\u201cThrough my study of history I\u2019ve really come to admire the British empire\u2026 It was undoubtedly a force for good in the world, and the men they sent out to colonise the planet were some of the most noble, brave, and manly to ever live,\u201d he said \u2013 already a questionable statement from an American, given that their country\u2019s national identity is grounded in throwing off the yoke of empire.<\/p>\n
But Walsh had more to say: \u201cThat\u2019s why it pains me to see this once mighty nation brought to its knees by the barbarian hordes \u2013 an army of invaders who didn\u2019t, and couldn\u2019t, defeat them on the battlefield, but were rather let in the front door and given free rein to rape British daughters and slaughter British sons in the street. Very sad to see. What a tragic conclusion. And so totally preventable.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few minutes later, Walsh decided he had hit on the solution. \u201cThere is a MUCH stronger case to be made for invading the UK, toppling its tyrannical government, and liberating its people than for pretty much any regime change war (to include Iran) over the past 30 years,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n
It is tempting to dismiss Walsh as a lone crank, an influencer who has evidently gone off the deep end, who is best ignored. Why risk amplifying voices in the wilderness like him? Sadly, that\u2019s not the world we live in. Walsh\u2019s formulation might have been extreme, but his opinion was not.<\/p>\n
A growing portion of the American right believes Europe in general and Britain in particular have \u201cfallen\u201d, that radical Islamist violence means it is unsafe for white people to leave their homes \u2013 lest the men be killed and the women and girls raped \u2013 and that as a result, the US and Europe no longer have anything in common with one another.<\/p>\n
This is not a viewpoint that has emerged in isolation. It is being actively fostered by a loose coalition of overlapping interests. The world\u2019s richest man, Elon Musk, has been radicalised by his own social network, and often intervenes to inflame UK politics \u2013 especially at times of civil unrest.<\/p>\n
One of the British political figures Musk most frequently boosts is Rupert Lowe, who \u2013 like Tommy Robinson, another Musk favourite \u2013 has inflamed the real and grotesque scandal of Pakistani grooming gangs to fuel a far right political agenda. Lowe even recently held a so-called \u201cinquiry\u201d into such gangs \u2013 styled similarly to \u201cindependent SAGE\u201d Covid reports \u2013 to provide fuel for those fires.<\/p>\n
As if that mix weren\u2019t toxic enough, the divisions are being encouraged behind the scenes by Russian influence operations and bots. For Vladimir Putin, the cold war never ended \u2013 anything that weakens the western alliance must naturally strengthen Russia.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At a time when Russian troops and tanks are still in Ukraine, the practical consequences of dividing the US from Europe are apparent. Russia has not created these issues, but its online agents are more than happy to stir the pot and nudge the debate where they can.<\/p>\n
All of those actors \u2013 even Musk \u2013 are dwarfed, though, by the final one: the extreme vision of a fallen Britain and a fallen Europe is being actively spread and fostered by the White House and by senior Trump administration officials. What we might hope to dismiss as the feverish ranting of online trolls and Russian bots has, over the last year, become the official position of the US government.<\/p>\n
Vice-president JD Vance laid the groundwork for this narrative in his 2025 Munich Security Conference speech. During a live shooting war in Europe, he said the main threats to the continent were not \u201cexternal\u201d but instead the \u201cthreats from within\u201d caused by \u201cthe retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values\u201d.<\/p>\n
What might have been brushed away as one rogue speech by the vice-president \u2013 an office, for all its supposed seniority, best known for its irrelevance \u2013 was soon codified into official US doctrine.<\/p>\n
When the Trump White House published its National Security Strategy in December 2025, it listed the European Union as a \u201ctransnational body\u201d that is \u201cundermin[ing] political liberty and sovereignty\u201d. It worried about \u201cthe real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure\u201d across Europe, and pledged to tackle this by directly intervening in European domestic politics. US diplomacy would, it said, focus on \u201ccultivating resistance to Europe\u2019s current trajectory within European nations\u201d.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump is waging a war on minorities at home. His administration is dehumanising Somalians and stripping people legally in the country of their rights to remain there en masse \u2013 with no recourse to the courts or to due process. ICE has been given unprecedented powers to grab anyone they suspect might be in the US illegally, often with tragic results.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Trump and those around him are exploiting anger about immigration to threaten the fundamental rights on which American democracy depends \u2013 and a determined coterie of figures on the British right appears to be working in concert with the MAGA movement to do the same here.<\/p>\n
