“Grab your popcorn and enjoy your front row seat to the collapse of modern Britain”
Last week, I wrote about how a dystopian view of modern Britain is thriving on TikTok. Some people are being served video-after-video on their heavily curated For You feed that depicts a world where everything is broken and everyone is corrupt. Not just that the trains are late, but that civilization as we know it is on the brink of collapse. This kind of content is extremely addictive for the viewer and extremely lucrative for the platform. As we live more of our lives online, our view of reality is being warped. If it feels like those you disagree with are living in a different world, it’s because they are.
All of this got me thinking about the YouTuber Charlie Veitch. Last year, I spent some time with him as he went about making videos for his hugely successful channel. Charlie is a fascinating character, who went from being a rising star of the conspiracy circuit, to being rejected by them, to finding a new home filming on the streets of Manchester. He’s built a community around his provocative and antagonising videos, giving him and his followers a strong sense of purpose and belonging. They’re addictive, and so he is. He’s charismatic and watchable. Some people love him, some people hate him, but they’re all talking about him. Online, he is a caricature. In person, I found somebody far more human and complex. What follows is what happened when I went to spend some time with him. An edited version of this was first published in the always-brilliant The Mill.
***
Charlie Veitch grips his camera on the platform of Market Street tram stop as pro-Palestinian protesters march across the tracks below.
“Darling, darling viewers, here they come,” he barks over the thumping sound of chanting and drums, “I want to show you the balaclavaed ones at the front, they always send the balaclavaed scary ones to intimidate the people to get out the way.”
Charlie is filming one of his daily videos for his almost 800,000 YouTube subscribers, in which he wanders the streets of the North West, sweeping his camera through town centres, goading protesters, police officers, security guards, homeless people, and passersby, uploading the confrontations with a flurry of dramatic captions.
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Recently, I have been contributing to the millions of views he’s accumulated. My heart thumps as each video builds. It’s addictive. One video becomes two, becomes three. The more antagonistic, the more views. Thousands of people cheer him on in the comments, feasting on the drama. Everybody has an opinion. ‘Grab your popcorn and enjoy your front row seat to the collapse of modern Britain’ says one viewer. ‘Dickhead agitator’ says a post about him on the online forum Reddit. ‘This poverty tourist is just another example of how journalism can be dangerous and intrusive.’
It’s a wet Saturday afternoon on Market Street in the centre of Manchester, and Charlie has let me follow him as he films his latest video. A young woman in a blue cagoule positions herself in front of him on the tram stop platform. She has been staying close since he arrived in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens an hour earlier, warning other protesters not to engage with his claims that they are pro-Hamas, or his questions about where the Israeli hostages are being kept. Another young woman circles nearby, clutching a notepad and wearing an orange hi-vis jacket that reads ‘legal observer.’ There is a quiet tension on the platform as the protest rumbles past. More people gather with phones and go-pros, each staking out the other, waiting for one wrong move. A hooded man with a rucksack pushes his way through. There is an altercation. The tension snaps. Charlie’s bodyguard, Fred, throws an elbow, and then a punch. The ‘legal observer’ gasps, frowns and scribbles into her notepad.
“Get away from him,” cries one of the women.
“I got it all, he attacked you, he attacked us,” shouts Charlie into the camera. A police officer clambers up onto the platform and takes Fred by the arm.
We all gather around, the rain lashing on the pavement around us, as the police collect evidence and opinions. Charlie shows them his footage. The ‘legal observer’ gives her take.
“He comes here every week and makes people feel uncomfortable,” says the blue-coated protester. After some discussion, the police let both men leave.
Fred is anxious. When he isn’t following Charlie around Piccadilly Gardens, he works as a bouncer. He’s worried about the video going online, how it looks, his licence to work, and supporting his family. I wonder aloud how many views it may get. At the time of writing, a recent video in which Fred elbowed away another angry passerby has over one million views, thirty thousand likes and nine thousand comments.
“If I don’t post it, we look like pussies,” pleads Charlie. “I think that’s the most incredible footage since the elbow… to agree slightly with our journalistic brethren here, it is good content. At least we have the truth. The camera doesn’t lie.”
