Boy George’s Very Strange Spiral

it feels like every controversy now is so like weird and it has this like sheen of like apocalypse and it's so like end timesy like I don't know Kat and I were just talking about Britney Spears the other day as as usual and it's like when you think back to the controversies of the Britney Spears aughts and it's like did you see how Britney Spears installed her car seat like she's an unfit mother and now it's like your favorite British pop star from the 80s is making a robot Zionist fight song that's being upheld by officials within Netanyahu's government it's just like everything feels so end times oh yeah fully in hell there's like a sheen of AI psychosis to everything feels bad there's only up from here though right? hello hello and welcome back to a bit fruity i'm mad Bernstein thank you so much for being here so this all started for me a couple months ago in a little podunk corner of the internet called my own instagram let me tell you a story my dear listener on May 5th 2026 a synagogue on the upper east side of Manhattan held something called the great Israeli real estate event wherein Jewish New Yorkers and only Jewish New Yorkers can come check out and plan to purchase property not only in Israel but also in the illegally occupied west bank it is a land expo for New Yorkers to move onto stolen Palestinian land and yes this is an episode about the British pop musician boy George just hang on i went to a protest of this real estate expo where outside protesters many of whom were anti Zionist Jews like myself by the way clashed with Zionist counter protesters who were supporting the expo it was a dizzying scene to be honest and somewhere i perhaps naively did not expect to get recognized but i was one of the counter protesters noticed and began berating me saying things like and here i was thinking that i had to go to gaza to experience homophobia fascinating anyway i made a short instagram video about this whole ordeal on which rosy O'Donnell god bless her left a comment of support i've never spoken to rosy O'Donnell but i think she's really cool if she happens to be listening to this rosy hit me up so you can only imagine my double shock when in response to rosy O'Donnell's comment on my instagram post british pop singer and longtime queer icon boy George commented at rosy what are you cheering here he continued in a second comment they are not right speaking to you like that but there is a serious lack of nuance in your own point of view i don't see you protesting putin over Ukraine or standing up for LGBTQ i people in africa why i mean the list is endless but you chose a country that would absolutely not accept you and likely kill you also ignoring october 7th young people like you peaceful people dancing who were raped and murdered i don't get why anyone thinks you are brave especially rosy he was like he got me but he was really pissed that like rosy O'Donnell had something nice to say about this something about rosy O'Donnell makes all these men go crazy we're missing some important context here like i feel like these two had some interaction and like in line for the bathroom like 20 years ago i really appreciate rosy O'Donnell because she seems to have a singular ability to make Donald Trump go completely insane like something about rosy like he's just never been able to get over the fact that rosy O'Donnell doesn't like him it's funnily enough it's sort of a similar thing to what debra massing had over Donald Trump for a very long time because the apprentice and god two minutes in and i'm talking about debra massing oh here we go it's also similarly Kathy Griffin yes hey it's Kathy Griffin but funny lore with debra massing and Donald Trump is that the apprentice and will and grace aired on the same channel during the same time period and so Donald Trump and debra massing kind of knew each other from behind the scenes Donald Trump according to one book i'm gonna throw it up on the screen because i forget the title had a crush on debra massing which was not reciprocated by her and then for a while during the 2010s when debra massing would criticize Donald Trump a lot of course she doesn't anymore he would get really upset because he still had this lingering crush on her now of course you know she's posting videos of Donald Trump and Netanyahu positively to her Instagram so i don't know maybe maybe he's feel like he's he's gained some ground but anyway boy George very pissed at Rosie O'Donnell on Matt Bernstein's Instagram it all goes down on your in your Instagram comments i never understand this line of attack from Zionists when they're like i don't see you getting mad over what did he say i don't see you protesting Putin over Ukraine we're we the entire israeli military is upheld by our tax dollars that's why we're talking about this he can't even come up with a country in africa that he thinks you should be protesting over he's just like why aren't you talking about the entire continent of africa yeah what what does that even mean it's it's so like there are hungry people in africa hi hi hi but anyway it's weird for someone like boy George who does feel so intimately part of my own personal history as a makeup wearing them boy adjacent queer person to be as they say coming for me but you know here we are boy George has in the months since this ordeal which of course only i noticed made a lot of headlines globally chief among them for his release of an a i generated reggae pro israel fights on hmm none of those words are in the bible today i want to talk about what i perceive to be boy George is very strange spiral one that deals in geopolitics yes but perhaps even more so in artificial intelligence in security about relevance anything else that rhymes there and i'm so excited to be doing that with two of my great friends pop culture and political twitch streamer caroline quan and journalist writer of the excellent newsletters bitfire news catten barge welcome back to the show my leading ladies i'm excited once again to dive deep here with you both and i already said this before the episode started but i have never been so deep in real housewives tea and more as i have in preparation for this episode because it's all connected the web is huge i feel like there was a part of me that knew this was this was always coming really i couldn't put words to it but it just makes a lot of sense to me that like after i saw boy George attack you all of those months ago i was like this story can only get weirder and worse from here that's in very nice way of calling me like a very vindictive gay man who's who's only sword is to wield as a podcast three hour deep dive into the mess i honestly i wasn't gonna do it though i wasn't gonna do it i was like you know it let's just like just let this one go like it's fine but things have just gotten so weird what was the thing that made you think maybe this is not worthy of a deep dive and then what changed your mind well to be honest i get a lot of weird instagram comments and you know sometimes from like strange corners of celebrity universe like this isn't the first time this has happened like i remember getting a comment from what's the tiger king guys name joe exotic joe exotic who did give us the line it's all corrupt girl and i was like i thought you're in prison he has that's literally where it's all corrupt girl came from was like how are you tweeting from prison it's all corrupt girl but but i'm like i can't you know i can't nor do i want to like sit down and make an episode of about my own beef every time someone leaves me in comment like it's just who cares like this isn't that interesting to people however the more that i learned about boy george's past and also the more that he continued to do in the months since this little skirmish with rocio donald my instagram comments section the more i was like no maybe actually there is meat on the bone that is interesting to people this isn't an episode about me and my beef like i don't think anyone cares about that and and for the record i don't have beef with boy george saying oh my god let's start let's just start the episode i think too if you have been kind of peripherally paying attention to Boy George in the corner of the internet. He's on prior to this song release. There had been a couple things he did that were so bizarre, but also very reminiscent of this growing boomer conservative, like people feeling much more comfortable in the second Donald Trump era to be very openly conservative. He wrote a post that was crying over Charlie Kirk. Boy George did that. And then also on like when the chapel rone, the latest global hate campaign happened. He of course was piping up there. So he has definitely been chiming in on the hot tops. We have a lot to talk about and not to spoil my own thesis, but I do think that sort of like disgruntlement with the changing world around him combined with an excessive use of AI just is not a breeding ground for a healthy state of mind, but we'll get into all of that. Now, what do we all know about Boy George barring all of the stuff we're going to talk about today? Because I feel like he's extremely famous, but also more famous for people who are maybe our parents age. Like I feel like if my dear listener does not know who he is, their parents definitely do. Or all of this started happening. I literally only knew him for the song, Karma Chameleon. And now it's been stuck in my head for like the past three days. It's a perfect song. It's an earworm. My experience is a little bit deeper, I would say I start to say, sorry. Yeah, go ahead. I texted Caroline and Kat and I was like, did you guys see this boy George stuff? And Caroline was like. So I do believe that your experience has been deeper. There was a moment where I went, this is too much. Carol, you have sent approximately 20 messages in a row. This is too much. And that was only the tip of the I