‘Sophie of Dundee’ and the online right’s BS machine

Two young girls are on film, screaming, seemingly being chased by an aggressive migrant with a cameraphone. ‘These are kid bashers’, one says. ‘Get the fuck away from us!’ ‘Show the knife’, the man responds. And then the viral moment: one of the girls brandishes a knife in one hand, an axe in the other. ‘Don’t fucking touch my little sister’, she says. ‘She’s fucking 12!’

For the terminally online right, this 44 seconds of footage from Dundee, Scotland was enough to confirm their most nightmarish fears. Britain, it seems, is now so overrun by illegal-migrant child molesters that pre-teen girls are forced to carry weapons to defend themselves from the constant onslaught of foreign rapists. Worse, when reports emerged that the girl had been arrested on suspicion of possessing a weapon, this too was seized on as proof of the UK’s slide into anarcho-tyranny. The corrupt British state might ignore the threats to young girls, many an X user mused, but it will spring immediately into action to protect the migrant paedos.

Now, anyone with an ounce of common sense or credibility should have felt at least some scepticism about the footage. It surely seemed to fit almost a little too neatly into the ‘rape of Britain’ narrative.

And, as it turns out, the footage was not all it seemed. As the Daily Mail – hardly a bleeding-heart liberal outlet – uncovered this week, the ‘illegal migrant’ behind the camera was a 21-year-old Bulgarian who was with his wife at the time of the incident. They were on their way to the shops when the two young girls got in their way and started swearing at him, one of them carrying the weapons. The police and CCTV footage have since confirmed that he committed no offence.

Yet by the time all this had come to light, the footage had been shared, retweeted and memed thousands of times, all around the world – helped along by the likes of Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson. The young girl with the axe was christened as ‘Sophie of Dundee’ – a modern-day, female ‘Braveheart’, defending herself, her sisters and her homeland from the predatory migrant hordes. A crowdfunder was set up for the girls, which has raised £62,000 from credulous onlookers at the time of writing.

‘Sophie from Dundee’ is hardly a one-off, either. The right-wing bullshit machine has been in overdrive in recent weeks. It isn’t so much reflecting genuine and understandable public anger about Britain’s broken borders, as it is monetising dystopian fantasies.

The misinfo has ranged from the silly to the sinister. On the daft end, we recently had Rupert Lowe, the MP who was kicked out of Reform UK, mistaking a group of charity rowers off the Norfolk coast for a stray migrant-filled dinghy. ‘Enough is enough. Britain needs mass deportations. NOW’, he tweeted, after sighting an ‘unknown vessel’ of some men raising money for motor-neurone disease.

On the dodgy end, we’ve seen Tommy Robinson tweeting a video of two black men and two white children playing in a park. ‘WTF is going on here? Where are the parents?’, Robinson asked his 1.4million X followers earlier this month. Subtext: these are foreign paedo kidnappers. In truth, one of the men was the girls’ grandfather and the other was his brother. Two entirely innocent men smeared as child abusers to an audience of millions, purely because assumptions were hastily made because of the colour of their skin.

The tarring and feathering of entirely innocent people is bad enough on its own terms. But it is also poisoning the discussion we really need about Britain’s border crisis. The public is right to be furious about the never-ending flow of small-boats arrivals. About the unknown, unvetted men being housed in hotels in their towns. About an asylum system that puts the rights even of foreign criminals above the public’s right to be safe.

Pushing back against this will need credible arguments and clear-sighted demands, not lurid fantasies about girls battling migrant paedos with axes. Those peddling this nonsense are helping no one but themselves.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.