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Britain has experienced its worst far-right riots in living memory. They first erupted in Southport, then spread like wildfire to Rotherham, Tamworth, Middlesbrough, Hull, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Bolton, Blackpool, Sunderland, Plymouth, Hartlepool, Belfast, and beyond.
Targeted mostly against Muslims, mosques, asylum seekers and people of colour, the country – and, indeed, the world – has watched in shock at images of rioters destroying shops, libraries, cars and hotels, while seeking out ethnic minority citizens for harassment and violence.
At the centre of the maelstrom is ‘Tommy Robinson’ – the far-right convicted fraudster who played a leading role in whipping up the unprecedented racist violence, and whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
But the violence which has racked the streets of Britain has been in the making for more than a decade.
This exclusive investigation by Byline Times shows how it has been enabled by a network of technology platforms and far-right organisations, with close ties to the Trump campaign, and especially to individuals who supported the January 6 riots, aimed at reversing Trump’s presidential election loss in 2020 – some of whom maintain direct ties to the Russian Government.
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Tommy Robinson and ‘Silenced’
On 27 July 2024, Tommy Robinson screened a banned film in London’s Trafalgar Square to thousands of followers. The rally quickly turned violent, resulting in nine arrests.
Silenced was created to support his false and defamatory claims against Jamal Hijazi, a 16-year-old Syrian refugee schoolboy who was receiving racist bullying. Robinson claimed that he had been “violently attacking” his female classmates and threatening to stab another schoolboy.
Much of the film is based on the disproven claims of Bailey McLaren, the boy who was caught on video assaulting Hijazi by waterboarding him – and whose family reportedly has a history of racist far-right activism.
Hijazi eventually sued Robinson for libel. Three years ago, Robinson lost the case, and the High Court warned that he would be jailed if he continued to ignore the court and repeat his libellous claims against the boy.
“I’ll be jailed for two years for showing the inconceivable truth,” Robinson wrote to his followers, urging them to share the film.
Two days after the screening, the killings of three children at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport provoked shock and anger around the country. That same day, Robinson fled the country to avoid a contempt of court hearing. On his way out, he was arrested and interrogated under anti-terror laws before he was let go.
From a five-star hotel in Cyprus, Robinson swiftly began ramping up anger among his followers about the Southport attack on Elon Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter), which he blamed on mass migration and Muslims, while calling for mass deportations.
As the riots laid waste to property and terrorised ordinary people, Musk amplified Robinson’s posts on X by questioning his arrest under anti-terror laws and allowing Robinson’s banned documentary to receive more than 33 million views via the platform.
As a result, Robinson’s posts were seen up to 1.2 billion times. According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “almost everyone” it interviewed at protests outside Downing Street “mentioned Tommy Robinson”.
Musk not only amplified Robinson, but systematically boosted a range of far-right influencers promoting disinformation around the riots. In response to incendiary footage of the unrest, he tweeted that “civil war is inevitable” – criticising Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s promise of support for Muslim communities by writing: “Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on all communities?”
But the infrastructure for Tommy Robinson’s stoking of violent race riots across Britain did not come out of the blue.
The Alt-Reich Comes For Britain
That infrastructure has been carefully nurtured during the past few years by a transatlantic network of far-right conspiracy theorists and ‘alt-tech’ platforms with intimate ties to both the Trump campaign and the Russian Government.
Byline Times can reveal that, as part of this infrastructure, Tommy Robinson is being backed by some of the most influential supporters of the January 6 insurrection, during which a mob of thousands rioted, vandalised, and looted the US Capitol Building to derail the 2020 Presidential Election result, which Donald Trump had lost.
One of Robinson’s financial supporters is an American multi-millionaire Trump ally, Patrick Michael Byrne, who encouraged Trump to overturn the 2020 Election, spoke at the January 6 rally, and maintains ties with a Russian intelligence agent sanctioned by the West for promoting disinformation about the invasion of Ukraine.