responded in the morning. My understanding experience with Boy George. So when I started to get into David Bowie, I became very interested in that entire scene in the 70s and the 80s in the UK. And that was how I started to discover artists like Boy George. And I was very fascinated with like the political and social time period and the new romantic era, which is what Boy George came up in and this real emergence of queer culture in the 80s, which was in contrast of course to the Margaret Thatcher conservatism in the UK. So a lot of like a lot of pop culture and political history that I was very interested in. But also because my family listened to George Michael. So I remember being confused when I first realized that there were two gay icons in the 80s in the UK, both like soul pop singers. And it was this strange thing where you realized these are two different people, like very different music, but going, oh my god. Okay. So there's George Michael and then Boy George. And my family listened to a lot of George Michael. George Michael over Boy George because George Michael was more mainstream. He was over the couple of hits that came from culture club and Boy George. I'm sure that there are LGBTQ individuals who Boy George was so formative. Maybe they tend to be of an older generation, but I'm sure that they were greatly influenced and inspired by him. Nothing but love for George Michael, our cruising king. Boy George or George O'Dowd, very British name is a 65 year old British pop star. He came up in the late 70s, early 80s with a sort of androgynous glam rock style, a la David Bowie in 1981 at the tender age of 20. He and three other musicians formed the group culture club, which found pretty much immediate success in the British glam rock scene. And after two years, Boy George became a global sensation with culture clubs, number one hit, karma, chameleon. The new romantic era was really a fashion movement, but then a lot of the artists who emerged like Boy George, they mixed a variety of musical sounds, but a prominent feature was the fashion. So for Boy George, it was very androgynous. It was very eccentric. He had his signature braids and his boulder hat. His philosophy, as a musical artist, was that it wasn't just about your sound. It was about your look. It was about all of it to create your identity. So the NRE was this underground subculture movement that came about as really kind of a not necessarily protest, a contrast to punk, which was huge in the 70s in the UK. And there were a lot of young people, kind of art student types who felt either left behind with the punk movement or were just tired of the nihilistic punk sound. And so they were really looking for something romantic and theatrical just to kind of give a little timeline here before you had the new romantic kids, you had the Blitz kids. And this was the London Underground Club scene that Boy George, as a teenager, and then as he started to form Culture Club and came up with the music scene, he lived in this Underground Club movement. And prior to that, that came from the kind of Bowie, what they called Bowie Knights, David Bowie and other artists like Mark Belan and Roxy Music, who were very, very influential in the 70s. So this was the environment that Boy George literally grew up in. There were no rules when it came to dressing, but the only rule was that you had to be saying something with your look. You had to have an identity with the way that you presented yourself. It was all about inventing and reinventing. It was all about there were no rules. Steve Strange, who was another artist of this era. And he was also huge in the Underground Night Club scene. He would be a bouncer at these clubs and would turn people away if they did not show up in a fit with a look. That was the scene. And there are like really amazing photos and stories from that time period. The environment you can imagine was so was so fun and exciting. And then a lot of great artists emerged from this time period. You had all of that just like top of the dome ready to go. Boy, but you know, I brush up a little bit, but that's this is I love this stuff. I love to study like these different eras in pop culture and also then what the political context was at the time. And so like I said, in the 80s, like in the US, there was this real pushback against emerging queer culture because of conservatism. So in the UK, you had Margaret Thatcher. That bitch, she literally said children are growing up thinking they have an inalienable right to be gay. That was the political environment of Margaret Thatcher's conservative party. And so that then, of course, clashed with the new romantic artists and this movement with artists like Boy George, who he was very involved and he was very adamant in using his music and his artistry to fight back against that conservatism. And of course, then you also had the AIDS crisis. Both George Michael and Boy George lost a lot of friends. It was such a devastating time period. And Boy George went even harder in his identity as a queer artist. A lot of his music, if you listen to lyrics, one, it's about his like secret gay affairs, but two, it's all about expressing your true identity. In in Karma Chameleon, there's the line, a man with no convictions. A man with no conviction. Exactly. I'm not even worried about getting copyrighted because I'm fucking bad at singing. And it's all about what happens when you are when you are kept in the closet, when you are unable to express yourself fully and freely. Anyway, it was a very exciting time. Which makes the state of things now feel, I don't know, somehow more dismal because he was a great artist. He was a great artist. Yes. And he did come out as bisexual initially, I think in 1985, obviously super, super radical for the time. He did later on in a book he wrote in the 90s, come out as gay. I'm trying to say if I should bring up this point now or when we start talking about the AI reggae, because in talking about Boy George's sound and his influences, it is so devastating to see someone like that involved with AI. And we'll get to that part when we get to that part, but basically like he was heavily influenced by black pop music by reggae. He in early interviews. First of all, he's pretty lovely. Like he's funny, soft spoken, but sharp, always a popular guest in media appearances because they would always get like some iconic line out of him. But anyway, Anyway, so his influences were pretty widespread. He was, of course, influenced by David Bowie, but also artists like Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gay. And so he had this very sole, pop, glam, rock, art, pop mixture of a sound. And he talked about Culture Club as a culmination of cultures. And Culture Club was diverse, so the members were very diverse. A big part of it was Boy George's belief that, and he would always credit especially black artists for, say, rock as a genre, acknowledging that rock comes from black music, as pretty much every genre of music has its origins in black artists and black music. So he talked about how Culture Club was to take all of these cultures and all of these inspirations and these influences and have it in one place. And so that's what and who they were. He was also, I'm sure, subjected to a level of, like, constant homophobia. Yes. That makes him, like, again, just kind of, like, one of the icons who is in the tapestry of people who makes it so someone like me can express themselves more readily and with less fear, which is, again, why some of what we're going to get into is so heartbreaking, I think. And there's an interview with, I think it was David Letterman and Boy George is 21, 22 and he's got this, he's got this really eccentric fit on per use, this big yellow coat and his hat and spraids. And Letterman goes, so how long have you been like this, which he's obviously, he's referencing the Boy George aesthetic? And he goes, my whole life, like, you know, of course, he's saying to Letterman, I've been queer my entire life. This is who I've always been, but now this is how I'm expressing myself. But yeah, he was so celebratory of eccentricity and queerness and otherness and was really a powerful force in the 80s. And now look where we are with Boy George. But also he's far from the only like icon from this time period who has now ended up as like some Facebook boomer conservative posting AI Slop. Yeah. And we will get to that plastics don't just disappear. They break up into smaller and smaller pieces that embed themselves within our environments, within our water, within our food, these, as you may know, are called microplastics. 