Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 938: Michael Marshall and UK Politics

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Revealed: Reform rakes in £20m in donations from crypto investors | The Independent Nigel Farage, U.K. far-right leader and former Trump ally, resigns amid finance scandal in high-risk gamble - CBS News Glasgow dad taking legal action against far-right activist Tommy Robinson - Yahoo News UK 'I'm not sorry': Tommy Robinson blames 'admins' for false accusation post Palantir Co-Founder Peter Thiel and Reform UK's Cambridge University Recruitment Pipeline Project Revealed – Byline Times The Peter Thiel-Linked Race Science Network that Penetrated Cambridge University and Targeted Jason Arday – Byline Times Nigel Farage wins election in which his main rival was a trash can | CNN

This episode of Cognitive Dissidence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. From Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissanence. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way, we bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's political. There is no welcome, Matt. Today is different than when I recorded this particular show because I recorded this show yesterday. So I wanted to jump in here before we get to the full

episode. Now, the full episode is me talking with Michael Marshall. We talked about many stories that are involved in the UK politics right now and the sort of what's going on in the UK. So that's going to happen in a few moments. But before we get to that, I wanted to do a Tom update. So that's why I'm doing this today rather than when I recorded the full show yesterday because Tom got surgery yesterday. I went to the hospital yesterday to see Tom and to be with him while he was getting his surgery. He had gotten, if you didn't know, there was some problem with his back years ago that he had fixed. They had to go in and basically where the nerve of your spinal cord. goes through your vertebra that was sort of filled with stuff basically, like bone growths

and other things. And they sort of cleaned that out years ago. Well, there's a bunch of scar tissue and other stuff that sort of formed there. And over the years, it's grown. And now it is pressing on that nerve. And Tom was in intense pain for nine straight days. Really, really difficult time for him. Yesterday was he was in massive pain before the surgery. The great news is the surgery did take much longer than we had thought it was going to take. But he, around 9 o'clock at night, I was able to see him after he had gotten out of surgery. And he was doing much, much better. He still has a tiny bit of nerve pain when he stands. But it is far better than the pain he was experiencing before. He's on the mend. There are a few other things wrong with him that they're

going to have to look at in the future. And I'm not going to relay all of Tom's medical history to our audience. I'll let Tom decide how much of that he wants the audience to hear. But understand that Tom's back, lower back, the problem that he went in specifically that he took an ambulance ride for that is hopefully on the mend. He received surgery yesterday. He's being released from the hospital today. He should be recovering for the next week. So, and I know I'll say this for Tom. Tom will probably say it when he comes on the air the next time he records. Thank you, everybody, for all the well wishes. We got a ton of people who sent messages, personal messages to Tom. And I know, for sure, that really cheered him up. So thank you so much for all that. That's really amazing

that our audience did that. So really cool of you. Next week, I am on vacation. So we would have planned, before Tom had gotten injured, we would have planned to have had something in the tank so that there would be a show next week. Now, I have talked to Tom. And there's a possibility he may be up to a show, doing a show either by himself or with someone else next week without me because I will be out of town. So there'll either be no show next week or there will be a show, but it'll just be with Tom or with Tom with someone else. Stay tuned for next week. So I'm not sure what's going to happen. I don't know how Tom is going to feel and neither is he.

So he may be up for it and he may actually record something. He may also not be up for it and he may not record something. Okay. So thank you, for sending in your messages. Tom is on the mend, and we are going to continue on with this episode. This is, like I say, an episode with Michael Marshall, so let's go to that now. So I'm joined by Michael Marshall from Skeptics with a K, the Skeptic Podcast, and my co-host on the No Rogan experience. Good morning, Michael. Morning, morning. It's nice to be here in a very different environment.

You know, this isn't like the big serious space that we're in with No Rogan. I haven't got any charts in front of me. You've got, that's not even coffee in that mug you've got there. The relaxed fireside chat compared to the stuff that we do on Roa Rogan normally. Absolutely, absolutely. Our very structured No Rogan experience.

And if you haven't been over there to check the show out, we think we do some pretty good work. So if you're interested in what Joe Rogan is talking about every, we don't, obviously don't cover every episode, but we cover the ones that either they go viral or have some really interesting content.

And so if you're interested in what Joe Rogan is talking about, his thought process, the guests he have on, that is, it's been a really interesting project and I think we do some pretty good work. So check that out. It's no Rogan.com. And that's the last.

We're going to plug it. Now we're going to jump right into, the reason I'm doing this today with you is because I've always wanted to say this. Now we're going to go to our British correspondent, our UK correspondent. Because we're going to talk a lot about what's going on in the UK. And there's, what's really interesting is,

as someone who's now sort of paying attention to Rogan and then paying attention to his guests, I'm hearing more and more of what's going on in the UK in a very inaccurate sense from Joe Rogan, obviously, because he's got a very distorted view of what's happening over there. We've caught him lying about the number of arrests that are happening and the number of the way in which they're cutting out all kinds of free speech. And he's had on a sort of parade of people from the UK who come over and have these very sort of great replacement theory opinions.

And so what I wanted to do was sort of look at it. the last maybe month and a half of British politics, which has been an absolute circus, and sort of have you wanted to talk us through a lot of what's going on in Britain right now because of just because of like the Great Replacement Theory has sort of taken over many people in many different parties. And we have these, I mean, just like essentially riots that are happening now all the time where people are getting attacked and there's a huge anti-immigrant push that's happening over there. Yeah, we've had riots, I think every year, several race riots in particular,

just like regular riots. We've always had regular riots, but specifically the race flavoring of riots. I think we've had those every year for the past couple of years. It started with the murders of some girls in Southport, not too far from where I live in Liverpool. Following those murders when there was misinformation being spread about who the murderer was, the misinformation that he was a recently arrived, a Muslim immigrant who just arrived in the country and went off to kill people. That wasn't true. He was actually someone born in this country,

but that misinformation didn't get checked. And as a result, people first went to Southport to start attacking Muslims in Southport. That spread to Liverpool. I attended one of the counter rallies in Liverpool, but all around the country. And that was a couple of years ago. And then reliably every year, especially around summertime, when it's actually quite nice to be outside, coincidentally, in the UK. Not a lot of riot. in like December, in the debt of December, which is a shame because the amount of stuff they set on fire would actually be handy in December

to keep you warm at those riots, but there's no point burning a car in office. You're absolutely right, yeah. Yeah. But we have these kind of riots every year, basically. And there was one very recently in Belfast. The thing is, they're actually, the rioters are also getting a bit smarter about their tactics

because it's Southport. One of the reasons we know many of the people who were rioting at Southport and in the riots after Southport is because they fill. themselves and live streamed it to telegram. Sure. And so police were able to go through and say, well, here you are in your live stream on telegram committing crimes, you're going to be imprisoned. And as a result, Joe Rogen can say,

people are being imprisoned because they what they post on social media, said, yeah, they're posting evidence of them doing crimes, Joe. Yeah, sure. At this point, that's fine. More recently, the messages that were recruiting people to these riots were come all, wearing all black with a black mask over your face and nobody films anything. And that makes it much, much harder for the author it to pick up on. But yeah, we've been inflamed in race riots for several years now. It's not a good time over here. It really isn't.

