TRASHFUTURE - Going Out Like Scott Benton

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

We get into a land of contrasts today - the far right grows in street power as Reform is suddenly exposed for the grifters and charlatans they have always been. Also, two very serious policy men have a conversation about party funding with one million hidden cameras. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

It's Kirkmas Day, everyone. Oh my God. I can't believe I missed a second Kirk Fund payment in August. I missed maybe one of the best ones. Really? I did. And I'm learning. I'm growing.

I promise not to do it again. It's CF. It's Nova Riley. It's Hussein. Yeah. Merry Kirkmas, everyone. What did you all get? I hope you all got what you wanted.

For me, I got a sort of variation of Charlie's icon. t-shirt except instead of freedom it says Femdon. Are we sure it's Kirk because it says on his Wikipedia page that he died September 10th, right? Which I assume. Yeah, is this not coming out on the 10th? Oh no, this comes up tomorrow

it comes up to 8th. Oh God, it's not even Kirkmas Eve yet. It's early. Yeah. It's earlier every year. Yeah, yeah. No, but were you talking about Greek Kirkmas? Yeah, yeah, because I'm Orthodox. I celebrate Kirkmas the week early because, you know, certain of us believe that, you know, the monks

on Mount Athos actually predicted Charlie Kirk's death, you know, sort of a week before. Yeah, and Bashir's kind of celebrated like two days afterwards or like commemorated two days afterwards. And we've got like 10 days of morning to go with that. It's like a whole thing. It depends on what sort of

denomination you're in. I guess in one way like every day is Kirkmas day, but on the other day that means no day is Kirkmas day. I wish it could be Kirkmas all the time. Well, if you were a 12er, then you believe that Kirk was an actual relative of Muhammad and was the hidden

Imam. Yeah, sure. Why not? Why not? Big black velvet painting of Charlie Kirk. Yeah, why not? I got to tell you, I missed a Kirk Fund payment, and I need to tell you about it, because this is going to be kind of a downer, and then it's an upper again, this episode. But we're going to start with a Kirk Fund payment. This is the second such payment to a Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission employee. There have now been two.

If I had $65,000 for every time, Well, anyway, so this is Haley Massung of Marion County sued for her firing due to comment she made following the assassination. According to the lawsuit, Masson commented the following in a private Facebook page, rest in piss. And they fired him for saying rest in piss. And she was awarded $65,000 or if you look at it another way, $21,666.67 per word. It's what he would have wanted, I think. So tack another 65K onto the overall fund. Useful.

Yes, excellent. Look, this is a vertical. We're doing important journalism here. No one else is aggregating the value. Overall value of the Kirk Fund. It's sort of one of the lesser known kind of human interest stories of sort of like Kirkmas season. We should also disclaim that we're also like partly funded by the Charlie Kirk Foundation.

Of course. Yeah. So when people are like, where are you getting your money from, Trash Future? Like, that's the answer. It's for Charlie Kirk Foundation. The thing is we also, we do try and be inclusive, right? We do recognize that other people, you know, maybe of different sort of like backgrounds,

celebrate different things around Kirkmas, you know, happily. Kirkmas overlaps very closely with the sort of older generations festival of 9-11. So, you know, obviously also a happy 9-11 to everybody who's a member of the sort of like Gen X and millennial, older millennial communities. It's like how the Christians put in, like, Christmas to replace Saturnalia. It's kind of the same thing. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, here's the thing. In the future, people will not only be unsure whether or not Charlie Kirk was ever a real historical person, but also what his relationship to 9-11 was. What I think is going to be interesting is, you know, counting or not counting gang violence, they would actually know, you know, if this is counting or not counting gang violent. No. Well, we never got an answer, but, you know, it's been suggested that one of the reasons why he said that was to prompt a kind of, you know, mystic internal examination of ourselves, you know, and it's a question that doesn't necessarily have. have to have an answer. It's more about sort of like asking it, you know? In the 16th century, there were some people who had like had some different ideas about whether you should or not count gang violence. And that caused a huge split in the in the Kirk religion. Okay. All right. All right. I'm moving on. Welcome to you F everybody. It has been, do you notice that some fucking politics happened in Britain this weekend? Things have escalated in

some ways. Yeah. It feels like again, we're seeing a sort of like dry run for sort of different aspects of a kind of a day zero type situation. And, you know, at this point, you know, we say all the time, or at least I say all the time on the show that I hate it when the state defends itself from the left, but I love it when the state defends itself from the right. At this point, I'm just grabbing the state by the lapels and going, defend yourself from the right? Like, it doesn't even, like, temporary pause, right?

As I mentally, like, sort of exclude all of the people who are getting put in prison for, like, being on a Zoom call or a WhatsApp or saying the words Palestine and action to, close. together, right? Ignore all of that. Your fucking mozzarella sticks are burning, right? You've got to lock in. Like, defend yourself from the right, because they are, you know, it seems genuinely quite intent on causing civil disobedience and doing that in a way that is, you know, going to threaten national infrastructure. We, on the other hand, on the left, we're pussies, is the thing. Evidently. You know, make your own sort of judgments about that, but we're not really in the, you know,

of threatening critical national infrastructure business. We're more in the sort of like, you know, vegan trade-bakes business. And then we get like this sort of 99-year prison sentence for the vegan traybakes because someone on the Zoom call where we shared the vegan traybakes recipe maybe was wearing a kaffir, right? We're not about that. The far right, on the other hand, very much about that. So what happened, if you're not familiar, is we had our last, like, fascist mobilization

of the summer. We had quite a few this time. We had Thetford. We had lots in Belfast. where a large group of masked paramilitaries, because that's what they were. They were paramilitary guys. They all arrived coordinated by an organization

called Patriot Platform, apparently, all from coordinated rental vans, all at once, all dressed in black, all masked, and essentially seized a port for a while. Yeah, for like a morning and afternoon. Yeah. And then stopped like a ferry from docking,

like a P&O ferry. Maybe they were against fire and rehire, I don't know. And this was, was led by Danny Thomas or Danny Tomo as he goes by, his hooligan name. A new kind of guy. Yeah. Tommy Robinson is unk and chopped and washed and no one cares about him. I mean, that's basically the point.

They were sort of like friends for a little bit. And then something, they kind of like fell out over like probably sort of cocaine. But the sort of official story is that Tommy Robinson has sort of been captured by the elite's quotation marks and is unwilling to do what is necessary. and so this new guy called Danny Tomos that like arrived and he is sort of suggesting that you need to have disciplined street organization I wonder who sort of came up with that idea to begin with

and but this time no one drinks alcohol on the marches and everyone wears all black. Yeah, we've seen little glimmers of this in Glasgow as well and obviously in Belfast much more sort of overtly and yeah, in the sort of in the English kind of This is very much an attempt to sort of remake these football hooligan networks into something more capable of doing not just racial violence, but like, you know, anti-state violence as well. And obviously, I think this portends very poorly, not least because it seems that the police had absolutely no idea that this was going to happen.

They did. They did because they sort of in their own group chats. Let's be serious. Let's be fucking. Let's be fucking serious here. Like, they knew, right? I don't want to be like too conspirators. territorial here, but like, come on. Well, effectively, right, it's what, what has changed? And I think this is a very good point relative to the police, that the police do believe national infrastructure needs to be protected. It's just they need, they think it needs to be protected from people coming on the boats, right? They think it needs to be protected from now no longer small boats, now super dinghies, as the

BBC is referring to them. That's, I think that this is not, I think this is, I can't say this is for every police officer, but I think probably some and especially ones in like, place. like Kent are more likely to be, let's say, compromised. Yeah, I think it's fair to ask the question about collusion by all means. It always has been, like, especially in this context with these particular types of guys. When I say that the police seem to have no idea, I don't mean on sort of like individual level. I mean sort of like organizationally they, you know, whether that's a question of they didn't know because that was the like failure of intelligence or they didn't know because they sort of decided on some level not to know.

