Brian Rose — probably not the next mayor of London.
Over the past month, giant images of an imposing man in a pinstripe suit have appeared on billboards across London, professing to reveal the “next Mayor of London”. It’s a window into a fantasy world, and the UK’s first post-truth politician. The photo doesn’t show the incumbent, and odds-on favourite, Sadiq Khan. Nor does it show his Tory opponent Shaun Bailey, or even Laurence Fox, the “anti-woke” outsider seeking to challenge them.
Instead, the man gazing out is Brian Rose.
Rose, 49, would certainly make an unusual boss at City Hall. He is, after all, a former Wall Street stockbroker who has spent the past year hosting Covid-19 conspiracy grifters on his YouTube channel and website. He is also Britain’s first post-truth political candidate.
In Rose’s self-created fantasy world, his campaign is proving a roaring success: he is running in second place to be Mayor, he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history” and his raft of glossy films calling out Mayor Khan have racked up millions of views.
Yet in the consensus-based reality occupied by the rest of us, this version of Brian Rose doesn’t really exist. Why? Because all his metrics of success have been systematically distorted — and in the one that really matters, the polling for London mayor, he doesn’t even register, not even breaking 1%.
So how has Rose managed to craft such a fabricated narrative of success? The answer, I suspect, can be traced back to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when San Diego-born Rose first made a name for himself after hosting the conspiracy theorist David Icke — most famous for claiming that world is controlled by a secret lizard Illuminati — on his show “London Real”.
In the frantic early days of the pandemic, the interview hit a nerve and went viral. Unchallenged by Rose, Icke spun a grand narrative, that the “Covid pandemic” was fake, was really caused by 5G and was a cover for a murderous global cult who were determined to create a fascist state. He said that 5G was designed to cause a mass cull, and that if humanity didn’t “get off its knees” then “human life as we know it is over”.
In an environment where 5G masts were already being destroyed, and engineers threatened, YouTube took the video down. All of which allowed Rose, never one to miss an opportunity, to turn himself into a free speech martyr; a victim of Big Tech censorship. Whether or not he knew it at the time, his Mayoral campaign had just begun.
In the following days, Rose went into overdrive, claiming that he had been censored by Big Tech and that he was determined to fight back. He launched a crowdfunder for what he called a “Digital Freedom Platform” to host another interview with Icke. It would, he said, be “of the people, by the people and for the people”. More importantly, it would be fully independent of London Real.
What he didn’t say, however, was that it would also be fully owned by Longstem Ltd, the company that owns London Real and has one shareholder: a Mr Brian Rose.
Still, in the early days of the pandemic the crowdfunder hit a nerve among those frustrated with Big Tech’s heavy-handed attempts at censorship. Rose hit the initial $100,000 target in less than a day — so, over the course of a few days, he added new features to the crowdfunding campaign to justify increasing the target, including unspecified “blockchain technology” for $200,000, and a promise to take YouTube and other tech companies to court for another $200,000. In the end, the crowdfunder maxed out at over a million dollars.
But it was unclear from the start what the point of the platform was, or even whether it was necessary. Several tech commentators have noted that he could have used any number of free video services, such as Bitchute, to host the videos, if YouTube took them down. Needless to say there have been no court cases brought against the big tech platforms — though Mr Rose’s spokesman assures us that they “plan to proceed” — or any introduction of “blockchain technology”. Instead, he seems to have dedicated all his energies to his Digital Freedom Platform, and hosted a slew of interviews with other controversial conspiracy figures, from Infowars‘s Alex Jones to anti-vaccine activists Judy Mikovits and Robert Kennedy Jr.
In fact, at the time, the only tangible development was the sacking of nearly all of London Real’s video production staff, and the hiring of political advisors for his mayoral bid. Today, the homepage for the “Digital Freedom Platform” takes you through to a campaign site of “Brian For Mayor”. When I pointed this out to Rose’s campaign, his spokesman said that the Digital Freedom Platform “is in the process of being set up as an entirely separate commercial entity”. He also emphasised that none of the money raised through the “Digital Freedom Platform” fundraiser has been used to fund this mayoral bid.
After raising $1m, Rose was flying high, but then he managed to push his luck just a little too far. Shortly after the crowdfunder was completed, he announced that he needed to raise running costs for the platform to $250,000 per month. Within hours, the penny dropped for his supporters; the comment threads under his video turned into a bear-pit. Overnight, he became an online pariah, and finally got the media attention he craved — but not the headline he wanted: “The YouTuber Accused of Using Coronavirus to Scam His Followers”.