Well, let's get started. Let's jump into some politics stuff right away. This is from the Independent revealed reform rakes in 20 million pounds in donations from crypto investors. Crypto has become a major source of fun. for Nigel Farage's party, accounting for nearly 60% of his total donation since 2024. So this piece of news hits. This is an investigation into Nigel Farage, 20 million pounds.

This feels quaint, by the way, when you talk about how much money we spent in politics. It's not our fault that we have rules. Like, you don't have rules, we have rules. But basically, we have rules so you can't just buy a political party. Now, people have been working around that because they've always made donations to this part of the party here or donations in kind. But in theory, all that stuff is meant to be very heavily regulated and particularly around elections and around particular MPs and give money to parties. But if you give money to an MP, they just have to declare it. They have to say to the Parliament to register, I got this amount of money from this source.

And that's how we check to make sure, well, is this an unfair amount of money for like an unreasonable amount of money for an MP to receive? even, could this lead to some amount of influence on their decision-making, things like that? That's why we have it. It's a very reasonable system. Oh, yes. 100%. I agree. I agree with you. So much I agree with you. I wish we could take it out of ours. But when I hear 20 million, I'm just like, that feels like a Tuesday for a senator. Well, bear in mind that Keistama, when he was still prime minister, was criticized because he accepted a gift of some new glasses, some spectacles. Shut the fuck up.

And I think a suit and some Taylor Swift tickets. And that was like, this is unacceptable levels of corruption for the Prime Minister. Who is donating him a suit jacket and why? That was genuinely it. The same papers who spent a lot of time asking those questions were like, I think Nigel Farage should be able to get five million pounds personally from a Thai-based cryptocurrency morgue without any questions to be asked. Yeah. So after this happens, there's sort of this investigation. And I'm going to dovetail this

with another story at the same time. So there's another CBS story that sort of follows up on this essential initial investigation. It says Nigel Farage, UK far right leader and former Trump ally resigns amid finance scandal and high risk gamble. Now, that sounds amazing because Dodgers is a piece of trash. But it's technically a little different than that, Marsh. resigned, but it was a takesies-backseys resigned. Yeah, it was. So the whole point of this was Nigel Farage himself was given a £5 million donation by this cryptocurrency guy. So not to reform the party, but to Nigel Farage himself. And he didn't declare that to the parliamentary standards. And he said, I didn't need to. I was given it before I ran. But you have to declare anything

in the year before you become an MP because obviously someone could just give you money to say, hey, go be an MP. And then if you didn't have to declare that, then all the last. that influence never gets tracked. So he said, okay, that was before, but even still, it was a personal gift. No, it wasn't a personal gift. It was to finance my protection because I'm the most attacked MP in British history. We have had two MPs assassinated, but in the last 10 years, but he is the most attacked MP in British history. And then he said, okay, it wasn't protection. It was a reward for delivering Brexit, which sounds like political. It sounds like some sort of quid pro quo at that point.

Yeah, quit broke well. So every single time he came up with a different excuse and every one of them did not hold. And so he said, okay, I'm being investigated. This is me being attacked by the elites. I am going to stand down rather than being investigated. And then I'll go to, I'll stand for, when that seat is up for election, I will stand in that seat. So the people of my constituency, they will be the ones to judge me. It's not the parliamentary standards committee who have powers of investigation who can, like,

requisition records and things. It's Bethel, and it's Ethel and Beryl who live in Clacton, who will be the ones to hold him to account. And that was his plan. And obviously his plan was, he runs, and then Tories run,

and Labor run, and the Greens run, and the Greens run, and he gets to say, well, what about this candidate? Look at what they've done, and this person wants to do this to you and turn the entire lens on everybody else.

That was the whole plan he was going for. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me really quickly, this place called Clacton. Is this a place that he was going to lose in? No, not at all. Very much the opposite.

So Nigel Farage would never have ran in a seat that wasn't already a complete lock-in for his politics. So he has shopped around the country to try and find the most safe reform constituency. So he was always going to get this back. So when he said, I'm going to resign so that the people can judge me, what he was saying is,

I'm going to make sure that the people whose job it is to investigate me are undermined because I know I'm going to get voted back here. But this was all kind of screwed by the fact that every other major party said, this is a charade. This isn't how accountability works. We're not going to stand a candidate in that election. And so Nigel Farage was the own, so reform were the only major party to stand in that election. Yeah, they put major in there because we've got another story coming up. There is another person. and we'll get to it.

Yeah. So this whole thing, though, seems crazy, right? When somebody says, I'm going to stand down in protest, but I'm going to be voted back in momentarily, that doesn't feel like anything. They could have just not done anything at all. That feels crazy that that's a thing that can happen. So it is, but bear in mind that the Parliamentary Standards Committee,

like if that investigation had found, corruption, then the penalty for that is Farage can be recalled from Parliament if I think 10% of his electorate wanted to put him back to the vote. So the penalty at the end of this would be he would have to go through a by-election potentially. But I have like a by-election where he is found guilty of corruption and slees, essentially. So he's recognized that that penalty is coming anywhere. If he jumps the gun on it and then forces a by-election before it, he's thinking, I can get people to already vote for me. And then there's another kind of thing of it as like, if he's not trying to avoid the investigation, because it's not the case that he gets elected

now and then there's only a year before his current election, well, if the donation was made to him in the 12 months prior, like more than 12 months before, is it now outside of the scope of investigation from his second kind of state? That's not how it works. All that happens with the investigation is it pauses while he goes through this ridiculous charade. And if he gets back in, it continues where it left off. So when he got back in, he got reelected, it's restarted the investigation like an hour after he was reelected.

He's like one of those criminals that's trying to get away and he pulls into one of those parking garages gets into a new car, drives away and they're just like, we just have a helicopter. Yeah, it's you. It's that guy there.

We know it's that guy. We could see you in the driver's seat. Yeah. So that's what he was trying to do. He was trying to do so that he could win this election against all the other parties. and then when he was forced to go potentially to a second election, he could be saying, well, this is the elite.

Look at all these parties. They lost the first time, and now they want to come from me again because they couldn't handle the result the first time. That was his plan. When everyone else decided not to stand, it kind of fucked up the entire thing for him, completely. Between our questions, you confess to the person they can't able.

It's a busy life in Camelot. I have to push the Pramelot. On second thoughts, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place. All right. So that brings us to our next story, which has kind of been, I've been kind of paying a lot of attention to this. I don't pay a lot of attention. Admittedly, my bad, I don't pay a ton of attention to UK politics if it doesn't sort of dip itself into the United States.

I'm very United States-centric. I get that. I understand. I probably should pay a lot more attention. But this one won my heart. Nigel Farage did win his. election, this election in Clacton, but he won it and his main rival was a trash guy with a trash con on his face called Count Binface.

Now, you say a guy, what you mean is a member of the Recycline Race from Sigma 9 in space. He's not a guy. Thank you for the correction. He is a hero from space. He has a cape. It's not just the bin on his head. He has a cape. Here's what I was hoping.

