London Has Fallen (E356)

Like a lot of right wing media crazes, this is basically a larp. You get to inject meaning into your pointless life by pretending you're reporting on some sort of DMZ walking around Brixton. When I was young I used to pretend there were snipers watching from upstairs windows that I had to dodge on my way to school, this isn't much different.

A problem with my payment method prevented access to QAA for a while. I’d forgotten how excellent this podcast is. I’m a former Londoner who lived in Whitechapel for over a year. Yes it’s poor and untidy. But the Bangladeshis I met were great. And my local corner shop made me realise that smosas are epic snacks and not the dry cleggy nonsense you get in supermarkets. Brixton has always been part of my life as a South Londoner. Again, so many fun nights at The Fridge or Mass at St Luke’s or on Coldharbour Lane (is the Dogstar still going?) I rage at the bs of these grifting YouTubers and how they misportray my home town. Keep up the amazing work! Love you!

Take us back to the Whitechapel of yesteryear…when Jack the Ripper roamed the streets

I’d be so interested to learn more about ‘auditing’ in the UK and if it’s a British phenomenon? These auditors are a really stessful presence in Leeds where I live, they claim to be ‘documenting’ anything they consider to be anti-British and have been turning up at the asylum seeker hotels recognised as press by the police even tho they are just guys with phones

Strange turn around. One week you're calling Cubans who don5 support the regime gusanos, the next you're claiming people are spebding 20 years in jail for selling cigars.

Was that first guy doing the video South African? his accent sounded a little bit like he might be. I currently live on the outskirts of London and I teach in a state school. Earlier this year we had an incident where colleagues of mine multiple colleagues posted racist and incendiary unsubstantiated news reports in our work chat. I have heard children using racist language who are white British against children who are not. Today when I tried to do a Holocaust remembrance Day activity the children refused to cooperate and talked over it while the video was describing Auschwitz. I'm looking at moving.

I’d walk up to you guys and say hi if I knew what any of you look like lol.

The part where he complains about the buildings being ugly shows he's a privileged suburbanite. Anything resembling a livable, walkable urban space disgusts him. His idea of a good neighborhood is a cul-de-sac. Suburbanites are sub-human.

It’s a dead giveaway that these YTers assume that “English” culture is necessarily going to be cleaner or less violent than what they imagine what they’re presenting to us is. Whitechapel is where the Jack the Ripper murders were committed, and was for a very long time a poverty-stricken area in which the likes of the Kray twins operated. Do YTers and their audience think that everything English is like Downton Abbey? If so, guess whom you almost never see on that show . . . .

I actually know a Londoner who listens to this rubbish, bizarre.

I remember seeing similar videos (a few years ago) about San Francisco. It was all bullshit. 😒

Losing my mind as an American listening to people trying to take down various parts of the UK. It’s literally fantasy island compared to what we’ve got going in the states 🙄

Imagine going from a place that’s filled with guns (US) to a place where literally the cops don’t carry guns - let’s get serious

the streamer from the beginning needs to be put in a medieval torture device for the rest of his miserable life

The older passages about whitechapel are indistinguishable from hp Lovecraft

Sucks this is even happening, but glad y'all exist so at least I'm not surprised when WWIII starts... (ijs)

Let me see... Oppression is when you go to London and you see minorities? Jesus Christ we need to purge these softies from the planet

Its crazy Travis gets a word in edge wise on this episode. Oh wait, Julian wasn't on. Never mind

I like Karl rock. He’s not an attention seeker like say ‘the modern singhs’. That’s cultural appropriation rubbish at its worst

My husband and I were in London a couple years ago. The thing we were most excited about was the diversity and amazing international food options. WTF is wrong with people? Also, humans have been migrating for hundreds of thousands of years. Our stupid idea of borders and passports has also got our minds twisted.

What a great episode! Thanks boys and Annie! What is Mr. Kelly’s podcast named?