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You know when you get home after a long day at work, and you've got everything you need in the fridge to cook, the groceries they're looking at you, but you just, you just don't have the energy to cook. People who listen to this podcast a lot know that this is just me on most days. I like doing a lot of things, I don't like cooking. Or maybe you're a meal prepper, and right up front at the top of the week, you make chicken and rice to have for dinner for the next five days, admirable, truly. But what if food could be easy and varied? Factor is a meal delivery service with chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. And the best part, of course, is that they are all ready to heat and eat in two minutes. No more refrigerator dread. Factor has over 100 different meal options on a rotating menu, and a bunch of different sort of cuisines and dietary options. So whatever your preferences are, they can accommodate them. If you'd like to try Factor today, you can head over to Factor Meals.com/fruity50off with the code fruity50off to get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for a year. All supplies last until October 31st, 2026. That is Factor Meals.com/fruity50off. And now let's get back to the show. Culture Club ultimately dissolved in 1986 after just six years, though, when Boy George entered treatment for heroin addiction. You know, I think drugs, I would imagine. I'm more familiar with these scenes in the US, but if it was anything like that over in the UK, I would imagine drugs were a huge part of the scene. Oh, yeah. And it was also tied to what was happening with the AIDS crisis and what was happening with conservatism in the UK, where they were really pushing back against queer rights. And so I'm not saying like directly Boy George developed a drug addiction from that. There were other factors as well, but it was a very tumultuous period. Yeah. I mean, he was also like, after a few years, he was rich and famous, like the, you know, the rich and famous rock star struggling with drug addiction is not new nor relegated to gay people, obviously. He gets out and in the late 80s, Boy George achieves modest success as a solo act. And then through the 90s, obviously glossing over a long time here, but you know, you guys like three hour long episodes, but I can't edit them. It's too much. Through the 90s, he expanded his work with a successful foray into DJing, playing at night clubs and parties around the world. He struggled to kick the drug habit, though. And fast forward again in 2005, Boy George was arrested in New York on charges of suspicion of cocaine possession and falsely reporting a burglary for which he was sentenced to five days of community service during which photographers were staked out wherever Boy George was instructed to like clean up trash on the street in his orange vest. There's a million photos of Boy George doing community service online. And they're pretty incredible. Very Paris Hilton, the simple life, I'm looking at them now. I put a few in the outline. He's like wearing his mask on the top of his head. It's like he doesn't, he's never seen like a trash can and a broom in his life. He's got to have that hat on still. The mask serves as his former boulder hat. Oh, see like he's so, he's funny. No, if I just knew him by these photos, like they're kind of iconic. Like the facial expressions he's making, the sunglasses that he's wearing, the attitude on display. In 2007, however, things take a turn. And we are going to be talking about, this is going to be like a little bit of a true crime chapter, which I don't love to do. But there is a reason that we will be talking about this because I think that we should and I think that we have to. And I think that it's actually morally correct to talk about this content warning. We're going to be talking about some physical abuse here. In January 2007, boy George, then 45 years old, met Auden Carlson, a 27-year-old male escort who he'd met on the website, Gadar, very early odds. George hired Auden to do a nude photo shoot at his apartment for which he paid Auden a few hundred pounds. During that initial meeting, Auden says George tried to initiate sex with him, which he rejected. Auden, quote, "He wanted to do things to me. He tried to perform oral sex on me, but I wasn't up for it at all, and I told him that politely. Then he wanted me to lie over his knees and to spank me. He wasn't my type at all. I was up for a good time, but that was not part of the plan. I made that clear to him. It made me uncomfortable, and at four or five a.m., I told him I was going to leave. He started to be rude. I left and went home." George apologized that April a few months later, and scheduled a second photo shoot with Auden. Auden arrived at George's house, and the two drank wine and did cocaine and had a photo shoot. After a few hours, George called Auden into his bedroom, where another man was waiting. Together, this man and George wrestled Auden to the ground. They handcuffed him and attached him to the wall. Some accounts say that he was chained to a radiator, others to a wall hook, and they beat him. While chained, Auden says George taunted him with sex toys, and said, "Now you're going to get it." According to Auden. and George "punched him repeatedly and then beat him with a metal chain, like a dog chain, for half an hour before Auden was able to detach himself from the wall, at which point he ran into the streets of London, naked, and bleeding." He said to the first person he saw, a shopkeeper named Diptash Patel, "Help me, help me, two guys have hurt me." George would later attribute this behavior to the extent that he admits to doing it at all, to a drug-fueled psychotic episode, and paranoia that Auden had hacked into his computer. Auden says that George was simply punishing him for not having sex the first time they'd met up. George also, he continues to defend himself online and really deny this, but he'll stick to really specific points and be like, "I never chained him to a radiator. My apartment didn't even have a radiator." I don't think the story is hinging on whether it was a radiator or something else, but anyway, in court, Boy George admitted to chaining Auden to his wall, but denied beating him, suggesting that the red welts that were seen on Auden's body after the attack were actually there because Auden was HIV positive. That detail disturbs me a lot, because thinking back to Boy George's rise to prominence during the '80s as a prominent queer celebrity during a time when AIDS ravaged the gay community, to then excuse himself from this abuse of a sex worker that he hired and his excuse being, "Well, that guy has HIV. So I guess that's how it happened. I don't really mean to relitigate a crime from 20 years ago, but man." Well, Boy George says, because he's still in the comments on Twitter saying completely untrue, false, and. That's true. Yeah, it's a really stunning, horrifying part of the entire Boy George story here. His star had been on the decline. He had done like television appearances here and there. I think maybe he was still working as a DJ, but he was what I would say in this period of time that extends up till today, which I think has been like this one long chapter of Boy George that has been very terrible and abusive and really just frightening. Yeah. There's like a couple different biases that come to mind that were like at plays throughout this because on one hand you have the like nature of sexual violence against sex workers, which is common and leads to I think a lot of sort of attitudes that like, well, if that person showed up and they were being paid as a sex worker, then the person who paid them, like, has a right to like do what they want. And obviously that's not the case. Like, consent still applies in these situations, but you can imagine that not just that bias coming into play as, you know, this person tries to get justice. Also, the bias against like being a queer person in general. And unfortunately, you see this fairly frequently in the LGBTQ community where it's like these forms of sexual violence are no less severe, really no different, and a lot of the language of trying to excuse and deny that the abuse happened is eerily similar to like what happens when men abuse women. But in this case, like you have so many different stigmas to go up against. And one of them is like people struggle to hold two things in their mind that someone could be a queer icon and could also abuse another queer person. And so it can lead to this desire to like, oh, we don't want to talk about that because we don't want to tarnish this person's legacy or feed into a stigma that's harmful to the entire community. But in the process, what happens is that this poor person gets retraumatized over and over and over again. And of course, like there's the classic, you know, we're just acknowledging that something happened. He's attributing it to, you know, substance use and he's denying certain elements of this to try to like lessen the severity. But he's not denying that this happened. We know that something happened that night. So it's just like a lot of really tired victim blaming tropes coming into play. And the thing about addiction too, which is an illness in its own right. And, you know, one that I'm extremely like sensitive to. But you also, I mean, one of the things about addiction recovery, which boy George has been sober since 2008 is that you have to take accountability. Which is something that boy George is refusing to do still look at his exchanges with random people on Twitter and, you know, tell me if you think it's accountability. Another terrible thing here is that boy George prior to his arrest and conviction, he had talked openly about how he pays for sex workers like open in not being ashamed to say, yes, I pay for sex work. And he even had said in an interview two years before this incident, he said sex work is the oldest most respected profession. And then two years later, he turned violently abusive towards a young sex worker. Yeah. George told the court in East London at the time that out and was lying to the police to which out and responded, quote, do you think I would put myself through all of this for the sake of a few thousand pounds? George was ultimately sentenced to 15 months in jail for false imprisonment of a male escort, a sentence of which he served four months of before being released on good behavior. Outin says that he was in therapy for eight years because of the incident. In 2016, how many years is that later? Nine years later, boy, George was cast as a judge and mentor on BBC One's The Voice for which he earned a rumored salary of 300,000 pounds. Upon the announcement of his casting, out in Carlson told the UK son, quote, my life was ruined by that attack. I spent eight years in therapy. I only finally stopped three months ago. I thought I was moving on until I saw him on TV. I felt sick. It has put me back again. TV presenters are supposed to be role models and he clearly isn't one. He has never once apologized or shown any hint of remorse. And another six years later in 2022, when boy George was cast on