MAGA has come to the UK

Do we want to get suckered in by this giant squid?

In 2023 I spent time with some women from the MAGA movement in America filming for the documentary The Conspiracists. When I got back to the UK it was a relief to be home. My escape may have been short lived though. Like a giant squid, the MAGA tentacles are stretching across The Atlantic to the UK.

In psychology the tendency to ignore disconfirmatory evidence is known as ‘disconfirmation bias’, where people favour information that supports their existing beliefs and dismiss information that contradicts them. Conspiracy theories protect our cherished beliefs by ignoring disconfirmatory evidence. When I was with the MAGA women they were horrified when I told them I had had the Covid vaccine. They showed me pity for my naivety. But, how come I was still alive and in good health? I asked. This fact did not hold them back. I had probably been given the saline version, I was told. They couldn’t give the real version to everyone because then ‘they’ - the elite cabal - would have killed all the workers. They still needed some workers after all. But I had had it three times, had I been given the saline version three times? Well, maybe I was just good at detoxing, came the retort. Once we are wedded to a belief, no evidence to the contrary seems able to persuade us differently. That I was there, alive and well, despite having had three doses of the vaccine, was not sufficient cause for them to question their belief that the Covid vaccine was anything but a nefarious plot designed to control and kill us. As we navigate living in today’s post-truth world we all need to be wise to the trap of disconfirmation bias.

Here is a short preview clip from The Conspiracists of my conversation about the Covid vaccine.

Anti-vaccine views are now on the rise in Britain. At the recent Reform party conference Aseem Malhotra was given a slot on the main stage - the main stage, not a side fringe event. His speech was entitled, “Make Britain Healthy Again”, a direct reference to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA), Robert F Kennedy’s campaign slogan. Previously, Malhotra had written a paper calling for a moritorium on Covid MRNA vaccines. In his Reform party conference speech he talks of the censorship from the mainstream press who would not report on his paper and goes on to thank GB News for standing up for free speech as the only broadcaster who would air his views. He recounts that after that GB News interview Robert F Kennedy Jr called him to thank him and since then has “been in constant communication with him.” The irony is not lost on me that at the commencement of Malhotra’s speech he states, “barriers to the truth are often more psychological than they are intellectual”. Yes, that is similar to the statement I wrote at the top of this article about disconfirmatory bias. There are other sections of his speech I agree with in essence, such as the dangerous influence of lobby groups. But that is where our shared views end. What conspiracy theorists are masters at is taking a shred of truth and then spinning them into something that fits their ideology, however far fetched. His thesis is that “evidence based medicine has become an illusion”, that there is “an epidemic of misinformed doctors” and - to a big round of applause - he announced “that the general population don’t know what’s happening and they don’t even know that they don’t know’. Were they applauding his announcement that they, along with the rest of the population, are ignorant? Or did the people in that audience see themselves as apart from the general population? There were so many elements of his speech that sounded like the conspiracy theories I heard on my trip with the MAGA women. He called the Covid MRNA vaccine “gene therapy”. He tells his confirmatory audience that “it’s highly likely that the Covid vaccine has been a significant factor in the cancer of members of the royal family”. The royal family popped up regularly in many of the conspiracy theories the MAGA women shared with me. Molhatra also went on to say that “the Covid MRNA jabs have likely killed or seriously harmed millions of people across the world”. This conspiracy theory has been debunked time and time again, and in fact the opposite can be said to be true: there is evidence that it saved upward of 14 million lives and research by the World Health Organization puts the number of lives saved in the UK at 475,000 with many more kept out of hospital or off a ventilator. Like the conspiracy theorists I spent time with, Malhotra had an answer to that too. He tells us in his speech that the World Health Organisation “has been captured by Bill Gates”, and thus cannot be trusted. These conspiracy theories are quite literally, dangerous. Measles is on the rise in the UK. Measles can cause life long disabilities and even death. But it feels like scientific fact is losing the battle against disconfirmation bias right now.

Also present at the Reform party conference was the climate change denial thinktank The Heartland Institute. During a speech there it was reported that Lois Perry claimed that “There’s nothing wrong with CO2. CO2 is not a pollutant.” She said that “government net-zero policies had been introduced to control us. It’s to tax us. It’s to take our money and it’s to take our liberty.” She added: “They want us in electric cars. Electric cars can be remotely controlled. Again, not a conspiracy theory. These cars can be shut down.” This idea that an elite group are out to control us like characters in some kind of science fiction fantasy novel is all over MAGA conspiracy theories. To be fair, there are times these days when it feels like we are characters living in a science fiction novel, but the idea that a group of powerful people are working closely together plotting to control us all is absurd.

