TRAILER: Shire folk

In the autumn of last year, George Banja emerged from a tube station in Central London into a crowd of 150,000 people. Above them, a screen showed Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, speaking about a pending civil war. "Whether you choose or not, France is coming to you," Musk told the crowd. "You either fight back or you die." The man Musk was addressing was Tommy Robinson, a former football hooligan with a string of criminal convictions. For fifteen years, Robinson has conjured a vision of Britain as a failing country whose culture is being destroyed by radical Islam. During that time, he has been blacklisted by the British media, largely kept off screens and confined to distant corners of the internet. But something has changed. Banja has spent six months investigating how some of the most powerful people in America have turned Robinson into a prophet—and Britain into a cautionary tale in a battle to save the West.

The rise of a blacklisted figure