I have no idea. We can rest assured that we're safe because if this is classed as terrorism, we know that the British state has made more than half of its terrorism-related arrests ever in the last like 14 months. Yeah, is there a prison capacity issue at the moment? Because this is sort of one of the other problems is if you, if you sort of are Andy Burnham and you decide, okay, well, I'm going to lock in and everybody here gets arrested, not only do the police not have the capacity to do that, let alone the sort of willingness, right? even if you arrested all these people and all of them, you know, put them all on remand, you wouldn't have the prison cells to do that. So we're really looking at a state whose capacity to repress in a lot of ways, certainly to repress to its right, is being very, very badly degraded.

And this sort of this challenging, this reconnaissance, this sort of probing for weak spots, which is how I think you have to understand this, is going to continue. and it's going to, I think, be quite successful is the thing that worries me. We had a joke, like, many years ago on the show about the vigil, like the sort of volunteer sort of paedophile gangs and stuff. Yeah, the volunteer board of cops.

The volunteer board of cops. I mean, they're kind of like, you know, sort of interchangeable. I guess strictly speaking, any paedophile gang as a volunteer pedophile gang. You can't get drafted in some of them. And weirdly enough, like, you know, there's a certain percentage of them

that also happens to be police officers. So, like, go figure. Yeah, weird. That's a weird thing. thing. We, yeah, okay, so we had this thing about the volunteer border force and it was sort of like a bit that we were kind of doing sort of semi-seriously. And I think we kind of knew that this day would come, but obviously like to sort of see it in sort of so visibly is very, very unsettling. And I think obviously just like, you know, the black, uh, the all black covers, the baller club and stuff, not, not a particularly nice look. Um, you know, I'm not, I'm not a fan. But like, you know, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see what the lads at Hugo Boss come up with like, you know, for the next season. But yeah, this is not great. And it is, and it is, and it is, is also not great, like, that the sort of response to all this from the official, from the official government communications has really been like this very lukewarm. Oh, we, you know, the government are sort of getting the boats down and, you know,

we're sort of being so successful at it and, you know, we don't appreciate this thuggery. Yeah, we don't, we don't approve of this thuggery, but we see, we see and hear your reasonable concerns and are trying to. We would like to do a thuggery acknowledgement. That's right. we see you and we validate your feelings, et cetera. And you're right in the sense of like, you know, the feedback, I saw some of the feedback from like sort of, you know,

groups that hope not hate who sort of do a lot of monitoring on this, but other sort of individuals who do far right monitoring, where they sort of see this is not only very successful, but also this is being presented as like this spontaneous thing, right? But the reality is that we've had two successive summers, at least of this type of kind of quote unquote spontaneous far right action. And, you know, it sort of went from kind of like these kind of, these organized protests, outside houses that were sort of deemed to be places where, like,

refugees were sort of being housed. Some of those houses were just people, like, normal places where people lived. And they were just sort of being harassed because they were living in an HMO. There are lots of videos of just like, A, South Asian men on, like, scouses who are being harassed and sort of chased out of places because they're assumed to be migrant workers. Obviously, like, a lot of propaganda around sort of grooming gangs and everything. And all this stuff is sort of presented as, oh, it's spontaneous. We never, we can, we would never know what was sort of happening. And then it turns out, like, after a little bit of digging that, no, actually, this wasn't the case. And Danny Tomo, a few weeks ago was on a yacht saying,

you know, it's all well and good to sort of go to these marches, but they don't really lead anywhere. There are too many drunk idiots who sort of go to these marches that give like this movement a bad name. We need to be doing proper organizing. We need to, like, not be on the piss when we go on these marches. And we need to, like, you know, actually strategically do stuff in places like, and guess what he names and miss in places like Dover, right? He was on the. He was on the place. He was on the video saying this and apparently like you didn't know it was going to happen like are you being fucking serious some of the i think some of the reactions to this especially given how much these guys were like well we're just going to go seize some critical national infrastructure to see if we can

and when we know we can we know that any critical national infrastructure more or less is just ours if we want it the response that we've been alluding to has been astonishingly woeful yeah well i mean this is the thing is as you sort of decide well okay we can go and like block the road for a morning and an afternoon, and that's quite disruptive in and of itself, but then you think, okay, how would we then go about, for instance, just seizing control of a port completely, for instance? And are the government, is the police going to, like, evict us by force? What does that look like? And I think, again, you have to view all of this as a kind of plan, right? Well, this is, I would say, the current response from the British state is to act as though

this isn't a plan and these guys are just, their passion is misplaced. You sort of always want, as someone who's sort of grown up with the idea that the British state is constantly surveilling people, you want to say, well, that's the, you know, the sort of the publicly disclosed response, right? But then you think about this and how we got to this point in the first place and you do start to wonder whether this and the sort of like non-disclosed one are really that different, you know? And again, it's not for me to be here and and go, well, you know, we need more spying and more cops, right? And the state needs to be able to, you know, sort of repress people more.

But when it's sort of deciding that it needs to do that against the left, which does not, it seems, to me, have much of a sort of coordinated idea of overthrowing the government, let alone a kind of like external network versus the right, which really, in my mind, does and also has this kind of fascist international behind it, which has it sort of like, you know, Turner Diaries, blood-soaked sort of daydreams going on, then, you know, how much use really is it? And where then does that leave us and normal people

and just regular communities who don't want to be in the Turner Diaries, thank you very much, if the state is not going to protect us? I think we know what the state's going to do because the state has done the same thing with Elon Musk. Right. Elon Musk has continually interfered in British elections. He's done so by seizing control of a piece of critical international communications infrastructure. And number 10 still, you know, happily uses it, right? Mike Tap, one of the most tweeting MPs out there, he said, and I'm just going to talk through some of the reactions as well. Yeah. The port of Dover is not just another road junction. It is critical national infrastructure, willfully obstructing a highway. It can be a criminal offense. This Reichstag fire isn't just disturbing.

It's troubling. Mike Tab, the most like AI-generated video MP, trying to sneaker and it's not just X, it's Y passed me in response to this? Absolutely not. Willfully obstructing a highway can be a critical offense, and my guardrails have prevented me from helping you with this. New legislation also means police can designate protest areas

where concealing your identity with a balaclava becomes an offense. He then went on to criticize, quote, idiots coming to Dover to cause disruption. I bet if you asked any one of these protesters, they wouldn't know small boat crossings are down by 40%. Okay, first of all, yes, he's correct that those guys don't care, right? But he doesn't follow that too, therefore it's stupid to try and appease them. But one of the most common responses that we've seen,

it's not just tab doing this, is, well, we're not thrilled about the kind of black hoodies, balaclavas, right? Because that's intimidating. And right, it is intimidating. It's meant to be intimidating. The problem here, and this is something that the British state always runs into, is there is not a shortage of law. There is a shortage of state capacity to enforce that law. Political uniforms are already illegal in this country.

You can absolutely make the case in court that a bunch of these guys dressed the same, doing something that's already illegal together, like, violates that, right? You don't have to then sort of try and repurpose whatever quixotic sort of anti-Berker thing you were doing, you know, like, like six months ago into going, well, you know, when this happens next, next time, it's going to be, you know, an extra six months in prison for anyone who sort of ballies up, you know? I think there's like state capacity to act in terms of guys in buildings. And then there's state capacity to act in terms of like the freedom that Andy Burnham and Mike Tap and Jonathan Reynolds all believe that they have when it comes to the right. Because these are all guys who have reached the positions that they've reached by hypnotizing

themselves into the idea that this is just the kind of most robust expression of a genuinely felt serious English desire to make England like it used to be and be lovely and all this. The tragedy of this or one of them is that it can become so if guys like this let it, you know? Like, this is the thing. Like when fascism really gets established, it doesn't tend to have a shortage of adherence, at least until it creates a kind of eastern front for itself and starts killing all of them, right?