***
Charlie Veitch grew up in Brazil, with a Brazilian mother and a Scottish father, whose job piloting ships for oil companies took them around the world. They travelled between West Africa, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Caribbean. Charlie was often the new kid in remote places.
“All I ever consumed of the western world was through Betamax or VHS tapes. I fell in love with media… that was my gateway to the world.”
His earliest ambition was to become an actor or director, to see himself in the media he watched. Eventually, the family returned to Edinburgh, where Charlie did a philosophy degree. His parents convinced him to get a job in finance.
“I did that for a few years, I was getting fat and upset in an office. I’m not an office kind of person.” Charlie says he’s always been bolshy, “more anarchist left-wing… a bit more old school, fight the man.”
A few years after the 9/11 terror attack, Charlie had watched a film by the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, claiming the attack was an inside job. It planted a seed.
“I am like my own case study on how you can fall for conspiracy theories… I wanted to believe that the reason I had no status, no success, was because there was a worldwide conspiracy of either Zionist overlord reptilian interdimensional shape-shifting beings, or at the very least psychopathic bankers, at the very worst interdimensional aliens that steal children. And it’s very exciting. I think the danger is you get these fantastical thoughts about yourself, you think you’re important, you think you’re vital.”
He went to work in London and, in 2007, set up a YouTube channel in his spare time. His first video – ‘15 City Police to Arrest One Postman’ – is eighty seconds of shaky camera phone footage capturing a group of police officers pinning down a black postman who, Charlie claims in the description, had refused to move his van. The man squeals in pain as Charlie pans the camera to capture the people who had gathered to watch. The comments under the video debate how heavy handed the police had been, if it was an example of police brutality, or if the officers actions were justified. Charlie had always wanted to see himself in the media, now he was the media.
A few years later, the Occupy movement began to bubble up in London, with protests targeting large corporations and banks. Charlie would take his megaphone to work and turn up with it on his lunch break. It was Charlie’s natural territory. He is tall and bolshy, hard to miss, hard to look away from, theories and opinions tumble out of him.
One day, the City of London police took pictures of Charlie in his long tweed hunting coat, suit and beard. They turned up at his building, he says, and asked the caretaker which office he worked in.
“That just kicked me off, paranoia, conspiracy theory, they’re out to get me.”
He quit his job, and started working full time on his YouTube channel with his friend Danny. They called themselves The Love Police. They filmed themselves hugging strangers and antagonising police officers and security guards. Charlie muscled his way into some newsworthy events, like being arrested for a planned protest of the Royal Wedding, which sparked freedom of speech protests itself, before being released without charge.
At the same time, the seed planted by Alex Jones’ video had grown, and Charlie became a rising star of the 9/11 Truther Movement. He found himself embraced by conspiracy circles, including Alex Jones himself, and the former footballer turned conspiracy theorist David Icke.
“When you’re in your 20s, with no status, and you’ve got Bolshevik ideas of revolution and listen to Rage Against the Machine, you idolise Che Guevara and Fidel Castro for kicking the man out… looking back now I was a father of three with a fourth on the way, but we’re all young once.”
In the summer of 2011, the BBC cast Charlie in a documentary called 9/11: Conspiracy Road Trip. He would join other 9/11 conspiracy theorists on a bus tour of America, to visit ground zero and the Pentagon and meet first responders and bereaved family members. It quickly changed Charlie’s mind, turned him against the 9/11 Truther movement… and turned the movement against him. A video he filmed in Times Square denouncing the theory that the attack was an inside job led to a stream of abuse, lurid accusations and threats of violence. Alex Jones and David Icke both publicly disowned him. The event hurt Charlie. He told The Daily Telegraph in 2013, “I don’t have the same love for people as I did… I’ve become a misanthrope and I’ve become very cynical. I hope it goes away.”
Eventually, he moved to the North West of England and repurposed his YouTube channel, spending his days filming protests and passers-by in Manchester, Liverpool, Preston and Leeds.
