On Wednesday evening, Dan Wootton gave Caroline Farrow over twenty minutes of airtime in a segment about my campaign against GB News. The on-screen caption read: AXED GB NEWS STAR SPEAKS OUT ABOUT WITCH HUNT HORROR.
That witch hunt is me.
My name is Liam Rondi. I’m a British freelance copywriter who moved to the south of France two years ago. Since June, I have been tirelessly and meticulously documenting what GB News broadcasts about gay people. In that time, Ofcom has received almost 20,000 complaints about four of its programmes – a new record for the channel – and has opened two Standards investigations.
Before this year, I had never successfully spearheaded a campaign in my life. I’m not affiliated with any lobbyist groups or organisations. I have no funding, and I’m my own researcher. There is no producer in my ear, no press office to answer to, nor do I have a legal department vetting my output. I haven’t got any shady donors funding my work, the vast majority of which has been done on an iPad at my desk amidst a sustained heatwave, after my laptop packed up in the middle of it all.
In two months, not one broadcaster has asked me a single question. I haven’t been given the opportunity to comment, I haven’t been quoted in any write-ups, nor was I afforded a right of reply to being described on Dan Wootton Outspoken as an angry man with a “terrifying” comment section. The sum total of my platform outside my own accounts is a single podcast episode. The people I’m campaigning against have cumulatively been given hours.
I’ve already spoken extensively about what was said on GB News, and what it cost. I want to talk about something else, which is the method – the moves this crowd employs every single time. I’ve watched them all like a hawk for two months, and they continue to borrow from the same tired playbook. I’m bored of it.
Wootton and Farrow’s interview this week conveniently gave me the ideal framework to showcase said moves, because they ran the complete set.
Denying you said the thing you said
The first and easiest move is to say the thing, and then claim you never actually said it – but ensure the denial is loud enough that anyone quoting you accurately can subsequently be accused of smearing you.
It all began on 20 June, when Syntyche Djunga (also known as Based and Bougie) told her fellow panellists during an episode of The Saturday Five that gay men and gay couples are statistically more prone to “child sexual assault with their adopted children” and “sexual deviancy.”
Two months later, Djunga is yet to produce those statistics. Despite promising on-air that she’d share them online after the broadcast had finished, she hasn’t offered a single study or figure to prove her claim. It isn’t like she hasn’t been asked – repeatedly.
Instead, she has opted for a series of retreats. When given an interview with Lewis Goodall on LBC (a booking I still cannot get my head around), she unsurprisingly downplayed her stance. Addressing her recent YouTube content on Pride, with titles such as “more degeneracy at pride” and “attending the degenerate festival”, suddenly it wasn’t all gay people she was talking about.
That’s the same line Djunga wheeled out in her own interview with Dan Wootton, in which she bemoaned the fact that “if you do criticise degeneracy, apparently you’re talking about all gay men. I’m sick and tired of it.” Guess what – so am I, because these caveats didn’t exist at the time! That defence is available only to someone who didn’t say the sentence she said, which was about gay men and gay couples with no qualifier of any kind. GB News has graciously left the segment up on its YouTube channel, so you’re able to watch for yourself.
The channel tried running the same play at scale. Issuing a public statement in response to the furore surrounding Farrow’s comments, they insisted that her remarks were “robustly and repeatedly challenged by two other contributors.” Unfortunately, that clip was taken down by GB News at the same time, so I can’t ask you to endure it. Instead, you’ll have to take my word. I found the original broadcast on the channel’s website, in which those challenges to Farrow’s remarks were neither repeated nor robust. That may explain why an investigation was opened.
Wootton opened his interview with Farrow this week by playing the original clip to his audience. Everyone watching would have heard her say that Pride is “not about gay rights,” but is about celebrating “bizarre and unhealthy kinks, including furries and bestiality and even minor-attracted… they call themselves minor-attracted people – you know, paedophiles.”
Minutes later, she told him she completely stands by what she said, and that it had been “infuriating” to see it misrepresented, “because I was very clear that it wasn’t all gay people.” She then restated her original comments, before following it up with: “Not once did I equate anybody with being a paedophile.”
Unlike Farrow, I’m not going to pretend you’re all stupid. Anyone with sense understands the connotations behind her claim, directly drawing from the longest-running homophobic trope in the book. Considering her track record as a staunch Catholic activist, I’m willing to bet she understands, too.
Free speech and the threat of litigation
The second move is unconditionally embracing free speech, especially when it pertains to racism or transphobia, right up until somebody decides to exercise it in your direction.
