GB News isn't fond of me. Extremists are fine, though!
Alex Armstrong and Syntyche Djunga, both of whom are on GB News' payroll, have made their position clear
This week, I had the pleasure of an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist making a video all about me.
I use the term “all about me” loosely, considering most of said video was my own footage, bookended by a quip about me having a 12-inch dildo up my rectum, and a gag about me guzzling semen – really riveting, insightful stuff.
The person who made that video is Tyson Pengelly, a so-called “researcher” for the Australian branch of Gays Against Groomers. For the uninitiated: Gays Against Groomers is a designated anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group, and the Southern Poverty Law Center specifically notes that they trade in racist and anti-Muslim rhetoric – hold onto that, because it matters.
Before anyone reaches for the obvious objection, GLAAD highlights that the label covers any organisation pushing false claims and conspiracy theories about the community, regardless of how they personally identify. In other words – and as any rational person would tell you – being gay doesn’t stop you from causing direct harm to gay people.
The Los Angeles Blade detailed in 2023 how Gays Against Groomers “peddles dangerous and misleading narratives about the LGBTQ+ community,” and GLAAD has also repeatedly documented its people turning up alongside the Proud Boys, an actual neo-Nazi outfit, as well as John Fournace, a white nationalist who told attendees of a drag show that “most of us want to kill all of you,” whilst wearing a GAG t-shirt.
A gay New York City council member spoke out against Gays Against Groomers in 2022, only to have members of the group vandalise his office and apartment building with accusations of paedophilia, before physically assaulting his neighbour. Three people were arrested and charged as a result. Google, PayPal, Venmo, Printful and Wix have all cut ties with the organisation for breaching their terms on hate speech, and TikTok removed their account entirely.
Now apply all of that to the comment section of the video in question, where Pengelly himself declares that “conservatives are not your enemy.” Beneath that, in the same thread, one conservative calls me a f*ggot. A second says I love being called that slur whilst “on my knees”. That same person then suggests I belong on a watchlist, and Pengelly rounds it off by claiming I’m linking myself to paedophilia. That’s just a portion of the bile thrown my way, all because I dared to claim that right-wingers hate gay people.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across none other than Alex Armstrong in that section, joking with Pengelly about how I come across as “obsessed.”
You might remember Alex Armstrong as the GB News presenter who, a fortnight ago, threatened me with legal action for campaigning against comments made by a guest on his programme – first in an Instagram comment, then in my DMs, then never again, because he didn’t have a leg to stand on. He also promised to put an Instagram repost he’d falsely attributed to me on air to the nation that night. That also didn’t happen. What did happen, two days later, was Armstrong reading a pathetic statement on television denouncing his own guest’s homophobia after I’d told him to fuck off, before launching into a tirade about how he would not be “smeared” by people with different “political ideologies” who were determined to “cancel” him, which all felt very predictable.
What I didn’t expect was Dan Wootton – former GB News presenter, now broadcasting from the unregulated wilds of YouTube – devoting twenty minutes of his show to attacking my campaign whilst inadvertently confirming it’s working. Armstrong’s statement, he said, was forced on him by his bosses. It doesn’t reflect Armstrong’s actual views, or the channel’s. Wootton also expressed how sorry he feels for Armstrong, comparing his “apology” to a “humiliation ritual” – but to be clear, there hasn’t been an apology. The word “sorry” still hasn’t been said once.
He said that as a criticism of us, seemingly without realising he’d said the quiet part out loud and confirmed the suspicion I had all along, which was that this repentance was simply saving face. To make it even more transparent, Wootton and Leo Kearse – a “right-wing comedian” and GB News regular, apparently – then went on to repeatedly mention the channel’s fear of losing its Ofcom licence.
So when Armstrong turns up beneath an extremist’s video to agree that the gay man campaigning against his homophobic employer is the unhinged one, I’d argue that’s how he truly feels without a producer standing over him. Incidentally, his programme is currently carrying over 11,000 Ofcom complaints, the most for any GB News broadcast in history.
Then there’s Syntyche Djunga (also known as Based and Bougie), who has racked up 3,439 complaints of her own since falsely claiming gay men are “statistically more likely” to abuse their adopted children while on air in June. She shared Pengelly’s video to her 51,000 followers on X, stating that I need to be “checked into an asylum” and that I’m “embarrassing myself online for free.”
Djunga also offered me a full-time role as her “grammar and fact checker lol,” in a sentence with a word missing. Three days earlier, she’d shared that she could “already here Liam Gayondi crashing out” over one of her posts, only fixing it after I’d pointed it out on my Instagram story. Shortly after, she told people that China had “2x atomic bombs” dropped on it, but is now the “3rd most advance City in the World.” I think that says it all.