Another of Robinson’s supporters, Byline Times can reveal, is a far-right Danish politician, Morten Messerschmidt, who is close friends with Reform UK Leader and MP Nigel Farage. As the riots were escalating, Farage posted a video in which he questioned “whether the truth is being withheld from us” about the Southport murders. This was despite the fact that the only reason the suspect’s identity was originally withheld was because he was a minor in law.
Neil Basu, the former counter-terrorism chief at the Metropolitan Police, accused Farage of inciting the riots by “undermining the police, creating conspiracy theories, and giving a false basis for the attacks on the police”.
Messerschmidt has a long history of racism and making anti-Muslim remarks – including warning in 2009 of the inevitability of race wars in Europe that would require Europeans to participate in a violent uprising. Yet, this is a man with whom Farage has seemingly developed a friendship – having worked with him in the European Parliament, and most recently providing him a personal endorsement for the leadership of the Danish People’s Party.
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Robinson’s connections with Byrne and Messerschmidt, and the amplification of his false claims via key technology platforms controlled by Trump donors, suggest that Britain’s far-right riots were orchestrated by an international far-right network.
To acknowledge legitimate concerns around the riots, this reality – and the grave threat it poses to British national security and community cohesion – should be at the top of the list.
Robinson’s Working Mentor in Denmark
When Tommy Robinson completed a first cut of his film, one of his earliest supporters was the American far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones – whose false claims about the Sandy Hook massacre led American juries to order him to pay $1.487 billion in damages to the victims’ families.
In 2021, Jones had released a trailer for Silenced on his website, Infowars.
The following year, Robinson started working with MICE Media, which described itself as a decentralised media channel based on crypto-currencies. Having started by releasing Tommy Robinson-inspired NFTs, by 2023, MICE Media began helping him finalise a new version of his film.
MICE Media, which now appears to be defunct, was founded and run by Bryn Davis – an American technology entrepreneur, avid Donald Trump supporter, and 2020 Presidential Election conspiracy theorist.
Robinson’s MICE Media version of Silenced was launched on 1 April in the Danish Parliament in Copenhagen, at an event organised by the far-right Danish People’s Party (DPP) and the Danish Free Press Society. Both organisations have a long history of racist and anti-Muslim hatred.
Hosting Robinson at the event was Farage’s connection, Morten Messerschmidt, DPP Leader since 2022, who spoke both before and after the screening and congratulated Robinson as a hero.
Convicted of racial hatred in 2002 for putting up a poster blaming a rise in rapes on an multi-ethnic society, Messerschmidt is one of the earliest proponents of the idea that Europe is on the brink of a racial civil war triggered by Muslim immigration.
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More than a decade earlier, in October 2009, shortly after winning his seat in the European Parliament, Messerschmidt spoke at a Washington D.C. event – the International Legal Conference on Freedom of Speech and Religion – which was co-sponsored by the International Free Press Society (IFPS), a creation of the Danish Free Press Society.
On the sidelines at the event, Messerschmidt was interviewed by a friend of Tommy Robinson, IFPS board member James Cohen, who would go on to head up the ‘Jewish division’ of Robinson’s English Defence League (EDL) – set-up to distance the EDL from its antisemitic reputation.
Messerschmidt’s video interview with Robinson, now deleted, was published by a notorious far-right blog, Gates of Vienna.
The thrust of Messerschmidt’s views can be gleaned from a separate interview he conducted just a month later with a fellow DPP politician, Nicholai Sennels, who was also a regular Gates of Vienna contributor.
“There is no understanding [in the European Commission] that you cannot simply replace Europeans with Arabs without ‘Arabising’ Europe”, he told Sennels in the interview, since removed, which I transcribed in 2016.
Messerschmidt’s comment was a nod to the far-right ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, which baselessly claims that white people are being replaced by mass Muslim immigration – and which has inspired several white supremacist terrorist attacks.
“Europe will be increasingly marred by autonomous Islamised areas,” he continued. “The riots we are observing today – in Nørrebro, Vollsmose in Denmark, as well as in no-go zones of other EU countries – will no longer be mere riots, but will evolve into genuine insurgencies with demands for independence, complete implementation of Sharia etc..”
