Is the Global Right Cooked?

Let me show you something.In March 2026, a photo went viral on Reddit of two United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents patrolling the corridors of New York's LaGuardia Airport.All things considered, it wasn't a particularly notable picture.If ICE is going to be anywhere, it makes a whole lot more sense for them to be at an airport than at the Super Bowl.There was one thing which stuck out, though.The agents seemed really, really young.

With their cool, young people haircuts, they looked like they were part of some kind of reverse 21 Jump Street program, and Reddit users began to mock them relentlessly.As far as I can tell, no journalist ever quite managed to confirm how old the agents actually were.But the presence of younger -than -usual recruits would certainly have made sense.The previous August, then -Secretary of Homeland Security Christine Noem had lowered the age limit for joining ICE from 21 to 18.This was amid a huge recruitment drive for the agency.With ICE being sent to effectively occupy the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in an effort to round up alleged illegal immigrants, Noam and Trump needed as many bodies as they could muster.

They didn't only drop the age limit.Gnome also announced a $50 ,000 sign -on bonus and a student forgiveness program worth a further $60 ,000.The eligibility criteria?An ability to complete 15 push -ups, 32 sit -ups, and run 1 .5 miles in a leisurely 14 minutes.The Atlanta Black Star summarized the recruitment criteria in four simple words.Anything with a pulse.

It worked.Soon, the Department of Homeland Security was celebrating a 120 % increase in the number of agents on its books.And yet, the consequences of these lax standards were just what you'd expect.Things got far worse than just some agents looking a little on the young side.The footage which emerged from Minneapolis during ICE's so -called Operation Metro Surge was terrifying, but also kind of farcical.Agents appeared out of shape, they were undisciplined, they also just looked hopelessly out of their depth.

When two citizens, Alex Pretty and Renee Good, were killed in separate incidents, their murders seemed as much the result of a cascade of incompetence across many different levels as anything else.None of this is how we imagine these things working when it comes to far -right governments.When we picture a dystopian society in which an aspiring dictator assembles their own private army, we tend to picture a well -oiled military machine—something like the Peacekeepers from The Hunger Games or the First Order from the Star Wars sequel trilogy.What we got instead was the Stormtroopers from the Star Wars original trilogy.As much as liberals often like to think of Trump as an evil force, he's just as often been a hapless one.Particularly in his second presidency, his track record has been one of failure after failure after failure.

The more chaos and increased cost of living which has followed from Trump's chaotic second reign, the lower his approval ratings have sunk.As the conservative writers Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. had predicted the previous August, Trump's casual supporters didn't mind the cruelty.could overlook a little sexual assault, corruption or insurrection, the one thing they haven't been able to forgive is incompetence.And, that same incompetence could be about to take the wind out of the sails of ascendant far -right parties across the world.Let me shift focus to the UK.This week, a good proportion of the adult population of Great Britain will be heading to the polls in a series of local elections.

Maybe they've happened by the time you're watching this, maybe they haven't, it doesn't really matter.Because the broad narrative of the results is pretty certain.Nigel Farage, leader of the far -right Reform UK party, is set to have an incredible night.His party has a strong chance of winning the Wealth Senate and have taken control of county and city councils across England, even including some in London.Other small parties are likely to benefit too.The Green Party in particular is on track to make some really big gains.

Nevertheless, the few hundred seats that the Greens are set to gain pale in comparison to the more than 1 ,000 new councillors which Nigel Farage is hoping to walk away with.

Britain is about to get very reformy.

Or, you know, maybe the monster anything loony party will completely sweep the board.Such is the danger of me filming this more than a week in advance.There's a morbid sense of inevitability to these election results.It feels like the UK, like many other countries in Europe and elsewhere, is on this inevitable trudge to the right.Wins in local elections for the Reform Party this year, and the next, and the next, are but an aperitif for an inevitable seizure of the full power of the state at the next general election in 2029.Prime Minister Nigel Farage will then be able to go and join President Vance, Prime Minister Maloney, President Le Pen, and Chancellor Vidal as they plan a new far -right world order at G7 meetings which will presumably all be held in the headquarters of the Springfield Republican Party.

But what if it's not that simple?What if these various Trump hangers -on, all of whom have at one point or another seen both Trump and Maga as templates for their own careers, mightsimilarly be stymied by very Trumpian run -ins with incompetence.This is a recording of a Zoom call between members of the Reform UK group on Kent County Council.It was October 2025, and Reform had recently won control of the council during the local elections which took place during the May of that year.Their victory in Kent, as well as 11 other areas of England, was a big moment for Reform.

