Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 791: The UK riots and the far-right’s misinformation machine

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Special Guest Michael Marshall:

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, This is Cognitive Distance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way, we bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. Today is Wednesday

September the 4th recording a little bit early We're doing that because we want to have a very special guest on and that is Michael Marshall Out of the UK and he did not want to record at 3 in the morning on a Thursday Yeah, which I thought was rude super rude super rude of him Yeah, we had to record on Wednesday, if anything happens of great import and note. Yeah, we're taking a week off during election season, but we thought it was worthwhile because what Mark has to say really does reflect a lot about American politics too. So we're going to talk to him in a few minutes, but we wanted to talk to you first before

we get into anything. On September 21st, we were sort of hinting at this for a while, but on September 21st at 8 PM Eastern on our YouTube channel and possibly stream to other places we have to see first. I'll have Ian confirm that and we will have links on our show notes and the shows leading up to it to make sure you have access to all these places. But on our YouTube channel for sure, we are going to be doing a Humanists for Harris live stream event. Now this live stream event is going to be Tom and I,

but then also Noah, Heath and Eli from the Scathing Atheist, but more importantly, all of us from Citation Needed, the Citation Needed podcast, we are going to be doing a live Citation Needed rendition of the introduction to Project 2025. So the Project 2025 introduction has been turned into a script. We're going to be reading that script aloud and then we'll all be making interjections just like it were written as a Citation Needed episode. So show up. It'll be a couple of hours of us just hanging out and raising money for the Harris Walls campaign. Yeah, this is a very exciting, you know, we've had fundraisers in the past when things were

incredibly important and I can't genuinely, I can't say that this is more important than the other fundraisers, but it is absolutely as important. You guys have always showed up in the past. You've shown up. We've put our money where our mouth is. We've behaved as humanists. We've put dollars in the door and it makes a difference.

We know that this makes a difference. We need people to show up. Again, it's 8 p.m. Eastern time. You can find it. Well, We'll ensure we'll send links out on all of our socials. We'll have links to how to donate, but then more importantly, we'll have links to the live stream. We'd love to see as many people as possible show up just, even if, even if you can't donate, just to show up in the live stream itself to talk and hang out and to chat with other people. That community helps grab other people from farther away into this community and introduces them

and maybe they'll donate as well. So even if you can't donate, just showing up is important. And if I can ask also for everybody listening, if you can amplify this everywhere that you're at in terms of any spaces that you might have control of, your social media, I know we have podcasters, other podcasters and content creators that listen. We really want to get the word out here about this fundraiser.

We want to really, we, I mean, we got to get Harris installed as fucking president, right? That's what needs to happen. Let's be real. Money helps make that happen. So not only do we want you to show up and attend and have a great time and donate to an incredibly worthy cause, but really help us amplify the size of this event. Let's get as many people there as possible. Let's have a great time and let's fucking put Trump into the fucking old people home slash prison that he needs to rot in forever. And very specifically too, this is an opportunity for us to show as humanists, as atheists, as agnostics,

that we are a force. We're a group of people who are motivated to help. We are motivated to do charity work and this is a perfect opportunity for that. So we do that every year with Vulgarity for Charity. So, you know, we want to show that we do this other times as well. And this is an important moment too, to make sure you very much include that humanist part, because that's the important part to let everybody know that that's sort of what our group does. That's how our group comes together to help. Yeah. So we are joined by Michael Marshall of the Skeptics with a K podcast and the Skeptic UK and the Be Reasonably Skeptical podcast.

Thanks for joining us, Mike. How are you doing? I've stopped doing that podcast just so you don't take the piss out of me. I haven't got an F4 add, so I just like to lay that in my history. I'm good, guys. I'm good. It's a pleasure to be here. I was so happy you could make it.

Marsh, in Skeptic UK, recently, there was a long article that you posted that was really fascinating about what happened in the UK. There was some riots that happened, but really the genesis of this entire thing, it feels like a lot of dominoes that sort of fell to finally get to the riots. So can you sort of like give us a background, to finally get to the riots. So can you sort of like give us a background, start at the beginning on how this sort of seed of anti-Islamic behavior and white supremacy sort of built itself in the UK?

Yeah, it is a kind of a fascinating and kind of terrifying thing. And it's hard to know exactly where to start really, because from the one hand, the riots themselves were kicked off by a specific event, but that event really had nothing to do with it. And I think I've described this in some places as, this was like our January the 6th essentially,

it was a perfect storm of it happened after a transition of power from conservatives who'd been pushing culture war points for quite some time, they're now out of power. And there were people out there who wanted to make it look like the incoming more left leaning government would be weak. And so when, how best to explain it really, I think the thing that I found fascinating is throughout the pandemic, I spent my time in Telegram groups.

And obviously Telegram has been in the news a lot more, even more recently. Is that because you hate yourself or you just like, couldn't think of a more terrifying way to spend your time during a pandemic? It's like some soothing anxiety to sort of layer on to the pandemic anxiety or? Yeah, well, genuinely it was because there were, and I'm sure I've talked about this in lots of places, there were anti-vax groups that were starting up by having QR codes on LandPorts that you scanned.

You know, they had the QR codes with like these gut level messaging of saying things like the government is trying to kill you, there is no pandemic, there is no virus, no doubt everything. And when you scan those QR codes, you ended up in a Telegram channel. And I'd never used Telegram before,

but I found that the more time I spent in Telegram, the more time I would spend on Telegram because you're in there, you've suddenly got this community of people. Anybody in your group can immediately add you to another group. Anytime you, so like you're in one group, people think, well, these people are lying to me on this vaccine thing.

So maybe they're relying to me on this other thing. So I'm going to hit a button. I hate that so much. As you're talking and like realizing that the CEO of Telegram just got arrested this week in France, I'm like, I don't want to be added to anything. By someone else. Like you've been added to prison time. I honestly think, right, Telegram, I think it wasn't designed for this purpose, but it's actually, you could not design something better for the dissemination of misinformation as quick as possible. Because like I say, you join this one group, people can click a button,

add you to another group. You have to choose to leave. A lot of people aren't going to choose to leave. So now you're in two groups. But then also anytime you see a button, add you to another group. You have to choose to leave. A lot of people aren't going to choose to leave. So now you're in two groups. But then also, anytime you see a message, you can hit a button and forward it to every group and every contact that you have. Jesus Christ, I'm such a boomer. I hate this so much.