“I was bullied a little bit in school,” Charlie tells me when I meet him at a sweeping country pub near his home in Clitheroe, “you know, half-Brazilian, half-Scottish, my parents travelling every 18 months. So I’ve always had to work harder than most to make friends. I think maybe part of it is getting my own back on some of the bullies… now that I’m tall and confident and strong. As Hunter S Thompson said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. I am weird and I have turned pro, and I’ve monetised my psychological problems into a very successful [YouTube] channel.”
He suggests I come with him on a filming day in Manchester. Saturday, he says, is going to be a big one.
“Mile for mile, pound for pound, no other city in Britain has this much drama, and craziness, and madness, and degeneracy, and drug dealing, and crime, and drunks. In a four or five-hour period, which is how long it takes to do a daily video, I will get so much more content from Manchester.”
***
“Ignore this guy,” the man with the megaphone tells the small crowd in his soft Mancunian accent. “He deserves boos, he deserves to be chased off the streets, but ignore him because you’re giving him content and that’s what he exists on.” The crowd cheers.
“I have been wanting to catch up with you for so long,” says Phil, one of several passersby who approach Charlie over the course of the afternoon, shouting his name, cheering him on or asking for a selfie. Were it not for the volume, I’d assume he’d set them up. “I have been following Charlie for a long time. He’s very edgy, he’s funny to watch, he seems to tell it how it is… like how he deals with the crackheads in the park.” I suggest to Phil that some may see Charlie as an agitator, pushing his way into protests, pursuing unnecessary conflict. “Let’s face it, the crowd that is here today, it’s unnecessary conflict,” he gestures to the protest. “There are a lot of questions I wanted to ask him about how he went to America… when he came back he stopped uploading for a while.” I ask Phil for his theory. “I believe the CIA said to him, shut your mouth or we’ll do something to you. That was my theory… we don’t know the full story. Charlie was very outspoken about it at the time, and his views seemed to be growing over it.”
“Now that you’ve cornered me, Darryl,” says Charlie when I ask him about it later, “not only was it the CIA, it was Shin Bet, Israeli secret police, and also Mossad. I got taken into the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, into Room 101, and using LSD therapy and high doses of THC, they were saying 9/11’s not an inside job, 9/11’s not an inside job, go film the crackheads in Manchester…”
I suggest some of his audience may be hanging on to the conspiratorial Charlie he left behind. “I still hang on to a lot of that conspiratorial [Charlie]… I love conspiracy theories. Two or more people organising anything is a conspiracy, the literal definition of a conspiracy. I was charged with conspiracy to cause a nuisance [while filming] at the royal wedding, that law is 900 years old. Once the wedding was finished, they dropped the charges and released me. I have been a political prisoner.”
Charlie trips into his trademark style of fast-paced oratory, listing off some of the conspiracy theories he doesn’t believe; chemtrails, Jewish space lasers, that the Earth is flat. 9/11, he says, is a “forensic issue.” Like most conversations with him, it becomes an intense display of ideological gymnastics, invoking a deluge of intensely specific characters and moments of history. It’s dizzying and disorientating. It’s hard to tell what he really believes. I try to regain my footing, and admit that I find keeping up with him quite exhausting.
“From a normal person’s point of view, I can appear as an utter raving lunatic. Now, would I want my daughter to grow up and partner up with somebody like me? I’d have to think about that, Darryl.”
A young woman thrusts her phone at Charlie. “Hey Cameron, it’s Charlie Veitch, you’re literally going to be in my video, I am filming this conversation, how are you?”
Her name is Kirsty. She watches Charlie’s videos with her boyfriend. “I do watch it because I think it’s important to take in other people’s views, but his views I definitely don’t stand with… chasing vulnerable people around Piccadilly isn’t something I’d consider journalism… I think if you shove a camera in anyone’s face and provoke them and call them names, they’re going to respond, especially if they’re already mentally vulnerable.” I ask again why she watches, and why it seems to be so compelling to people. “I think Charlie is a provocateur, he gets money from it. It’s the same way we have Katie Hopkins, who makes money from saying provocative views. But, to me, journalism is seeking the truth and finding both sides, not chasing around vulnerable people… look, he’s literally doing it now,” Charlie swoops past us, his camera trained on somebody, “it creates a scene, they chase him with a camera, then he gets more content, it’s a vicious circle.”