Their biggest yet.The party had managed to get several Members of Parliament elected before.They'd also persuaded several MPs from other parties to join theirs.Even if they lost one MP to his own, new party as a result of not being racist enough.As members of what is, in Parliament at least, an absolutely minuscule political party, however, Reforms MPs don't really have anything in the way of responsibility.Their job is to sit at the back of the opposition benches and throw verbal tomatoes at the Prime Minister and his cabinet.

All of which is kind of easy.One doesn't have to be a massive Keir Starmer superfan to recognise that it is far easier to sit back and criticise the way the government is doing stuff than to actually have to make a go of things yourself.May 2025, then, anointed Reform UK with something it had never really had before—responsibility.The party itself saw its newfound power as the ruling party in county councils like Kent as an incredible opportunity to prove their worth.Nigel Farage was said to have described such councils as a shop window into what a Reform government in Westminster would be capable of should they win the next general election.Unfortunately for Nigel, what they were capable of was making an absolute clusterfuck out of everything they touched.

One of the party's earliest challenges came in trying to hang on to all of those councillors they'd managed to get elected, many of whom appeared as if they hadn't really expected to win.Perhaps the highest profile example of this was Rob Howard.the extremely short -lived leader of Warwickshire County Council, who a Google search tells me didn't direct the 2006 adaptation of The Da Vinci Code starring Tom Hanks.Howard was elected leader of the council by his fellow councillors on the 16th of May.Then, just 41 days later, he resigned, citing health problems which he said limited his ability to do the job to the standard required.Although he has continued to serve as both a councillor and as a member of the council's cabinet since.

On standing down, Howard was replaced by his deputy, George Finch, who happened to be the grand old age of 18.Barely out of school, Finch found himself in charge of a council which controls around £1 .5 billion in assets and which has an annual budget of half a billion pounds.It hasn't just been Warwickshire though.In the less than one year since Reform's big victorious night at the polls, the party has lost around 70 councillors, either through them quitting the party, the party giving them the boot, or them quitting as councillors altogether.Some have been kicked out of reform as a result of inter -clique fallings out within local parties.Following the leak of that chaotic Zoom call in Kent, for example, the local party suspended and then expelled four of the councillors present for bringing the party into disrepute.

Crucially, not Lyndon Kim Karen, the one filmed shouting at everyone, but four of the people she reckoned might have leaked the recording.Sometimes I will make a decision that might not be liked by everybody in the group, but I'm afraid Others have been suspended for the thing that you would expect membersof a far -right political party to be suspended for.Sound the boomers making horrific social media posts on accounts which use their full government names alarm!There was Ian Cooper, one -time leader of Staffordshire County Council, who was expelled after being accused of sending racist abuse to Sadiq Khan and David Lammy.There was Lancashire's Tom Pickup, who was found to have described Kistama as a dick -taker in a WhatsApp group in which other members had called for a mass Islam genocide.

There was Laura Ann Jones from Wales, who also got caught out on WhatsApp after dropping a slur for Chinese people whilst discussing TikTok.Not to forget Northumberland councillor John Allen, who was expelled from the party after it was alleged that he had a YouTube account with which he left comments under videos promising to shoot Keir Starmer.Which is unfair, because personally, I think anyone who comments on YouTube videos at all should go straight to jail.Some of Reform's councillors were Ronins in real life too.Corby councillor Robert Bloom, for example, resigned after a neighbour alleged that he'd repeatedly shouted the N -word at them, while Kent County councillor Daniel Taylor was expelled after being arrested for threatening to kill his wife.This isn't even a complete list, there's possibly worse examples in there, I just had to stop arbitrarily because else this video would be mind -numbingly long and boring.

Probably my favourite loss of a reform councillor is David Taylor, who quit the party live on TV, in a scene which I can only describe as bringing the energy of a reality TV confessional booth to the Sunday morning BBC Politics Midlands show.Taylor had opted to resign his membership of the party in protest at attempts by the reform -run council of which he was a part to raise council tax by nearly 9%, something that they later followed through with.Because, yeah, reform haven't only been played with dodgycouncillors, they've also failed at pretty much everything they've tried to do.In a deeply lame move following its historic election gains in 2025, the Central Reform Party had announced its intention to launch its very own knock -off Doge unit, led by Zia Yousef, the ex -chairman of the party who had only just recently re -upped his membership after briefly resigning following one of the party's MPs calling for a ban on the wearing of the burqa.

Doge going in to the county councils looking at where billions of pounds of council taxpayers' money is being spent.

