Media Storm - S3E1 Radical thinking: How to fight the far-right - with Nigel Bromage

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

Warning: mentions of sexual violence  As political polarisation stretches us to breaking point, co-hosts Mathilda and Helena head to the shadowy fringes of society to find out what pushes people to the far-right, and how we can pull them back. For its season launch, Media Storm puts these questions to reformed Neo-Nazis, far-right grooming victims and undercover counter-extremists. We investigate the recruitment tactics of violent terrorists attempting to spread hatred, and uncover proof that mainstream media and politicians may be playing into their hands. The episode features a deep-dive into a terrorist attack that no one remembers… the bombing of a Dover migrant centre late last year, that came with comments by the UK Home Secretary about an “invasion on our southern border”. Dr Rajan Basra unveils the untold story of the radicalisation of Andy Leak: what should’ve been a lesson for us all, but was lost to a 24-hour news cycle. For part two, we're joined in the studio by former neo-Nazi, turned founder of Exit Hate UK, Nigel Bromage, to pick apart what the mainstream media could do better to tackle extremism. Exit Hate UK offers non-judgemental support for individuals & families impacted by far-right extremism. For support please contact [e-mail] Speakers:  Julia Ebner @julie_renbe Dr Rajan Basra @rajanbasra Nigel Bromage @EXITUK1 Sources: Media guidelines for reporting on extremism: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-10/ran_reporting_about_violent_extremism_pcve_challenges_journalists_17082021_en.pdf US press review: https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220971142 Dover fake news story: https://www.euronews.com/2023/04/20/debunk-did-migrants-throw-rocks-to-block-a-road-near-english-channel-crossing Home Office data on ethnicity and grooming gangs, 2020: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/944206/Group-based_CSE_Paper.pdf  Get in touch Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod or Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod send us an email [e-mail] check out our website https://mediastormpodcast.com Music by Samfire @soundofsamfire.  Media Storm is brought to you by the house of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today is a big day. Start with the fact that Media Storm is back for a whole new series. And after many, many, many months of trying to make this a reality, Helena and I are now focused on the show full time. That's right. We have quit our day jobs, baby. To dedicate all our energy to bring you the journalism missing from the mainstream. We're all in.

And we hope you're with us. But it's also a big day because... It's election day. I was actually going to say because Helena is legally allowed to get married. Yeah, that also happened today. I didn't realize that getting married was essentially paying people money to say, yes, please, I would like to get married. So basically, you have to pay the state to keep them informed of your love life.

Yes, exactly. Speaking about the state, back to the local elections today, it's the first big ballot box test for Rishi Sunak since because. coming PM, which means us Islanders are forced to ask ourselves a question. Which party do we think deserves our vote? And it's not not a question, right? Because politics feels so consumed by culture warfare, basically detached from the lived day-to-day realities of voters. I just don't want to play anymore. Exactly. I often feel when voting, I just have to pick the lesser of two evils. But civic participation is important, right? We owe it to ourselves.

we owe it to one another, so it's on a principle of fighting polarization that today's episode is founded. Now, don't freak out when we tell you what this episode is about. It's on far-right extremism. Not platforming their ideas, though. We're not like, oh, hey, we think white supremacy just needs a voice of its own. This is about learning how to fight the far-right, because in order to do so, we need to know why people are flocking there and how to bring them back. And we need to hear that in their own voices. This is an issue of no small urgency. The rise of the far right is now a familiar beat of the political drum. We've seen these groups elected into governments all over the world, from the United States to Brazil to India,

Italy are literally under a party descended from Mussolini's fascists. It's time for tough questions and tough truths. Why are people turning to the far right? Why are the rest of us failing to stop them? And what does it mean for us all if the extreme becomes mainstream? I'm off to meet some former neo-Nazis, far-right grooming victims and undercover counter-extremists who can shed some light on the political shadows. And I'll see you back in the studio with a very special guest to discuss everything around this media storm. Far-right extremism is now considered a greater domestic threat.

The rise of the rise is a fantastic thing. 25 people have been arrested in Germany on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. Tucker Carlson was like a gateway drug for a conspiracy theory. I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turned the friggin' frogs gay. Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Malinson. And I'm Helena Wadia. This week's investigation.

Radical Thinking. How to fight the far right. Ultra-nationalist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, conspiratorialist. What drives a person to the far right? Today, we will ask those who have been in their grip, being groomed, leading groups, or going undercover. Because if we can't understand those across the divide, we're doomed to drive the wedge only deeper.

So my name's John, and I guess the reason I'm talking is because I'm a former far right member. My name's Sarah, and I'm the mother of the mother. John. A teenage boy groomed and the woman who raised him. John and Sarah spoke to me separately, but their stories belonged together. Oh, John was just, he was a delightful baby, all eight pound, nine ounces of him. I was sort of just a very typical councillor state British working class lad. He was just a cheeky chapie, big personality. The class clown. You know, a life like it is for everyone, it's not always easy. Money can be tired. and times can be tough, but we had each other and we got through it.