“Everyone has the right to interpret my work, my silly little videos, in any way they see fit,” says Charlie over a coffee during a break in filming, “I’m not surprised Kirsty may interpret it as he goes out to provoke, because what do my videos show? They show the footage that I am pointing my camera at, where very often people will run out of the background, straight into the foreground, to threaten violence against me to not capture the video. Who is provoking who in that situation? I think we fought two world wars, and the Cold War, so that a 43-year-old British man can walk around doing his little vlog, on his little YouTube channel without getting kicked in. If you disagree with that, you have lost already.” Charlie says somebody once told him that if it were his family on the street, he wouldn’t film them like this. “Actually, I’d be twice as angry… I have a very strong moral backbone, and it’s wrong to allow people to commit suicide slowly on the street without either challenging them or challenging the system, showing it to the people. 99.9% of the people that criticise me would step over what I call Schrodinger’s corpse, is he alive or is he dead? We don’t know until we collapse the quantum wave into a particle. They will step over him, whereas I will film him and check he’s breathing. Who is the evil person?” You could do that without filming it, I suggest. “Which authority, which moral standard, are you asking that question from? What is wrong with filming a drunk who has made himself very publicly unconscious on the street?” I suggest that Kirsty was accusing him of exploiting the problem for views. “It’s maybe highlighting it, or you’re documenting it, or you’re archiving it. I mean, exploiting? I’m not hiring a bunch of underage girls and forcing them to do webcam… I’m not Andrew Tate. I’m not exploiting anyone.”
Charlie checks his phone. The view count on his video from last week keeps ticking upwards. Every time he opens the app, he has a mountain of notifications. I wonder how it feels for him in those moments of high drama. “I feel a heightened sense of being alive. I feel all my senses are coiled and ready to react. It can be exhilarating at times, but like warfare, 90% of it is running around with nothing happening. I enjoy that. The more I do it, the more I enjoy it, the more I feel like I need to do it, the more it feels like a mission. If I don’t do it every day, I feel like I’m not working. There is a massive, massive public demand for the videos I produce. Am I creating that demand? I don’t know.”
I am reminded of something Charlie said to me a few days ago, at the country pub in Clitheroe. “I do notice a pattern that a lot of the people that come up to me and hug me… are autistic people… aspergers, like on the spectrum type people, and they’re very grateful for my videos. I’m going to fly the flag and be the Messiah for all the weirdos, the neurodivergent, the autistic. And those of us who grew up on the peripheries of society… I do the best with what I have, which is that I’m a strange man who tries to pretend at times he’s doing strong cinematic videos, but he’s really just lashing out at the shadowy ghost bullies who made him feel strange as an 11-year-old.”
***
Charlie and a few of the protesters fall into a circle on the outskirts of Piccadilly Gardens. He films them, as they hold their camera phones up to him. Everyone goes quiet for a moment. It’s a Mexican stand-off. One woman swings her camera phone towards me. I hold out my audio recorder, pointlessly capturing the silence, because it feels like the right thing to do. I try to explain that I am following Charlie to write a piece about him, but my voice is washed away by the noise of the protest, or just ignored. In my head, I wonder what role I am now playing in this story. I suddenly find myself part of this bizarre spectacle. I’d come to follow Charlie because I was curious about what was motivating him. I was struck by his background, how he had gone from being a rising star of conspiracy circles to filming people on a Saturday afternoon in Manchester. I spotted a vulnerability in Charlie, the possibility that he was a little bit lost, trying to carve out a role for himself in the world, and that the huge dopamine hit of a successful YouTube channel was irresistible. The more confrontational and dystopian, the bigger the numbers, the bigger the hit.
Something shifts. Charlie rumbles on and the stand-off dissolves with no clear winner. The woman swings her camera away from me and I lower my recorder. I think about Kirsty.
“Chasing vulnerable people around Piccadilly isn’t something I’d consider journalism…”