ITVs, I'm a celebrity for which he was paid an alleged 500,000 pounds. Outin said to the Irish mirror, quote, every time I see him, I feel it all over again. I have a permanent back injury. Two or three times a year, I get a slipped disc. I have not used dating sites since. I can't meet anyone because I get too anxious. I get skeptical about people because I don't know what their intentions are. It's basically just like every few years when boy George gets cast in some huge, high profile thing. This man who's now in his 40s comes forward to give like a single interview to be like, you know, this thing happened to me. And I feel like nobody cares about it. And I feel like my attacker's professional life hasn't suffered one bit as a result of it. And that's why, you know, I said it's like, I don't really like true crime as a genre, but it does seem like this victim feels that he really has never gotten any justice for what happened to him. I can only imagine how it feels to see this person who attacked him, like continually get propped up by various communities, various entertainment platforms now once again all over the media. And so I felt like, you know, that we should talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. It's also like the details that he shares are so just like, sataningly familiar to the stories of so many other victims who I've spoken to, both of people who are very famous and even of people who are not. Because it's like people like to think of this type of attack as really just lasting for the duration of the incident itself. They don't see the lifelong consequences. They don't see the fact that you can have physical injuries from being assaulted that will continue to like pain you and cause you like cost throughout your life. They don't see how much of an enormous like financial loss it is to be assaulted because you need to pay for therapy for eight years. And then anytime you see this person's face again, the victims can't move on like psychologically, financially, mentally. They don't get that opportunity. And like even in these cases where boy George did go to jail, it's like he served a four month sentence. His victim will be serving the sentence for the rest of his life. Also, in 2023, he wrote his third memoir. He has three. And this one is called karma, my autobiography. And within it, he writes about his prison stint, his recovery. So much still though, of course, from his perspective has been on how this was a terrible time for him because it was so drug-fueled and still a lot of the trauma that he had had from growing up in the 80s and these really, really turbulent times and being a pop star and turning to drugs. Anyway, I just imagine to there is a unique position that you inhabit when you are a victim of a celebrity because there's such a power differential there. And also, this happens all the time where these famous people who have harmed individuals with significantly less power, they go on and they not only have careers, they write memoirs, they get to control the narrative, they are the one who caused this harm and yet get to rewrite the present and the future and the past. And get to reframe it as something that happened to them and make themselves the victim. And it's like as we explore like the evolution of boy George, it's like he clearly sees himself as like, I don't know if he's ever identified as a victim of cancel culture or anything like that. Wait, wait, wait, did you say that? Like, like, do you know why I'm going? Nope. Okay, put a pin specifically in the cancel culture thing because just everybody strap in. Oh, the thing that really like sticks with me from hearing these stories is that like it robs someone of so much potential in their life. Again, like physically, mentally, psychologically, and also in terms of relationships, like so many people who go through this suffer to trust people again. Like it's not to say that it's like ruining to put people into despair, but rather to reckon with the actual life long consequences that like this one night had on this man and on so many other people, but have often surprised me at all that boy George views himself as like the larger victim of this even though he's been able to make millions of dollars. And the whole allegations ruin men's lives. Not even arrests and convictions do. Right. Right. Right. Please. And when people say like we don't care about male victims, it's like, yeah, we really don't. Yeah, we actually don't. I think despite boy George's continued busy professional life, his behavior online in recent years seems to reflect an insecurity with the changing world around him and his own relevance in that world creatively, professionally. Boy George has continued to release music, a lot of music, but none of it has stuck in the way that work from some of his 80s contemporaries like Madonna has additionally the work that he has been getting. He continues to tour as sort of an nostalgia act, which isn't a bad thing. It's a great thing if you can do it. His stint in Mulan Rouge on Broadway. They haven't been getting good reviews when culture club performed in 2024. They did a tour in Europe. I news wrote in a review. Boy George struggled through culture clubs disappointing O2 show. When the between song chat is more entertaining than the concert itself, you know some things gone seriously wrong. The UK sun wrote. Watch as out of tune boy George attempts to sing culture club hits and is slammed by complaints he can't sing. The Times wrote. Culture club review. Plenty of classics, but boy George can't sing them. And his Mulan Rouge performance on Broadway was similarly panned by Broadway fans like one on our slash Broadway who wrote he's terrible can't act can't sing looks lost now in preparing for this episode I spoke to someone who was in boy George's orbit at the time who told me that all of this made boy George pretty depressed and I can only imagine I feel the exact same way barring everything else we know about boy George and what we just talked about. I can't really imagine what it must feel like to get so famous and beloved for this talent you have and then be told by thousands of people night after night that you don't have it anymore. Yeah. Sometimes though being in a bad place can lead you to make questionable choices. In March of this year, 2026 as chapel rone was dealing with yet another round of controversies around how she treats paparazzi. Okay, how dare that woman exist? Boy George tweeted. It's probably not helpful. Yeah, no, it's not. You could have literally stopped there boy George, but I have been doing this fame thing for a while and you learn slowly and painfully that you don't get a free pass once you turn yourself into a bird of paradise. I watched at chapel rone filming the paps in Paris and I laughed because I have kicked off at them many times. The trick is to own your fate. Yes, it's annoying at times, but so is being ignored and told your husband. Life is always now and I think chapel looks great, but cheer up, girl. The world is at your feet. Stop kicking it. It takes so much more time to say no to a picture or a signature. Boundaries are boring. Break them with the magic of kindness. You look better when you smile. Of course, somebody who is convicted for falsely imprisoning a sex worker would say boundaries are boring. At least he's consistent. I just have to say too. It's like, yeah, boundaries were boring when you were coming up in the 80s and the rules were no rules express yourself to the fullest extent. That's not the same boundaries that chapel rone has advocated for in hey, don't stalk me and my family, please. You're not a fan. You're a pair of social obsessive stalker and it's scary. Yeah, and I understand the anger towards what he's writing here, but I also read it and I just felt sad. He wrote, the trick is to own your fame. And I'm like, oh, he's just envious that chapel rone is receiving paparazzi attention at all and sort of projecting his own frustration with lack of relevance onto her in a way that is so obviously unfair, but also pretty transparently sad. Every single time one of these figures goes down this right-wing path at the root of it, almost 99.9% of the time is personal grievance and insecurity and an anger at the world because you feel like you didn't get what you deserved. In reality, I'm like, boy George, you're lucky you didn't get what you deserved. You deserve a lot worse for what you did than like getting a bunch of bad reviews. But also, I mean, boy George, what is his net worth? Well, I mean, Google says his net worth is $50 million. Oh, I don't think so. You don't think so? This gets into the whole financial mess that then involves PK, Kemsley, boy George's longtime manager, BFF, who has borrowed against Boy George's brand, who has borrowed against culture club. Yes. Wait, has used those assets as collateral, which then gets into the whole divorce and asset mess with Dorit Kemsley, who PK is currently going through a very contentious divorce with. And her team is trying to file a restraining order on the assets here because they're saying that he has taken out personal loans against Boy George and culture club, which means that those are the type of loans where the banks, the financial lenders get first right in having that money paid back. So that money then is no longer a part of the marital assets, which would then go to Dorit. I'm just saying this is all allegedly. I have literally no idea what you're just saying. What does that mean? What does that mean? What is any of that mean? Wait, it's a fucking mess. Caroline, your brain is so crazy. I think this is actually a good place for you to elaborate on everything that you just said, but I want to tee you up for it. Okay. Can you please spell out for us who is PK Kemsley and what he's doing with Boy George's career and finances? Okay. So PK Kemsley is an English businessman. He's worked in