TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Exeunt Sad Boer feat. Benjamin Fogel

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

Historian and journalist Ben Fogel joins the gang to talk about South Africa, and how it came to be a totem for the modern right. Also, we look at Elon’s continued decline and fall (despite the “success” of his project), and Robert Jenrick’s new career as an influencer. Get the whole episode on Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows *TF LIVE ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Big Fat Festival hosted by Big Belly Comedy on Saturday, 21st June! You can get tickets for that here! You can also get tickets for our show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Robert Jemmick is proving that he's the opposite of a nonce because he will fight a child. Well, I think he's mostly, this is basically what he's doing is he's walking around Stratford Station doing pieces to camera for TikTok about how like in Sadiq Khan's London, only one brave member of parliament is willing to go and confront tube fare dodgers. The right honorable dread. Yeah, well, I think he's thinking of himself as a kind of British Batman, which is I think one of the very few ways that the Tory party has forward now that they've been like led into the sort of most groypary cesspits of discord by Cami Badenock.

Yeah, he's been doing like a lot of these types of videos that sort of begin with him kind of going around dodgy areas and by dodgy areas, it's like areas which happened to have a lot of ethnic minorities for some weird reason. Like he did one in Birmingham and where he just like went around like pointing at like during the bin strike, where he's just going around like pointing at the bins. It's just like, there's a lot of bins around here, isn't it? It's a bit fucked up. Challenging a bin to a fight. And a lot of it is just like these sort of aesthetic markers that are very like, you

know, wink, wink nod to like a very particular kind of online, like sort of youngish millennial, right? This is very much it. He's signaling to this sort of new generation of like, well this generation of British Gropers. Which way Western Groper? Well basically that, but it's very low, you know, it's very you know It's your point Riley about like the American be increasing Americanization of British politics But it's done on like such a sort of like small budget And so like he's just got a guy following him with like an iPhone camera while he's like doing these various stunts and his latest Stunt he's gone to Stratford Westfield

Which I found really funny because like a few years ago Stratford Westfield was like the place you would go if you were like a Young youtuber to ask like what people's body counts were. I don't know if you remember that genre video. That's where Robert Jenrick is trying to become an influencer. He's trying to become British Mr. Beast. He should do the equivalent. He should go around and be like, I'm going to give you 20 pounds if you'll fight someone who dodges their fare. He's trying to increase his body count, but like confirmed kills. This is where the Tory party now has ended up, which is very amusing, utterly replaced Yeah, he's trying to increase his body count, but like, confirmed kills. Yeah.

This is where the Tory party now has ended up, which is very amusing, utterly replaced by reform. They're now reduced to deciding which group of strange and off-putting gropers do they want to become influencers to. This is the other thing too, because Jenrick is obviously thinking that Kemi's not going to last very long. And this is very, that could very well be a vacation. It may not last until the end of the year. The price lies bare for the shortest time. And genre Jenrick will sort of take his place, take her place. But the thing is like in

this video and all the other videos he does, he's not really having any fun with it. And that's what they're sort of missing about like the sort of ability to kind of compete with reform, which is that reform, like the reform guys all look like they're just having a great time with like doing the sort of like, they're sort of racist bits, right? You're in a Britannia hotel breakfast bar, you're yelling about milk. Exactly. You're having a great time. They're sort of enjoying it. But like these guys, like they're just having, you know, Robert Jenrick does not want to

be in Stratford Westfield. Yeah. Right. And it's very evident he doesn't like, it's the last place he wants to be. They haven't even got cotton traders there. Right. He hates the carnival environment of being an online right-wing influencer basically. But I want to bring in our guest for today. It is Benjamin Fogel, contributing editor at Jacobin, head of publishing at the Alameda Institute, but most importantly, white South African who got lost on his way to the US

and ended up in the UK. How's it X? It is well, thank you. Hey, you're excited to have joined Keir Starmer's refugee program for white South Africans? I mean, to be fair, they've been here for a while. I mean, if anyone in the UK knows, if you go southwest, Putney, Wimbledon, you sure can find somebody. We'll talk about when things, when we were in charge. When things were good. As a refugee, have you been offered like a four-star hotel room in like,

our fucking like, Grantham in like a Holiday Inn or something. To be fair, when I arrived I was offered a very expensive healing bill at my apartment. I mean like also I stay north because I'm trying to be like separate myself from the big communities down southwest precisely because I don't have any urge to talk about the good old days. Yeah you don't want to talk about hey hey, maybe if the shorts were shorter, the Bush War would have gone another way. You know, when you're in the wrong part of Southwest London, you will find some amazing things. You will find people who claim to have, you know, killed multiple terrorists during the Bush War. You find people who claim that if they hadn't been injured in high school,

they could have played for the box. People who might have been claimed to be related to Elon Musk. Magical things. Oh, well, to be fair, increasing numbers of people are related to Elon Musk at the rate at which he's like artificially inseminating women like battery hens. He's like a soy Genghis Khan. I mean, I really feel he's got like a method behind this. I really feel that like, and I can, you know, I can see into his soul that he really just wants to use this Neuralink thing to transfer his consciousness into his children so he can live forever. Mmm.

