit and enjoying nature. And donating to popular front. Also a good idea. You should also donate to the corporations that ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

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to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. That was a not one of my better ad transitions. They're all kind of like that. So when we left off Stephen Yaxley, or Stephen Yaxley Lennon, whatever his actual name is, he's doing pretty well. He's gotten out of jail in the scale of things, a pretty minor assault, and he's got a business and he seems to be making very good money. But then in 2009, things start to change for him. And this starts when a group called the Royal Anglian Regiment, which is a British military unit who'd been stationed in Afghanistan, rotated home from deployment. Now, since many of them came from the Latin area, there was a homecoming parade

for them in the town. And this did not sit well with members of a local Islamic extremist organization, Allah Sunnah Wal Jama. They held a counter demonstration wielding signs that said Anglian soldiers, butchers of Basra, Anglian soldiers, cowards, killers, extremists, and extremists, and similar things. They shouted that the returning soldiers were child killers and generally did their best to troll the people of Luton. Now, this small demonstration was immediately condemned and disavowed by other Muslim groups in the area, but that didn't stop it from acting as a radicalizing catalyst for local right-wing extremists. A write-up by the University of Northampton notes, quote, this small Islamist protest was specifically designed to both be

offensive and provocative, although numbering no more than 20 protagonists, it offered the perfect opportunity for an instance of tit-for-tat radicalization to develop in the town, which is very much what you see is this kind of like, there will be these extremist Muslim groups that will recruit people, in some cases, for the Taliban or whatever, and more often just sort of say really, kind of like the Westboro Baptist Church in the U.S. That is exactly such a good way of describing it, actually. Yeah, it's like Jad Westboro Baptist. To be honest, man, we had like a good five years in England where we just had a real problem with these hate preachers, man. Like, it was a nightmare. You would see them all

the time and they really, really did the worst thing possible because it did radicalize a lot of people, you know, people that perhaps didn't really know any Muslims or like didn't really care about them either way would then see these people and then be like, oh, like, oh, and then then, you know what I mean? And then the ball starts rolling into this kind of radical stuff. It was really bad, man. Yeah, yeah. And that's exactly what happens here. But it happens to this whole town as a result of this, like the kind of series of events that this group starts into being. The extremist Muslim protest of the Anglian soldiers' homecoming led to a huge amount of press coverage which riled up local hooligans and provided an opportunity for right-wing extremists

to organize them and counter demonstrations. One of those extremists was a dude named Paul Ray. Now, Paul is an anti-Muslim blogger who wrote under the pseudonym Lionheart and would later be found who have had ties with Anders Brevik. Yeah, the Utoria shooter. You've heard of Paul Ray? Yeah, man. So, like, I really, really went deep into the Anders Brevik stuff years ago. And yeah, he, I don't, there's no one quite knows what his role was, but it does seem like there was something, some kind of connection to Brevik, yeah. And there's, yeah, I haven't, you know, obviously I was digging on Tommy, so I didn't get deep into Paul. I didn't find like a clear connection, but it's like a lot of people say they were definitely in communication. There was some

sort of role the guy had. Right. And Brevik claims to have met a British guy called Lionheart, if I remember rightly, you know, it's just all very dodgy. But again, like his, I read his manifesto, which the whole thing is bonkers, it's made up of like 50 different things. So, you never know, you know, but possibly. If I'm, if I'm, if I'm criticizing manifestos on quality, it's definitely one of the lower writing quality of the, of the murderous. Yeah, one of the worst manifestos. Yeah. Yeah. Now Ted Kaczynski, that guy could write a fucking manifesto. Uncle Ted man, solid manifesto. Solid manifesto, really like the gold standard of trying to radicalize people with extreme politics. So, so this guy, Paul Ray, who we're

just talking about helps organize a rejoinder protest to the, the initial like Muslim counter protest of the homecoming parade. And he gets about 150 activists to show up in April of 2009. And I'm going to quote now from that university of Northampton right up on the founding of the English defense league, which is the group Tommy's about to found quote, at this point, the demonstration included figures previously linked to the extreme right wing group combat 18 symptomatic of the wider far rights early interest in the Latin area at this time. The next demonstration in London came on the 24th of May. This protest developed when another nationalist protesting organization, March for England, MFE, began to organize a protest directed primarily against

one of the local Islamists present at the 10th of March demonstration, Saiful Islam. In the lead up to the event, a mosque linked to Saiful Islam was the target of an arson attack, which is revealing of the growing anti-Muslim tensions within the town during the EDL's initial year of formalization. After securing permission to hold this event, MFE formally withdrew, although the march still went ahead with smaller unofficial MFE presence. The event resulted in a more violent confrontations, a breakaway group targeted Muslim areas of Luton, which itself inspired a counter response by around 150 young Muslims. So that's the tit for tat stuff like we're seeing, like the key different groups start holding these rallies, people get assaulted, you know, right wing extremists assault Muslims,

then like some young Muslims will assault white people or right wing extremists or whoever, like they credit as being that and like it just leads to more and more fighting. It's the same thing we've seen up in like Portland. It's just kind of what happens when this shit goes down. It got really violent though, man. Like it was crazy. They were like big, big groups, you know, it spread so fast over the region as well. Like it spread, man. Like it ended up even there was like when I was just finishing school, there was a few people were like, we're EDL and like, you know, we would fight with them. But but like it was kind of a foreign like, you know, like right wing Nazi stuff or whatever or whatever it was was like a really weird concept in our town and in a lot of towns. But now they

kind of set the groundwork. You know what I mean? Yeah, it was yeah. And it just hasn't quite good. It's like ebbed and flowed since then, but it hasn't gone away. And it does like, yeah, yeah. So the process continued for several weeks and culminated in the founding of the English Defense League that summer. Now the EDL as its most commonly known held their first event on August 8th. This was widely seen as being a dog whistle to British neo nazis since August 8th is eight eight. And if you listen to this podcast regularly, you know what double eights mean to neo nazis. Some organizers of the EDL, including Paul Ray, actually pulled out of the event because of the dog whistling. Ray stated anybody with the slightest bit of knowledge about neo nazism knows the

meaning of eight eight, which is why I pulled out of any active participation. So Paul Ray decides that the the EDL is too Nazi for him to be around. Yeah, Paul Ray was from a different kind of strand. He was like far right. Sure. But like anti Nazi, because he's like a Christian, you know what I mean? Like a real Christian fundamentalist type, crusaders and all of that shit. So certainly he's like a far right guy, but he was like not involved with the Nazi stuff. It's not like he was like, that's too much for me. I think it was just like, Oh, that's not my that's not my thing. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's not my cup of cup of tea. Yeah, it's not my cup of racism. You know, I want the other one. Yeah, yeah. So someone who did not pull out of active participation in the