In July, Alex Armstrong – one of GB News’ most prominent faces, with a namesake show airing every weekend – replied to an Instagram comment of mine to tell me I’d be hearing from his lawyer if I carried on. He then followed that threat up in my direct messages, offering me two final warnings, which was kind of him. The cherry on top was his warning that he’d be putting a repost from my Instagram Story on air to the nation that evening.
Of course, nothing actually happened. I haven’t received any legal correspondence, nor have I heard from a solicitor. Armstrong also didn’t broadcast my Story to his rabid viewers. What did happen a mere two days later, once the complaints had stacked up and the pressure became too intense, was Armstrong disowning the segment live on air. The threat came first and his conscience soon followed, and allegedly only because his bosses forced him.
That warning of being put on air to the nation turned out not to be a one-off, either – and in hindsight, I was lucky. A few days later, Armstrong announced a primetime segment putting Kate Osborne, a gay Labour MP, in the spotlight after she dared to say the channel vilifies LGBTQ+ people. It’s the exact same intimidatory move, and in this instance, he actually went through with it.
Meanwhile, I left a single comment under one of GB News’ posts on TikTok, asking why Armstrong and Djunga had aligned themselves with a member of an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group in order to attack me personally. TikTok gave me an account strike – my first ever. My appeal was also denied.
And on Wednesday, Farrow reached for free speech as a defence, whilst also claiming she didn’t actually say what she said. So the remark was never made, but it also would have been fine. They are convenient excuses, not valid arguments.
But the thing I keep returning to from that interview is the fear she described. In a separate video she shared to X, which was then replayed in part by Dan Wootton, she told of how she drove home from a recent holiday with a pit of anxiety in her stomach, frightened of what might be waiting at home – a calling card from an activist, a letter from the police, a vandalised home, a lawsuit.
Nothing was waiting, and no litigation exists. Nobody has filed a lawsuit against Farrow, nor has anyone threatened to. In two months of documenting this, I haven’t seen anyone suggest that anyone should. It is something she conjured up and retold on television, and was subsequently handed a caption reading WITCH HUNT HORROR for.
I don’t have to imagine legal threats, because a leading face of the channel funded by a Dubai investment firm and a right-wing multi-millionaire wheeled them out against me. As I mentioned earlier, I am a regular citizen with no legal cover of any kind, and a presenter with a weekly television programme decided that the appropriate response to criticism was to invoke solicitors at me. A mere two days later, he was on that very programme disowning the segment. How utterly disingenuous.
Cutting me out of the story
The third move is one I find very revealing, because it’s one that actually requires discipline – in two months, none of these people have said my name. Not correctly, anyway.
Farrow has never uttered it, despite posting and talking about me. Djunga has written entire threads about me being in need of an “asylum”, labelling me a “deranged stalker” and, in a bewildering show of hypocrisy, a “racist” because I said publicly that I hate her – without ever writing my name alongside it. She came close when LBL (London by Londoners), the right-wing activist group she’s a part of, mocked my campaign and she called me “Liam Gayondi” in response – I cackled at that one, to her credit.
The Family Education Trust described all of this as the work of “the drag queen leading the campaign.” The Free Speech Union, the Toby Young-fronted institution currently facing questions over its dodgy spending and links to the MAGA movement, targeted Good Law Project’s Jolyon Maugham in their coverage. Most of the press has credited either Bimini or Zack Polanski, both of whom have helped undeniably in amplifying the campaign – especially Bimini, who worked on the complaints generator and has loudly supported me throughout – but neither of whom started or spearheaded it all. I have to stress that I don’t say that out of bitterness, but out of anger that they’re being unfairly targeted.
Nevertheless, Dan Wootton attributed the entire campaign to Bimini whilst repeatedly misgendering them, before Farrow eventually got to me:
“Yeah, and there’s some other guy who’s really, really… who… he keeps tagging me on Instagram and TikTok and I’m not a big contributor there – I’m actually locked – and, you know, he gets really, really angry and says I’m gaslighting people, and… (laughs) and, and, and, and on his feed I’ve read some terrifying comments about what people want to happen to me and what they think of me.”
Two hours after that broadcast she was back on X, posting a timeline of her idyllic evening – the interview, the gym, cooking dinner, family time, and a partridge in a pear tree – before referencing a post I’d made after her Wootton appearance, getting the timing of said post correct down to the minute. You can’t be too disengaged to answer me but engaged enough to audit my comments and clock my upload times. It’s one or the other!