This makes me want to snap my telephone over my knee in half. And so now you're in these groups and messages from other groups will be forwarded in there. And when they get forwarded in, they come with a link from where that group originated. And if you click on that, it'll add you to that group as well. And when you talk to people about their time in Telegram, they will, especially in the conspiracy theory Telegram space is where I would spend a lot of time looking, people

would joke about how many Telegram groups they're in. And then you have that thing of, well, then there's an unread message, so I've got to read it. So I'll scroll to the bottom of this group, move to the next group, scroll to the bottom, move through all 10 groups. Oh, what do you know? The first group has more messages for me to read. It sounds so rabbit hole-y.

Like so rabbit hole-esque. Like in a way that is just different than other things. Yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely a rabbit hole. And so when I talked about this at a previous QED, and we're talking about how this was the extremism rabbit hole basically, is that you start with these genuine fears,

just understandable fears about the virus, about the pandemic, about the confusion that happened in our lives. And within a couple of clicks from the thing you scanned on the lamppost at the end of your street, you're now being fed this network of misinformation. You know what's interesting is this is a human algorithm as opposed to a computer algorithm, right? The computer algorithm, on TikTok,

you look at a couple of Manosphere things and in six flips you're at transphobia, right? Because the computer recognizes, oh, maybe you like this stuff. But this is just a human version of that. It's a human version of like, you would like this stuff, here it is, and it's in your feed. Right. Yeah. It's just as damaging. Right. Yeah. And it happened at the worst possible time because it happened at a time where people's actual contacts went away. We couldn't go and see our friends and family, but you can spend, you know, you're not going into the office for a lot of people, or a lot of people, you don't have a job anymore because your job relied on you

being able to go to the gym that you run or the store that you run, and now you can't do that. So your job went away, and people turned inwards into apps like Telegram and spent their time in these new communities. And the problem was, once the pandemic starts to improve, those people are now trained to accept these places as the place where they go for community. And so the people who want to keep them there, the people who want to, who will capitalize on having this network of people following their every word, will start feeding them other things that will continue hitting those paranoia kind of buttons that will keep giving you that dopamine hit of, I know what's really going on.

And so you see people move from pandemic vaccine, conspiracism into things like QAnon, into things like the 15 minute cities, which I know we've talked about before, and then into the next paranoia and conspiracy theory du jour. It went through drag queen story hour and into transphobic stuff and into all this kind of stuff.

And that's just it operating without anybody putting a thumb on the scale. But the problem was when you know that there are these groups which had hundreds of thousands of people in or tens of thousands of people in, and you're someone who is a bad actor, you know that you can put your thumb on that scale by joining those groups and saying the kind of things they would agree with so they will follow you to your space. And that's how the more and more time that I spent in the anti-vaccine space, I saw more and more overt white supremacist, overt Christian nationalist imagery, overt racism that was happening.

And so you would see things like the great replacement conspiracy theory, the idea that Jewish elites are deliberately bringing migrants and people of color into white majority countries in order to dilute the power of the white race, which is what the great replacement theory posits. That would just come up more and more, more and more often in these conspiracy theory spaces that I was in. So that is all- So just to say that one back to you differently so I understand it. So the idea is that Jewish people are going to import Muslims because of the famed love of those two groups

to work together? I mean, just kind of say that back out loud. Again, it's like, I mean, just kind of say that back out loud again. It's like, I mean, there's historically not a great Jewish Muslim brotherhood. So the idea that you'd be like, hey, you know what we need? We're secretly in power. Do you know what would really help that?

This group where we have historical strife. Yeah, I wish we were. Like more, like, right? But you're not thinking as the evil caricaturist kind of plotting and scheming Jewish person that this conspiracy theory posits. Because the idea is, well, you already hate Christians so much, so you're not trying to bring in Muslims to work with. You're trying to bring in Muslims to dilute the power of the Christians.

Oh, the enemy of the enemy. And therefore, give you complete control. Yeah, exactly. And so one of the things you actually see, and this is why I think Telegram absolutely needs- No, it still doesn't make any sense at all. It's like, I'm supposed to believe that the Jewish animosity with Christians is greater than the historical animosity between Jews and Muslims. And I just am like struggling there. What if you were also turning up the heat on the animosity between Christians and Muslims as well, which is the other thing that happens is that there is this intentional push to

otherize Muslims in the UK, in America, and this is all kind of, this is still all preludes to the riots that happen because this is the background that's been building for years of not just these conspiracy spaces, but conservative politicians deliberately trying to play into these kind of narratives in order to win populist votes to say, well, we are being invaded by people coming over, refugees, asylum seekers. This is an invasion. People within the Tory cabinet, Priti Patel, who was Home Secretary, this is an invasion. People within the Tory cabinet, Priti Patel, who was Home Secretary, called it an invasion of people at our southern border

crossing over the water from France. And so when people are- I'm so glad we don't have that kind of language here, that sort of inflammatory dehumanizing language around the southern border here. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That would be terrible. And so when people are trained

from the mainstream politicians to see this as an invasion and from the alternative sources of information to see this as a deliberate plan that's designed in order to dilute your power, to take away what little you have, after a decade and a half of people having less and less through the austerity government here, things were just incredibly febrile. And then you have other people like the bad faith actors who see all of this kind of paranoia and tension and know that they can start to capitalize on it. People like Tommy Robinson, who's a very famous long-term racist here in the UK, who I've been speaking about on various podcasts recently.

Real quick on that. How scary can somebody named Tommy really be though? You know? Like I'm just like... Like when you have like... It's Tommy. It's like... I mean... Well, bear in mind he took that name deliberately.

That's not his real name. It's not even one of his many real names. That was a name he took as a way of... Yeah, yeah. His name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, or it could be something else, but we don't know, because his passport has a different name on it. Tommy Robinson is a pseudonym that he took on in order to seem more like an everyman, less like an Irishman. Makes sense. Also because he took the name from a different hooligan named Tommy Robinson,

so that if he got into trouble, the police would come knocking on the other guy's door. That was why he's put them in the hang. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that was just making a Tommy joke. Like that's fucking amazing. Yeah, but partly he wants to have that kind of name that sounds like it's not threatening. This is just a guy expressing concerns. But throughout the pandemic, Tommy Robinson, who was the leader of the English Defense League, who was a member of the BMP, who's joined every far right group imaginable, led half the far right groups in this country. He suddenly started switching to COVID vaccine denialism and anti-vaccine. Is he like in government or is he just like a talking hat or what is he?

