I am starting a research project about progressive campaigning and online radicalisation. To get my mind moving I have interviewed Hannah O’Rourke from Campaign Lab to learn more about the state of right wing slop campaigns today, and why they’re working.
If you want to learn more, work with me on this, or be interviewed feel free to reach out by replying to this email or sharing with someone who you think will be interested. Thank you!
There’s this thing I do where I say, “I’m from Cyprus, actually” just to signal that I am in fact only culturally British, and not ethnically English. Unfortunately Cyprus seems to only be known for three key things: being mistaken as ‘part of Greece’ by gammony British holiday-makers, being used as a tax haven, and being an absolute cuck in wars waged by The West against petrostates.
Like any crumbling empire, the UK has military bases scattered across the world on tiny obscure islands, including Cyprus. This is an overseas territory that the UK has full sovereignty over, so last weekend when Iran sent missiles and drones to Cyprus, they were in fact trying to bomb the UK, not Cyprus, who maybe should relax and be proud that they can help their colonisers participate in a pointless war from a nice strategic location. They are of course not proud, and want the bases gone.
Last Sunday I honestly spent most of the day as an anxious husk, watching my family group chat trying to make sense of what was going on, sharing misinformation back and forth, and posting first-hand footage of missiles flying though the sky. I know this isn’t an original take, but we really do live in a world beyond politics, governed by gripes and aggression. Politicians don’t make decisions any more, they just post on social media and ask the closest think tank what they think they should do next.
To me, this is the cornerstone of empire: dither away in your palace, bombing other countries because an older kid asked you to, all the while telling the poor people at home that everything will be okay right after this next violent episode. As I mentioned last time, the UK is at a cultural precipice: the party in power are impotent, withering, and useless when it comes to governing and trying to pretend to be left wing. Their greatest opposition are a group of reactionary right wing culture warriors who’s deft, mystical powers of campaigning make the government look like a sad amateur theatre troop. I’ve always struggled to understand why it’s this way around. Why are progressives barely able to string a coherent message together while The Right gain popularity by chugging pints of bitter and swinging from zipwires?
To make sense of all the political peacocking, I interviewed Hannah O’Rourke, who runs progressive campaigning organisation Campaign Lab. If you want to get all the depth of flavour of Hannah’s wisdom and my charming wit, listen to the entire conversation now.
I initially wanted to speak to Hannah because of her work AI slop and how it’s benefiting The Right, and why The Left never experiment with new media to get their messages across. We talked a lot about that — and about pubs lol. Again, please listen, or just read on for some top highlights.
The main kinds of slop that Hannah is seeing come from The Right can be broadly split into three groups:
Strange cinematic depictions of lions clad in armour, protecting England, with captions such as ‘the lion is waking’. These are like cartoons that are meant to convey a feeling — everyone knows that they are fake and no one is being fooled.
Satire, for example Keir Starmer prancing around the beach, topless, singing — this is to make people laugh, and Hannah compared it to Spitting Image, a satirical puppet show from the 80s and 90s with severe gross-out aesthetics, as was the style at the time.
Actual fake news and disinformation: and this maybe falls out of the ‘slop’ paradigm because it is literally trying to look like real clips of news casts saying that the government want to introduce bogus taxes, curfews, and other such nonsense.
The comparison to Spitting Image is key — sometimes it feels like we’re so busy being scared of AI that we forget that we’ve been using media to make fun of politicians for decades now.
There’s a resistance from The Left to post about what they care about, with their emotions, whether using AI or not, because we tend to get stuck in ‘facts’. There’s the feeling that if the other side just understood the problem accurately, they would be convinced. This is maybe the right instinct, but the wrong way to look at it — people need facts to be wrapped in good storytelling rather than having stats barked at them. If you want to go deeper, Campaign Lab recently worked with Rootcause to understand the types of political content being shared and engaged with on TikTok specifically.
When it comes to storytelling it’s clear that The Right win out every time, and that’s likely because The Left never get to the story part. They’re too busy deciding what the story could be, and cannot work with each other unless they all agree on a list of one hundred ideological points. It’s very puritanical, and it does not move the work forward.
Most people in the UK voting Reform aren’t far-right reactionaries, they’re just sick of the status quo. This makes sense and barely needs explaining. Those who are calling to disrupt the legacy systems that make life hard and unfair make a very compelling case, very easily. ‘Everything is bad — let’s change it’. Good idea! But The Right are getting at this by dividing people: they are bankrolling independent news orgs like GB News at a loss — and GB News, unlike any left-leaning media outfit — are great at making clips, leading the conversation, and using any tactics necessary to stay relevant. Some smart TVs even default to GB News when you turn them on. Reform are out there re-opening pubs for local communities while the progressive queers are getting dizzy trying to find safe drinking holes that aren’t full of scary old men. This division is unacceptable, and The Left should be bringing us back together — not belly flopping into stupid war.