She also appeared underneath the video itself to accuse me of arguing with myself, and I have to hand it to her – it’s one of the first times Based and Bougie has been truthful. I’ve resorted to arguing with myself because everything this professional debater has sent in my direction has been a slur, one of which she left on a TikTok post of mine after unblocking and re-blocking me specifically to do so, and which the Met Police have since confirmed to me is a reportable offence.
I find it perplexing that Djunga’s entire schtick is that gay people make everything about sex, as she repeatedly states on social media. That seemingly only applies until a homophobic extremist (who happens to be gay) conjures vividly sexual images at my expense, at which point it’s worth boosting to her followers.
This is the same reasonable angle she attempted to take on LBC, when Lewis Goodall – and whoever works on the booking team – made the utterly nonsensical decision to bring her on. Sat across from Goodall and asked to account for calling people at Pride in London “degenerates” in a YouTube video she filmed at the event, she immediately shrank her stance into something more palatable. Suddenly, it wasn’t all gay people – in fact, exactly three people told her paedophilia was “okay” by her account – and some of her closest friends are degener– ah, no, sorry, gay men. A Freudian slip, apparently.
The thumbnail of the video in question, which is still live, reads “attending the degenerate festival.” In a follow-up video – captioned “more degeneracy” – she opens by tricking a gay attendee in his thirties into an interview under false pretences. She not-so-subtly mocks him when he says he knew he was gay from a young age, before once again confronting him with the false claim of “MAPs” being added to the LGBTQ+ umbrella. He audibly rejects the notion and clearly states his wish to leave the conversation, and Djunga lets him – before telling the camera that he is “definitely guilty” of being a paedophile. Sharing this clip to her X account, she said Pride has always been about “normalising degeneracy, perversion and sodomy” and “participating in darkness.”
Based and Bougie may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but she’s clearly smart enough to understand when and where to let her true colours show. This, for the avoidance of doubt, is someone who is booked as a legitimate commentator, given a chair on national radio after racking up thousands of Ofcom complaints, invited onto a licensed news channel, appointed a Youth Ambassador for CPAC UK – an outfit whose organisers and their US Christian-right funding ties were the subject of an incisive Nerve investigation – and, as of last week, sent out to debate on behalf of Turning Point UK, a British offshoot of the organisation founded by Charlie Kirk.
Out of curiosity, I looked up TPUK’s self-published guidelines, which are freely available on their shoddily-built website. They expressly forbid homophobia and any other form of discrimination, and require representatives to conduct themselves in a “friendly and respectful manner.” I’d love to know which clause covers repeated accusations of LGBTQ+ people being paedophiles, the usage of homophobic slurs and the resharing of a video about a gay man’s rectum.
I’d like to return to the video Pengelly made, because the choice of source material is not incidental.
On 25 July, a van was driven into the Christopher Street Day parade in Berlin by a radicalised Islamist extremist, killing one woman and injuring 29. Within hours, many British broadcasters and public figures who had spent the entire summer describing Pride as perversion, degeneracy and a paedophile recruitment drive discovered a deep and sudden solidarity, positioning the event as a cherished western value – just long enough to make it about Muslims as a collective. Nigel Farage’s immediate contribution was to state that the “strange left-wing alliance between Islamists and the LGBT community” cannot last.
I made a video pointing out that we were being used as leverage by people who also despise us, and have made no secret of it. The far-right has a long history of being verbally and physically violent against us, with a mere handful of examples detailed earlier in this article. In 1999 – when I was three years old – a neo-Nazi planted a nail bomb in the Admiral Duncan, a gay pub in Soho, killing three people and injuring 79. Just four years ago, two gay men were shot dead in a targeted attack outside a gay bar in Bratislava.
I should add that this is the same ecosystem that spent days politicising the Preston Davey case to indict gay men and Pride generally, before accusing me of making it about myself for pointing out the homophobia that followed. Those nonsensical rebuttals were very clearly designed to silence us, as are these current attempts to humiliate me into submission by labelling me “obsessed.”
In the last five weeks alone, Syntyche Djunga has posted 21 videos to Instagram attacking gay people, and 25 more to YouTube doing the same. It’s odd, then, that this doesn’t seem to constitute an “obsession” to these people. Incessantly demonising LGBTQ+ people at every given opportunity is simply a job, and objecting to it is a disorder. A gay man sides with his oppressors to joke about me using sex toys and ingesting bodily fluids, and I’m the one who needs sectioning.
