Is the radical Right a crypto scam? Boundaries between tech and politics are collapsing

In her recent memoir, former alt-Right vlogger Lauren Southern recounts accompanying Right-wing activist Tommy Robinson to Romania to meet Andrew Tate in 2018. As Southern tells it, she arrived thinking the discussion was about Tate investing in a Right-wing media platform. Over the conversation, though, she realised they were being offered an opportunity to become the media front for a crypto token. It would be presented as a patriotic endeavour; Southern and Robinson would get shares; everyone would make money.

We only have Southern’s word for this, but a recent investigation by Pimlico Journal, into Robinson’s links with contemporary crypto ventures, contains some striking parallels. While viewing the livestream from Robinson’s recent Unite the Kingdom rally in London, Pimlico spotted a set of watermarks on the stream that seemed linked to crypto outfits: “Athena Bitcoin”, “UKFOMO”, and “UTKCOIN”. It then transpired that a crypto $UTK “token” has been launched, in conjunction with the rally, and aided by Robinson’s appearance on a number of associated X spaces.

You might say: so what? Political events often have business sponsors. And yet the nature of crypto means that links between cryptocurrencies and influencers are different in kind: the mutual financial interest is more direct, and the opportunity for self-dealing far more brazen. I’m also old enough to remember a time when anything less than a scrupulous public distance between business and politics was called “corruption”. And yet, again, if we pause the partisan finger-pointing for a moment it’s clear that the boundaries between business, tech, and politics haven’t just collapsed on the Right but also, long since, on the Left as well. This has just happened in distinct ways, and in service to competing visions for our high-tech future.

Crypto really is different to regular commerce, though — it really does have a natural affinity with radical politics, and especially the Right. This is, in both cases, because unlike bank-backed (“fiat”) currencies, or more traditional kinds of assets — such as shares or even property — crypto has no material referent at all. Arguably, this is somewhat true of every kind of currency except the old-fashioned kind backed by a “gold standard”, abandoned by Britain in 1931, and the USA in 1970. But it’s particularly true of cryptocurrency, which floats entirely free from any national bank. It resides entirely in computer code, and its “value” depends entirely on what its investors believe it to be worth: a dizzyingly abstract amalgam of desire, meme, and digital code.

These attributes mean cryptocurrencies are both unusually immune to political interference, while also being uniquely volatile and vulnerable to bubbles, gold-rushes, and — sometimes — outright scams. Crypto is popular with libertarians (as well as criminals) for its security, resistance to taxation and other forms of state interference, and its opacity from a conventional accounting perspective. And it is of course eminently possible to make large sums of money entirely legally via this route. But the crypto world can also attract dodgy and sometimes outright fraudulent activity, such as “rugpull” scams, in which fraudsters artificially inflate the value of a cryptocurrency, then abruptly withdraw their initial investment, plus profits, and vanish, leaving other investors out of pocket. The untethered, highly mimetic nature of crypto valuations also means a well-placed influencer who invested in a cryptocurrency and then encourages supporters to do the same might stand to benefit significantly as its value rises.

In the X spaces Robinson joined to promote $UTK, reports Pimlico, he claimed to know nothing about this terrain, merely encouraging his supporters to get involved out of a general spirit of supporting Unite the Kingdom. Is this the whole truth? It’s hard to be sure, though Southern did place Robinson in a meeting to discuss a crypto scheme with Andrew Tate back in 2018. But we only have Southern’s word for this; and she also reports that Robinson was so high on cocaine in that meeting he was barely coherent.

So perhaps he doesn’t remember. Conversely though, perhaps former Robinson aide Lucy Brown is telling the truth in her recent memoir, Hate Club. There, Brown recounts Robinson’s habit of diverting political donations to personal uses, such as buying drugs or extravagant gifts for a wife to whom he was routinely unfaithful. Brown describes further how “lying to keep Tommy afloat was just an unwritten rule of his entourage”.

Now, I have no reason to believe $UTK is a “rugpull”. And if we set aside conventional beliefs about keeping business and politics at least somewhat distinct, we might argue that it’s just an unconventional means of political fundraising, with a happy side order of personal profit. Maybe buying $UTK actually will funnel finance to some kind of patriotic activism, or at least to Tommy Robinson.

And we might argue further, in Robinson’s defence, that the $UTK cryptocurrency mashup of business and politics is reasonable on its own terms, as a response to a distinct but just as potent mashup of business and politics among his enemies on the Left — one that weaponises purportedly neutral institutions including finance against the Right. More broadly, we might point to the way those clusters of culture-war issues we used to call “Left” and “Right” appear today more like two competing visions for the high-tech future.

