Finally, Gary Stevenson Has Been Found Out
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I do not believe in making politics personal. I believe that the failure to treat our political opponents as human first and wrong second is one of the great challenges of our time. The power of atomising technology has transformed the public debate into a public shouting match. Why? It’s not just that the Internet has given everyone a voice. It’s that it has given a voice to people who never have to sit in the same room.
Before the age of Youtube and social media, political and media opponents didn’t have the option of shit-talking each other from the safety of podcast studios. They had to sit across from each other in TV green rooms and then sit together in one room and at least pretend to be talking to each other.
Having done a fair bit of media in my time, I can tell you that meeting the people you’re about to debate in the green room beforehand is an important part of the process. It might be that the extent of what you can discuss without an argument erupting is limited to the weather because it’s 2026 and we can’t seem to agree on what a woman is. But still, you are forced to be civil.
The effect of this you know from your own experience: the way you react to someone accidentally cutting you up in traffic is far less restrained than your response to someone accidentally bumping into you in the street. The action is the same but the level of offence both taken and expressed is not. Why?
Reassured by the physical distance and feeling of safety it provides, we feel comfortable to engage in more confrontational behaviour.
This difference has been recorded in study after study.
Not that you need a study to understand this. The great American philosopher and former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson said it best when he said:
“Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face.”
This is why when I’ve had disagreements with other people I’ve always tried to engage with them in person. We did this with Jimmy the Giant, a new Left content creator who made a video calling me a “grifter” and eventually apologised and took it down after we had a robust discussion in our studio. We did this with Dave Smith over Israel. With Peter Hitchens over Ukraine. We just did it in a blockbuster upcoming interview with Tony Blair’s former spokesman Alastair Campbell.
I always try to criticise people’s ideas, not them personally, because I know that physical separation is corrosive to public debate. Not only do we feel safe and far from the people with whom we disagree but there is now a giant audience which is not in the room who are watching all the drama. Drama, remember, is, above all, a performance. And in today’s world, you don’t have to play to the audience, you just have to play to your audience. And your audience doesn’t want you to self-moderate. They want you to ramp it up to 11.
A significant portion of the content creator space has realised this which is why we are living in the age of the character. Andrew Tate is the “heel”, a well known character in combat sports from which he hails. Candace Owens is the “entertaining conspiracy loon” character. And Gary Stevenson is the “articulate and courageous champion of the downtrodden” character.
It’s important not to confuse actual articulate and courageous champions of the downtrodden with the characters.
You can help poor people and you can want to help poor people. They are not the same.
The problem with Gary Stevenson is not him as a person. I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice guy. It’s just that he doesn’t understand basic economic concepts. Daniel Priestley once spent several minutes trying (and failing) to get Gary to understand the difference between assets and income. This clip is really worth listening to in full even though it feels dry and technical. Just watch Gary's brain short-circuit repeatedly as he — ironically — complains about how much tax he paid when he was making millions as a Citigroup trader.
Winston Churchill famously described his political opponents as “modest men with much to be modest about”. Gary has no such problem: what he lacks in expertise he more than makes up in the complete absence of modesty. He was, after all, “the best trader in the world” according to one Gary Stevenson. A recent article in the FT suggests that, to put it mildly, some of his colleagues didn’t quite see it that way.
Gary has now moved on from his success in the world of finance to being “one of the world's leading experts on inequality”, a title given to him by, well, himself. He appears to have confused his online fame with knowing things. But Gary is a political campaigner, not an expert. He’s the Greta Thunberg of tax.
There’s no denying he has built up a large audience. That makes him an expert in one thing and one thing only: building up a large audience. And it’s true, you can build up a large audience by making good arguments about important issues and offering genuine insight. But you can also do it by pandering to people’s anger and economic illiteracy.
In the words of the great American economist, Thomas Sowell:
“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear”.
Gary has done fantastically well out of advocating policies that would make this country poorer on the basis of false claims about the source of the problem he so passionately wants to address.
This was described in extensive detail in a well-referenced post by tax expert Dan Niedle who appeared in Gary’s recent documentary. Niedle sums up his breakdown by saying:
”Gary Stevenson clearly cares deeply about inequality, and passionately wants a wealth tax. But he is uninterested in the detail of either the problem or his solution. He exaggerates his expertise, and his research is sloppy. Given the size of his audience, that's a shame.”
Even the Guardian agrees, publishing a scathing review of the documentary. It’s the Guardian so they still think a wealth tax is a brilliant idea but even they are shocked by how unpersuasive his arguments are when challenged properly and how lost he appears when he comes up against the most basic counterarguments to his well-rehearsed talking points.
Gary thinks he’s Robin Hood, the man who took from the rich and gave to the poor. There’s only one problem with all of this: Robin Hood didn’t take from the rich. He took from the Sheriff of Nottingham who was - pay attention now - a “tax collector and debt enforcer” taxing ordinary citizens to within an inch of their lives.
Robin Hood is not a story about taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
