Helen from Wales Vs. The BBC

A Very Typical BBC Self-Own

Glastonbury ended up being surprisingly relevant this year thanks to the folks over at the BBC not understanding how the Streisand effect works. During the livestream for the Belfast-based rap group Kneecap, the broadcaster cut away right as the group was leading the crowd through chants of “Free Palestine” and “fuck Keir Starmer,” the latter a reference to the UK’s prime minister telling British media earlier this month that the group wasn’t “appropriate” for the festival.

The BBC editors were less quick on the trigger for other acts, however, and accidentally aired rap group Bob Vylan leading a crowd chant of, “Death, death to the IDF.” Very typical BBC self-own.

“We have edited it to ensure the content falls within the limits of artistic expression in line with our editorial guidelines,” a spokesperson for the BBC told The Independent. “As we have said before, acts are booked by the festival, and the BBC doesn’t ban artists. We didn't stream Kneecap live.” And an edited version of Kneecap’s set is currently up on the BBC’s iPlayer.

Bob Vylan’s set, however, is not on iPlayer. The group has been dropped by United Talent Agency and had their US visas pulled. And, according to the, uh, BBC, Glastonbury’s organizers were “appalled” by the crowd chants during Bob Vylan’s performance. Starmer and a whole bunch of UK politicians have called both Kneecap’s and Bob Vylan’s sets “hate speech.” Chris Philp, the UK’s shadow home secretary, posted on X that Bob Vylan was inciting violence and that the BBC broke the law by airing it. Tough talk from a guy who has the word “shadow” in his title like he’s some kind of Yu-Gi-Oh! card.

Anyways, the true hero of Glastonbury was “Helen from Wales,” a woman named Helen Wilson from Swansea, who held her phone up in the crowd for over an hour to livestream Kneecap after the BBC cut the feed. She told The Irish News that she kept streaming even as her phone started overheating and literally burning her fingers, to fight against the BBC’s “deliberate act of silence.” Her stream got over a million likes and Kneecap have offered her free tickets to their shows. There’s also fan art.

Sen. Ted Cruz, who is very smart and self-aware, shared a video of Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury set, writing, “This is the base of the Democrat Party.” After he was made aware that Glastonbury is in the UK and, thus, most likely did not have a lot of registered Democrats in the audience, he wrote, “Lots of comments saying this is in England. True.” Great stuff as always, Ted. Thank you.

If you’re looking for context for the BBC’s stance on the conflict in Israel and Palestine, it’s pretty similar to how The New York Times here in the US is criticized for being pro-Israel, with the added dimension that the BBC is tax-payer funded and the UK doesn’t have the first amendment. Kneecap member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh was charged with promoting terrorism, after UK Met Police investigated videos of Kneecap chanting "up Hamas, up Hezbollah" on stage in 2024. So it’s not exactly far-fetched to say that there’s a legally-enforced government line on the conflict being parroted back by the media. And the UK press has gone full attack mode on Kneecap, Bob Vylan, and even poor Helen.

Outlets like The Daily Mail and The Sun are flooding the web with outraged articles about Glastonbury, demanding Kneecap and Bob Vylan be arrested, and a bunch of right-wing influencers associated with outlets like GB News are calling Helen a race traitor. What is not being reflected in a lot of the media reports from this weekend, however, is how these incidents were not just rappers criticizing Israel on stage, but huge crowds, at what is easily the most mainstream music festival in the UK, possibly even the world, chanting along with them.

“Whatever you make of this and wherever it may be going, I think we have to agree on one simple fact: the toothpaste is fully out of the tube here,” X user @flying_rodent wrote. And, as Chapo Trap House’s Felix Biederman wrote, “There is no partisan or cultural counterweight for hundreds of millions of people seeing thousands of the worst images they’ve ever seen, and then hearing almost every prominent figure in Western politics say ‘this is fake, and I love it.’”

In other words, sentiment has shifted. And, in this case, the mainstream media is literally refusing to document it. And of course that’s not working because we all have phones now. Phones through which to view the conflict in Palestine and phones through which to view the protests against it that are very clearly gaining steam around the world.

Interestingly enough, there was one British journalist brave enough to enter The Glastonbury Revolutionary Autonomous Zone and report on what he saw: Adrian Chiles, the long-memed, delightfully mundane Guardian columnist, famous for bangers such as, “A Guinness shandy? The request that stunned my favourite pub into silence” and “Who could deny a hot, tired delivery driver the fruit from their cherry tree?” Chiles attended the festival for the first time this year and wrote a bit about the Kneecap drama. “Word reached me of fire and brimstone elsewhere ahead of the Kneecap gig,” he wrote. “It came across like news from a distant planet where they did things differently. I neither saw, heard nor felt anything along those lines anywhere I ventured all weekend.”