rally was Steven Yaxley, who at that point adopted the moniker Tommy Robinson. Now he started out as just kind of one of a couple of prominent people at early EDL protests. He would always wear a mask and he was kind of the clothing he wore was very identifiable. And he gradually kind of wound up in control of the largest group of hooligans with within this like forming organization as they carried out anti Muslim rallies and had a bunch of street fights. And so you know, by the time the EDL is a formal thing, Tommy Robinson is its head. So calling him the founder might not be accurate, but he's certainly like the guy who winds up in charge of it once it becomes like a real concrete organization. Now in the offing of it, the British fascist right community saw the EDL

as a useful tool for directing activists towards more extreme groups like the BNP and National Front. However, the EDL's more moderate appearance and more diverse membership allowed it to accrue vastly more public sympathy and support than any explicitly fascist organization ever could. As the months went on, Tommy Robinson made the wise decision to explicitly reject the Nazi roots of his organization. At one point, burning a swastika flag on BBC Newsnight as a symbolic rejection of the ideology. And this works. The EDL actually spreads very rapidly at this point. And Facebook was utterly critical to that. Robinson was very effective, though, at building a grassroots movement. You know, there was no real clear political ideology in the EDL in its early

days, just a hatred for radical Islam and probably more than anything, a desire to get into street fights. Yeah, like, certainly, you know, EDL, it's, you know, Tommy is not a Nazi, you know what I mean? He might be a fascist, but yeah, that's you're right. Like they're like, certainly what he did there. It wasn't like he was hiding it. That you're right. Like the way he got it to spread was because, you know, he's not a Nazi. People to this day, people are very aware of, you know, the sacrifices, the troops of our country gave to fight the Nazis. So it's never been as huge as you might think, you know what I mean? So he was clever in, you know, firstly, he was, he was honest that he's not a Nazi, but secondly, he was clever in being like, hey, we're not racist or

Nazi, anyone can join. And that, yeah, that's what made it spread, man. Like I knew a lad, one of my friend's brothers, he's half Pakistani, was like, oh, I might join it. And we were like, are you mad? Do you know what I mean? And he was like, no, man, they're not racist. Like, you know, and it was, do you know what I mean? It really, a lot of kids really started to believe it, you know? Yeah, yeah. And that's, I mean, that's part of like, because you've obviously, you've seen the same thing with like the Proud Boys, and with Patriot Prayer here in Portland, where like, they always focus on like, you know, let's get our black members and our Asian members up front, so that, and you know, when that group, American Guard, tried to drive an armored bus into downtown

Portland was a group that's been tied to nine murders and is very much like a serious extremist, white supremacist group. The guy who was swinging a hammer at people during the rally was an Asian man. So like, I mean, and that goes like, that's, it's not an ineffective tactic to sort of like, no, no, no, we're not Nazis. Like, look at how much more racially accepting we are than Nazis. And yeah, I wouldn't call Tommy Robinson a Nazi. I think he might be a fascist, I think more than anything, he's a grifter, but you know, that's the story we're telling today. Yeah, he's like, he's like a grifter that's like, you know, pretty racist. He's just like, I think that's what it is to certain people. It's, I go back and forth on a lot of these guys.

I do think Steve Bannon's a true believer, whatever you want to call him politically, I think he believes it. I think Gavin McInnes probably believes a lot of it because he could have pretty easily pulled himself away from this group before it got into legal trouble. I don't think it's profitable anymore. I don't know. I don't really know Gavin that well. But I had, that's my suspicion is that he believes more than a guy like Tommy does. But I really don't know. Yeah. So yeah, I'm going to read a quote from a 2018 BBC write-up about the EDL's growth in from like 2009 up through 2011. Quote, each event appeared to draw a bigger crowd. By 2011, the group had gathered sufficient

support to prompt police to close Littentown Center for a day to facilitate the EDL's homecoming protest. But Robinson's campaign was also unraveling because of his inability to control his followers or his own behavior. Later that year, he received a 12 month community rehabilitation order after a massive football brawl between supporters of his blooded Littentown FC and those of Newport County. As the fists flew, he let his followers in a chant of EDL till I die. And I will remind our American listeners that when you people talk about football, you mean soccer. Well, we mean football. We mean football. You mean soccer. I, one of my favorite things about like the cussedness of my people is our insistence

on doing things that no one needs to do differently. It's the same thing with like the fact that we use inches and feet. It's like, why do we have miles and not kilometers? There's no point. We're just dicks. But it's just like America, we can. Yeah. We're going to do it different. Yeah. It's just so rude. You know what I mean? Yeah. I want to take that further. Like if I'm ever in charge of this country, I'm just going to rename ours. We'll call them Charles or something just to like fuck with people a little bit more. Yeah. Just yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Robinson got in serious trouble because of this football brawl because a year earlier in 2010, he'd have been convicted of

abusive threatening or insulting behavior during a different EDL fight. So he'd essentially been on probation when the football fight broke out. He was arrested for breach of bail conditions later that year and jailed in Bedford prison. While there, Tommy became incensed at the fact that the prison served halal meat and he went on a brief hunger strike. Well, for 10 minutes. I'm not eating breakfast. Oh, man. Man. I'll never understand like the kind of right wing obsession with like halal being something sinister. Like no one cares, man. Like all the kebab shops on my area at halal. Like we just go in and it's like, hey boss, kebab, like no one gives a fuck. Like these people

are maniacs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's frustrating. I wish every country would be better off with more kebab shops. It's the best thing to eat when you're wasted at three in the morning. Absolutely. Nothing. Nothing comes close. Just a big pocket of cow. Oh, I love them. Fat Donner. Yeah. Fucking Donner with just everything. I'll dress that son of a bitch. Yeah. I miss Donners. So in September of 2011, after pretty shortly, I think after getting out of jail, Tommy was convicted of assault again after he headbutted one of his own marchers during a 2000 man rally in Blackburn. Lenin Coley or Robinson claims that the guy was a Nazi. And it's really hard for me to tell precisely what went down. It's possible the dude was doing

Nazi shit and Tommy didn't want him at his rally. It's possible the fight was about something else. Either way, the whole fight sounds very silly, which I think is example by the fact that his form of assault chosen was a headbutt. What's not silly is that EDL members during this time got up to a lot of much more sinister shit. So as the number of folks who showed up at that Blackburn rally should tell you, by late 2011, Tommy's little band of hooligans had turned into a national movement. And the rise of the EDL saw a corresponding rise in hate crimes against British Muslims. Faith Matters, an organization aimed at reducing extremism, launched a program to track hate

crimes against Muslims in March of 2012, largely as a result of the increase in hate crimes that happened after the EDL's growth. In the first 12 months after starting that program, they received 632 reports of separate hate crime incidents. 54% of perpetrators had far-right ties. Nearly all of those were either to the EDL or to the British National Party. But numbers are boring, so let's look at a specific incident of violence from old Tom Robb's mob. In June of 2011, a bunch of activists in Yorkshire held a rage against racism concert. The EDL showed up, and I'm going to quote the Yorkshire Evening Post on what happened next. 2 people were injured at Saturday's All Day Rage Against Racism event.