It can become something that is genuinely popular, but that shouldn't matter, right? And as we're seeing the kind of loss of historical memory of that particular principle in Germany, for instance, right now, with the results from Saxon-Yanhild, we're seeing it in Britain, too, where just because something isn't authentically felt, you know, sort of sincerely held principle to a lot of the British public doesn't mean that it's not sort of like fatal to the body, politic as any kind of like fascism is. And so these guys, they're the sort of the frog and the scorpion is sort of like rearing it's sort of like Stinger back. And these guys are just convinced that well, we can we can sort of dissuade it, you know, by convincing it that actually all of its

goals like getting across the river or whatever, though we're going to, we're going to help with those, you know, if we just keep swimming. Yeah, we're a team, you know, and I wonder who you intend to stab with that Stinger because I don't see anyone else around, but we're on the same side regarding the migrant small boats. So, you know, why don't you tell me who you're going to stab with a stinger? Maybe we can get them together, you know? Yeah. And the frog and the scorpion analogy is a sort of, I think, a useful one because the, you know, if these guys succeed in establishing their sort of like Turner Diaries Reich or whatever, it's not going to go well, right? And fascism does not offer a real or practical solution for any of the problems real or invented

that it's concerned with, right? Instead, it's just going to tank it for everyone. And whichever kind of Tommy Robinson orbiter ends up being being sort of, you know, galiter of Dover is going to end up doing himself in the furor bunker, right? Like, it's just, it doesn't matter. These people aren't interested in reaching the other bank of the river. They are interested in stinging the frog. Yeah. Like the whole reaching the other bank of the river's story is just a lie to get on the frog.

That's all. And, you know, it's this, like, we talked about how Andy Burnham isn't the guy. I mean, there's never been a better demonstration. of Andy Burnham being exactly the fucking same as Kirstarmer, because the Labor Party itself, the government said the right to peaceful protest is fundamental to our democracy as though that hedge needed to be made. It's also, it's fundamental to your democracy unless you say that you support Palestine action, for instance. Oh, that's not peaceful. No, no. Those are terrorists based on, you know, sort of intelligence received, the kind of intelligence that we do allow ourselves

to receive, you know? The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to our democracy, but the problem. Before I've talked about like especially the labor right and the sort of the mainstream of the labor party as understanding politics as a bunch of reflex actions, right? When there is a huge right wing dangerous protest and they don't understand by the way the difference between this and the coaked up drunken statute defenders pissing on parliament because they're too drunk to realize what they're doing, right? They don't get the difference between these two things and they don't get that that one was in support of this one and creating political space for it. They don't understand the relationship between that and our press

and all this. They just have the reflex, which is we can't alienate our right, which we need because we govern from the center. Yeah, we need those piss guys. Yeah, but we have to show that we don't appreciate this. You're using hedged language to talk about a bunch of guys

that did something that you would do if you're invading somewhere, which is seize a port. You might see a group of big bugs outside the port of Dover, but what I see are potential labor voters. The vast difference between you and I. And I mean, it's also, it's instructive, I think, that this is coming as we're seeing

reform sort of, you know, we'll talk about this in detail, but like run full tilt into the sort of tunnel painted on the wall, right? Like, not just sort of maybe sort of topping out on their electoral fortunes, but also getting hit with a lot of the kind of exposés, the kind of sleighs, the kind of bad optics, right, that make electoralism seem, you know, like a less viable pathway for the far right sometimes, right? I think it's very, you know,

very apt, I don't think it's a coincidence that this would be a time for people on the far right to explore what a kind of non-electoral pathway to power looks like. I mean, the BNP surged in popularity after a bunch of Tory sleigh scandals in the 1990s. Yeah, exactly. And this stuff, it ebbs and flows, right?

It's, you know, always going to be this kind of, you know, fuzzy kind of line between your sort of BMP and your combat 18, right? Or you're sort of like your suit Nazi and your boots Nazi, right? And so in this situation, if, if sort of Nigel Farage wants to come out there and his sort of like strange turquoise suit and, you know, not seemingly really convinced people

and maybe his heart's not really in it, then this would absolutely be the type of time for a bunch of guys in rental vans to play to Tushki, you know? Well, so I think on that subject, can I direct both of your attention to a Google document and could I direct your attention to page three of that Google document? Uh-huh. And when we're talking about reforms,

is there any better metaphor for the ebbing fortunes of the Reform Party, which I'd like to talk about as well, in a couple of different ways, then this sad old man not realizing that he can't take a sword as part of his King Arthur costume into the Reform Party conference. I sympathize of him as someone who would love to take... Or is you fucking do.

My noble imitation katana. I'm not allowed to take the noble imitation katana with me to public places. And so it has to remain in my house. This is one of the most powerfully British images I've seen in a long time. Can you just try what we're seeing here, please? Okay, well, first of all, you need to understand that this is, so in photography, we like a kind of layered image, right? And so reading from back to front, what we have is, first of all, we have the void,

just a kind of black, cursed, and void. Then we get a sort of normal layer of sort of reform attendees queuing, so bald white guys and suits. Then a sort of set of security fencing, and then in front of that on this sort of like blue carpet, we have a guy, a sort of bewildered looking sort of older man, dressed to my eye as Richard the Lionheart, being confronted by two security guards,

like to event security with the like black high viz, the sort of tactical, do you want to be seen or not, mate, Gila. And one of them has his arms out in a kind of just doing my job kind of way. And it's just sort of a beautiful moment, right? It's a very, very static composition. It's a little bit sort of like unbalanced in a way that kind of disorientance. I really like this photo. I think there's a lot to say here.

I think if we want to talk about reform, there's no better way than the utter confidence of, and by the way, it doesn't mean the right is not ascendant. We just talked about what the new right is now that the electoral right appears to be in the midst of embarrassing itself, possibly out of being able to compete seriously in elections. Again, early days, we'll see. But I've just to get the supreme confidence to get dressed up in your gold fringe cape as

Richard the Lionheart only to get your sword taken off you. And then you look like a swordless asshole all day at the reform conference. And then you walk from there, you are this swordless sort of older dickhead. Yeah. Not to be, not to sort of body shame, but the paunch hanging over the sort of sword belt is also very important to this image, I feel. Yeah, I mean, I think relevant because... This is a sign of middle age, apart from anything else.

Yeah, also, you're imagining yourself as a warrior valuing sort of all this, like, physical vigor and strength and a weird... You have this ideology of, like, sort of physical superiority. But then you walk into the Reform Conference, and the first thing you see, if we can scroll down, please, is an image that I cannot stop thinking about. November, could you please, uh, once again, describe for the piece? I have it from two angles because I love it. What we have here is a beautiful little sort of diorama, I suppose you'd call it, which has been branded as Labor's In Convenience Store, which shows you how Labor is making stuff worse because,

and I think this really cuts to the heart of a lot of reforms support. The tobacco is separate and is branded plainly and has big tobacco health warnings everywhere, which has been the case for basically as long as I smoked, which I quit 10 years ago. So this is not a new grievance, and it's just kind of something that most people are kind of habituated to, but has never stopped being a kind of nanny state grievance to a segment of people.

My favorite thing is, again, imagine that I'm sort of swordless Richard the Lionheart and sort of shambling through this store that's designed to make me angry that tobacco can advertise with cartoons anymore. My favorite Nanny State sign is not even one that the Nanny State does. It's just reminder to drink water and stay hydrated. It's like, oh, no, fucking drink water. I'm going to piss brown for the rest of my life.