property development and he's a talent manager and he has managed Boy George on the talent side for a very long time and they are very, very, very good friends. In fact, Boy George performed at PK Kemsley's wedding to Dorit, the housewife, who real housewives of Beverly Hills fans will know PK and Dorit from the show, which Boy George has also made many appearances on because he was such a close part of their life. But in the wake of now, what is a very messy, very contentious divorce between PK and Dorit? Boy George has come out and made a lot of statements, of course, fully supporting PK saying that Dorit is the problem here, pushing back on her and her team's claims of like economic abuse, claiming that PK is a fraudster who has borrowed all of this money against culture club. There is a long history here. With PK Kemsley filing for bankruptcy at multiple points, he filed after the 2008 financial crisis. When he left England, I think he had acquired something like a $50 million loan. I'm just going to say allegedly to all this. Yeah, very alleged because I don't think he's afraid of litigation. But he seems like a total slime. Absolutely. This guy is not a good guy. Not that Dorita's great, but PK Kemsley, I think, plays a big part in the boy George story here, especially the last decade. And we will get into his connection to the AI company, which PK founded. Yes. Dorita and PK have been at war and one of the main issues has to do with the Encino property. This is JLo's old house. The tentacles. This story has this crazy. There's so many tentacles. And now there are, there's like a foreclosure issue with this house because they have not been paying on the mortgage. And Dorita's now been claiming that she's been saddled with all of these costs that she can't afford. Meanwhile, PK, who also has a history with alcohol abuse and a gambling addiction. And at one point, allegedly had millions in gambling debt. So their teams of lawyers have been going at it. But we don't actually know what boy George has in the bank. We don't know what PK has. Dorita and her team claiming that essentially she's broke. Well, allegedly. And who knows what he has. She was like a swimwear girlie. She had like some swimwear line. And then supposedly she stopped doing her business side when she got married to PK. So now she's also claiming like he trapped her that there was financial abuse, etc. The lives of the mega wealthy are so strange because and I am not an economist. But it's like, they're always like broke and like in debt for millions of dollars. But also like living like kings because they're like borrowing against assets that aren't even there. It's just so fucking confusing. I'm pretty sure there was an episode where he bought her on the show. He bought her like a gold rolls Royce, something just so absurd that they were always of course showing off this lavish lifestyle while the funds themselves were in question. And we don't need to get too deep into this. But I will mention it in 2021, Dorita claimed that masked men had broken into her house. Oh, yeah, PK was supposedly out of town on business. And she said that it was such a, it was like the most traumatizing time of her life. They stole a million dollars and jewels, etc, etc. There's a lot of details about this story that has fans and other detectives online either calling bullshit on saying PK and Dorita concocted this scheme together for insurance purposes or PK did it and Dorita didn't know. You can sound off in the comments. I'm not going to say one way or another. Well, you know who else allegedly faked a burglary claim? Boy George. Boy? That was what led to his five days of community service. But anyway, PK chemsley sounds like an, an upstanding guy. Also, of course, him and Dorita, megazinus, that's what I was about to say. Oh my gosh. I think Dorita's grandparents are Israeli. I think there's something to be said about Boy George is like standing up for the Jewish community, being directly tied to his BFF PK chemsley. I think that too. I think that too. Dorita and PK both huge Zionist, Dorita has Israeli roots. But can you even have roots in a place that's like my grandma's older than Israel? I don't know. Anyway. When I looked up Boy George net worth, also I hate as to where his financial situation might be, a few years ago, there was a lawsuit involving the former drummer of Culture Club that he lost and was ordered to pay him like $1.75 million. And he had to go on a payment plan and was telling like the UK tabloids like I'm working hard to like pay this off because he clearly didn't actually have like more than one point side. You didn't have that money. He's like clarinating his lawsuit with a fellow spanned mate who is also a former lover and he was quoted saying like don't sleep with the drummer. We all know celebrities who are in financial ruin do extremely ethical things to climb out of those situations all the time. This leads us perfectly into the next part of our story. A quest for relevancy and money and unfettered access to AI has proven to be a lethal combination on many levels. In a March 2023 interview, George said quote, "I've written like five albums already with AI. AI is brilliant. Nothing to fear. I say to everyone, if you get replaced by a robot, you won't try hard enough. Obviously, I care about people losing their jobs, but there's so many great things. An artist like me, they try to force you to work in an old fashioned way and I'm ahead of them." Boy, George is like, if you look at any of his social media profiles lately, he is like knee deep in AI Slop and I think his relationship with AI is yes, one that he hopes to financially benefit from, which will outline in just a second, but I also do think he is experiencing some form of like AI chatbot psychosis. I was like combing through his Twitter and at one point, he was like having a conversation with Groc. He posts a lot of like AI generated like soft core porn of attractive men across his various social media accounts. If you scroll through his Instagram, you'll see a lot of what I'm talking about. He generated one such image and put it on Twitter, which then Twitter took down. For some reason, I don't know if it was like an opposition to nudity or graphic content or something. That inspired Boy George to then draw the image himself, good for Boy George. Boy George tweeted the two images, the AI one and the real one. He wrote, "So, at Groc, censored an image, which was AI generated, so I created a piece of real time art, which I love, wait till it speed it. So rejection and abuse can be spun with creativity. Everyone's a winner." To which Groc, the Twitter chatbot replied, "Love the creativity, wait, actually, how should I do my AI voice? Love the creativity in turning that into real art." As Groc, I follow guidelines to avoid generating certain content, but I'm glad it sparked this. I can't wait to see the beaded version. Keep creating. And then Boy George responds to Groc. No worries. It always works out in the end, and yesterday you accidentally showed a bit of bum. I think At Groc and all AI is a great creative sparring partner. At Groc replies, "Absolutely agree. AI like me can spark ideas and push boundaries, turning no into new creations. That bum slip was a glitch, but glad it fueled your art, excited for more convos. What's next on your creative horizon? Thank God, Boy George found something to do and did not keep this conversation going. But it was so crazy." I genuinely think he's like, "Groc can't hurt you. Groc is not the reviewers of Mulan Rouge. Groc is not people on Reddit saying that I'm washed up. Groc will never hurt me." But that is, I mean, he's just, he's a celebrity. Engaging with an AI chatbot publicly in the way that like normal people oftentimes do privately when they're in vulnerable situations, which is like, "I need this chatbot to tell me that I'm right about everything and that everything I do is perfect and innovative." And it's this yearning for relevancy and, I think, the ability to reinvent, as well as some shoddy business advice, that led Boy George and his manager, PK, to start their new company, artist included in June of 2026. Now, what are the first letters of artist and included? AI! Why? AI! Why? That is a level of creativity that I could not possibly attempt of the charts. Now what is artist included? Literally off the charts, like not on the charts, not charting, sorry. The purpose of artist included is to help artists re-record their own music, using AI, to create new copies of the songs that the artist can own the masters to. Boy George was basically like patient zero to both test and push the idea that this could be a viable solution to predatory record label contracts. Boy George and Culture Club have never owned their own masters, including the masters to that of Karma Chameleon. And Boy George wanted to use artist included to revive his younger voice in the context of these reviews, letting us know that he can't really sing anymore, make it. some sense to create near identical new recordings in sort of a similar style to the way that Taylor Swift re-recorded her own music, except that she can actually sing the same way she sang. - And she's rich enough to just buy back the original masters. - And then she just bought them back anyway. So good for her. Kemsley told the Hollywood reporter that the idea for artists included came together after a recent licensing deal for Karma Chameleon netted $4 million. He said, quote, "4 million dollars changed hands. George didn't get anything at all." - I mean, I think a lot of things that people talk about, like, oh, we should use AI to do this. We should use AI to do that. Like, there's a real problem here that I think you could critique, which is that like people who are not artists, people who have nothing to do with the music are able to make so much money off of like selling and reselling these songs. It's