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Your Life Story Shouldn’t Be on ChatGPT

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Feet Loaf

The Key To Understanding Zohran’s Campaign

As New York City descends into chaos following Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic primary victory last week, there have been a lot of attempts to understand exactly What Happened. Was it Brooklyn’s “Commie Corridor” that sealed the deal? Was it Mamdani’s media expertise, deployed both on mainstream channels like CNN and in random internet videos? Or was it simply because Andrew Cuomo is a weird creep and that current New York City Mayor Eric Adams is even weirder. Well, what if it’s even simpler than that?

Mamdani released a video last year right after the election where he went to the New York City neighborhoods that supported President Donald Trump the most. And it’s a fascinating watch because the majority of what Trump supporters said they wanted from Trump are almost verbatim what Mamdani ran on: Lower prices on food and gas, cheaper rent, and an end to the conflict in Gaza.

Now, of course, Trump is a liar and nothing he’s done over the last six months has made life easier for anyone, let alone working class Americans, especially the immigrants in the neighborhoods that Mamdani visited, but Trump’s promise to do something about those issues clearly resonated with people. And it’s, frankly, shocking that it took a leftist candidate this long to capitalize on those false promises. Definitely seems like a better strategy than whatever the heck Project 2029 is.

Is Peter Thiel The Antichrist?

Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel recently went on The New York Times’ Interesting Times with Ross Douthat and had some serious issues answering basic questions, such as, “do you like democracy,” “do you think humanity should continue,” and “are you the Antichrist?”

Or, as one very unwell X user wrote, “Peter Thiel is a six sigma intellect with the capacity to forecast complex systems five years out. But he just gets instantly oneshotted the second he's put in front of a camera and tries to cultivate popular sympathy.” To which another X user replied, “Why do you people talk like that?”

I can’t actually recommend watching Thiel’s entire interview, but this clip where Thiel seems to realize in real-time that he’s basically the devil is kind of fun.

The Actual Way To Spot AI Content

Anti-AI paranoia is surging right now, and for good reason. AI-generated content has, clearly, flooded the web and it’s starting to get good enough that people aren’t noticing or, perhaps more realistically, don’t care.

Case in point: a psychedelic “rock” band that’s currently trending on Spotify called The Velvet Sundown that is entirely AI-generated and pulling in millions of listens on the platform. And it doesn’t seem like Spotify users care all that much. Which means we’re likely not far off from an AI-generated hit song. The interesting question is how an AI act would tour. Would it be a human cover band of the AI music? A purely digital version similar to something like Hatsune Miku? A Gorillaz-like hybrid? We’ll probably find out soon.

All of this had led to attempts to keep up with tells that what you’re looking at or listening to is from an AI. When it comes to music, I found one way that seems to still help a bit. AI doesn’t seem to understand how bass parts work. A typical bass line in most music repeats to create a groove, AI basslines tend to meander and never repeat.

As for AI text, a lot of people are really convinced that em dashes, or the long dash (—), are a sign that an AI wrote it. Which is annoying because Garbage Day uses em dashes lol. It’s likely that AI text uses them because models like ChatGPT illegally ingested a ton of journalism, where em dashes are fairly standard.

Thankfully, X user @linkofsunshine found a better tell. The current iteration of ChatGPT has a bunch of rhetorical quirks it can’t seem to shake. The most prominent is “…isn’t just x — it’s y.” Which does use an em dash, but the sentence construction is way more common for ChatGPT. It seems like Rep. Laura Friedman is a big fan.

Was Gen Z Radicalized By Lead Poisoning?

One of the great mysteries of our current moment is “what the hell is wrong with Gen Z?” They voted in huge numbers for Trump, they create and share a lot of weirdly conservative content on social media, and they seem pathologically obsessed with status and money. Do you know how hard it is to make millennials look subversive?

Well, here’s a possible explanation: According to a new study from UC Davis, disposable vapes have lead levels so high that one of the study’s authors thought their measuring instruments were broken.

Why does this seem to explain Gen Z conservatism? Well, lead exposure is often pointed to as an explanation for why Gen X is, uh, so Gen X-y. It, also, might explain why we had so many serial killers in the 1970s.

(I, apparently, as a kid, spent a fair amount of time eating lead paint. But I turned out fine, I think.)

A Good Post

Some Stray Links

• “Natasha Lyonne’s big AI problem”

• “People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into ‘ChatGPT Psychosis’”

• “AI-created videos are quietly taking over YouTube” (We wrote this one!)

P.S. here’s a good Tumblr post.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***