I wish I was an affluent dip shit who can throw thousands of dollars at an overseas trip just to piss and moan about everything around you. What a miserable fucking existence. Also, really funny hearing that moron complain about the lack of “English culture”. Ya, losing a lot by not having dog shit food and people with fucked up teeth on the street. Jokes aside, you can walk into any museum in London and it’s going to showcase the history of Great Britain. These people are obviously rage baiting idiots and I don’t get how people buy into this shit. I guess Jake does have a point that it’s probably a bunch of angry losers who’ll never travel these places and would rather gawk at strangers and get upset the second they see a brown person in a western country.

Jake is the heart of the pod. Love ya!

Regarding 'audirors',I know more about weirdos than my fav weirdo knowers. Giant L, need to get life together

None of this is what auditing is. You guys should look into that. It's not dis similar, but this isn't what that is. This is just a garden variety, rage meat

If Julian was on this episode they would’ve had to bleep him out every time he talked

Love, love, love and Annie episode. Always so smart and well-developed.

Hello from Poland. There is other side of this content. Travel vloggers traveling to the nicest parts of Warsaw Gdańsk or Cracow and showing how nice and safe it is (meaning that most of people there are white). I want them at least to be honest. So when they are showing bad parts of Paris, London etc. show also Brzeska street in Warsaw.

when i lived in london the only people who ever made me feel sad or unsafe were white english men shouting things after me. i never felt unsafe walking around the areas these people mention. beigel shop on brick lane! i still miss it, there are no bagels like that where i live now.

UK more like zed K. 😉

This episode was so frustrating to listen too, these YouTubers are the scum of the earth, intentionally disingenuous and outwardly racist. Really pissed me off.

My dad was recently telling me a story that started with “back when I was in London in February” and I assumed he meant when he was in the navy in the 80’s, but I (jokingly) asked “you don’t mean this past February right?” And his immediate response was “Hell no I didn’t go to London. I don’t speak Arabic.” 😑

The main problem with these creators is this. How the hell do they know these people aren't English citizens? They're basing this purely on skin colour. Which is the definition of racism.

inspired reading, Jake 💯

“Auditing” is a slightly different genre, with the intent is mostly to provoke a police response, either to scold annoyed bystanders about privacy laws, or to potentially have the filmer arrested so they can fundraise or suit the Municipality

A good way to counter this is to go to all shitty impoverished villages around the country (UK and US) that are full of white people and gawk and be like "this isnt how US/UK should look" and maybe if nothing else it can channel the outrage into productive policy (unlikely)

I'm going to go and film a video in Bicester Village where I look as scared as possible and keep muttering that the Chinese are invading the UK

If most opinion leaders had Annie’s empathy, calmness and deep curiosity, our media landscape would be a paradise. Thanks a lot Annie for being such a positive example

So embarrassing to hear those Irish accents amongst the right wing YouTube clowns 🤡

I lived in Whitechapel for several years - my flat was across the street from the East London Mosque. I have pictures of the EDL coming to riot and start shit at the mosque. My local back then, Indo, was downstairs from me and directly across the street from the mosque. Everyone got along. The only time it looked bad was when the far right made it look bad. We wandered around Brick Lane in early January and it's so gentrified compared to when we lived there 15 years ago. These narratives are so wild.

Think you guys were a little too easy on the guy that's denying the statistics on crime or whatever. Denying expertise or figures that arrive at inconvenient truths is like one the main themes of the far right. Why bother arguing with hard numbers if you can just deny they even exist? What do experts even know?

It reminds me of when my dad sees a story on Fox about violence in Chicago and texts me to see if I'm OK. It's always, "was the riot near you?" or "was the shooting near your work?" What riot? What shooting? What the fuck? More often than not the "riot" is a bunch of teens menacing tourists or kids popping off in the loop at 4AM on a Saturday.

fuck nuts, it's white supremacists conflict journalism.

The problem with this episode is that theses youtubers are sooo incredibly boring and repetitive. Important topic though. Good to hear from Annie again

Can't wait for the next Jake's Takes: Top Ten Flavors.

I got really excited when Annie mentioned auditors/auditing. That whole video genre overlaps nicely with sovcit and qanon. It would make a great episode topic

If we ever needed a Julian bleep rant it was for these guys.

