No tracking. No cookies
Subscriptions
Subscriptions
Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on ‘what the papers don’t say’ – without fear or favour.
To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.
With Donald Trump now sworn in as the US President and unleashing waves of executive orders on everything from citizenship to the environment, the man who helped secure him victory, Elon Musk, has been busy trying to destabilise British politics.
For the last few weeks, Musk has harnessed the power of his social network, X, to orchestrate a merciless attack on members of the Labour Party over supposed failures tackling “Asian grooming gangs” that have dominated the news agenda.
This, on January 8, led The Guardian, to suggest the news in the UK appeared to be, “whatever Elon Musk says it is”.
Musk’s attention was drawn to the issue — often relied on by the far-right to advance anti-immigrant sentiment — by a tweet from a contributor to Pimlico Journal on December 30 saying that “people should have hung for Rotherham”. Seven men were jailed for a total of 106 years for sexually abusing two young girls there in the 2000s.
The Journal tweet was re-shared by a popular right-wing account who added an excerpt from a court transcript from the trial of the grooming gang in Oxford, which sent the posts viral.
Thus began the chain of events which has seen Musk go to war with the Labour Government, accusing Jess Phillips of being a “rape genocide apologist” and even, according to the Financial Times, looking into ways to oust Keir Starmer ahead of the next election.
Musk has suggested “a quarter-million little girls were — and still are — being systematically raped by migrant gangs in Britain” and demanded a new public inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation in not only Rotherham, but Oldham, Rochdale and elsewhere. As The Guardian noted in its report, there is no reliable basis for Musk’s figures.
Review Into Grooming Gangs Announced
However, a week ago, Yvette Cooper announced an urgent national review into the scale of grooming gangs amid a raft of other new measures to tackle them. The Home Secretary, however, stopped short of launching a statutory national inquiry.
The following day, Lisa Nandy, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, denied the Government had been pressured into the review by a social media storm, stirred up, in part by Musk, saying: “We’re not a government that governs by social media. We govern for the real world.”
Since Musk first started tweeting about grooming gangs, the X-owner has interacted with and amplified a constellation of anon accounts, podcasters and alt-right Youtubers that make up the very online far-right in Britain.
The Voices Musk Has Amplified
Some of these individuals, such as British YouTuber Carl Benjamin, were part of the original wave of ‘alt-right’ media personalities that “fought” in the so-called “great meme war” that helped spread Trump’s message and inject his 2016 campaign with a sense of countercultural, anti-elite rebellion.
In 2018, a report into this influence by think-tank Data and Society, named Benjamin, also known as Sargon of Akkad, as an important node in Trump’s network.
Benjamin, who ran unsuccessfully in the 2019 European Parliament elections as a UKIP candidate, has been repeatedly boosted by Musk to his 211 million followers since he began his crusade against Starmer.
Benjamin gained wider public attention — including from the police — when his tweets to Phillips, stating “I wouldn’t even rape you” were unearthed during his campaign.
As the scandal unfolded, Benjamin doubled down adding: “There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
Benjamin deleted most of his videos when YouTube demonetised his channel following the controversy, but still makes content as ‘Sargon of Akkad’ every few weeks. His main output now is through an organisation he founded in 2020 called the Lotus Eaters.
The Lotus Eaters, named after the race of happy lotophages in the Odyssey, is a far-right outlet that produces content about culture and philosophy as well as commenting on British politics. It also regularly promotes mass deportations, the idea of replacement migration and attacks feminism.
The Lotus Eaters cast of presenters includes Dan Tubb and Beau Dade, both Reform UK candidates who were expelled from the party when old tweets surfaced, Stylianos Panagiotou, a former philosophy lecturer, Benjamin, the journalist Connor Tomlinson, along with commentators making their name for the first time on the channel, like Harry Robinson and Josh Ferme.
Commenting on Starmer’s attempts to attack the Conservatives with right-wing rhetoric on immigration, Dade said, “no matter how strong the rhetoric is from Starmer, until I actually see the streets and towns of this country have less foreigners, that have obviously come straight over, until I see that I don’t believe any of it”.
When discussing the fact that the most common newborn boy’s name for 2023 is Muhammad, Robinson, said: “It just shows that there is a mass of Islamic foreign men in this country who should not be here”. He added: “It will make deportations a lot easier when you just go [to] M.”
This idea of conflict between the West and Islam informs other views that the presenters hold.
In response to a video of the porn star Bonnie Blue offering to sleep with young men during freshers week, Tubb tweeted: “If we are going to beat the civilisation battle against Islam in Europe, putting back in place the restrictions on excessive female behaviour is absolutely necessary.”
He added: “Yes that means jailing people like her for public indecency. Yes it means treating women differently from men for essentially the same behaviour. Because women are different. A man trying this would get nowhere, so it’s not reality to pretend otherwise.”
Another outlet that overlaps with the politics and personnel of the Lotus Eaters is the New Culture Forum (NCF), a YouTube channel with over 300,000 subscribers operated by the culture war think-tank of the same name, run out of 55 Tufton Street.