I was hoping that he was going to put googly eyes on. a cabbage and put it in himself like Liz Truss. Like he was going to swallow all the different old party members. This is amazing. And at first I was going to say, I was going to come on and say, it's so adorable that you guys could have like a joke and have that person run. But this is a pretty small race. And we've had people in the United States, like the rent is too damn high guy in

New York. Right. So we've had people who have been outlandish personality. who have run in these smaller areas all over the country. That happens. I was going to say something like, that wouldn't happen in the United States, but yeah, it kind of does already.

And I think it's great that's sort of built into the system, essentially people could just pay a little bit of money. It's like 500 pounds or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And then get 10 people or something crazy low like that to sign a petition essentially. And then you get to run.

And then I guess you guys have a long tradition. of people just making a statement, essentially, a joke statement in lots of cases, in these races. Yeah, absolutely. There's a party called the Monster Raving Looney Party that has stood candidates, I think, for at least 30 years, maybe more than that, in multiple races, every time we have an election, they'll always stand. And there's a real tradition, especially in the constituency where the prime minister or the leader of a party is being up for election, for people who are, are either jorke candidates, satirical candidates, or in some cases, fairly extreme candidates, to target that constituency particularly. And that's why you'll have kind of amazing scenes,

like, you know, the leader of the Tories finding out they're not getting their seat back that they lost while stood next to someone dressed like Big Bird, who's the, from the Big Bird Party or whatever, like ludicrous over-the-top, ridiculous stuff like that. And Count Binfest, in particular, always, I say always, he's often ran against the leader of the party, especially the Prime Minister, or he's ran for London Mayor twice. But this, there was actually, he's only Count Binfist. He used to be called Lord Buckethead. But then genuinely, there was a copyright case from a different Lord Buckethead, who also

was a guy with a bucket on his head, who said, you can't have the IP of Lord Buckethead, and thus Count Binfist was born. I just hire a Lord of a Count. I think, a Lord, I think. I don't know, actually. I think a count is European typically But I don't think we have counts I don't know that we have counts

In the UK I think they might be foreign lords essentially I could be wrong I could move to I could move there and call myself count then That's what I figure I figure if you don't have it That I could just do it right I think if you went around the UK calling yourself count You'd find a lot of people called you something very similar to count Nicely done

So this guy Just this person, they said, is a comedian who does this sort of work, right? This person does this a lot then. They go into multiple different races. Or is it, is the bin face sort of the thing and multiple comedians play bin face? Or is it just one guy? Yeah, the guy, he's lost London mayor a couple of times. He ran for other elections.

He's never before got his deposit back. Because as you say, you pay for a general election or a by-election. you pay 500 pounds, but you need to get, I think it's more than 5% of the vote. And if you don't get more than 5% of the vote, you lose that 500 pounds. And joke candidates almost never get their 5% of the vote. So they always lose their money. And they sort of see that as the cost of doing business, essentially. Did that happen here? No, well, for the London mayor is, by the way, it's 10,000 pounds, not 500 pounds. So people lose a lot of money here doing it. In this case, no, for the first time, I think possibly ever a joke candidate didn't just get more than 5%. He

He got 27% of the vote. So more than a quarter of the people who bothered to vote voted for BinFace. So Farage did actually get 1,000 more votes than he got the last time he got elected there in 2024. But he got those 1,000 extra votes while nobody from any of the party was standing against him. So like the Tories weren't standing the Greens label at down. No one. But BinFace got 27%. I think it was 9,900 people voted for the bin, which is incredible.

So after this is over, your elections, essentially after the MPs elected, they do like a counting ceremony, right? So they do a thing where they say, and this is the winner. It's like the end of the UFC where they hold your hand up. Exactly. All the other people have to like shame face look at the ground because they lost. He, Nigel Farage skipped this part. He didn't even show up. This is like traditionally something you show up to, but he didn't want to stand next to count bin face.

So he didn't show up. Yeah, exactly. So at the count, and bear in mind, it wasn't just Nidal Farage versus BinFace. There were 35 candidates running on this by-election because it's just the only by-election happening at the moment and so high profile. So every independent candidate, every slightly nutty candidate, every joke candidate, they all flooded into this constituency. So there were 35 people.

The ballot paper that you would put your little X in the box of was 90 centimeters as long. It was rolled out and rolled out and rolled out. Shut up. Was it really that big? It was genuine 90 centipers. Holy shit, man.

Half of my height was the ballot paper of 35 canters. That is amazing. And I don't know whether all 34 others of than Nigel Farage attended the count, but the vast majority would. And the whole point is, you're there to show that this is all level.

This is all like a level playing field. We're there, we're not humble. Nigel Farage refused to turn up. Now, as I understand it, it is the first time that a returning MP so someone who's actually already elected and got elected back in, the first time they have refused, actually not just returning, the first time somebody who won the election, the local by-election,

is the first time they have refused to turn up since I think 1981. And in that case, in 1981, it was a guy who got elected called Bobby Sands, who was in prison on hunger strike for the IRA at the time. That was the reason he missed it. So Nigel Fras has set precedent here by refusing to stand next to the bin and saying like basically, I refuse to stand on stage being demeaned by nobody. But like, he's not a nobody, Nigel. He's a count.

That's higher in the standing than you've ever been. So obviously, Fras didn't turn up to the count. Now, that wasn't just because he didn't want to be demeaned by having to stand with the oi-polloy. He said it was because he'd been advised by the police that there was a credible threat to his safety at the end. And so he's saying, I couldn't possibly attend. I was told by the police not to attend. But obviously, if you say something like that in public during the most high, profile by election in recent history,

someone's going to ask the police. In fact, every national newspaper out of the police, and the police said, no, he wasn't. We've never said anything of the sort. He's just straight out lied about the police there as well. Because apparently, while he wasn't at the count, he was nearby in a hotel

conference room filled with his supporters at an event dubbed Farage Fest, or Farage Fest. He was at his own little festival. Yeah, so Nigel's back in. But the investigation continues. Do you think that he is going to face any kind of repercussions for this particular thing that he did? He obviously, this is something that they're looking into.

You were saying before that this tiny little suit coat and glasses and tickets got massive attention as if it was the worst thing that ever happened when somebody got those things as a gift. this is substantially more than that. Will there be repercussions for something like this, you think? It's really hard to know. But there will be some repercussions in that the investigation into the finances of Reform UK haven't stopped here. And actually, the more that Farage has squirmed and the more that he's denied things and lied about stuff, the more intense that investigation is becoming, the more that it's found.

So it's found it's not just this five million pounds. There's another guy, George Cottrell, who's been financing him. and then it turns out that Cotroll, all the donations made from Cotrell or made via Cotrell's mum as a way of laundering it through. And there's questions as to whether that money was laundered from who knows what kind of industries or businesses beforehand. So there's some dodgy stuff going on there. That is going to continue. And there are more and more questions being asked about who has been financing Reform UK. So there's accountability in the sense that this is just shown an even bigger spotlight on it. And there's accountability in the sense that

if he does end up being recalled to Parliament, which I think it would take 10%, about 7,000 votes from the people of Clacton, if he's found guilty by the Parliament Standards Committee, 7,000 votes from the people of Clacton will force another by-election. Now, 9,000 people just voted for the bin. So there's a decent chance that those votes will come in.