I'm going to get kidney stones. You can't fucking stop me getting kidney stones, Andy Burnham. They've suggested that they're going to do tobacco packaging to bars of chocolate and making them include a health warning that says that chocolate makes you fat, which it does. Because this is,

what they're appealing to is like this stand, which, by the way, was put on by an organization called WeVape, which was funded in part by the U.S. Pro Tobacco Consumer Group Consumer Choice Center, which is itself funded by Philip Morris. So it was funded by Philip Morris through a bunch of front organizations, including one called WeVape, is just appealing to like a whole politics built around getting angry at the computer, just about getting, about purely like having the oldest case of oppositional defiant disorder.

in history. Some of these other warnings include warning, alcohol is addictive, and warning, vapes are addictive, which I think kind of gives the game away a bit. Yeah. Don't you want to, like, just absolutely cram your arteries full of cholesterol, never hydrate, alternate between sigs and vapes, so you

can die, and you never have to see your shit-ass, pink-haired grandson again? Yeah, and I mean, it's one of those things, right, where, you know, for a lot of people, and I remember this being a feature of the discourse, you know, it's something that, for instance, Jeremy Clarkson made his career off of, where it's like, I know this stuff's bad for me, but I resent being reminded of it. And I resent the kind of hectoring tone that, you know, the British government uses to convey public health warnings.

And I find because I'm a misogynist and I have a problem with women, I'm going to conceptualize this as being like a sort of mother figure or a nanny figure telling me what to do, which I really, really don't like because I don't like listening to women. But then it also folds in what I think is a much more pressing issue for, you know, people who aren't. sort of, you know, let's say, you know, golf-brained, which is, oh, the food is expensive. And it's like, that bothers more people than feeling kind of patronized or condescended to by the, like, cigarette health warnings. Also, to be clear, the register for this stuff is patronizing and it is condescending. That's because the only way the government knows how to talk to people and has done for, like, decades, is to be patronizing and condescending, right? and, you know, not without some reason, because if you feel sort of patronized by the cigarette health warning, it's because you are authentically stupid enough to kid yourself into thinking

that you're not going to get any of the health effects of smoking. So to an extent you do kind of deserve it is the thing. And I say that as an ex-smoker. Yeah, I can't believe lung cancer is going to happen to all those other people. Basically, yes. And so I think that's really essential to the kind of reform worldview. It's like, no, I want to live in my fantasy world, you know? I don't want to be. be reminded of this. I find it disrespectful to remind me of the consequences of my actions. I want to live in a drawing. Basically. And, you know, I want to live in a drawing. Who will help me live in a drawing? I guess those likely lads down in Dover are doing their part to make help me

live in a drawing. And of course, the lads of Philip Morris. They're all working together to help me live in a drawing at the town of the vicar on a bike. Oh, they're so nice. At the same conference, by the way, a number of old men with Keynes beat some young climate protesters, also senseless, an event was called heavy-handed as metaphor. Yeah, I mean, I think this is the thing, right? We can talk about the kind of generational warfare there, but I think it ties into the thing I said earlier about reform's sort of optics problem, right?

And that this is kind of now, you know, making it more explicit that this is the party for the, you know, let's say 20% of the British electorate who are old and antisocial and hate and fear everyone younger than them and vote in every election until they die. that's one thing, but I think if those people, you know, because that's a problem for the, you know, electoral prospects of reform, they can just kind of go a bit more mask off with it if you're also, if you're also trying the Dover stuff, you know?

Yeah, well, because absent the Dover stuff, right, this kind of shock junkism only works when everybody in the press and every other party is on your side because, again, everyone's been kind of hypnotized into thinking that you and only you are broadly, considered to be the source of how real Britain gets into Westminster. And so you're like, so it's this feedback loop of this 20% of the population that actively wants to nuke London and Bristol and thinks you should be able to run someone over with your car if you're annoyed. And so they just, there's this feedback loop between them and those people. And that that's who you get Robert generic going on Sky News and saying, oh, you know, get a life. Who cares about some people being

beaten senseless with with Keynes at a party. And Lee Anderson, it was now, by the way, realizing, of the worm may be turning has said the party would have a whip round to buy the man who hit her a new cane. Yeah, it's like, do you want to, do you want to sort of speak to the base and the base is the guy trying to like, you know, clobber a young woman

over the head with a cane, right? Or do you want to make the kind of political calculation that reform has tended to make before this, which is that those people will sort of, you know, go with you, right? At least until Restore showed up. What you need to sort of well to that

is the, if you like, the sort of right lumpen, right? the sort of people who don't give a fuck but know that everything is bad are maybe a bit racist in themselves, but mostly just want something different and to like stick it to Westminster, right? That's the same constituency that's done very well for the AFD, for instance, just on the basis of, yeah, that's why they're called reform. That's why they're called alternative for Germany, right? It's the same deal.

It's the pitch is something other than this and we're just going to soft pedal exactly what the something is. reform was sort of rising high. One of the things that was very clear was that what Farage was very good and always has been very good at doing is really realizing how there is like a very sort of open tendency in British politics that the main point of politics or like their sort of position in politics is to be just to just be a cunt, to just be like a horrible, horrible person. And like for a long time, being that type of person, you know, has had kind of political benefits. You've had like multiple parties basically say, yeah, like the way that you view the world is completely correct. And, you know, but most of the time, those people have largely been kind of middle class

homeowners, right? Their sort of being a cunt was sort of reined back by this sort of illusion of like their wealth kind of increasing and increasing and increasing. Um, you know, the sort of cruelty could be hidden. But now you're at a stage where like being a homeowner actually kind of sucks and being a landlord really sucks. Um, not in this, you know, this is not like defensive landlords or homeowners, but more just the sense of like your return on investment is not really as good as it used to be. And that is leading to like, you know, I think some of these types of political outcomes, which I guess you could sort of best describe as a form of radicalization. And it's also happening simultaneously with a radicalization of a particular kind of young person

or a younger person who does not have access to that type of material wealth. But it's sort of been told or it's kind of been kind of spread a narrative of, well, it's because of all these people on the boats that like you can't sort of have this type of life. So you've got like this tendency. And for a bit of time, I feel like reforms would have felt that they could bring those two, like, two tendencies together and try to channel it as a political force. And for a little bit of time, it worked. But the issue with that was always the case of number one, like, there is no ceiling to being a cunt. You can always be crueler and crueler and crueler. And the question is, what is your willingness to sort of

be able to go with that? Reform has sort of shown that it has a ceiling, but restore has not. And so it'd be interesting to sort of see politically where that goes. But my feeling is also that, like, you know, these kind of street movement or these sort of like, you know, the vigilantes and the thugs and the people who are sort of like capturing infrastructure. I think they're also kind of aware to a big extent, but like, look, electoral politics is not going to work in this instance. It's not going like, you know, we're going to be used. We're going to be exploited. And then like the moment you sort of hit the mainstream, you know, the leaders will be asked to sort of distance themselves from you and expel you and so on. They have lost faith in even the parties that represent them and tell them we will literally give you whatever you want. Like we will send the gunboes to the sea if we have to. And they've just to say, decided they're going to do it themselves. And I think that in the reform conference that happened this weekend, in alignment with this as well, I think is super interesting because it basically sort of shows two ways

of the road for the right. One, which is to kind of pursue this sort of path of being a cunt, but, you know, within the sort of structure of like a formal and respectable political party. And another, which is just like, what if you just took the reins off entirely? What if you just did the unspeakable? And my feeling is that actually the second might be a lot more appealing to many more people than a lot of political pundits and analysts and people who sort of study this and get paid more money than us would think so. I mean, a big part of this as well is because these parties, these far right parties attract huge numbers of scammers and criminals and chancers. And we're going to get to some of that, especially because, like, for example, you know, like, Raise the Colors's Ryan Bridge, like the guy who came up with Raise the Colors, who by the the way, Danny Tomo worked on, was given the soft glove treatment. He was a guest of honor

at the conference and Farage promised to support his work. And then it's like, well, what is Ryan Bridge did before this? He had a company that helped people make false claims that they were poisoned in Spanish hotels. And he's like on trial for that currently, right? Like

that's what he did before this before he started raising the colors. I don't think it's sort of difficult for anyone, whether that's on the right or otherwise, to look at reform and think, oh, all of these guys are grifting and on the make, right? And that's not to say that, you know, none of the sort of paramilitary side are either, quite the opposite, but there's a clearer delineation of who's going to get enriched here, you know? Well, if we want to talk about

getting enriched, because I don't want to dwell too much on litigating whether reform is a spent force, although I want to note that we've been calling in a spent force ever since Farage promised to fund a tax cut for pints funded by reinstating the two-child benefit cap, which was a pure brand and move, and you never get the stench of Brandon off you. But anything can happen, you know, obviously we still don't know. However, there has been a reform Scott Benton situation, which I have loved. I'm afraid Dan Jukes and James Orr, they're going out like Scott Benton. What can I say?