When he was 14, things did start to change. One of my friends at the time in school, he was already involved in the far right. One day when he showed me a post on his phone, he said, if you think British soldiers shouldn't be on the streets, share this post. I had an uncle at the time that was struggling really bad mentally. He used to be a soldier. And that was sort of my ticket into this online group. You just saw this really dramatic change.

from being very close and having a lot of fun and laughing to the point where it felt like he absolutely hated me. Now, of course, the group didn't immediately start sending me pictures and people doing Nazi salutes or anything like that. They know if they give you too much too quickly, it's going to scare you off. So it started off very, very slowly. It started off with people messaging me saying, John, the only reason your uncle is struggling so much right now is because we send billions

off in foreign aid. There definitely was a stage where the propaganda started to take a turn where it did start to become much more violent. He was just a boy that I didn't recognise anymore. He looked like my son. He sounded like my son. But it just wasn't my son that was in front of me. As a parent, you try everything from reasoning with them to grounding them.

None of it was successful. Everyone just saw him as a bad lad as a problem. Not everybody gets involved in the far right immediately because they hate somebody of a different skin colour or a different religion. A lot of the times do you have a vulnerability and the far right will manipulate that vulnerability to blame it on these groups.

I think just a lot of the people who are in, you know, are just very hurt people. Parents blame themselves more than anybody. Night after night, I'd replay his life and our life from him being born, thinking, is he anywhere that I went wrong? My physical health suffered. I lost a lot of weight.

You see, lots of parents. with children involved in radicalisation, sadly, separate. Would you say there was anyone to blame for your radicalisation? They would be the far-right recruiters. They look for, you know, vulnerabilities that they can exploit. They look for autism. They know that they give somebody with autism a task. They'll work on that task until it's completed.

They're looking for a lot of these people who, you know, are socially outcast. And as well, they look for quite well-built lads. people that have been involved in the military before. You think that the safe at home, they're in the bedroom online. You think what's the worst thing that can happen? They're not walking the streets. But I never forget one Saturday. He said, I've been to a march, a demo.

And all he'd say to me is there was another one coming up and it was going regardless of what I thought. So I said to John, if you want, we'll drop you off. I said, I'm not coming with you, getting involved in whatever you're doing. I'll go and have a coffee and when you finish. me a ring and I'll pick you up. He spoke to me more in the car that day than he ever had been. He was so excited.

The demonstrations are a massive adrenaline done. That's the only way to describe it. We arrived and we said, right, off you go. And what you didn't know, we went and sat in a bus shelter opposite. So I could see what we're going on. You're going into a town or a city where you know people don't like you. You know you're hating. You've also got a massive police presence.

You know that it's going to be people there to oppose the demo. often in numbers more than those who were attending the demo and it is almost like that feeling of walking behind any lines within minutes my world just came crashing down I watched him start marching and singing racial slurs and the pride on his face was just soul destroying that was the moment when I found out that's when everything kind of yeah changed

it's only afterwards where you get home and you know you sort of wind down for the day you realise how bad some of the things they seem really are. What sort of things? There was one demonstration where there was a young Muslim woman and she sort of had a full berker on. She had no idea that the far out was in town. I remember she had two kids.

I remember she was getting spat out. She was getting bare thrown out of her. Ten plus guys saying these horrifically racist things towards her and the kids. The kids won't be the suicide bombers. I made eye contact with her very, very quickly. Just to see the terror in her eyes, I don't think it's possible for me to forget that look. There's lots of things that I did involve in the far right.

There's people that I hurt that I can't reach out to. I don't know who they are. There's people that I did try to recruit. There was people that I did try to radical out. It is something that I feel immensely kill you of. John, you left the far right through the government-led counter-terrorism program, prevent, and the help of an intervention provider. How did he help you to change your views?

There was around about 20 or so quotes that I had from the Quran at the time. I believed them to be like a declaration of war against British people in Western culture. And all he told me to do is, as simple as this might sound, is he told me to download an app on my phone, which was just a Quran translating into English. And he told me to research the quotes of myself. I researched him that night. And it turns out that all but one of them was completely fake. And the only one that was real was taking out of context.

And at that point, it was like that light bulb above the head, where a reality I've been lied to and when it's 32. You know, as the famous phrase goes, once you've got your eyes open to the truth, it's very hard to be blinded again. I hope prevent both our lives. I know what it's like to carry the weight of the world around on your shoulders, constantly be aggressive and drained all the time,

argue with your family, fallout with your friends. It is awful being in that world. You know, if I can help people get away, I always will do. There's so many parents like me in the same position. please don't judge them. These people are very vulnerable individuals that have just been manipulated by some horrible organisations. A lot of the families are petrified of what's going to happen.