But he may well get returned from that. But it does mean that when he runs again in Clacton, every political party will stand in that election, and they will say, are you going to vote for the guy who ran on a pro sleaze to, you know, tip essentially? He has been proven to be guilty of this. So it may well affect him here. And the other thing it is affecting is, I believe, reforms appeal across the board, not just to the average voter who aren't, like, Clacton is a very reform heavy area in Kent. Other parts of the country have

voted reform on much, like, slimmer margins. And the head of reform being humiliated in the and shown to be corrupt like this, is probably going to eat into those margins. It's also going to make reform far less palatable to the people who want to put something like reform in place. Elon Musk, we know, has switched his support from Nigel Farage to Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain. And I think other external forces who've been driving reform surge in UK politics will also jump ship to other arguably more extreme, but maybe not quite as exposed parties. So I think this could be, there's no on the books laws accountability of like, and you've done this and therefore you're barred from everstanding as MP again. I'm not aware of anything that he'd do that

would make that the case. But I think it's kind of damaging his credibility to a point where, yeah, I think it's damaging his electability or certainly the electability of his party. Gone to your head, which is worse, reform or restore? It depends what we mean by that. So I think restore are absolutely worse in terms of terms of their policies. Restore was set up by Rupert Lowe because he found reform, partly because he found reform to be too tame and partly because he was kicked out over bullying and abuse allegations. Restore have a far more extremist policy set, but also are far more electorally toxic. So there are far fewer people going to vote for Restore, then Reform. It was a miracle when Reform got their

first MP. Restore only have an MP because. because he was voted in as reform and changed to restore to set of the party. I don't think they could get voted in as restore. So, yeah, I don't know. They're a much worse bunch, but sort of the further out you are on the extremist, like, pathway towards fascism, the fewer people are willing to look at you and go, yeah, that's normal. So it depends what we're measuring it on, really. I guess my question then is this scandal and possible problem with reform does.

Does that send more votes to restore and get more restore people voted in across your country? So it will send more votes to restore. I think that's definitely the case. But it'll also send more votes to the Tories. Because on the right wing sort of sphere, the right wing timeline. And the Tories are more centrist. I'm not saying they're centrist, but I am saying more centrist than these other guys. Yeah.

If you have to, if you're reform, which might be like a seven or an eight out of ten in terms of right-wing fascism, And then your choice is to go for a party that's a 10 or a party that's a six or a five, or a six maybe, which are you more likely to go to? I think a decent chunk of people are going to be more likely to go towards a six. The number of people in this country who are overtly comfortable with fascism is very, very low. And you and I have talked about Restore as much as Tucker Carlson. He covered it on one of our Norgan-Borner shows or Norfolk and Shores, Tucker-Cars, Tucker-Callson interviewed a guy who was a Restore Britain campaign.

And as much as Tucker Carlson tried to sanitize him, he was dressed like a 1930s fascist, specifically Oswald Mosley, and people in his party were found to have pictures of Hitler and copies of Mein Kampf. Well, he even quoted a fascist while he was on. He even quoted like a famous British fascist, as I recall. Yeah, it was the rivers of blood, Enok Powell. Enoch Powell's Rivers of Bloods, so yeah, they can't keep away from the overt fascism. And the average person, when presented with fascism, will recognize it,

except when it is being twisted out, twisted and contorted into something seemingly more palatable by a right-wing infrastructure, including Elon Musk, who is all in on Restore Britain these days since he fell out with Nigel Farage, basically. And they're being super-powered by the Great Repalism Theory, so they're starting, like the fascism now is starting to say,

well, look at these invaders that are coming to your country in these small boats, they are pushing you out there, taking your resources, they're taking your jobs, they're taking your jobs, they're going to take your women, they're going to attack you, you're in danger. And so all these things feed on people's fears, and what that does is that helps entrench these groups of people who are essentially stating fascist policies into,

well, maybe that sounds better than being afraid. Yeah, it's exactly that. And I also think it's not just the right-wing amplification through places like Twitter. There is a project, and I think we'll kind of come to that now, next basically, that there is a project to try to legitimize these ideas through both the media and through prestigious institutions like universities, to say, well, these are the ideas of studying whether migrants and people of color

are just genetically inferior and genetically morally incapable of integrating into British society. Is this something about their genes that makes that the case? Well, actually, that's a perfectly legitimate field of research, and therefore we'll have researchers at prestigious universities to do that. And what that all does is, instead of having this guy who's a random restore Britain guy who was bumped into on the street who's courting Oswald Mosley and talking about how he can't get a job, but here he is as Britain's greatest philosopher, as Tucker Carlson put it, instead of that guy who's very clearly not credible, you've got, here's a guy who studied

at Cambridge University and now writes for a well-known media outlet. saying the same things, but saying them with so much of the trappings of British credibility. And that's the real danger as to how these ideas get laundered and legitimized, I think. But for the first time of my life, I'm 18 and I can say, fuck you! Stephen, I didn't sell out, son, I bought in. Keep bad in mind. That kid is going to make one hell of a lawyer, huh? Yeah, he takes after his father.

He's a son of a bitch. Fuck you, dear. Well, let's get into that story. This is a story from the Byline Times. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and Reform UK's Cambridge University recruitment pipeline project revealed. So this is very specifically talking about Peter Thiel, who has worked his way into Cambridge University, a university that obviously rejected Marsh because he has a hate streak on him to go after Cambridge today. But in any case, Cambridge, they had this, they got a donation from him. We'll get to the donation because it's very puzzling to me that it's so small.

But the donation from Peter Thiel, who then sort of has this, this sort of, he has this person by the name of James Orr, who is the person who's sort of the front at Cambridge University. and this person is breaking a lot of rules when it comes to students in the sense that he's like helping house them sort of being involved in their lives in ways that people shouldn't be. They are staying with him. So like there are students who are staying in his house

who Peter Thiel has paid the scholarship for students to go to Cambridge University and those students live with their professor which is a massive safeguarding risk. It's a huge, huge. dread flag, it doesn't happen anywhere, but it's happening here. And then there's sort of this, this churning of all these same ideas, these great replacement ideas, these race, sort of politics and this sort of anti-woke ideas that are being churned up through this group that's sort

of creating a very, they're trying to create a very strong conservative movement at Cambridge. And Peter Thiel, according to this article and according to their investigations, seems to be part this or maybe even orchestrating it. Yeah, exactly. And this is a guy, as you mentioned, James Orr, who I think he's at the Faculty of Theology and Divinity at Cambridge. Now, obviously, Cambridge University, the reason that this is that this is Cambridge University is one of the two great university institutions in this country. Cambridge and Oxford are the two most prestigious institutions. So there is no way, if you wanted to try and launder right-wing ideas into the intellectual set of the UK. You wouldn't do that by going to Middlesbrough Polytechnic.

Sure, sure. Let me interrupt you and ask you a question. Now, if I were to ask you, is our Cambridge and Oxford traditionally conservative universities, or are they just universities and conservatives come out of there and people who are more liberal or left come out of there? It's just sort of, you go in and there's a possibility you could be either when you leave. Because if I were to say the Ivy League institutions of the United States, States. Like the really big universities like Yale, Harvard, maybe Princeton, they can produce, they produced like Ted Cruz went to Yale, right? So like obviously they can produce conservatives and they can produce people like Barack Obama was at Harvard. So it's not, there's not a mold

that's set. Is there one in either of these universities? It's tricky in the UK because political affiliation when it comes to university isn't necessarily as black and white. as necessarily class. So what these universities will absolutely do is be primarily filled with people from a certain social strata of the UK. So it'll be people who went to private schools, often a very select handful of private schools.