It was reported that at the Reform Conference Perry’s counterpart, James Taylor, claimed that “we are not facing a climate crisis, there is no way we could be facing a climate crisis.” In recent years opponents of climate action had shifted their arguments from outright climate denialism to ones that would delay or obstruct it instead. That we are now heading back to a US imported version of climate denialism is deeply depressing and a backward step in the effort to mitigate the worst effects of the climate and ecological crisis and find a way forward to a fair and just transition to clean energy.

It is unlikely to have missed your notice that one of the speakers at the recent Unite The Kingdom rally was Elon Mush¹. His highly inflammatory speech that called for civil war was full of MAGA tropes. The rally was attended by upward of 110,000 people and Charlie Kirk banners could be seen everywhere. While Charlie Kirk was a controversial figure in the US, not many in the UK will have heard of him before that week, yet there were hundreds of placards in homage to him. Charlie Kirk was the leader of Turning Point and was assassinated on 10 September 2025 by a lone gunman. Turning Point was founded to advocate for conservative politics, primarily in high school and college campuses. While I was on a research trip in the US in 2022 I met with a group of students from Turning Point. They told me they felt they were mislabelled as fascist just because they were pro America. They were quick, and proud, to inform me they had LGBTQ members in their chapter though. Remember back to those heady days of 2022 when diversity and inclusion was not yet a bad word? I wonder if they would have been so quick to tell me that if I were interviewing them today? One of the students was from a family of cattle farmers and he felt that agriculture was being blamed for climate change. He wanted us to keep our hands off his cows. Unsurprisingly, he was not a fan of the move towards plant based food. What was chilling about that meeting was how eloquent they were for their age. I complimented them on that and they were proud to tell me why: Turning Point had very sophisticated training courses that they had all attended. They told me that “Turning Point teaches you how to win and that you owe it to your ideology to win”. Those Charlie Kirk inspired trans-Atlantic giant squid tentacles are well trained and out to win.

At the Unite The Kingdom rally the American Republican candidate Valentina Gomez described Keir Starmer as, “the biggest paedophile protector in history.” A reference to Jeffrey Epstein. Not much time would go past while I was on my trip with the MAGA women without mention of paedophilia. “Pedo-Jo” was one of their favourite phrases, the name they gave to Jo Biden. The list of people they deemed as paedophiles was a rather long one. The MAGA women I met saw themselves as mama bears “We are the moms and the mama bears and our children have been threatened.” They were out to save their children from the evils of this world.

This “save our children” mantra was on display at the United The Kingdom rally and has also taken centre stage at the recent protests outside hotels being used to house human beings who are seeking asylum. The “save our children” mantra has now been co-opted and conflated with the highly politicised issue of immigration. In one single stroke every man fleeing horrors and searching for sanctuary in the UK has now been branded a criminal and a paedophile.

Also given the stage at the rally was Eva Vlaardingerbroek from The Dutch far-right. In her speech she said, “They are demanding the sacrifice of our children on the altar of mass migration. Let’s not beat about the bush — this is the rape, replacement, and murder of our people… Remigration is possible, and it’s up to us to make it happen. We are Generation Remigration.” In the most recent turn of events both Reform and The Conservatives have now gone beyond the “stop the boats” rhetoric to talk of “sending people back” who quite legitimately have leave to remain in the UK. Simultaneously In America we are witnessing horrendous scenes as ICE have been given a mandate to go out and catch their prey, arresting, detaining and deporting people, some of whom are quite legitimately in the US.