The version of high-tech utopia that dominated more or less until Trump’s re-election mapped more closely to the Left. Sometimes associated with the WEF’s much-maligned “Great Reset” proposal, this picture emphasises collective values, centralised state investment in “green technology”, and universalist social liberalism managed via digital surveillance and controls on speech, all with a side order of DEI. Though we can argue the toss about how genuinely “Left-wing” any of this is, taken together it represents a broadly progressive set of instincts that still commands some considerable institutional and corporate power — all tacitly and often explicitly supported by many big businesses.

By contrast, at least until recently, those who objected to this programme’s collectivism, compulsory “degrowth”, speech controls and “diversity” ideology have been more institutionally and politically fragmented, and have often found themselves at the sharp end of censorship and even wholesale exclusion from normal public life — even at the hands of institutions that, within conventional liberalism, were assumed to be neutral, such as banks. For example, in 2023  Nigel Farage was “debanked” by Coutts for his political views — despite being, by any non-partisan measure, a fairly mainstream political figure. Still more egregious was the 2022 Trudeau edict that forced supposedly private, independent banks to freeze the accounts of Canadian truckers protesting against mandatory Covid vaccination.

If the digitisation of our infrastructures has re-designated formerly neutral institutions as ideological battlegrounds, this reaches well beyond banks. Right-wingers will, for example, point to the way an infrastructure of message-manipulation, consensus-manufacture and latterly “disinformation” management developed under Obama. In 2020, this architecture was weaponised to pressure social media executives to suppress the “Hunter Biden laptop” story, calling it a Russian plot. Right-wingers claim it cost Trump that election: the laptop was genuine, and contained revelations that could significantly have harmed Biden’s presidential campaign.

Against this, we’ve seen the rise of a Right-wing, individualist tech subculture that understands its values as orthogonal to, and sometimes an insurgent reaction against, the more collectivist vision of our tech future that dominated in the era of “woke capital”. When the libertarian and free-speech absolutist Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X) in 2022, one of the first things he did was release files exposing the extent of the Biden laptop suppression.

In this context, opposing the Left inevitably leads to crypto, even with its occasional dodginess. Facing transparent weaponisation of nominally neutral financial infrastructure, any political figure to the right of Farage could be forgiven for concluding that the only way of hedging against being financially “unpersoned” is to exit mainstream institutional infrastructure altogether. In this context, Robinson’s advocacy of $UTK could be read not as a scam so much as an effort to protect his movement against weaponised digital-era institutions. And this kind of dissident tech has tended to emerge from, and be promoted by, tech entrepreneurs in search both of profit and a world more in line with their overall libertarian instincts. This isn’t just Musk: other Silicon Valley leaders who broke for Trump in 2024 indicated that this was at least in part because the Democrats seemed so hostile to their combined political and business interests, across crypto and AI.

So perhaps this fusion of political and commercial instincts is also the context within which we should read the recent investigation by the New York Times into crypto, tech, and Trump. The Times explored possible causal links between a Trump administration deal with the United Arab Emirates’ ruler, Sheikh Tahnoon, on access to advanced computer chips, and the announcement two weeks earlier of $1.5 billion in investment in a cryptocurrency startup owned by a key Trump aide, by one of the same Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment bodies.

Coincidence? Hearsay? The Times chooses its words carefully. But while we might look with dismay at the collapse this implies between public and private interests, crypto is hardly where it started — or even the Right. The boundaries had long since dissolved, in the years of “woke capital”, evidenced nowhere more outrageously than in the censorship-industrial complex. It just took a different form, and ordered itself to a different utopian vision. Now, though, it’s clear that the Trump administration’s new tech friends have both a financial interest in shaping the tech landscape to suit themselves, and also a different vision and set of priorities.

In both cases, the boundaries are long gone between business, politics, and innovation. But the previous, “Left”-coded, vision for this new hybrid postliberal regime was as a centralised, digitised, globalised, egalitarian green-tech utopia, powered by the free movement of peoples wherever they are needed. For this vision, the totemic built environment was the faceless, frictionless nowhere of the international airport.

By contrast, the insurgent, competing Right-wing, postliberal vision is just as digitised. Never mind the pocket-filling activism of some mid-tier, anti-migration influencer; at scale, its crypto-powered vision is of a decentralised, exceptionalist utopia, powered by nuclear fusion rather than “renewables”, that enables the Great Men of History to transform the world in their image. Its totemic architecture is not the frictionless, faceless Everyman airport, but the exuberant infinite horizon of the spaceport.

There is, though, no compromising between these visions. One will have to win. Would we rather have woke capital, powered by banks, management consultancies, and social media moguls? Or would we rather have techno-feudalism powered by AI visionaries and crypto billionaires? If a third option exists, it doesn’t have super-rich backers with skin in the game. And in the brave new world after liberal “neutrality”, that’s what makes the difference.

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