One man had teeth knocked out. Kevin Berry, assistant manager at The Well, formerly Joseph's Well, suffered an injured wrist during the fracas while shielding himself from a missile as he stood behind the bar. He said, a group of around 15 people, estimated to be aged between 16 and 23, barged into the premises shouting and chanting EDL. Yeah, so the way they chant it as well, they go E-E-E-D-L. I've been at a rally before against it, covering it back in that day, and you just hear it coming from down the road. It's horrible, man. Yeah, that sounds foreboding. Yeah, exactly. That's the right word for it. Yeah, sure, that's the goal. Now, around the same time in Dagenham,

two young Muslim men were walking down the street when they had the bad luck to happen onto a mob of probably drunken EDL men on their way back from a rally. One victim later recalled, quote, we were walking home when we spotted the EDL march. The next minute somebody starts shouting at us, Muslim bombers off our streets. Suddenly, everything changed. I was pushed and five men attacked me. I was punched. I could see a much larger group of between 30 and 50 of them surrounding my brother. He was on the floor. They were kicking him and punching him all over. He couldn't move. I was terrified. I didn't know if he was alive. One of the or several of the EDL guys later, like we're given jail time.

They were like broken bones, like pretty serious assault. Yeah, there's loads of those, man, like loads of those. Loads of those. It just kept going on. Yeah, I just picked two cases to kind of highlight what was going on because I don't want to just run through a laundry list of shit like that. Right, yeah. Fuck us, man. Yeah, yeah. That's enough color on EDL violence. You get the point. So let's get back to their leader, Tommy. In May of 2012, Tommy Robinson was caught flirting with a 15 year old girl on Twitter. As these things go, it was a fairly minor incident and he was not charged with committing any crime. But the whole interaction is worth reading.

A teenaged girl named Asia posted a selfie to Twitter to which Tommy responded, you're pretty fit for a Muslim. Oh my God. The young woman who I think's name is Asia, or at least that's what I'm guessing from her account name, responds, I'm 15 and you got the cheek to call Muslims pedos. Tommy responds, how's it feel to be nearly twice the age Aisha was when your prophet raped her? And then adds, Muhammad was 56, Aisha was nine, now stop flirting with me. Okay. Tommy Robinson. Thirsty Tommy is the worst thing ever. Yeah, it's pretty gross. Yeah. I can just imagine him though. I laugh at him man. Me and my best

friend, we watch him every now and then. We'll just sit there and just fucking laugh. One time my friend, he was smoking weed and he just put like Tommy's interview on when he got out of prison and like he'd lost the load of weight. And for some reason it was just the funniest thing. He's kind of over here now. He's kind of like you laugh at him. But I forget all of this happened. Now you're bringing it up. It's like, yeah, EDL was huge and they caused so much chaos. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's kind of nice that he's, I mean, obviously it's better that he be a figure of ridicule than a leader of a powerful street movement. And I hope that's kind of where all these guys wind up. But yeah, it is like for a time they were fucking huge.

Huge man. Massive. Yeah. Now, you know what else is massive, Jake? Go on. The gigantic corporations that support this podcast with their ad dollars. Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's an ad break time. It is. Products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good badass way. It's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of

forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to

go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back and we're talking about Tommy Robinson. Now, shortly after going to

jail several more times in early 2013, or in 2013, Tommy began to pull away from far-right politics. In October of that year, he was caught with a false passport and found who have traveled to the United States under the name Andrew McMaster using a friend's passport. As a repeat criminal with violent convictions, he'd been barred from entering the country. He was caught at JFK airport and the whole incident added a wrinkle to the already confusing and winding story of what the fuck Tommy's real name actually is. And I'm going to quote from some coverage of that. When he arrived at New York's JFK airport, customs officials who took his fingerprints realized he was not Mr. McMaster. Lenin was asked to attend a second interview but left the airport

entering the US illegally. He stayed just one night and traveled back to the UK for the following day to use his own legitimate passport, which bears the name Paul Harris. The court heard that is the name that appears in the EDL leaders passport, although he uses aliases. Sentencing the 30-year-old Judge Alastair McCreith told him, I'm going to sentence you under the name of Stephen Lenin, although I suspect that it's not actually your true name in the sense that it is not the name that appears on your passport. So again, I really don't know what his fucking real name is. It's probably Stephen Yaxley Lenin or Stephen Lenin. It's definitely not Tommy Robinson. No, so Stephen Yaxley Lenin is what everyone kind of believes it to be. He took the name of

that other football hooligan right. I think his uncle Tommy Robinson. Yeah, his uncle said take it for some reason. I hadn't heard that, but that seems plausible. Something like that. Yeah, yeah, like him and his uncle were very involved with EDL at the start. And if I remember right, they were like, you're like Tommy or something because of the fighting and he was like, all right, I'll take that name or something like that. Something weird. It's such a weird thing to do though. Yeah, yeah, it's a weird name to pick for that. And like, I guess I don't know enough about soccer hooligan culture to know why you'd pick that guy's name. Oh, it's a very, it's a very football hooligan kind of name. I don't even know how to explain why, but it

just is. Do you know what I mean? It does sound like the name of somebody who would chuck a bottle at you in celebration of his team's scoring a goal or whatever. Yeah, definitely. So yeah, as a result of this passport fraud, Tommy Robinson spent another 10 months in jail. EDL members held regular vigils outside of the jail and called him a political prisoner. Now, Robinson's time behind bars was tough. He spent 18 weeks in solitary confinement because of issues with him and Muslim gangs inside the prison. They were worried he might get murdered, which is probably a real fear to have. When he was released in October 2013, he appeared at least to be a somewhat changed man that certainly the impression reporters with the Telegraph walked

away with when they interviewed him about his decision to quit the EDL. Quote, Going to prison was the best thing that ever happened to me, declares Tommy Robinson. I am sitting in a hotel bar in Littentown Center, listening to him explain why he has quit the English Defense League. Before his imprisonment, he had been receiving death threats from Islamists, neo-Nazis, and neo-Nazis were threatening to take over the EDL. As a result, he says he was drinking alcohol, going out three times a week, neglecting my wife. I thought I was dealing with the pressures of the English Defense League, but I was pretty much just binging my way through it. So this is what he claims to be at this point. Robinson told the Telegraph that his time in