And yet in many ways, Rose’s fall from grace was a long time coming. Before he set up his Digital Freedom Platform, the main source of income for London Real was their expensive online courses. Indeed, at one point these courses were the business’s main source of income; eight-week courses titled “Business Accelerator” or “Podcast Yourself” were, for example, on offer for $3,000, while those who wanted to join his exclusive “Inner Circle” – for personal mentoring – could do so by coughing up $15,000.
Predictably, many of Rose’s “customers” felt they had been scammed: the website Scamguard has 28 scathing reviews of the courses, and a Google search for reviews shows up multiple unhappy customers. A Facebook group set up to advise unhappy customers on how to get their money back has nearly 300 members. In fact, many of those who signed up for London Real’s courses managed to get their money back from credit card companies, after they were able to prove that the courses were such poor quality that they were covered under the credit card company’s guarantee against mis-selling.
The $15,000 “Inner Circle” fared even worse. A few months ago, a letter signed by nearly every single person from the “Inner Circle” was sent to Rose, asking for their money back and complaining about the lack of value from the course. One of the signatories told me: “We had no mentorship whatsoever, it was a joke, we would have three minutes with him every 15 days and he would just talk about himself. The whole course rebelled against him.” When they eventually complained, the member said, Rose lectured them about how lucky they were to speak to him, as “people queue just to shake my hand”.
“Like many businesses, we receive occasional complaints,” Rose’s spokesman admitted. But, he said, “the reality is that this is from a handful of people amongst the thousands of satisfied graduates of our academy”.
It’s a bold claim in the face of such criticism, yet such self-confidence informs much of Rose’s myth-making today. From the start of Rose’s mayoral bid, he has claimed to be the “second ranked candidate” in the mayoral race, because he was second favourite at the bookmakers. At one point, before any polling data was collected to burst Rose’s bubble, he was rated at only 3-1 to beat Sadiq Khan.
How did he achieve this? Well, a number of political pundits have questioned whether Rose may have bet heavily on himself to distort the odds. In a flattering interview with the Times last month, he confirmed that he has bet on himself. His spokesman told me: “Mr Rose has staked a small amount on himself in the mayoral race, which wouldn’t be enough to influence even a single bookmaker’s odd”. As it stands, he is still around 20-1 at many bookmakers, ahead of the Conservative Candidate Shaun Bailey.
One suspects, however, that those odds remain extremely generous. On the face of it, if you visit the London Real YouTube page, it looks like Rose’s recent films, including one criticising Sadiq Khan, are receiving hundreds of thousands of views. Yet many of these videos show the tell tale signs of being paid posts, and the vast majority of his films released in the last few weeks are getting around two or three thousand views, a massive drop off from the heights of his conspiracy content during the pandemic.
As for his claim that he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history”, this also doesn’t appear to tally with reality. The non-profit group “Reform Political Advertising” identified this as one of multiple “false statements of fact, or blatant misrepresentations” in his advertising, in a letter they sent to his campaign.
Typically undeterred, Rose has since tried to repeat the trick of the Digital Freedom Platform, and generate controversy by claiming to be victimised by powerful forces. For months, he has been one of the only candidates to be campaigning heavily in person under lockdown, releasing stylised videos of him without a mask and shaking hands and mingling with assorted Londoners.
When the inevitable happened and he was stopped and fined by police while campaigning in February, he attempted once again to turn himself into a martyr, releasing a video claiming that he was being targeted for political reasons. He was given an on-the-spot fine, and tried hard to spin up some notoriety firstly claiming falsely to have been arrested, and then also falsely that he now had a criminal record as a result of the fine.
When I asked Rose’s campaign about this, his spokesman said: “Mr Rose was referring to the fact that he would ultimately be arrested if he refused to comply with the terms of the FPN he received. As he has chosen not to comply with these terms, he anticipates that the next phase of the legal process will commence in due course.”
That, of course, remains to be seen. And in the meantime, faced with the increased scrutiny that comes with any political campaign, his fantasy world could soon be about to come crumbling down. Only a couple of days ago, for example. Dorian Yates, a regular London Real guest, pulled out of an interview and released a statement claiming that Rose had refused to allow him to question on-air what had happened to the money donated to the Digital Freedom Platform.