" Reform's Doge unit was a pitiful rip -off of Elon Musk's Doge unit in the US.Despite the fact that, by this point, Musk's project had already ended in failure, with his team of teenagers identifying little in the way of savings.Reforms Doge had an even harder job ahead of it.For one, political power in England is heavily centralised, meaning that local councils only have so much agency when it comes to deciding what to spend money on.On top of this, local government finances in England are currently stretched beyond belief after years of cuts to the amount of money they receive from central government.The result was that there weren't really any savings to find.

In fact, many councils had already cut services to the bone and were nevertheless still teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.Far from cutting taxes, every single reform -led council in the country chose to raise them.The nearly 9 % increase in council tax in Worcestershire is a standout, but only just.Eight other reform -run councils have similarly raised taxes by 3 .8 % or more.Where reform councillors have been less shy is in adding expenditure, which benefits them.Reform councillors in Kent walked back a promised 5 % pay cut to councillors and instead handed

themselves a pay rise.One of George Finch's first acts in office was to arrange for councillors to be given permission to spend £150 ,000 on political advisors of the sort normally reserved for Westminster politicians.So yeah, Reform's time running local councils here in the UK has been nothing short of a car crash.There's little in the way of achievements to boast to voters about here.In fact, when asked about it, Nigel Farage gets pretty tetchy.As election day approaches, Farage has begun to seem kind of shaken.

There's no point, there's no point.Just write some silly story tomorrow and have fun with it.

As has been happening elsewhere in the world, a far -right which had appeared unstoppable as an outsider political move can't quite seem to stick the transition to power.

This is Giorgia Maloney, Italian Prime Minister and leader of the far -right Brothers of Italy party.

She's speaking to a scrum of journalists to make clear her feelings about Donald Trump's war of words with the Pope in April 2026.For Meloni to decide to criticise Trump quite so unequivocally was quite the turnaround.She'd previously gone to great lengths to connect herself to the Trump Project.Before being elected, she was advised by Steve Bannon.She was a speaker at CPAC in 2019, 2022, and 2025.

even on what the right should be, what it should do, how it should behave, and even how it should define itself.

year, she flew all the way to Mar -a -Lago to meet with Trump in the lead -up to his second inauguration.That's all changed.It's not just Trump's attacks on Pope Leo which have changed Maloney's tune.Across Europe, far -right politicians who were once desperate to present themselves as their country's equivalent to Donald Trump are now trying to pretend to have never had anything to do with him.Alternative for Deutschland leader Alice Weidel has told members of her party to stop flying to the US to meet members of the MAGA movement so much.Marine Le Pen called Trump's strikes on Iran erratic and a mistake.

CPAC is due to come to the UK in July as part of an international tour, but Nigel Farage has said that he and the Reform Party will be staying away.Trump, it seems, is no longer a good mascot for the global right.Maloney, Vidal, Le Pen, Farage, and their fellow travellers will all have watched the cringe -inducing episode of J .D.Vance flying to Budapest to hold a joint press conference with Viktor Orban in early April, only for Orban to lose catastrophically.Even if the reasons for Orban's declining support were mostly domestic, it's clear that an endorsement from the leader of the free world is no longer enough to move the needle.

On the other end of the spectrum, they'll also have been watching along as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has managed to completely turn around the fortunes of his country's Liberal Party precisely by hammering an anti -Trump message.Some of the most recent souring is a result of very recent events.America and Israel's war on Iran is as popular in Europe as it is in America.It's kind of worse on some level.At least in America you get to take solace in the fact that it's your own country.which has decided to press the make -everything -more -expensive button for no discernible reason.

Folks elsewhere in the world are facing rising energy costs and declining living standards as a result of a war which they couldn't have less to do with.Interestingly, many far -right leaders instinctively jumped to support Trump when the strikes on Iran first began.Farage told Sky News that, "'We should be supporting the Americans '".The vice -president of Le Pen's national rally party reacted similarly.It was only as the impact began to be felt in people's wallets that they both performed an about -face.It's like even they can sense something of a low -hum vibe shift.

A hesitancy.For the first time since Donald Trump came down that escalator to announce his presidential run in 2015, that inevitable victory of the global right appears to be hitting some very real stumbling blocks.This is not a video of Nigel Farage.It is instead a video of some of his rivals for the parliamentary seat of South Bannock during the 2015 general election.If you're a regular watcher of my videos, you'll likely have seen it before in a piece that I made telling the intertwining tales of Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage last summer.Fun fact, my laptop has decided that when I start typing in the website for Getty Images to find footage for projects, it should auto -complete to the URL of this specific video.