Im reminded of Jacob gellars statement on signs of end times of like "you have had decades of proof that this very premise is wrong it's like intentionally choosing to become a loser"

Great ep! Just wanted to pushback on the example you used to show the harm of Kurt’s videos though. The claim that the minor crimes he filmed in Cuba resulted in 20 year sentences for the subjects is pure sensationalist fiction. Cuba reserves such severe sentences for violent crimes and coup plotters. I know you guys put in a lot of effort to support your claims in every aspect of your writing, so it was disappointing to hear you guys reinforce and spread this rumor that, to be a bit blunt, strained credulity even before looking into it.

Brilliant episode, an evisceration of these scared racists was long overdue.

My list of people who need to delete their save file in the videogame is getting so long these days. The historical perspective was interesting but think how all those books and articles had to get written, printed, and distributed and then people had to buy and read them. One of these guys can pour so much gasoline on the fire with zero effort or friction. I do at least appreciate the perspective of laughing at how dumb these takes are but damn, still. It also makes one very conscious about the thickness of the line between these guys vs the Channel 5 style street doc.

Being scared while walking around the UK is honestly a skill issue. I got married in 2022 and, for our honeymoon, we went to the UK and rode the trains around to different cool places. While we were in London we took a trip over to Harrod's to gawk at the rich people stuff in there. In and out of the store there were a lot of tourists from all over the place, including some extremely fancy looking middle eastern people who had a little entourage with them. The only exchange my husband and I had over that was "damn, I wonder if they're related to a crown prince or if they're just fancy." Went to Birmingham to get drinks with some of my husband's old coworkers from a contract job he did over there. I learned that Birmingham has a big Pakistani population from my husband's coworker, and he gave us some recommendations on where to get the best halal food. It was really cool! we then walked around the town a bit, and visited the library to look at the cool shakespeare room and to get a good view of the canals. I only learned after we got home that people consider Birmingham to be "bad and scary," when the only bad and scary thing I witnessed was the traffic. Being scared of a city or a neighborhood because it's racially diverse is like being scared of your bedsheets because you read that they have a pretty high thread count

I don't usually get so mad about the subject of an episode that I have to turn it off and walk away but this one did it. Thank you for your service, Annie 🫡

Bracing for the backlash… I don’t enjoy Annie’s habitual “mmmm” when others are talking.

Oi, clean shirt.

can we talk about how the racist right has embraced being triggered as their whole personality?

Personally I am very afraid to go visit London. What if a British person tries to talk to me or robs me of my spices???

Always love an Annie episode, but as a Londoner, this might be my very favourite! Jake reading the Victorian Whitechapel writing had me cackling - loved everything about this one.

Glad you covered this! I watch small brained American, which I don't get these vibes from. But immediately after I started, I got Kurt recs and several other American youtubers doing the same kind content in the states. I won't watch people walk around scared and complaining.

My wife and I went to Europe for the first time last fall. Our trip included a few days in London. When we got back literally the only thing my family from rural Michigan wanted to know about was how many Muslims and Indian people there were. Apparently this stuff about London being taken over has spread to Facebook shorts or whatever since that’s all my folks watch. Which is funny to me bc as a person who lives in Chicago I have no idea what it’s like to have the city you live in be vilified and portrayed as a war zone daily.

I’m glad we got it frowned. These people who are trying to mimic 19th century travel writers. You know, the ones who expired Jack the Ripper.

I don't get the angle about these guys being miserable and afraid when they're out doing this. This is 100% a grift in my mind. If I was being paranoid I'd say it's most likely paid propaganda

Man, learning what Homer Simpson's lyric from the barbershop quartet episode was referencing was not in my plans for today. "There was nothing in Al Capone's vault, but it wasn't Geraldo's fault..