When we're going through that, we need friends. If Johns is a story of underageed grooming, what of the generation above, founders at the forefront of the UK's far right? My name's Darren, Darren Carroll. My father, the grandfather now. And that's me, really. That's about who I am. I could give Darren Carroll many introductions,

founder of the Migs in the 1980s, Luton Towns Hooligan firm, uncle of Tommy Robinson of far right notoriety, ambassador for exit hate UK, or the title that led him there and sits him here today, founding member of the English Defence League. I was a good lad at school, I was a prefect at school, I was an altar boy in church,

didn't have a lot, No more happier than when I was out playing with me mates playing football or with my mum. After its origin in 2009, the EDL swiftly rose to global infamy. They are a notorious right-wing group accused of being violent racist. But intelligence suggests the EDL is essentially made up of football hooligans. I can give you the backstory of where I think it led to from this point. Well, my dad died when I was 12. My mum died very shortly after.

So when I was 13, I started playing up at school when I was. I was getting into a lot of fights, so I got expelled, and then, you know, I've done a big long, lonely walk home, and I got home, and I just sat there for weeks on end, really, trying to think of something to do. I've always been a very passionate person, and my passion in life was my football. I'd be down to my local football club, which is Luton Town Football Club, and I was someone. I was somebody at the football ground. It was at a time when there was a lot of hooliganism going on around the country.

and you saw clearly the thuggery of a group of hooligans who could never have claimed to have come along simply to enjoy the football. There was a lot of violence in the grounds, and indeed I was hurt, you know, punched a few times, etc., even as a kid by older men. Maybe it was my anger and my anger turned to hate. I started a football hooligan firm myself in Luton. There was a lot of social economic issues going on in the town.

People were leaving town. And that brings in its own fears as well. So if I'm going to stay, what's going to become of my future? The thing is that so many people feel these things, what made you take such drastic action that you set in motion one of the fastest rising far-right groups in the country? In 2009, I was going down to sort of welcome the troops home. They had come back from Iraq. There was a demonstration or a protest.

I wasn't expecting that. So it kind of like rooted me to the spot. I felt leaden to bad it. We started a demonstration. And in my mind, it was to welcome the troops back through. I thought 20 people had turned up, but hundreds turned up, hundreds, but it just got out of hand. And it all went wrong. The Home Secretary bandled demonstrations in Luton for three months.

There's probably really no excuses for me at this point. We started a demonstration, Birmingham, and that's when we decided to start the EDL on that particular day. There's the biggest mistake of my life. Why was it the biggest mistake of your life? It was kind of the EDL turned into an anti-Islam thing really, very quickly. Liberties have been taken across a whole nation, and the days of militant Islam walking across our country, unchallenged, are gone. It was just there all of a sudden. You could see organisations, like neo-Nazi organisations, and then the chance went up about Islam and Muslims.

The battle for it was lost. To try and turn it into anything other than that, it was lost. The EDL are now being urgently investigated by various police. various police forces. This thing was like holding onto a team of horses with one rain. There was EDL in every village, town or city. It was like, where's this going to end up? Do you feel responsible?

I feel responsible for people that turned up that were looking for help. There's people looking for friendships, for groups to belong to, and we're turning up thinking, is this the answer? The gravity of like someone looking to you for leadership to give them the answer for their issues in their life that weighs heavy. And I'm looking at them thinking, wow, you think I've got answers to your problems. I haven't. And I kind of never told them that I did, but there are people that do. And that's worrying. Darren, was there a moment that shook you out of it that caused you to turn your back on the movement you helped to start? One of the things that rooted me to the

spot was I was walking in a demonstration in Birmingham. And there was two ladies about my mum's age when she died. And I went to give way, as you do, and they spat in my face. They just said, Nazi scum, get out of Brum. At that stage, I just felt so little about myself. You felt like the ground would open up, me drop into it, and then the pavement sort of cover it back over my head. It was probably the best thing that would happen at that moment for me, you know. I wonder what, let's call her Mao. I wonder what Mao would think or say or do it at this stage, you know. And I know she would have been saying, then first 13 years I raised you. I raised the avoid a prefect time thing.

You should be ashamed of yourself, really. Why not leave all this behind you? Why sit here with me today, reliving it? There is a want of rectifying things. There is that. But there's also more strongly for me is if this is going to happen to me, I know it's happening to others,

and I know there's people that are feeling disenfranchised, polarised, if you like, all those words that I've learned, okay? But if I'm speaking up, I know then that there'd be people that may hear maybe this podcast or my story. It just might stop them. Words break through at different times for people. And that just might be the right time and right moment for them to come off that path.

Today, John, Sarah and Darren work with a group called Exit Hate to guide people away from radicalisation. It was founded in 2011 and since then, demand for its services have escalated tenfold. It's one thing to grasp why people are radicalized, another to understand why more and more are being so. When I was in a weak position or myself not feeling well, I was becoming more prone to starting to believe in some of these ideas. I reached out to Julia Ebner, a counter-terrorism expert whose research has taken her undercover into the darkest fringes of our democracy.