Rose is yet to respond to Yates’s claim, instead preferring to release films of him shadow-boxing the camera. But in truth, it is hard to see where he goes from here. The pivot from his glossy interviews via his Digital Freedom Platform to his mayoral bid has alienated his online fanbase, while more and more of his course “customers” are starting to speak out. He now has Facebook groups and Reddit threads dedicated to calling him out and picking apart his claims.
Indeed, once London’s voters deliver their verdict, it is hard to see where Brian goes next. After all, the actual votes counted come May 6th are a somewhat purer metric of popularity. And so far London seems immune to Brian’s reality distortion field.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeWho on god’s earth are these people who handed over fifteen thousand dollars to this c**k to be part of his “Inner Circle”? For what, based on what? What did they think they were getting for it? It’s all very well complaining about the lack of value received but perhaps they should start by questioning their own judgement.
Caveat Emptor indeed
I was thinking exactly the same… Its hard to have too much sympathy for people who hand over that much without knowing exactly what they’re buying
I would watch this loon’s anti-covid videos as I am exceedingly anti the insane response the Governments took, but once he said he needed that huge crowd funding I never watched him again. But I still hope he wins, as London needs a total Trumping as the horrid race industry runs the London Politics, and London needs to get real and get back to making money and pumping out culture. Currently it is about redistribution of money (except for the global elite, they get it handed to them by the billions as always) and culturally it is about rewriting history and art and culture to make the British Self-Loathing.
This guy will be just what is needed, crazy and out to make money every way possible and maybe stop the cultural decline, but not sure on that as I stopped watching him, and he is from California.
Seems to me this guy is a great candidate for the job. He lives in his own fantasy world, just like all politicians do. Would be refreshing to have a new narrative in charge. The old one is getting gray and torned.
He is a smart guy who has made millions. Who would not want to learn his secrets through personal mentoring?
You should know that Fuller is/was a long time Channel 4 and BBC journalist, which isn’t mentioned in his very brief description above.
Make of that what you will, but to have been in the employ of the 2 most biased broadcasters in the UK for over 10 years suggests to me that whatever he is writing about is completely in line with those who pay him.
Perhaps for his next piece Fuller could do an equally damning expose of Kahn’s last 4 years and where all the money has gone, who he has taken money off, which people he regularly meets coupled with a bit of Kahn’s past legal history. There would undoubtedly be many online outlets that would publish such an expose, Unherd for instance…
David Fuller no longer works for Channel 4 nor BBC. As a freelance on C4, he was frozen out for his pro-Jordan Peterson work after the Cathy Newman interview. Fuller independently produced one of the first documentaries on JP, and it was sympathetic. Fuller continues to produce sympathetic vids on JP and the Intellectual Dark Web on his youtube channel.
I have found David Fuller never less than fair and balanced. I get the impression he continues to have a friendly relationship with JP.
So, never judge a book by its cover.
Agree Judy. David’s channel provides very valuable information. I feel that what is offered there is in alignment with what is offered at Unherd – sites offering alternatives to the mainstream, deeper analysis, highly qualified and interesting guests. And even if the writer of this article was some sort of ‘MSM shill’ the facts regarding Brian Rose are still facts! Rose’s scams deserve to be investigated by the police because in my view they rank as criminal behaviour.
Thanks for putting me right, noted.
Nigel, can I ask: how did you see my reply? Did you come back to the thread, or was it posted to your profile? I ask because the only way I can see replies is to remember where I commented and return to the threads!
Yes Judy. In the old format there was a tab above the comments which notified you of all replies and interactions with your comments. I was in contact with the Unherd tech people who were very sincere and said they were onto it (and even wrote back to check if I was “satisfied”). However, a couple of months later and nothing has happened. It’s a mystery. Due to the lack of this feature, I have almost completely stopped commenting here. It’s a shame.
Are you intimating that the current mayor is corrupt? If so back your allegation up with something concrete.
Haha
David Fuller has that incredibly grating London-media, watched too much American tv, middle class accent that makes him sound like a 15 year old girl. Discriminatory though it is you can predict with utmost certainty what his views probably are from that alone sadly.
He’s spent an awful lot of money on this and bored me rigid with pop-ups in the process. He must be pretty near to exceeding the legal campaign expenditure limit, and there’s still a month to go, so I hope he get prosecuted by the Electoral Commission.
