It is, perhaps, only natural that the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence – the moment that marks the birth of what became the United States of America – is prompting reflection on the history of the special relationship between the USA and the UK.
The problem is that reflection is not something that comes naturally to Matt Walsh, the far right Daily Wire contributor and documentary film-maker behind What Is a Woman? and Am I a Racist? Recently, he gave his verdict on Britain to his four million followers on X.
“Through my study of history I’ve really come to admire the British empire… It was undoubtedly a force for good in the world, and the men they sent out to colonise the planet were some of the most noble, brave, and manly to ever live,” he said – already a questionable statement from an American, given that their country’s national identity is grounded in throwing off the yoke of empire.
But Walsh had more to say: “That’s why it pains me to see this once mighty nation brought to its knees by the barbarian hordes – an army of invaders who didn’t, and couldn’t, defeat them on the battlefield, but were rather let in the front door and given free rein to rape British daughters and slaughter British sons in the street. Very sad to see. What a tragic conclusion. And so totally preventable.”
A few minutes later, Walsh decided he had hit on the solution. “There is a MUCH stronger case to be made for invading the UK, toppling its tyrannical government, and liberating its people than for pretty much any regime change war (to include Iran) over the past 30 years,” he concluded.
It is tempting to dismiss Walsh as a lone crank, an influencer who has evidently gone off the deep end, who is best ignored. Why risk amplifying voices in the wilderness like him? Sadly, that’s not the world we live in. Walsh’s formulation might have been extreme, but his opinion was not.
A growing portion of the American right believes Europe in general and Britain in particular have “fallen”, that radical Islamist violence means it is unsafe for white people to leave their homes – lest the men be killed and the women and girls raped – and that as a result, the US and Europe no longer have anything in common with one another.
This is not a viewpoint that has emerged in isolation. It is being actively fostered by a loose coalition of overlapping interests. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has been radicalised by his own social network, and often intervenes to inflame UK politics – especially at times of civil unrest.
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One of the British political figures Musk most frequently boosts is Rupert Lowe, who – like Tommy Robinson, another Musk favourite – has inflamed the real and grotesque scandal of Pakistani grooming gangs to fuel a far right political agenda. Lowe even recently held a so-called “inquiry” into such gangs – styled similarly to “independent SAGE” Covid reports – to provide fuel for those fires.
As if that mix weren’t toxic enough, the divisions are being encouraged behind the scenes by Russian influence operations and bots. For Vladimir Putin, the cold war never ended – anything that weakens the western alliance must naturally strengthen Russia.
At a time when Russian troops and tanks are still in Ukraine, the practical consequences of dividing the US from Europe are apparent. Russia has not created these issues, but its online agents are more than happy to stir the pot and nudge the debate where they can.
All of those actors – even Musk – are dwarfed, though, by the final one: the extreme vision of a fallen Britain and a fallen Europe is being actively spread and fostered by the White House and by senior Trump administration officials. What we might hope to dismiss as the feverish ranting of online trolls and Russian bots has, over the last year, become the official position of the US government.
Vice-president JD Vance laid the groundwork for this narrative in his 2025 Munich Security Conference speech. During a live shooting war in Europe, he said the main threats to the continent were not “external” but instead the “threats from within” caused by “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”.
What might have been brushed away as one rogue speech by the vice-president – an office, for all its supposed seniority, best known for its irrelevance – was soon codified into official US doctrine.
When the Trump White House published its National Security Strategy in December 2025, it listed the European Union as a “transnational body” that is “undermin[ing] political liberty and sovereignty”. It worried about “the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure” across Europe, and pledged to tackle this by directly intervening in European domestic politics. US diplomacy would, it said, focus on “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.
Donald Trump is waging a war on minorities at home. His administration is dehumanising Somalians and stripping people legally in the country of their rights to remain there en masse – with no recourse to the courts or to due process. ICE has been given unprecedented powers to grab anyone they suspect might be in the US illegally, often with tragic results.
Trump and those around him are exploiting anger about immigration to threaten the fundamental rights on which American democracy depends – and a determined coterie of figures on the British right appears to be working in concert with the MAGA movement to do the same here.
Last week, we got a glimpse of what that looks like in practice. Sarah B Rogers, the US under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, spoke at a London conference held by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, one of a network of influence organisations established by the billionaire GB News founder Paul Marshall and laid out in detail by The New World in an investigation last year.
In her remarks, Rogers, a senior serving US diplomat, dedicated a whole section of her speech to “Da Yookay”, a longstanding meme beloved of the British far right. Rogers blended real events and online exaggerations to paint a picture of how the UK looks from the vantage point of X.
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“In Da Yookay, you can be remanded without bail for an inflammatory tweet, while a psychopath who seizes a three-year-old and feeds him to crocodiles walks free,” she began. “In Da Yookay, the moral sense of jurors won’t save you because jury trials for speech crimes are abolished.
“In Da Yookay, a girl can escape from a rape gang, flag down a police constable, and discover that the cop is in league with the rapists. In Da Yookay, you get a free car for pretending to be disabled. In Da Yookay, cops defer to a murderer who calls his victim a racist. Then they handcuff you as you bleed to death if you’re white.”
Usually, when a public official rattles off a long list of inflammatory and distorted information like that, they are getting ready for a big counter. Not so with Rogers. While she went on to set out her vision of Britain in a better era – ironically, that of George Orwell, a man who took a bullet to the neck after volunteering to fight fascists in the Spanish civil war – Rogers stood by the stories.
“That’s the Britain you see online,” she concluded. “And I’m not here to tell you, as your minders do, that it’s all misinformation or mirage.”
Setting out the plain and public facts on this can make you look like a conspiracy theorist, but it is beyond deniable: the US government is working in concert with the British far right to take over our country and rebuild it in a Trumpian image.
The richest man in the world, who controls the social media network most used by our politicians and media, is on board with the plan. None of it is happening behind closed doors, because no one involved needs to hide what they’re doing. It is right there to see, for anyone who will look.
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We have spent most of the last two years – crucial time in which we should have been bolstering our defences and shoring up our democratic safeguards – wilfully blind. Keir Starmer’s government seemed to hope that if it ignored what the US government was trying to do, it simply wouldn’t be real.
Similarly, it hoped that if it talked sternly about social media regulation, and acted as if tackling big tech was the same kind of bipartisan, wonkish issue it had been under Joe Biden, that might become true. Bizarrely, given its usual hostility to Starmer, most of the British media was happy to play along with that illusion. We are the frog that has placidly allowed itself to be boiled.
The UK will soon have a new prime minister, almost certainly Andy Burnham. All of these problems will then be on his desk, alongside dozens if not hundreds of others.
Some will seem more urgent, and some will certainly be higher-profile, but this may be the most important – not just for the prospects of the Burnham project, or even of the Labour Party, but also for British democracy itself. We have collectively spent two years failing to meet the moment. We may not have another two years left to waste
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