What explanations are there for the apparent rise in far-right extremism? One is the series of crisis that we've faced since the turn of the millennium. We first had the financial crisis in 2008, then we had the so-called migration and refugee crisis in Europe. We also had a kind of security crisis, as I would call it, with the rise of ISIS. Then now we, of course, had the global coronavirus pandemic, as well as the Ukraine war. And then on a completely separate level, there's a radical change. happening on a technological level. Digitalization but also globalization have left many people

feeling like they're being overrun by these developments. Some people fear that they lose their privileges and those identity crises could really be exploited by extremists. Extremist groups are sometimes quicker than politicians or NGOs in offering alternative solutions. They paint the world in black and white and that can be very appealing. extremism today. The really extreme conspiracy myths and radical ideas that I've been looking at for a long time for the last seven years, I've seen them enter the mainstream. It's an invasion of America. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. Now their leader stands in the House of Commons parroting the conspiracy theories of violent

fascists. We spend most of his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy There was a time when the media provided a lot of amplification. They gave a lot of space to this really disfringed community at the time. And now something similar is happening in debates around, for example, trans rights, where we see that it's a hyper-polarizing and a hyper-emotional debate. Have you actually seen those debates being picked up by far-right recruiters? Absolutely. This is one of the main topics where they manage to mobilize new audiences.

It's quite interesting because the trans rights debate has been exploited to the extent that they are using a lot of the narratives that extremists were using in the so-called migration refugee crisis. There were a lot of similarities in terms of the language around pedophilia, painting the trans community as people who would be at risk of exploiting our children. So there's also often this language of our children or our women. that has been successful with female audiences. And of course, extremists have in the last few years noticed that they need more women in a similar way really that Islamist extremists have identified women as key to seem legitimate to help their branding, but also to reproduce, of course. Radicalization is a human story, a story of grievance, hardship and loss.

But so too is it a political story. People are not being radicalized in a vacuum. Their personal grievances are being repackaged as struggles between an us and a them. And who are the thems they're taught to fear and hate? Be it migrant or trans people, it's those that populate our mainstream debate, those used as clickbait. There's been one story sitting in the back of my mind, the terrorist attack that everyone forgot.

Joining me now is guys Iva Bennett, who's in Dover. On the 30th of October 2022, a man threw petrol bombs at an immigration centre in Dover, injuring two. Minutes later, he killed himself. I was able to trace the earliest digital footprint of his back to 2014. And his first tweet on December the 15th was, I love the world. And then the second one, a day later, was it's time to intern all radical Muslims. What led Andrew Leake to attempt mass murder? I went to meet Dr Rajan Basra at King's College London

to retrace the digital footsteps that Leake left behind. So Andy Leake had a Pinterest page and he had seven posts there and one of those was titled Pakistani grooming gangs. I'll read it. It says, we in the UK have a serious problem with Pakistan and Muslim grooming gangs, grown men in packs,

track down white Christian girls to rape. This is part of their culture. These are scum, paedophiles, and they will get what's coming to them. God save the Queen. Here, he's coming out with the typical narrative that was used by the far right in the wake of the Rotherham grooming scandal, but you would also find it in mainstream press. You would find us reported in the Times, on the BBC, in the Daily Mail and elsewhere.

More on that later. We've seen his thoughts on Pakistani grooming gangs, refugees as well. There's clearly a racialised strand here. What else is happening in the news cycle at the time that plays into his apparent radicalisation? The eyes to the right, 312. March 2019, there was a vote in Parliament against a no-deal Brexit. So the eyes have it, the eyes have it. And at the same time, there was also an outage on Facebook and on Instagram.

For Andy Leak, that was a sign. Facebook has committed treason. On the British people, they have blocked Facebook because of the vote that was taken tonight. So this is straight up conspiratorial thinking. Are you aware of a movement that was pushing this narrative? This was actually a mainstream narrative, right? The judges were looking to thwart Brexit, media was looking to thwart Brexit and so on.

He seems to be taken that a step further. Just a few months before the attack, in April 20, He posted a lot more about his personal life. I buried my 41 year old son yesterday. 16 views when I archived it. He's just posting it out into the void, into the ether of the internet. And then he posted another video. I'm dying, but no one will believe me.

We now know that he had stage 3 cancer. I mean, it's difficult not to empathise with him. Bizarrely, he follows those with another one, again, posted on the same night. If you want to be in on the next biggest dating site, contact me. 100 pounds will get you a long way. Something is not quite right with Andy. The year of the attack, Leake's extremism appears to snowball on Twitter. Between May 22 and October the 30th, when he launched this attack and killed himself,

he tweeted 4,271 times. His bio is quite interesting. He calls himself the defender of free speech, protector of women and children. And his location is listed as In the Trenches Waiting. So there's this tweet from June a few months before the attack. He's commenting on a GB news video about the Rwanda asylum plan. Next bank holiday, get to London. Let's bring this to an end.

No more raping of our women and children. This is something a bit more concerning. because now he's actually advocating specific action. And then on the 11th of October, so just a few weeks before the attack, he replied to a tweet that said refugees are, quote, laughing at us. Not for much longer, there is more than one way to skin a cat. Immediately before the attack, he made one tweet, which said, your children will feel the pain,

we will obliterate their Muslim children are now our target, and their disgusting women will be targeted. mothers and sisters is burn alive. This is a red flag. Why are we looking at this today? Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I always hope in the aftermath of an attack, regardless of ideology, that there'd be some kind of a discussion.