solitary provided him with an opportunity to finally look at where his life was headed. And that's when I started to question, where's the EDL going? Because we march up and down this country, but what is it we want to get out of it, and how do we succeed? Now, this article was part of a brief press tour Robinson carried out in order to convince the world that he had changed and was now dedicated to anti-radicalization. He started working with Quilliam, which is an, bills itself at least, is an anti-extremist think tank and is run by a former Islamic extremist named Majid Nawaz. Now Nawaz talked to Robinson while he was filming a BBC documentary after getting out of the clink. Tommy recalls, he said to me, Tommy, if you ever think about leaving

the EDL and you want to chat, I'm here for you. So at this point, after getting out of jail from his passport fraud, Tommy starts to claim that like his time in solitary and his friendship with this guy Majid had convinced him that he'd been wrong to call Islam a disease and that like the real way to fight the danger of radical Islam was to work with moderate Muslims and reformers to de-radicalize extremists. So he starts saying things that at least seem like they might be reasonable. Yeah, that's kind of the twist that Tommy Robinson's life takes at this point. Yeah, it was a shock that I remember like loads of EDL types were fuming with him, obviously, you know what I mean? But I'll be honest, back then I was quite young when that

happened, but he did seem kind of genuine at the time. I think he had like a very brief moment of clarity and, you know, realized that like, oh, like this is radical Islam is a very specific thing. It doesn't mean Islam, you know what I mean? But then, yeah, he didn't last long. No, it did not last long. And part of that is because in November of 2013, like a month after that Telegraph article, Tommy Robinson pled guilty to mortgage fraud. He just can't stop committing crimes. He just loves it. Like, he's addicted to just getting himself in petty crimes. Like, it's just his favorite thing, man. It's so weird. Always petty and he's never any good at it. How do you even do mortgage fraud? Like, what?

Yeah, I don't. I'm not going to claim to understand the ins and outs of this particular case, but the basics of it is he worked with a crooked mortgage broker to obtain mortgages under false pretenses. It's like the authorities think that Tommy probably made about the equivalent of about, you know, 300,000 US dollars, something like that, about 160,000 pounds as a part of this scheme. And the broker he worked with made about four times that much money. She came out very well, other than going to prison with him. Now, this would be an entirely nondescript story of white color crime, if not for the fact that Tommy Robinson is a right-wing extremist and his partner in crime was a mortgage broker with the name Deborah Rothschild.

Here we go. Okay. The Jews are wanted to get accused. As far as I know, like, I haven't found any evidence she's actually connected to the Rothschild family. And, like, to be honest, a crime on that smaller level would be kind of small beans for... Yeah, it'd be a joke. Like, the worst Rothschilds ever, yeah. Yeah, the very worst of the Rothschilds. Well, you did a flipping mortgage scam, like, what? Yeah. And I'm sure there were... I'm sure you could find Nazis in the DNP who, like, got all conspiracy-ish about that.

Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, I've have heard before, like, on Stormfront, when I used to go in there, like, for research, and on Poll as well, they all call him, like, a Jew lover and stuff. Like, they're really, like, anti-Semitic towards him, because I think he even went to Israel and stuff as well. It was, like, pro-IDF and stuff. Yeah, he's very pro-Israel. He does nuts. I will say this, like, he doesn't seem to be anti-Semitic. Yeah, like, that doesn't seem to be one of the things Tommy has pushed. Yeah, and he's clearly willing to work with the Rothschild, so... So, Tommy was sentenced to another 18 months in prison. Obviously, he didn't do all of that, but he did a lot of it,

and much of it, most of his time, he had to serve in solitary due to the perceived danger, again, that he would face from Muslim gangs. By the time Tommy got out of prison, it was 2016, the year of everybody's favorite election and a motherfucking boom period for the global far right. Robinson instantly discarded all of his prior claims of working towards racial reconciliation. Instead... Yeah, that did not last. You might make that out as a case that, like, all prisons do is radicalize people. I think in this case, Tommy just saw that there was money in being a racist again. Yeah, literally, like, oh, he's had a chance. Yeah. So, basically, as soon as he got out, he joined a group called Pegida, or patriotic Europeans against the

Islamisization of the Ossident. Is that what... Sorry, the Ossident? Is that what... Yeah, the fucking... Yeah, yeah, the Ossident. Oh, okay, all right, whatever. I don't know why it ends in an A either, other than that. They decided that Pegido sounded dumb. It sounded like Pido. Oh, man. Oh, fucking... I forgot about them. They were fucking clowns, man. Yeah. Yeah, they were German... Initially German, they spread, but, like, they started out as a German, a far-right anti-Islam movement, and they saw a huge early success, drawing in more than 25,000 people into the streets for protests before a bunch of their leaders quit due to scandals. One example of that, pictures surfaced of their founder dressed as Adolf Hitler.

Surprise. Yeah, right. Yes, real surprising. So, all of that went down before Tommy was out of prison. Once he was free, he showed up to speak at several of their events in Germany. He warned attendees that the mass of Syrian refugees entering the continent constituted a military invasion. Then he announced that he'd be running the UK branch of Pegido. He started planning rallies, which led to one of my very favorite Twitter interactions of the entire Tommy Robinson saga. So, I found this Twitter post screen capped on an archived Facebook page for the Midlands Anti-Fascist Network. So, your own local anti-fascist group. Yeah, and this is from January of 2016. A user named Will Black says, hey Tommy, how is the Pegida march going to be different from the

drunken EDL mobs you led? And Tommy responds, the banners will say Pegida instead of EDL. That's pretty clever. That's actually quite funny. That's not bad. But also like completely owning his own group, you know. Yeah, that's not bad. So, in February he held his first and I think only Pegida march. Roughly 200 people showed up, which is quite a decline from his 2011 numbers. Many of those people bore placards that said Trump is right. The rally was uneventful as these things go, and Tommy's association with Pegida did not last long. Once he was out of jail, he began focusing on new fearmongering grifts. On a new fearmongering grift, I should say. One that was even easier to cash in on than fear of

