Families nationwide are struggling to budget for Christmas, but spare a thought for some of Britain’s racist and fascist grifters who are feeling the pinch and whining more loudly than ever.

Two of the loudest complainers are Sam Wilkes (known since 2021 as Zoomer Historian) and Colin Robertson (known since 2013 as Millennial Woes).

Robertson is one of Britain’s best known online racists and, we can reveal, was housed for years by an antisemitic Muslim convert, Allen Newport, who served a jail sentence for drug smuggling.

Sleazy behaviour

Robertson is detested by many others on the far right for his sleazy behaviour.

Mark Collett (who’s not exactly a moral paragon himself and was reprimanded in his BNP days for bringing underage girls back to his Blackpool hotel room during a party conference) threw Robertson out of Patriotic Alternative in 2020 after allegations of sexual harassment at a PA conference.

Like a disgraced American televangelist, Robertson apologised for “letting people down” and said he would be taking “some time away to actively work on my personal failings in a productive and sincere manner.”

What Robertson meant by productive was that he would make a show of contrition, then get back to the grift. This peaks every December with “Milleniyule” when Robertson posts dozens of interviews with fellow far right “leaders”, again exploiting the sad and friendless world that many of his viewers inhabit.

As with so many online racists and fascists, Robertson has found a way to monetise parasocial relationships and to make losers feel their views count. Yet even these losers are likely to be shocked when they read who Robertson lived with.

Undercover investigation

Soon after being exposed as part of an undercover investigation of international racist networks in 2016, Robertson moved into a house in St John’s Wood owned by an anti-semitic Muslim convert and former drug dealer turned property developer, Allen Newport.

In June 1990 Newport was given a four-and-a-half year jail sentence for his part in a £2.5 million (at current values) drug smuggling conspiracy. One aspect of this network involved Newport’s purchase of a former Boots building in South Wales.

For much of the next few years Robertson shared Newport’s house in St John’s Wood with a procession of other far-right characters.

Some of these, such as the Holocaust deniers Michèle Renouf and Alison Chabloz, hated each other and Robertson tried to keep out of their way, knowing that Newport’s hospitality was his meal ticket. (His landlord spent most of the week at his other house in Sutton, South London.)

All that ended soon after Newport’s death in February this year. Robertson now had to find somewhere else to live and yet again the begging bowl came out so the world wouldn’t be deprived of his erudition.

Millennial Woes now operates from a PO box in Linlithgow, Scotland and until he finds another ageing drug dealer sugar daddy he will depend on the generosity of his viewers.

Complaining grifter

Another nazi grifter complaining loudly is Sam Wilkes, known since 2021 as Zoomer Historian.

By his own account, Guernsey-born Wilkes only became politicised in the late 2010s mainly through watching videos by American far right “groypers” such as Nick Fuentes.

He was radicalised by conspiracy theorists during the pandemic and claims he only started to become interested in nazi history and Holocaust denial around 2021, again through online videos including old David Irving speeches.

Hitler apologist

As Searchlight readers know, Irving has a long record as an apologist for Hitler and has worked with notorious nazis ranging from Third Reich veterans to the terrorist gang Combat 18 who used to guard his meetings.

As a student in the late 1950s Irving was briefly a Mosleyite and produced racist propaganda. During the fragmentation of the National Front in the early 1980s he set up an embryonic fascist party but decided churning out pro-Hitler “history” was more lucrative.

By the end of the 1980s and through the 1990s he was a leading champion of Holocaust denial, and only started to back away from this line when it threatened his income.

After a famous trial in 2000 a High Court judge ruled that:

• “Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence;
• that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews;
• that he is an active Holocaust denier;
• that he is anti-semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.”

Worked with Irving

Yet for Sam Wilkes, self-styled “Zoomer Historian” whose knowledge of the Second World War came from watching and making YouTube videos, and who seems to have no training whatever as an actual historian, Irving was “a man who tells things as they are” and who “spoke plainly without an agenda”.

Wilkes admits that for the past three or four years while making his own living from YouTube videos he has worked with Irving (until Irving was incapacitated by illness) and then his family, who now seek to milk what they can from their father’s legacy.

Crashing down

At the start of November Wilkes’s world came crashing down. He claims to have been largely dependent on YouTube for his income and assumed that this platform would forever be happy for him to monetise his pro-Hitler and other far right videos.

A big part of the grift for today’s far right is to flatter their paying members and subscribers who are enabled to use comments sections and guaranteed a personal reply.

It’s a scene full of lonely souls who get a thrill from having their ramblings read out online by a celebrity fascist. It’s a particularly low-grade version of vanity publishing.

Begging bowls

Wilkes has now moved to a couple of other platforms who are still prepared to collaborate with nazi apologists, with half a dozen different begging bowls and promises to give “special shoutouts by name” to anyone who gives him more than £25 a month.

Perhaps his ultimate dream is to follow Robertson’s example and find a retired drug dealer and Jew-baiter to keep him in the style to which he has become accustomed?