It's something that I would hope from the media. And people forgot about the attack almost as soon as it happened. There was almost no commentary afterwards about why did this man do what he did. It's not just a case of someone who was sad and isolated. It's someone that was sad, isolated and framed their difficulties through this lens of an existential crisis between migrants, Muslims and white Britain. The day after the attack, the Home Secretary made a statement saying that there's an invasion of migrants, right? Where's to that effect? The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast.

In many ways, I think media coverage actually falls into the trap. terrorist lay out for us. They want to destroy the nuance, the moderate views, the understanding that could maybe bridge divides. They want us to think in us versus them black and white. And I don't know if that's the way the media is constructed. I don't know if that's because the audience that the media is playing into. You should listen to some media storm and we go into the reasons behind that a lot. That takes us back to the studio. Thanks for sticking around. Welcome back to the studio and to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. Joining us today is the founder and CEO of Exit Hate, a charity dedicated to helping people escape extremist thinking, and for which Sarah, John and Darren, the speakers you heard earlier, are all ambassadors.

But for more than 20 years, he waved a different flag as an organiser for the British far right. Nigel Bramage, when did you become disillusioned from the movement and what led you to set up exit hate UK? I think my journey towards the sort of end of my involvement in the far right. The pinnacle moment for myself was a moment where a gentleman was getting racially abused and attacked. And for me, witnessing that and trying to stop that attack was the moment when I decided that I wanted to. to leave. However, it took me nearly three years to leave because it's, you know, once you're involved in the far right, actually it's very often like a gang. It's very, very difficult to leave, some of the organisations. And then you set up exit hate and is that because of the

difficulties that you experienced leaving and wanting to make it easier for other people to escape? Yeah, in about 2015, I noticed the far right were getting more intense with what they we're doing it was becoming more scary and that was the push that i needed well we're really really glad that you are here speaking today in the capacity that you are because it's no small feat really that you are sitting here today and are able to talk to us on this podcast and obviously what we want to do today is really talk about the mainstream media's role in reporting on far-right extremism and terrorism. And in Matilda's investigation, Julia Ebner warned us that news coverage of extremism has in the past been guilty of inadvertently amplifying the radical messages of terrorists.

Intelligence also warns us that terrorists themselves see journalists as a propaganda tool, you know, because is there such a thing as bad press to movements who's core tactic involves terrorising a society. I want to Nige, do you have any thoughts on how the media kind of can report on these ideologies responsibly without necessarily becoming that vehicle for spreading them? I think that's a really, really good question. And often when we look at news articles, people will talk about the activity or the violence or the impact of it, but don't try and look at the core causes. And most people don't want. up a supporter of Adolf Hitler, there has to be a grooming process to take you from that.

It's no good just talking about, you know, what the individual's done. Let's really try and find out about how that individual got to that stage. I guess a real-life example of that would be the Christchurch mosque 2019 attack in New Zealand when Brenton Tarrant, an Australian far-right extremist, went on a killing spree and murdered 51 Muslims. And he tried to take control of the media narrative that would follow by writing this manifesto that detailed his political awakening, as he called it, rather than his radicalization, as we'd called it. And I'm sensing what you're saying, Nigel, is actually what a responsible media should do is rather than perpetrating that story, which could have really harmful ideological consequences, analyzing his actual

background in the way that the people we interviewed, you know, Darren and John, they tell the story of their radicalization through personal and social factors rather than ideological ones. And that's really not what the media did. In this case, I mean, this is a really good example of how the media actually played into the propaganda game that Tarrant was playing. And brace yourselves, because this is quite unbelievable, but the Daily Mail actually hyperlinked to his manifesto in their report so that readers could download it directly from the website.

Yeah, I mean, there was a backlash. They removed it. They said it was a mistake. But as if the Daily Mail would ever accidentally hyperlinked to ISIS propaganda. It's just mind-blowing. That's really shocking. But actually, it kind of shows us that really have we come that far? Because if you remember in the case of Anders Breivik,

who carried out the 2011 Norway attacks in which 77 people were killed, you know, he said his main motive for the attacks was to publicize his manifesto. So he had written this long manifest. which was filled with, you know, very extreme right-wing neo-Nazi ideas and copied a lot from other right-wing terrorists. And he wanted that to be public. And what happened? CNN, the BBC, Reuters, they printed quite a lot of it. I think it caters to our natural desire to find answers to like, why did this happen? But in seeking those answers, we often forget that these manifestos aren't just a confession of the killer's actions and motives. They are literally

propaganda and should be called out for that instead of just amplifying a terrorist message in the search for answers. The context, as you said, Nige, needs to be included. Yeah, definitely. And most sort of far or activists will sort of look at, you know, the mainstream media as a simple propaganda tool. You know, you want to make sure that you get your name of your organisation into the newspaper on a television programme because then it doesn't matter where you search for your information, if you've got a name of an organisation, you can get to an extremist website within seconds. In my day, it was newspaper and it was really time-consuming. So, whereas it took me 10 years to go from somebody who believed in elections and politics

and leaflet and all that type of stuff, to embracing sort of violence after 10 years of involvement, you know, now we've got young people who we speak to who are becoming radicalised and sort of pro-violence within months. And that's terrifying if we're looking at this realistic way. Yeah, it is. And when you put it like that and you show the scale of it, I suppose that brings up the other risk on the flip side that the media might sometimes downplay or underestimate the threat posed by far right ideology.