I remember how shocked I was when I heard the Roe v Wade had been overturned in the US. There is evidence that Nigel Farage is now connecting up with the The Alliance Defending Freedom (AFD), the US anti-abortion group that challenged Roe v Wade. The ADF has now brought its playbook to Britain and is focusing on a topic it believes will resonate with British voters: free speech. They are attacking the “safe access zones” implemented outside UK abortion clinics citing freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the right to protest. Those safe access zones were put there to protect people entering them from harassment. They have now been weaponised amid MAGA-esque cries of “censorship”. But in a brazen show of double standards the cries of “free speech” only seems to apply when it suits them. When it is “free speech” they don’t like it gets shut down, and with their leader Trump in The White House he is proving able to pull the necessary levers of power to shut it down. In another example of those squid like tentacles reaching across The Atlantic, campaigners and right wing pundits in the UK have been quick to jump on this flawed “free speech” band wagon too, marketing it as a backlash against cancel culture. There has always been tension as to where the line is when it comes to free speech, but the use of hate speech that, not long ago, would have been shunned by most of society is today becoming more acceptable.

And now the UK has a new emerging think tank that has all the hallmarks of the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA led organisation that drafted “Project 2025”. Project 2025 was the basis of Trump’s second term agenda. James Orr, an associate professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge University and close friend of JD Vance is one of the names behind this emerging UK think tank, the Centre for a Better Britain. Orr is on the advisory board. He went to the same boarding school as Rishi Sunak by the way. He is friends with the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel who has heavily influenced right wing politics in the US. Orr has been quoted as saying, “The CBB will be guided by a post-Brexit, pro-nation, pro-sovereignty, pro-Britain impulse and framework”. MAGA is a pro-nation, pro-sovereignty, pro-America movement. One of the central facets of the MAGA movement is its distrust and hatred of the elite who are disconnected from ordinary citizens, and with it comes one of its biggest contradictions: It is hard to square that with the fact that MAGA’s poster boys, and its UK equivalents, the likes of Trump, Musk, Thiel, Farage and Orr, are anything but ordinary citizens. Farage too went to private school before becoming a commodities trader in the London Metal Exchange. Most commodities traders command salaries deep into six figures, a far cry from the median annual salaries of British people of £37,000.

None of the MAGA women I met were inherently nasty people. In fact, they showed kindness towards me. They certainly showed no evil intent. They had however chosen the route of conspiracy theories to try and make sense of their lives, and they had found powerful communities - primarily in online spaces - to validate their beliefs. We all live in echo chambers. Echo chambers are comforting, it is the path of least resistance to be surrounded by people who agree with you. I venture outside of my echo chamber from time to time because of my work, otherwise I think I’d probably choose to stay in my cosy chamber. But the problem with that is our cosy echo chambers are not impervious and when their walls crumble we may find ourselves looking out onto a horizon where there is no longer a place for liberal values. The conspiracy theories you will hear in my film may sound whacky to some, but they are a bedrock of the MAGA movement and Trumpism. It is a movement that is being imported into the UK, without tariffs, but with a very heavy cost to our human rights and the multi-cultural progressive Britain that not so long ago was lauded.

And so we find ourselves today, with a polarised Britain where neither side will move its position. Yet those at both poles have more in common than we are often willing to accept. Many of those at the Unite The Kingdom rally came because of a shared distrust and hatred of a political and corporate elite who they see as self-serving and most definitely not serving them. They have ‘elected’ the likes of Farage and Tommy Robinson to be their de facto leaders. Those on the left are equally disastisfied by our political and corporate elite, and since Zack Polanski took over the leadership of the Green Party there has been a marked surge in membership and support for a more leftist agenda. The cost of living crisis and the effects of austerity are at the root of this discontent on both sides. However, the narratives and ideologies coming from those leaning towards the far right bear many of the hallmarks of the MAGA movement in America. Which brings me back to that giant squid. It catches its prey with its tentacles, gripping it with serrated sucker rings. Then it brings its prey to its beak and shreds it with small, file-like teeth on its tongue. What we now need to figure out, and fast, is how we avoid getting sucked.

---

We are now releasing The Conspiracists in the UK and are keen to connect with community groups to host screenings and discussions. If you would be interested in attending a screening event near you please take a moment to fill out our petition form or get in touch with me directly.

Screenings of my film The Line We Crossed continue across the UK. Up to date screening information can be found here. As a postcript to the film I made a short piece “Requiem For Protest” in collaboration with Kim Halliday. For those interested in climate and protest rights I would highly recommend listening to this podcast I recorded with Jonathon Porritt.

I am currently working on a film about the right to asylum and the highly charged issue of immigration. If you would like to talk to me about that, please reach out.

1. Type noted but some typos are just too good to be corrected.