Boriswave, fighting-age men, cultural Marxism: how the far right is changing how we speak

This is the Guardian. Today, are you inadvertently using the language of the far right? If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed, but even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The history bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This press conference is about stopping the Boris wave of a minimum of 800,000 people getting indefinitely to remain at vast cost to this country over the decades to come. Yes, there are historic. Another day, another reform UK press conference. Nigel Farage, yet again, banging on about immigration. This time, pledging to abolish indefinite rights to remain. The right accrued by long-term immigrants to live and work in the UK permanently. But this time, there was one phrase. A pretty new one, that he was keen to shoe one in at every opportunity. Actually, the age profile that worries us about the Boris wave in some ways more than anything else. Young, unproduced. The Boris wave. You know which Boris. This is not what Brexit voters wanted. We're an election after election after election. They were promised that net migration would come down to tens of thousands a year. And we learn it was up to, in the worst year, a million, although we haven't yet got the revisions. What you perhaps don't know is that Boris Wave is not simply a jaunted description of a sociological phenomenon. It's a term coined and popularised among the very online far-rights, used in unapologetically racist terms to describe new arrivals to the UK from outside Europe. And it's been rapidly laundered into the mainstream. And it's far from the only example. From the Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt, today in focus. Boris Wave, fighting age men, cultural Marxism. How the far-right are changing how we speak. Dr Robert Topinke, you're an expert on reactionary digital politics at Bookbet University. Thanks ever so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Thank you for having me. So you've been watching the way that words enter the political mainstream. And we're going to discuss some of the most popular terms in the episode today. But to start with, we wanted to discuss one particular term, Boris Wave. Tell me when and where did the Boris Wave first emerge as a term? It first emerged on X from an anonymous account that posts right-wing content in June 2024. The first person who seemed to have used the term is this X poster called Max Tempers, which is a pseudonym. And he's someone who posts about British politics from a right-wing perspective. And the way he was using the phrase and the way it was picked up by other posters on X in places like 4chan, was in one sense to describe this increase in migration from non-EU countries. But also as a sort of euphemism to refer to people from the global south. So you'll see people on X saying, oh, there was a load of Boris Wave at the bus stop today. And often the examples are of kind of rural British towns where one might not expect a multicultural population, groups of Africans standing or walking along country lanes in the middle of nowhere. And then they say, well, why are there suddenly Boris waivers in our small towns? So it's a way of framing it as a kind of deliberate invasion in spaces where non-white people are perhaps not expected to be found. And it's almost kind of become a racial epithet. But it's sanitized through a description of something actually did happen in terms of this increase in migration from non-EU countries. So what you're saying is that this term is not simply about pinning an increase in migration on Boris Johnson. It's about anger about who he left into the country, perfectly legally when we were stressed and where they've ended up. And essentially it sounds like it's just become a bit of a racist shorthand for brown people. Yeah, I mean, this is where you see the kind of ideological work the phrase does. Because again, it describes something that actually did happen. There was an increase in migration from non-EU countries. But by attributing it to one person, Boris Johnson, and giving it this kind of particular partisan slant, it becomes a way of framing it not as a kind of broader dynamic of, you know, more nurses and NHS. But instead framing it as part of a kind of right-wing conspiracy theory that there is this plan to replace the West with people from the non-West. So it's a way of describing something that's actually happening, but then committing those who use it, whether they are aware of it or not, to a particular ideological framework. So how did this get into the mainstream then? This Max Tempers character. You said it's a pseudonym. What was his technique in terms of getting his phrase, if he was the inventor of it, to enter the lexicon, really? Yeah, so Max Tempers himself doesn't actually have that many followers. He's got about 20,000, which is, you know, a fair amount, but not massive. But it started getting picked up by other anonymous accounts. So part of it is about just posting it repeatedly, and then someone, possibly Max Tempers, it's not clear, created a Wikipedia page. Right, okay, for the phrase Boris Wave. Yeah. So then that starts to make it seem as if this is part of the kind of public conversation. And then from there, slightly more legitimate publications can then pick it up. And from there, can kind of make the jump to increasingly mainstream publications. So it doesn't necessarily take someone with a huge following to see the conversation. It's more about finding a phrase that resonates with people, and then others can pick it up in a kind of a travel through the network that way. But in terms of the mainstream media in the UK, when did Boris Wave first appear? I mean, I think it happened partly because Zio Yusuf used the phrase in a post on X in December 2024. Right. He's the chairman, isn't he, of reform UK, or was at that point. Yeah. And he's often someone speaking on behalf of reform UK. So