One of the questions that Rajan Basra, another interviewee, raised with me about the Migrant Center attack was whether police and the press would have hesitated to call it a terrorist attack if the attacker had been clearly Islamist rather than white nationalist or culturally nationalist. And a review of US print news

found that the word terrorism was five times more likely to be used in articles about Muslim terrorists than articles about non-Muslim ones, which makes me wonder whether you think the media sometimes underestimates the threat of far-right extremism. I think the thing is today a lot of organisations, the government, the police, have all sort of stepped up and actually, you know, because of increased training, because of increased awareness

and now actually take the far-right threat really seriously. And I think that's, you know, something to be applauded. But do you think the media, especially the mainstream media, has kind of caught up with that because I still think that because the mainstream media is still kind of so obsessed with this anti-immigrant and particularly anti-Muslim narrative, whether they're promoting it or calling it out, I think that dominates the media and it almost means that far-right extremists kind of slip under the radar a bit in the media. I think what happens is people simply don't understand what far-right extremism or terrorism is and we have to call it out for what it is.

if somebody commits an acts of violence to influence a change in society, you know, and that's a bait-creating fear, then that's terrorism. And I think it's often when I speak to journalists and give them, you know, the insight as into what's happening in today's world in the extreme right-wing world, they're absolutely flabbergasted because they simply see as like, you know, yes, there's some violent thugs or they may go out and march on a Saturday, but is it really a threat? You know, some of these people are willing to give their lives. And if that's where they're at, then we've got to really get serious.

So what do you think the key questions or conversations are that the media should be having when they're reporting on violent extremism? I think they definitely need to look at the individual. What has been their lead up to this? Because there has to be a leader. You know, have they tried to be active with mainstream media? Have they written letters in and been ignored? have they tried to go on a podcast and then been silenced because all that leads to frustration

and the more frustrated and the more sort of you feel that you're voiceless, eventually you do get to a point where we should think, well, actually, if you're not going to listen to me, then you're going to have a violent reaction because that's the only outlet then many of these individuals have. And I think mainstream media has a lot of responsibility. I suppose one counter-argument some people would give to that, or a criticism you'd hear is, oh, but, you know, if you humanize the perpetrator too much or you blame it on mental health rather than ideology, you risk condoning it or making excuses.

And I think I've seen that it expressed as a double standard because often, you know, white nationalist terrorists will be given more of a human narrative than is the misterrorists when that's interrogated, which isn't to say that, you know, we should be doing less of that. maybe we should just be doing more of it for is the misterrorist. I suppose, yeah, I wonder what your response to that is. I think my response to that would be, you know, we've worked with over 600 people now since exit's been going and in only one case, if I ever heard one individual say that their experience in the far right was positive, many of these people getting involved are doing so because they have suffered sexual misuse and they've been abused. You've got others

who have suffered bereavement, domestic violence, you know, the list goes on, and then often many of these people are looking for a community, whereas they can not only belong, but they can be supported, and what we need to do is get people back into society. And, you know, one of the comments we talk about is many of those who get involved in any form of extremism, you know, they're not monsters, in many cases they are victims, and we have to look at that. And extremists do have a human face, you know what I mean? All of us are individuals and we've got to look at the individual and not the extremist

because that's the way you destroy the ideology, myself and others. Many of the reasons we became like national socialists or Nazis, whichever term you want to use, it's because everybody kept calling me a Nazi or a racist. You know, I joined the far right to stop the IRA and terrorism. I wasn't a racist, you know, I didn't give a monkeys about anybody's religion or colour, but the more you kept calling me a racist and a Nazi, eventually I just thought, do you know what, I'm going to take the label because it's going to stop the arguments.

And the minute I said, well, yeah, actually, I'll support Hitler when I'm a Nazi, nobody come back with me or anything. And I just thought, why didn't I do this years ago? Because it literally just stopped the left wing in its tracks because they didn't have anything more abusive to call me. And I think it's really dangerous to use these terms because you're pushing people to the next level. So I went from an anti-IRA activist who hated terrorism and extremism

to becoming a racist, to then becoming a Nazi, not through an embrace of the ideology. It was because anti-racists and left-wing individuals kept calling me that, and I just thought, I'm going to embrace it now. Actually, I'm really glad that you are bringing this all up because, you know, on Media Storm and particularly because, you know, we work with minority groups, often the criticism tends to be leveled against right-wing media and actually the left-wing media and the left-wing political party culture as well

is definitely culpable in the polarisation of society that we're seeing. So it would be great to talk about what the left could be doing better. And I've heard from a lot of forms I've interviewed this idea that people feel excluded from the conversation or spoken down to, you know, a common theme was patriotism and people resented that patriotism was being or is being equated with racism or colonialism and that they weren't allowed to be proud to be British. Yeah, I think that when people talk about patriotism, we'll go out into the communities and talk about, well, actually, patriotism, real patriotism, is about place, not race, and it doesn't matter, you know, where you come from, whether you were born in the UK or

have come from another country. You know, you can embrace things like St. George because St. George was the patron saint of not just England, but Palestine, Syria, Ethiopia. So if we do it properly, we can challenge the far right. You know, if you look back to 1939, if you were a patriot, you stood against the far right. They didn't like stand with it.