Muslim terrorists. Fear of white English kids getting raped by Muslims. During a speech at the Oxford Union, he focused on sexual grooming gangs from Muslim nations and accused police of allowing these people to rape children because they were scared of being called racist. Quote, we have a two-tier police force that treats crimes within the Muslim community differently. Now, when he made this statement, Robinson was not just referring to a vague conspiracy theory. He was harkening back to a specific crime or rather 20 years of crimes. The Rotherham Child Sexual Exploitation scandal. Have you heard of this? Yeah, yeah, I was going to say, this is real. This is really, and what he said about the police being scared to report was actually proven to

be true as well. They basically said we were too scared to investigate this for being accused of being anti-Muslim or whatever. It was an absolutely abhorrent thing. I mean, it wasn't a Muslim sex grooming gang as much as it was, I mean, yeah, sure. It depends how you see it. It wasn't like they weren't doing it in the name of Islam. They just happened to all be Muslim, but there was also white guys in it that weren't religious as well. Whatever it was, it was a horrific, horrific thing that honestly got very little attention in the media. And I actually, you know, I hate to say this, but I do think he's right that it was just, the liberal media was too scared to properly dig into it, I think. And unfortunately, that allowed the right wing to just rumble it and

just talk shit, you know what I mean, turn it into something it wasn't, which then just read the word, the biggest fallout from this was that the victims didn't get the proper, you know, attention that they should have. Yeah, really horrible situation. Yeah, and we're going to dig into it a bit because it's a lot more complicated and messed up than Tommy wants to give it credit for. Because like at what use, like one of the factors absolutely is the police and not just the police, it's actually primarily not the police, but other authorities were scared of being seen as racist. But there was a lot more that went on to it as well. And like you said, one of the big tragedies here is because it got so politicized due to a mix of right wing

grifting and liberal being afraid to be seen as racist. Like everyone missed a lot of the really critical lessons about like why this was allowed to go on for so fucking long. Exactly. So yeah, first off, this obviously it's very much a real crime. The total number of girls molested and raped as a result of the Rotherham trafficking ring was probably over 1500 and may have even been significantly more than 1500. Yeah, it's a huge number. A sizable majority of the traffickers were of Pakistani or other Asian heritage. And I should note here in the UK when people like the term Asian when it's used often refers to Muslims, specifically the way that like it's used in this context. And in the US, we don't really see it that way. But like

they're generally talking about people from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Yeah, that's right. You and me were talking about it in Syria actually. Asian for you would be like kind of, I don't know, like Chinese or Japanese. Here like Asian, you kind of mean like Indian, Pakistani, you know, maybe even Afghan sometimes, which actually would make more sense. But you know what I mean? It's different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And here like we, a lot of times people will call like someone from Afghanistan, like a Middle Easterner, which is like, no, it's not really right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's so yeah. So yeah, sizable majority of the traffickers were of Pakistani or Asian heritage. But obviously, the case is not just as simple as Muslims running

a rape gang. Paul Williamson, the senior investigating officer on the operation that helped bring it down, called the Rotherham ring quote, a unique and unprecedented investigation challenging in its scope and complexity. Now he claimed a toxic mix of factors allowed the sex ring to persist from 1997 to 2013. One of the in like journalistic organs that actually did a pretty good job of covering this as the Guardian, they devoted a lot of coverage to it. And I'm going to quote from some of that now quote, he said a failure by police to listen, safeguard and investigate the reports had led to a corrosive lack of trust among victims that the NCA was still trying to break down. And one reason why the police failed to listen was in fact a fear that

this would damage community cohesion and cause ethnic strife and be seen as racist. But this was not the only factor. The biggest issue with getting police to take this seriously was that these girls were being sexually trafficked, as in they were being used as prostitutes. And while like rational people can say that all underage sex trafficking victims are rape victims, not prostitutes, that does not stop them from being treated like prostitutes by police. The Guardian notes quote, and this is like summarizing the findings of an investigation into the abuse ring. In a small number of cases, which have already received media attention, the victims were arrested, and these are the young girls, were arrested for offenses such as a breach of the peace or

being drunk and disorderly with no action taken against the perpetrators of rape and sexual assault against children. Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the police gave no priority to child sexual exploitation, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003, and 2006, with three reports known to the police in the council, which could not have been clear in their description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. So not wanting to be seen as racist was a factor,

but based on at least all of the reporting on this, it seems like a bigger one is cops just assumed these young girls were prostitutes and were more willing to arrest them than to investigate them as victims of a crime because they, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's awful, man. It's fucked up. It's very fucked up. Now, there's a very detailed government report on the whole cluster, fuck, and it does, I'm going to read here what it says about issues of ethnicity and how that played into the case. Issues of ethnicity related to child sexual exploitation have been discussed in other reports, including the Home Affairs Select Committee report and the report of the Children's Commissioner. Within the council, we found no evidence of children's social care staff

being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases. In the broader organizational context, however, there was a widespread perception that the messages conveyed by some senior people in the council and also the police were to downplay the ethnic dimensions of CSE. Unsurprisingly, frontline staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as racist. From a political perspective, the approach of avoiding public discussion of the issues was ill-judged. So that's kind of what they have to say is like the fact, like what sort of the desire to not be seen as racist played into it. So it was more of an

issue in, yeah, like once this was known, like the sort of inability of police to want to talk about it or get the word out or like deal with this as a like systemic problem. Whereas the difficulty, like the reason that it wasn't caught for so long is sort of police bias against people they saw as prostitutes. So again, it's like this mix of toxic factors. Yeah. Just a real mix that only he picked out one thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, yeah, it sucks. The whole thing sucks. And because we live in the 21st century where nuance is dead, the only takeaway from the story for millions of people is that gangs of Muslims are grooming and raping white girls. This is obviously the line that Tommy Robinson has started pushing in his public speeches, along with the idea

that the government is too scared to go after this people. And it's a line that's been helped along by research recently published by Quilliam, the anti-radicalization group Robinson worked with for a hot minute. They published a report in 2018 claiming that 84% of grooming gang offenders are Asian and the majority are Pakistani Muslims. Now, this report seems to mostly be bullshit. Ella Cockbane, a national expert on child sexual exploitation called it a case study in bad science riddled with errors and consistencies, a glaring lack of transparency, sweeping claims and gross generalizations unfounded by its own data. See, for one thing, grooming gang, which is what this Quilliam study claims to be about is not a legal category. So there's no actual legal data on

grooming gangs. There's just data on child sexual exploitation. And child sexual exploitation falls under a number of different criminal offenses, depending on the exact type of sexual exploitation that's going on. One issue with their report is that the ethnicity of the culprit in these sorts of cases is actually only recorded when that person is non-white. So finding good data on CSE is very hard to do to begin with. And Quilliam never really tried. Their study was based on 58 cases they picked from 2005 to 2007 that led to 264 convictions and they just counted up how many of those convictions were of people from Asian backgrounds. They provide no info on why they picked these 58 cases and not any of the other child sexual exploitation cases that like may have fit the

same criteria as being sort of like a grooming gang style, you know, attack. Critics pointed out that there were like, if you look at the total number of CSE cases that involve like multiple adults, there were way more than 58 during that period that were perpetrated by white people. And like if you actually look at the data that exists, like the conclusion that you're drawn to is that a majority of perpetrators who in like child sex grooming in the UK are white because a majority of the people in the UK are white. Exactly. Again, that's like data that people use that. Well, all the all the sex people, they were white. It's like, well, yeah, because there's more white people. Do you know what I mean? It's more white people. Yeah, it doesn't work the same way

