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Nigel Farage has spent the past five years upending politics, breaking the two-party hold on parliament, and apparently sending several Cameo videos a day to his paying customers, charging £374,893 overall. But the Reform UK leader’s side hustle isn’t separate from his political work: posting is politics now, which is why Farage loves to brag that he runs laps around other MPs on TikTok.
Cameos are personalised messages, but they are not private – punters get a shareable link so they can post their anniversary wishes and birthday messages on social media. When Farage sent videos to a neo-Nazi group that used the videos for publicity, or described Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in language typically found in Pornhub categories, he was indeed making public statements. The defence from Farage’s team is that he can’t be held responsible for what people do with the messages he sends them, which is perhaps why most politicians don’t send personal endorsements to random people over the internet for money. His spokesperson said that Farage’s Cameo videos “should not be treated as political statements or campaign activity”.
The videos give us a glimpse into how Farage speaks to his supporters away from television studios and radio spots. He is adept at tapping into online meme culture. In several videos, Farage shouts out “Big Chungus”, a meme that references an image of Bugs Bunny gaining weight to mock Elmer Fudd. It is a nonsense meme, but the extreme right on spaces such as 4chan likes to attach “Big Chungus” to real (and sometimes extreme) political phrases or slogans. When Farage sings to a fan “Rule Big Chungus, Big Chungus rules the waves”, he is participating in that culture. Farage has defended controversial Cameos by claiming ignorance – and meme culture does tend to be obscure – but ignorance doesn’t explain why Farage posted his own TikTok video teasing an announcement about whether he was himself “Big Chungus”.
Of course, Looney Tunes references are silly, but other references are less innocent. In a video he sent only last summer, Farage told a supporter that “Ngubu” sends his regards. “Ngubu” is an online racial slur used as a generic surname for stereotypical African footballers. There is even an Ngubu memecoin with an avatar that makes its racism unmistakable. Perhaps Farage was unaware of how fond online extremists are of reinventing the N-word, but in the same video sending regards from “Ngubu”, Farage repeated the slogan “Up the Rhodesia”. This is a play on the online appropriation of “Up the Ra” – a phrase Farage has previously got into trouble for using in a Cameo – which has been stripped of its Irish republicanism and turned into an all-purpose edgy catchphrase in comment sections across TikTok.
But the Rhodesia reference makes this more than just another bit of online brain rot: Rhodesia has been a white-nationalist reference point for 60 years. In the 1960s and 1970s, in magazines such as Soldier of Fortune, white-power activists imagined Rhodesia as a noble but ill-fated white ethnostate that might one day be restored. Vietnam vets active in the white-power movement even travelled to Rhodesia as mercenaries, seeking to become martyrs in the struggle for white rule. Today, the Rhodesian brushstroke, the camouflage pattern of the Rhodesian Security Forces’ uniform, is popular among rightwing militias such as the Boogaloo Bois. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015, published his white-supremacist manifesto under the title The Last Rhodesian.
If we put these Cameos in the context of Farage’s alleged personal history of racist bullying, Reform’s proposals to end indefinite leave to remain for hundreds of thousands of immigrants settled legally in the country, and the party’s promise (or threat) to create a British version of ICE – an agency currently waging war on American streets – then what might seem like a few innocuous one-liners from the depths of the internet start to cohere into a worldview.
That Farage plays with memes should not distract us from his seriousness of purpose. He masterfully taps into the energy of digital culture to fuel his popularity. If we want a preview of what a Reform government might bring, we can turn to the US, where shitposting, AI slop and brain rot are the aesthetic of an authoritarian regime wreaking havoc at home and abroad.
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Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London
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