We will regularly just be in the office, and my computer will just start shouting about Oog the Beneficent.One of the key takeaways of that video was that Nigel Farage has historically been bad at winning elections.Really bad.That piece of footage was filmed after he'd just failedat his seventh attempt to become an MP.It wasn't until 2024 that Nigel Farage actually got into Parliament, a full 27 years after he first started trying.

The most fascinating thing about Nigel Farage's career, however, is that this has never really mattered.In fact, losing has tended to work extremely well for Arnage.He's managed to maintain this presence as a constant spectre haunting British politics in such a way that both the Conservative and Labour parties have felt as if they have had to adopt policies that his voters would like in order to stave off his competition.Hence, Europhile David Cameron opting to hold a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union.or former celebrated human rights lawyer Keir Starmer talking endlessly about stopping of the boats.It's a good position to be in, and has similarly been a good position to be in for many far -right parties.

The success of far -right parties in many countries across the globe has been in their ability to act as lightning rods for popular discontent with the status quo.The leaders of these parties have carved themselves in Trump's image as outsider candidates ready to tear things up.Governing, however, is something else entirely.We already saw, in 2020, that the outrage which is currently driving people to vote for norm -defying right -wing politicians is not unstoppable.The chaos and incompetency which often defines their contact with power is easily overlooked by their most loyal supporters but tends to put the softer supporters that they also need to win off.Sure, for a while it might be possible to blame the deep state or the blob or the courts

or central bankers, but after a while, those excuses begin to wear thin.Nigel Farage and the Reform Party are likely to do very well in this week's local elections in the UK.What that means in the longer term, however, is far less clear.Should reform take a bunch more councils and then end up putting up taxes or otherwise causing chaos, it could make Farage's path to a victory at the national level harder, not easier.The global far -right have, until this point, thrived off the chaos of financial crises, pandemics, and war, but when the chaos becomes unattributable to anyone but themselves, there's every chance that their luck could run out.That, however, depends on voters hearing about these failures.

We live in polarised and polarising times, in which many of us are consuming entirely different media diets to one another.Take Donald Trump's often entirely self -defeating use of trade tariffs.Last month, Trump announced that he was considering imposing new tariffs on the UK in an effort to get our government here to scrap the 2 % digital services tax, which it currently levies on big tech firms.Different newspapers presented this story in completely different ways.And, if you're someone who, like me, really values being able to see how stories are being reported by different media outlets in this way, then today's video's sponsor, Ground News, is an incredible tool.Ground News brings together reporting from over 50 ,000 sources worldwide on any given story.

Their app and website easily shows you the political leanings of different outlets, who owns them, and how factual they tend to be.You can then decide for yourself how those contextual factors might be impacting the reporting.If we use Ground News Story to track down different takes on the tariff threat, we canwe can see that 45 different sources reported on this story.The left -leaning Daily Mirror emphasised the size and revenues of the companies which have to pay this tax in a manner which kind of suggested that they deserve to pay it.By contrast, the right -wing outlet GB News embraced Donald Trump's framing of the digital services tax as a cash grab.

One of the tools I particularly like on Ground News is its Blindspot feature, which showcases the stories each day which one side of the political aisle are obsessing over while the other is almost completely ignoring.When ICE began scaling back some of its more controversial practices in April, for example, right -wing outlets largely ignored the story, perhaps worrying that it might be seen as evidence that ICE—and therefore Trump—was failing.But it's not just me.Ground News has picked up a bunch of other praise for their work.The mobile app has been featured five times as Apple's App of the Day, and the Nobel Peace Center have celebrated the app as an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview.If you want to get access to all these great features and adopt a new way of seeing the news, then I've partnered with them to get you 40 % off the same unlimited access vantage plan that I use by either scanning the QR code on the screen or going to my link ground .

news .com .au.That makes it come out to around £5 a month, which is a small price to pay for being able to see how the media is working to shape narratives at this really deep level.Thank you so much again to Ground News for sponsoring today's video, and to you for watching.Richard, Gary, Dickon Spain, Bill Mitchell, ZC Rees, Zoe Alden, Alexander Blank, Neil Zibildgaard, Sophia R, Sergio Suarez, Richard Rapun, Gabriel Koch, Jimmy Dunn, Fiasco Linguini, Agent Maxwell, Glenn Sugden, Emil, Jarabar, Unumson, Paulius Idicus, Sam Fortunato, Douglas Urquhart, and Ahmed Harachick.

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