There are a few clear reasons for the omission, and it isn’t fear of defaming me. Firstly, saying my name would direct people to the extensive campaign I’ve been running, exposing the heinous behaviour of everyone involved and stopping their “woe is me” tour dead in its tracks. Secondly, I don’t have an X account and I refuse to make one, because wading into the lion’s den would be unproductive – but it means they get to control the narrative in front of tens of thousands of followers blindly taking them at their word.
The third and most glaring reason is that I’m not a convenient enemy for these people. “Some other guy” means nothing, because “some other guy” isn’t a figure people will recognise and attack on command, but a prominent, outspoken drag queen and a barrister are. The second these people are positioned as the orchestrators of a “leftist hate campaign” as it has been labelled, it can instantly be dismissed as something nefarious. These sly bastards can’t afford the big, scary mastermind behind it all to be me.
Playing the victim
The fourth move is to default to playing the victim of the thing you’re doing.
In Caroline Farrow’s aforementioned monologue she posted to X a few days ago, she referenced Katie Hopkins as a source of inspiration and said if you put yourself out there, you have to take the rough with the smooth. She repeated that sentiment on Wednesday, whilst also bemoaning the fact she’s the subject of an “orchestrated campaign” and suggesting the complaints aren’t valid as a result. She has also set her endurance of the past month against the persecution and crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
As if all of that didn’t sound bizarre enough, it gets weirder – Farrow is the manager of global campaigns for CitizenGO, an ultra-conservative lobbyist group with an extensive history of orchestrated campaigning against everything from abortion to same-sex marriage. She recently appeared in court as part of her campaign against puberty blockers. As I’ve said many times over the past few weeks, it’s rules for thee, not for me!
Syntyche Djunga, on the other hand, recently told her followers she doesn’t believe in the concept of cyberbullying because you can simply turn your device off, and anyone falling victim to it is choosing to. She posted that while also calling out the supposed “racist deranged stalker” that “hates” her.
GB News’ version is eerily similar to Farrow’s, in that the Ofcom investigations are the product of an “orchestrated campaign” against them. Almost 20,000 people followed a statutory process that the channel willingly signed up to when obtaining its licence, after nine previous breaches of the Broadcasting Code. Ironically, one of those breaches was over – you guessed it – an orchestrated campaign. If GB News doesn’t like people mobilising to combat their bigotry, they could stop airing it – or forfeit their licence and make life easier for everyone.
All of this has culminated in the campaign being labelled a “witch hunt horror” from “bloodthirsty leftists”, so here is a full inventory of what has happened to Farrow and Djunga in the past eight weeks: they weren’t rebooked by a channel that allegedly doesn’t pay them anyway. That’s the horror.
For comparison, here is a partial inventory of what has happened to me. Djunga left a homophobic slur under one of my videos, unblocking me specifically to do so – the Met told me it was reportable, but that I’d have to file through my local police force in Montpellier for transfer to the UK. I have been called angry, deranged, racist and a “stalker”. A video was made about me by a member of an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group with documented ties to neo-Nazis, before being shared approvingly by Djunga and Alex Armstrong, both of whom were in the comment section where multiple slurs and accusations of paedophilia were left standing. I got a platform strike for asking a question about it, and I got legal threats for drawing attention to it all. I also had to delete my Facebook account because of the volume of people calling me a nonce and threatening physical violence.
But sure, Mrs Farrow – the most terrifying thing is my content. I fear these people need to get a grip.
Throwing stones in glass houses
The fifth move arguably gives the entire game away.
When they need to indict an entire community, one individual will do. In Caroline Farrow’s case, she repeatedly reaches for Stephen Ireland, a Pride organiser who is now rightly serving thirty years. This week, Dan Wootton reached for Perez Hilton as proof that there’s a legitimate debate to be had… about Pride. Syntyche Djunga’s contribution was to attend Pride in disguise, posing as a gay journalist called Grace (an ironic name choice, if you ask me) in order to ask attendees about paedophilia – and when those attendees declined to talk or opposed the idea, she accused them anyway.
None of this actually touched the claims in question, which are that Pride celebrates paedophilia and bestiality instead of gay rights, and that gay parents are statistically more likely to abuse their kids. A convicted man proved a convicted man, and not much else. If this reasoning were sound, no institution on this planet would survive it – considering both Farrow and Djunga are devoutly religious, they’re welcome to step up to the plate.