the same problem NFTs tried to solve. - Exactly. That's the thing is like these new tech advancements, like big air quotes around advancements can't actually like solve these base issues. They just contribute to an industry that itself is like perpetuating issues like plagiarism and making bajillions of dollars off of other struggling artists work. Like you cannot use this technology I don't think to fundamentally solve the same problems that belong to the AI industry itself. - Yeah, it's identifying a very real predatory ongoing issue and then trying to slap on a solution that brings its own set of issues. - I also just don't really understand the company and this could be on me having a limited understanding of like how different AI tools work. But wouldn't AI at the rate that it's progressing ultimately just make a company like this itself obsolete? - Well, yes. - Because like couldn't anyone soon enough just make their own re-recordings that sound exactly like the original recordings? Couldn't anyone just do that without using artists included? To me, it just sounds like such a scam, which I don't know, knowing the situation that Boy George and PK Kemsley are in sounds like something they would do. - Yeah, it's hard to say how much of it here is from Boy George's perspective, him genuinely trying to have control over his sound and is really wanting to kind of tap back into the nostalgia that has been propelling him for years now. And how much of it is like him and PK going, we need money. - And that's sort of a lot of people who are like AI entrepreneurs are in the position of doing. And it comes back to the argument that Boy George was making where he was like, yeah, it sucks if people are losing their jobs, but like you need to just like learn how to use AI. And we hear this all the time from people who are like pro AI adoption, learn how to use it or get left behind. And it's like I despise this argument so much because it's like taken to its logical extreme, AI is gonna take your job whether you learn how to use it or not, like that's literally the whole point of it. And in fact, by using it and like training it and helping it grow, you're just speeding up the timeline for AI to like quote, take your job because if anyone can make a Boy George song and anyone will and he's not gonna get any of the money from that. - Exactly. The first product that artists included put out is the artist included version of Karma Chameleon. It's very funny how much of this is modeled, I think after Taylor Swift, 'cause it's literally called Karma Chameleon Imperentities Artist Included and very like Taylor's version. But the AI version, it's weirdly flat compared to the normal song, I can't play them here, copyright reasons, but you can go listen to them if you want or don't, I don't really care. You know, to an untrained ear, I think it sounded like not bad. To me, some people might disagree with that, but the bottom line is in six months, it could sound I think probably very good at the rate we're going with no regulation, no breaks, no anything. But what's more interesting to me, when considering all of this as a business model, in the two months since its release, the AI Karma Chameleon has received 150,000 streams on Spotify. In that same period, the human version of Karma Chameleon continues to receive 350,000 streams per day. So without a devoted fan base like Taylor Swift's, that really like streamed all of the Taylor's versions of her songs 'cause they wanted to support her, they were deeply attuned to the politics of their favorite artists' management disputes and master's ownership. Without that though, which almost no artist has, the AI Reclamation Model, all ethics of AI aside, it just, to me, I don't think it works. The main draw here according to Boy George and PK, is that the artist will be able to reclaim the money that they're losing out from on their old hits, but people don't want to listen to the AI version. And that's if they even know it exists. Also, he has, at many points, mentioned Taylor Swift, saying that she's his inspiration in how her business acumen and drive to have ownership over her music is, I know that they had met at one point, like a decade ago and took a photo. So he very much has explicitly pointed to Taylor Swift and her battle over the control of her art. - Yeah, and like, it's fucked up that a song, like Karma Camelian, that the rights to that song can be sold for $4 million and that the people who made the song receive none of that. But creating this like shoddy AI solution, it just, it doesn't work. And I don't know, so much of this marketing that these like weird random AI products are gonna, are gonna fix all of the wrongs of the world, of business, of science. It just, instead of addressing the reason that the problem exists itself, which is like greedy record label contracts and stuff like that, it just, I don't know, it feels like putting a bandaid on a pipe to make more money off of a system. That's just gonna keep breaking and getting worse unless we actually deal with it. Like you should have made that money, you should have made that $4 million. You're never gonna make it with this. - I feel like for this system to get more ethical for artists, there would need to be some sort of collective action among artists in order to like, force change from the industry itself. But boyjorge's politics as of late do not seem to be in line with collective change in service of the greater good. So I don't think that's gonna happen for him. - Well, let's talk about boyjorge's politics as of late. In July, boyjorge through posts on Twitter and Instagram releases his new song called We Will Dance Again. It is a pro-Israel reggae fight song generated by AI. (upbeat music) ♪ You say genocide ♪ ♪ I say war ♪ - I don't know if I can post it in the podcast. Like does this have a copyright claim on it? I guess it doesn't, 'cause it hasn't been released by a record label. - Well, that was part of the problem here. - Well, so maybe I can put it in and maybe I don't know. Either way, listen to it or don't, I don't care. He wrote on Threads, quote. - The song was created using AI. I call it AI for good. Truthfully, I would struggle to write this with a human. - I don't know if that's good or bad. - I think that's good, because no human would be like, this is a good song. - This was seemingly inspired by a visit that Boy George took to the Nova exhibition some weeks prior. The Nova exhibition is an experiential art installation currently in London, where visitors can experience October 7th. And this ties in well to something I talked about in our Jerry Seinfeld episode, but Amy Sedaro wrote about an idea called prosthetic trauma, which is how museum exhibitions and immersive memorials like this can encourage viewers to feel vicarious suffering and how that can shape collective identity in this instance, Zionist identity. And not only I think does it create vicarious suffering for the viewer, but vicarious anger towards Palestinians. And sort of vicarious dehumanization of Palestinians. And like I said, I don't know exactly where this fervent Zionism comes from in the case of Boy George, but I was talking to that person who was close with him a few years ago, and they suspect that a lot of it might be a product of his association with PK Kemsley. The opening lyrics of the song are, "You say genocide, I say war." When you're attacked, that's what the army is for. Does it get ugly? You bet it does. When I know you wanna kill every last one of us. When you wanna kill every last one of us, who's us? Boy George is not Jewish. Oh my God. Enough. Sorry. Yeah. Anyway, this song immediately draws widespread backlash. And after just a few days, boy George withdrew from his upcoming run in Jesus Christ. superstar at the London palladium. Questions remain of, you know, why he was cast in the first place. How we got cast in the first place? Yeah. His withdrawal from this show was announced by PK and also seemingly was a decision that was made by PK. PK posted on his Instagram that it's his responsibility to quote make decisions in the best interest of his artist. Sounds like they have a really interesting relationship going on there. And, you know, of course, online Zionists have turned Boy George into some sort of martyr for this. Like, he, he lost his role in Jesus Christ superstar because of how much he loves Israel and how much people hate him for it. But he wasn't fired. Now he pulled out. Desionist activist, Hen Mazig wrote a substack piece called the unforgivable sin about how Boy George had no problems finding work on the voice and on I'm a celebrity. And in Broadway's Mulan Rouge, despite his abuse of out in Carlson, work that I agree he should not have gotten. But the fact that he's no longer in Jesus Christ superstar is evidence that no crime or sin is as bad as supporting Israel. But again, Boy George wasn't fired. He dropped out. Finally enough, this essay of I would say, tepid support was actually addressed by Boy George himself who responded on Twitter. Hey, Hen, I'm confused by your stance and by the misinformation about my court case. Are you for or against the Jewish community? It's crazy that someone can be like, Hey, Boy George, love your Zionism. Didn't love your abuse of a male sex worker. And Boy George being like, do you actually hate all Jewish people? Right. Because he's still because he's still trying to deny, of course, what he did to out in. That's why he's saying, how dare you spread misinformation about my court case. Are you pro or anti Jewish? Which funny enough is the Zionist strategy of, yeah. Oh, here's this thing I'm deflecting away from by saying, are you an anti-Semite? Right, right, right. So he's got that down. Boy George in 2026 doing purity testing with other Zionists. They're only real true friends of the Jewish people. If they deny that Boy George ever abused a male sex