You know, many, many servicemen come from lots of different ethnicities and religion. And if we are, you know, giving the far right the flag, then we're actually failing them on that. You know what? I actually got goosebumps when you're talking about the flag of St. George. Maybe I'm a sucker, but it does show how powerful symbols can be. Yeah, especially when you look at, you know, you look at things like the lionesses, things like that.

That is something to be really proud of. That's the way, one of the ways we destroy the far right. And I think from a left-wing political perspective, quite often when times are tough, you know what I mean, and people are struggling with bills and everything like that, the extreme is the right wing always grows. And I think what we need from a left-wing political perspective is then to look at those human sort of, you know, issues

and explain actually, you know, if there was, you know, an increasing wage is if bills were a little bit cheaper, then that would actually solve many of the problems for the people going to the far right because it's that day-to-day issue. You know, if somebody lives in a bed seat and they've got mould on the walls and, you know, they've got a couple of children and the far right turn up and start talking about we're going to build five million new homes when we get into power. You might become supportive of the idea. It's not because you support the far right, but the message is really attractive.

You know, slandering and sort of calling people's names doesn't work. We've got to offer those alternatives. And I think the left wing press are really well placed. to get that message into our, you know, working-class communities who often do feel abandoned. It's interesting how you spoke about the most disadvantaged in our society because, you know, on media store, we talk about a lot about how politicians and the mainstream media

often the right-wing mainstream media are guilty of stirring up these kind of culture wars that polarised society and demonise the most disadvantaged in our society, like refugees or transgender people. And there's something ironic about the fact that the people vulnerable to radicalisation are often socially, culturally or economically disadvantaged in much the same way as those groups. So I wonder in your work at exit hate, have you and others found that you often have a lot of shared grievances

with the people that they were once taught to demonise? Yeah, and not only myself, but others as well, quite often will have conversations with people from many different communities, not only about the grievances that we all have, but also as well about shared values, whether it's education, having a nice home, you know, bringing your children up in the right way and sort of making sure that they have a great sort of future. And then when you get to learn about everybody's shared values, you're going, why am I at war with you? And then it's starting to think, well, actually, the extremists were pushing a view. I've got a view from mainstream media of why I should be against different people. That just escalates the problem. And after we'll get extremists to sit down with Muslim community or sort of, you know, Jewish community, see community. And, you know, in a common safe area where there's lots of other people around, we'll have honest conversations. And, you know, over food, you get to see the person as an individual. And, you know,

You know, it sounds a bit corny, but literally love kills height. And I think that's just such a powerful thing as we move forward. Time now to take a look at recent headlines on this topic. A couple of weeks ago, the leader of the far-right Britain first group, Paul Golding, posted a video on Twitter. He claimed this video showed migrants in Calais throwing rocks on the motorway in an attempt to block the road so they could stow away in lorries and be smuggled into Britain. This was a complete lie. The video was actually taken during a protest in Israel four years ago

after an Ethiopian man died at the hands of Israeli police. But Golding's tweet, it got over 200,000 views. And it's not even the first time that this video has gone viral. In 2019, a French far-right politician posted the same video with the same lie and it went even more viral back then. It was also fact-checked back then and found to be false. But this story, it just shows us how resistant fake news can be and how it just has a way of coming back around.

Now, none of this was covered by the mainstream media in the UK who are arguably the best equipped to combat this kind of malicious fake news, which begs the question, how important is it for the media to correct misinformation from far-right propagandis and what are the best ways that they could do this? Nigel, did you see this story? Yeah, it's regurgitated again and again and again. But because it's remarketed and it's repackaged and sent out,

then people who didn't see it the first time, and because they have a loyalty to these organisations, will take it as gospel. Any media company that can that actually can challenge this is absolutely critical. Show the two examples, and that way then we're sowing seeds of day. And also as well, doing a non-judgment or way, do it on the facts. So you're not sort of just slanding them off because you don't agree with their opinions. Prove that they're lying.

And, you know, nobody likes being lied to. And if we prove that enough times, then again, you're weak in that attractiveness of extremism. I looked at the comment section of the Daily Mail when they reported on the Andy Leak bombing and a scary number of commenters. and maybe some of them were bots were calling this man a hero. And I feel as though, you know, papers need to have an awareness of who their audience is and the power that they have to actually combat extremism and live up to that responsibility. We have to look at the comments because many, many far activists will actually highlight

how this is a story, you know, go there and make as many comments as possible. Because people will look at the story and they go, oh, let's have a look. look at what's being said. And if you see 200 people with the same opinion as you, you then don't feel alone. You might think it's Joe Public, whereas actually it's 200 political activists from one organisation who have just simply gone on there and tried to reinforce this opinion. And, you know, it's a trick of the trade that the far right do all the while because it reinforces that opinion and that sort of viewpoints. We also want to talk about some of the political headlines that have dominated news cycles over the past few weeks.