I’m surprised you did not talk about bald and bankrupt, he’s not as overt with his content but definitely drops in comments. Also pretty sure he’s one of the guys that started the right wing sex tourism I mean travel content trend

Looking for someone to sponsor my new YouTube Travel show where I make videos like "You won't believe what these islamist are doing in London" with a click bait image of me looking shocked or with me hand over my mouth. Then its just a video about Muslim people doing community building and art and stuff.

Honestly what these people are doing is inherently anti-social so of course most people are gonna be staring at them and perhaps cringing just like people anywhere do when some pasty white weirdo is walking around filming with a semi-pro camera rig w/ lights and mics and muttering to themselves. And I say this as a pasty white weirdo

It is not auditing!! The first amendment auditors are the Best thing on tik tok. Seeing the cops get triggered and exposed is priceless.

The YouTubers are such little bitches goddamn

i went to pizza corner and i was SHOCKED there was NO british cuisine, we are being OVERRUN by ITALIANS

What even is British food?

Am I remembering wrong or did Travis go over that Victoria era trafficking story in Trickle Down? It seemed familiar.

Been to London several times, most either solo or with my young daughter. Have walked home from the nightlife alone and late, have been accosted by homeless but no one has been threatening. Have walked through parks, hung out in them, had a marvellous time. I know I don’t live there and only have a small slice of experience but imagine going somewhere only to shit all over it?! Just why? Stay home then losers.

As an ignorant American that has never been to the UK, do these YouTubers say this same shit about Liverpool? It has historically had a large Muslim population, but I never hear Liverpool being treated as a lost cause. Is that because it’s northern and already has a “bad reputation”? So has Merseyside already “fallen” in these weirdo’s eyes?

Piccadilly Gardens is basically the goto place in Manchester for this sort of content. It's central, has loads of public transport connections for the city, and it also has a lot of signs of drug abuse. A few years back, you would see people high on spice just sitting all over the place. There are also a lot of public preachers and evangelists there and on neighbouring Market Street so if you want to do "Islam is taking over content" you can just roll the dice and go there a few times. There was also a spot that I referred to as "Antivax Corner" where a few people would come throughout the week to raise awareness about how the COVID vaccines have nanobots and will cause you to have a heart attack etc. They were there from like early-mid 2021 to mid-late 2025, right next to the Wetherspoons.

Man I miss the (short) time when people were somewhat ashamed to treat "British" or "American" as interchangeable with "white."

Peep Show mentioned 🔥

So depressing that these guys have my dream job: touring the world and getting paid for it and they are still so vile

I think some of the fear is genuine, if entirely manufactured. They're not afraid because they are in an unsafe neighbourhood but because they are ostentatiously filming themselves slagging off the people who live in that neighbourhood, who would quite rightly give them a slap if they cottoned on to the insulting things being said about them and their home. I don't remember the last time I had to pause content so many times in sheer incredulity, oh actually I do, it was yesterday listening to trump in Switzerland, happy times.

Good to see that Europe is finally getting a turn at those fearmongering "travel" videos of cities like Portland, Chicago, NYC, DC, Philly, Baltimore & Atlanta that have been popular on YouTube for a whole decade now.

"White Chapel? More Like BLACK Chapel, am I right?" It was right there.

Listening to this while safely walking along an East London canal 👋

It would be extremely naïve to assume the popularity, growth and in some cases even existence of these people's content is mostly organic. It's deeply woven into the political media scapegoating fabric and the messages haven't changed for decades, like just go watch the film 'This is England' and you'll see eerily identical recollections of past extremist far right movement rhetoric. It's the same old trick used to get the same old result from voting societies under thrall of endemic generational political amnesia.I increasingly feel like I'm the crazy one just for having a fucking memory lol - - - - - this. this crap saturating the information funnels to the majority of people's attention economy carries the same old undead motivation: DO NOT GIVE THE PEOPLE ANY ROOM OR LANGUAGE TO CRITICISE THE ECONOMIC SYSTEMS FUCKING THEM OVER TO BENEFIT THE ALREADY ULTRA RICH (AUSTERITY IS NOT A CHOICE ITS A FORCE OF NATURE WHILE THE NHS MUST BE SLOWLY DISMANTLED AND SOLD OFF TO AMERICAN CEO's) - also fuck white south Africans lol

17:00 they *wilfully ignore the repercussions.