He was a football hooligan who just got famous by fronting far right, not parties, but semi, the UK equivalent of militia essentially. I see. Okay. Tell him dope who everybody just listens to. Yeah, a rabble rouser who would consider himself a journalist when push came to shove, but his journalism is that kind of propagandist style stuff. He went to prison at one point because, again, pushing the narrative that the powers that be in the UK favor Muslims, he wanted to make the argument that if you are a pedophile and a Muslim, you will not get prosecuted. He went to a trial of a pedophile ring and tried to disrupt that trial by filming the

jury on the way in and yelling kind of about the people's guilt and yelling facts about the case in order to cause a mistrial. Because if there's a mistrial, then those pedophiles don't get prosecuted and he can say the government won't even prosecute Muslims. Well, it is nice that he has the best interest of the public at heart though. I mean, you can just, you can feel the love and empathy and civic duty kind of welling out of that kind of thing. Jesus Christ.

Exactly. So this has all been, I mean, it sounds paranoid to say it was planned and it wasn't planned in the sense of this is the end goal, but it's more that every stage of it is, well, how do I disrupt? How do I sow dissension? How do I cause fear and mistrust at every point? Because that plays well into Tommy Robinson's bottom line, because those people who follow him

will then give him donations when he says he needs to pay for this legal bill or this holiday. I was going to ask, does he sell boner pills and vitamins? He doesn't, but he does ask for donations. Okay. And donations to keep his message out there, to keep him free, to pay his legal bills, because he, as you imagine, free, to pay his legal bills, because he,

as you imagine, gets quite a lot of legal bills. And so you can throw Tommy Robinson there. You can throw people like Nigel Farage in there. So Nigel Farage is a figure who absolutely is part of the same stalking of tensions. And this was a leader in your party, in a Tory party, correct? So he was a member of the Tory party. He left and became the leader of UKIP, which was the UK Independence Party, which was pushing for us to leave the EU.

The Tories took on that policy in order to stave off a threat from UKIP and lost the EU referendum. Nigel Farage now is the leader of another Reform UK, which is a political party that's actually a limited company that he runs. It's not a vote organization. He's now a member of parliament, but for years, he's just been an adjutant pushing for curbs on immigration, all that kind of thing, and playing those same far right kind of populist buttons. So all of this has kind of been stewing for years. The pandemic came along and gave it a place to kind of really intensify like a crucible. And so when there's a transition of power, suddenly there are these actors who want to

try and push that the new government are going to be weak or that they're going to be too pro-immigrant, too pro-Muslims. And then we had an event about 30 miles from where I live right now, where three schoolgirls were stabbed to death at a dance recital, essentially a dance class. And those spaces online released the information that the murderer was a Muslim refugee, a recently arrived Muslim refugee named Axel something or other. And so given all of that, those spaces went up in flames online. So Telegram was immediately beset by, well, we need to go to the vigil.

We need to show that we are not going to take it anymore with these refugees destroying our way of life, killing, coming for our children. And they went to Southport to disrupt the vigil and it turned into a riot. Now it turns out the killer isn't a refugee. He was born and raised in Cardiff, and he's not a Muslim, he was born and raised Christian. He was nothing of the sort. Quick question.

Were they able to find out, or were you able to find out, who originated the first lie? Like that, like who's ground zero for that? Yes, sort of. So this is something that has come out. So there's been some reporting on it. So the first place that could be tracked in this particular lie was a website, Channel Three Now News, which was where everyone was saying, Channel Three Now News are reporting that this is a refugee. Now there isn't a Channel Three in the UK. That's not a news service in the UK. It doesn't exist. In fact, I think it was based in America, but it was originally a Russian YouTube channel

that was bought up by an American person and disseminated through a team of writers in Pakistan who, as far as I can tell, just pumped out everything. It didn't seem like this was deliberate propaganda. It was more just throw everything at everything all time, because that's how you get the clicks and how you get the advertising revenue. So just throw a billion things out, regardless of whether it's true. But somebody picked up on that one report and fed it to a COVID conspiracist here called Bernie.

Well, her pseudonym is Bernie's tweets. She's since been arrested for this. But she took this and shared it to her Telegram and her Twitter saying, if this is true, then a Muslim refugee has just killed these girls. And that got picked up by Tommy Robinson, who sent it around all of his followers with a list of places you need to go and show them that you won't stand for it. So I think the source of this wasn't deliberate propaganda. It was just that engagement farming, be the first to say something and say as many things you can and some of those things are going to catch on.

But I suspect that somewhere down the line, the person who sent it to Bernie before she spread it further, when she would have sent it to a DM so we can't trace it, that is someone who would have recognized the value of putting us on Muslim refugees. And from there, it hit the COVID sphere, it hit the conspiracy theory, networks that had grown through the pandemic, and it caught fire and set alight to the country, essentially. Now recently, your government sort of changed hands. Did some of that push back from the far right, seeing that the left sort of got more power, was that tension also something that you think might have fueled some of this?

I think so. I think at some level, the leaders of those spaces would have seen this as their opportunity to kick off, to cause a riot, to cause dissension on the streets, and to show that this left government can't control, hasn't got their authority, isn't credible. And you saw immediately right-wing pundits who work for places like GB News, which is a right-wing news channel trying to be Fox in the UK, immediately seizing on this and saying, this is proof that the Labour government cannot, can't rule, doesn't have the authority, Kiyosutama needs to quit.

Bear in mind, this happened like two weeks or less. A couple of weeks. Yeah. Yeah, a couple of weeks after the election. So the idea that any of this was on Kiyosutama was obviously ludicrous. And in my opinion, the people organizing these riots were looking for an excuse to hit the goal button and thought this was the excuse,

but unfortunately for them, this wasn't what they were looking for. They were hoping this was actually a crime committed by a Muslim refugee. It turns out it wasn't, but had this been a crime committed by a Muslim refugee, things would have been even worse here, I think. Were there any, I don't want to say legitimate because I think if they did it they're by

de facto not legitimate, but were there any more like traditional or mass media sources that also amplified this message with bad vetting? So not that I'm aware of. I think it actually got out pretty quickly that it was, that the real name, the real name didn't get out. And it turns out because the real killer was a 17 year old. And so, sorry, the real, the real killer was a 17 year old called Axel. The lie that spread was he was called Ali al-Shakti, I think was the lie that he was

a Muslim. His real name was Axel. But his name wasn't even released. So 100% of the spread and amplification was all, all and exclusively, it sounds like, on these illegitimate news sources or influencer spaces, right? Like none of this was coming out of mass market or mass media, traditional media. Sort of. So the difficulty is, yeah, so the difficulty is we've got those does it how best to explain this

This wasn't coming from places like the BBC or the Guardian or the Daily Mail But people who are on things like GB News so the equivalent of your Tucker Carlson Like imagine a Tucker Carlson figure on Fox. Well, that's what I was trying to understand. Yeah So yeah, so people like Aaron Grimes is someone like that or well Nigel Farage himself jumped on this and said, the police are hiding something from you. You need to go, you need to wonder why the police aren't giving you information. Things are being held back from us. So I just want to clarify one, and I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm trying to understand something and I think it's important. So like Nigel Farage is a person though, right?