the other one doesn't work. You know what I mean? Basically, we have a huge fucking pedophile problem. Exactly. And it doesn't matter what color the pedophiles are. Exactly. Kids are getting abused. Yeah, exactly. You're right, man. Like, and it's people like, well, it's white. Well, it's this. It's like, kids are getting fucking raped, like shut up. And like, let's focus on that first and then worry about where it's coming. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, it's horrible. Yeah, yeah, it's fucked up. And it's fucked up to like, that's the whole discussion as opposed to like, yeah. I mean, and the reality is that like any of these kitty diddlers have way more in common with each other than they do with like, other people who happen to share their skin color,

because they're people who molest kids. Right. Exactly. Like, yeah. Oh, you're a Muslim. Yeah. Like, oh, well, you're like me. Like, no, like, no, like my Muslim friends are not pedophiles. Like, don't be fucking stupid. You know what I mean? It's, it's, that's exactly it, man. You're right. Like the only thing that they, they have in common is with other fucking pedophiles. You know, this is pure evil. It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's just crazy how it has been politicized. Like when you lay it out like this, it's really depressing, actually, if you think about it like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's super depressing. And you know what isn't depressing is pivoting to ads. Of the back of pedophilia. Okay. Not the first or the last time we will pivot

to ads off the back of pedophilia. It's not a Disney advert, is it? No. Well, maybe. I mean, they will own us in about 47 seconds based on, uh, yeah, so enjoy Disney plus. Yes. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver

hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we

put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man,

Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Now, in 2017, Tommy Robinson got a sweet gig writing for Rebel Media, a Canadian far right outfit in part funded by the Mercer's, who are very wealthy American business people who like to fund far right media groups. He received about $10,000 a month in salary from them, which he largely used to put out videos that he hoped would ignite right-wing rage about

the Islamistization of England. This led him to Canterbury Crown Court in 2017. He showed up at the courthouse to film the defendants in a child grooming case. Robinson's justification for this was essentially predicated on the idea that law enforcement was too scared to bring these evil Muslims to justice. And so him filming these people was the only way to ensure that they got their due. So Robinson filmed for an hour or so and approached several of the defendants. This was all illegal, as the case was subject to reporting restrictions that expressly forbade what Tommy was doing. He was arrested and sentenced to three months in prison, but given a suspended sentence which he triggered the next year when he showed up outside of Leeds Crown Court to again

film defendants in a child sex grooming case. He filmed for over an hour broadcasting confrontations with defendants and eventually his arrest to more than 10,000 viewers. This whole mess activated Tommy's suspended sentence and added another 10 months to his term in jail. Now, Tommy's fans have claimed that this was all part of an attempt to take Tommy down for his exposure of the dangers of Islam and the collusion of law enforcement. And the fact that he wasn't banned from filming this event is like the suppression of journalism and free speech. The reality of the situation is that by doing what he did, Tommy nearly helped those child rapists get off without a conviction. Exactly. That's exactly what he nearly did, the fucking donut. Yeah. Yeah, there's a reason

you're not supposed to. They're trying to try these people and you can't prejudice the jury. It's called contempt of court. It's a big law. He's mad. Yeah, basically he gave them a chance to claim that it was like a mistrial, that there was no chance for a fair verdict and they actually got a hearing at the Court of Appeal that might have led to them getting off for the crime because of what Tommy did. Fortunately, they didn't, but like the only reason it was a chance is because Tommy showed up with a fucking camera. The best bit about that clip is where he's like, he's all like, he's acting like he doesn't care. And then when he realizes he's getting arrested, he's like, cool my lawyer. It's so funny, man. I love it. So for a while there, up until this year

really, Tommy did seem to have hit upon a perfect grift and he was well on his way to riches throughout 2017 and 2018. This is like financially the most successful chunk of his career when he starts pretending to be a journalist and like showing up and doing that sort of thing, provoking people, like making videos for rebel media. Sorry, but I should just mention, I just remember, not remember, so you see this period of time when he was doing that? I actually spoke to him. I contacted him because me and my friend wanted to make a doc about him because when we saw him doing this like, I'm a journalist now. We were like, boy, we wanted to, I said to him, look, let us come and film with you. And he was like, oh, I don't know. You guys are lefties or

whatever. And like, yeah, we tried to get him to let us go and film with him. We just wanted to do it. I said to him, look, we ain't going to stitch you up. I said, but if you do something wrong, it's fucking going in. We just wanted to know what is this. But in the end, like, I don't know, we kind of went off the idea. But yeah, man, that was a crazy period. Sorry, sorry to butt in. I just thought, oh, man, I remember like, I wish we'd got to film with him. Oh, yeah, that would have been a hoot. Just getting to watch him get arrested. Which happens to Tommy about as often as like trips to the gym happen for a relatively healthy person. Yeah, like his hobby, you know, his hobby is just to get arrested for stupid stuff.

So yeah, in 2017 and a lot of 2018, he's making fucking bank. In 2018, he put out a video called Three Boys Tragedy or Terrorism. It was about three young London teens who were hit by a drunk driver of Asian descent. Now, there was no evidence of malice or terrorism in this. It was, I mean, obviously, like the guy's piece of shit, he killed people because he was drunk. But like, it wasn't terrorism. And like, the fact that he was drunk should be the evidence you need that he was not a hardcore Muslim. But Tommy turned it into an excuse for an anti-Muslim screed anyway, saying in the video, quote, it's clear that these families have been systemically failed and lied to by the police. I can't be 100% certain this was a terrorist attack. If this was a terrorist

attack and cover up, we could be looking at so many more terrorist attacks than we could ever have imagined. So yeah, I mean, like, it's just, I mean, it's like he's trying to find a problem all the time, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because that's where the money is. It's like saying, like, oh, a drunk Irish guy ran someone over like, was it the IRA? Like, no. Yes. Yes. Yes, it was. I mean, I blame all car accidents on the IRA. Well, only the ones that go boom, you know. Oh, oh boy. They've been involved in some Tesla related crashes in Los Angeles recently. That could be the like, that'll be the future, you know, like IRA, like rigging up Teslas, man. So there were, of course, demonstrations for justice as a result of these deaths.