Noted , next time your in London I’ll keep an eye out for Jake

Imagine going to Brick Lane and complaining about it all being curry 😂😂😂

This is another great episode.

They always go to Whitechapel Road, 4 mins down the road is the fucking city filled with white people. Even if you walk in the opposite direction you enter hipsterville.

This is one of the darkest episodes I can remember. Not because the content is that dark, but because of how hopeless it feels when such blatant evil exists.

"Gonzo Travel Racism" In one, Annie. In one.

ANNIE KELLY. As a fellow Brit and ex-Londoner of six years typically living in more diverse ends, I'm so pleased you're doing this. It's a spot that sorely needs bursting. Here goes...

There should really be a parody genre of people going to the City of London and walking around asking people if they're doing insider trading. The worst offenders are politicians who've jumped on this trend, Rupert Lowe and Robert Jenrick for instance. They also display a deliberate lack of knowledge that's pure dog whistle. The racist project seems to be to train people to lack empathy.

Turning places scary has happened to Chicago forever! Lived there for 11 years and now live in a small town in central IL. People that find out I lived there ALWAYS bring up “how dangerous it is” like first thing. You know, Jake! My Chicago bro

Arghhhh this drives me mad! These racist idiots. As someone who was born in London, has lived here most of my life and is raising my kids here I have so many thoughts A) they are all racist idiots B) if they are 'mad explorers' and supposed to be so adventurous why are they so scared of being somewhere where people might look at bit different and things are a bit different from them?! C) East London and Whitechapel in particular has a long history of immigrants for centuries or more. Jewish people, Hugenots and South Asian people are some examplea. It is literally part of the history and fabric of the place. My family moved to Spitafields in that area from Lithuania in the l1890s and I have visited the house where they lived! This is what makes London good and interesting. D) the bloody British Empire happened. What do you expect? Our governments asked people from other countries to come here to supply industry and services like the NHS with a workforce . There is a great photographic and story series called Britain Called and We Answered by photographer Steve Reeves that I recommend. About people from Caribbean countries who came to Britain to help rebuild the country after WW2 https://welcometowandsworth.com/heritage/britain-called-we-answered/ E) the film Notting Hill has a lot to answer for as tourists seem to expect that is what everywhere will be like This has become more of general rant against racists and anti-immigration rhetoric I realise. And I don't deny that London does have social issues and poverty, and other issues as Annie said. As do loads of places in the world. But I really hope people don't fall for this bullshit and see through the nonsense

Isn’t this the bastard child of the way snobs and racists used to “justify” gentrification: “it was such a rough area before” when they moved into areas like Brixton and Hackney (and equivalents in other cities) and priced out the locals who were majority black, Brown, and working class, often queer snd creative, and also source of disproportionate amount of music, food, club cultures that have been enjoyed throughout the world? Now they’re stomping on our graves and whining that “we’ve” stolen “their” culture🤪😅😱This episode is hateful and I’m very grateful for it as a white person born in London and so deeply grateful for the welfare state and multiculture which raised, inspired and educated me and doing all I can to give something back while all that is ripped to shreds.

"Four naans Jeremy...four?!" I forgot it's from the episode with Darryl the racist, it works so well https://youtu.be/feJlRDLX0iQ

As a white South African, I am deeply embarrassed by the existence of Kurt Caz. I would love for a Nigerian YouTuber to visit one of the many extremely whhhhite areas of Cape Town (y’know because of violently enforced segregation) and grumble to themself about how only every twentieth person they see is black. This is Africa after all!!! Why don’t all these Europeans go back to where they came from??

John Roger's videos on historic London are good.

My absolute best memory from our family vacation to London was eating the most amazing and delicious butter chicken I have ever tasted I still dream about that meal 😋

I’m not even a third in and I’m LOSING MY MIND. context: I had a glorious, mostly sunshiny even, London trip in Sept. I even saw Milo Edwards! What on earth.