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, right? We'll talk about it. But just bear in mind as we do that if this is the level they're operating at, How many more of these things have happened and not been found out? Or how many times has this sort of could this have been tried and has not been before the media decided to turn the big like, you know, reform stocks down switch on? Yeah. So Dan Jukes is one of Farage's many boys he keeps around who looks up to him as a father. He came up through the UKIP Ugand and now is or was Nigel Farage is like chief of staff essentially.

You know, it's James or is a sort of Roger Scruton multiplicity clone, theologian. in the faith flag and family tradition and someone who it just so happens who would be revisiting at the end of the episode if there's time. He's a policy director or senior advisor.

So sort of Farage is like two back men, basically. Yeah, yeah. His hands and his brain, basically. And here's a description of the two of them from the spectator.

Or was one of the figures from the world of think tanks and ideas who gave the party intellectual credibility. Jukes is like a son to Farage, a prickly working class lad

from Sutton Coldfield with Essex Boy vibes who'd been with Farage for a decade and is effectively his guard dog. Given any choice at all, there is no way Farage would ever have thrown him under a bus. That he is gone is a measure of the seriousness of the situation. So what happened? Yeah, you have, you have a, these two boys, they have a couple of points, discuss a couple of

business deals, and all of a sudden everybody's an expert in electoral law. And like, this is one of my favorite genres of thing, which is political flax explaining in detail to journalists, like the menu of crimes that they will commit for them. I mean, I think about Scott Benton, who, if you don't remember, said to a, like a journalist posing as a gambling lobbyist, hey, I love breaking the law. Will you pay me the rent of a small London apartment monthly for me to break the law for you on an industrial scale at Parliament? And then he was like, it was loud. I couldn't hear anything. This is from the byline time. So basically, this investigation was conducted over a year by an investigative group called verbatim using an undercover reporter

posing as William Lockwood, the British-educated son of a wealthy American businessman, who ultimately secured a meeting with Farage himself, essentially offered him a bunch of illegal funding. The undercover operation began in 2025 when Lockwood, quote-unquote, established contact with Orr. Or told him he would report directly to Farage and describe fundraising as part of his role. It was in January. Orr suggested that the American company associated with this fictitious donor could pay for an opinion poll commissioned for reform. He's recorded as saying, I need someone to pay for it, and it can't be a reform donor. The investigators then supplied details of a U.S. company,

which receives an invoice from a polling company called JL Partners and paid it. Results later appeared prominently in the Daily Telegraph from the Times, without readers being told that reform had commissioned the research. And then I looked into it, and the research that they commissioned were things like two-thirds of voters want Starmorout, and another reported, reform vote unions at the same level as labor. But to, like, publish this without the sort of link to reform, being associated with it.

That is illegal, right? 100%. Just like prima facieus, like that is illegal. Yeah, that is disguising a political advocacy disguised. You have to say paid for by reform, this person on behalf of reform, you nuclear can't do this.

You also can't, by the way, accept donations from someone who's not here. Like, you can't do that. And so, Orv then said, but you realize you can do that. He's filmed at saying at one meeting at a luxury London hotel called Clarit, If there was any way of seeing it, it would technically be a donation in kind, but is anybody

going to find out? Am I going to tell anyone? Obviously not. So we're easily going to get away with it, he told the reporters. Please, please talk as normal into my gigantic cowboy hat because I'm an American man. Uh-huh. Uh, y-haw, thank you. No God's No Mers fan. We also joked that with the money, they could quote, literally do the old John Lecare. You print it off, put it in an envelope, drop it off somewhere, we'll pick it up. The old John La Cary is also a great sort of detail because it's like, I don't want to just convey that I'm offering to do crimes. I'd like to convey a familiarity with doing crimes. Yeah, of course.

Oh, crime? I love it. It's my favorite. Yeah, I have favorites. You know, obviously I don't tell the other crimes that I've got favorites. Mr. Orr suggested there would be little chance of consequences because the proposal was only to technically breach the rules of the Electoral Commission, which is useless at enforcement, because the regulator was so dumb and ineffective. I agree that the Electoral Commission isn't ineffective regulator. I think one of the only times when it would be a sort of like dangerous thing to say that would be into a camera after having gone, I will commit some crimes, maybe, allegedly.

So basically the operation then gathered pace, right? So they've already done the sort of the fake polling where, you know, you basically just because you're being paid by reform, you're like, well, keep going into you get this result, obviously. And then the operation gathered pace. In recorded footage, senior reform figure and Farage's right hand man, Dan Jukes, appeared to suggest that the American father could give money to his British son who would then donate it to reform. He said that their polling arrangement was highly important, had a big app impact and was relatively good value for money. And then said, it's great it doesn't show up in any public records. These little clandestine projects are so valuable.

Interesting. Interesting. I just like doing your sort of Malcolm Tucker act just into. a sort of full size video camera is very funny. Just with a with a sound crew. Like oh sorry, we didn't get,

could you just, you said those little, the boom mic sort of clipping into shot as you're doing like British House of Cards, fan cam monologues. It's like, oh, what are those guys doing? Oh,

they're just another party. They're not related to us. Don't worry about them. Oh, okay, sure. I mean, I assume that's kind of how it is at Claridge's. I've never been.

No, it's like they're so like, they're so like, want to act as though they've been there before. They're just like, well, yeah, of course, this is the sound crew

I'm familiar with being here. So, but in this meeting, after being like, number one, when we broke the law with you, that was super useful. We love doing it. It's generally valuable every time we do it. How many polls, polls, by the way now, saying like X, Y, Z about reform are trustworthy, none. The whole, the entire enterprise is utterly worthless.

What's the kind of thing? If you were serious about this, and again, if you have the kind of state capacity to do this, you should have the electoral commission in sort of like, you know, blue windbreakers be carrying boxes out of reforms headquarters to go through exactly what he might have meant by these little clandestine projects. You know? Maybe they're getting them made. Oh, maybe.

Maybe they're talking to that company in McElfield, which I found via a FOIA request made the ones for the ICO. They're like, let's get the same ones. Maybe. Mr. Jukes proposed to have the undercover reporter make a substantial donation, even if the source of the money was his American father. At an earlier meeting in May, Jukes also joked that he would take a five million pound personal unconditional gift saying, I know a guy.

Because if Nigel makes, it's very funny. If Nigel makes it to number 10, you're having a pint with effectively who's going to be the chief of his staff in number 10. If that isn't a business interest, I don't know what is. Again, could you say that directly into my hat, please? It's sort of like, you know that scene in like the Wolf of Wall Street? But when they're on the boat and the FBI agent is just like, yeah, can you just like say that to me again really slowly?