Eaton, for example, a lot of kids will go to Eaton private school, and they'll be taught all the way through that. You will be going to Oxford. And that pathway will be set for you, not based on your intellectual ability or educational attainment, but based on the access that you had to the mechanisms to kind of to propel you along that path. So I think absolutely Cambridge, Oxford can, does produce plenty of people who are quite liberal,

but it will also produce people who are quite conservative because they'll come from quite conservative backgrounds of, like literally the elite, the people who have got, whose father was a lord and his father before him was a lord, and who, until we abolished it recently, was a hereditary member of our parliament, of the House of Lords. That was your great, great, great grandfather was appointed the House of Lords, and therefore you will be one day too because it gets passed down lineagely. That is kind of a part of British class system, and that is quite intrinsically tied to Oxford and Cambridge. Now, they will also make outreach to people who weren't from those kind of social strata,

but that will always have a bit of a cap to it, because these are the most elite institutions. And if you're from an elite background, it's far easier for you to get in. King Charles went to, I think Cambridge, despite not having remotely near the qualifications that would have got someone to Cambridge. He didn't get there because of his intellectual ability. He got there because he was the future rule of the country.

I see. I see. Similarly, I think there's only been two prime ministers in the last maybe 30 or 40 years, maybe longer, who didn't go to either Oxford or Cambridge. So like the political elites will come from Oxford and Cambridge. So that's on both parties, but primarily in the Tories. We're mostly ruled by the Tories. I just want to do it.

correct correction. Ted Cruz went to Harvard, Princeton and Harvard. I apologize, it was Princeton and Harvard and then Barack Obama, Harvard. I was thinking to George Bush who went to Yale.

But I just wanted to say that because somebody's going to send me a message, so I just wanted to say that out loud. So, okay, so let's scroll back to this particular thing. You have Peter Thiel, a guy who named his corporation after what the evil guys in the Lord of the Rings

used to spy on people. Yep. This guy, who says that, by the way, says they are tragically misrepresented in our literature. This is a guy who does, he does lectures on the Antichrist and he does lectures the Antichrist at Cambridge. Like those those Antichrist lectures happened at the Cambridge Faculty of Theology. Yeah. Because James Orr arranged it. So Teal paid for Orr to have this kind of this position. And Orr is the head of policy at Reform UK. So he is part of the reform.

institution for what there is of the institution of reform. He's now at Cambridge, which is very credible. He's there because he's got the qualifications to be there. That's not in dispute. He's got the degree, the professorship, like he comes from an academic background. But he's given money by Peter Thiel to develop what is essentially a hot house for right-wing students at Cambridge, to either find students who are right-wing and get them into Cambridge, or to find students at Cambridge and get them to be right-wing. And so that is why they end up living with James Orr, where they'll rub shoulders with the people who spend their time at James Orr's house, including Charles Murray, who gave a talk about the bell curve, invited by James Orr.

Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson was staying with James Orr when he finished his last book in 2024. And the students talking about how they didn't used to be supportive, Jordan Peterson, but then they stayed with James Orr for a while, and now they recognize he's got a lot of good ideas. And Teal himself was also paying for some students to have scholarships, even if the quality their work wasn't necessarily up to Cambridge standard, which is an ironic twist on DEI, I'd say, because I don't think he was finding students of non-privileged backgrounds to put into those places. I was going to bring this up that they are so anti-D-EI, but this feels like a giant DEI program for people, that right-wing people. That's what it feels like. To me, it feels like they're genuinely

trying to influence the university and trying to create opportunities. for people who believe the same things that they believe, and then to sort of create and churn out people with that same idea set, this feels very similar to what they accuse DEI of. Yeah, exactly. This is affirmative action for right-wingers. Essentially is what it is. And this is all very deliberate because what they want is for more people to come out of Cambridge,

being able to say, I am from Cambridge, with their right-wing ideology that they can now use with credibility. So you get into Cambridge being right wing, and as you come out, your right wing and from Cambridge. And then from there, they'll go on to write for various different publications that we have in the UK. So places like The Spectator or Unheard or G.B. News, all of those being owned by, I think, a near billionaire, he's worth like £900 million or something like a guy called Paul Marshall. He owns the Spectator and Unheard and GB News. Or they'll write for The Critic, which is owned by a reform donor called Jeremy Hoskin.

or they'll write for Quillette, which is funded by Peter Thiel and also funded in part by Mark Andreasen. And the number of people who write for each of those magazines, the authorship has a massive overlapping Venn diagram. So you'll find people who've written for every one of those in the space of a month. And so it's sort of like a media hydra in that it looks like there's multiple different heads,

but it's all the same beat. But it now starts to sound like consensus because I read this thing in unheard that agreed with a spectator that I saw on G.B. But it's all the same stable of people. Right. And just I want to give people an idea of sort of who these people are. Because we touched on it, but I want to read just a paragraph from this. So this is from this article.

Recent guests and visitors read like a who's who of political pilgrims and scholars, almost exclusively from the right. Peter Thiel has visited, as has his protege, Donald Trump's vice president, J.D. Vance, who described. or James Or as his British Sherpa. So too have former Dutch MP and anti-Islam activist, Ion Hersey Ali,

the conservative author and advocate of white identity politics, Douglas Murray, the Canadian psychologist and anti-woke activist Jordan Peterson and the comedian and writer John Cleese. So all those people all visit, can I just ask you,

is there a worse dinner party list than that? Like, if you show up at a dinner party list, party. I mean, I feel like you want it to be that movie The Menu where you're going to die at the end of it, if that's the case. Yeah. That's a hard question because any dinner party where Jordan Peterson is at is already the worst because no one else, you could be sat next to Hitler. Hitler's not getting a word in. He's not going to be able to interrupt Jordan Peterson to say anything. So it doesn't get worse for the addition of Hitler because Hitler's just a voyeur at that point.

He's an audience member. So this, this is a big deal. and these people are all sort of, they're churning out this stuff when it comes to these publications, but them creating this and this sort of really clear conflict of interest that's going on there. And then this article very specifically mentions

that they reached out to this university for comment and the university sounds like it gave a very Trump-like response back, which is like that's fake news, essentially. I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but it's very much, I'll link the article in the show notes, and you can read, it's the like the last paragraph. But essentially the university is like, there's so many errors in what you've said we're not even going to respond. Yeah, which is just a refusal to, well, what it is is a refusal to engage without being a denial as well. Like, you don't have to deny it by saying that's too filled with errors to respond to. You haven't said that isn't true. I deny that any of that's true.

Because there might well be errors, but the central part of it. it may well be true. It's impossible to tease apart exactly which bits they mean are errors if they're not going to say anything. So yeah, I think it's incredibly, what I think this is, I think this is entryism, because they know that Cambridge is where we get our politicians, Cambridge is where we get our media figures from. Oxford and Cambridge are the places where an embarrassing amount of the British institutions, the British kind of intellectual culture, British society runs through. So this is, you get a bit, if you've got a CV, a resume with Cambridge or Oxford on it, that is a rubber stamp of authority and approval

that people won't need to look in too much further. And I think that's why they take them from these kind of places and just land them in various different media roles to start amplifying this extremist language. And these media roles, as I'm pointing out, like, they're so incestuously connected. So, like, Quillette is edited by someone called Claire Lehman. She used to work for Rebel Media.