Unfortunately, as the Tory campaign in 2010 and Tory campaigns since 2010 have shown, the Electoral Commission is pretty toothless. In 2010 money flooded in from a banker based in the Americas, which broke the regulations, but was laundered through a number of companies in the UK with a web of invoices and receipts to obscure their source. All the EC did ultimately was to complain about the obstructiveness of the companies in preventing the ultimate source of the money from being identified, even though his identity is perfectly well known to anyone involved even moderately in UK politics at the time.
Interesting, I’d never heard of him.
I wonder if they are somehow manipulating the betting markets to give him publicity.
“Yet in the consensus-based reality occupied by the rest of us […]”
Whatever Brian Rose has or hasn’t done that’s illegal or unethical, I’d just like to state for the record that I don’t believe that reality is determined by consensus.
Ah but, a 97% consensus forms the reality of climate change
Is the statistic that 97% of a sample of scientific papers which expressed an opinion on whether human activity had more than no effect at all on the climate said that, yes, they thought it had more effect than none? That’s what I remember of what I’ve heard, but do you have a good reference?
It’s even worse than that…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/01/tol-statistically-deconstructs-the-97-consensus/
Is there a consensus that all 3 of them are wrong about everything, and don’t deserve to be heard? I appreciated how they helped me to consider alternative interpretations of what I see, rather than trying to close people’s minds by using dismissive ad-hominems.
Rose is about as likely to be elected Mayor of London as I am to be elected Queen of England.
He;s hardly the UK’s first ‘post-truth’ politician, that ship sailed a long time ago.
As for the Icke interview it’s no different from BBC, Sky, Ch 4 etc allowing politicians and officials to make all sorts of assertions without evidence unchallenged, indeed that’s more dangerous as many more people take them seriously and they have real power
This is how the political right in the UK now works. All you need to do is say you are a victim of powerful forces who wish to silence your message of truth. Then you can dismiss all counter arguments or objections as attempts to undermine you.
These forces are variously described as the: Elite, Establishment, Illuminati, Globalists, WEF, Great Reset, Communists etc They are almost never precisely defined. To do so would expose the stupidity of such a concept.
The smart ones among you would of worked out this is almost a mirror image of the strategy used by the Left, although they sometimes use slightly different oppressive groups.
I suspect people are beginning to see through these rather simplistic strategies. Unfortunately, reading some of the posts on this comments section, many still do embrace them.
This is how the political
rightleft in the UK now works.FIFY
If the size of a Windsor knot is inversely proportional to the trust one can place in an individual, Brian Rose is down there with Philip Green and Bernie Madoff.
I love UnHerd. I want to hear essays pushing in all sorts of directions. I’ve seen a couple of Mr. Rose’s interviews, including one with Seth Godin, and thought they were informative. But it always boggled my mind that anyone would hand over good money for some master mind course with him.
When I saw the Youtube vids I thought it was a parody/joke candidate.
This man is new to me, though his conspiracy stuff isn’t.
My neighbour was (and is) a true believer in such things, even going to the trouble of creating a DIY Faraday cage to keep out assorted radiation, especially wi-fi, mobiles, 5G and much else.
Useless of course (I tested it) but keeps her happy.
About 4 years ago I met a lovely woman at the park who you could tell had a physical frailness about her. She told me she had been a teacher at a large middle school in LA. When she started getting headaches and other ailments the docs couldn’t figure it out. A colleague said it might be the Wi-Fi just installed at the school. She was skeptical as was her attorney husband. But as she learned more, she thought it was a possibility. When the school was asked to test the RF, they waited until school was out of session. She complained that they should have done it while school was in session with all the children’s laptops and phones in the room. Knowing how corrupt LAUSD is, their response wasn’t surprising. I think we won’t understand the impact form these frequencies for quite some time. https://theconversation.com/sonic-attacks-in-china-and-cuba-how-sound-can-be-a-weapon-97380
Err, wi-fi does not use audio frequencies. In fact it uses the same frequency that is used by microwave ovens, but obviously at much lower power levels. And why do microwaves use 2.4GHz? because that is the optimal frequency for exciting water molecules. i.e. the worst that could happen from too much wi-fi is a slight warming. Probably much less than the leakage from your microwave oven.
BTW newer forms of wi-fi use frequencies in the 5 GHz band.