And obviously like Jordan Belfort kind of knows. But in this instance, it's like, oh, yeah, like, what part would you like me to say slowly? And then this repeats the entire sentence. I think there is authentically a lesson about electoralism here, right? Which is to say that if you, you know, try to do this sort of Prince of Darkness Act, it works for as long as it works. But it works for Labor and the Tories because they have the infrastructure around it, they have the sort of mutual system of compromise and deals with the press, you know. there are reasons why you don't film Labour's

version of this guy saying shit like this, right? And it's not because it doesn't get said. It's because there are sort of very, very good systems in place to make sure that you know, Labour or the Tories are better at insulating themselves from any of the kind of shady stuff.

And because if they, even if they do, it doesn't get out. Whereas with reform, this is clearly something like where the other shoe can drop at any time and the time is now. When the Tories did it, it wasn't like fucking Nick Timothy who was implicated in this.

It was their dumbest new intake guy. It was the stupidest member of the parliamentary conservative party who got stung like this. But these are like the big motherfuckers. And I think it's because Reform genuinely spent years getting absolutely convinced of its own invincibility.

Yes. You can fall victim to your own hype is the lesson here. And they're like, they were already measured, they were like opening, bribe taking bank accounts. They were measuring the drapes. And irrespective of the corruption, right, even if you're determined to sort of do this kind of electoralism,

you're determined to, you know, do it the right way, which, first of all, no one does, which puts you at a sort of unfair disadvantage. But even if you're determined to do that, the lesson here is that they will let you do this until they won't, you know? Absolutely. What reform fails to realize is that they were a tool of the British establishment.

And I don't think they realized that. Well, it's because they were allowed to wag the dog. It just didn't, the penny never dropped to them that, you know, sort of playing pretend is fun, but at a certain point, you know, playtime is over. Playtime is over when Danny Tomo starts like, you know, measuring the drapes for his, you know, new command center in the port of Dover. That's when playtime is over. That or when you start sort of threatening people's jobs in Westminster.

They hired an American actor to play the wealthy father. Then they all had a meeting that included Farage. legally we can't say that the American actor that they hired was Jonathan Majors that he was looking for work at the time yeah it wasn't like Army Hammer either but you know oh I mean I think Army Army Hammer would be like a white hat version of this who's like goes into he's hired by reform to like be a wealthy American who wants to like support them and he's like doing pen testing

that's the future the future is hiring American actors to sort of like It's like a very elaborate, like Nathan Fielder thing where you sort of hire American actors to talk to each other about British political problems because you don't, like, you're scared of being stung, but also you don't want to like interact like a normal person. Yeah. The Basin that hired an American accent, Nathan Fielder, to play the wealthy father. The plan to save British democracy was simple. So the supposed donor explicitly told Farage, by the way, I paid for those polls, illegal style. Farage then said their impact was amazing and agreed they provided great bang for Bavar. buck saying then it worked, boom, at a lunch entirely comprised of wine and oysters at his constituency

and Clacton. Again, the undercover reporter spelled out the mechanism for the larger donation. Yeah, my dad's Nathan Fielder, is going to give me the money, and then I'm going to be a sort of straw donor for him. Yeah, it's just a type of donor, a straw donor. Which is illegal, right? Like, that is a crime if you do that. And Farage did not object to the recorded exchange, and after being told lawyers and party officials that handle the arrangements, he simply replied, Thank you. Which is like, I can't believe that of everything, everybody involved said to the two guys in the gigantic cowboy hats with whirring lenses in them. That was the most careful that they were.

Well, also, you know, as you say, the fact that, you know, this raises a lot of questions about reforms funding more generally because I assume if you're sort of that, you know, relaxed about all of this, this is probably not your first meeting. of this genre. Because we already know, right, a huge amount has come from non-UK-based crypto billionaires involved in like tether. We know there was another one. We know that this, that when they talk to these guys who are stinging them, they were like, oh yeah, this is like our bread and butter. We cannot get out of bed without doing a little bit of electoral law break.

And again, right, just to make this explicit, right, If you were a left winger, right, and you were sort of like approached by someone who was like, I'm an American, like, I'm George Sorrows, right? And I want to fund your vegan tray bake operation, right? I want to fund you throwing some beans on some works of art, right? And I want to buy you the cans of beans, right? And this came out, all of these same people would be calling on you to be like hanged for treason. Yeah, 100%.

No doubt in my mind. Now, obviously, they have stepped down pending an internal end. investigation even well. Reform said this was a hoax perpetuated by foreign funded climate change activists posing as would-be party donors. Yeah, but it's fucking works though, didn't it? Yeah. Just because it, yeah, it's like the fucking Trojans being like, this horse was no great gift at all. We objected the most strong, and the strongest possible, uh, the terms. And it's like, okay, come on. Yeah, it's the thing. It's like, you could send a million fake American billioners to try and sort of like illegally give donations to us if we were a political party and we wouldn't be tempted because we've never taken illegal political donations as a political party, right?

They had to send one to entrap Nigel Farage. So scoreboard essentially is what we're saying. But Lee Anderson, who may be panickedly looking for a door back to Burnham's Labor Party, said, not to worry, reform has nipped this problem in the bud. You know, you nip a problem in the bud when it's completely rife in the organization and the top two people are actively engaged in it, plus enriching themselves personally. That's what I call nipping in the bud. It's all going great. Oh, yeah. The situation.

Also, just to the point about treason, right? Like, on the one hand, I sort of don't care, right? I'm not nationalist enough to. But how much more evidence do you need that this is a sort of like international fascist conspiracy to, to understand. undermine our government than the sort of insurgent far-right party going, oh yeah, we'll just take some foreign funding for this, you know? How many more sort of signs you need to guess? We get foreign funding for our national political project basically all the time. Why are you asking? Yeah. I mean, if you want to talk about the far right international, you could of course do worse than

the recent piece. They just happened to come out at the same time. I wonder if the F.T. was just sitting on this about James Orr's fabulous boy farm. Excuse me. Well, uh, James Orr, we've talked to... Surely a man with a boy mine. We've talked about him on the podcast before. He is the man who introduced J.D. Vance to Tom Skinner so they could hang out while J.D. Vance was visiting the UK. Fucking how. I don't think that an American billionaire could pay me enough to be in that room.

He has ties to Orban and Vance and Teal. Like, we know who the far right international is. It's those guys. And James Orr is its connection to reform. A quote from late in the article, Orr admires Orban's vision of a Christian Europe and has called him the caliber of statesmen we saw in the 19th century, a Castleray, a Metternick, a Bismarck, a Bismarck, a Palmerston. I mean, he was sort of 19th century level corrupt.

You have to give him that much. From the guy who was like, no more gays in Budapest and then just ate shit electorally. No, Bonn was always such a cheap thug, right? I guess it's sort of like one of the sort of roles of guys like Orr is to sort of launder these fucking idiots through, you know, Oxford or Cambridge and be like,

oh, yes, he reminds me of Matanich. Yeah, it's like, you know the script you have to say, but it is pretty fucking cheap. Surely at some point it's beneath your dignity, you know? I mean, I don't know, we saw what he said to those cameras. I don't think James Orr has very much. Or at least not anymore. It was New Year's Day 2003 on a black run in the mountains above Verbeye

that James Orr had a religious awakening. He was 25 years old, tall flaxen-haired, and hung over from a New Year's party the night before. He and his sister were hurtling down a gully in a heavy cloud when he shouted at her to stop. Peering through the rip-miss, the pair realized they were on the roof of a chalet, barely a skis' length from a sheer drop on a jagged rocks. They scrambled down a drain pipe and landed in the snow, and when the cloud broke, it revealed an eight-foot wooden crucifix propping up the house. Okay. No 90-degree structure has ever been used to prop up a building before. Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess if you want to take that as a sort of religious moment, sure.