when he used the phrase, that slightly legitimated it for a more mainstream audience. So I think the first kind of mainstream publication to pick it up was was unheard in January 2025. And then a few months later, it got picked up by the spectator. GB News had Dominic Cummings on for an interview that they titled Dominic Cummings speaks about the deep state and the Boris Wave. So there's two kind of ideological conspiratorial phrases in there. Right. So that was August 2025. They actually think that a lot of these things that they did, which the voters think are insane, they actually really believe in still. So immigration cleverly defends the Boris Wave, the Afghan. So from there, it's kind of been laundered through from X to increasingly mainstream publications. And then, you know, publications like the Guardian, pick it up as well and try to explain its context. And so then at that point, it's become part of mainstream discourse. And those extremist origins are often obscured in that process. It's been kind of interesting watching the term spread because it's not just been reform UK who have been using it. They're at least two Labour MPs who have used it to criticise the conservative record on immigration. One of them was the MP for crew Conor Naesmith who used it in May 2025. So he was using it before Dominic Cummings, it sounds like, which is kind of saying something. And then let's talk a bit about Nigel Farage's press conference. How did you feel when you heard Farage talk about the Boris Wave? Well, in a sense, it's not surprising because it fits reforms political strategy right now, which is they can say they're the ones who are able to stop the boats to stop migration. And part of the reason they're able to do that is they haven't been in government in any significant way. So they can say, look, we're not the Tories, we're not Labour, we're the ones who can actually do something. So for Farage, it works really well to be able to pin a relatively complex phenomenon that has its roots in Brexit and global migration patterns and things that perhaps the UK can't control on their own. But for him to be able to pin that to Boris Johnson, that's a really convenient political move to be able to make. Give me full details. None of the 800,000 plus that came here under the Boris Wave that will be available to apply for indefinite leave to remain over the course of the next three to four years. None of them will be given indefinite leave to remain. And it also reflects something that reform UK has been really good at, which is they're very closely tapped into this kind of online discourse. And they're able to absorb it and to reproduce it on TikTok, where they have a lot more followers than any other political party on X, whereas you use it was using the phrase almost before anyone else. The Boris Wave of millions of unskilled migrants shipped in by the last story government from getting indefinite leave to remain. So they're very good at picking up on sort of subcultural phrases and using them as part of their political messaging. It's interesting isn't it that the rights seem to be so much better at social media? I guess in terms of Verage's press conference, he was using the Boris Wave to announce like a pretty contentious policy, which would see potentially hundreds of thousands of people who've built lives in the UK, paid taxes, provide public services, fallen in love, had children. I mean, it sounds like you've got an American or the American accent. Like, maybe people like you would have to go home and then just sort of justifying it with this catchy insult. How did you feel when you heard what he said? Yeah, I mean, I'm now a British citizen, but I am someone who benefited from the indefinite leave to remain policy that Nigel Farage wants to get rid of. And this is another thing that's part of his strategy is that the Boris Wave phrase distracts from what is a radical overall of migration policy in the UK that would have massive implications for millions of people. So it's a way of turning it into a kind of political game in a way that obscures what is a pretty ominous reality for a lot of people. I'm interested to hear how you keep on top of all of this. You're an expert in this stuff. Like, are you permanently online? Unfortunately, yes, and I have been for almost a decade now. I'm not someone who contributes much, but I spend a lot of time watching far-right spaces. And unfortunately, in some ways, my work has become easier with Elon Musk's takeover of X with YouTube and Facebook sort of pulling back from content moderation, because it used to be that these sorts of memes and phrases and ideas had to circulate for quite a long time on places like 4chan, the sorts of spaces that a lot of people don't spend much time on. But now they can start right away on X and get picked up almost immediately. So that kind of gap between the subculture and the mainstream has sort of been short-circuited in a way that right now is really benefiting the far-right. On recent episodes of today in focus, we've talked quite a lot about the post-organizational far-right, this idea that the far-right are now a lot less to do with parties and groups, but more about influences, influential individuals like Tommy Robinson. And in terms of the people who are seeding terms like Boris Wave in the conversation, how would you describe them? What term would you use? Extremely online art people who basically spend their days posting and engaging in online info wars. So often they see politics as a kind of game where the goal is to post the most resonant content, because to get the most likes, to get the most reactions, to get the biggest response from your enemies. So it's all about how much can you post? What can you post that will troll your enemies? How can you get a reaction out of your enemies? And if you look at their activity online, they are posting almost all the time. That's part of how this works, too. It's not as if every single term they invent catches