He went on to claim that Europe would become embroiled in a full-scale civil war before 2030: “Europe will – perhaps not as soon as 20 years – see a development similar to that in the Balkans, where in Kosovo, for example, the Muslims have succeeded in driving out the Christians and declare an independent republic.”
The only response would be for Europeans to fight back, he implied, saying “European citizens will come to their senses and throw off the tyranny”.
He referred to specific examples of violent retaliation, including repelling “the Turks at the Gates of Vienna or the repressive aristocracy in France”.
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‘Being Muslim Raises Some Fundamental Problems’
Nigel Farage has had a longstanding friendship and working relationship with Tommy Robinson’s Danish ally, Morten Messerschmidt.
More than a decade ago, Messerschmidt worked closely with Farage in his Europe for Freedom and Democracy (EFD) group in the European Parliament, when Farage was Leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
In February 2012, Farage promoted Messerschmidt’s anti-EU film, Promises and Lies, on Facebook. The film falsely claimed that 80% of Denmark’s laws and budget were determined by the EU (overall, the figure stands at around 14%) and implied that being part of the EU would threaten Danish jobs by opening the door to mass Muslim immigration from Turkey.
In 2014, Messerschmidt left the EFD to join the European Conservatives and Reformist group run by the UK’s Conservative Party, for which he served as vice-chair until 2016.
In 2021, Farage created a video message for DPP members endorsing Messerschmidt for leadership of the party.
That year, Messerschmidt told the Russian state-backed media platform RT: “For many people, being Muslim raises some fundamental problems with living a Danish life. Whether that is views on women or views on law and democracy.”
Claiming that “the country has experienced issues and occasional violence from certain immigrants of a Muslim background… over the past 30 years”, Messerschmidt called for the religion of “would-be citizens to be recorded on a publicly visible register” along with a ban on granting citizenship to people “married to foreign nationals”.
He was subsequently elected Leader of the DPP the following year. And, after Farage finally became an MP in this year’s UK General Election, Messerschmidt tweeted him a hearty congratulations, declaring: “Our collaboration in the European Parliament has been a pleasure, and an invaluable friendship.”
Nigel Farage, Reform UK, Morten Messerschmidt, and the Danish People’s Party did not respond to requests for comment.
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Trying to Open the ‘Gates of Vienna’
The influence of the Gates of Vienna ideology on Tommy Robinson – transmitted through the likes of Messerschmidt – came to light around a decade ago, when Robinson was caught trying to inflate civil unrest in Britain.
After convicted neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people in Norway, the Gates of Vienna blog turned out to be one of his chief inspirations – having been cited 86 times in his ‘manifesto’.
One of the blog’s most prominent contributors is ‘Fjordman’ – the pseudonym for Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen – whose online writings were linked to 114 times by Breivik.
A month before Breivik’s terrorist attack, Fjordman claimed that western governments were complicit in “a policy of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing targeting the white majority population”. He added: “Yes, the Islamic creed by itself is inherently violent. No, it cannot be reformed, and Islam in any way, shape or form does not belong in the West. Islam, and all those who practise it, must be totally and physically removed from the entire Western world.”
He later condemned Breivik’s attack and denied promoting violence.
Among the Gates of Vienna’s other racist, anti-migrant, and anti-Muslim posts are “detailed descriptions of how anti-Muslim paramilitary groups could operate during a conflict with European Muslims”, and even “a guide to amateur bomb-making”.
By 2015, anti-fascism charity Hope Not Hate found alarming evidence that the Gates of Vienna blog was linked to a far-right plot to exhibit inflammatory cartoons about the Prophet Muhammed to “incite a violent backlash from British Muslims, leading to serious disorder between Muslim and non-Muslim communities”.
The plot was masterminded by Tommy Robinson with far-right activist Anne Marie Waters, with whom he founded the anti-Muslim street protest movement Pegida UK.