Other employees of Rebel Media are Paul Joseph Watson and Tommy Robinson. They've also been employees of Rebel Media. But it sounds more legitimate when you look towards Quillette. She also used to work for the Free Speech Union. They're run by a guy called Toby Young, Lord Toby Young, in fact. He's the editor of the Daily Skeptic. He's the contributing editor of the critic. He's the associate editor of The Spectator.

He writes for Spiked. He writes for The Telegraph. He is fingers in all these different pies. How many different places can you edit while pretending that these places are in any way separate or distinct from one other? And Toby Young owns a company called Skeptics Limit. That's really fucking irritating. He owns it with a guy called Noah Carl. Noah Carl is the editor of Aporia,

which is a eugenics magazine. Holy shit. It is like, Aporia used to be the pioneer fund. That's the one that funded Charles Murray's Belkhov. So this is all just, so much of just old money.

Like the Human Diversity Project, which is another eugenics organization, are involved in funding this stuff. So they've just, the same old eugenics, racist money has put on a different hat and a false mustache and pretended to be someone else.

and they've managed to buy their way into the very heart of British credibility here. I don't this makes you sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, but the names are all there and you can check them all out, you know. Yeah, it's Elon Musk. It's Mark Andresen and Peter Thiel all in a trench coat together. They're all standing on each other's shoulders. So they have the names of things that are called the skeptic, right? So daily skeptics limited.

This is not tradition. how we would use this language. This is a different way to twist the idea of skeptic, right? Yes, yeah, it absolutely is. So the Daily Skeptics started life as a blog called lockdown skeptics at the start of the pandemic to say that we shouldn't be looking down. Oh, gosh, I already know where this is going. And now, and then it pivoted to vaccines,

and then when it pivoted to anti-wokeness and transphobia and climate change denial in particular, it called itself the Daily Skeptic. I see. And now if you go there, I've written about it for the Skeptic magazine, the one that I run, a genuine skeptic. magazine. I've written about how if you go there, you can just see, even in the midst of, like, record-breaking heat waves, just wall-to-wall climate change denial from the daily skeptic,

arguing that this is fine, this is normal, nothing bad is happening. And I think if you look hard enough into their money, you'll also find that they receive funding from places like the Institute for Economic Affairs or the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which are climate change denying think tanks. So these these publications are just vehicles for old, Denialist conservative voices, but repackaged for a modern age as if there's something else. That's what I thought when I first heard it because I was like, they can't call it denialist magazine. That sounds terrible. You can't do that. You got to choose a different name and skeptics fit. So there you go. When I see this sort of insidiousness that happens and it happens here in the United

States just way more blatantly, right? Like we can see that this sort of thing happens all the time when it comes to media institutions, we see all the different things that are propped up by these billionaires. You see how Twitter can mold, even mold Joe Rogan when it comes to getting things in front of him, the way in which certain things are pushed through these right-wing media spheres.

You can see it's all pretty transparent the things that they're doing. And what they're trying to do is amplify this great replacement theory, this race hatred, and trying to get that into the forefront because that's an easy, way that they found that they can control a large group of people and shift their opinion right,

move that Overton window to the right, and this is a great way for them to manipulate people, and then to continue essentially just pilfering all the money that they possibly can from everyone else if they can keep us distracted. So it's a great move by Peter Thiel to do something like this. It is, and if Peter Thiel was publishing this stuff to his own blog, we'd be saying Peter Thiel says X. Peter Thiel says X and no one would give it that much credibility. If some random person set up a website, which is how race realists, who now call themselves hereditary and revolutionists, because everything is hereditary, nothing is nurture, it's all just nature. They used to have their own blogs. Places like American Renaissance, run by an American guy called

Jared Taylor. I interviewed him on an old podcast, Be Reasonable, is a white supremacist, and it's pretty clear that what they're doing is just old-school. white supremacy, and people don't give it much attention. They don't give it much credibility. But if you can pay for your guy from Reform to have a place at Cambridge, who will then get a a so-called race realist, an associate position there, an affiliate position there on some funding to while he's there, this is a guy called Nathan Kauffness, actually was given an affiliate position at Cambridge under James Orr, while he's there to start writing about how actually black people are inferior, and that's just science.

Now this isn't coming from a random blog. It's coming from the University of Cambridge. It's coming from someone affiliated with a legitimate place. And if Joe Rogan wants to, or someone on Joe Rogan Shaw wants to start spreading these ideas, they're not having to go to KKK quarterly. They're going to, you know, the University of Cambridge professor says this. Or if they're not going to the University of Cambridge, it gets picked up by the spectator who is citing the universe. A professor from the University of Cambridge has explained how race science proves that black

people are intellectually inferior after all. And now this is a news report on the scientific finding. And it's just putting the same kind of, you know, it's putting a patina of credibility onto the same old school racism. And now it seems more palatable. That brings in another story by the Byline Times, too, because if we're talking about these sort of attacks, these racial attacks,

there's another one that just happened. And this has been all over the news. this is a Cambridge professor who was targeted specifically by this group of people he was a black gentleman by the name of Jason Ardey

and he was accused of plagiarism in his PhD dissertation and it was found that that wasn't the case. Yeah and it's so it's a little more complicated than that. So that's the bones of it. But that's the bones of it.

but Jason Radee, so he got a PhD from Liverpool John Moore's University, so up here, not far, not far, well, I should work for LGMU at one point in fact. And when there were question marks asked about whether there was plagiarism in that thesis, LJMU did an investigation and they cleared him. But actually, other people have still gone over it. And there may actually, there's some signs that maybe there is some play, there may be there's a reasonable amount of plagiarism in there. I know some data scientists who've kind of spent some time looking at whether there is too much repetition from certain places that have. haven't been well credited. And the key to this is, even if Jason Ardei had plagiarized his entire thesis, does that justify 249 separate articles across the press about him, across the media, over the course of two straight weeks, including more than 200 articles after he resigned from Cambridge?

Now, I would say, like, if there was, like, let's say that there is plagiarism, and I've seen some reasonable evidence that there is, let's say there was plagiarism in there. I say that's the kind of thing that is a story on page 12 of the newspaper, Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism, and then a few days later or a week later, another story, Professor Accused of Plajorism quits. And then you don't hear about him again. There's actually lots of other professors who've been accused of plagiarism, who've been found guilty but are still in place, who've never had to face repercussions. The very reason that this became a big pile on Jason Ardey, in part is because Nathan Koffness, who was this guy at Cambridge, who was let go for being a race realist,

took after him because he was black, because Cambridge was celebrating having a young black professor, and that offended Nathan Coffner's, who went on to spend a lot of time digging through his thesis. Had Jason Ardea not been black, I don't think Nathan Coffner's would have been remotely motivated to look for plagiarism at all. And I think that's also true of much of the news reporting.

