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GB News’ new US-focused show is providing a regular platform for conspiracy theories – as well as the claim that the UK needs to be ‘saved’ by Donald Trump’s America.
The Late Show Live launched on 22 September, broadcasting in the US, as well as on the UK channel and on YouTube.
Speaking at the American party to mark the launch of GB News in the US last month, its co-owner Sir Paul Marshall told the audience of ‘Make America Great Again’ allies and supporters: “We need you to come and save us. To rescue us… You are making America great again.”
The right-wing millionaire added: “We need to make Britain great again… We need as many as possible of you… to appear on our channel, to tell the story of what you’re doing to turn your country around.” Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage, a GB News presenter, was the headline speaker at the party.
The new US show appears to be fulfilling Paul Marshall’s wishes.
Hosted by Bev Turner and Ben Leo live from the United States, The Late Show Live is also being shown – along with other GB News output – on Donald Trump’s streaming platform Truth+ as well as other pro-Trump networks.
Content from the inaugural US show – which also aired in the UK – included frequent praise for Trump and his MAGA backers by the GB News hosts and guests – and vice versa, praise for GB News by MAGA figures.
The US launch raises questions about the media and political discourse GB News hopes to frame around the UK, from the perspective of American politics, and the extent to which such a project aims to help Farage’s party, which is leading UK polls.
Both Turner and Leo have rejected man-made climate change, espoused anti-vaccine views, and appeared to cast doubt on the Coronavirus pandemic being real.
Turner’s heavily pro-Trump commentary has previously included her saying “I think we’ve got such amazingly exciting times ahead” under the President, and on another occasion, “where Trump goes, hopefully the UK will follow”.
Leo also has also praised Trump, called the climate crisis a “climate scam”, and frequently uses far-right tropes about a so-called immigrant “invasion”.
He has previously referred to pro-immigration politicians as “traitors” and said of the US President: “I think President Trump, in decades to come, will be remembered as one of the greatest US presidents in living history. He has shifted the Overton window on everything from mass deportations, from the trans debate, take your pick… I think his face should be carved into Mount Rushmore.”
The first programme featured an exclusive interview with senior Trump advisor, former Fox News anchor and 2020 election result-denier Kari Lake, who – along with host Ben Leo – repeatedly castigated the UK on issues such as immigration, free speech, and the BBC licence fee, while calling for Reform UK’s Leader Nigel Farage to become the next prime minister.
Subsequent shows cemented GB News’ apparent Trumpian worldview.
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Night Two: Paracetamol Panic
On its second airing on 23 September, Turner backed Donald Trump’s announcement urging pregnant women to stop taking Tylenol – the name for Paracetamol in the US – claiming, without firm evidence, that it caused autism.
She said: “I just find it astonishing when Wes Streeting comes out as our Health Secretary the morning after and just says this is wrong as though he has evidence… I imagine he hasn’t even read their report by the time he went on breakfast telly this morning.”
And she put forward claims that doctors would recommend Paracetamol on the basis that they do not like Donald Trump.
“The trouble is, if people go into the doctors and the doctors hate Donald Trump and they say ‘I’m pregnant, should I take Paracetamol?’ The doctors are going to say, yeah, take Paracetamol, don’t listen to that Donald Trump”, she claimed.
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“Social media is literally awash with people, pregnant women today on TikTok. I mean, it blows my mind, necking Tylenol just to say, you take this Donald Trump as they put Tylenol down their gullet with their pregnant bump.
She added: “What’s wrong with those women? They [have] completely lost their mind. They are that politically enraged by Donald Trump that they would risk the health of their baby rather than listen to people who have their best interests at heart.”
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That same night, right-wing American guest and commentator Stephen Kent drew a comparison between diverse London with “Pakistan or India”.
“The idea that Britain should be British and that, when you go to London, it should feel like the storybooks and the history books that you were promised is not a controversial idea”, he said. “You’re not going to London to visit Pakistan or India”.
GB News’ Neil Oliver also made an appearance, who has platformed antisemitic conspiracy theories on his YouTube show. His output has largely disappeared from TV broadcasts but he remains a GB News host online, where content is largely un-regulated by Ofcom.
Kent described climate advocacy as having “religious fundamentalist energy”, suggesting it meant “we need to cleanse the Earth of human beings”.
Night Three: Injecting Bleach
In the third show, host Bev Turner challenged a guest, Mally Smith, who had said of Trump’s attack on Tylenol: “We also should have scepticism if we’re taking medical advice from one guy who told us to inject bleach during Covid, which would be President Trump.”
Turner spoke in Trump’s defence, saying: “Just to clarify, he was talking about hydroxychloroquine, which, let’s face it, sounds like a bleach, which was a medication which we now know did well on Covid.”
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Smith replied: “He did not. He actually said we should inject bleach.”
In April 2020, President Trump said at a press conference, as the first wave of the Coronavirus was taking hold in the US: “I see the disinfectant where it knocks it [Covid] out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it’d be interesting to check that.”
Night Four: Firing Squads
On the show’s fourth airing, Turner agreed with bringing back the death penalty in the UK, stating that “Britain could lead the way, frankly, in Europe, in bringing it back. And it would dramatically cut crime, I guarantee it”.
She asked a guest: “President Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has announced that she’s seeking to apply the death penalty across the whole of the United States. But with Britain’s crime rocketing, is it time to do the same, bring back the death penalty as the ultimate deterrent?”
She also suggested that Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer should be killed “by firing squad”.
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Turner called the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ protest rally in London on 13 September, organised by far-right convicted criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) as a “celebration, I would say, of Britishness on the streets of London”.
The Metropolitan Police described the event as “a very challenging day that saw disorder, violence directed at officers, and 26 officers injured”. There were dozens of arrests for offences including affray, violent disorder, assaults, and criminal damage.
