A few months after Fox’s “clumsy” comments regarding Sikh actors in 1917, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. This is when, with the help of YouTube’s well-known alt-right pipeline1, Fox fully turns from a well-respected actor to the conspiracy theory peddling crackpot he is today. Part Two of this three-part miniseries will focus on Fox’s downward spiral into becoming a right-wing politician, spreading racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other bigoted remarks on Twitter.
The first of these turns came from the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown. On Twitter2 (remember when it wasn’t called X?), Fox tweeted that he had a large group of friends over for lunch, which was a flagrant violation of the UK’s lockdown rules. He went on to say in the Tweet: ”Stay out. Protect your rights. If the NHS can’t cope, then the NHS isn’t fit for purpose. Compliance is violence.”
Now I can say from personal experience that lockdown was not fun. While I saw two milestones— graduating from high school and starting college— my mental health took a nosedive during this. I would have liked to have lunch with many of my friends, but I had to maintain the fact that WE ARE IN A PANDEMIC. You may not get sick, but someone else definitely will and can die from it.
ANYWAY, lockdown was not great for my mental health because of the unhealthy coping mechanisms I used, including (but not limited to) spending an unhealthy amount of time online. Coincidentally, my negative coping mechanism is the same one Laurence Fox utilized. I, however, did not turn into a raging fascist like Fox did. I became a leftist, which I attribute to watching the United States abandoning much of its population to the doctrine of “states’ rights”, which was the first time I experienced what sociologist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.” I then did research (shoutout to Anarchist Library and the Coffee with Comrades podcast) and realized that the best way to counter state violence is to collectively organize and look out for said marginalized people, whether that be through direct action (which includes actions from sabotage to wildcat strikes), building up communal relations, mutual aid, or joining a union. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m a member of the IWW, or International Workers of the World, which is a union that tries to unite all members of the working class regardless of job occupation.
Also, unlike Fox, I can appreciate the logic behind public health agencies issuing it; it is a strategy, alongside masking, of reducing the spread of COVID-19. And especially given the lack of knowledge scientists (and the general public) had of COVID-19 and the effects on people, limiting the overload of cases on healthcare systems (i.e. the NHS Fox is railing on about overloading with COVID-19 cases) as well as other public spaces in the short term would help scientists and researchers find ways of treating it in the long term.
Also during 2020, George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin led to a global reckoning of sorts3 about racism. While people protested Floyd’s death in the streets, large companies in the immediate aftermath also issued statements committing to DEI and anti-racist strategies. One of these was the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, which, like other companies, released a statement stating that it will try to make its locations “a much more diverse and inclusive place to shop.” They laid out five points as to how they intended to stymy such an inclusive environment, from training its 250 leaders and board in “understanding and fluently talking about race and ethnicity” (Retail Tech Innovation Hub) to setting up an ethnicity pay gap review within their company.
A few months after making this statement, Sainsbury’s announced that it would be celebrating Black History Month4. Fox responded to the tweet: “Dear @sainsburys, I won’t be shopping in your supermarket ever again whilst you promote racial segregation and discrimination…I sincerely hope others join me. RT. #BoycottSainsburys.“ (Sarah Jones).
Not only did Twitter users lambast Fox as “‘attention seeking’” (Sarah Jones, The Independent), but Sainsbury’s responded to Fox’s tweet. They clarified that the support spaces that Fox said were promoting racial segregation were spaces where Sainsbury’s Black workers could safely share their experiences with racism and support each other, i.e., Fox, you don’t know what you’re talking about (Sarah Jones, The Independent)
Such statements as the one Fox made came part and parcel with these announcements that companies made in the summer of 2020. Retail Tech Innovation pointed out that one user shared that they would not shop there due to its political statement. These types of claims insinuate that companies should stay away from political matters by making such statements, while obfuscating the fact that companies do participate in political matters by the simple fact of existing in such a society where politics matter and said politics include race, gender, sexual orientation as other facets of how people approach the various social, political and economic issues that surround their lives. (Retail Tech Innovation, July 3, 2020) The very fact that Sainsbury’s mentioned that they had 8% of non-white board members shows not only racist hiring practices that minimized the number of non-White people Sainsbury’s hired, but also how public outcry over those practices can lead to said company adapting its operations to a changing political landscape.
And just when you think Fox’s tweets couldn’t get any worse, well, Fox found a new low. In April of 2021, Fox tweeted a comparison of the EU authorizing COVID-19 vaccinations to Joseph Mengele’s medical experimentation on humans. I could not find the original tweet on the Twitter mirror Nitter (see Note 2), but I did see other users’ responses to this, some of which I have posted below:
Given the wide array of backlash to his tweet (British comedian and author David Baddiel is one of the people who directly responded to Fox’s tweet, as seen in one of the screenshots), Fox chose to halt his Mengele=EU comparisons. One realm where he has not received as much pushback is in comparing doctors who give gender affirming healthcare. He even went so far as to compare a doctor who’s discussing bottom surgery for trans people who do gender affirming surgery to Joseph Mengele, an example of which is below. He is not the first right-winger to do this; more prominent right-wingers like Matt Walsh and Chaya Raichik use this rhetoric to demonize trans healthcare in the eyes of supporters, which, among other rhetorical points, has become the impetus for waves of anti-trans legislation in the United States as well as the United Kingdom, intending to roll back trans people’s civil rights.