Good heavens, Max Headroom for Mayor, anyone?
The moniker Max Headroom has already attached itself to Keir Starmer, much as Steptoe did to his predecessor.
So what you are saying is that Brian Rose is less corrupt, expensive and harmful to the citizens than the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats parties.
This is simply 20th century American TV evangelism reimagined for the 21st century. Every Rose has it’s thorn eh?
Yes I was reminded of Elmer Gantry. Fantastic film if you haven’t seen it with Burt Lancaster as the charismatic and criminal preacher.
Was shocked when Brian Rose started publicising conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and how they started to get popular. Relieved he is so unlikely to get anywhere in the mayoral election.
The elections are a weak method of choosing the right person for the job. London has been a great trading capital of the UK, but in recent years or decades it is changing beyond it’s past sucess and stories slowly creep out of the place to the rural parts of the UK and we ex-Londoners are in the dark to the going ons. All I hope is that the hatred camp do not win and the commonsense candidate is the one we need the most. We are getting transport firms quoting huge prices to send goods to London and some even just say we do not do London. Please vote for a person that will make London the greatest city in the world again. You have the choice dropping onto your doormats. Choose wisely my friend the holy fail could be the result.
If he changed his name from “Rose” to “Rosebud” he could easily be the new Citizen Kane.
He is a disgusting, image-obsessed, creepy, “self-development” scam artist. No amount of muscles or East European “stunners” can make him likeable or acceptable. A very unattractive man with the charisma of a bloated slug (and I am a person who agrees with many things he says).
For those of us in the UK who don’t see the Mayor of London election as quite on the same level as the POTUS election could those of you who do explain why we need to know about someone we have no affinity with? I mean who is this Sadiq Khan?
Another smear job. I read the smear job on Unherd of both George Galloway and Alex Salmond. I suppose this is in part because of the inherent small mindedness of Tory thinking and its media. I also suspect, however, that Unherd is being subverted by its neo con cousins…
His campaign was never about winning the election for Mayor of London. It was always about building a brand, curiously named Brian Rose! When the voting is over and Khan remains as Mayor what will be left in the minds of Londoners? Brian Rose….challenger brand of course. And from there he can extend anywhere using his existing channel and subscribers. He is a canny operator, make no mistake about that.
Unfortunately Sadist Khan,the Pi***poor mayor of an EU regional assembly (UK isn’t in EU) Record Crime,Record business failures,etc..has 18 opponents 15 if you dont count Woke tories,lib-dims,green; the Opposition should have fielded 1 or at most 2 candidates,Now idiots like ”rejoin” have crawled out from under a Vaccine stone, I think londoners must be thick?> i lived there until 2018, i thank god I left the cycle lane madness & Violence behind..bon appetit!
Many of the people who drive the London economy live outside the city and do not get to vote.
i don’t know a lot about Brian Rose – but if being sceptical of government agendas makes you “post-truth” that is just cheap sloganising. My belief is that 5G is not closely implicated in the spread of Covid but it is an incredibly dangerous technology which is a completely unnecessary development for ordinary civil communication. Shoddy article. I will probably vote for Fox or Kurten. Telling people 5G is benign is about as “post-truth” as you can get.
A BBC journalist (ex) has decided that he really, really doesn’t like a minor would-be politician and writes ten pages about it. Why is this interesting?
Well, watching Rose interviewing the ex goalkeeping oddball David Icke, without asking for any evidence of Icke’s assertions, ands without a hint of irony, was hilarious. Much funnier than most post modern comedians.
Richard Tice and Laurence Fox should withdraw and back this candidate.
Are you mad?
or withdraw and support Bailey
Bailey is a Tory Chancer,Promising to Tax rich pensioners & Take Away Transport Passes is NOT popular or logical..
That’s the best suggestion I have seen on here for a long time.
Perhaps they should all withdraw to give Khan a free run?
Although no-one has withdrawn, Kahn’t clearly is going to get a free run
I was thinking something similar.. is it not the time instead of individuals we start working as teams?.. is it not working together natural? the Old false divisions -right /left/ centre-.. is dying for a long time now.. it is only us we do not see what is in front of our eyes.. I believe entirely new fresh candidates required everywhere, but not standing as individuals but working together.. I would like to see Fox and Rose as mayors together.. that should be the new normal.. and that would be Our normal since a very long time ago..