In another segment, right-wing British-Indian activist Aman Bhogal said that the UK Government’s plans for digital IDs presented “a very, very slippery socialist slope to full-blooded communism” and that “Starmer might as well rename the country the People’s Republic of North London”.
The programmes so far have also seen frequent claims from hosts Turner and Leo that the Prime Minister should replicate Trump’s border policy, with Turner declaring to a guest that “we” – either GB News or the UK – “are here to be saved!”
Night Five: Tongue-Tied
On the programme’s fifth airing, host Ben Leo claimed that “there’s some streets [in the UK] where they don’t speak English at all. I went to one in Leicester the other week.” It is not clear whether he spoke to every single resident on these unspecified streets.
According to the latest 2021 Census data, more than 91% (52.6 million) of residents in Britain, aged three years and over, had English (and English or Welsh in Wales) as a main language. A further 7.1% (4.1 million) were proficient in English but did not speak it as their main language.
Guest Raheem Kassam also branded the UK civil service’s “quote unquote, deep state” as “nefarious” and “entrenched”.
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Night Six: Guns for All
Ben Leo delivered a flurry of extreme comments on the sixth night of the show.
On Antifa (antifascist activists) being classed by Trump’s administration as “domestic terrorists”, he said that “we should do the same in the UK”.
On US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) making light of deportations, he said: “As a Brit who has 50,000 illegal migrants flooding the Channel since Labour took to power, I quite enjoyed that.”
He praised Trump’s military deployments to Democrat cities, adding: “I love them. I love seeing the National Guard on the streets of DC. They make me feel safe… I salute them.”
And he suggested bringing in the military against asylum seekers in the UK: “President Trump sends in the military to defend immigration officials in Portland, in Oregon. He’s literally sent in the big guns, the army’s there, and they’re protecting the ICE agents against the lunatics from Antifa. Do we need to do the same thing in the UK?”
Night Seven: High Steaks
On the show’s seventh night, Leo cast doubt on Trump’s convictions, the pandemic, what he called the “green scam”, and US election results.
Commenting on the UK Government’s plans for digital IDs, he suggested that it was a form of social control, claiming, without evidence, that it could be used to monitor how much meat people eat.
“Maybe they’d say… you’ve had too many steaks this year… Your carbon footprint is doing harm to the nation… You are eating chickpeas and gruel for the next six months until your social credit score is big enough”, he claimed.
Leo added: “Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t care.”
The GB News anchor also referred to the Coronavirus as a “so-called pandemic”.
Commenting on the 2020 US Presidential Election which President Joe Biden won, Leo gave a nod to Donald Trump’s debunked claims of election fraud, saying: “Wasn’t it interesting that 20 million less [sic] people voted in the election last year than the 2020 election?… Where did 20 million votes go?” The answer is that many Democrats stayed at home.
In another segment, he said that he was “pro-gun”, adding a usual (and much parodied) pro-gun trope: “I argue guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
While he conceded that it may be preferable to have no guns, he added: “At a time when criminals, bad people, bad hombres, have access to all sorts of weapons, the only sane response can be is: you need to make sure you’re armed yourself.”
Reaction: ‘Out of Touch’
GB News is broadcast in the UK on streaming channels regulated by broadcast regulator Ofcom, including this new US show which airs on UK television from midnight until 2am every night.
Asked about the various comments on GB News’ US show, as documented in this article, an Ofcom spokesperson told Byline Times: “Our broadcasting rules apply only to content that airs on Ofcom-licensed channels. We enforce these rules fairly and proportionately, acting independently and impartially at all times.” However, this comment came before Byline Times learnt that the show was also broadcast on the channel’s UK station.
“Ofcom has an ongoing duty to be satisfied, as the independent UK broadcasting regulator, that broadcast licensees remain fit and proper to hold their licences. We keep all licensees under review.”
For Richard Wilson, co-founder of Stop Funding Hate campaign group, GB News’ “relentless promotion” of Donald Trump’s Government “makes a mockery of the channel’s claim to be a champion of free speech”.
“Just at the moment that Trump is stepping up his attacks on freedom of expression in the United States, this toxic channel is doubling-down on its effort to ingratiate itself with the MAGA movement – and import the Trump playbook to Britain,” he added.
Polls indicate that around 70% of Brits now have a negative view of America’s President – with Wilson saying this shows “how out of touch GB News is with the UK public”.
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MAGA Motivations
The channel’s US launch event on 4 September provides insight on its American love-affair.
Politico reported that the US launch party of GB News’ new Washington DC bureau featured “many of the Trump administration’s biggest hitters” at a private members’ club.
The outlet added that the White House threw its “full weight” behind the launch, “offering up as speakers both Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick” and that “almost a dozen members of Trump’s Cabinet were in attendance as speakers discussed a budding transatlantic alliance that could help propel Farage into Downing Street”.
Perhaps most tellingly, GB News co-owner Sir Paul Marshall – who also owns the Spectator magazine and the UnHerd site — told the crowd: “You are an inspiration. The United States has an incredibly important role to play in the future of Britain. You provide us with hope. You provide us with inspiration. We want to shine a light on what’s happening here.”
Marshall was reportedly “close to tears” as he quoted Churchill, branding Trump and his supporters “the new world” which would replace the “old” one.
“We need you to come and save us”, Politico reported. “To rescue us… You are making America great again. We need to make Britain great again… We need as many as possible of you… to appear on our channel, to tell the story of what you’re doing to turn your country around”.
GB News did not respond to Byline Times’ request for comment.
Correction: This article initially stated that the US show was not regulated by Ofcom. The show is broadcast on GB News’ UK channel from midnight every night.
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