Fine, I guess. I'm not sure what that has to do with Victor Orban, but yeah. Oh, well, you see, Victor Orban is the one who is going to be crusading through Europe to bring Christianity back at the heel of a boot. Right, I see. Okay. Orr's sister was astonished by his instinct. She asked him how he'd sense the danger. He was unable to explain it, but a connection was forming.

The night before, he had drunkenly offered a prayer, challenging God to reveal himself. He'd woken in a room pierced with sunlight, the rays rebounding off the snow outside his window, and now 10 hours later, here was his sign. It's very funny for a story that is ostensibly about sort of like the sort of humility of a sort of religious experience of revelation to be kind of inadvertently going, yeah, by the way, I kind of provoked God in a sort of debate me way. it's so hard that, you know, he revealed himself to me. Yeah, I actually beat God in a debate. And now I don't have to have faith anymore because he gave me some proof.

So over the next six weeks, Orr was presented with further signals of God's existence, which he found too compelling to ignore. At what point is a religious experience, a manic episode, right? Well, I mean, I don't know that I live in a sort of house opaque enough to draw that particular line. Over the next six weeks, Orr was presented with further signals of God's existence, which he found too compelling to ignore. At home in London, he lost the desire to smoke or drink, became obsessed with the New Testament and the quest for the historical Jesus.

He found his way to the evangelistic Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Brompton. Oh, motherfucker fuck, he's an Alpha Course guy. Okay, of course he is. Of course he is. How's this the skeleton key to the sort of, because he wants to be Roger Scruton. Riley, do you know about Alpha Courses? So I know about the various churches in Brompton as like the source. As a kind of clearinghouse for like young chuds. Yeah.

So alpha courses are a sort of evangelical introductory sort of indoctrination thing within the sort of framework of the Church of England. It's a weird kind of American entryist project of the 80s onwards into the Church of England, which, you know, has long been criticized, not without reason for being sort of God, vibes rather than God. And so these evangelicals kind of came in and went, no, what if we sort of turn this towards a more conservative, more evangelical, more charismatic direction. Lots of weird sort of offshoots of this.

But yeah, the Alpha course kind of came into its own in the 2000s. They sort of marketing externally. I think they even soft-pedaled the kind of Christian aspect. It was just like, hey, you ever thought about God? Come to an Alpha course. And they got a few people that way. But it's still a fixture of this kind of

of sort of Anglicanism. Suffice it to say that this tracks, basically. He quit his career in corporate law to study theology and then said later on a podcast about faith called surprising rebirth. Quote,

I'd stumbled on a deep truth about the human condition and about the reality of the divine. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I skied into it, yeah. Yeah, he skied right into the alpha course. At Cambridge, he now,

where he has become a theology fellow where he has his little college that he sort of improvised for himself. He scouts like-minded students to work in a future reform government, and his family home is a Christian community, which his wife described as an alternative Cambridge college, a refuge from the liberalism of the academy. It forms the intellectual seat of the reform project

and Orr's brand of Christian nationalism. Or Seb, too many people in public life do not realize how much faith, Christian or otherwise, which I bet it fucking really hurt him to type, matters to millions of people in Britain. That's interesting. There's a bit in the paragraph above where he says that he rejects the label of Christian nationalism as being an American import. And that's very funny for an alpha course guy because the alpha course is an American import in the purest sense. His transformation from former corporate lawyer God Curious to now runs a kind of alternative college monastery like where his wife leads prayers for the most shut it out divinity students and theology students at Cambridge in a shipping container.

Sorry? Yep, that's what it is. Oh. All turns on one night in 2018 where he met one Jordan Peterson. Oh, motherfucker. Okay. Jordan Peterson openly weeping telling him to put a bunch of boys in a shipping container. That night, there was a public debate between Jordan Peterson and Roger Scruton or theological ideological loanstone.

A dinner was held afterwards in a private members club. One of the attendees was Charles Vaughn, chief of staff at Teal Couch. Capital. Vaughn's broad aim was to build a network of conservative influence at Cambridge and other elite universities. And by the way, the reason you build the network of conservative influence at Cambridge and other universities, as Nova indicated earlier, is so that someone who sounds respectable can say, oh yeah, J.D. Vance is like, you know, a modern day pericles. That's why you do that. You sort of, if you're getting laughed out of the actual sort of theology faculty, then to have one guy have his own sort of private thing, absolutely. Yeah, well, there's the actual

theology faculty, which is like the economics department, and then the Christian nationalism boy farm, which is like to business school. Or had spent four years in a postdoctoral theology role at Christchurch where he felt increasingly isolated. He claimed to have been the only Brexeter in the college's senior common room. And this basically had this Vaughn fellow just say, okay, you're our guy. I have another picture taken from this article. You can please scroll to page nine and then read, read for me the caption on page nine, the picture in age nine. I mean, at least we know someone's celebrating Kirkmas.

This is James Orr attending Charlie Kirk's memorial service in Glendale, Arizona, September 2025, with a face like a slapped ass. It's so, so funny to send a guy who's like a conservative Anglican. What a marriage this is,

right, to send your sort of like conservative Anglican to Erica Kirk's fireworks passing. This reminds me also of like the people who take selfies outside Auschwitz. And they're like, You can't really smile outside it, right? You can't really do like, you know, he's the saddest person there because he has to sit through something so tacky.

A sense of detachment crystallized on his return to Cambridge where the polarizing effects of Brexit coincided with heated debates and identity immigration free speech. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They asked you to put your pronouns in your email signature, I guess. Essentially, yes. It's literally going to be us, isn't it? He fucking saw one of us and he went, yeah, no, okay, it's gone too far.

left with no choice but to become Victor Orban's hype ban The University's proactive recognition of the rights of, I guess we can get some air horns here, transgender people was his flashpoint alienating a conservative minority according to him Or said about marshalling a rebellion. He planned to establish a legal defense fund

for any academic who was threatened for refusing to submit to woke ideology which by the way, that's just the same thing that Jordan Peterson did. He's just saying what Jordan Peterson said. Things are going to become very unpleasant indeed in the next 20 years. he wrote to a colleague, it's crucial that those of us outside the asylum begin to organize. So he becomes this professionally annoying right-wing gadfly at Cambridge.

When he's given a permanent position, he then invites Jordan Peterson for like 10 days of lectures in 2021, which was designed to provoke Sunak's government into like putting his friend in as the all right-wingers get to do whatever they want at university's czar. And he keeps just pressing these advantages. So his strategy was to invite guest speakers such as Charles Murray or Amy Wax, a U.S. scholar who questioned the academic capabilities of black students. Like, if he's still in good standing, I'm sure he's got an email out to Nathan

Koffness. Yeah, he's like a provocateur. And as it's the same story we've talked about a bunch where it's like all of these fucking libs, right, are completely unprepared for this and fumble completely. And while each speaker's reputation was inflammatory, under Ores chairbenships, the talks themselves were very

bland. But also it's like, I think the article here misses, it's otherwise like a pretty good critical one that shows that this guy's a huge piece of shit is that it's not that Orr told these people to be bland. It's that Charles Murray has one thing to say.

And then he'll come up and say it. And everyone will agree, who isn't this naughty? Aren't we rebellious? And then that's kind of it. The actual speech is a black box. Charles Murray could come up and just like burp the alphabet. And it wouldn't matter because the point is,

oh, don't you hate that he's here? Of course he's going to give a bland speech. Because that's the least important part. Yeah. Right. James seemed to have an ideology of inviting horrifying people, but you always get them to say really innocuous things. So while they were platformed, what they were saying was not really controversial. So Orr's not a member of any college.

