Ahead of the far-right rally in London on 13 September, I watched an AI-generated video of Elon Musk discussing the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory and urging white British people to ‘fight back’. Everyone in the comments knew the video was AI-generated, but they engaged with it and shared it with others, most of whom also knew it was fake. ‘It actually does not matter if this is AI-generated,’ one user wrote. ‘It is describing exactly what is happening in Britain right now to a tee.’ Debunking would have been of little use when, days later, the real Musk was beamed into the march to say more or less the same thing.

Last summer, I spoke to dozens of right-wing rioters who took to the streets after the Southport murders. I wanted to see if the Daily Mail – which has spent decades vilifying migrants – was correct in blaming an alleged piece of ‘Russian disinformation’ for the riots. No one I interviewed believed the false narrative that the attacker was a Muslim ‘illegal immigrant’. They correctly identified him as a British-born son of legal immigrants. They wanted all migrants gone.

This year, in the run-up to the 13 September rally, I spoke to new recruits on far-right Telegram channels. A woman from Norfolk explained that she shared AI images of young white women cowering under the gaze of leering migrants because ‘you can’t photograph them, or they’ll call you racist.’ A man in Leeds said he was creating images of blonde children smiling and holding signs that read ‘send them back’ because ‘this country belongs to our children, and they can’t speak for themselves.’ A Londoner spreading deepfakes of white women saying they don’t feel safe ‘because of migrants’ told me impatiently that everyone knows the videos aren’t real, but I was missing the point: ‘It’s about us showing everyone what’s really happening.’
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As Deleuze and Guattari wrote in Anti-Oedipus, fascism in the 1930s was not fundamentally a problem of ignorance: ‘The masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/september/fascistic-dream-machines