And like he amplified, but he did not amplify through, say, the Guardian, right? He didn't like write an op-ed to the Guardian. And is the same true of these other sources? Because like what I'm trying to understand for listeners, or like the point maybe I want people to think about, is that when we're in spaces and we see somebody and they are a person that is not connected to any kind of a source that has a vetting department or a

corrections department or that that's that is de facto not trustworthy. Right. We should never if I say it if Tom Curry is the first one to break this news to you and I'm not citing a source from a mass media vetted publication you should immediately be like, Tom is probably lying about this. This is not a true, why would Tom know this? You're stretching the truth or something. Oh, you're just wrong, yeah. Tom's not just wrong. Like you should be like, fucking shrug emoji to that shit.

I'm not paying attention to it. So what I'm trying to understand is, because even if it's like a member of parliament, you know, like it's like, well, who gives a shit? Like he's not a vetting and fact checking department behind Nigel. So did and what about the Tucker Carlson esque character that you were talking about? Were they like on because Tucker's platform now is X, right? It's Twitter, I think.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tucker's in the same space where he's got no no infrastructure behind him to undergird him. So it's like, we should immediately be like, well, that's bullshit because it's just one guy talking. Is it the same kind of scenario? Yeah, exactly that. So as far as I'm aware, GB News themselves didn't put this out, partly because this moved very, very quickly. And I think the lie that got around got corrected pretty quickly. So any official news sources wouldn't have got on it. But people who work for GB News,

not in the capacity of being on GB News, but just being on Twitter, people like Darren Grimes or Calvin Robinson, who's another host of GB News, were using their Twitter to share this. Now, for the average person following them, it's quite difficult to be absolutely certain what is under the guise of working for GB News and what is you just using your personal

Twitter. That works to their advantage because they use the platform given to them by a national television show to then amplify their own views and conflate their public and private or public and professional personas, essentially. But there were no, as far as I'm aware, credible, legitimate, official news outlets anywhere that would run by a two-source rule of don't release anything unless you've got two sources to confirm it. Right.

None of them went with this. But yeah, so the lie got around that this was Ali al-Shakdi, a Muslim refugee, so people rushed to Southport. Actually, while they were in Southport, a second lie fully ignited the riot because another thing started to circulate in those spaces that a Muslim had turned up to that vigil for those three murdered girls with a machete intent on harming people. It came with a photograph of him being arrested by the police. This went around and that's what caused people into violence, in my opinion, from what I've seen.

But actually, it wasn't a Muslim. The guy was a member of the far right who turned up with a knife in order to cause violence towards the police. But somebody had taken his picture and because he had a beard and was wearing a beanie hat and you couldn't quite see him and he looked at a slightly darker skin in the grainy picture. They were like, well, that's a Muslim, therefore he's a threat to us.

And I saw that picture. That picture was taken by a potato at 300 yards. I mean, that picture is a fuh, and how much of that shit is intentional too, right? Like it's like, oh, here's like your shaky Bigfoot cam bullshit, you know? Yeah. You can tell by the gait that he's Islamic, you know, when he walks.

I just tell. Now importantly, the camera will steady for just a moment for these three steps. You can see there's a fold back there. That's actually his muscles, not a... Not a bend in the costume. Not a costume bend. My muscles fold. That's how they do it.

I think the picture wouldn't have been taken with the deliberate... This is where the kind of the disinformation starts to get kind of murky, because I think the picture wouldn't have been taken with the deliberate... This is where the disinformation starts to get murky, because I think the picture wouldn't have been taken with the deliberate intent of disinformation, but it only takes one person to come across that and attach a false narrative to it. And therefore, you can't deny that the picture is real, but the story that it's suddenly been attached to is complete bullshit, and that's what kind of lights the flame. And that's what we of lights the flame. And that's so important, like, right, because we think of, I think we're like, we're, we're,

we're accustomed, I think, and even trained and like, you hear the terminology of seeing is believing. And it's like, well, first of all, no, not anymore. I mean, that's just, we should just throw that out. No, not anymore. But also, like, we're not just seeing, like, it is important because people, I think, don't, don't think we're not just seeing. Like it is important because people I think don't think critically and actively and explicitly about this. They see and then they're reading. And then they're combining and contextualizing

what they're reading as what they're seeing. And they're saying, well, I saw it happen. And it's like, no, what you saw was this picture. What you read, it contextualized the photo and may have nothing to do with one another. But if people don't really explicitly only derive that information from trustworthy sources, then that can always be re-contextualized. The picture could be 10 years old, you know, like none of that is anything. But it's really hard for our brains to want to do that because

we've been trained and conditioned to do something entirely different. So I don't want to place blame. I just want to point out that there's an antidote, but the antidote's really hard. Yeah, yeah. That's absolutely it because had that rumor gone around that somebody had turned up with a machete and there was no picture at all attached, that wouldn't have had anywhere near as much impact. But the fact that they could attach it to a real picture, even though it wasn't a picture of what they said it was, was enough to get people who were already on an emotional knife edge to kick over into violence. Some people had clearly turned up to that riot for violence. The guy with the knife, who was a member of the far right, had while taking the knife

to the vigil for the murder of three young girls, who were stabbed to death and he took a knife to that vigil, had put on his Instagram reels along the lines of, I hope it all stays peaceful tonight, but I can't see that happening. Well, if you're turning up with a knife, and of course you can't see it happening, you've got to leave. It's not happening. It's like, hold the match and be like, I sure hope this place doesn't burn down.

My goodness. This Tinder factory doesn't seem to be a bad place for fire. Now to juggle road flares. Yeah. So the people turning up to a vigil for three murdered girls with knives or, as you saw with lots of other people, cans of lager, they weren't there to commemorate the lives of the three girls who died. And I honestly wish anybody had stopped them for a moment and said, can you name the girls?