Harrison Pitt, one of the presenters at the NCF has appeared on Lotus Eaters. Tomlinson hosts shows on both channels,and Benjamin recently appeared as a guest on the NCF’s youth show, Deprogrammed.
The NCF also features a rotating cast of GB News pundits and right-wing newspaper and magazine columnists. Like the Lotus Eaters, the discussions on Deprogrammed often occur in the idiom of memes from the online right.
Presenters often use terms like “elite human capital”, “gay race communism” or “djinn brain” and other coinages from Kunley Drupka, an X account popular on the British radical right, whose memes have been quoted on GB News, in the Telegraph and by Tucker Carlson.
This cultural politics of memes and alt-media now developing in Britain, was a significant part of Trump’s campaign as an insurgent in 2016 and the wider cultural shift that followed in his wake during his re-election campaign in 2024.
Musk’s control of X helped cement the dominance of MAGA on the Republican right in the run up to the re-election and is now boosting the British alt-and-far-right.
The American Right versus the UK Right
Richard Hames, one of the co-authors (under the pseudonym Sam Moore) of The Post-Internet Far Right argues that the American right is far more advanced than the UK as it is no longer “insurgent”.
He told Byline Times that the metapolitics — deploying cultural strategies such as the spreading of memes, online and through cultural and media output to influence politics — of the American right has “massified” since 2016.
Hames argues that because there is no British equivalent of Tesla or SpaceX, and because a decline is an increasingly real factor in British politics, the UK far-right has focussed primarily on ending immigration as a way to halt decline.
This message, that immigrants are to blame for the decline in living standards and that they must be removed (rather than just reducing overall immigration numbers), is rapidly gaining purchase in the UK.
While they might be marginal in the landscape of British media, the Lotus Eaters command a growing following. The channel has 460,000 subscribers and regularly attracts a podcast audience in the tens of thousands. According to the company’s accounts, the number of employees doubled between 2022 and 2023 from 10 to 20.
Earlier this year, the platform landed their highest profile guest, when Liz Truss was interviewed on the channel about her book Ten Years to Save the West.
The Radical Right Digital Landscape
The Lotus Eaters are part of a growing ecology of radical right digital media in the UK and performs an outrider function for Reform UK, urging Nigel Farage to be “stronger” and promoting Rupert Lowe, Reform’s MP for Great Yarmouth.
The channel’s commitment to pushing Reform even further to the radical right is evident in the presence of one its presenters, Dade, a Reform UK candidate in the 2024 election that was dropped after Hope Not Hate revealed he had published a policy document which proposed the expulsion of “foreigners and their dependents” and the prosecution of civil servants and judges, calling them “a cancer which must be cut out, regardless of the disruption it causes”.
After he was dropped by the party, Dade tweeted: “I stand by every word.”
Benjamin also regularly uses his position at the channel to argue against Farage distancing himself from the UK’s most well-known far-right figure, Tommy Robinson. Benjamin is a regular speaker at Robinson’s rallies.
As well as video, there is a growing world of internet publications to which the young online right can contribute.
Tomlinson regularly writes for the European Conservative, the Viktor Orban government funded online magazine, where Pitt is an editor and for which many of the guests of the two channels also write.
As well as Eurocon, the semi-satirical J’accuse, Critic magazine and Pimlico Journal — a Substack publication by and for Conservative SpAds and Reform sympathetic graduates — form part of the growing scene of radical right media in Britain.
John Merrick, a writer and journalist who covers the British right, told Byline Times about how this radical turn on the right is occurring not just among anonymous accounts, but among the grassroots of the Conservative youth wing.
The Pimlico Journal and a few associated publications are at the sharp end of a trend that has only been occasionally remarked on: the increasing numbers of young Conservative activists turning to the ideas of Enoch Powell to articulate a new vision of conservatism
John Merrick, writer and journalist
Merrick continued: “Obviously, Powell’s arguments have been in and around mainstream conservatism for generations, and his influence, however disavowed, on Thatcherism was obvious.
“But never before has his vision — combining Great Power nostalgia, free markets and intense immigration controls — been so openly embraced by so many people with direct links to the Conservative party. Unlike previous Powellites, this isn’t just fringe groups on the party’s periphery.”
Merrick suggested those behind the publication want a “reinvigoration of the British economy achieved via an intense bout of free market shock therapy alongside a nativist immigration policy”.
ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE
Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.
We’re not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.
Pimlico Journal’s analysis has been endorsed by Conservative MP Neil O Brian, and Musk recently shared a post from one of the magazine’s young contributors indicating that its readership extends into the halls of power.
In 2018 Becca Lewis, author of the Data and Society Alternative Influence report, detailed why this influence was so important to scrutinise, stating that: “Increasingly, understanding the circulation of extremist political content does not just involve fringe communities and anonymous actors.
“Instead, it requires us to scrutinise polished, well-lit micro-celebrities and the captivating videos that are easily available on the pages of the internet’s most popular video platform”.
As Reform UK climb in the polls and the world’s richest man continues to back them, it’s worth paying attention to the fact that a radical right wing alternative media ecology is emerging in the UK, and is eager to back a candidate in 2029.
The Lotus Eaters did not reply to a request for comment.