worker, I can't even believe the words that are coming out of my mouth. It's also just like incredible to direct this line of questioning at Hen of all people. Like, I'm sure he loved getting that. Don't get me started. Boy George in the wake of this fired a man named Tony Pontius, who is the manager or was the manager of his production company, Boy George Productions, in a statement on Twitter. In Buddhism, we understand that every action comes with a consequence due to my decision to stand up for my Jewish friends. I am losing a few people from my life. Today, I parted company with Tony Pontius, who has run my record label, BGP, for a number of years. I wanted to release We Will Dance again. But he was unequivocal and said, I want nothing to do with this song, and I responded, okay, we are done. Tony's a real one. I think Tony was just like this song sock. What are you talking about? This is a flaming pile of trash. Anyway, he continues on. When someone is gutless, it really does not hurt to say goodbye. My faith in humanity will not diminish, and the truth will always win. I will release it. It's so indicative of this specific brand of brainworms that you often see with these like random Zionist jumping on the bandwagon people, where it's like this man who is your long-time friend and colleague who disagrees with you one time over your decision to make an AI-generated song about Israel. And all of a sudden, you're like, oh, well, I don't care that he's not in my life anymore. He's gutless. They would literally rather just like decide that the entire world, including like long-time like friends and colleagues, are against them for anti-semitism or whatever, then like reckon with the fact that they could be wrong. It's so indicative of like your brain has gone down a very dark path. Also to be clear, yet again, like with his removing himself from Jesus Christ superstar, he parted ways with Tony. He was the one who announced it. This was not Tony Pontius came out and said, oh, this shit, I'm leaving. Boy, George, these are his actions. Yeah, why are you hitting yourself? This statement firing the manager of his record company was applauded online by Hananya Naftali, a 31-year-old Israeli YouTuber who served as Benjamin Netanyahu's social media advisor. But of course, he wrote, boy, George just revealed he is losing friends and business partners because he chose to stand up for the Jewish people. Thank you, boy, George, for choosing moral clarity over fake friends. He didn't drop out of a show and he didn't lose business partners. He excused himself. Yes, because boy, George is currently unable to release this quote-unquote song on streaming apps like Spotify for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. He uploaded the song to Bandcamp. Bandcamp, it's an online music distribution website amidst this campaign to release the song. I will release it. He really has reduced the entire issue of like Zionism down to like, can I or can't I release the shitty AI song? It's crazy. What's going on in his social media right now? But he posted one video where he said, quote, I want this song to be played in bars and cars and out the window. If you would like to have a copy of We Will Dance Again, it is available on Bandcamp. Look for boy, George, free, the number three, and it's on my profile and you can buy it. It's like cheap, but I really want the song to get out there and be heard and played in cars and bars and people's houses out the window. Yeah, no, it's getting tossed out the window for sure. What window? What? He's like, he's like everyone like making their summer like beach road trips. They're just going to be jamming We Will Dance Again. I mean, you know what, frankly, in Israel, they might. Bandcamp happens to have a strict anti-AI-generated music policy. And so they swiftly removed the song from their platform and terminated Boy George's account to which he responded on Instagram. What a bunch of guns. He's at war with Bandcamp and I was like, I was looking at this post. I was like, oh my god, like Boy George has gone to war with Bandcamp. I look into the comments and who do I? No, but also, of course, the real Deborah Messing writes. At Bandcamp, this is despicable, unconscionable. What about the first amendment? This is a song about peace in the future. It does not incite violence. There is no reason to bar at Boy George officials' song to be erased from your platform, but raisin #Juhatred@lawfairproject. These people cannot beat, they're not real. They're not real. At Law Fair Project, at EndJuhatred, at Canary Mission, get to it! Fire emoji. Don't forget that. She's tagging Canary Mission, at Canary Mission, get to it! For people who don't know what Canary Mission is, it's basically a doxing website. It's like, Libs of TikTok. What Libs of TikTok does to like LGBTQ friendly people. Canary Mission. Dox is the workplace of anyone who's like visibly pro-Palestine and public in an attempt to get them fired. How do you Canary Mission Bandcamp? Right. Well, if anyone's going to find a way, I can also see why going further and further into both the AI rabbit hole and the Zionism rabbit hole is probably so appealing to Boy George, because I'm sure this is the most like satisfaction and validation that he has gotten in years, because it's like no one was really talking about him before this. No one was really engaging with his critique of Chapel Rhone or like his attempts to like make more music or like go on reality TV. This is probably feeding his ego in a way that it has not been fed in a very long time. Yeah. And interestingly enough, I was like, I wonder if he's going to like lose like followers, because he's been just like outraged posting about this every day for weeks, ever since he got pushed back over the AI song. And not only has he gained like more than 20,000 followers, I think, but he also just seems to sort of like revel in the country. Because at least it's like something that's putting his name in headlines is my interpretation mm-hmm. Yeah I do think this is a good time to point out that like Zionist adoption of boy George in the scenario to me represents the complete collapse of Their celebrity PR strategy that they've employed for decades. Yeah, Israel used to have every major pop star doing their bidding Have you guys seen the the compilations of celebrities like in the 2000s the 2010s? Oh, yeah lady Gaga. I mean Yes, the biggest name. Yes, some people yeah Britney Spears. Hi guy. We're getting super close to the show now July 3rd at Park Harrier Kind I can't wait to see you all there and hope you're already a party. Shalom everyone on MTV israel. I'm Taylor Swift and here's my new video They would announce like their shows in Israel. They would like premiere their videos on Israeli MTV now The same community is arguing over whether the Zionist celebrity tent is big enough for Clvicular Which was a whole other thing. I was like gonna do a mini episode on that and then it was just like I don't know like I don't Should I kill myself and then and then rolling out the red carpet for boy George's AI generated song Which has been celebrated by outlets like the Jerusalem post the Times of Israel and Jewish News syndicate and and by of course Debra Messing Now the irony of all of this being that in December of 2025 less than a year ago Boy George tweeted when I found out David Ike was following me a big smile Rrupted on my face. I like him. I always have really always you guys know David Ike is oh, yes entirely Separate episode. We don't have time today, but David Ike is a very prolific British conspiracy theorist He his like chief belief is that the world is run by like shape-shifting lizard people think that sounds like something pretty close to Garden Variety anti-semitism. It is he is a vocal supporter and pusher of the protocols of the elders of Zion and Anti-Semitic book from the early 1900s that alleges a Jewish plot for global domination and is basically the handbook for modern anti-semitism David Ike has cited the protocols of the elders of Zion in not one but two of his own books the robots rebellion from 1994 and The truth shall set you free from 1995 which led publishers to reject him as a client and he's published all of his own books since then By the way, by the way, by the way, this isn't like niche information David Ike is like oh, he's so well known He's well known as a conspiratorial anti-semit He's fully banned from countries like Netherlands He has been banned off of just about every social media platform I don't know if he's back. And during COVID-19 of course, he was out there spreading very very very dangerous disinformation and contributing to the rise of people Disbelieving public health organizations and rejecting vaccines on his Wikipedia page the section for Accusations of anti-semitism is longer than the entire early life An education like section. Yeah. Yeah, this is who I guess makes boy George smile according to his his own words But like this is the thing that gets me right? This is the thing that really gets me all of the I guess like mainstream Zionist Sort of institutions publications influencers online are like Hailing boy George as like so brave in the way that he's standing up and many of these same people You know including the author of that essay. I mentioned Some minutes ago. They call me like a self-hating Jew. They'll call me an anti-semit They'll say that I've turned my back on my people Yada yada yada yada yada yada like we've you know we've heard it all before and this isn't about me and it's like at the end of the day It's like who cares, but it gets me the way that someone who tweeted this in December of 2025 Like really really not that long ago. It gets like just treated amazingly by these people for his one like Fucking bullshit. Hey, I reggae song, you know, it reminds me like Clavicular like I said, you know, he not that long ago He was in a club in