TRIGGERnometry - June 04, 2026


Henry Nowak： How Anti-Racism Gave You Racism - Konstantin Kisin

Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Henry Novak George Floyd Vikram Digwa Hampshire Diggler Digua
＂We’re Regressing Into The Unknown＂ - Dr Jared Cooney Horvath The Russian Mindset and Where it Comes From - Historian Sir Antony Beevor

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

166.15

Word count

1,382

Sentence count

91

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Racism kills, and we will do whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again. Henry Novak's last words, captured on body cam footage released by Hampshire Police in the small hours of a Tuesday morning when the fewest people would see it, were the same as the words that six years earlier had become the defining phrase of a political movement. They were spoken on murals, chanted at marches and printed on t-shirts in Westminster.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:01:00.000 Henry Novak, How Anti-Racism Gave You Racism
00:01:09.000 Cast your mind back exactly six years.
00:01:11.000 It's the summer of 2020 and Britain is undergoing
00:01:14.000 what its commentary breathlessly describes as a reckoning.
00:01:17.000 The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer
00:01:20.000 sent hundreds of thousands of British people into the streets.
00:01:23.000 Statues were toppled.
00:01:25.000 Corporations issued groveling statements.
00:01:28.000 Police officers, British police officers in British cities policing British people,
00:01:33.660 took a knee before the protesters.
00:01:35.600 The message, repeated endlessly by politicians, journalists and institutions of every kind,
00:01:41.560 was unambiguous.
00:01:42.900 Racism kills and we will do whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again. 0.90
00:01:47.940 Sorry, we just got attacked racially by some white person.
00:01:50.740 What did he say? Did he...
00:01:52.860 Was he racially abusive?
00:01:53.880 The police needed a report, come here.
00:01:55.460 Yeah, he was.
00:01:56.240 Do you want to speak to my brother?
00:01:57.240 He's then laid a punch onto me. He's pushed me back and my turbans come off.
00:02:01.300 Six years later, an 18-year-old student named Henry Novak was stabbed five times on a Southampton
00:02:06.620 street. As he lay bleeding, he told the police officers who arrived at the scene exactly what
00:02:12.180 had happened. He had been stabbed by Vikram Digwa, who was standing nearby. Digwa, for his part,
00:02:17.720 told the officers something else, that he had been the victim of a racist attack. The officers
00:02:23.420 believed Diggler and handcuffed Novak. As he lost consciousness, he could be heard on body cam
00:02:28.840 footage repeating the words, I can't breathe. The same four words that six years earlier had
00:02:33.760 become the defining phrase of a political movement. They were stenciled on murals,
00:02:38.200 chanted at marches, printed on t-shirts. They were spoken on the floor of the United States
00:02:43.600 Congress and quoted in parliamentary debates in Westminster. When British police officers knelt
00:02:49.240 in the streets of London, it was those words they were kneeling for. Henry Novak's last words,
00:02:54.640 captured on body cam footage released by Hampshire police in the small hours of a Tuesday morning,
00:02:59.740 the middle of the night when the fewest people would see it, were the same. I can't breathe.
00:03:04.520 He said them while handcuffed on the pavement, bleeding from five stab wounds, to officers who
00:03:09.920 had decided that the man who put those wounds in him was the real victim. You will not see Henry's
00:03:15.080 words stenciled on a mural. No politicians will quote them in the comments. No corporation will
00:03:20.160 change its logo. The same establishment that made four words immortal when spoken by a black man in 0.67
00:03:25.420 Minneapolis has met the same four words spoken by a white boy dying on a street in Southampton
00:03:30.380 with what can only be described as a determined institutional silence. That silence is not
00:03:36.160 neutral. It is a statement. It tells you exactly whose suffering the system has decided counts
00:03:41.860 and whose does not.
00:03:43.380 And it was produced not by the old racism, 0.64
00:03:45.400 not by skinheads and yobs,
00:03:47.140 but by the people who spent six years telling you 0.71
00:03:49.420 they had abolished it.
00:03:50.680 Digua was convicted of murder last week
00:03:52.640 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
00:03:54.440 Hampshire police issued a public apology.
00:03:57.060 Their IOPC launched an investigation
00:03:59.260 and a country that had spent the better part
00:04:01.780 of a decade being lectured
00:04:03.240 about the unique and unforgivable evil of racism