One of them even involved the mother of one of the kids who, thanks to Tommy, now believes her son was murdered and that his murder was covered up, which, yeah, it's just gross. He's a gross guy. So Tommy also self published a second book during this time titled Mohammed's Quran, Why Muslims Kill for Islam. The BBC notes that he and his co-author open to the book with these lines. If you are a Muslim, please put this book down. We do not wish you to become a killer because this book leads you to understand the doctrines and history of Islam more thoroughly. So, yeah. Really? That's what it starts with. Yeah, that's how it starts. Yeah. Firstly, he's presuming that a Muslim is going to like seek out that book. And then secondly, like,

oh, shit, I don't want to become a killer. I better put it down. Oh boy. Yeah. Oh God. I'm glad I saw that disclaimer. Oh, thank God. I was about to kill. Yeah. Flipping out. So prior to the Trump years, Tommy had spent his whole political life, such as it was, is very much a fringe figure. But he exploded in at least international popularity in 2017 and 18. His Facebook page hit more than a million followers. And for months, he was able to use it to solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. Donations. He was also very active on Twitter, tweeting this on the anniversary of the 7-7 train bombings. Where was the day of rage after the terrorist attacks? All I saw was lighting candles. It's called a memorial dickhead.

It's called a memorial dickhead. Yeah. How crass. Like, you know, like the 7-7 bombings and also the bombings in Manchester where they, those fucking jihadists like killed our children, you know, like in this country, it was disgusting. What do you think we're going to smash the place up? No. Like the correct response is to have a candle lit vigil to pay respect. You know, it's crazy. Yeah. It's, yeah. And it just is a symbol of like what a gross guy he is that he's able to say like, look at this horrible violence and be like, why wasn't, why didn't we just do more violence in the wake of it? It's because like, that's not what people, that's not what sane people want. Yeah. Yeah. And let's, let's gather and make a really big problem for the police,

which would then allow the jihadists to get through even better. You know, like, I don't think he thinks half the time he says stuff. You know, I really don't even think that he's like, I'm not saying he's good, but sometimes it doesn't, it comes from a place of just not even thinking. Like, do you know what I mean? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That I would say that's fair. So Tommy's shit talking eventually led to a very real tragedy. In 2018, early 2018, a man named Darren Osborne drove a rented truck into a crowd of Muslims outside of the Finsbury Park Mosque, killing one. Osborne's journey to radicalization had started a few months earlier when he watched a BBC drama about the Rockdale sex grooming gang. He went online to learn more and

he found Tommy Robinson's writing about the sex grooming gangs and his social media accounts. Osborne signed up for Robinson's newsletter and is suspected to have indirectly quoted Robinson in the note he wrote out before the attack. Mark Rowley, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said that there was no doubt that material posted by Tommy Robinson contributed to the attack, saying of Osborne's rapid radicalization, he had grown to hate Muslims largely due to his consumption of large amounts of online far right material, including as evidenced at court statements from former EDL leader Tommy Robinson, Britain First and others. So and this guy, like this was a dude who was in a very bad place in life. I think he was

addicted to drugs at this point. He'd lost his job. Like he's the kind of guy who, you know, most of the people Tommy preaches to are going to want to show up to get into fist fights. This is a guy who decided to drive a truck and disappear. It was a really weird one actually because like from what I read at the time, I mean correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure there were people saying like he wasn't really, he wasn't even like a racist guy. Like he'd show no, he just got radicalized so quickly. Yeah. It sounds like he was like either drunk or on drugs and like depressed one night and watches this documentary and it enrages him and he just like falls down a rabbit hole and decides like really within a couple of weeks

to carry out an attack. Literally. Yeah. Rapid. Yeah. Really rapid process. Yeah. Crazy man. So, so lucky that he didn't do more damage. You know, I mean like one guy, you know, God rest his soul, he died, but like fuck that was lucky that he didn't, you know, it could have been a lot worse. Could have been a lot worse. Yeah, thankfully it was, yeah, it was not more dead. Now, obviously journalists reported on this and Tommy's rolling it. Tommy collected their information and tweeted out their names and social media accounts to his followers. Several reporters received death threats as a result of this. Tommy got messy enough with his social media and the way he phrased things that by the end of 2018

he'd been kicked off of every major platform as well as PayPal for massive and constant violations of their terms of service. He reported at this point that his income had fallen off by 70%. Now, like most right wing provocateurs in the same situation, Tommy has attempted to rebrand himself now as a free speech crusader. His last post on Twitter before being banned was the truth has to be told. I can't do it without you. After he was banned, he held a day for freedom march on Downing Street with the Breitbart, London editor and Milo Yiannopoulos. Now, Breitbart, I should note, also received a lot of funding from the Mercer family. So did the US-based think tank, the Middle East Forum, which curiously enough has fronted Tommy's legal bills for his,

you know, illegally filming defendants in a court case and nearly getting child molesters off on a technicality thing. So that's who's paying for his legal bills right now is the Middle East Forum, which is backed by the Mercers, who also backed rebel media. Now, it's unclear exactly how much money Tommy made off of his grift before the crowdfunding part of it dried up. And it's unclear if he's still receiving money directly from people like the Mercers. We do know that earlier this year, he put his $1.8 million house up for sale. The BBC reported that real estate agencies, agency pictures showed a Range Rover in the driveway, a hot tub in the garden and a TV above the bath. So he did very well for a time, although the fact that it's all on sale now

suggests that maybe he overspent and is, you know, maybe he might be broke at this point. Yeah, or he's just fucking moving, you know what I mean? Or he's just fucking moving. Or he just needs more coke. Yeah, or he needs more coke and it's really expensive when you're in jail. In July 2019, as a result of a second illegal court filming arrest and a violation of his suspended sentence, Tommy Robinson was sentenced to another nine months in prison. Before his sentencing, he sent out this plea to President Trump. I feel I am two days away from being sentenced to death in the UK for journalism. Today, I call on Donald Trump, his administration, and the Republican Party to grant me and my family political asylum in the USA.

He thought he was like Bobby Sands. He really believed that he was this political prisoner. He had a fucking t-shirt on. I saw it on social media and it said, the UK is North Korea. Basically, like, oh, I'm getting sent to prison. And then suddenly the UK is North Korea. Like, it was bonkers, man. And it said, like, convicted for journalism. Like, convicted for a journalist. So good. Like, he really wasn't like, he just jumped the shark. Like, he became this fucking, like, I don't know, just a caricature of himself. You know what I mean? And it's the kind of thing if there were the slightest bit of doubt in anyone's mind that he, like, if he had been a little bit smarter about how he got in trouble or something,

he might have gotten a response from the president. But it was just like so obvious that, no, you just committed a crime and you're doing time for the crime you committed. Like, even Donald Trump didn't want any part of that. Yeah, like, and you're wearing a t-shirt comparing, like, America's biggest ally to, like, do, you know, the biggest dictatorship going. No, we like them now. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, he's a special friend. That is true. But he might change his mind in 10 minutes. So, yeah.