Because I suspect they wouldn't know who it was who'd actually died. Then we had this kind of rolling series of other riots around the country, and those riots were exclusively, pretty much, organized on Telegram to a point where I saw messages in some of the channels that I was already in from the pandemic and that I joined subsequently when I saw these riots happening that were sharing lists of targets with fire emojis to say, here is, in this city,

this is a refugee processing center. In this city, this is an asylum charity. In this city, this is a place where refugees live while their claims are being processed with fire emojis. Meanwhile, Tommy Robinson is doing interviews on Infowars with Alex Jones about how this is just proof that the UK government and the UK police favor Muslim people over white people, and now the white people have had enough.

He said, and my job is to stay here, because he was on holiday at the time, I'm going to stay here on holiday and pour petrol on the flames is what he said. And a day later, his followers tried to burn down two hotels filled with refugees. What the? Jesus Christ. And you could think that the language is a coincidence, or you could think that that language is a tip and a wink

to what they need to be doing. It's a command, right? Well, is Tommy Robinson been arrested? I mean, and if not, why? I mean, like if you say out loud, I'm fanning the flames of violence and you don't even bother to go winky face after you do it, it seems like, how are you not in all the jails?

Like just all of the, like a Russian nesting doll of different jails that he should be behind. This is the funny thing about it. And again, just that this all happened at a perfect storm of a time. Tommy Robinson hasn't been arrested because he fled the country to avoid arrest. Before any of this happened, he fled the country to avoid an arrest of a different thing. Jesus Christ! He was, he organized a rally at the end of July, so like a week, days before the stabbing, just

coincidental timing, a rally for his supporters who were trying to take England back. At that rally, he showed a video that he'd made, a documentary about how bad immigration is in the UK. In that video, he made allegations that a Syrian refugee had attacked one of his classmates at school and tried to kill her. Now, he'd made those allegations before and the kid sued him because it was complete lies and the kid almost got killed over it. It was death threats and beaten up and things. And the judge ruled against Tommy Robinson, said it was defamation, said, you've got to pay, it was something like 200,000

pounds of costs. I forget, maybe 600,000 pounds of costs. There was a load of money on costs anyway. Never repeat those allegations again. Tommy Robinson went to a rally he'd organized and screamed those allegations to 30,000 people, was going to be arrested for breaking the conditions of that previous defamation suit for maliciously breaking those conditions, fled the country to avoid being arrested for that, was actually caught at the border, at the airport or the tunnel by border police, but let go, even though he'd missed his court date, said, oh, well, as long as you come back for a court date in October, you'll be fine.

And so he went off on holiday and he's there complaining about two tier policing and how the police go easy on Muslims and overly hard on white people. He was arrested while fleeing the country and still let go and allowed to flee the country on holiday. That's kind of amazing. This is like why that free speech absolutism is just such blatant bullshit, right?

What that is is just like a license to commit violence and to encourage violence. I'm not a, I'm an American, I believe in free speech as a fundamental principle of liberty, but free speech absolutism is inherently a bad thing. It's an obviously bad thing. You can't just be like,

I am now pouring petrol on the flames of violence based on lies. And everybody's like, well, he's got a right to do it. That's the world I wanna live in. Yeah. I was telling this story to Noah and no illusions are from scathing atheists, and he said, it's fighting for the right in a crowded theater to shout fire to your firing squad.

That's what they're asking for. The perfect way of explaining it, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And so obviously Tommy Robinson is saying this is all about his free speech, but he's just sat off in a, again, a tremendous irony of this whole thing. He was sat in a luxury hotel in Cyprus, tweeting to all of his followers,

and because Elon Musk allowed him back on Twitter, Elon Musk amplified his tweets he responded to and retweeted some of Tommy Robinson's tweets over this stuff. So Tommy Robinson has, I think like a million followers of something on Twitter since Musk allowed him back on and Elon Musk is actually amplifying and sharing his stuff.

But he sat off there in luxury, a newspaper tracked down which hotel he was at and took pictures of him, and Tommy Robinson put a video on Twitter threatening to go for the news journalist's family and threatening to go for his kids for having exposed where Tommy Robinson was and endangered his kids and saying, like, you're endangering me on this holiday because I'm in a hotel and now my kids don't feel safe in a hotel. Well, it wasn't the right hotel. He clearly had a different hotel in mind that should be firebombed. Yeah.

Literally, that was it. This was days after he encouraged his followers with just enough plausible deniability to not get him arrested to go try and burn down a different hotel filled with kids. And he's complaining that his kids feel unsafe in a hotel. Yeah, it's that free speech absolutism. You're absolutely right. It's a non-defensible position. It's not a serious position to hold. Was Andrew Tate part of any of this? So Andrew Tate was one of the other forces who were amplifying all the kind of misinformation. In fact, when Nigel Farage, who was... Farage kicked this off so much that these were initially called the Farage riots, because he went on Twitter and said, there are questions to be asked here. There are serious

questions to be asked. Another MP pointed out, if he had questions to be asked, he could have turned up to work and asked those questions to the people who had the answers. But instead, because Nigel Farage is an MP, he could go to work and ask that of parliament. But instead he turned to Twitter and just rumormongered. So when pressed on this on television, a journalist said, you said there were reports that something was being covered up. You said there were reports that there was more to this story. What reports do you mean?

And Nigel Farage eventually admitted his reports were from Andrew Tate. He'd seen Andrew Tate on Twitter and those are the reports that a sitting MP amplified in order to kickstart a race riot. Look, summer's coming to a close and it's getting to school season. We're starting to wind down a little bit and the last thing that you need to be worried about is what you're having for dinner. The grocery store's a nightmare. Prices are up.

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It's between the second and third. This is the world we're living in. Like there's a fucking MP who's like, well, I was looking at this human traffickers Twitter, and I really thought that that was a viable, incredible way to start a fucking race riot. What a fucking bizarre series of convergences. Yeah, it was the worst possible timing. It absolutely was.

I mean, in many ways, this was a tinderbox looking for a certain spark, and it didn't have to be this spark. It was going to be something. But then it's sort of no surprise that this rolled around the country because a lot of people were genuinely confused. I attended a counter protest in Liverpool and there were about, I think, 700 or 800 demonstrators, there were about 700 or 800 of us opposing them and I left before it started to get violent thankfully.