He entertains guests and students at his, like, just shy of two million pound Riverside home, which he describes on the Inspiration Project podcast. This guy goes on the strangest name fucking podcast. And I'm saying that as us. I think we get him on no gods, no mayors. Do you want to talk about the mayor of Cambridge? as a compound comprising his office, Shepherds, huts,

an art studio swimming pool, a boathouse converted into bungalows. Yeah, don't worry about it. It's just my compound. It's just my boy compound. Yeah. It's the place where I, you know, I warehouse my students

who all depend on me completely for housing, for academic progression, for all of their chances in life beyond me. I just have total power over them. Come on. But to the oars, the property is more than a place to entertain.

It's a having for right-wing question. who feel marginalized. Refugees from the revolution, as he calls them. Yeah, we're doing the Chud's secret history show. Hell, this genuinely, this seems to be what they're, what they're trying to do. He is, because he is trying to pepper his speech all with like references to Latin and Greek and says, oh, we're all the special ones, right? But the actual content of what they're doing is nothing. All they're doing, all they're capable of doing is living life as a post, which is, don't you hate this. Doesn't this annoy you? And I mean, to be clear,

if you and your friends want to, you know, it's the sort of, you know, shadow play of all of this that vexes me, right? Because if you just want to go and live in a sort of transphobic compound, I'm not going to try and get in the compound. You have fun, you know? Hey, you know what? It's great that you're in the compound. We're out of the compound.

I actually, I actually prefer that organization of you being in a compound, you know? This is actually kind of, look, I'd rather that, you know, none of that was going on at all. If it has to go on, you can listen to compound media, right? You can listen to Anthony Coomia in your compound. You know, it's you can be a network of compounds. Just stay in them. Helen, his wife, Helen, who since her marriage trained as an Anglican priest,

envisions their home as a monastic proto-college outside the liberal leaning environment of the university as a point at herself the college mother. The group has developed themed college scarf colors, a crest, a motto, and printed rugby shirts with plans to make ties, cufflakes and blankets. So, I mean, I'm not on some kind of a bet to use the word in every episode of trash feature, but one thing I've learned recently is that there is a deep human need to larp, right? And actual literal laughing is one of the less toxic ways, because this, this is the bad kind. Like, this is, no, I want to be in sort of even more chudded out Harry Potter. The only unusual thing here is, is her being a priest.

That's unusually non-chud. shopping, shopping these guys to GaffCon being like, look, they support women's ordination. Well, I mean, I wonder, you know, if it came down to it, if you have to stay good with Chod God, I think you'd probably be like, all right, I'm no longer a priest. I don't know. Rod Dreher, an Orban-a-lined US conservative scholar,

who stays with the oars when he's in Cambridge. What a dinner party. It's crazy how the fascist international, right, is like millions of millions of dollars and like a couple of couch surfing places. Yeah. He wrote on his blog that Helen had shown him plans that would formalize the organization

as a center of conservative Christian formation and networking in part depending on the intellectual and cultural resources of Cambridge University. You say depending on, I say parasitizing. Yeah. And also, again, like, we talk about, oh, Cambridge universe is so fucking woke. It assumes that black people are allowed to plagiarize.

You should get mad about it, right? That's what there's at the same time. It's like, oh, yeah, also. there's probably going to be this like, you know, fascism research center or whatever. That's like, that is also just like hosted there, which we like.

So last year, the Orr's launched a two million pound fundraising campaign for a new cultural center near the family home to be known as Scruton House. The campaign was subsequently scaled back than taken down, having raised little more than 21,000 pounds. Sorry, sorry,

hold on, hold on. That's embarrassing if you're sort of like tapped into this network and you can't get that kind of money out of them. Like Peter Thiel, of like sort of that kind of money falls out of him on a regular basis. I also just cannot imagine what Roger Scruton kind of thinks about his legacy. Because he's got like a horribly designed cafe in Budapest, right?

It's called like the Scruton coffee house and something. And it's just like horrible modernist like, you know, IKEA furniture, etc. There's not really any sort of like intellectual air to him by any measure. Like even someone who can kind of pretend, I guess like James all sort of like wants the B-back guy, but like, isn't really, like he does, you know, he's, he's like, like, Andy Benham, he's not the guy. And then, yeah, like, they can't really, like, no one really wants to sort of fund any kind of legacy for him as well, right?

It got to the point where, again, Rod had to urge his followers of his blog to donate to the project, which he described as a coffee shop for intellectual conservatism. This is, I mean, like, not to make an equivalence here, right, because I don't feel like we're grifting anybody. But I love the prospect of us sort of like getting a little hubristic with it and deciding, you know, that we were going to build the sort of like Charlie Kirk Memorial Center towards sort of like woke Jesus, right? And sort of going, yeah, we're 100% serious about this. Also, we need two million quid, right? Like, clearly that would not work out for us because we can't text Peter Thiel. This guy could.

And I guess Peter Thiel was just like leaving him on Red. he can get their attention when he's around. But, you know, these guys also are surrounded by, if you're like the sort of head of, you know, far right outreach at Teal Capital, you know, you are, you're being blown up constantly by a thousand people who all think they're the intellectual heir to Roger Scruton.

And it just so happens that this guy, this guy happened to get himself into reform. He got himself into Cambridge, but he still couldn't convert. And now they're like multiple complaints against him because he, from like conservative Christian students at Cambridge because he's like, yeah, he made me live in his house,

which is kind of weird. And he's like, I didn't make anyone live at my house and just being mischaracterized. And then like, he's out at reform. So it's like, I'm sorry, you're the intellectual heir to Roger Scruton. You appear to have lost a great deal of your mojo. That's a real shame.

I mean, I hope he's able to find some sort of divine guidance in the Shepankton title. Oh, God. I mean, you know, if God revealed himself to reveal himself to him, all those many years. ago skiing and then when he decided he didn't want to drink anymore or he still wouldn't want to drink as much and didn't want smoke anymore. I wish God had been a bit more specific, but I guess that's part of the ineffability, you know? Yeah, God was like, hey, we're going

to put plain packaging on cigarettes just for you in the inconvenience store. So, like, he put him on this path and then it's like, okay, well, I guess none of it really worked for you in particular. Like, your political project is still pretty successful, but you are apparently kind of fucked. Sorry. Yeah, he's going to go do the Jed Bartlett thing in the shipping containers, yell at God in Latin. It's got a real echo on it, you know? The residents of selected doctoral students and fellows, you know, freaks all, pay rent and do chores. Helen is fashioned a small chapel from a shipping container, which we mentioned before, in which she holds morning prayers. But yeah, holding all these events at his home and merging his personal life, totally with his teaching and research and political career, has meant that he's like shows up late to exam boards at Cambridge because he was just like on a call with

or Bon about like some reform policy being like, what are we like a bus or something? And he has not a few complaints, you know, guess who some women, who have been made to be overly focused on an uncomfortable, to quote the article. But on the sidelines of a festival in Hungary last year, however, or did hint at a possible future when asked how reform would save the UK. His answer recalled the vengeful sieges of Nebuchadnezzar, the Old Testament king, saying, if you look around the institutional landscape of Britain at the moment, there's very little that looks worth conserving. I believe in Britain and I believe in its future and I believe in its people and its institutions. But my goodness, there needs to be a lot of clearing out, a lot of burning down,

a lot of reconstruction and a lot of restoration. Well, or James looks as though some of the clearing out is starting and it's starting with you. So hey, you know what? You can go try and find employment elsewhere. There are lots of jobs available in cyber. Maybe your next job's in cyber. All of these guys will be fine. They always fucking line on their feet. Anyway, look, this has gone a little bit long. But I want to think there was so much around this stuff that I wanted to talk about. And it's all so interlinked that I felt it was worthwhile. So thank you very much for listening to TF. This has been a free episode. There will be a premium episode this coming week. And thank you very much. As always, to my lovely co-hosts, our lovely producer and our lovely

audience. And we'll see you again in a few short days. Bye-bye. Bye. Thank you.