We've seen both the government and the opposition accused of using racism for political gain, specifically of demonising South Asian men, Pakistani men as child molesters. And this feeds into this stereotype of Pakistani grooming gangs that, as we've learned this episode, is one of the far. rights most mobilizing topics. For the government, it was a live interview on Sky News and the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, singled out British Pakistani men as child sexual groomers, saying they, quote, hold cultural values at odds with British values, and alleging they target, quote, vulnerable white English girls. She then reaffirmed this in a newspaper column, which claimed perpetrators were, quote, almost all British Pakistani men.

And it's important to state here that there's no evidence of that claim. The Home Office's own investigation in 2020 concluded that it was impossible to establish any patterns based on ethnicity and offending. Helena, why don't you tell us what happened, you know, across the political playing field on the left? Right. So on the other side of the political battleground, Labour released a series of attack ads that could be said to have played into the exact same stereotype. They shared a picture of Rishi Tuna's face with the title,

do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn't. The small print underneath the photo includes data about convicted perpetrators avoiding prison. Whether or not that's directly to do with Rishi Sunak is another point entirely. But the way the whole ad is designed means that there is a conversation to be had about our first ever British Indian Prime Minister with the words sexually assaulting children written all over his face. Nigel, do you think this kind of racialised political messaging

will be used by far-right recruiters on both sides? Yeah, I think this is a really, really difficult subject to cover it, and this is a subject we discuss, like, in depth within our training. We've got to be honest and say, you know, there is a minority, and I repeat, a tiny minority of Pakistani Muslim men who do green white English girls. And if we do not have that conversation, then we're opening the door to the far right. However, what we've also got to look at is actually the majority of paedophiles within this country are white and British, yet nobody slanders and targets the whole white British community as groomers or paedophiles.

And a few weeks ago, we highlighted a story of 21 white paedophiles in the West Midlands, who basically committed some terrible acts. we monitored every single far-right site and not one far-right website covered it. And we actually said in the story, you know, I wonder what the far-wrought will say about this, will they mention it? And they never even mentioned it once. So they literally pick and choose what they want to do. They're not there to protect children. You know what I mean?

They literally are using the issues of rain grooming for their own political agenda. Nigel, you said that so perfectly. And then there's just one thing that I have to, I just have to bring up and this is going to sound bizarre because I didn't think that I would, you know, be fighting this fight. But I did an investigation on Media Storm earlier into paedophilia and what it means and how there's actually quite a large number of people who have paedophilia as a clinical disorder and never act on it. And we confuse the word paedophile and child molesting. but actually a lot of people who abuse children aren't paedophilic. And so everything is right in terms of how we need to correct our conversation around child abuse and child molesting.

But I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I didn't just point out to listeners that actually paedophilia is a clinical disorder. And in our media, everywhere in our conversation, we confuse it for child abuse and child molesting. And there's a lot of people who spend their whole life. trying to get through the day with a disorder that they don't want to have and they will never, ever act on. So they just have to say that. Before we wrap up, Nigel, will you just say to any listeners now who may know someone at

risk of radicalisation or anyone who may be susceptible themselves, who they can turn to for non-judgmental help and support? Brilliant. Thank you. If I'm honest, I'm going to start with the main thing is, you're not alone. People actually care and they want to give you support. Give yourself a second chance. Decide that being involved in any form of extremism is wrong and actually it's going to harm you and also as well others. So reach out and get support and we don't care whether somebody comes to exit height or heads off to prevent or act early. You know, just go out there and get support but if you're a family member or a friend and you know you've got somebody you really care

about who is talking about an extremist narrative don't walk away from them you know listen to what they're saying listen to why they're angry and simply signpost them open the door so they know that they have got that support because if you shut down the door the only place they're going to go is to extremist and just from a personal point of view you know it must at exit, we really appreciate the fact that you folks have reached out to us, you know, asked us for our opinion. It's really important because there is a solution, but it's going to take all of us to get there. So thank you so much for the invite. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with a bonus episode on gynecological health as part of the Eva Peels get

lippy day to get us chatting about all things vaginas. And our next Media Storm investigation, which looks at a year on from the exclusion of the protection of migrant women in the domestic abuse bill, will be out the following week on the 18th of May. Follow MediaStorm wherever you get your podcast so that you can get access to new episodes as soon as they drop. If you like what you hear, share this episode with someone and leave us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps more people discover the podcast and our aim is to have as many people as possible hear these voices. You can also follow us on social media, at Matilda Mal at Helena Wadia and follow the show via at MediaStorm pod.

Get in touch and let us know what you'd like us to cover and who you'd like us to speak to. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helen Awadia and Matilda Mallinson. It came from the House of the Guilty Feminist and it's part of the A-Cast creator network. The music is by Samfire.