Well, I welcome him to try. Have a go! I welcome Elon Musk. Yeah, we welcome Elon Musk to try. But look, we're going to talk all about the place that South Africa has come to occupy in the primarily American, but also somewhat British imagination. We're going to talk a little bit about exactly who these quote unquote asylum seekers are and look at why let's say the global north seems

to once again be turning on South Africa, but for a bad reason as opposed to the last time they did it, which just a pretty good reason but first I want to talk about a little news because we now know who attended the Trump cryptocurrency dinner This is of course for those of you who may not remember that the Donald Trump meme coin that he released upon his election That he created some utility quote-unquote for which is the top 25 holders of the meme coin get to have dinner with him at the White House and I'm sorry at a golf course excuse me and that you know essentially this is a great way if you are a blockchain lobbyist to spend a couple million dollars to say to Trump hey can you tweet my you know fart coin can you please tweet

about fart coin because I'd like to make a billion dollars from mugs, essentially. And so we now know who attended because let's say the contest is done and the people who attended were a coterie of, let's say, people accused of extreme criminality by the SEC. Great. Yeah. Well done. Well done. Yeah. Crazy that those people would want to attend some kind of cryptocurrency dinner with Donald Trump I mean you think they would they wouldn't want people with kind of securities fraud allegations anywhere near such an event No, this is of course Justin Sun who we've actually talked about before on the show and other people like this as well Justin Sun was my father as well as basketball NBA star Lamar Odom

Also a cryptocurrency promoter. That does not surprise me given his unfortunate trajectory. Kardashians, drugs, crypto, natural progression. Yeah, so essentially what happened, what I think this is worth talking about is it is the classic Trump pattern, which is he loves to fleece his biggest supporters. As it turns out, people spent upwards of like $1.8 million on the Trump meme coin for him to arrive via helicopter, stay for 10 minutes and then give a brief speech about how he's the most pro crypto

president in history and then leave without talking to anybody. Awesome. Yep. He fleeces those that love him most get fleeced the hardest and they just love him more. Yeah, that's pretty sick. I'm actually working on an essay right now called The Golden Age of Grooft. I don't need to explain that. Yeah. So, from one attendee said,

He helicoptered in, he helicoptered out. We didn't even get to shake hands with him. I wanted to touch the president. Yeah, fuck. They got rug pulled. Yeah, they got sort of real life ruglife rug the utility turns out it was never there This is sort of like the the Glasgow Willy Wonka experience But if you're a crypto guy, you know They said they would be Donald Trump there and then you're just talking to like a cardboard cutout of Trump with like some some like

Sayings programmed in the person then, but that's about what I expected. I got the chance to stand close to the president when he was giving his speech. Overall, it was worth the money. Do you think this is about like aura grafting? Like, you know, if you're close enough for his aura, you can absorb some of it and then go scam somebody that follows you or something?

I think this is, look, the final mission of all crypto promoting people is you've been scammed by the person before you, that's how you got your real money in and bought the cryptocurrency, of course. You have to scam someone else bigger. I was going to say, because like it is described, the way that we described like the Trump appearance of a dinner is very much like a shit coin in the sense that it's like hyped for ages.

It costs like a good amount to sort of costs a good amount to initially invest in. You do get to see said coin, but for a very short period of time. Then it goes away and you've got to convince yourself that it was all worth it. And you just got to keep holding on. We built a great community at Trump dinner. That's right. That's it. It wasn't about Trump coming on at all. It was about all the friends you made on the way out for dinner. It's kind of fitting in a way at the moment that we've got an American pope, because Trump is sort of like an American pope. He actually says and does very little, but he just kind of turns up and people will go through huge amounts of hardship just to be close to him arbitrarily. The people who love Trump the most are kind of elderly Italian women. They

just want to brush at his sleeve or whatever as he goes by. They should get him a big like, you know, glass car that he can drive around in and some robes. I've often said that American Protestantism is taking on some characteristics of Catholicism because there is now, I can safely say that the, like when Donald Trump dies, like different mega malls in the States will start displaying his like metatarsal bone like a reliquary. You don't think it'll be like Lenin's tomb that the people will just have like a modified body of Trump that there'll be a pilgrimage to go to?

Well he won't decompose because of all the aspartame that he's drunk over the years. I guess that's the question. Again, which way Western griper, are you going to preserve the body so people can pay their respects to it? Or are there going to be like upwards of 300 genuine Trump like ribs in reliquaries that like strip malls around the country? The eternal president, Donald Trump. You could have like statues of him everywhere.