on. There's a lot of trial and error, sort of AB testing. Yeah, they're trying to see what will resonate. And they don't necessarily need to offer a kind of positive political project. Often their goal is to take down their enemies, to own the lips, to mock the mainstream. So they just try to find ways that will catch on. Sort of insults that might work, conspiracy theories that might work, phrases like porous wave. And if one doesn't catch on, then they can just go to another one. And in terms of 4chan, a lot of people listening will have vaguely heard about it. If they have, they'll associate it with QAnon, Pete Segate, conspiracy theories like that. How does that work in comparison with Twitter, Stroke X? So 4chan has been around for quite a long time. And it became most infamous with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, as a kind of space where the meme was started, where a lot of alt-right memes were created like Pepe the Frog, for example, can trace its origins to 4chan. In particular, this one board called politically incorrect. So this is a kind of playful, extremist, deeply ironic, deeply racist, deeply anti-Semitic board, where a lot of memes that later circulated into mainstream culture were forged and created. And that's the kind of ethos of 4chan is for the laws and for owning relips, basically. So it's a troll space. But it's also a space that was important to the rise of the alt-right and important to the rise of the Trump administration, which was able to ride the momentum of the alt-right and the meme wars. And that continues to be what 4chan's role is. But now with X being owned by Elon Musk and with content moderation, almost a thing of the past on X, you don't need a subcultural space like 4chan to create memes that can later circulate in the mainstream. They still do that, but now they can start in a kind of quasi-mainstream space like X, where there's a bigger audience. And how intentional do you think it is? Are these people intentionally trying to change the mainstream conversation? Or are they doing it for the laws as you put it? Are they surprised when what maybe starts out as a bit of a joke ends up actually influencing political politics? I mean, I would say doing it for the laws and deliberately trying to influence politics are not in contradiction with one another. They're doing both. So they're having a lot of fun. They are doing it for the laws. They are laughing at their enemies. But they also see it as a game that they take very seriously, but that they're trying to win. And so they see it as an information war. They believe in that phrase, "Steve Ben" and often uses that politics is downstream from culture. So they think the meme wars are a real political war. But the idea is to, as they say, shift the overton window, change people's vocabularies, change the phrases they use to talk about politics. And if they can get their enemies to use their language, then they see that as a victory. And I'd like to talk about a few other phrases that I'm hearing more and more. I was at the Tommy Robinson Unite, the kingdom, march to make an episode of this podcast. And I heard time and time again, fighting age males. This term being used to describe asylum seekers, anybody who's living in an asylum hotel, essentially. What do you think of that term and where has it come from? I think it actually originally comes from the US military, which would describe victims of drone strikes as military age males. So it was a kind of euphemism for justifying drone attacks. But then it got picked up as a way of describing immigrants to Europe and North America. So the broader context to it is also the great replacement theory, which is this idea that there is a deliberate plot to replace white people in Europe and North America with non-white people from the global south. So it was a way of condensing what is a kind of complex range of references that people who are deeply online might recognize right away, you know, like on 4chan, the great replacement theory sort of taken as common sense. So people already kind of in these online millions will recognize that connection. Others might not, but it's a very kind of emotive phrase in a way of presenting migrants as a threat and aligning them with an invasion. When I was growing up, refugees were the young, the old, the sick, and the poor. They weren't military age men. No, they're children. We're women and children. Yeah, they say that they're their children, but they're all men. How is this all going to end? Who knows? Hopefully the government will start listening and start doing something about making it stricter. They need to be vetted. Do you think that we play into this idea by having a sort of separate category of innocent women and children? Yes, I do. I mean, I think if migrants can be framed as military age males, as is Yusuf, again, picked up on the phrase in a post on acts, if we can talk about the small boats as a kind of invasion, it benefits the right, it kind of undermines the real reasons the asylum and refugee policies exist. It also misinforms people about how migration works because there is a reason that young men are the ones who make the journey often because they're often most at risk of violence, you know, in their home countries, most likely to be drawn into fighting there that they want to escape, but also the ones perhaps most capable of making a risky journey. The other thing I found interesting at the United Kingdom March was that nobody was actually talking about asylum seekers or refugees. It was all illegals. They're illegal people rather than people who've sought sanctuary and the home office will decide whether they have a legitimate claim or not. Yeah, you know, in a way asylum seekers are almost, you know, they have to take a regular roots almost by definition because a refugee is someone who's been designated as a refugee and then is given travel arrangements. An asylum seeker is by definition someone who is fleeing violence or persecution. So