According to a Hope Not Hate investigation, during meetings to plan the exhibition, Robinson and Waters “openly discussed using the cartoons… to incite a violent backlash, which they hoped would spark a wider conflict between communities and, ultimately, civil war” and that “one idea was to hold simultaneous demonstrations in areas of high Muslim density in towns and cities across the UK”, which they believed “police would be too stretched to cope and at least one of the demos would lead to a riot”.
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Ready to Rumble
Tommy Robinson has maintained a close relationship with Messerschmidt for a number of years. This has included featuring him on his Silenced podcast, produced through his media organisation Urban Scoop News and released via ‘alt-tech’ website Rumble – the Canadian anti-censorship video streaming platform co-owned by the American Republican Senator of Ohio, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, and billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.
Earlier this year, Thiel told podcaster Tyler Cowen that he agreed with the critique of liberalism by prominent Nazi Party member and political theorist Carl Schmitt, comparing America today to the Weimar Republic in the 1920s – the collapse of which paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
“Liberalism is exhausted, one suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted, and that we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window,” he said.
Under Vance and Thiel, Rumble quickly became a mouthpiece for Russian state-backed media propaganda. Although earlier this year, Rumble content was blocked inside Russia due to concerns about potential anti-Russian material, it has continued to serve as a platform for RT to broadcast to millions of North American and Western viewers.
The Trump Election Conspiracist
After Robinson launched the MEDIA Mice cut of his Silenced film with Messerschmidt in Denmark, the full video appeared on the Rumble platform. It was published under the generic account name of ‘Silencedthefilm’, with the statement: “A judge of the High Court has threatened to send Tommy to prison if he released this documentary to the public. That is where we come in! Leaked to us by an unknown source, it is our duty to share this story with the world.”
The statement urged viewers to donate to “help protect Tommy” and “his family”. It provided a link to a fundraising campaign hosted by GiveSendGo – a Christian crowdfunding website operating as a hub for far-right fundraising, including QAnon supporters and rioters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6.
The ‘alt-tech’ site has raised more than $6.2 million for extremist causes since 2016. Among the biggest beneficiaries of its fundraising was the Proud Boys – designated a terrorist group by the Canadian Government, and an extremist group “with ties to white nationalism” by the FBI.
Tommy Robinson’s GiveSendGo fundraising campaign, which states that “all proceeds will go to protect Tommy’s family and Bailey Mclaren [the boy who attacked Jamal Hijazi] as they are not yet in a safe haven”, was created and run by Patrick Byrne.
The campaign had aimed to raise $100,000. It only managed $12,037.
On 2 August, as the UK riots were unfolding, Robinson tweeted an image of a supposedly autobiographical book by Byrne, Danger Close: Domestic Extremist #1 Comes Clean, stating: “Here’s my book of choice for this break I’m having. It’s Patrick Byrne, a man at the forefront of saving America.”
Byrne is an American multi-millionaire and former CEO of online retailer Overstock.com. He is also a prominent 2020 US Presidential Election denier, who launched the American Project with Trump’s disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in April 2021 – which Byrne has used to provide extensive funding for far-right groups promoting election conspiracy theories in Arizona, Michigan, and beyond.
On 18 December 2020, Byrne and Flynn met Trump in the White House, with other election deniers, where they urged the then President to mobilise armed private contractors and the National Guard to seize voting machines. They presented a draft executive order to Trump based on letters and emails drafted by a Trump official tasked to find evidence of “election fraud”.
Encouraging Trump to overturn the election result, Byrne and Flynn pushed outlandish conspiracy theories at the meeting, including that Venezuela had meddled with the election and that Nest brand thermostats were changing votes. Several hours later, Trump tweeted to his followers to come to Washington D.C. on 6 January.
“Be there, will be wild!”
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Russian Ties
Trump had previously pardoned Michael Flynn, after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his secret communications with Russian officials in 2016, at the same time Russia was attacking American democracy.
Flynn – a leading figure in Trump’s attempted coup efforts – is no longer affiliated with the American Project. But, in June, Byrne suggested him as a potential vice president for Trump, tweeting: “Flynn knows how to spring Trump from prison. The world is at war and we need a general.”
