Nishka Ma
Appearances
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Well, look, this is a conversation we've just scratched the surface of. Chris, we hope you'll come back and follow up further on this. But in the meantime, thank you so much for joining us today on Podsafe.uk.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Now, after the break, we're going to find out how the far right has spread its tendrils across the world and wedged itself firmly in the UK. We'll be speaking with journalist Nafiz Ahmed.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And of course, this song and dance about growth and opportunity conveniently comes at the same time as the government is staring down some grim economic forecasts. So joining us now to make sense of what the AI plan actually means is technology journalist and the author of How AI Ate the World, Chris Stoke-Walker. Welcome, Chris. Thanks, Nish.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
With the re-election and imminent inauguration of Donald Trump, the rise of hard-right parties across Europe and Elon Musk blasting disinformation diarrhea all over the UK press, it feels like the long-standing effort to keep extremist forces out of the government is unfortunately over.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
To help us understand how the far-right is taking the world by storm and what can be done about it is Nafis Ahmed, a systems theorist, investigative journalist and the author of Alt-Reich, The Network War to Destroy the West from Within. Thanks for joining us, Nafis. Thank you.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Boy, it must be a real mixed emotions for you right now. Because everybody likes to be right, but sometimes you don't want to be right.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
They have a fixation with these, I mean, we would call them conspiracy theories, really, like cultural Marxism and the sort of great replacement theory, right?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
So who were the key players now in the kind of international, the alt-right, who were the most important figures globally in this movement?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And in one of the key players that you talk about in the book in terms of the alt-right network as it stands is Vladimir Putin. How much connection? Because we sort of I sometimes think Putin seems to sit alone because he comes so specifically out of the kind of Russian tradition and the kind of KGB seems like such a specific and singular figure.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
What's his interest in the European far right and particularly in the UK? Because in the book, you also talk about Nigel Farage having sort of nurtured a warm relationship with Russia. What's Putin's interest in this far right network? And why does he have a kind of interest in building a relationship with someone like Nigel Farage?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Oh, you can't spell Trainspotting without AI.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Just to start us off here, what has the government actually announced in terms of this AI opportunities action plan? What's the protein?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
So like, actually, in many ways, you're the absolute perfect guest for the show.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And so then you have this kind of alliance between people who are ideologically Nazis. Then you have this sort of group of hyper-capitalists that will essentially back any political project as long as it doesn't regulate them in any way, shape or form. I think that brings in a lot of those Tufton Street guys.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Then the sort of third facet of this is tech companies and, you know, the Elon Musks and the Mark Zuckerbergs. I don't know if these people have an underpinning political philosophy. I suspect not. But in reality... What's underpinning a lot of their movements in the last few years is, again, this attempt to push back against regulation.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And essentially, if people who are ideologically of the far right promise not to regulate the tech sector, they will give them kind of unbridled support. Now, when you consider that kind of triangle working in Congress today, it starts to feel pretty hopeless, right?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And now in the UK, we've ousted our incumbent government and there are elements of the Conservative Party that I think have mainstreamed a lot of these ideas. Various Jewish groups criticised Suella Braverman very heavily for her consistent use of the phrase cultural Marxism and attempted to explain to her the actual... card-carrying Nazi roots of that term. So we've ousted the Conservative Party.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
We've now got a Labour Party in power. Starmer's tactics to push back against the far right all seem to be focused on delivery and sort of rebuilding people's trust in politics. But these are kind of slow burn tactics. And in an age of disinformation, do we need a more rigorous and immediate approach to push back against this? Yeah.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Nafis Ahmed, thank you so much for joining us on Pods Over the UK. Thank you. Now, clearly, the era of disinformation is upon us, with Meta last week announcing that they're ending their fact-checking programme. This week's episode of Offline, Lina Khan, Commissioner of the US Federal Trade Commission, joins them to talk about her fight to break up Amazon and Meta.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Tune in to this episode now on the Offline feed or check it out on their YouTube channel.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
I am increasingly aware that I'm looking more and more haggard on these shows. I've got a busy personal and professional life.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
It's ridiculous. It's a real kick in the teeth to get a comment from Glass Spider, who I'm going to assume is a fellow David Bowie fan. I'm just going to assume that that is a David Bowie reference. Yes. Why not tune into the YouTube feed to see how disheveled I look on a week-to-week basis?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
After the break, we'll open the mailbag to hear your thoughts on how we should deal with disinformation.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
We've been flooded with listener responses about this thorny question, and we'd like to thank you all for writing in. Lots of you are on board with the idea of debunking... fake news or nonsense, but not all of our listeners agreed. Hannah said that the media should ignore Musk as he's nothing more than a troll. He needs to go back to the bridge he crawled out from under.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Straight facts there from Hannah. Jason said, I don't believe that we should give Musk and his far-right fuckwit buddies the time of day because he's simply not worth it. However, I can totally understand why people are wanting to engage in it because the last thing you want is for these ideas to snowball.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
You are not given enough credit for the quality of your voice work. Thank you. Your range of accents is beyond compare.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
We also had a fantastic response from Israel Butler, who's the head of narrative and framing at the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, who trains and supports progressive communicators on how to get the public on site. His comment was really insightful. Here's what he had to say. The way to get people to let go of misinformation is not by correcting the facts for them.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