Following the path of anyone who wants to gain political power, Fox founded his own political party. Dubbing his coalition the Reclaim Party, Fox mentioned in an interview with The Times that he created it ““challenge the woke orthodoxy of ‘white privilege’ and ‘systemic racism’”. One can draw a straight arrow from Fox’s tweets lambasting Sainsbury’s anti-racism efforts to making campaigns against said efforts part of his political party and platform. It also should not surprise y’all that he also campaigned against lockdown requirements because he just loves manspreading COVID.
Okay, okay, all jokes aside, his London mayoral campaign resulted in him garnering a paltry 1.8 % of the vote and forfeiting his 10,000-pound deposit (Nurary Bulbul and William Mata, The London Standard). I can assume this poor showing does not come from his lack of qualifications to be a mayor—just look at the current president of the United States—but due to his controversial (and that’s putting it lightly) posts on social media that were reflected in the Reclaim Party’s platform. While he did perform slightly better as a candidate in the 2023 Uxbridge and South Ruslip by-elections, by 2024, his party did not field candidates and instead endorsed Nigel Farage’s Reform UK candidate slate (Nurary Bulbul and William Mata, The London Standard).
Despite the failure of his mayoral campaign, Fox rode the media attention all the way to a job with GB News, which I can best describe as Fox News but with a posh accent. Given this, he definitely felt encouraged to keep posting his bigoted thoughts on a public platform. The most notorious tweet from this period, and the one that came with a Twitter suspension (remember this is before Elon bought Twitter), came during June of 2022, where he changed his profile picture to a Pride flag photoshopped to look like a swastika. The insinuation here is that LGBTQ people were the real Nazis for, get this, demanding people and governments not to discriminate against them due to their sexual or gender identity. That’s me following his logic, and writing even a fragment of a sentence along those lines makes me feel uncomfortable.
The suspension, however, did not stop him from comparing LGBTQ people to Nazis. His first tweet upon his return to Twitter was a retweet with a picture of Munich lined with Nazi flags after Austria’s annexation in 1933, underneath a tweet of Regent Street bedecked with Pride flags to celebrate Pride Month. In all seriousness, why is this guy obsessed with swastikas? There are neo-Nazis less obsessed with swastikas than this guy.
He was fired from GB News in 2023, after he made one edgy comment too many that led to media regulator Ofcom getting involved. The offending comment stemmed from an appearance on GB News anchor Dan Wootton’s show, Dan Wootton Tonight. When the two men talked about journalist Ava Evans’ comments on a BBC discussion about men and mental health, Fox said “[W] hat self-respecting man would climb into bed with her”, basically reducing her accomplishments and societal value to how attractive men could (or could not) find her. Wootton all but endorsed Fox’s misogynistic comments by smiling and laughing and then, for “a touch of balance,” said that she is “a very beautiful woman.” (Yasmin Rufo, BBC News), again objectifying her. Ofcom’s investigation of Fox and Wootton also pointed out that neither man apologized for their comments, nor did anyone on Dan Wootton Tonight issue any scrolling chyron apologies or anything of the sort (Yasmin Rufo, BBC News). After Ofcom’s investigation, GB News fired Fox and suspended Wootton.
Not only satisfied with becoming an all-but-unabashed fascist, Fox also tried to launch a music career, releasing albums in 2020 and 2022. I wish I were joking, but given that we live in the worst potential timeline, I am here to tell you I am not. While I don’t plan on listening to it because, you know, I don’t want to give a fascist money, YouTuber John Duncan did an amazing impression of his songs.
In an interview promoting one of his subpar music albums with The Times, Fox credited right-wing YouTube videos as a key part of his turn to the far right. In an article dissecting Fox’s alt-right turn, George Grylls of the New Statesman uses Fox’s radicalization as an example of the effects of YouTube’s well-known alt-right pipeline. For those not in the know, the alt-right pipeline is a term that refers to the YouTube recommendation algorithm feeding users with more extreme content to keep users watching and, therefore, giving YouTube money. YouTubers can do so as they are not limited by broadcasting regulations like GB News is with OfCom, leading to the development of such a conduit (George Grylls, The New Statesman). Fox is not alone in being radicalized down this pipeline; there has been much research in the US and UK on this, including the startling book Meme Wars.
I will admit that Laurence Fox is a smaller player in the conservative media ecosystem. There are other people with more political clout than he, such as Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk in the US, who have generated more attention, and rightfully so. But I feel that his downward spiral from beloved actor to right-wing crackpot deserves a closer look, in particular by me, a guy who loves Inspector Lewis and other British murder mysteries. This miniseries will conclude in Part Three, wherein I list how his views had consequences, not only legally, but also for his personal life and career. Some may fight fascism by throwing bricks at fascists’ heads; others do so by filing lawsuits.
Thanks for reading Not Another Newsletter! This post is public, so feel free to share it.