Now, Jake, that would be a nice, fun note to end on. Tommy going to jail. But rather than that, I think I'm going to close out with this footage I found in an article by the independent of Tommy Robinson that he apparently filmed himself of himself on vacation in Italy on what appears to be an enormous amount of cocaine. So we're just going to watch this video. And I need my listeners should know that in the UK, the word gear is slang for drugs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I just sent you the link. Why don't you click that and play it? The thumbnail is already just gold. It's just like a big, like, he looks like a shouting bald baby in the thumbnail picture. Yeah, like, he's got a head like a bowling ball with, like, fucking gel on it. Okay, come on,

let me watch this. Let's see, let's see. Stephen Yaxley Lennon. Okay, I got it. It contains some foul language. Okay. Yeah, true does move over because me coming through and this what me I'm going to do. I'm going to punch in the head. I kick in the face because I am the king of the whole Islam race. No matter where I've gone in the world, I score. I'll show you tonight. As soon as we get in this pub, I'm going to record it for you. I've gone to I've gone to guitar pub. I've gone to Doha school gear of the sesh when they were praying. I've gone everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Every city I've gone to when we went to Germany for the World Cup, I was like, see that? That's where you're going to find out. I can almost feel the sweat on his

forehead. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you can smell him in that video. Yeah, he's clearly been like, he's clearly done enough cocaine that it would probably have killed someone who hasn't been eating cocaine every weekend for the last 20 years. You know, you see him at like 3 a.m. and you're like, right, lads, we're going in and he's the guy that you don't even know. He's like, come on, boys, come on, boys, let's have another drink. And you're like, mate, fuck off, like, you know what I mean? Like, get a taxi, man. Good God. Yeah, he's really, well, I didn't even know about this. I'm so glad I found this. Yeah, you found this rather. Yeah, incredible. Yeah, he talks about starting a world war. And yeah, you get him like talking about how he wants to go fight for Israel if there's a war

between Israel. So Tommy Robinson. I love who he says I'm the king of the whole Islam race. Yeah. What do you even mean by that? The king of the whole Islam race. And then bragging about buying drugs in Doha. Fuckin' school or anywhere, mate. Oh, man. He would go to jail for so long if they caught him doing that. Oh, yeah, he would never, he would never see the bottom of that hole. Jesus, man. It's one of those things, like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we call it like Gack. Like, they call it Gack. He's a fucking Gack head, you know what I mean? Like, he's clearly a big Coke head. He does a lot of Coke. Oh, yeah. Like, I think one of like Lawrence Southern or one of them ones, like, we're saying recently in a letter that like, he's just been fucking, no, actually

might have been, I don't know, but one of them was just saying that like, they know for a fact that he just gets fucking high on Coke all the time from all the donations he gets, you know. And it's so expensive in England. Like, cocaine is like, I don't even know, like, what? I don't know, like, 60 pounds, 70 pounds a gram, you know? So it's a lot of money. So yeah, he must be really off his nut. Yeah, I think he spent, I think he made hundreds of thousands of pounds. And I think he spent the bulk of it on keeping his nose fat. I bet I wouldn't doubt it. Yeah, absolutely, man. Yeah. Which, you know, if a guy like Tommy Robinson is going to spend money on something, poisoning himself with cocaine is not the worst way he could spend the money. And it's not like,

if I had to choose where all of those right wing grifters, dollars should go, some random Coke dealer, probably better than them continuing to have the money. So. Yeah, I mean, fuck it, it's got to be better than like it going to rebel or that shit, you know. Yeah. Yeah, it's either that or they spend it on funding some armed militia in the US or whatever. I'll let it go to a Coke dealer. So this episode is dedicated to Tommy Robinson's Coke dealer. Yeah, whoever you are. A real hero of the story. Now, Jake, we're at the end of the episode and you have a very special thing to plug, not just popular front, but this fundraiser that you are currently running for it. Yeah, man. Thanks. So yeah, so my platform popular front, it's grassroots journalism,

conflict journalism, 100% independent. And right now we're trying to raise 10 grand, 10,000 pounds, because basically we all our equipment is fucked. We just don't have a lot of money to do anything with at the minute. So we're trying to raise 10 grand to like, buy new equipment, make everything more efficient. And certainly like the rate at which popular front is growing, which is rapid. I need some money to just go, hey, like, you know, bring people on board or whatever. So yeah, so we're trying to raise 10 grand to make more content and put it out quicker, basically. So if you go to popularfront.co slash 10k, you can get involved there. And what popular front does that I think is so valuable, I mean, number one, you guys put out

a lot of or you I should say at this point put out a lot of really interesting content and valuable work at a very quick race considering like what a what a shoestring you currently operate on. And I can say that like, my other podcast, it could happen here, like a good number of the things that the details that I included when I was like, trying to figure out like what a hypothetical US civil war would be like, we're based on things that I heard about in episodes of popular front like that episode you did talking about like drone warfare and stuff and like how much that's evolved in like Syria with all these like off the shelf drones, like there's it's really important work, like it's not just like most war journalism, it's either like too

broad to be super useful. Or it focuses entirely on the stuff that I don't know is like what some editor sitting in an office thinks is going to get clicks. Right. And I think popular front provide like is way more interesting and provides really critical context on like how war is evolving in this decade that we're in. So I think what you're doing is great. That's really nice to hear, especially from you, man. And yeah, that's definitely what we do. You know, we focus on the very niche things. And we go into the detail that like you said, the commissioner at the big legacy media won't allow their journalists to do. No, no, they're going to want another story about some ISIS guy. Yeah. And yeah, so, you know, you do good work. Donate to popular front

listeners. Unlike Tommy Robinson, Jake will not spend your money on cocaine. Absolutely, no anti drugs. Yeah, yeah, it's a good cause. There's a reason, you know, I went with you to Syria. We had a great fucking time, didn't we, man? We did have a great time. It's gonna be a great fucking podcast. Yeah, man, I can't wait. Yeah, so donate to popular front. And Jake, where can they find you on the on the on the twits, the the grams, the twins to grams? Yeah, so Twitter, I'm active on there. It's at Jake underscore Hanra Han, which is h a n r a h a n. And then Instagram, I don't have a personal one, but we're on their popular front, popular front dot. No, sorry, Instagram, the Instagram is at popular dot front. And when Jake says h,

he means h fellow Americans. I don't know. I think I don't know. I don't think I do. I'm Robert Evans. You can find this podcast on BehindTheBaspers.com where we'll have all these sources for this episode if you want to watch Tommy Robinson on a lot of cocaine for yourself. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and at bastards pod by T shirts at behind the best or at the T public. And yeah, the shirts shirts are good. Everybody loves a shirt. That's the episode. Go fucking, you know, go listen to popular front or pet a cat. Ideally, both both. All right, that's the episode, Jake. Too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.