But what was interesting was how many people on their side, I honestly genuinely wonder what they thought they were there for. Because they were shouting about paedophiles coming for our kids, which nothing to do with what happened in Southport. This was a stabbing of three girls. There was no sex crime involved. Do you think that's because these spaces are QAnon spaces as well?

Do you think that everything just kind of rolls back to this like QAnon-esque blanket that hovers over the top of everything? Like a grand unified theory of bullshit? Maybe something like that? I think it's two things coalescing. It's all the same. Because at that same protest,

there was a guy holding like a-foot-tall cross. I couldn't see what he'd doled. He'd written on the cross, but he'd made himself a cross and he was parading around in it. We don't have that kind of Christian nationalism typically in the UK. This is an import from America. We don't have that kind of Christian nationalism. That's what you sound like.

Yes, you do, motherfucker. Yes, you do. No, this is not. Yes, you do. Well, I saw QAnon marches through the streets of Liverpool during the pandemic. That was one of the things that came into the pandemic because they had to go somewhere. They went from, ultimately, go back far enough. They went from Flat Earth to QAnon to COVID anti-vaxxerism to 50-minute cities to drag

time story hours to this thing here and who knows onto the next thing or not. So I think part of the coming for our kids where we must protect our kids from the pedophiles is a QAnon thing. And part of it is at least a decade or more of right-wing agitants making Muslim groups synonymous with pedophile groups here in the UK. And so those two things came together. What's interesting is that when Barack Obama was elected, there was a group of people who were just pissed, right?

They were just mad. So they found 60 different fucking things out there to be mad about and they formed under a thing called the Tea Party. And so that Tea Party went and protested all over the place and they had crazy disparate signs, right? So somebody would be upset about taxes, but somebody would be sad about migrants and other people would be upset about all these other things. And then plenty of conspiracy theories and racism mixed in.

And this reminds me of that in that there's just a ton of stuff that people are upset about, but they just need a bucket to throw that shit on someone else. Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of what they're upset about as well, a lot of it was actually quite legitimate things that they just had directed at the wrong scapegoat. Because we've had, prior to this Labour government, we had 14 years of the Tory government removing social safety nets step by step. It's now, I think there's a report saying that adults in the UK haven't had NHS dental care for God knows how long because it's almost impossible to see a dentist, partly because many of our dentists came in from Europe, from places like Croatia, and they can't get to work here

anymore because of Brexit. So, it's much harder to get a dental appointment. It's much harder to get NHS appointments with your doctor, your local GP, because many of those GPs came from abroad. They don't anymore. We have a shortfall. We have a massive lowering of standard of living over the last decade. We have a cost of living crisis where people are having to choose whether to heat their house or eat. Fuel costs are astronomical these days. People are feeling their way of life genuinely squeezed and finding it harder and harder to get by, especially in places where the riots broke

out, which were some of the most deprived places in the country. Many of them the places where I grew up actually in the Northeast. So you have all that happening, but you also have a long standing history of far right agitants saying, and the reason is, the immigrants. You can't get a doctor's appointment, but a refugee can. You can't get a council house, but an asylum seeker can. I mean, no they fucking can't, that's just a lie. But it's a lie that's convenient because when you have nothing and you have no power,

it's easy to go after the person who has less power than you than it is to look up the chain and fight the system that's fucking you. Yeah. Jesus Christ. So tell me about how this sort of this counter protest protest went with you. You said you left before the actual violence, but before we started recording, you also mentioned that there was people who are marching on a mosque and someone you know might have helped sort of slow that down.

Yeah. So I attended a counter protest on the Saturday. Now that protest was there because on the Friday people had gathered outside of a mosque in Liverpool, again, blaming the mosque, even though by this point it was completely evident that there were no Muslims involved in this story, except the ones you're targeting. The only people bringing Muslims into any of this were the mobs. They tried to attack a mosque in Liverpool.

Liverpool has quite a strong tradition of fighting the far right, of being quite a socialist city. And so the fact that they were targeting that mosque was found in these spaces in part by someone I know apart by some other people who were monitoring these kind of conspiracist spaces and shared to anti-fascist groups. And so when like 100 people turned up to attack the mosque, there were 500 people there to counter them. But what was really remarkable was if I was in that mosque, I'd be terrified. Oh, fuck yeah. There was violence happening all over the country. The was in that mosque, I'd be terrified. Oh, fuck yeah. There was violence happening all over the country.

The leader of that mosque, a guy called Adam Kerlewijk, came outside the mosque with food and with drinks and took them to the people who were coming to burn the mosque down. Once he knew his safety was not guaranteed, but once he knew he wasn't under a massive threat, as huge a threat, he spent his time talking to and listening to the people who were coming for him to actually talk about what it is they thought was going on and to have a conversation. There's remarkable footage and pictures. At the end of that night, before all the protesters went home, one of the biggest adjutants who was there shouting all sorts of obscenities at the Muslims and at the mosque was hugging this Imam.

Wow. By the end. It was genuinely impressive. And Adam was saying, I invited him into the mosque. He's going to come in in a couple of days. We're going to chat. You can ask me anything at all about Islam, about what we're about. We can just chat and let's build some bridges.

What did he put in the tea? Well, yes. But yeah, it was just like, remark, genuinely remarkable. And I saw him speaking the next day. And what he was saying was that what he was finding was the people he was talking to were just confused and scared because like three, three little girls, three, seven, eight year old girls had been killed. And it was a random act of horrent violence, but like that could be your little girl. And that's what these people were scared of. And they'd been These this was the reason this is the thing you can do and short of having

Nothing to do which what else can you do? They acted on the misinformation they were given but when they human face to to what the Muslims of Liverpool were about They found it much harder to sustain that confusion and anger. And so yeah, Adam talked to them down I think one of the guys he was talking to, even the next day when a more violent mob descended on the city, the guy he was talking to was seen protecting some Muslim women from the mob. It was genuinely impressive. Okay. Has anybody interviewed that guy, the guy whose mind was changed? Because I think it would be really useful to understand that conversion, that moment of catharsis for that person. Yeah, if they have, I haven't seen it.

