The MAGA Movement’s New British Crush

Americans have two stereotypes of Britain. The first is the cozy, parochial world portrayed in my country’s biggest cultural exports—the “soggy bottoms” of The Great British Baking Show, the boarding-school backdrop of Harry Potter, the aristocratic deference valorized by Downton Abbey. The second, now promoted by a zillion MAGA podcasts, is a postapocalyptic hellscape of sclerotic socialism, repressed speech, and rampaging Muslims.Rupert Lowe, the leader of the British far-right party Restore, has pulled off a neat trick. He sounds like an emissary from the first Britain, thanks to his refined accent and his taste for anecdotes about shooting pheasants. But he understands exactly what the modern American right wants to hear: that the second Britain exists, and only Donald Trump is preventing the United States from heading in the same direction.Indeed, cranks and conspiracists on the American and British hard right now exist in happy symbiosis. In their ecosystem, Lowe fills a crucial niche: a guy with a posh voice who validates all of their prejudices. He recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to, among other things, push the claim that gangs of Muslim men had raped 250,000 white girls in Britain.This allegation is his entry ticket to the American podcast circuit. It arises from Lowe’s crowdfunded investigation of “grooming gangs”—a real and troubling phenomenon over the past few decades in several English towns, where men colluded with one another to recruit girls and women to sexually abuse. Early evidence suggests that, although the majority of perpetrators in these cases are white, British Pakistani men are overrepresented. Elon Musk loves talking about grooming gangs, because they justify his belief that Britain is a land of naive “hobbits” who need to be protected by “the hard men of Gondor.” Rupert Lowe, presumably, is one of those hard men.From the July 2026 issue: How Britain became as poor as MississippiLowe warmed up for his star turn on Rogan by appearing on PBD, hosted by the Trump fan Patrick Bet-David, and DarkHorse, hosted by the former professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Weinstein now promotes conspiracy theories so arcane that the mainstream brain struggles to comprehend them, but he still remains friends with many members of the “intellectual dark web”—a group of heterodox commentators lionized by The New York Times in 2018. Right at the start of Rogan’s show, the podcaster thanked Weinstein, along with Musk and Jordan Peterson, for suggesting Lowe as a guest.These chummy connections explain why Rogan granted a platform to a man whose party polled just 6.8 percent in a recent special election and has only a single member of Parliament, Lowe himself. (It’s as if a British podcast had seriously interviewed the U.S. Green Party’s Jill Stein about her plans for the presidency.) Lowe used to be a member of a much larger and more popular right-wing populist party, Nigel Farage’s Reform, but he was forced out in an enjoyably catty and melodramatic schism after calling for mass deportations.Lowe’s marginal position in Britain doesn’t seem to bother his allies in the United States. These days, Farage—despite his personal relationship with Donald Trump—is not hard-line enough for the MAGA elite. They much prefer Lowe, who recently described part of the city of Manchester, in northern England, as a “third world shithole” and has promised that “under a Restore Britain Government, all immigration from Pakistan into our country will end.”Rogan is a self-declared conspiracy theorist, and one of the reasons he has moved so sharply rightward in recent years is that American conservatism has become a reliable, prolific generator of conspiracy theories. Thanks to Trump’s influence, anyone who might have acted as a gatekeeper or guardian of reality has folded in the face of grassroots pressure to endorse a demon-haunted world of celebrity pedophiles and assassination cover-ups. The audience demands to have its suspicions upheld. Witness the awful spectacle of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino trying and failing to convince MAGA influencers that, now that they’d looked at the Epstein files, they’d realized they were no big deal.Knowing Rogan’s attraction to the idea of numinous forces controlling the world, Lowe duly played him like a fiddle. He alluded darkly to the World Economic Forum, and the elite Bilderberg group, for reasons that did not need to be explained, because it was assumed that the audience already understood. Also, did Rogan know that the departing British prime minister, Keir Starmer, was a member of the Fabian Society? Of course Rogan did not, because—why would he? The Fabian Society is a gradualist-socialist think tank founded in 1884 by (among others) a vegetarian playwright. It was named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius, whose nickname was the Delayer, to emphasize that it was not a revolutionary organization. Membership involves absolutely no hooded robes, geopolitical puppet-mastering, or child sacrifices.Nevertheless, Lowe represented the Fabians as a deeply sinister fifth column because their logo was once a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Rogan asked his producer, Jamie, to pull up the logo, and the two men marveled at it as though they were looking at a signed confession from Lord Voldemort himself. (Sadly, they did not inspect the society’s other early symbol, the tortoise, for potential darker meanings.) This is the conspiracist mindset in its full glory: They put their evil plan right there on the logo! That just shows how crafty they are.Interview podcasts are where fact-checking goes to die. At one point, Lowe and Rogan joked about the hoary aphorism that says anyone who isn’t a liberal at 25 has no heart, but anyone who isn’t a conservative by 35 has no head. Wasn’t this something Winston Churchill had said, they wondered? Producer Jamie was dispatched to look this up, and the VAR judgment came back positive. Except