It is November 2025 on TalkTV and a 17-year-old pundit is on a crusade. “My generation are being sexualised through the early exposure of pornographic material, including what I would consider drag queens,” he tells a nodding Samara Gill. “I mean, they sort of uniform women as oversexualised characteristics as a form of uniform.”
The pundit’s fans know him as Young Bob. His real name is Thomas Moffatt and he is an ambassador for the British branch of the campus conservative association Turning Point.
He makes a swift segue to gender identity. “They’re hyper-sexualising these children by transing them,” he observes. “It confuses the youngest generation into this sort of Marxist illusion that we must progress in every single thing that we are taught as a younger generation.” Young Bob is always dressed for a job interview but has the crafty air of a Dickensian pickpocket.
“I’ve never had [an] audience response like when he’s on,” Gill tells the TalkTV audience.
Moffatt shot to virality after starring in the genre of lightweight political video content that has reliably produced virality for more than a decade. He descends on a British university campus or high street and sets up a stall. The tablecloth will say something like “THE WEST NEEDS BORDER CONTROL. PROVE ME WRONG” or “LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION. CHANGE MY MIND”. Some will refuse to speak to Young Bob on principle; the most tuned-in throw baked beans at him. Others take up the challenge. They will stumble over their words and make arguments they haven’t quite thought out. Moffatt defeats them with quickfire questions and segues. These awkward exchanges make their way on to his social media and Turning Point UK’s YouTube channel.
An important part of the Young Bob narrative is that his parents kicked him out for his views. This makes him adoptable, like a polar bear in a WWF advert. If you’ve fallen out with your own teenage children over trans issues or Palestine you can simply turn on the radio and hear from a smarter, better son. He’ll grow up on camera like a child star. You can say you were invested from the beginning. Look at his comment sections on the TalkTV and Turning Point pages and you’ll find clusters of potential surrogates.
“Absolutely awful that Bob’s parents rejected him as he’s an absolute fine young man n [sic] if he was my son I would be absolutely proud and happy of what he’s achieved and achieving 🎉🎉,” said one TalkTV commenter. “I cannot believe his parents threw him out of home at such a young age due to his work, and have left him homeless …i would be proud of him if he was my son standing up for what the majority of us think [sic],” said another.
Long-term followers of progressive media will get déjà vu from Young Bob. The 2010s were littered with underage activists. Internet access momentarily put these teenagers on equal footing with well-connected trade unionists and environmental protesters; journalists raised them to the level of folk heroes. It was in vogue to be small but angry, to declare strikes and start Change.org petitions. Youth came with supernatural foresight. Teen Vogue published op-eds about Trump 1.0. Malala Yousafzai blogged about her life under the Pakistani Taliban; they shot her in the head and she became a feminist icon before she was old enough to drive. Greta Thunberg addressed the UN at 16. In 2019 she published a career-defining collection of her speeches under the title No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference.
A year after her book, a sea change in public opinion made the Thunberg phenomenon harder to replicate from the left. In forcing people online, Covid-19 destroyed the progressive techno-optimism of the 2010s. The internet stopped being about connection and consciousness-raising; the common vernacular began to accommodate terms like “doomscroll” and “brainrot”. Schools across the world started to ban phones. Australia forbade social media for under-16s; the UK brought in universal age-gating. It became a mark of middle-class respectability to have offline children.
Today, the leftist enfants terribles are officially out. America’s anti-Trump “No kings” marches were criticised by opponents who noticed a dearth of younger attendees. The fetish has turned around. The new political wunderkinds are on the right. In July, a school in Rugby sent Year 7 pupil Courtney Wright home after she wore a Geri Halliwell-style Union Jack dress for a Culture Celebration Day. Major papers picked up the story. The school apologised. Two months later, Wright spoke at Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally in London. “Let’s hear it for this brave little British girl!” shouted Robinson, with all the aplomb of a cinema marquee advertising a Shirley Temple musical.
“Even though I’m only 13, I already know how lucky we are to live in this country,” Wright told the audience. “We may be young, but we are the future, and together, with pride in our hearts, we will always stand for our great nation.” Wizened audience members gazed up at her admiringly. “This is the voice of the next generation refusing to be silenced,” Robinson wrote on X. “This is what love of country sounds like.”
Today’s junior pundits are made on campus. Last December it was Connie Shaw, who was suspended from a student radio station at the University of Leeds over a gender-critical post. Her case featured almost immediately in the Telegraph and Spectator and on the GB News show Good Afternoon Britain; later that month she surfaced in a GB News podcast called Silenced for Telling the Truth. Shaw is still a fixture on the channel.
This October, three Cambridge students replicated her success by founding the single-sex Cambridge University Society of Women. Before announcing a single event they were profiled by the Telegraph, and then by the Times. (“Three brave students are taking on the trans bullies,” went the latter’s headline). On Instagram, peers shunned them; on X, they were inundated by offers of support from gender-critical Cambridge alumni. “Over 20 student membership applications, and alumnae membership already over 60!” they wrote. “Are there only three intelligent, sensible and biological[ly] literate young women studying at Cambridge today?” said a Telegraph commenter.
There is a shift here. Thunberg was supposed to represent the climate-consciousness of an entire generation. Her media champions were all on the centre left; her anti-heroes were the shadowy world leaders she accused of “stealing [her] childhood”. Bookshops fundraised to get her collected speeches into UK schools.
The undertone of this new generation is more cynical. While Thunberg and Yousafzai were the heroes of Manichaean dystopias, Moffatt et al live eternally on university campuses, where they wage petty wars on behalf of their older allies. Young Bob is at least 30 years younger than his average supporter, which is fine until you realise that he exists to smash the campus wokes, and that the campus wokes are also 30 years younger than Young Bob’s average supporter. Their viewers live vicariously through them, but these activists will make minimal progress. Their enemies write them off as smug careerists. Politics will never grow up.
[Further reading: Why does Tucker Carlson hate Britain?]
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