I know some people were looking for some of those people. I mean, I also suspect it's quite hard to be that guy because you don't want to be in the newspapers as that guy. Even for changing your mind, it can be quite a lot. But I haven't seen reporting of him. But it takes a lot to be able to stand up and admit that you have been misled in that kind of way. And I wonder just how many people were in those initial wave of riots who then realized this is what we should be doing and

step back, but unfortunately were replaced by people who were there to harm people they didn't like for the color of their skin, and other people who were there to harm people they didn't like for the color of their skin. And other people who were there to just destroy because they've got nothing. And so we saw like quite a lot of young, young lads, like between the ages of 12 and 16 were joining the riots just to smash up cars and kick down doors and break into shops and loot Greg's, steal sausage rolls from Greg's as some people would say. That's the most British thing anyone's ever said. Sausage rolls. I love it. What happened after everything was sort of, did it just sort of eventually peter out on its own? Is that what happened? And just eventually people just lost their taste for it? It was a combination of things. I think it certainly lost momentum. And especially once the reporting on

what was actually happening became clear, because the same pattern would happen, is that they would be a riot would break out in a place, and the next day, the local community would turn up and clear everything up. It was a very clear show of solidarity. I think it became pretty clear to the rioters that they were not in the majority at all. Even the ones who, in Middlesbrough or Sunderland, places not too far from where I live, were stopping cars in the majority at all. Even the ones who like in Middlesbrough or Sunderland, places not too far from where I live, were like stopping cars in the middle of the street to check if the drivers were white or not. They saw videos of this.

Yeah, like really horrible kind of stuff. Even their communities were turning up the next day to show solidarity. So I think that show of solidarity definitely helped. And I also think the way the government handled it wasn't terrible. They acted very, very swiftly. Within a week of the riots, some people were already facing trial, essentially. We already had hearings and lots of them admitting guilt and therefore being sentenced. The media fucked that up really badly because in a lot of those cases, the media would report

on the story with things like, man arrested for shouting at the police, you're not British anymore. Jesus Christ. Obviously, that circulates around your Tommy Robinson spaces and you see this is the kind of clampdown that white people are getting. This is two-tiered policing. This is kind of government totalitarianism and people like Elon Musk will amplify it and Jordan Peterson will amplify that. Jordan Peterson shouldn't even know about Sunderland, let alone know what a riot in Sunderland did or didn't say. But when you look at the details of the story, the guy who shouted, you're not English anymore,

was sentenced because he was on a release from a 20-year drug crime and turning up to a race riot and incentivizing violence. That, it turns out, is a violation of your parole. Wow. So he went back to prison on a parole violation. Crazy. That should have been the headline and not man arrested for shouting. So too many of those cases were there. So it just plays into the right-wing narrative again. There's so much like ridiculously bend over backwards, both sides-ism bullshit that gets like when these things happen that tries to humanize a Group of people who are just trying to burn people to death, right? Like this is a group of people who if nobody had stood in their way if nobody had stopped their hand

They would have been burning people alive and then the press goes out of their way to be like Well, let's see what their thoughts it's like, fuck that. Like there's not very fine people on both sides. Sometimes the people on the other side are not very fine at all. They're not at all. Another failure with the press, unfortunately, because I think actually if you were to read some of the actual stories, they wouldn't have been both sidesing it too much. But then the sub editor comes along and needs to put a headline on it. And you put the headline, man sent back to prison on drug violation, or do you put the

headline of the most kind of visible thing that he was doing. And so if you're not thinking through your headlines because you're working too fast, you're processing too many stories at once, you want clicks, then you put up a headline that just feeds the far right. Well, we've talked about that too. Most people aren't reading the whole story. Most people are only reading the headline and the headline is produced not by the person who writes the story to say this is a capstone or summation of my article. The headline is an advertisement. That's all the headline is. It's an advertisement. It is not a summation of the article, the headline is an advertisement. That's all the headline is. It's an advertisement. It is not a summation of the article's thesis. But we're, again,

I feel like we've been trained to think about journalism the wrong way. We've been trained to think that a headline is something other than an ad, but it's just an ad. If we think of it as a thesis statement for the article, this is going to be about the headline, then we're very easily misled into adopting a worldview based on headlines that is never gonna be accurate. But we're in a place where the information that we share is mostly image-based. It's mostly just a snap, a screen grab of a headline,

move on, a screen grab of a headline, move on. So we're not getting the article. Like so many people are never even getting to the article to read through. Yeah, it's an ad made by the person who didn't make the product as well. So a headline is an ad written by someone who didn't write the article,

doesn't know the story particularly well. And I think, so if you think about the various touch points of this story, this kicked off with that fake story from Channel 3 Now News, which people saw the headline. Well, it was a fake story. They glanced at it, shared it as if this is true, then this is a big thing, all the way down to man arrested for shouting at police.

Every time something is shortcut in that way, it plays into the hands of the worst actors. None of this plays into our hands. There's never a point where you misconstrue or don't fully appreciate a story and share it without thinking, and it makes your argument stronger. It only plays into the people who want to sow division, who want to cause chaos, and who capitalize on those kind of

regressive forces in society. Unfortunately, it's another way the deck is stacked against reasonable thinkers. Yeah. Yeah. So I had one more thought I wanted to throw out there as somebody who spent a lot of time in Telegram and in these spaces. One thing that occurs to me is like, I know there's got to be a hundred antidotes to this problem, right? And then we will probably

never fully inoculate. I totally get that. But is a way to, I guess, think about how to solve for some of this. One of the first things you said is, you mentioned the idea of community, going into Telegram, and these people are finding community there. And I hear that a lot when people talk about online spaces, that people really feel like they go

into these online spaces because they find a lot of value in that sense of community. But I wonder if we aren't in a place where we really need to do active work to help redefine the idea of community, not as a place of volume of interactions, but as deep and meaningful personal interactions with less volume, right?

So like my community, I am safer in terms of what I think and thinking, you know, more accurate things if my community is deeper and smaller, right? Like my community is you and you and people I know. And it is less safe by definition, I think, when we broaden and shallow it and make it more shallow. Does that feel like work that would help this kind of thing where we're not like constantly being bombarded with a volume of interactions that don't have The same kind of like personal empathy that is the basis for other human interactions. I

Think I think certainly in terms. Yeah, I think so in terms of I think certainly in terms, yeah, I think so, in terms of quality, quality of interaction rather than quantity. And I think in lots of these spaces, and we see that on even Twitter, Facebook, the ways in which people are rewarded for quantity of interactions are a regressive force on their ability to engage critically with the world. Even looking at that tweet from Bernie's tweets who first pushed out the false name of the Muslim guy, the reason she was sharing that was to get as much attention as possible. She didn't care whether it was true.