00:04:06.720 was left to contemplate
00:04:08.460 what its anti-racism had actually produced.
00:04:11.400 The answer, if you're willing to look at it honestly, is this, a new form of racism,
00:04:17.400 a bureaucratic racism, an actually institutionalized racism, a racism so thoroughly laundered through
00:04:24.160 the language of progress and inclusion that the people enforcing it genuinely believe they're
00:04:29.400 on the right side of history. What else do you call a system in which a dying teenager's word
00:04:34.200 counts for less than his killers because of the color of his skin? To understand how we got here,
00:04:38.840 you have to understand what the post-Floyd reckoning actually did to British institutions,
00:04:44.040 especially the police. The response to Floyd's death wasn't merely emotional, it was ideological
00:04:49.880 and it was systematic. Forces across the country underwent mandatory diversity and anti-racism
00:04:56.100 training. The principle drilled into offices explicitly or implicitly was that accusations
00:05:01.680 of racism must be taken with the utmost seriousness, that the historic failure of institutions to
00:05:06.740 believe minority victims of racism was the original sin and it needed atoning for. Racism
00:05:12.180 is bad. Attempting to address it is good. The problem is what happens when you apply it without 0.77
00:05:17.380 judgment in the real world. You train officers to weight an allegation of racism so heavily
00:05:22.660 that it overrides the evidence in front of their eyes. You produce exactly the outcome we saw in
00:05:28.560 Southampton. A man bleeding to death on the pavement begging for help, being told by officers
00:05:34.300 who should be saving his life that they don't think he's been stabbed.
00:05:38.500 What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors almost exactly
00:05:42.400 the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent.
00:05:46.140 George Floyd died saying, I can't breathe, while a police officer knelt on his neck.
00:05:51.300 Henry Novak died saying, I can't breathe, while police officers knelt on his back and handcuffed him.
00:05:56.040 The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Novak.
00:06:01.520 The politicians who marched through London streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras.
00:06:06.900 The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued
00:06:11.820 statements. This is not an accident or even a surprise. It's the logical consequence of an
00:06:17.000 ideology that does not actually oppose racism. It simply reassigns its acceptable targets.
00:06:22.360 I want to be precise here because precision matters. I'm not saying that the officers who
00:06:26.740 attended the scene that night are bad people, or that they set out to let Henry die. I believe,
00:06:32.080 in fact, the opposite, that they were following the spirit of their training and of the culture
00:06:36.260 that had been built around them, in good faith, over many years. The problem is not the individuals,
00:06:42.020 the problem is the system that produced them, a system that taught them, in effect, that an
00:06:46.960 allegation of racism is a trump card that overrides normal investigative procedure,
00:06:52.680 normal medical common sense, and normal human judgment.
00:06:56.120 That system was built with the best of intentions
00:06:58.600 by people who genuinely wanted to address real injustices.
00:07:02.380 And it has produced a policing culture
00:07:04.440 in which a killer can stab a teenager five times,
00:07:07.980 claim to be the victim of racism,
00:07:09.920 and watch the officers handcuff the person
00:07:12.060 bleeding out on the street.
00:07:13.520 They will not acknowledge what they've built.
00:07:15.520 They will say that this was an isolated failure
00:07:17.720 of individual officers, not a systemic problem.
00:07:20.520 They will say that raising this case is itself a form of racism and attempt to undermine legitimate anti-racism efforts by dwelling on edge cases.
00:07:30.200 They will say, as they always say, that the real problem is that we haven't gone far enough.
00:07:35.880 But that game is up. Anyone with the eyes to see and the ears to hear the truth knows what happened here.
00:07:41.660 A young man is dead. His killer exploited an ideology to escape justice, if only briefly.
00:07:47.080 And the institutions that were reformed in the name of anti-racism are now openly racist against white people.
00:07:54.140 If you appreciate these videos, you should know that they're available on my substack days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time at ConstantinKissen.com.
00:08:03.360 This article has also been printed in the Free Press and The Australian, so please go ahead and share it with friends and family.
00:08:17.080 You