there are someone who has to travel often by clandestine means perhaps by a small boat. So describing them as illegal is a way of discrediting asylum policy without directly saying so. And what do you think that's come from this idea of illegals? I mean, there's a long history to that to anti-immigration policy saying, well, we're happy for anyone to come legally, but our problem is with illegal migration. Meanwhile, policy interventions continue to close down options for legal migration. And that's, you know, precisely what Faraj is doing with his proposal to remove a definite leave to remain, which is one of the few legal ways to migrate to this country. And I wonder what are the terms of you noticed having entered mainstream conversation? One phrase that started to be used by Tory ministers was cultural Marxism. Yes. And so, well, of Braveerman, used this phrase in 2019 in a speech at the Brewer's group, the Eoskeptic Think Tank. She referred to the cultural Marxist plot. Yes, I do believe you are invited against the cultural violence, and as I said earlier, we have a cultural evolving from the far left, which is about snucking out freedom of speech, freedom of speech, no one can be offended anymore. We are living in a cultural world. So, the cultural Marxism phrase relates to a conspiracy theory that the Frankfurt School of Intellectuals, Jewish Intellectuals, came to the US to undermine the West to destroy American culture with political correctness and willingness. And it has no basis in reality. In fact, it's a way of describing again a plan to kind of undermine the West from the West. Coming up, is it about time the Left came up with their own catchphrases? What do you think it is about these phrases that gets them picked up by the mainstream? I think in a context where people feel that, you know, their voices aren't being heard, or that there are kind of expectations for how good their lives might be seem to be declining. Identifying a particular enemy to stand in for a broader dynamic is a very appealing way of framing things. So that's partly what Boris Wave does, right? It explains a complex global process by attaching it to one individual. Same thing happens with the deep state or the globalists or the cabal. It provides one entity that sort of stands in for a broader phenomenon. So it gives you an enemy, it gives you an explanation of what's gone wrong, and it kind of simplifies things for you. And what do you see as the harm in these terms, entering the mainstream? Well, it commits people to a right-wing framing, right? So it obscures reality, right? It often is based in reality. Like, as I've said, the Boris Wave does refer to a real shift in migration, but by attaching it to an individual from a particular partisan viewpoint. It commits us to this right-wing framing, and then it obscures a more robust conversation about how migration is shifting. That tends to be the same with all of these phrases. They're basically scapegoating a particular person who may or may not be involved, or a particular group of people who, you know, in the case of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, are not involved. But it scapegoats someone, and then in doing that, in providing an enemy that you can invest your enmity in, it prevents a conversation about what's actually causing the problems we're facing. So it can be a distraction. The far right, a particularly good at memes and social media, you know, should the left play the right at their own game? I mean, I think some people are trying to, part of the issue on the left is that there has been this commitment to what, you know, critics call political correctness to wokeness. So there's a certain carefulness with how people on the left use political language, and there often tends to be kind of a lot of internal debate about what the right phrase to use is. So what ends up happening is the debate tends to be about which phrase to use, which phrase is the least problematic? Like, for example, what, what, what, what has the left tied itself and not so about? Oh gosh, they do it about everything. How do refer to non-white people? Yeah, so do you use the phrase "bipoke" or does that leave people out? Do you use the phrase "people of color" or is that too euphemistic? So then it tends to devolve into these debates about which phrase to use, and becomes an internal debate rather than kind of, you know, external launch of a way of framing and thinking about things. But I think too often the left gets divisive basically as they debate over which term is the least problematic, and as they're doing that, they're not advancing a framework for other people to pick up and use. And what would you say is the best way to approach this issue, the entering into the mainstream lexicon of these quite unpleasant terms? It's difficult, particularly when X is become a kind of right-wing propaganda machine. But I think it's useful to explain the context and, and wherever possible to avoid using them. I mean, in a way, there's a risk in even explaining them, you know, even describing them is giving them a boost. It's introducing them to a new audience. So there's always a risk in describing them. But I think just ignoring them is also not a solution. I think the context needs to be explained and they need to be critiqued. Otherwise, they will continue to see mainstream conversation. Well, lucky we've got people like you who can critique these terms and explain them for the rest of us. Rob, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, Helen. That was Dr. Robert Tapinka from Bobex University. Thanks to him and also to our Guardian colleague Archie Blande, whose first edition newsletter on this topic inspired this episode. You can find that newsletter at TheGuardian.com. And that is all for today. This episode was produced by Amelia Gill and Eleanor Biggs and presented by me, Helen Pitt. Sound Design was by Eli Block and the executive producer was Courtney Usif. We'll be back tomorrow. This is The Guardian.