Those aren't quality interactions. She's not trying to build a community or build friendships and build bridges with people. She's just trying to get as much attention as possible. And I think whenever we have these systems that are set up to incentivize quantity, we're going to come into this kind of degraded level of quality of messaging. Anything we can do to promote a quality of interaction, a quality of back and forth, of integration into a community, that's what's going to make the difference is that, yeah, it's not about numbers. It's about depth. I think you're right.

Yeah. I wonder if like a way to think, I'm just thinking out loud and laughing to myself, like how many of these people would help me move? You know, like how many of these people would help me move? Who's going to come to my house and pack a box? You know, because like, I mean, if you look where Tom will live these days, a lot of his followers helped him move from a very small place to a much larger place. It definitely helped him move in that kind of way.

Indirectly, I guess. Mars, this actually transitions into QED quite a bit. So tell us a little bit about QED and what you're doing there. Yeah. I mean, speaking of quality interactions rather than quantity, we have now for what? Since 2011, been trying to build that style of community within skepticism. I mean, speaking of quality interactions rather than quantity, we have now for what, since 2011 been trying to build that style of community within skepticism. We have our next QD coming up, the 19th and 20th of October.

I'm actually going to be talking about this. It's really interesting. We've got a panel. At the start, Tom, you talked about how a telegram is a rabbit hole. We've got a panel that I've called From the Rabbit Holes to the Riots, which is actually taking what just happened and analyzing that with people. So I'm going to be on it. There's a guy who works for a company called Logically, which essentially one of the things it does is track telegram channel to channel. What is spreading? Who's

it coming from? What are the forces impacting on it, and what impact does that have on the narrative or on conspiracy theories, things like that? So, Joe Ondrake. And then the other person we're going to have on the panel who's a panelist is going to be my friend Louis, who is the guy that I met when he was running the anti-vax group in Liverpool, who because on Telegram, I got in one-on-one conversations with him and had that quality conversation rather than quantity conversation, a back and forth where we could actually be

honest with each other and have a proper open discussion and he could bring questions to me that he had about the vaccine. He left the anti-vaccine world, he left the conspiracy theory world, and joined the Merseyside skeptics as a result. He's going to be on the panel talking about what it's like being inside those rabbit holes while they're being pushed towards extremism and radicalization. And that's just one of the things that we've... That's awesome. What it's like to be brainwashed by Michael Marshall. That's amazing. That is, we pulled him out of one program.

That's like the Q&A on deep programmers, deep programming the skeptics like sitting outside. Yeah. So that panel is going to be hosted by Dr. Alice as well. You've had Dr. Alice on the show. Yeah. Yeah. She's great. But yeah, I think we've announced all of our main speakers now for QED. So it's like two full days.

We've got 12 main stage speakers. We've got eight panels. We've got live podcast recordings. We've got workshops where you can actually learn how to... There's a workshop on doing magic. There's a workshop on how to test paranormal claims, like how to actually construct a test. There's a workshop on how to use freedom of information laws in order to get access to truth, how to actually work with those laws and turn it into journalism, essentially.

So, yeah, lots of hands-on stuff as well. Yeah, should be a really great weekend. So that's, yeah, qdcon.org, and the tickets are now £189 for the weekend. It's a great event. Tom and I went to it a couple years ago, and then Tom went again afterwards, and we've had amazing times there. It's really wonderful. So if you have the weekend open

and you can get to the UK to check this out, it's really worth doing. It genuinely the best to check this out. It's really worth doing. Genuinely the best conference of its kind. The best conference. Hands down. Yeah. A lot of people say that. It's always great to hear.

You remember the QD you guys were at? You were told about how the Queen owns all the swans? Oh my God, yes. In that conversation. The person in that conversation, I think either the person who told you that or the person you were having the conversation with was Lizzie Collingeinge Who's now an MP for Malcolm in the Northwest? That's awesome see the video of her signing into Parliament with the the humanist affirmation rather than signing on a Bible and we now have a

Dedicated skeptic who's been to almost every QED going every QED up until now is sitting in Parliament That's a mission to warn that Bjork outfit with the sword that went around the head. The Queen can take that right off of you. The Queen just walks up and grabs her and takes her away. A member of our QD community who's done a billion other fantastic things as well, but we know her from QD. That's awesome. She's now sitting in parliament.

That's amazing. So Marsh, people are going to find you. Where are they going to find you on the internet? You're going to Mersey... Tidegram it turns out. ... find me on Telegram. I don't go by the name Marsh on there. I'm slightly more sensible than that. I did at one point during my anti-vax investigation, they put a link up saying if you want us to send some of our anti-vax propaganda, just pop your home address in the here. And I did do that. And then I thought, why am I giving you people my home address? This is not really...

I stopped doing that. So you're using Andy Wilson's address. That's also part of a good thinking society, by the way. Good thinking society right there. Yeah. So if you go to MergeSideSkeptic.org.uk, you can see all the podcasts. If you go to Skeptic.org.uk, you'll see the Skeptic Magazine, which I've been editing now for four years. And yeah, we do some really interesting stuff there, I think. And is Andy Wilson going to do his third episode of Incredulous?

He is doing an Incredulous episode there. There is going to be a live Incredulous. Oh my God. The now annual recording of Incredulous. It's all now at Jack Beauty. But it's actually at Jack Beauty. That's always a packed room. It's always a fantastic, it's always a fun show.

It is. It's awesome. I love Incredulous. It's always fun. Yeah. It's always a packed room. It's always a fantastic, it's always a fun show. It's awesome. I love it. It's always fun. I think I was on the last one. Yeah.

In 2019. Marsh, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate you coming on. This is great guys. Lovely to catch up. All right. That is going to wrap it up for this week. You can check out Michael Marshall, like he said, on Skeptic UK magazine or on Skeptics with a K, Merseyside Skeptics. You can check out QED. All that stuff is going to be in the show notes. So you can sign up

to go to QED. I am not kidding when I say it is an amazing event. You will, if you have an opportunity to go anytime, you really should really outstanding people who put it on and a wonderful group of people who show up and hang out there. We had a blast. I'm going to try my damnedest to go next year, but really genuinely outstanding events. So check it out if you get an opportunity. All right. That's going to wrap it up for this week. Be sure to put on your calendar, September 21st, 8pm Eastern. We're going to be going live Humanist for Harris. Put it on your calendar now, tell everybody about it and show up. We're going to catch you next time. We're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed.

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