So those 200 articles that happened that came out after Ardei had already resigned, the number of those that came through that exact media network that I've talked about. You know, the unheard, the critic, Quillette, spectator, daily skeptic, free speech union, even the telegraph. Also the Guardian, also the Times. But like the number that came through this right-wing media ecosystem is very, very clearly a coordinated effort by this incestuous network of writers to say, we need to amplify this message.

And you can look at it and say, Kofness was right about the place. But the thing is, that doesn't mean that he's right about the race realism. If Jason Ardea was a plagiarist, he wasn't a plagiarist because he was black. But they came after him because he was a black and found out that he was a plagiarist. Well, this reminds me of the thing that happened with clotting gay from, I think it was Harvard. I'm not sure. It's one of those big universities, one of the ivory universities.

And this was when the entire rightling ecosphere went after her very specifically and tried to get her fired. because they said that, like, she plagiarized, and then they found, like, a couple of inconsistencies with how she footnoted. And, like, that was the level at which it got to, as I recall. But, like, there's, it's, it's, one of the things that, that's frustrating to watch is how the hill that people of color have to climb

to be recognized as good, upstanding academics and not be attacked for it. And I think what the spin of this is, and especially when you're talking about these articles is it's not it's not a professor might have plagiarized it's a black professor who didn't deserve this job because this was a white job that person wound up plagiarizing and that's the uphill battle that every person of color has to fight because what what we've seen is there's a this sort of like white supremacist media machine that wants to say, that job always belonged to a white person and you stole it. And now we're

going to point out why you should have never had that job. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the point that this was made so clearly about race, even in media publications or the fact that the rhetoric, the discourse was so tied up in race, filtered even to media publications that shouldn't be about this kind of thing. That wouldn't normally countenance, race, realist, eugenic's point of view. The BBC ran a headline about Jason Ardei, and I think it was Black Professor at Heart of Plagiarism scandal quits. So, Black, his plagiarism wasn't anything to be with being black. Why would the BBC include Black into that? It's not the only terrible headline that happened throughout all of this.

The Telegraph, which published an awful lot on Jason Ardey, added the mail and the various of the right-wing newspapers. The Telegraph published an article titled, Jason Arde is Living Proof that You Reep What You Saw. And then after he killed himself, they edited the text. title to take out living. That happened. If you go to it now, it says, Gis and Arde is proof that you reap what you saw. Shit. Wow. They also removed some other articles that were, that pointed to some of the motivations of the people who first found out about Ardei's plagiarism, including the guy who was initially asking

questions before Nathan Koffner, who was a guy who lost his emeritus professor status over harassing and abusing his colleagues over his kind of, I think it was critical, his, uh, his, uh, paranoia about critical race theory at the time. That was his animus to begin with when the guy first starting initial questions of Jason Ardee. When that came to JMU, LGMU and Liverpool John Moore said there's no cares to be answered here, that was then passed on to Nathan Coffner, who describes himself as a race realist, who says black people, in a colorblind meritocracy, there will be no black people that will eat institutions, he said, because they're suited only to high levels of, in high level positions in entertainment and sports.

Wow. That's when he started all of this. And now, so from here, Nathan, Nathan Koffners lost his job at Cambridge. Not over the Jason R-Dade stuff at all. He lost it over publishing a blog where he said black people shouldn't be at elite universities. And when he lost that affiliate position, he was never hired by Cambridge. He was only ever an associate kind of there. He was funded by someone else. They basically gave him an office to work from. That's the amount that Cambridge was related to him. When he lost that position, he sued Cambridge. Cambridge, and he was represented by the Free Speech Union run by Toby Young and Noah Carl, Noah Carl being his editor at the Eugenics magazine. I don't think he went there because he just found a random organisation that defends free speech. I think he went to them because he attended their same heterodox thinker eugenicist conferences with them and knew them already, and they were keen to push his worldview. And as it happens, he lost that case against Cambridge. And I think a week later was appointed to another position at the University of Ghent under another professor who attended a eugenics conference. And he was teaching about how he teaching a political philosophy course

that included why migrants can't fit into European cultures because they aren't compatible with the liberalism of the West. And therefore liberal democracies will be overrun by the illiberalism of the migrants, which you and I know exactly what that sounds like. Sounds like Gad Saad, to be honest with you. Yeah. And now Kofnes has been suspended from the University of Ghent. And there are letters supporting him from signed by 700 academics, including many of the people from the network we've orally identified. But also Michael Schumer, Jerry Coen, Lawrence Krause,

people who would otherwise consider themselves skeptics, but their skepticism gets turned off when people say academic freedom. And they're saying Nathan Koffness should have at Ghent the academic freedom to pursue things that we disagree with, including race realism. Nathan Koffens was never hired by Ghent University to research race realism. He was there to research something completely different, but went around saying, I'm forwarding the hereditary revolution as part of my position at Ghent University, which wasn't his position.

Yeah, it's a totally fucked situation, but so many people get their critical thinking turned off when people say, but academic freedom, freedom of speech. This reminds me of sort of how the right is treating Islam and Muslims right now. This reminds me very similar, like something of that because I don't think anybody would look at anyone else and say plagiarism is good, right? I don't think anybody's saying that plagiarism is a good thing.

Plagiarism is something that should be overlooked. Of course not. I don't think anybody's saying that. But I think that there is undue scrutiny against certain groups of people very specifically when it comes to this, and then it gets amplified. The same thing happens with Islam.

people go after it and try to basically say, like this is an awful, awful religion. It's like all religions are pretty awful. We just don't pay attention to any of the other awfulness that happens. What we do is we are hyper-focused on this very specific set of religion that happens to be practiced by a lot of people who happen to be brown. And so that is where we're focusing on our attentions. And the same thing's happening here.

It's like, yeah, all that stuff is bad, but you're never putting a white professor on the front. of front page of the newspaper to say, you know, Cambridge professor let go because of plagiarism. That's, like you said, gets put on page 12. It's never paid attention to. Or never covered it at all. There are people, I'm not sure at Cambridge. There's certainly people I've listed who have been proven to be plagiarist who are still just in their role, who like use the work of their students, published it off as their own, and are still zero repercussions. And I think that's the thing of, if Nathan Koffner, some people like him, argue what would be,

what the world be like in a colourblind meritocracy. Well, in a colourblind meritocracy, everybody's thesis would get equal amounts of scrutiny. And in that colourblind meritocracy, would we find that only people of colour were committing plagiarism? Great point. Yeah. But we aren't in a colourblind meritocracy, which means that it's people of colour who are under way more scrutiny. And then when you find someone who you can say, here is some evidence of wrongdoing, that one case gets amplified out of all proportion. And now people can say, well, you can't say that that isn't plagiarism. It's like, well, no, you've snuffled around in the ship for so long you've found a truffle,

but that doesn't mean that where you were was all truffles. The rest of it was still shit. And all of your other results is shit. You just happen to have stumbled upon someone. You're not interested in where, you know, white professors, male professors, straight cis professors are guilty of the things that you think are, you know, particular crimes when done by people who aren't from those privileged backgrounds. I'm not a stupid fucking idiot.

I know it was just a pig, but for 50 seconds, it felt really real. And when you think you're going to get eaten, and your first thought is, great, I don't have to go to work tomorrow. You're relieved? You don't have to go to work because you thought you were going to get eaten? What the fuck is this world? What have they done to us? What did they do not?