the International Churchill Society has no record of the British leader ever saying this.This relaxed attitude toward the facts allows Lowe to go on MAGA podcasts and offer a distorted vision of British public opinion, presenting himself as a persecuted truth-teller who is simply saying what everyone is thinking. He pandered to Rogan’s well-established love of hunting by claiming that his own freedom to bear arms was curtailed because Britain had banned handguns after “one murder”—an odd way to refer to the massacre of 16 children and their teacher at a school in Dunblane, Scotland. Since that incident, in 1996, the United States has had more than 1,500 school shootings. Britain has had zero. There is absolutely no wellspring of untapped energy in the country in favor of relaxing gun laws. Lowe was offering pure America-bait.The most serious failure of fact-checking, however, came when the discussion turned to the report from Lowe’s grooming-gang inquiry, which he has promoted as the antidote to the liberal elite’s refusal to take the issue seriously. The document claims that a quarter of a million “young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma” in recent years. Even Rogan found this figure implausible: “The number, I want you to say it because it sounds so crazy,” he told Lowe. “If I say it, people—it’s going to sound wrong.”Imagine a claim so outrageous that even Joe Rogan is nervous about repeating it—appropriately nervous, as it happens. The 250,000 figure comes from taking the estimated prevalence of sexual grooming in Rotherham, one of the worst-affected towns, and extrapolating that across all of Britain. That reasoning is obviously flawed. The report assumes that similar gangs are operating on the same scale everywhere—even in places where no such activity has ever surfaced. The real number of victims is unknown. Nevertheless, Lowe told Rogan that “a minimum of a quarter of a million rapes” was an “incredibly conservative” estimate. Musk has gone further and promoted posts claiming that there were 1 million victims, based on an unsourced figure used by a single politician a decade ago.The existence of what experts call “group-based sexual exploitation”—wherein men band together to recruit and control victims—is not a conspiracy. Successive legal cases have demonstrated that in several towns across England, these gangs were disproportionately led by men of South Asian origin, and that police and local authorities were wary of publicizing this fact and of moving aggressively to smash the gangs, for fear of stoking racial tension. In three high-profile cases that resulted in criminal convictions—in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford—the majority of the men involved were South Asian. (White grooming gangs also exist, such as the ones in the rural county of Cornwall and in Glasgow, Scotland.) However, it is also true that the British far right—which is not normally noted for its ardent feminism—has latched on to this issue to press for mass deportations and to make the broader case against any Muslim or nonwhite immigration to Europe at all. During Lowe’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, he frequently referred to America and Britain’s shared “Anglo-Saxon” culture.Idrees Kahloon: Burnham is Britain’s last chance before FarageLowe is convinced that mainstream news outlets are ignoring his inquiry because of political correctness. The real reason is that his report is an unfocused jumble of personal testimony, with no evident attempt to corroborate the lurid and sometimes unbelievable accusations made by anonymous sources. In one case, a witness known as Kate reported that her captors had filmed her being raped by a dog—an extraordinary allegation. (When a New York Times opinion columnist made a similar accusation against Israeli prison guards, American conservatives were openly skeptical.) Kate also claimed to have seen two other girls killed in retaliation for snitching, and another anonymous victim is quoted as saying that she remembered seeing “a man opening the back of a van and I saw maybe 15, 20 girls locked in dog cages.” Corroborating evidence for those allegations has yet to materialize.Lowe’s report has had little impact because of its obvious limitations. The government is currently setting up its own official inquiry into the gangs. Rape Crisis, one of the biggest mainstream charities working in the sector, commended the “courage of the survivors” in coming forward to Lowe’s team but added that “framing the issue squarely in terms of immigration” was reductive.In the MAGA podcast-sphere, nailing down facts is less important than building a vivid narrative. Talking to Rogan, Lowe barely mentioned the victims of the gangs, because his interest was making the case for the mass deportation of Muslims from Europe. At the same time, he told Rogan that Britain is a “matriarchal society” where women are “omnipotent,” which is hard to square with girls being sexually exploited on an industrial scale.Here in Britain, Lowe is one step up from a nobody, the leader of a second-rate populist party. Our right-wing media much prefers Nigel Farage, who is more careful with his language and who leads a genuine political movement that wins elections.Farage has lost favor on the American right for the same reasons he has gained ground at home. He fell out with Musk because—I paraphrase lightly—the trillionaire felt that the Reform leader was insufficiently racist. Farage has always refused to admit the prominent far-right activist Tommy Robinson to his party, because the latter was once a member of an explicitly white-nationalist organization, the British National Party.Farage’s serious desire to be prime minister has left a vacancy for chief British doomsayer to the American right—a vacancy into which Rupert Lowe has gratefully stepped. On the MAGA podcast circuit, the new kid on the block just has to call Britain a “shithole” to be received as a great oracle. Sorry, America, but I suspect that you haven’t heard the last of him.