Watch what happens when the individual is one of theirs, though. Take Rod Liddle, who passed away on 2 August. An outpouring of sincere, emotional tributes came from across GB News and its wider circle, among them Patrick Christys, Darren Grimes, Andrew Doyle and Caroline Farrow.
Liddle wrote a Spectator column in 2012 in which he said he couldn’t be a teacher as he “could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids.” He wrote a 2003 Guardian column questioning whether viewing indecent images of children should be a crime at all. He accepted a police caution in 2005 for common assault against his partner, who was pregnant at the time.
The people currently indicting every gay man in Britain on the strength of one criminal spent a week eulogising another one. If their “protect the children” rhetoric were sincere, it would apply to the man with the published record. The absolute hypocrisy is on full display – they pick up their outrage when it’s pointed at us but set it down once the tables have turned.
That same test explains the alliances. Ben Leo, GB News’ US reporter, has built a public identity on protecting kids and being a doting father, but was teaming up with Tristan Tate last month to wage war on transgender people. Just this week, Farrow found sympathy for Nathan Cofnas, the academic who kickstarted the furore against Jason Arday and was suspended over his writing on race. Some have called him a white supremacist.
Wootton, a gay man, told his audience he doesn’t associate with the LGBT movement and finds Pride “totally degenerate and disgusting.” I personally find sexual deception using false names degenerate and disgusting, but to each their own.
Making everything about trans people
The sixth and final move I want to talk about is a reflex that happens all too often when it comes to anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry.
In August, Kate Barker-Mawjee – the chief executive of the anti-transgender charity LGB Alliance – publicly praised GB News for “championing the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals”, and characterised the segments in question as “calling out the homophobia of the straight TQ+ movement.” Their co-founder, Malcolm Clark, posted that he was in “total agreement” with Farrow, claiming that Pride is, in his words, “nonce-adjacent. At best.”
Yes, you read that correctly. A registered charity for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals looked at those segments linking gay men to paedophilia and sided with the broadcaster.
Reading the replies to these posts was enlightening, to say the least. Just to really hammer it home, this campaign concerns two claims, neither of which mention transgender people. Regardless, the entire thread was about them within hours. Not one of the people arriving to defend the broadcasts engaged with what was actually said. They didn’t need to know what it was. A campaign exists, which must mean activists exist, and those activists must be trans.
I sent that organisation an open letter with four questions and three requests. It’s been well over a week and I’ve accumulated over 550 signatures at the time of writing, with the letter being addressed to the chief executive and the charity’s trustees. I also filed a lengthy report with the Charity Commission, because the alternative is arguing with strangers on the internet, which is clearly the arena they feel most comfortable in. I’m putting it on the record now that I haven’t had a response to any of it.
Caroline Farrow is correct – I am really angry, and I’ve said as much. I’ve been petty at times and made cheap jokes that perhaps I’d cut if I were writing them again, but I have to inject some levity somewhere.
But throughout these two months, I haven’t said a single thing about one person that I couldn’t put solid evidence against. That has been the one pivotal rule I’ve stuck to since June. When most of the press reported that GB News and Alex Armstrong had apologised, for example, I spent days arguing publicly that they hadn’t – but it didn’t matter, because my voice is smaller than theirs.
Nearly 20,000 people filed complaints. The anger is collective, and Bimini’s reach and work put this in front of people I could never have reached alone. What I did was get up every single day for eight weeks, watch the tape, transcribe it by hand, check the claims and mobilise people in a way I’d never done before. Nobody else did that, and I’ve earned the right to say it at least once.
It doesn’t change the fact that the people who said it have the reach I don’t. Farrow was given twenty-four minutes to grovel to a clueless audience this week. Djunga has had LBC, Wootton, Talking Point, CPAC, Mike Graham and a great deal of YouTube. Armstrong has his own programme on national television.
I’m not saying that I’m owed a booking by default, but it’s a pattern I can’t help but notice. I hear a lot of chatter about the British press in particular being predominantly left-wing, and about how right-wing public figures and commentators are always being silenced or cancelled, yet it seems incredibly easy for them to blag their way to a national audience. I haven’t been given a single opportunity – and I’d confidently argue there’s a story here, but nobody seems willing to touch it. I wonder why.
I am not just “some guy”. My name is Liam Rondi, the TikToker whose sustained campaign led to two contributors allegedly losing their GB News gigs and two investigations being opened. You’ll know it soon enough, because I can assure you I’m not going anywhere. In fact, I’m just getting started.