Alex Armstrong will find that the right word is “persistent,” because not a single one of these hacks will take any genuine accountability, and have instead been operating on the assumption that nothing will happen. Knowing I have them even the slightest bit rattled only fuels my desire to seek some form of justice.
It’s understandable why these people are acting like they’re untouchable, as Ofcom has predictably issued no decision on any of it. In the meantime, it has declined to investigate a GB News presenter who disputed footage of a burning house during the Belfast riots, which tells you everything about where the bar is currently sitting – as does the fact that Ofcom’s Wikipedia page has a dedicated section for its inaction towards the channel.
Even those who are opposed to GB News do it a favour by parroting the line that it’s licensed as an “entertainment channel,” which isn’t true – but it does suggest to people that complaining is pointless. Ofcom doesn’t hand out licences by genre, the channel is bound to the same rules as every other news broadcaster, and it has somehow won Best News Programme at the TRIC Awards for four years running.
The only thing that will move the needle at this point is continued pressure, and I am beyond thrilled with how far we’ve come. I had a fantastic chat with Bimini for their podcast, in which we discussed this campaign at length. It was written about in the latest issue of Private Eye magazine, which is a genuine honour. The likes of PinkNews and Attitude have covered it consistently, the Good Law Project has taken an interest after their successful campaign against GB News last year and, as mentioned, we’ve broken the record for the amount of complaints levelled against the channel.
All of this has happened in the last six weeks, during which GB News has made their stance clear. Here is a non-exhaustive list of everything they’re seemingly fine with, haven’t apologised for, and have apparently deemed not worth acknowledging:
A segment drawing over 11,000 complaints in which Caroline Farrow says Pride is about “celebrating paedophiles”
A second segment collecting more than 3,000 complaints due to Syntyche Djunga falsely stating gay men are “statistically more likely” to sexually abuse their adopted children
A third segment receiving over 2,000 complaints after Sharron Davies voiced concerns over teachers with “LGBT agendas” grooming children at school, with presenter Nana Akua in agreement
A presenter from the so-called “bastion of free speech” trying to silence me with legal action
A contributor using homophobic slurs, calling innocent people paedophiles, stating she “despises” the LGBTQ+ community and attending Pride events with the sole purpose of using deception to antagonise people
Those same two figures teaming up with a documented anti-LGBTQ+ extremist, with ties to Nazism, to attack a gay man campaigning against homophobia
That’s without mentioning Ben Leo, GB News’ US reporter who recently took to social media to attack transgender people. By his account, his child was telling his younger brother that “girls can become boys” and vice versa. Leo followed this unverified anecdote up with the bold claim that “no child is safe from this demonic crap,” before later confirming that his son was not indoctrinated, but had instead walked past a trans woman in public with no interaction whatsoever.
That didn’t stop Leo from replying to none other than Tristan Tate, the influencer who is in custody in Florida alongside his brother while contesting extradition after even more allegations of rape, sex trafficking and indecent images of minors. Tate told Leo that “attack is the best form of defence” when it comes to transgender people and Leo saluted in response, saying “nothing else matters more than this.”
When Tate was arrested just a couple of days later, Leo covered the story overnight on GB News. Failing to touch upon many of the heinous crimes they’ve been accused of, he instead brushed over the alleged offences in favour of getting onto their main story of the night – diversity initiatives in British police forces. The machine is working in plain sight, and I can’t quite believe how many people are happy to let it do so.
That’s why I’m urging you to keep speaking up. You still have time to make your complaints to Ofcom over Farrow and Davies’ comments – the deadline has passed on Djunga’s, and we’re waiting for a decision. At the time of writing, the regulator’s latest decisions bulletin should arrive tomorrow, which will hopefully detail what they’ve chosen to do (unless they continue to drag their heels, in which case I’ll continue to make noise).
Whilst you’re here, please also sign the Section 28 public inquiry petition. It’s open until 24 September, and we want to reach 100,000 signatures. The lie that law was built upon is the exact same lie being broadcast now, by people who aren’t yet embarrassed enough.
I understand that all of this may feel tedious, but I personally believe all of the actions detailed above to be utterly untenable. The climate we’re living in is such a regression from how far we’d come in recent years, and the hatred is spreading at a velocity people aren’t fully aware of. Homophobia is becoming profitable again, perhaps because they expected us to roll over and take it. For as long as I live, I will never let that happen.
SO glad to see you on substack!
🌈🌻👯♀️❤️