So we wanted to cover and talk about this Tommy Robinson story, because Tommy Robinson gets a lot of play. We talk about Tommy Robinson on the other show we do quite a bit. We talk about, at least talk about sort of the things that he's involved in. And Tommy Robinson is a figure in the UK who his real name isn't Tommy Robinson, is it? Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. We think it may actually be something else, but it's probably Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

He's changed his names multiple times and gone by various aliases, including when he tried to illegally enter America as an illegal migrant to America at one point. He was on a different passport at the time. Crushing it. Amazing. So in any case, this, he was, he's at the time. heart of sort of a controversy around his social media account. What happened was is there was a person who was at the playground with his children. This person happens to be brown. So this happens

in Glasgow and this person is born in Glasgow. So they're not, they're not an immigrant. They're not somebody who's an immigrant at all, but there's an anti-immigrant sentiment that's sort of popping up all over in different places. And this person is there with their children. They see this sort of anti-immigrant rally that's happening, and they say, I'm going to take my kids home, but they're at a playground. So they decide to come back to the playground and film these people,

because they're sort of nearby, and they pull their phone out, and they start filming, and someone takes a picture of this person filming, and thereby a playground. And then they sort of caption it as if this person is filming near a playground, and they are,

there's somebody who's actually filming children, rather than filming a rally that's happening at the playground. And you can hear in one of the videos, they're being called a nonce. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. Yeah, in any case, nonce. But that's like a pedophile, essentially. They're calling the person a pedophile.

And this person is just filming them because, and they had already taken their kids home, they're filming them because they just want the protection of filming someone else who might be violent towards them. And Tommy Robinson wound up retweeting it, or his, team did. And then he had to go back and apologize. And then once he apologized, he took the apology back by saying, I never did anything wrong. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is a classic

disinformation tactic because you can either, the ways that you can do disinformation is to create something wholly new that is just an outright lie. Here is a faked picture of something that never happened. I'm going to lie about what it contains. Or you take a video or a picture of something that did happen, but present it. it in a way, in a context that isn't true. So this is absolutely a picture of a guy filming at a children's playground. And you can say, here's a guy who's brown, children's playground, look how bad this is. But obviously, all of the context, as you've said, is that he's filming the race riot that's happening and he is a local. So the invaders in many ways aren't him. It's the

people who are coming into his community to try to upset and attack and intimidate people. but this is just a classic disinformation tactic and again, just like we were talking about with finding the plagiarism with Jason Ardeh, if this had been a guy filming and you weren't able to track it down to a specific guy who had a very clear and obvious reason why it's been misrepresented,

this would be going viral and we couldn't do anything about it because, well, it's true, this is absolutely clearly what's happening. But in this particular case, we're able to sort of track it down and say, actually, no, this is misrepresented. So, like, they will film all of the things,

until they happen to either stumble on a piece of gold. And if they can't find something that's a perfect illustration of the thing that they think it is, they'll just lie about what it is and then use that for propaganda purposes. And when he got caught, he tried to roll it back. At first, I think his team apologized and said,

I got this one wrong on his social media. I got this one wrong, essentially, is what they said. And then there's a video of him, evidently, after the fact, saying, I'm not sorry, that was like an admin who did that. I don't give a shit basically, essentially is what he's saying. I don't care that this person faced any kind of backlash online. That's not up to me.

I don't give a shit, basically. And so he's being sued by this person. And I really, oh, gosh, please lose. That's all that. I just please lose. I just want to see these people lose money when they do this sort of thing. Because there seems to be no repercussions for lying in our culture anymore. There's no repercussions when you outright lie, you outright try to trick people.

with this sort of very specific and devious post that is made to trick people into thinking that this thing, this horrible thing is happening and to try to inflame them and to try to be like, look, see, we told you all about these people. We told you what they're going to do. We told you. And here's a perfect example of it,

even though it's not even that at all. And then there's no repercussions for doing that at all whatsoever. Once in a while, when they at least lose money, like that Lindel guy who gets, I'm just like, this is delicious. Just make these people so poor they can't post anything anymore. Yeah, well, I'm not going to be the one to reign on that particular parade. But look, the British libel law is particularly difficult.

And I think there's a decent chance that Tommy Robinson will either have to settle or settle out a court or something. But I also think that he's not going to lose a awful lot of money because he's on Twitter. His stuff gets retweeted by Elon Musk. He's a blue check account on Twitter. He makes a lot of money off Twitter. know how much money he's making of Twitter. We know that other people are making a huge amount. Like Rupert Law, there was a story in The Guardian, literally start of this week. He earns more money

from Twitter than he makes from his salary as an MP, just from saying inflammatory things on Twitter. He made something like £932 an hour of his time on, because he has to declare this. As an MP, Rupert Law has got to declare it. So I think he made something like £93,000 or up to £105,000 just from his Twitter posts alone in the last year. it wouldn't surprise me if Tommy Robinson is in the same ballpark so he's going to lose money but I also suspect he's going to gain money by complaining about how much money he's losing and if that calculus doesn't really work in his favour

he's probably got a friend at the head of Twitter who'll just tweak the algorithm to make sure that he gets more and it's because there aren't there's no accountability anymore there are no punishments anymore for lying so yeah I think I think there's a decent chance this guy from Glasgow we'll get some amount of compensation for the amount of harassment he's had, intimidation here. But I think

it's kind of Waterford Ducks back, unfortunately, Tommy Robinson, who makes a shitload of money out of this. Lying pays. We're in business. Sure does, man. Sure does. So, Marsh, if people were going to find your work somewhere on the internet, where would they look? There's a couple of place to go, obviously, the Noreogan experience, norrogan.com. I always forget our email address, our website address, you know, I never use the website address. And then when it comes to it,

I completely forget. And I whiffed on that three. You probably edited it out. I whipped on that three times and still possibly fucked it up. But other than that, you can find my writing at the skeptic magazine, which is skeptic.org.com. That is a skeptic magazine that is not affiliated with Michael Shermer and not anything to do with Toby Young's Skeptics Limited. And as such makes far less money than they do. It is a voluntary position. But there's some excellent writers who write about all the sort of positive, compassionate skepticism that we care an awful lot about. And I write there about some of the stuff that I discover, including around this kind of network around the free speech union. And then I also do a podcast every week called Skeptics with a K,

which is original skeptical investigative journalism, essentially. So I actually talk on a recent show or an upcoming show, depending on when the show comes out, about the Nathan Kofness and network at Cambridge. And I'll go into a bit more depth on it. there. So yes, skeptics with a K on all the podcasty places. Thanks so much for joining me today, Marsha. I appreciate it, man. Oh, it was a pleasure, man. All right. Thank you so much to Michael Marshall for joining me for this particular podcast. You can catch him on the No Rogan Experience at nerogan.com. You can also catch him on Skeptics with a K, which he does every single week. And then you can also catch him on the Skeptic podcast. He's also the editor of the Skeptic U.K.

You can find all links to all the things he does in our show notes. I want to thank him again for coming on the show on short notice. It was amazing to have. All right, that's going to wrap it up for this week. May or may not be back next week, but we're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics' creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit.

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