Last week, we got a glimpse of what that looks like in practice. Sarah B Rogers, the US under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, spoke at a London conference held by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, one of a network of influence organisations established by the billionaire GB News founder Paul Marshall and laid out in detail by\u00a0The New World\u00a0in an investigation last year.<\/p>\n
In her remarks, Rogers, a senior serving US diplomat, dedicated a whole section of her speech to \u201cDa Yookay\u201d, a longstanding meme beloved of the British far right. Rogers blended real events and online exaggerations to paint a picture of how the UK looks from the vantage point of X.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Da Yookay, you can be remanded without bail for an inflammatory tweet, while a psychopath who seizes a three-year-old and feeds him to crocodiles walks free,\u201d she began. \u201cIn Da Yookay, the moral sense of jurors won\u2019t save you because jury trials for speech crimes are abolished.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Da Yookay, a girl can escape from a rape gang, flag down a police constable, and discover that the cop is in league with the rapists. In Da Yookay, you get a free car for pretending to be disabled. In Da Yookay, cops defer to a murderer who calls his victim a racist. Then they handcuff you as you bleed to death if you\u2019re white.\u201d<\/p>\n
Usually, when a public official rattles off a long list of inflammatory and distorted information like that, they are getting ready for a big counter. Not so with Rogers. While she went on to set out her vision of Britain in a better era \u2013 ironically, that of George Orwell, a man who took a bullet to the neck after volunteering to fight fascists in the Spanish civil war \u2013 Rogers stood by the stories.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the Britain you see online,\u201d she concluded. \u201cAnd I\u2019m not here to tell you, as your minders do, that it\u2019s all misinformation or mirage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Setting out the plain and public facts on this can make you look like a conspiracy theorist, but it is beyond deniable: the US government is working in concert with the British far right to take over our country and rebuild it in a Trumpian image.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The richest man in the world, who controls the social media network most used by our politicians and media, is on board with the plan. None of it is happening behind closed doors, because no one involved needs to hide what they\u2019re doing. It is right there to see, for anyone who will look.<\/p>\n
We have spent most of the last two years \u2013 crucial time in which we should have been bolstering our defences and shoring up our democratic safeguards \u2013 wilfully blind. Keir Starmer\u2019s government seemed to hope that if it ignored what the US government was trying to do, it simply wouldn\u2019t be real.<\/p>\n
Similarly, it hoped that if it talked sternly about social media regulation, and acted as if tackling big tech was the same kind of bipartisan, wonkish issue it had been under Joe Biden, that might become true. Bizarrely, given its usual hostility to Starmer, most of the British media was happy to play along with that illusion. We are the frog that has placidly allowed itself to be boiled.<\/p>\n
The UK will soon have a new prime minister, almost certainly Andy Burnham. All of these problems will then be on his desk, alongside dozens if not hundreds of others.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some will seem more urgent, and some will certainly be higher-profile, but this may be the most important \u2013 not just for the prospects of the Burnham project, or even of the Labour Party, but also for British democracy itself. We have collectively spent two years failing to meet the moment. We may not have another two years left to waste<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThrough my study of history I\u2019ve really come to admire the British empire\u2026 It was undoubtedly a force…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73032,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,361,33294,3053,33295],"class_list":["post-73031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-britain","tag-donald-trump","tag-maga","tag-media","tag-read-against-racism"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116836113449203050","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}