Byrne also has ties to notorious convicted Russian spy Maria Butina, with whom he had a romantic relationship.
Butina had successfully penetrated conservative political circles in the US, before being outed and serving a 15-month US prison sentence for acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia. According to a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, during this operation, Butina attempted to get the Trump Campaign to create a secret communications back-channel with Russia
Byrne later claimed that he had been instructed to maintain a relationship with Butina by the American ‘deep state’. Yet, after her return to Moscow, Byrne continued to maintain a strong relationship with Butina – including financing her pro-Putin political campaigning in the State Duma to the tune of tens of millions of rubles. Butina later wrote the preface to Byrne’s book, Danger Close, published in February 2024, while Flynn wrote the book’s foreword.
In addition to ties with US insurrectionists, Tommy Robinson has also cultivated his own direct ties within Russia.
As documented by Ross Burley, founder of the Centre for Information Resilience, the year before Robinson lost the High Court proceedings launched by Hijazi, he had travelled to Moscow and St Petersburg to meet pro-Kremlin Russian figures – many specialising in foreign influence operations and disinformation.
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Race Wars: The Key to an Ecosystem
A week before the outbreak of riots in the UK, Patrick Byrne was publicly threatening US law enforcement with death by “piano wire” and “blowtorch” for pursuing the prosecution of a Trump ally and election denier accused of tampering with election equipment during the 2020 US Presidential Election.
As extremists took to the streets of Britain, Byrne’s attention began to shift. He tweeted a series of inflammatory anti-Muslim posts that appeared to justify the violence.
He wrote on X that “2.5% of British population (Muslim men) commits 90% of rapes. Are they racist? Because I think that a group expecting to do that without expecting response has a latent sense of supremacy”.
It is not known how much financial or logistical support Patrick Byrne has provided to Tommy Robinson. Byrne did not respond to a request asking him to confirm or deny such support. A request for comment to Robinson’s media organisation, Urban Scoop News, has not received a response.
Robinson’s direct connection to a Russia-linked Donald Trump associate at the forefront of attempting to help the former President overturn the results of the 2020 US Presidential Election on January 6 – as well as his wider connections to Russian influence operatives and far-right European racists agitating for civil war on the continent – raises urgent questions.
The backdrop to the UK riots was not just online disinformation. It can reasonably be argued that more than a decade of austerity has laid the groundwork for widespread disillusionment, apathy, and exclusion. Yet, previous Conservative Governments attempted to manage this national crisis, it appeared, through ‘divide and rule’ – weaponising disinformation and fake news about Muslims, migrants, and minorities to distract from the systemic causes of persistent social and economic malaise.
The constant demonisation of minorities by the right-wing press has channelled growing anger and frustration into a politics of division– the sharp end of which is racism and anti-Muslim hostility.
But these factors, even taken together, do not explain how they culminated in a week of violent racist rioting in Britain. This investigation suggests that the riots were enabled by a pattern of disinformation promoted by far-right influencers with ties to many of the same people involved in the violent insurrection on Capitol Hill four years ago, using tech platforms owned by some of Trump’s most ardent supporters – including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
The extent to which the riots may have been orchestrated by foreign actors with form for similar criminality, whether in the US or Russia, will be difficult to determine. But perhaps that is to miss the wider point: that the violence was enabled and triggered by what has become a global ecosystem of far-right disinformation.
Key figures in this ecosystem are radicalising people into believing that they are the victims of a ‘war’ – the faces of which are minority communities depicted as harbingers of a foreign invasion, which therefore requires violent racism in response. This is not an accident. The spectre of Western democracies torn apart in race wars is a vision which key figures in this movement have desired for more than a decade now.
The toxic amalgamation of dark money, technology platforms, unaccountable hard-right-wing billionaires, and far-right criminal gangs has pushed us to a global political tipping point. The risk of murky nefarious interests stoking far-right paramilitary violence to undermine our democracies from within is greater than ever – and, in the absence of a meaningful response, the social fabric of our country will remain at risk long after these riots have ended.