It's by making them realize that the source of the misinformation is not trustworthy. I And you do this by exposing that they have hidden motives, which actually involve doing something that harms your audience.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Listen, I don't know if I'm just hungry. No. And the use of the word sandwich has made me think this is a great idea. But that sounds like a great sandwich.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
You couldn't have picked a worse time in Dylan's artistic output to make that sort of a claim.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Had you done it in the middle of the 1980s, you'd have been making an excellent point. In the sort of nadir of Under the Red Sky, you'd be making an absolutely fantastic point.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
So the problem is a big one, and we clearly need to add more mental health capacity within the NHS, as if left unchecked, it will only fester. Parliament has even taken submissions from mental health professionals detailing why it's so important to intervene early, laying out that if unchecked, issues can worsen for individuals, leading to negative health and social outcomes for society.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And perhaps most ironically for those on the neoliberal bandwagon, it actually leads to negative economic outcomes as well.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
I'll tell you what's bad for my mental health, seeing Tony Blair speak about anything in 2025. I think it's really important to try and engage with the fact that the crisis in mental health is not the result of self-diagnosis or over-medicalisation. Many people are living with an undiagnosed mental health condition due to systemic failures to identify and treat conditions early enough.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
According to Bipolar UK, people with bipolar disorder wait, on average, nine and a half weeks years for a correct diagnosis. This delay has profound human and economic consequences with bipolar related suicides alone costing the UK between £436 million and £872 million annually.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
If you're talking about challenges of life, then by all means, let's have a conversation about the housing crisis, meaning people are struggling to pay their rent or the you know, job insecurity or the fact that real wages have struggled to increase in the last 15 years. If you're worried about why people are worried about the challenges of life, maybe look at kind of systemic inequality.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Do you know what I mean? It is patronising shite that, you know, it's sort of pseudoscience that he doesn't actually seem to substantiate with any hard evidence. And meanwhile, organisations stuffed with experts on this issue are saying that, yeah, there is a mental health crisis, but It's a crisis of people actually getting seen for the mental health problems that they have.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
As somebody who has experienced a certain number of mental health issues that I've spoken about publicly in the past, I know the only reason that I've been able to see them is because I have been able to pay for private mental health support. That's just a reality of my life. I know that that's the only reason I've been able to get assistance in this. It's incredibly offensive.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
to people that are struggling. For somebody that we're constantly told has this incredible political skill and acumen to read the national mood, he's never sounded more divorced from reality.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
That's a really critical thing here is like, do you believe in reason and evidence?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Or do you want to simply baselessly speculate? But then I guess Tony Blair has never been a huge fan of evidence. Whether it's in the mental health of the UK or the lead up to the war in Iraq, Tony Blair has always had a, shall we say, mixed relationship with a need for evidence.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And that's it. Thanks for listening to Pod Save the UK. As always, we want to hear your thoughts. Email us at psuk at reducedlistening.co.uk.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Pod Save the UK is a reduced listening production for Crooked Media.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
The executive producers are Anishka Sharma and Madeleine Herringer, with additional support from Ari Schwartz.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Well, write in and let us know, American listeners. How happy were you with that accent? To find out what this means for the United Kingdom, we're joined by technology journalist Chris Stoke-Walker.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
A big part of this push is to do with Labour's plans for the economy, which sort of solely centre around growth. Do you buy this idea that this is a sort of magic bullet that can create the sort of economic growth that Labour needs to finance its medium to long term spending commitments?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And I'm Nishka Ma. On today's show, can AI save the UK?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
How much of an impact will this have in terms of the job market? I mean, for under-25s at the moment, the employment prospects are already fairly bleak. In terms of short-term pain, is that going to disproportionately affect that generation?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
And later, we'll be sharing your thoughts on Elon Musk's unwelcome interventions into British politics.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
I'm instinctively a Luddite with these kind of things, and I'm trying to push back against that and be open to this. However, there is this huge elephant in the room, which is the environmental impact of rolling out AI. There's the obvious energy cost in terms of running all of these data centers, but there's also hidden costs as well. Water is increasingly becoming a scarce resource in the world.
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
Building the chips, it uses a huge amount of fresh water and also cooling the systems uses a huge amount of fresh water. One of the data sites that's being proposed is sort of seven miles from the Abingdon Reservoir in Oxfordshire, as you've already mentioned, which is an area that's already struggling with water shortages. How much of that has been factored in
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
to the government's thinking about this?
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
A Cornell University study, I mean, this is one of the sort of best guess estimates that you're referring to. Cornell study estimates that global AI could account for 6.6 billion cubic meters of water use by 2027, which is the equivalent of nearly two thirds of England's annual consumption. So the best guess estimates are,
Pod Save the UK
Facts versus F-wits: how to fight the Alt Reich
that academics and experts in this field are making seem potentially catastrophic. We sort of almost expect this kind of behaviour from the tech sector. They've fought regulation tooth and nail in a number of different areas, not just AI. But... especially from a government that has at points touted its green credentials. We need more protection from our policymakers, right?