Jake, buddy… You gotta stay off Bourbon street. It may be one of the worst places on the planet lol. There’s no reason to go there unless you want to punish yourself. Lmk next time you go to New Orleans and I’ll help point in the right direction . 🫂 Great episode, albeit disheartening.

I would like to walk the streets of America and do the parody of these type of videos. Presenting the streets as full of neonazis, skinheads, people openly siegheiling each other, everybody carrying a gun, openly. I would talk about people openly being snatched if their skin color differed from white, or their accent seemed off. Of course in the background I would have people just walking and living their lives. One big problem, I would really be afraid as a foreigner and how ICE is behaving latelly

Ah mate, this kind of episode will drive me loopy. There loads of these walk-and-talk channels that go from city to city in the UK strategically filming as to show the grottiest places in said city. It all concludes with them shaking their head about how far the UK has fallen mostly due to wokeness and immigration. They all claim to love the UK but they never have anything good to say about it.

My British Chinese brother in law is falling for this stuff! Yet me & his brother go to London with our toddler & have a wonderful time. He's falling down an Internet rabbit hole after a break up & I don't know what to do.

"he sounds like a bad guy"... Yeah he is a white South African.

I'd call it Voyeuristic Racism

Master Yoda said it best "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering"

The prototype for this kind of slop is the YouTuber Bald and Bankrupt.

Having not listened to the episode I can already tell they will be complaining about the phone snatching, Muslim population and litter.

It feels so weird to say something like "I loved this episode" when it's about something so distasteful, but i...appreciated this episode?

I mean, London is kind of a shit hole if we’re being honest. It’s full of British people 🤢

I won’t post the link because it’ll probably scare people, but I recommend everyone go watch the sketch from Goodness Gracious Me, ‘Going for an English’. An amazing take on Indians having English food after a night out.

i love this new genre—great replacement tourism

This POS is walking around on the very streets where Jack the Ripper preyed on sex workers and day laborers 150 years ago and talking about how "bad it's gotten"...

I always thought "auditing" was referred as "small dick energy."

Annie, you're just never going to give us a happy story are you? Other than getting rid of a motherfucking plague.

And the Youtube people just get worse and worse. Fuck these racist sacks of shit, And fuck his color palate, whatever it is.

And with one Armenian reference I realize I know where Jake lives, lol.

I wonder if it would do any good to walk around Rogers Park (Chicago, super diverse) and make the opposite sort of video, just celebrating the 15 different cuisines and alphabets

Dude... When I went to Berlin in mid 2010s, I fucking loved it. One of the best cities I'd ever visited. It's impossible to reconcile with his description.

With regard to the supposed shoplifting epidemic causing retailers to lock their deodorant behind glass: for another perspective may I recommend an episode of the excellent "If Books Could Kill" podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-organized-retail-crime-panic/id1651876897?i=1000632623232

If Rick Steves wasn't great at his job. And was a racist piece of shit.

Only 8 minutes in and already raging at what a piece of shit this guy is.

I just got back last month from my 4th solo trip to London. I watched a few of these types of videos ahead of the trip and it seemed obvious that they had a RW lean fear agenda. Just be aware of your surroundings and you'll be fine.

ANNIE KELLY!!!!

Preach Jake, travel totally does fucking suck , especially the giant anxiety attack that is flying.

Jake, I'm sorry boy.

This completely reminds me of when I was living in Washington DC many years ago and my Dad (white, very non-urban) came into town for .. some conference? And we were walking in the city and after a block I saw that he was just paralyzed with terror

That first douchebag at the beginning has serious would've joined ICE if he was American vibes.

The National Baby returns!

The QAA merch has been sold out for while now. Take more of my money please!

Haven't listened to this yet but Annie, you need to look into the Amelia meme. It's so rich for QAA.

anglo spotted

Annie Kelly

The horror of being a British person on my phone at 1:50am on a work night and getting a notification that an Annie Kelly episode has dropped. Love and loathe to hear what’s happening!

Yup, great to have that Yorkshire lass back.

Annie!

Hell yeah