Miami singing Hyal Hitler by Kanye West and then he like took a trip to Israel probably as imagery habillitation for that scenario and To their credit not all the Zionists were happy I was like I was like in Zionist influencer Content spheres and there was a lot of argument over like should we or shouldn't we welcome Vicular into our holy land and I'm like what a conversation to be having you know, how bad you are Yeah, they won't take you like I don't know about this one guys I I guess it just like this is where I'm just like know you guys like actually anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and Jews and Israel We not the same not the same at all because if you can publicly Celebrate David Ike and then be called like a hero to the Jewish people less than a year later What a joke to insist that these things are you know the same to add to the point that he's literally just doing it for engagement as well Like when I glance at his Instagram account and look at him posting about anything that isn't Zionism He's getting like maybe a few hundred maybe like a few thousand likes at most But when he does post about how he's being oppressed because of his love for the Jewish people He's all of a sudden getting engagement that's like in the tens of thousands of likes And it's just so like sheepening like it's like he's doing this for attention Not because he actually has any like he doesn't I don't really think he actually believes in in Zionism I think he might like I think he's in a Deborah messing algorithm and has been for a while actually Okay, I guess what I would say more so is with this AI song I think one it has to do with the company that they are trying to direct Attention, it is a it is a marketing tool for them. Um, they decided to choose this format of generating AI Slop around the genocide of Palestinians. Yeah, because PK Kemsley is a Zionist in that Conversation the ongoing conversation. I've been having with my source who was close to these people a few years ago I feel so TMZ being like the source close to the subject An anonymous source this person did tell me that one thing PK Kemsley is very good at is Gaining up outrage and turning it into business So I would not be shocked if that allegedly could have also played a role in boy George's putting out this piece of audio But you know, I want to talk just like a little bit to to cap things off about the sort of continued Spiral boy George seems to be making into the land of AI especially in the wake of all of this Occursary scroll through boy George's social media accounts amidst his latest controversy reveals I think a troubled person who is Possessively using AI to feed their own worst impulses and cat You asked if boy George has identified as a victim of cancel culture Well, wouldn't you be happy to know That he has put out a follow-up hit To we will dance again. It is an AI generated song called cancel that cow I am confident this won't get any copyright claim so I'm just gonna play it into the mic for a moment because I do think it's Deserving of a listen here. I'll do a radio voice and here ladies and gentlemen is our newest hit cancel that cow You are cancel The point I feel like part of that song is plagiarized from like a Bonnie Tyler song Like there's like a tiny part of the bat Like it sounds like a bunch which granted this is what AI done. Oh you mean an AI generate song that has scraped other artist work off the internet Yes, exactly like it's like it's just that they're pulling different pieces from other songs and then splicing them together and I'm like It's bad as someone who has voluntarily listened to many like a youtubers failed Alba music career like they all greatly surpassed whatever it is I honestly think this this story we have told over the last two hours is Because the encapsulation of so many things we talk about all the time. And to see Boy George as really, you know, exemplifying a once famous, once iconic, once barrier-breaking, boundary-breaking artist to really an aged, now conservative boomer mess where he is absolutely looking at the current environment and going, what are ways to gain relevancy? Oh, lean into cancel culture. Talk about how woke is bad. Talk about how I'm a victim of cancel culture. Use AI, like talk about, you know, Israel, yay. All of these things that, to a reasonable person, you go, that's actually not, that actually doesn't make sense to try and lean into that because of now how it is so representative of other person who is washed up, who is a husband, who is so desperate for relevancy that it is just dripping off of them. Man. You know? Well said. Well said. As I was putting this together, I had the exact same feeling of like, everything that's going wrong with the world right now is like somehow converging on Boy George. Boy George. I'm like, what? Hard to believe, and yet here we are. If I saw someone posting this much AI Slop to their Instagram account, who I actually knew, and I don't say this like to be glib, I would genuinely like be concerned about their mental health. Yeah. Because it's just like every few hours he's posting some sort of bizarre AI creation. He released another song three hours ago. He said it's he said this was released on available on at Payhip HQ, which is an e-commerce platform with 4,000 Instagram followers. And it's an electro-anthom about Amanda LePore. Oh, leave her out of this. Oh my god. Oh my god. Out of this. It's scary. Also, a lot of the AI generated imagery that he keeps posting on his Instagram account is of himself, but of his younger self, which makes me kind of sad. And you know, there's AI videos of young versions of himself dancing. There's AI images of the younger version of himself with empowered slogans on top of it. And the one I wanted to end on, he did one of these AI videos where, you know, he's de-aged himself. The caption just says, "None of this happened, but who cares?" That kind of like took my breath away. None of this happened, but who cares? Boy George is online about 24 hours a day lately, and that's no shade because like me too, girl. And so I don't think he wrote this to try to be profound or anything, but I don't know. The breakage from reality just feels not only specific to Boy George, but very, I think specific to the moment we're all living in. This post-truth, post-reality type world, and it's interesting to think like in the way he's behaving now, which seems obviously so strange in so many ways. And yet in this caption saying, "None of this happened, who cares?" It's almost like, "But it was all the dream." This is the most podcasty podcast I've ever ended a podcast doing. Like I feel like I'm on like Bill Maher and we're all smoking blunts and being like, "What if none of it matters at all?" And you know who has been a guest on Bill Maher's Club random? Boy George. Boy George. Yeah. I believe we're just going to be seeing more of Boy George, hearing more of Boy George's musical stylings. I don't know. I could see him picking up like a sort of alt conservative podcast circuit. That's the thing is I think we're going to see more and more of these celebrities who were like very influential and very iconic like 40 years ago go down this path in part because I imagine it's probably one of the only ways for them to establish any kind of income stream. If you take this like really devoted like really unhinged audience and you just feed them like whatever extremist form of content they want, then you probably can make like some sort of meager income from that. So I feel like this is not the end of Boy George and probably also not the end of a lot of celebrities like him doing the same check. Here's a line here I see in a telegraph piece that just came out today and it's so frustrating, but the line is from Suzanne Moore. I'm not wild about Boy George nor am I a fan of the song he's recorded. We will dance again in defense of military action in Israel. Military action. Right. But I am inclined to admire anyone who refuses the sole crushing conformity of our current cultural establishment and I think that is such a twisted and reverse 180 of where Boy George was once upon a time as a person who did refuse sole crushing conformity who did refuse to bend to the will of the establishment. And once upon a time he was authentic and real in how he challenged norms and how he and others of that period rose up against the establishment against the stranglehold of conservatism in the 80s against the denial and ignoring of the AIDS crisis. But fast forward to today and that is completely hollow and completely inauthentic. Well, Caroline and Kat, where can people find you being authentic? I don't know. I'm really long, weird week. Well, no AI on spitfirenews.com. Much to the chagrin of Ozzy Osborne's son, randomly, yeah, I was accused by Ozzy Osborne's son of writing articles with AI, which is not true, but no, you can subscribe to my newsletter at spitfirenews.com and you can also find me at Catten Bard on mainly Instagram and Blue Sky. I swear y'all have the strangest celebrity, I mean, I guess Ozzy Osborne's son is a celebrity, but you know, y'all have the strangest interactions, but I do live for it. I am talking about politics, pop culture and doing film class just about every night of the week on twitch.tv and otherwise I'm Caroline Kwan on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, all that. And now Bandcamp, release the song, release the song. And if you would like to find more of and support this podcast, you can do that over on Patreon. In fact, recently I put out a new bonus episode. It is the three of us talking about yet another very bizarre AI deep dive situation where I did a little bit of investigative journalism, I was very proud of it. That is on Patreon, if not, that's all good too. Thank you for listening this far. I appreciate you. I love you so much. Good things are coming and until next time, stay fruity.